The first time Min-jae saw VANT perform, he was twelve years old.
Not in person.
He wasn't that lucky.
His older cousin had been watching a music show in the living room during Chuseok while Min-jae sat nearby pretending not to care.
Then five young men appeared on television.
They didn't look like anyone Min-jae knew.
That was the first thing he remembered.
Not because they were impossibly handsome.
Though, annoyingly, several of them were.
It was the certainty.
The music began and suddenly those five people behaved as though the entire studio belonged to them.
One leaned into the camera with a lazy grin that would have looked ridiculous on almost anyone else.
Another delivered his verse like he'd personally invented rhythm.
Their clothes were strange.
Their hair was stranger.
The adults complained that they looked like delinquents.
Min-jae couldn't look away.
VANT were already becoming enormous by then.
Vertex Entertainment had built its reputation around artists with sharper edges than the industry's cleaner acts, and VANT embodied it perfectly. Hip-hop, electronic music, pop hooks, outrageous fashion, songs members actually helped write.
They seemed less manufactured than everyone else.
Whether that was true didn't matter to twelve-year-old Min-jae.
He believed it.
A few months later, MUSE happened.
Nine girls in matching stage outfits moving with such impossible precision that Min-jae found himself wondering how many hours a person had to practise before nine bodies could look like one.
Where VANT looked dangerous, MUSE looked perfect.
Aurora Entertainment polished everything until there wasn't a hair out of place.
The choreography.
The smiles.
The camera angles.
The formations.
The little differences in personality that variety programmes somehow made viewers feel they personally understood.
Min-jae became fascinated.
Not with one group.
With all of it.
Music shows.
Training documentaries.
Backstage footage.
Award ceremonies.
Fan chants.
Dance practices.
The seconds before a song started, when thousands of people were screaming and the stage sat dark.
That moment most of all.
The anticipation.
People waiting for you.
He wanted to know what that felt like.
It embarrassed him, even then, how badly he wanted it.
Not money.
Not exactly.
Not even fame, though he was honest enough to know he wouldn't have complained about either.
He wanted to walk onto a stage and become impossible to ignore.
He wanted thousands of strangers to know his name.
He wanted to be good enough that when the lights came on, people watched.
At thirteen, Kang Min-jae decided he would become an idol.
At fourteen, he learned that wanting something and being suited for it were entirely unrelated concepts.
His mother had paid for his first dance lessons only after he promised his grades wouldn't collapse.
Three months later, his instructor stopped using phrases like You just need to loosen up and began using phrases like You have improved a lot.
Min-jae eventually learned that these were not the same thing.
He had rhythm.
Technically.
He simply seemed to require conscious permission from every joint before moving it.
He practised anyway.
Two hours after school.
Then three.
Weekends.
Mirrors.
Recorded videos.
Again.
Again.
Again.
He became less stiff.
Then decent.
Never exceptional.
Vocals were worse.
His first teacher listened to him sing for thirty seconds, pursed her lips and said, "Well, you're not tone-deaf."
Min-jae had gone home believing this was encouraging.
Years later he understood it had been triage.
He trained breathing.
Pitch.
Placement.
Falsetto.
Support.
His voice became stable enough that nobody would cover their ears.
Eventually it became pleasant.
Sometimes even good.
It never became the kind of voice that made an A&R employee straighten in their chair.
Rap?
Average.
Expressions?
Practised.
Camera awareness?
Learned.
Height?
Acceptable.
Face?
Good enough that girls at school occasionally liked him and bad enough that casting directors rarely remembered him after he'd left the room.
That had been one of the cruelest lessons.
Min-jae had grown up believing he was handsome.
His mother said so.
His aunts said so.
Girls sometimes said so.
Then he walked into rooms filled with aspiring idols and discovered that being the most attractive boy in a classroom meant approximately nothing when the boy beside you looked like he'd been assembled by a cosmetics company.
Still, he tried.
Aurora rejected him.
Vertex rejected him.
Harmony Media rejected him.
Daon Entertainment rejected him.
He went to open auditions where hundreds of teenagers waited in corridors, each of them privately convinced they possessed something everyone else lacked.
Sometimes Min-jae sang for less than thirty seconds before someone thanked him.
Sometimes they let him dance too.
Once, a casting manager spent most of Min-jae's audition looking down at a clipboard.
He cried afterward.
Not at the audition.
He maintained dignity until he reached a subway bathroom.
Then he sat inside a stall, furious with himself for crying, and promised he'd practise twice as hard.
At sixteen, he was rejected from another company.
At seventeen, a small agency finally accepted him.
His parents stared at the contract for so long Min-jae thought his father might burn it.
"Your grades."
"I'll keep them up."
"University."
"I can go later."
"Min-jae—"
"Just let me try."
His mother had looked at him for a long time.
Then she'd asked, "Do you really want it that much?"
"Yes."
He hadn't hesitated.
That might have been the last period of his life when every serious question had an immediate answer.
The agency lasted eleven months.
Min-jae trained almost every day.
Vocal lessons.
Dance lessons.
Fitness.
Monthly evaluations.
Diet.
More dance.
More vocals.
Then rumours began.
Payments arrived late.
Staff disappeared.
One afternoon the trainees were told training would be suspended temporarily.
Temporarily became permanently.
The company didn't collapse dramatically.
It just stopped being a place where anyone was going to debut.
Min-jae found another.
Eighteen months.
He improved.
Enough to become reliable.
That was the word used by one of his trainers.
Reliable.
Min-jae hated it.
Reliable was what you called someone when there were five positions in a formation and six trainees.
Reliable was the person management kept around because he didn't cause trouble, learned choreography, showed up early and could fill whichever spot was empty.
He wanted to be indispensable.
He was reliable.
At nineteen, they released him.
No cruelty.
No shouting.
The manager actually apologised.
"We're changing direction with the next group."
Min-jae bowed.
Thanked him.
Packed his things.
Auditioned again.
Company three changed everything.
For a while.
They weren't large.
They had one moderately successful girl group and a solo singer most people over thirty knew from television.
To Min-jae, they might as well have been Aurora.
He trained there for nearly two years.
And somehow, against every sensible expectation he'd gradually learned to suppress, his name appeared on a preliminary list.
Seven trainees.
Six intended members.
Then six trainees.
Six intended members.
Min-jae stared at the paper taped outside the practice room until one of the others slapped him on the shoulder.
"You made it, idiot."
He remembered laughing.
He remembered not believing him.
He remembered checking again.
KANG MIN-JAE.
His name.
There.
For several months, the future changed shape.
They recorded guide tracks.
Discussed concepts.
Took test photographs.
Worked with stylists.
The company asked them to suggest stage names.
Min-jae spent three nights secretly thinking of terrible ones before deciding his real name sounded better.
They moved into a dorm.
At two in the morning, six exhausted young men lay across mattresses talking about what they would buy their parents if they ever earned real money.
Min-jae called his mother.
"I think it's happening."
She went quiet.
"What?"
"The group."
He lowered his voice even though nobody in the dorm was asleep.
"They've put me in the lineup."
His mother started crying.
He laughed at her for crying.
Then he had to walk into the bathroom because his eyes were burning too.
For the first time since he was thirteen, the impossible thing stopped feeling impossible.
He was going to debut.
Not maybe.
Not eventually.
He was in the team.
They had songs.
They had a concept.
They had schedules.
They had—
A meeting.