PROLOGUE: The Silent Star
The Year: 2024 (Original Timeline)
Location: Seoul – Global Arts Center Backstage
The air in the dressing room was thick with the scent of expensive cologne and sterile hairspray. On a wall-mounted television, a sleek, high-definition broadcast was playing.
Interviewer (on screen): "We are here with the 'Voice of a Generation,' Kang Sun-woo. His latest album, 'The Empty Room,' has topped the charts in forty-two countries. Sun-woo-ssi, critics are calling this your most haunting work yet. There is a rawness, a deep sense of longing in the lyrics. People want to know... what was the influence behind this masterpiece?"
The camera panned to Sun-woo. At twenty-eight, he was breathtakingly handsome, but his beauty was like a sculpture in a museum—cold, distant, and untouchable. He sat with his hands clasped, his eyes fixed on a point just past the camera lens.
Sun-woo (on screen): He paused, a long, heavy silence stretching across the airwaves. He looked as if he were trying to remember a dream that had turned into a nightmare. "I think..." his voice was a low, tired rasp, "I think I’m just writing about a ghost I never got to meet. Most people spend their lives trying to find someone. I’ve spent mine feeling like I’ve already lost her."
The interviewer blinked, taken aback by the solemnity. "That’s... very poetic. Is there someone specific? A first love from your school days?"
Sun-woo offered a faint, joyless ghost of a smile. It didn't reach his eyes. "I don't remember much from high school. Just the sound of a guitar and a lot of noise. But sometimes, when it rains... I feel like I'm waiting for someone to walk through the door and tell me to change my chords."
He stood up, signaling the end of the segment.
Sun-woo (on screen): "Thank you to the fans for listening. Without you, the silence would be much louder."
The screen flickered to a commercial for luxury watches.
In the real room, the real Sun-woo clicked the TV off with a remote. He sat in the dark, the city lights of Seoul twinkling through the floor-to-ceiling windows behind him. He looked at his right hand—perfect, unscarred, and capable of playing the most complex melodies in the world.
Yet, as he stared at his reflection in the glass, he looked utterly empty. He had everything the world told him to want, but he felt like a man living in a house with no floor.
He picked up his coat and headed toward the door.
"Where are you going, Sun-woo-ssi?" his manager asked, popping his head into the room. "The after-party is starting. The CEO is waiting."
"I’m going for a walk," Sun-woo said, not looking back. "I found a little bar on the outskirts of the city. I want a drink where nobody knows my name."
He stepped out into the cold night air. The first few drops of rain began to fall.
Across town, a woman named Han Da-bin was finishing her shift at that very bar, looking at a photo of her late parents and wondering why her life felt like a song that ended too soon.
Neither of them knew that in exactly one hour, the music was going to restart.
