Behind the closed door, the world had lost its texture. Han Yoo-jin sat at the sterile desk in the anonymous office, staring at the wall. The silence in his head was a physical presence, a high-pitched, constant ringing in the absence of the data that had been his companion for a decade. He felt like a man who had lost a limb, his brain constantly sending signals to a phantom appendage that was no longer there.
He had to work. That was the only thing he could think to do. Work was structure. Work was purpose. He could force a semblance of normalcy, could pretend the man who had walked into that penthouse was the same man who was sitting here now. He forced himself to move, his actions feeling slow and clumsy, as if moving through water. He opened his laptop and navigated to Aura's secure server. He found the submissions folder, a place where aspiring trainees and unknown songwriters sent their dreams.
He clicked on the first file. A demo track from a new seventeen-year-old trainee, a girl the vocal coaches were supposedly excited about. He put on his headphones and pressed play.
A simple, clean acoustic guitar melody filled his ears, followed by a young, sweet voice, clear and full of untrained potential. It was a pretty song. In the past, the moment the first note hit, his world would have transformed. The blue interface would have materialized, breaking the song down into its core components.
[Song: 'First Rain' (Demo)]
[Thematic Resonance: 78% (Nostalgia, Youthful Melancholy)]
[Lyrical Complexity: 55%]
[Melodic Hook Potential: 82%]
[Overall Commercial Potential: B+]
[Recommendation: Strong candidate for a pre-debut single. Rework bridge, simplify chord progression in second verse.]
The data would have flowed, effortless and absolute. He wouldn't have had to think; he would have simply known.
Now, there was nothing. He just heard… a song. It was pleasant. The singer had a nice voice. Was it a hit? Was it special? Was it just another forgettable ballad in a sea of forgettable ballads?
He had no idea.
He had an opinion, of course, the same way any A&R manager would. But the god-like certainty, the absolute, data-driven conviction that had been the bedrock of his every decision, was gone. He listened again, trying to force the analysis, trying to find the magic he used to see so clearly. But there was nothing there but his own, terrifyingly fallible human judgment. Panic, cold and sharp, began to prickle at the edges of his consciousness.
He slammed the laptop shut, unable to bear the silence where there should have been answers. He pushed away from the desk and began to pace the small office. He had to try something else. Something more concrete. Contracts. Legal documents.
He found the file for a pending negotiation, a scoring contract for a new independent film Aura Pictures was co-producing. He spread the papers out on the desk. He forced himself to read the dense, legal text. Before, his Eye would have made short work of this. It would have scanned the document in seconds, highlighting exploitative clauses in red, flagging ambiguities in yellow, and cross-referencing the terms with a thousand other deals to project its long-term value. It would have given him a data-driven analysis of the composer, his 'Integrity' stat, his 'Work Ethic' level, his 'Scandal Factor.'
Now, it was just a wall of words. His eyes scanned the lines, but the meaning seemed to slide off the surface of his brain. He felt slow. Stupid. He realized with a sickening lurch that for ten years, he hadn't been a genius negotiator. He hadn't been a brilliant legal mind. He'd been a man with a supernatural cheat sheet. He had been playing poker with a card-reading machine embedded in his eye while everyone else was just trying to read faces. And now, the machine was broken.
A wave of pure, helpless rage washed over him. With a guttural cry of frustration, he swept his arm across the desk, sending the contract, the laptop, and a dozen other items crashing to the floor. He sank into his chair, his head in his hands, the silence in his mind screaming at him. He was a fraud. His entire career, his entire identity, was a fraud.
He didn't know how long he sat like that, adrift in the wreckage of his own self-perception. But eventually, a soft, hesitant sound penetrated his prison of thought. A knock on the door.
He didn't answer. He didn't want to see anyone. He didn't want their pity, their fear, their confusion.
A moment later, he heard a soft rustling sound from the other side of the door, then the gentle clink of ceramic on the floor. Then, retreating footsteps. He waited a full minute before he forced himself to get up and open the door a crack.
On the floor outside was a simple tray. On it was a steaming cup of barley tea, its nutty aroma filling the hallway, and a small plate with a few gimbap rolls, neatly sliced. There was no note. It was a gesture of quiet, unassuming compassion. It was Go Min-young's work. She wasn't judging him or demanding answers. She was just making sure the man inside was still human enough to need food and drink.
He stared at the tray, a strange tightness in his chest. He was about to close the door when another set of footsteps approached. It was Ahn Da-eun.
She stopped a few feet from his door, not trying to look inside, respecting the barrier he had put up. She just stood there for a moment, and he could feel her presence, a silent weight in the hallway.
"Yoo-jin," she said, her voice soft, directed at the closed door. It lacked the anger of their last encounter, replaced by something hesitant, something uncertain. "I… I heard what Gyu-ri said. I don't understand all of it. This thing… this 'Eye.' I can't even imagine what you're going through."
She took a breath. "But I know one thing. Before any of this happened, before you were the CEO of Aura, before you were the 'Midas Hand' of the industry… you were just a man in a noisy, crowded club. A man who heard my voice when no one else was listening. Not my potential, not my stats, not my commercial viability. You heard the music."
Her voice was a lifeline thrown across a vast, dark ocean.
"You heard me," she finished softly. "Don't forget that man. The machine didn't find me. He did."
She didn't wait for a reply. She turned and walked away, leaving him alone with her words.
He slowly closed the door, the echo of what she had said reverberating in the oppressive silence of his mind. He looked at the simple tray of food on the floor, and then back at the mess he had made of the office. For the first time since he had seen Ryu's video, a single, coherent thought cut through the static.
The man before the machine.
It didn't fix him. It didn't bring back the power he had lost. But it was the first, faint crack of light in the walls of his psychological prison. It was a reminder that somewhere, buried under a decade of data and deceit, there was a version of himself he had completely, utterly forgotten.