Chapter 15.2
Was I not supposed to be?
I was itching to grab Cheon Tae Rim and interrogate him. But I couldnât. Because he had no intention of letting me debut with Reverb.
And after days of observation, I was sure of one thingâthat bastard was either suffering from memory loss or was just too dense to recognize a fellow regressor. My entire personality had flipped 180 degrees, and he still didnât see it?
I had no idea how he was missing it.
So I made a decision. I wasnât going to tell him we were both regressors. Not until he figured it out himself.
Screw you, Tae Rim. If you werenât a regressor, Iâd have dropped you too.
With that thought, I dragged Go Ha Ram with me as I left the practice room. I needed to check B-Class trainees to see if there was anyone worth pulling into Reverb. Not all B-Class trainees were hopeless cases. Most new trainees started in B-Class unless they were exceptionally talented. It was basically the starting point before working their way up.
Trainees like me, who shocked trainers into thinking I had prior experience, and Hwang Eui Jae, who had already been a top-tier trainee at Ciel, got placed into A-Class immediately. But for everyone else, the time it took to move up ranged from six months to seven years.
For example, Zhang Ziyi and Go Ha Ram got fast-tracked because they were audition standouts. And Cheon Tae Rim, he should have still been in B-Class at this time. But just like me, he had rewritten his past the moment he regressed.
As a regressor, he had no excuse not to. Every time I saw how well he was maneuvering, I felt a surge of frustration. He was navigating everything so smoothly, so why the hell hadnât he figured out that I was a regressor tooâŠ?
The longest it had taken for a trainee to reach A-Class was Choi Hyun Hee. He had joined R&M at eleven but didnât make A-Class until he was eighteen. He dropped out of high school to become an idol, but his body just wouldnât cooperate. He spent years struggling in B-Class.
After him, it was Kim Sung Hoon who took the longest. He had joined as a teenager, which was already late, and it had taken him five years to reach A-Class. Some trainees moved up in a day, but for most, it took an average of three years.
That meant anyone who had been in B-Class for less than three years was probably still stuck there, waiting like raw diamonds in the rough, buried under other rocks in their raw state. Every single member mattered to fill out Reverbâs lineup.
With Myeong In Woo gone, the biggest problem was solved. Now I had to cut out any trainees who would cause future scandals. That meant eliminating anyone whoâd get caught in the major drug bust with the Daycrush members ten years down the line, and anyone whoâd get caught up in scandals too big to contain.
The problem is that I still didnât know who to fill the gaps with. Even with Zhang Ziyi, the lineup wasnât full. And the Thai trainee was out of the question because of military service issues.
Even Zhang Ziyi was a bit of a gamble. He had left immediately after failing the debut survival show last time. If I put him in the lineup, he might just pack his bags and fly back to China again.
But if I didnât include him, the numbers wouldnât match.
I seriously considered why Reverb had to be a nine-member group, and the answer was simple.
Because in Pick Your Romeo, when participants voted on the final debut lineup, they kept choosing high numbers.
Since Pick Your Romeo was a debut survival show, the final group size was determined through preliminary voting by both viewers and contestants.
You could vote for a minimum of four and a maximum of ten, but most contestants chose between eight and ten.
It made sense. The more debut spots available, the higher their own chances of making it.
They came up with all sorts of rationalizations to justify bigger numbers.
Meanwhile, I had voted for the absolute minimumâfourâwhich got me labeled as a heartless bastard.
Back then, and even now, my ideal debut lineup was between five and seven members. An odd number was better for formation balance, and keeping it under seven made blocking and choreography transitions cleaner and less confusing.
Sure, large groups had their own advantages, but the bigger the group, the more it started falling apart.Â
Seven members is manageable. If small cliques formed, it wasnât obvious in group settings.
But if they were nine, it was impossible to hide who was close with whom. Anywhere you put nine people together, at least three or four would start clustering, and the rest would feel left out.
And when someone like me, with zero leadership skills, got stuck as leader?The whole group would go to hell. Even before I realized I was going to be the leader, I knew this instinctively. So I had strategically voted for the smallest possible number, since the final decision would be based on an average of all votes.
Of course, the real problem was that my vote ended up on national television.
