Chapter 56. Their Peach Garden Oath
"It's seriously a disaster over there. I heard that Kang Ha-do borrowed money everywhere the moment he turned twenty and bought a used foreign sports car. Apparently, he has a younger brother. When Ha-do went to prison, the debt probably fell onto that younger brother. The poor guy is probably still working himself to death paying it off."
Im Sori didn't know the exact details because she'd only heard rumors.
But as far as she knew, the day Lee Jeong-yeol drove drunk and the day Kang Ha-do caused his accident were the same day.
Then there was a chance they'd been drinking together.
Did they hear the crew member was injured and both drive away separately, only to both cause accidents?
That coincidence felt too strange.
"Is that information reliable?"
"Yes. It wasn't publicly released at the time, but everyone in the industry knows. It's also true that Kang Ha-do went to prison after a drunk-driving accident. I heard Lee Jeong-yeol visits him in prison regularly."
I needed more details.
Should I contact Kang Ha-do?
If he was in prison, I could probably arrange a visit through the correctional service.
But I doubted he'd happily spill everything simply because I said I was curious.
If he had been a car-obsessed guy and an employee at Fever Music, there was a high chance his personality was terrible.
While I was thinking about other composers I could contact besides Im Sori, a message arrived.
Had Lee Jeong-yeol changed his mind?
I hadn't even managed to give him my business card before getting thrown out.
I checked the sender.
Spam.
[Title: 4/7]
[Recorded: 2023.07.31. 08:34]
It hadn't even been a full day since the previous spam message.
Another one already.
After the upgrade, the total had changed from ten messages to seven.
That also made me curious about what the next upgrade might be.
First, I calmly checked the GIF.
It showed the end credits of a music video titled 〈Homesick Girl〉.
The background was completely black.
I couldn't tell who the singer was.
I couldn't see the music-video concept.
The only information visible was the text scrolling through the credits.
[Composition: Kang Sang-do, Fever Brothers]
[Lyrics: Fever Brothers]
[Arrangement: Fever Brothers]
Another GIF related to Fever Brothers.
This opportunity already cost two spam messages.
Considering the first one showed more than one hundred million views, maybe it wasn't such a waste.
The 〈Homesick Girl〉 in the GIF had to be the exact song Fever Music had just proposed to us.
The only new information from this GIF was the production credits.
Then I simply needed to compare them against the credits written in the proposal.
I immediately opened the file.
Composer.
Lyricist.
Arranger.
All of them listed only Fever Brothers.
That meant Composer Kang Sang-do wasn't originally listed anywhere.
Yet by the time the music video was released, his name had suddenly been added.
Why was he added specifically under composition, not arrangement?
As far as I knew, there were only two common explanations.
One.
Fever Brothers plagiarized a song originally composed by Kang Sang-do.
Later, they settled the copyright dispute by listing him as a co-composer.
Two.
Kang Sang-do had actually composed the song from the beginning.
Fever Brothers unfairly omitted his name.
Later, the truth came out and they were forced to add him.
Which one was it?
Should I listen to every song Composer Kang Sang-do had ever written?
I searched the name.
No composer named Kang Sang-do appeared.
Only one Fever Music employee.
I remembered the face of the man who had brought me the chair earlier.
Kang Sang-do.
He called Lee Jeong-yeol hyung.
Apparently, he lived under one of those workplaces that forced a family-like bond onto employees.
Kang Sang-do wasn't exactly a common name.
The man added to the future credits had to be this Kang Sang-do.
Had Fever Brothers plagiarized an employee's song?
That seemed unlikely.
An employee at the studio couldn't exactly release music independently without them knowing.
Then only the second possibility remained.
Kang Sang-do's name had been unfairly removed from the composer credits.
I didn't know what future event caused his name to be restored.
My goal was to make 〈Homesick Girl〉 into a Blue Moon song.
And the future GIF was showing me an event where Kang Sang-do's name suddenly appeared in the credits.
If I investigated Kang Sang-do, I had to believe some solution would appear.
There wasn't much else I could do.
I turned off the engine I'd just started.
Then I sat there watching the entrance of Fever Music's building.
Sang-do.
Please leave work on time today.
It was still early afternoon.
Sang-do finally left after nine at night.
My eyes almost fell out after staring at the building all day.
I quickly approached him and asked whether we could talk.
He didn't look especially suspicious.
He led me to a nearby cafe.
"It looked like your CEO yelled at you pretty badly earlier. Are you okay?"
"Yes. I'm fine."
Judging by the atmosphere, I'd almost expected Jeong-yeol to slap him.
"The project got canceled, so there's nothing we can do now. But I was personally curious about something. This proposal only lists Fever Brothers as the composer. Does 'Fever Brothers' include you too?"
"No."
Sang-do looked at the proposal with me.
"Fever Brothers is simply the stage name Jeong-yeol hyung registered. Fever Music is more like Lee Jeong-yeol's workshop. Someone doesn't become a copyright holder just because they clean the bathrooms at Fever Music."
"Ah. Then you didn't participate much in creating this song?"
"That's not exactly true either..."
I knew it.
His name was in the future credits.
That meant he had participated heavily.
"How much did you contribute?"
"It's hard to quantify contribution in this kind of collaboration... but I built the entire melodic progression. I did the sound design too and uploaded the full project. By the time it became the final version, only a few lyrics had changed."
At that point...
Wasn't this basically Kang Sang-do's composition?
"Then why isn't your name here? Isn't that unfair? Seems like something you could challenge legally."
"Even someone like me who doesn't know much about law understands that it's unfair. But my situation isn't good enough to quit just because I'm angry..."
I remembered the hidden drunk-driving story Im Sori had told me.
His older brother couldn't pay his debts.
The younger brother was suffering and paying them instead.
People in that industry supposedly knew the story already.
So mentioning it probably wasn't too strange.
"I heard your older brother made a serious mistake in the past and left behind quite a lot of debt... so you can't really leave."
"Haaaa..."
Kang Sang-do answered with a deep sigh.
"Still, it's okay. I'll somehow pay my brother's debt. And Jeong-yeol hyung promised that if I work at Fever Music for another three years, he'll set up my own label. He always tells me I'm talented. It's not like loan sharks are breaking into my house because I pay slowly... I only need to tighten my belt for a few more years."
"The CEO promised to create a label for you."
"Yes."
Nonsense.
When I was a rookie, there had been one hyung who promised to open a used-car dealership for me if I worked for him for a year.
Another hyung tried to recruit me to work at a ranch on Jeju for two years, promising I'd leave with five hundred million won.
All of those guys were somehow living ordinary lives.
Not a single one had become a chaebol tycoon.
Why did Lee Jeong-yeol's face irritate me so much?
Because he had exactly the face of a hyung who exploited younger guys.
"I know this is extremely rude to ask, but when your real older brother caused that accident, were you there?"
"...So you don't know every rumor after all. I suppose it's been long enough that even people in the industry got tired of talking about it."**
After saying that, Kang Sang-do remained silent for a very long time.
It felt like nearly five minutes.
Then he spoke again.
"Do you know why Jeong-yeol hyung refuses to give Universe 〈Homesick Girl〉?"
"Because our company is small?"
"That's not all. Most of our highest-quality songs are eventually given to Turb Entertainment. Fever Music calls itself independent, but it's basically a Turb subsidiary."
Turb Entertainment.
Fever Music was that close to Turb?
Suddenly, I understood why Fever Music's reputation was top-class yet relatively few of its songs were released publicly.
And why its company building was so enormous.
Good songs were used like fake premium listings at a used-car dealership.
They attracted small and medium agencies.
Once those agencies arrived, Fever Music sold them weaker songs.
The real premium tracks all went to Turb Entertainment.
"I was only twenty at the time and working mostly on my own music, so I didn't know much. But apparently, there was a celebration party that day for the launch of a Turb Entertainment hip-hop group. Turb's CEO, Jeong-yeol hyung, Ha-do hyung, idols from the group, planners... quite a lot of people were there."
The story could be summarized like this.
During the party, Lee Jeong-yeol received a message saying one of his employees had suffered a burst appendix.
But just as Kang Sang-do constantly called Jeong-yeol hyung, Jeong-yeol himself followed Turb's CEO around calling him hyung.
He couldn't possibly abandon his elder brother's celebration just because one employee's appendix burst.
So Lee Jeong-yeol remained at the drinking party until the end.
Then, on the way to visit the hospitalized employee afterward, he had a very warm meeting with the police.
The real problem wasn't Lee Jeong-yeol.
It was Turb's CEO and Kang Ha-do.
"Ha-do hyung apparently offered to drive Turb's CEO in his sports car. But Ha-do was already fairly drunk, so he caused an accident. There was an important person sitting in the passenger seat, and he still crashed. That's the version everyone knows."
According to Sang-do, they couldn't hide Lee Jeong-yeol's incident because the police caught him directly.
But Ha-do's hit-and-run happened more privately.
So they managed to prevent it from reaching the media.
The people involved became passengers in the same boat.
Different days of birth, but forced to share the same day of death.
A true Peach Garden oath.
"You keep saying that's the version everyone knows. Does that mean there's another version people don't know?"
I pushed a little further.
"That's the version everyone knows. Smart judges and prosecutors know that version too. The police too. So I suppose that's what happened. I only heard the story. What else would there be?"
Sang-do became firm.
I handed him my business card before ending the conversation.
"Understood. If you ever need help, contact me. If you've met Turb Entertainment people often, you probably know this already, but I exposed the digital-chart manipulation incident. I also exposed the broadcasting sponsorship scandal."
"..."
Sang-do accepted the card.
He said nothing else.
There had to be more to the story.
Turb Entertainment had somehow been involved in both the broadcasting-station sponsorship parties and the Janggun Bodhisattva chart-manipulation incident.
It was a filthy company.
As I finished saying goodbye to Sang-do and left the cafe, an unknown number called me.
Who was it?
I answered outside.
"Yes, this is Do Jun-hyeok from Universe Entertainment."
"Manager Do Jun-hyeok! No, you're CEO now, aren't you? I should've congratulated you earlier, but I've been so busy I couldn't find the time."
The voice sounded very familiar.
But anyone whose voice I knew that well should've already been saved in my contacts.
"My contacts were recently wiped, so I'm sorry, but who is this?"
The person on the other end burst into laughter.
"Your contacts weren't wiped! You never had my number in the first place."
"What?"
"This is Yoo Jun-seok from 〈The Sixth Sense〉! You told me we'd have tea sometime, remember?"
