Idol of the Heavenly One - vanish into fiction

We were in the living room with the other members, except for Baek Jae-heon who was still asleep in his room, looking at an article together when even Kwon Ji-hak and Joo I-rip stared at me as if I were strange.

“Why? Because he’s handsome.”

“You could just say he’s handsome! Why use an expression that makes you sound like a fifty-year-old man?”

I was a little flustered at their genuinely shocked expressions, but I pretended not to be and answered nonchalantly, as if there was no helping it because Baek Jae-heon was so handsome that such an exclamation had to come out of me.

“I guess I was so moved by his looks that it came from deep inside.”

But the fact that they specifically said “fifty-year-old man” threw me off a bit. They probably said fifty because my stage name is Ji Cheonmyeong, but it still hit home. So I just blurted out anything.

“Whoa, that much? You’re totally a face stan!”

“Myeong-hyeon is a total face stan~”

“What’s a face stan?”

“You don’t know what that is?”

“Uh, it’s a person who only… cares about looks.”

When I asked, Go Hee-min gave me a baffled look as if to say, how could I not know that, and Lee Soon-bok immediately answered with the correct explanation. Good kid. He said he practiced speaking for two months, and it did feel like he stuttered less now.

But a person who only cares about looks? In another sense, that might actually be right. After all, I was the one who signed a contract with the company just because of Baek Jae-heon’s face.

“Yeah. I’m a face stan, that’s right.”

But the more I talked, the more it felt like things were heading in a weird direction. I kept blurting things out in panic. Thank goodness Baek Jae-heon was not here right now.

I only agreed to the “face stan” thing to smooth over the old man side of me that almost slipped out, but if Baek Jae-heon had been here, he might have misunderstood and thought a member liked him just for his looks.

I usually tried not to let any middle-aged mannerisms slip out, but sometimes the words that came from the heart were impossible to stop. Living as a nineteen-year-old, my body became healthy like my peers, and strangely enough, my thoughts and actions started syncing with my age. But for some reason, certain exclamations or ways of speaking from my past life still slipped out at times.

I guess old habits really do die hard.

“Maybe this hyung is actually really fifty in disguise?”

“Could be. Sometimes he really does seem like an old man. His food tastes too.”

“Huh? What about my food tastes?”

This time, I was genuinely flustered and stuttered. What part of me screams fifty? And what does my taste in food have to do with it?

“You like things like cheonggukjang and grilled Pacific saury.”

“Yeah! Total old man taste!”

Huh? How is that an old man taste? I’ve liked cheonggukjang and saury since I was twenty, so what part of that makes me seem like an old man? I stared blankly at the two, genuinely not understanding, then suddenly realized.

When I thought about it, kids this age probably like hamburgers and pizza. They grew up eating that stuff, so of course their tastes would lean that way. Even my younger sibling at home was always asking for malatang or whatever.

“It’s just a matter of taste.”

I did not have a good defense for this one, so I just said it was a matter of personal preference and tried to move the conversation along.

“M-Myeong-hyeon is not… an old man!”

But then, Lee Soon-bok, who had been quiet until now, suddenly jumped in to defend me. He looked so serious, like he had some irrefutable evidence to prove I was not an old man.

“Myeong-hyeon likes Moongbaek.”

Then he suddenly exposed my secret taste.

“What? That white bear character?”

“Oh? Really? I didn’t think Myeong-hyeon would like that kind of thing.”

What embarrassed me more than them finding out I had memories of my previous life was the fact that my liking Moongbaek had been revealed.

In my past life, I got caught being a Moongbaek otaku and kept hearing, “No wonder you never got married.” So in this life, I was quietly liking Moongbaek without buying figures or plushies. How did Lee Soon-bok know I liked Moongbaek?

“How did you know?”

“H-Huh?”

“That I like Moongbaek.”

“What? Myeong-hyeon hyung, you really do?”

“Seriously? It’s true?”

“Are you a kid?”

I only asked Lee Soon-bok one question, but suddenly there were follow-up questions coming from everywhere. Even Go Hee-min, who had been quiet, was now asking if I was a kid. I could feel my ears turning red. I mean, I did not even set it as my wallpaper. How did he find out?

“M-My chat theme…”

“What?”

“The theme is Moongbaek…”

“…”

I could die. When did he see that?

The chat theme I was using was a perfectly ordinary-looking one meant for blending in. The speech bubbles looked like the default ones, but both ends of each bubble had tiny white Moongbaek ears sticking out, and when you pressed a button, Moongbaek’s cute fluffy tail would wiggle. Most people would think it was just the normal default theme at a glance, so how did he even notice…