Chapter 180. The Giving Tree
[Title: 5/10]
[[Court] Registered mail was sent but could not be delivered due to absence.]
[https://qjqjsdlaz.xu]
I asked Shin Ji-yoon to excuse me for a moment, left the theater, and checked the message.
To put the videos simply, they contained exactly the kind of stage-planning information I needed.
Except for the third one.
The first video was CCTV footage of a small performance venue catching fire.
The second showed a young man on the stage of a large rock festival in Busan, directing the staff around him.
Naturally, the first video immediately caught my attention because I was worried about casualties.
Even so, the real protagonist seemed to be the young man in the second video.
The Busan Rock Festival had long been known as one of Korea's biggest rock events.
Rock was a genre where performance and spectacle mattered enormously.
Anyone planning stages there had to be a veteran among veterans, someone who had already seen every kind of disaster imaginable.
And yet he looked so young.
I needed to meet that planner.
Not simply because he seemed destined to succeed early.
Both the first and second videos had been recorded in 2028, four years from now.
The third one too.
All three happening four years from now couldn't be a coincidence.
Obviously, the incidents had to be connected somehow.
The young man from the Busan Rock Festival was probably directly or indirectly connected to the fire at the small venue in the first video.
I couldn't exactly visit the 2028 Busan Rock Festival right now.
Fortunately, the location in the first video was clearly identifiable.
So I decided to visit that place first.
Which was why I was now standing inside a small underground indie-band theater in Hongdae.
The moment I entered, I could immediately understand why the place would catch fire four years later.
For starters, it looked run-down.
It was dark.
The ventilation was poor.
Dust seemed to have been accumulating endlessly.
There were several plastic chairs lined up in the audience area, the kind you'd normally only use for outdoor events.
And strangely enough, the audience area was the clean part.
The stage, especially the audio equipment packed along both sides, was coated in sticky dried drink residue and dust.
Nothing had been cleaned.
Dust would get into the cable connections.
The insulation around the wires would gradually peel.
Eventually, there would probably be a short circuit.
The place was open, but there wasn't a single person around.
It was a shared venue used by indie bands.
I absentmindedly unplugged and replugged a few cable jacks.
Then I spotted a performance pamphlet with shoeprints on it.
It read:
Hongdae Indie Rock Festival
Under the Performance Order section were detailed names that sounded extremely indie:
Denmark Barbershop
Kim Cheol-su Band
Paprika Even Then
Shouting Within the Silent Truth
And so on.
Naturally, I'd never heard of any of them.
But the bands weren't what mattered.
I checked the name of the event planner printed at the very bottom.
It said:
The Giving Tree
Was that another indie-band name?
Probably not.
The Giving Tree was the name of an extremely famous Korean charity organization.
The one that handed out those little black plastic badges shaped like cherries to donors.
If that charity was handling the stage planning, then this venue probably belonged to them too.
Tsk, tsk, tsk.
If they were going to keep running performances here, they needed to maintain the building properly.
It was so filthy that I wouldn't have been surprised if some of those sticky drink stains came from 814 Cola, which had been discontinued in the early 1990s.
"Look! I told you I think that's Do Jun-hyeok...!"
I heard young girls whispering outside the venue.
When I looked, I saw a whole group of students carrying guitars on their backs.
"Ah, are you here to perform?"
"No! We rented the place for practice today. There isn't a show. But you're CEO Do Jun-hyeok from Universe, right?"
I told them to come inside.
The space had been prepared for people like them, after all.
A whole group that looked like band members entered and started unpacking.
Ah.
Coming here had definitely been the right decision.
One of the faces looked familiar.
It was the stage planner from the second future video.
He looked younger now, but four years wasn't nearly long enough for him to become unrecognizable.
The equipment he was unpacking looked like a bass guitar.
So he wasn't doing stage production yet?
I approached him and started a conversation.
"Oh. You play bass. I've always thought bass looked really cool. I've wanted to learn sometime."
"Really?"
He had been quietly setting up his instrument with a somewhat expressionless face.
But the moment I spoke like someone who truly understood the deep appeal of bass, his expression brightened.
"Bass is great. Honestly, even if you don't really play anything and just go boong, boong on the strings, it feels amazing."
"Exactly."
"I'm actually really good at bass. CEO Do Jun-hyeok, if you're ever interested, contact me. I'll teach you for free."
Come on.
No need to go as far as free.
He introduced himself as Seong Hee-jae.
Apparently, he was the leader of a band called Castle Light.
Seong Hee-jae.
Seong Hee-jae.
Remember the name.
"Do you perform here?"
"Yeah. We perform here and practice here too. But we're not allowed to touch the sound equipment. If we mess with it and something stops working later, they won't let us use the place anymore. We can only plug in the cables."
Seong Hee-jae connected his guitar and started plucking the strings.
The connection was slightly loose, so the sound cut in and out irregularly.
But after adjusting the cables and strings, he got it working quickly.
How did he end up becoming a stage planner?
Had I come too early?
"Have you ever thought about performing somewhere else?"
"I'd love to. But places like this are basically all we can get. This is the only venue that'll let us perform."
I looked around the theater again.
What was the point?
This place would burn down four years from now anyway.
"Then I can give you some performance opportunities, can't I?"
At my words, every member of the band turned toward me.
No one asked why I would bother helping them.
They probably assumed I was making proposals to different indie bands.
"We can't completely stop coming here, though. We raise donations while performing. You know The Giving Tree, right? They run the program. So we do it with a bit of a sense of responsibility too."
So even after becoming successful four years later, he was still coming back to this theater.
That made my suspicion clearer.
He was likely to be involved in the fire shown in the first video.
Not only him.
Probably every member of Castle Light too.
"Then what if we raise donations too?"
At my final question, Hee-jae looked toward the other band members instead of me.
"Then of course we'd do it. There'd be no reason not to."
Good.
Then I should test his planning ability now.
"Perfect. Let's move right away! How much performance pay does The Giving Tree give you?"
"Performance pay? There's nothing like that. It's a fundraising activity. It's a charity performance."
"Ah..."
Charity was good.
But most people would call that working for exposure before they called it charity.
The Giving Tree might feel unfairly criticized if I said that, since they were at least lending the venue with good intentions.
Still.
If this were a successful band already making decent money, asking them to perform for free once or twice might be understandable.
But how much could these people possibly make from performing?
They could've at least given them a tiny cut of the donations.
"Come on. I'll get you a much better practice room nearby."
After finding them a good practice room nearby, I returned to the car and replayed the third video.
Unlike the first two, this one irritated me for no particular reason.
The setting was a funeral hall.
"Looks like this guy was pretty popular, huh? More mourners than I expected. Was he good at making songs? I've never actually listened to them."
"Probably."
"There are seriously a lot of people. If we called it a memorial performance, we could probably raise some spending money."
"Spending money? Ah, you mean hold a support concert for this guy?"
"No, no. What support? I mean raise money for us to spend. He's already collecting plenty of condolence money."
It was a conversation between some middle-aged man speaking in a nasal voice and an ordinary-sounding younger man.
The camera didn't show their faces.
It only showed the side dishes in the reception room and people walking in and out of the entrance.
The nasal voice itself was irritating enough.
But the content was worse.
It was obviously the funeral of a singer.
And these people were talking about making money from a memorial concert?
For their own benefit?
Even as a joke, that was awful.
If they wanted to make a joke like that, they should finish mourning first, go home, bury their face in a pillow, and whisper it to the wall.
What were they doing saying it here?
Whether or not that mosquito-like bastard actually went through with it, he deserved punishment for saying that much.
The more I thought about it, the more certain I became that this was the funeral of a victim from the fire in the first video.
The future-spam videos were always connected.
Was it Seong Hee-jae?
Who cares?
Either way, it was definitely an indie musician who died while doing charity fundraising.
First, I needed to keep Castle Light away from that Hongdae theater.
There were plenty of ways to do that.
I could recruit Seong Hee-jae as a stage planner.
Or I could grow Castle Light until a tiny venue like that couldn't possibly accommodate them anymore.
But that wouldn't eliminate the fire victim entirely.
Couldn't I somehow make them clean the place?
The most reliable solution would be to destroy the small venue altogether.
But I couldn't exactly fill the whole place with concrete.
The Giving Tree helped not only indie musicians but people from all kinds of fields.
They probably hadn't even considered the need to maintain that venue regularly.
And the bands were probably uncomfortable asking the charity to clean a space they were using for free.
If they tried to clean it themselves, there were probably endless rental schedules from other groups even after their own practice ended.
I'd have to go there personally and talk to The Giving Tree about the theater.
I started the car and headed toward Jonggak, where The Giving Tree's office was located.
When I arrived, the employee at the front desk was talking to someone on the phone.
The moment she saw me, she looked startled and hung up.
"H-How can I help you?"
Why is she so flustered?
Do they not get many visitors?
I greeted her politely.
"There's someone here who manages the semi-basement performance hall in Hongdae, right?"
"The semi-basement performance hall?"
"Yes. You support indie bands there, don't you? I'd like to meet the person in charge."
The employee hesitated briefly before answering.
"If it's band support, you'll need to meet Secretary Han. He handles everything from fundraising to the actual programs."
"Where is he?"
"Just a moment."
The employee picked up the phone again, called somewhere, said, "You have a visitor," and then hung up.
"Follow me."
I followed her deeper into the building.
Everywhere I looked, I saw The Giving Tree's signature black cherry-tree motif.
It was a fairly large organization.
There didn't seem to be any area requiring help that they didn't somehow reach into.
The employee stopped in front of an office marked:
Culture and Arts Center
Then she knocked.
"We're coming in."
She opened the door and gestured for me to enter.
I gave her a small bow and stepped inside.
The first thing I noticed was a large desk with an elaborate nameplate.
Secretary-General Han Hyung-soo
The nameplate was so flashy it looked like something a company president would use.
A small-framed man sitting behind it stood up with a cheerful smile.
He must be Secretary Han.
"Nice to meet yooou. What brings you heeere?"
Hmm?
That voice...
