The Scandal-Proof Producer

The revelation that Nam Gyu-ri was now the architect behind Kai's debut hung in the Aura conference room like a toxic cloud. The name itself changed the temperature of the room, transforming their strategic challenge from a fight against a faceless corporation into a deeply personal duel. Yoo-jin had to make them understand.

He stood before his inner circle—his three chosen artists looking particularly pale—and laid out the threat. "You need to understand who we are up against now," he began, his voice low and serious. "Nam Gyu-ri is not Chairman Choi. She's not Sofia Kang. She doesn't fight with money or industry blacklists. She fights with narratives."

He looked from face to face, ensuring he had their complete attention. "Her method is to find the single truest thing about her opponent and twist it until it looks like a lie. She doesn't attack the song itself; she attacks the story behind the song. She will try to make your strength look like a weakness. Your authenticity, she will frame as a marketing gimmick. Your pain, she will call a product you are selling."

He let the chilling words sink in. "With her leading Kai's debut, our message of being real and flawed is no longer just our shield; it's our primary target. She will do everything in her considerable power to prove that it's all fake. That means this project," he gestured to Da-eun, Chae-rin, and Jin, "cannot just be good. It cannot just be successful. It has to be irrefutably true. The connection between you has to be real, because she will be searching for the slightest crack to exploit."

The weight of his words followed them into the main practice room. The space, which had recently been a sanctuary of healing and collaboration, now felt like a high-pressure laboratory where any failure could have catastrophic consequences. The three artists stood together for the first time with instruments in hand. The goal, set by Yoo-jin, was to start with the purest source material they had: one of Jin's stolen demos, a raw, minimalist ballad titled "Hollow."

Kang Ji-won sat at the grand piano, his expression grimly focused. He played the opening chords, a simple, melancholic progression that set a fragile, introspective mood.

It was a complete and utter disaster from the first note.

Jin, still emotionally raw and disconnected from his own voice, began to sing. He sang with a quiet, broken vulnerability that was authentic to his current state, his voice barely a whisper. It was the sound of a man trying to describe his own ghost.

Then Da-eun, tasked with finding her place in this fragile soundscape, came in. Her musical instincts, forged in the fires of rock and roll, screamed for power, for foundation. She laid down a bluesy, melodic guitar line, each note clean and powerful. She was trying to build a fortress around his whisper, to give it strength. But instead of supporting it, her strong, confident notes trampled all over the song's delicate melody. It was an invasion of kindness, an act of empathy that sounded like an attack.

Chae-rin, hearing the two opposing forces, instinctively tried to be the bridge. She added a faint, ethereal harmony, a high, shimmering vocal line that was beautiful on its own. But floating above the chaotic clash of the whisper and the riff, it just sounded lost and disconnected, a lonely satellite with no planet to orbit.

The result was a symphony of chaos. Three talented artists playing three different songs at the same time in the same room. The quiet pain of Jin's lyrics was being smothered by Da-eun's powerful guitar, while Chae-rin's harmony floated aimlessly above the wreckage.

Frustration, the natural enemy of creativity, began to curdle the air. After a particularly loud and soulful riff from Da-eun completely obliterated the emotional weight of a key line, Jin ripped his headphones off, his face a mask of raw anger.

"Stop! Just stop!" he snapped, his voice sharp with a pain that went beyond artistic disagreement. "That's not what the song is about! It's not an anthem! Can't you hear it? It's supposed to be empty!"

Da-eun, stung by the sharp criticism, immediately went on the defensive. "Well, it can't be a lullaby, either!" she retorted, her own frustration boiling over. "It needs some spine, some backbone, or it'll just put people to sleep! It's just you mumbling into the mic!"

"It's not mumbling, it's called subtlety!"

"It's called boring!"

As the two alpha personalities clashed, Chae-rin physically recoiled. She took a step back, her own voice, both literally and figuratively, disappearing entirely. The session ground to a halt, the room thick with resentment, artistic dissonance, and the bitter taste of failure.

From the control room, Yoo-jin had observed the entire catastrophe. It was worse than he'd anticipated. He activated his Producer's Eye, not to analyze their emotions, which were painfully obvious, but to diagnose the root of the creative failure.

[Synergy Analysis: Project Chimera]

[Musical Cohesion: 4%]

[Interpersonal Conflict Index: 92%]

[Primary Obstacle: Identity Defense.]

[Analysis: The artists are not attempting to create a new, unified artistic identity. Each member is unconsciously defending their own established territory. Jin is protecting the 'vulnerability' of his original song. Da-eun is protecting her identity as a 'powerful' musician. Chae-rin is retreating to her safe space of being an 'ethereal' background element. They are not collaborating; they are fighting for dominance.]

The problem was clear. They were trying to staple their sounds together, and it wasn't working. He needed to force them to melt down their old identities completely before they could forge a new one.

He walked into the tense, silent practice room. The three artists refused to look at each other.

Yoo-jin didn't lecture. He didn't tell them what they were doing wrong or how to fix it. He simply gave them a new, even more radical assignment.

"This isn't working," he said calmly. "So we're going to stop. We're going to try something different. A new piece of homework."

He looked at Da-eun. "You're going to learn Jin's ballad. You will sing it, exactly as he wrote it. No guitar. No rock and roll ad-libs. Just you, the piano, and his melody."

Then he turned to Jin. "And you are going to learn the lyrics to Da-eun's most aggressive, angriest song, 'My Room.' You are going to stand at that microphone and you are going to scream it. I want you to find her rage."

Finally, he looked at Chae-rin, who seemed relieved to be left out of the direct fire. "And you have the most important job of all," he said, giving her a new sense of authority. "You will be the judge. The producer. Your only job is to listen to them, and when they are done, you will tell them exactly what part of their performance felt fake. Where you didn't believe them."

He was not asking them to find a middle ground. He was forcing them to completely abandon their own artistic comfort zones, to shed their identities, and to wear each other's artistic skin. It was a bizarre, counter-intuitive, and deeply uncomfortable solution. It was either an act of production genius or a recipe for total mutiny.