Returning to the A&R department felt like walking into a theater after the play's dramatic climax. The air, usually buzzing with the energetic chaos of phone calls and overlapping conversations, was now thick with a tense, watchful silence. As Han Yoo-jin walked toward his desk, conversations died down, heads lowered, but he could feel the weight of dozens of eyes on his back. He was no longer just Manager Han. He was the man who had walked into the 40th-floor execution chamber with Director Kang and walked out alone. He was a notorious figure, an object of fear and intense speculation.
Before he could even sit down, Choi Jin-wook materialized at his cubicle, leaning against the partition with a predatory casualness. He had a styrofoam cup of coffee in his hand and a smug, probing grin on his face.
"Tough morning, Han?" Jin-wook asked, his voice a low, conspiratorial murmur. "I heard Director Kang got put on ice. Sent home to 'reflect on his management style.' You must be feeling pretty good about yourself right now."
Yoo-jin looked up at him, the familiar blue panel of the system flickering to life beside his rival's head. It was becoming second nature now, an involuntary reflex.
[Choi Jin-wook's Current Thoughts: Unbelievable. He actually got Kang suspended. How in the world did a nobody like him pull that off? He must have something on Kang. Or maybe on Executive Director Yoon. He's more dangerous than I thought. I need to figure out his angle. Maybe I can use this chaos to my advantage and get myself nominated for acting department head while Kang is out.]
The naked ambition was so predictable it was almost comforting. Yoo-jin gave him a tired look and began tidying the papers on his desk. "It's a bad day for the company, Jin-wook," he replied, his voice flat and devoid of emotion. "Nobody should be feeling good."
"Right, right, the loyal company man to the end," Jin-wook snickered, not believing a word of it. He pushed himself off the wall. "Well, if you need someone to help pick up the pieces on any of Kang's old projects, you know who to ask." He gave Yoo-jin a wink and sauntered away, already smelling the blood in the water.
The brief, slimy interaction solidified a thought that had been forming in Yoo-jin's mind since he'd walked out of the interrogation room. Surviving wasn't enough. His position here was now completely untenable. He had a target painted on his back. Director Kang would eventually return, vengeful and armed with the full backing of his allies. Jin-wook and others like him would be constantly circling, trying to either usurp him or tear him down. He couldn't win by playing their game anymore. The system hadn't been given to him so he could become a slightly more successful cog in a broken machine. It was a tool to build a new one.
His purpose sharpened. He needed a weapon. Not a corporate maneuver or a piece of blackmail, but a talent. A real one. An undeniable, industry-shaking talent that he could build his future on. The company's current scouting system was useless to him; it was designed by men like Kang to find marketable faces, not transcendent artists. They would never find what he was looking for.
Which meant, he realized with a jolt, that he had to look where they wouldn't. He had to search through their trash.
His thoughts turned to a place in the building few ever visited: the Digital Archive. It was a climate-controlled server room in the sub-basement, a digital graveyard that held every audition tape, every performance evaluation, every scouting report, and every terminated trainee file for the past fifteen years. A mausoleum of broken dreams.
That night, long after the last employee had switched off their monitor and the cleaning crews had made their rounds, Yoo-jin took the elevator down to the basement. The air grew cooler, smelling of dust and ozone. He swiped his manager-level keycard, and the heavy door to the server room hissed open.
Inside, rows of black server racks hummed quietly, their blinking green and orange lights casting long, dancing shadows on the walls. It was cold, lonely, and felt like a sacred space. He sat down at the single terminal in the corner, the only interface to this vast ocean of data. He logged in with his credentials, and the archive's interface came to life.
He navigated to the trainee database. A list populated the screen, thousands and thousands of names stretching back over a decade. The vast majority were marked with a stark red tag: TERMINATED.
He began his search. It was a grim, methodical process. He'd click on a name, bring up the trainee's profile photo, watch a thirty-second clip of their evaluation performance—a song, a dance, a monologue—and let his Producer's Eye do the work, scanning for that spark of hidden potential.
[Kim So-ra, Terminated 2017] -> [Overall Potential: C], [Critical Weakness: Poor Work Ethic, Inconsistent Pitch]
He clicked to the next.
[Park Jun-ho, Terminated 2019] -> [Overall Potential: D+], [Scandal Factor: 65% -> Details: Verified past school bullying allegations.] Good riddance.
Next.
[Im Chae-won, Terminated 2018] -> [Overall Potential: B-], [Critical Weakness: Chronic Vocal Nodule Issues. Career longevity is highly questionable.] A tragedy.
For hours, he sifted through the forgotten, the discarded, the not-quite-good-enoughs. It was a depressing parade of shattered hopes and flawed talents. He saw faces full of youthful optimism in their profile pictures, only to watch their evaluation videos and see that light extinguished by nerves or a lack of innate skill. He even came across Lee Seo-yeon's file. [Overall Potential: A]. He felt a sharp pang of guilt and anger, but forced himself to move on. An 'A' was excellent, but it wasn't the earth-shattering foundation he needed. He needed a legend in the rough.
The hours bled together. His eyes grew blurry from the monitor's glow, and a profound sadness began to settle over him. Maybe he was wrong. Maybe true, top-tier talent never got missed.
He was about to give up, to chalk it up as a failed experiment, when his mouse hovered over a random file from three years ago. The name was unremarkable.
[Name: Ahn Da-eun]
[Status: Terminated - March 2020]
[Reason for Termination (Instructor Notes): Poor performance in monthly evaluations, persistent lack of motivation, and rebellious attitude toward vocal and dance instructors.]
He sighed and clicked on her evaluation video file. The girl who appeared on the screen was maybe sixteen at the time, with sharp, intelligent eyes that held a defiant glare. Her posture was slumped, her expression sullen. When the off-screen evaluator asked her to sing a standard pop ballad, she did so with a lazy, almost contemptuous air. Her voice was fine, the pitch was accurate, but it was utterly devoid of passion or effort. It was the performance of someone who couldn't care less, who wanted to be anywhere else. Yoo-jin could easily see why she was cut.
He moved his mouse to close the file. But something, some instinct deep in his gut, made him pause. The instructor's notes said "rebellious attitude." The face on the screen looked less rebellious and more… guarded. He focused, pushing his ability, trying to see past the bored, cynical facade.
And then the panel appeared.
It didn't just flicker to life. It blazed. It was a brilliant, incandescent gold, a color he had only seen once before, on the superstar Kim Tae-yoon. But this one felt purer, brighter.
[Name: Ahn Da-eun]
[Overall Potential: S]
[Key Strengths: Vocal Versatility (Chameleon), Innate Rhythmic Sense, Unconventional Charisma (Tsundere)]
[Critical Weakness: Extreme Performance Anxiety (Manifests as Apathy/Rebellion)]
[Scandal Factor: 1%]
[Growth Potential: With targeted confidence-building mentorship and a musical concept that leverages her 'cool/aloof' exterior as a strength rather than a weakness, Overall Potential can be elevated to SS-Rank.]
Yoo-jin stared at the screen, his fatigue vanishing in a single, explosive instant. His heart began to hammer against his ribs. An S-Rank. A raw, undeveloped S-Rank that the company had thrown away.
He frantically rewound the video and watched it again. This time, he wasn't seeing a lazy teenager. He was seeing a girl absolutely paralyzed by fear. He saw the subtle tremor in her hands, the way she avoided looking directly at the camera, the tension in her jaw. The "rebellious attitude" was a shield. The "lack of motivation" was a desperate defense mechanism against the terror of not being good enough. The company hadn't seen a flawed trainee; they had seen her fear, misinterpreted it as a character flaw, and discarded her. They had thrown away a diamond worth billions because they didn't know how to look for it.
But I can see it, he thought, a dizzying, triumphant thrill surging through him. I can see everything.
This was it. This was his weapon. His ace. His foundation. This was the artist he would build his empire on.
His hands flew across the keyboard. He quickly and quietly downloaded her entire file—contact information, last known address, parental contacts, everything—onto a small, encrypted flash drive he kept in his wallet. The digital ghost was now his.
Now, he just had to find her in the real world.