The Road To Glory [EN]: Chapter 171

# 17 Is That Really What You Want?

Unexpected things always happen in life.

This phrase is easily used everywhere.

We often mention this magical sentence not only in our daily lives but also when creating special scenes in dramas or movies.

There’s another case.

Surely, there are times when you just meant to take a quick look, but before you know it, you’re watching walruses eat, starting from the first video on YouTube, right?

People have agreed to call this the YouTube algorithm.

So, it might be due to this YouTube algorithm that Jang Jin-soo was searching for Soyou clips and happened to find a video containing his friend.

Jang Jin-soo, who had been browsing YouTube with hazy eyes, suddenly stopped scrolling. No music was playing in the auto-played video, but he noticed something strange.

“What is this…?”

He doubted his eyes and stared at the video.

The video, which showed the familiar streets of Hongdae [a vibrant and artistic neighborhood in Seoul], had been uploaded a whopping two weeks ago. The source was a channel that often posted busking videos. The title was nothing special.

[A Male Student’s Spine-Chilling Busking Interruption Live #BeCareful]

It was a title with a dated vibe, but Jang Jin-soo couldn’t skip this old-fashioned video because he saw a familiar face in the video.

He immediately knew when this day was.

It wasn’t common to see so many people gathered on Hongdae’s busking street. In particular, the performance, which included office workers in suits, middle-aged couples, and foreigners, regardless of age or gender, made it impossible not to click on the thumbnail.

Jang Jin-soo, who bothered to click on the video and check the voice, was horrified and stood up from his seat.

He hurriedly made a phone call with his cell phone.

“Hey, answer quickly. Why aren’t you answering your phone? Hey! Noh Hae-il, something big happened!”

Jang Jin-soo checked the number of views on the video with trembling hands, just in case.

“Heok.”

He covered his mouth at the unusual number.

#

[A Male Student’s Spine-Chilling Busking Interruption Live #BeCareful]

480,000 views ＊ 12 days ago

Korean Busking (KOREAN BUSKING)

“What.”

At the nonchalant reaction, Jang Jin-soo pounded his chest as if frustrated.

“No, didn’t you see this on your way here?”

“I did.”

“Then why are you reacting like that? If it were me, I would have been going crazy.”

“Did I commit a crime?”

This unfunny bastard.

Noh Hae-il didn’t seem to care about the reaction his busking was getting.

‘Is this guy a *cool찐* [a Korean slang term for someone who tries to act cool but is actually awkward or uncool]?’

Jang Jin-soo looked at Noh Hae-il suspiciously and clicked on the video again. He had already watched it all the way on the subway, but his heart was still pounding no matter how many times he watched it.

The video starts quite early.

The busking *hyung’s* [Korean term for older brother or male friend] performance was over, and he thought everyone had left, but it seemed there were people watching them.

Noh Hae-il takes the microphone after receiving the *hyung’s* offer and stands in front. Until this point, no one paid attention and just passed by.

Then, the busking *hyung* starts playing the guitar.

It was the accompaniment of ‘Let it be’ that everyone knows.

Some people reacted to the familiar accompaniment.

Of course, many people glanced and passed by.

But the moment Noh Hae-il opened his mouth, the person who was about to pass by stopped in their tracks. College students engrossed in their phones and girls chatting with their friends stopped talking and turned their heads at the same time.

A strange pleasure arose there.

People gathered like moths drawn to a flame. It was only a moment before Noh Hae-il was surrounded.

One would expect to be nervous when people gather, but Noh Hae-il doesn’t seem nervous, as if he’s absorbed in his song.

The clear voice spreads through the streets.

He’s clearly singing a Beatles song, but it’s like listening to a hymn.

So, really incongruously, it felt like being healed.

It seemed that Jang Jin-soo wasn’t the only one who felt that way, as the audience moved their mouths slightly, singing along to the song, and slowly shook their heads. The eyes of a middle-aged man were moist, and someone stared intently as if shocked.

Everyone seemed to have forgotten that they had to react.

The only downside was that the video wasn’t very long.

Whether the battery ran out or there was another problem, there was no encore song from Noh Hae-il.

Jang Jin-soo stopped watching the video and checked other videos on the ‘Korean Busking’ channel.

Recently, there were no videos that reached 480,000 views. At most, 60,000. The ones that exceeded a million were from years ago.

The video’s reaction was unusual, not just because it reached 480,000 views in two weeks on a channel with an average of 30,000 views. The comments were especially crazy.

The comments that came in through the algorithm were fresh, from three days ago to just seconds ago.

-Why is this a regular person…?

-Guitar playing stopped from 1:24

└ ????

└ Iwhyjin [Internet slang for “Why is this real?”]

└ Surely… I heard it? Is this brain completion?

-Wow… I don’t know if this is the right word… but I feel choked up… Why do I keep tearing up?

-I came in to curse because it said interruption… I’ve been replaying this for four hours

-No one’s saying it’s fabricated. A cover of Beatles and Hwang Ryong-pil. I was impressed by the courage. I was blown away by the first syllable

-I’m the female student who appears at the beginning. The atmosphere was really amazing ㅠㅠㅠㅠ I was supposed to meet my friends, but I couldn’t move until it was over ㅠㅠ I got cursed at, but I definitely don’t regret it ㅠㅠ It’s cut here, but he sang Hwang Ryong-pil’s Emergency as an encore, and it was really awesome ㅠㅠ I couldn’t film it because I was enjoying it. Thank you so much ㅠㅠㅠ

In addition, it was mostly filled with Korean comments, and foreign languages were also seen here and there.

Anyway, what we can see here is that this video is just starting to go viral.

“There are always haters everywhere.”

-Just an entrance exam student level lol (329 dislikes)

└ ?

└ Excuse me, do you happen to go to Berklee?

Even if there were haters, the reaction was good enough not to care much.

“Hey, look.”

Jang Jin-soo pushed away the haters and showed Noh Hae-il the entire phone screen. Noh Hae-il’s expression becomes strange after reading a few comments.

As expected, he can’t help but be conscious of getting this much attention.

“How is it? Isn’t it amazing?”

“…It is amazing.”

It was amazing in a different sense than Jang Jin-soo’s “amazing.” 480,000 views means that 480,000 people have watched this video.

In a world where there are tens of thousands of broadcasting stations called ‘YouTube.’

That was amazing, but it didn’t really resonate. After all, he hadn’t actually seen 480,000 people.

“How’s the reaction to yours?”

Jang Jin-soo asks cautiously.

He could have just asked. Halo recalled the number of views on his four videos. Of course, it was less than this busking video.

When he shrugged his shoulders, Jang Jin-soo made a pitiful expression, but the corners of his lips went up.

“You know you can’t cancel the bet, right?”

I knew he would ask this.

Hae-il snorted and turned on the MIDI program.

“What are you doing?”

“What do you think I’m doing?”

He had just uploaded one album, consisting of four songs. That means there are still many albums he hasn’t uploaded.

‘But this time, I need to train a bit more.’

While uploading the 1st album [Struggle], there was a sense of relaxation, but the regret was stronger than anything else. The lack of physical strength in his body. More than anything, the time has come to focus on hitting his throat.

In fact, he felt like he had forced himself to release four songs this time. It was hard to record, and he was about to lose his voice when he tried to sing it all at once, so he sang it over three days.

This wouldn’t have happened to the original Halo.

This winter, from the time he fulfills his last responsibility, he will properly build his body. He can’t live with a body like a child forever.

“The grades are coming out soon.”

Jang Jin-soo stretched.

“Grades? Since when have you cared about that?”

“No, not the final exams, but the first results of Soyou are coming out. It takes about three weeks. Come to think of it, school grades will also come out around that time.”

School grades were something that Hae-il didn’t care about either, so he passed it off indifferently, and an puzzled voice was heard.

“Did you do well on the exam this time? To go to a foreign language high school, you need to be in the top one or two, although I don’t know well.”

“Why would I go there?”

“…Weren’t you preparing for foreign language high school?”

Foreign Language High School.

He roughly knew that it meant a private school that elites go to. Why would I go there?

Hae-il shook his head as if it were obvious.

“I don’t have to go to high school.”

“Eh?”

“Compulsory education is up to 9th grade, no, middle school.”

“?”

It certainly wasn’t wrong.

The education that Koreans are obligated to receive was designated as three years of secondary education.

Still, it was strange that Noh Hae-il, of all people, would say that he wouldn’t go to high school, which everyone usually goes to.

Is this the situation where a quiet person climbs onto the stove first [a Korean idiom meaning someone who is usually quiet or unassuming can surprise you with unexpected actions or opinions]?

Sometimes I feel like Noh Hae-il can be extreme. Sometimes he asks if he’s weak. This time, he says he’s not going to high school.

“No.”

Noh Hae-il has a face that asks what the problem is.

Is this the situation where a quiet person climbs onto the stove first?

Sometimes I feel like Noh Hae-il can be extreme. Sometimes he asks if he’s weak. This time, he says he’s not going to high school.

“Isn’t it a bit much not to go to high school, not even college?”

“Why would I go to high school if I’m not going to college?”

“No, you might want to go to college. Well, not now, but later.”

In fact, Jang Jin-soo didn’t understand why he had to say these things when he wasn’t even a parent. He himself wasn’t interested in college either. But he felt like he couldn’t leave Noh Hae-il like this.

He knows that Noh Hae-il has more talent than him.

“Not really.”

How can he cut off the future so resolutely like that?

“Or, how about an arts high school? You have good grades and you sing well. You’ll probably get in without much trouble. Go there and compete with kids who have similar dreams, and date.”

“Why bother?”

He really doesn’t seem interested.

Is it that they can’t even compete with him?

Jang Jin-soo brushed off the annoyance, scratched the back of his head, and said what bothered him the most.

“And, hey. I feel like a mama’s boy if I say this, but did you tell your parents that you’re not going to high school? …You didn’t, did you?”

As expected.

I thought so.

“Before you do anything, how about talking to your parents first? Any parent in Korea would obviously oppose their child not going to high school. Even the kids who go into agencies all go to high school. In the first place, there are almost no middle school graduates in our country, let alone high school graduates.”

Jang Jin-soo isn’t in a position to worry about Noh Hae-il, but he was worried because he could see that firm attitude clashing someday. Because he knows he’s not a bad guy.

“I know you have a lot of things you want to do. But there shouldn’t be fighting with your parents and building walls in there. Is that really what you want?”

Hae-il wondered why he had to hear these things from someone who was much younger than twenty. So he was about to cut him off, but his lips twitched at the last question.

‘What I really want?’

It’s a question with bones [a question that cuts deep or has a hidden meaning].

Jang Jin-soo may not know, but Hae-il felt that way.

In fact, from Hae-il’s perspective, Noh Hae-il’s parents are not important at all. The biggest thing is that Noh Hae-il’s parents don’t exist in the path he sees.

He didn’t need anyone’s help that much. It was like that in the past, and it’s the same now. He could live well on his own.

But there’s one thing that bothers him.

The reason why he can’t only think from the perspective of ‘Halo.’

‘Noh Hae-il,’ who gave him this body, bothered him in one corner of his heart.

‘I can’t know what Noh Hae-il wants.’

He can’t talk to Noh Hae-il.

Of course, there’s only one body, and he has Noh Hae-il’s body. He doesn’t even know where the real Noh Hae-il is, so there’s no way he could know what Noh Hae-il wants.

The only thing Noh Hae-il left behind was that secret notebook. The diary consisted of Noh Hae-il’s original songs, doodles, and miscellaneous worries.

He read the notebook thoroughly, but he couldn’t find anything that Noh Hae-il wanted. He only realized that Noh Hae-il was very indecisive and couldn’t make any decisions.

‘What would Noh Hae-il have done?’

In fact, he doesn’t have high expectations. Judging from the traces in the notebook, he would have ended up listening to his parents. It means that if they opposed, he would have given up.

Of course, this is just his guess.

It might have been different in reality.

He might have run away from home like Hae-il, or he might not have given up on either.

“That… I’m sorry if you’re angry.”

A timid apology is heard on the hardened face.

A timid guy. To mistake this kind of guy for a gangster.

Hae-il put his hands behind his head, leaned back in his chair, and lay down.

He wondered if he should care so much about the words of someone who was twenty years younger than him, but he was still concerned.

‘Don’t act like a teenager and speak properly.’

Is it because he remembers the manager who always nagged him that he was like a child?

‘If you’re an adult, take responsibility like an adult.’

Hae-il always brushed off the nagging as a joke.

He didn’t deny it because he never really thought he was a proper adult.

Time just passed.

He was always that sixteen-year-old kid who ran away from home. Nothing much had changed.

But he can’t just shout, “I’m a kid too!” to a real kid. Anyway, he’s gotten older.

“It’s difficult.”

“What, what is?”

“I can’t ignore it because I’ve received something.”

“What did I give you?”

Hae-il didn’t bother to correct Jang Jin-soo’s misunderstanding and stared at the air.

“I’m a little concerned about only doing what I want to do.”

“…Is that so?”

Again, this isn’t something he wants to say to Jang Jin-soo, but he didn’t deny it.

“Then what do you want?”

“You’d know that, right?”

“Hmm.”

A sigh comes out.

Not because Jang Jin-soo is annoying, but because he’s really worried. In fact, if Jang Jin-soo hadn’t nagged him, he wouldn’t have had these worries. Hae-il would have just acted like Hae-il.

“Well, this might sound funny and cheesy.”

Then, Jang Jin-soo’s voice was heard.

“They say that music contains the thoughts and emotions of the composer at the time. The reason why we can cry or laugh when we listen to music is because we share similar thoughts and share emotions. I don’t know if this fits your worries, but why don’t you just make music without trying to make it good?”

“…”

“Your real desires might be contained in that music.”

Hae-il’s gaze, which had been looking at the air, slowly turns to Jang Jin-soo. Jang Jin-soo thought it was too cheesy after all.

‘Shiba [a Korean swear word, similar to “shit”], I knew it. I should have just kept my mouth shut.’

“What did you say?”

As expected, the voice that comes back isn’t pleasant.

“Ah, I didn’t say anything?”

At Jang Jin-soo’s words, Hae-il is quiet for a moment and then suddenly jumps up.

He approaches the sofa and opens his bag.

Then he stops again and stares at Jang Jin-soo.

“Why?”

“By any chance, is Noh Hae-il, no, are you my lover?”

“?! What nonsense are you talking about? How would I know that?”

“…I guess you don’t know.”

Jang Jin-soo was puzzled by the sudden question and soon raised the corners of his lips.

“No, but suddenly a lover? A virgin who can’t even say a word to girls.”

He suddenly remembered that Noh Hae-il would avoid the girls gathered in front of the school gate. Noh Hae-il mutters softly.

“Then… who is it?”

“What?”

Noh Hae-il opens his bag and takes out his notebook. And he hurriedly flips through the notebook. It was the notebook that Noh Hae-il always carried around. What’s in there? Jang Jin-soo tilted his head.

“Hey, what is it?”

And he slowly approached Noh Hae-il.