The Scandal-Proof Producer

While Da-eun's world was consumed by the public firestorm of her family's crisis, Park Chae-rin found herself struggling with a quieter, more insidious kind of pressure. The global fame, the endless praise, the feeling of being constantly seen after a lifetime of being invisible—it was not the liberation she had imagined. It was a new kind of cage, one with invisible bars made of public expectation.

The agoraphobia that Yoo-jin's Eye had detected was beginning to manifest in subtle ways. The bright, open-plan office at Aura, once a sanctuary, now felt exposed. The friendly greetings from staff felt like scrutiny. Every time her name was mentioned in a meeting, a jolt of anxiety shot through her. She felt like a fragile specimen preserved under glass, and she was terrified that any sudden move would shatter her delicate new reality.

To escape, she found herself retreating to her old habits. Late at night, long after the others had gone home, she would slip out of the office, her famous face hidden beneath the deep hood of a sweatshirt and a plain black mask. She would walk for hours, drawn to the quiet, forgotten back alleys of Seoul, the anonymous spaces where she had once felt most at home. These walks were the only time she felt like herself, or rather, the self she used to be: a ghost, unseen and unburdened.

One chilly night, her wanderings led her to a small, deserted park tucked away between two towering apartment buildings. It was a patch of forgotten green in a concrete jungle, dimly lit by a single, flickering lamppost. She sat on a cold metal bench, pulling her hoodie down, and for the first time all day, she felt like she could breathe.

It was then that she heard it. The sound of an acoustic guitar, played softly and inexpertly, drifted through the quiet night air. On a bench on the other side of the small park, partially hidden in the shadows, sat a young man. He was hunched over a battered-looking guitar, fumbling his way through a melancholic melody.

She watched him for a moment. He was handsome in a raw, unpolished way that was the complete opposite of the airbrushed perfection of the idols she knew. His dark hair was messy, falling into his eyes as he concentrated. He wore a worn, faded jacket, and the sleeve of an intricate tattoo snaked out from his cuff, disappearing up his arm. He had the restless, haunted energy of a stray animal—a little lost, a little wounded, and maybe a little dangerous.

He was trying to transition to a difficult chord, a B-flat minor, and his fingers couldn't quite make the shape. The strings buzzed horribly. He stopped, cursing under his breath with a raw frustration that was painfully familiar to her.

Forgetting herself, forgetting that she was a global superstar who shouldn't talk to strangers in deserted parks at night, she spoke up. Her voice was soft, barely carrying across the space between them.

"You're pulling your ring finger off the fret just before you strum," she said. "That's why it's buzzing. You have to keep the pressure even."

The young man's head snapped up, surprised by the voice from the shadows. He couldn't see her face clearly, just the silhouette of a small figure bundled in a dark hoodie. He looked at his hand, repositioned his fingers on the guitar neck, and tried the chord again. This time, it rang out, clear and sad.

A slow, surprised smile spread across his face. "Hey, you're right." He peered at her, intrigued. "You play?"

She nodded. "A little."

The shared language of music was an instant bridge across the dark park. He gestured to the spot on the bench next to him, an invitation. Hesitantly, she stood up and walked over, sitting a respectful distance away.

"I've been trying to nail that transition for a week," he said, his voice a low, gravelly murmur. "Thanks."

"It's a hard one," she admitted.

They struck up a quiet, easy conversation, the kind that can only happen between two strangers at midnight with no expectations. He introduced himself only as "Ryu." He was guarded about his personal life, deflecting any questions with a vague, self-deprecating joke. But when he talked about music, a fire lit up his sad eyes. He spoke of songwriting with a desperate, all-consuming passion. He seemed to be a struggling indie musician, a familiar archetype in the city—a soul full of immense talent but lacking the luck or connections to get noticed.

There was an immediate, unspoken current of recognition between them. In his frustration and his raw, unpolished talent, Chae-rin saw a mirror of her own past, of the seven years she had spent writing songs in secret, convinced no one would ever hear them. She saw his invisibility not as a failure, but as a kind of purity she was starting to miss.

He, in turn, saw nothing of the global superstar Park Chae-rin. He saw a quiet, insightful girl in a hoodie who understood chord theory and spoke the language of musical struggle. He was talking to her, not her fame. He was seeing her, not her story. For the first time since her life had exploded, she felt anonymous. She felt real.

The interaction was innocent, fleeting. A brief conversation between two musicians in the night. It was completely disconnected from her professional life, from the high-stakes world of Aura Management and OmniCorp.

And because of that, it was a complete and utter blind spot for Han Yoo-jin.

His powerful Producer's Eye was an incredible tool for navigating the treacherous landscape of the entertainment industry. It could detect professional threats, latent scandals born from industry rivalries, media manipulations, and the internal pressures of fame on his artists. But its focus was, by its very nature, professional. It was not designed to see a quiet, private connection formed in the dark. It could not detect a threat that wore the face of a simple, struggling boy with a guitar.

This new vector of vulnerability, born not from the pressures of her career but from a quiet longing for her old anonymity, was a crack forming in a place he wasn't even looking. The ghost had found a stray, not knowing that some strays are not lost, but have been deliberately left, waiting to be found.