Lia lived in a city that could not be called poor, yet it never gave its people enough to dream too greatly.
She belonged to that fragile middle class—that narrow band suspended between safety and fear; neither drowning, nor floating.
Her father was a high-school mathematics teacher, her mother a nurse in a hospital—together, the very picture of a family built upon stable wages and the ordinary rhythm of life. Her only brother, a law student, could barely keep afloat between his lectures and the odd jobs that helped sustain him.
Then came the crisis!
Everything shifted the day her father's school went bankrupt. No more reliable salary, no safe position, no meaning in the stability they had once believed their jobs could secure.
He was forced into work that did not resemble him—work foreign to his nature and his dreams—simply to pay his son's tuition, to keep a roof above them, to hold life together.
Lia did not despise poverty.
What she hated was stagnation—that weary battle her family fought only to claw their way back to the very point from which they had fallen. She longed for more. Not only
to restore what had been lost, but to lift her family into a place they had never known.
To her, progress was no luxury, it was a necessity. And when opportunity appeared, she did not hesitate.
Lia was a quiet force, the kind of presence that enters a room without a sound yet scatters the stillness of the air.
By nature, she was reserved, but her silence was never born of fear; it was the fruit of sharp perception. She observed
more than she spoke, and when she did speak, her words came like shards of glass—clear, precise, gleaming with a rare wisdom in one so young.
She was gifted.
From childhood, chess had been her silent obsession. She spent hours at the board, not merely to defeat her opponent, but to know their next move before they conceived it. Later, she discovered the ancient Chinese game of Go—and it became her new battlefield.
In Go, there was no place for luck, only intention, foresight, and patience. All of these lived in her as if by nature.
Though still in high school, she seemed far older touched by the quiet wisdom of one who had lived many lives before.
Yet her greatest strength was not intellect.
It was her ability to slip inside the minds of others—to sense their fears, to grasp their logic, to strip away their masks. She could become someone else in an instant, not to deceive, but to survive in a darkening world. She did not merely read people—she read the empty spaces between them.
And then, one day, survival itself placed an unexpected card in her path.
It was a sleek, black card—its only mark a silver name: D6.
A rising company, swift and merciless, known for plucking the unknown from obscurity and forging them into stars. They offered to spotlight talent, to build bridges of fame, and in return claimed only a share of the profit—an arrangement that seemed, at least on its face, fair.
Lia's instincts whispered caution. Yet she could not resist the lure. This was the chance she had long awaited—the door that might open where so many had closed. Even if it was not chess, not Go, but something else entirely—even if it meant acting, a field she never desired—it did not matter. If it brought money, if it gave her family safety, she would take the risk.
For the first time in years, she felt life whisper: "Go on—your next move awaits."
When Lia returned home, she bore the news like a lifeline of diamond, or a boat to carry her family through the storm that had nearly drowned them. She told them of D6 and its promise, and their faces lit with hope. Her father's weary eyes softened with pride; her mother's gaze shimmered with pride and prayer entwined; even her brother, usually so restrained, smiled his rare blessing.
But inside Lia, clarity faltered.
Excitement wrestled with unease. Something in those glittering promises felt wrong, as though a hidden thorn lay beneath the velvet. Yet she silenced her doubts. Despair allows no room for analysis. She simply wanted—once—to
believe that life could offer a hand without cruelty in its palm.
All she knew was this: she would risk everything to save her family from the slow suffocation of fading into nothingness.
The next day, her steps were calm but tight with nerves as she arrived at the company's building. From the outside, it was everything that an aspiring talent agency should be gleaming glass facade, an elegant emblem, brisk employees moving with polished grace.
But the moment she crossed the threshold, the atmosphere changed.
Inside, it was no lively hub of creativity, but a space ruled by a discipline bordering on military. Every worker wore a flawless black suit, crisp white shirt, dark glasses—clones from a single mold. No laughter, no whispers, nothing spontaneous. All moved to an invisible, rigid rhythm.
Lia paused. This was no place for fledgling stars. Talent agencies were not run with such severity. Yet the image of her family's struggle pressed down upon her, forcing her questions into silence. Her mind never stopped asking, but her lips remained sealed.
She approached the officer in charge, who asked why she had come, what she had sought, what gifts she had carried. She answered truthfully—her talent for strategy, her hunger to secure a greater future for her family. Minutes later he returned, face fixed in a practiced smile:
"You are accepted… provisionally. All that remains is the contract."
She could not know then that the stroke of a pen would alter everything.
Led into the contract room, Lia felt the strangeness deepen.
The room stretched long and narrow. A single white table cut across the space, lined with twenty contracts and one black pen—like weapons waiting to be claimed.
The walls were painted a pale gray, draining the air of warmth, leaving behind the chill of an interrogation room—or a confessional. The sensation was wrong, entirely wrong for a talent agency.
"Please wait here," said the officer, voice clipped. "Do not touch anything. Do not read the papers. Wait until the others arrive. You will sign together."
She sat in silence, thoughts tossing like waves. What was this place? Why did everything feel… unnatural?
One by one, the other candidates arrived, each bearing the same confusion. None of them resembled the promise of a talent agency. Bewilderment became their common bond.
Lia's eyes lingered not on the walls, but on the faces around her.
A bold, radiant girl—surely a singer or actress. A boy with rigid features, stripped of expression. Another with the far-away gaze of an artist lost in reverie. And still more faces, each carrying its private hunger, its own desperation.
Every one of them had come, as she had, born by need.
or by despair.