WeTried Translations

Translator/Editor: Potter

Discord: https://dsc.gg/wetried

◈ My Fired Uncle Is a Genius Guitarist? ◈

Chapter 2: It Wasn't Wrong

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The department head’s scolding had a beginning, middle, and end.

Beginning, why I was late. Middle, my attitude at yesterday’s company dinner. Then, my work ethic lately. And somehow, the conclusion was a lecture about marriage. According to this body’s memories, it was the usual full course, but it was a kind of noise I had never heard in my life.

I had heard eighty thousand people screaming from the stage, but this was my first time being stabbed by scolding from beyond a cubicle partition.

“Manager Lee, are you going to get it together or not?”

“I’m sorry.”

The apology came out reflexively. It was a reflex that did not belong to me. This body was optimized for apologizing.

Even the angle of my head was perfect. Exactly fifteen degrees, the angle where any lower looked servile and any higher looked arrogant. A ten-year office worker’s muscle memory was far better preserved than my guitar muscle memory. What a joke.

I sat down. An order spreadsheet I had left unfinished yesterday was open on the monitor. Client name, item, quantity, unit price. Rows of fish cakes and imitation crab sticks to be delivered to supermarkets.

There was no way I could make sense of the numbers. Yet my hands were already working.

When I came to my senses, my right hand was flipping through sheets with shortcuts on its own, while my left typed client codes. What kind of code? Not E or A, but SJ0347, Samjin Distribution’s Samsan Branch.

That was the inertia of ten years. Even when the mind took a break, the hands earned their keep. The problem was that all the codes these hands remembered were this kind.

Manager in Daejin Foods’ Sales Administration Team. That was where the Lee Han Yong of this timeline had arrived after giving up music sixteen years ago.

I opened the desk drawer. A box of business cards, two hangover remedies, and a card statement. I already knew from this body’s memories that the bank account was overdrawn, but seeing the numbers on the bill made me dislike it all over again.

In my past life, I had piled unreleased songs in my drawer.

This body had piled up debt instead.

“Manager, have this. The department head’s especially bad today.”

Assistant Manager Kim from the next desk quietly slid over a coffee. The moment I saw Kim’s face, the name, years at the company, and the time Kim had taken the blame for a paperwork mistake in this body’s place last year all came flooding in.

It seemed this body had not been unpopular.

‘Better than me. No, I am me.’

I did not even know what I was saying.

There was no way I could focus on work in this situation. I slipped in my earbuds and opened a search window.

Muri.

The related searches already looked suspicious. Muri concert tickets, Muri Kang Taeo, Muri new song music charts.

Muri existed in this body’s memories too. But those memories were strangely thin. They were famous, and that was it. For sixteen years, this body had carefully avoided them, changing the channel when they appeared in the news and skipping their name in karaoke songbooks.

I clicked on their latest performance video. It was a music show.

Three seconds after the intro began, I pulled out my earbuds, then put them back in.

‘...?’

A synthesizer. Bright, sparkling synth sounds filled the entire intro. The guitar was in the back, adding little more than shimmery backing. The drums were tame, and you had to listen closely to tell whether the bass was even there.

Kang Taeo appeared. Same face. Same voice. But the song they were singing was...

Different. All of it.

The Muri I knew was a band whose guitars, drenched in drive, pushed forward like a wall. This was... what should I call it? It sounded like a well-made fizzy drink. Crisp, sweet, smooth going down, and nothing left afterward.

‘This is Muri?’

And there was something I heard even if I did not want to, like an occupational hazard.

The high note in the chorus was not very high. The whole song stayed within the range most comfortable for Kang Taeo’s voice. Whenever it seemed ready to climb, it veered into backing vocals, and when it should have exploded, electronic sounds burst in instead. The arrangement was carefully skirting the vocalist’s limits.

‘So that voice still can’t hit a D5 in this world.’

The composers here must have been carving songs around that voice too, just as I had done for sixteen years.

I skimmed the articles.

They were regulars on the music charts, in commercials and variety shows too. They were now a band everyone in the country knew. Even people who did not listen to rock recognized Kang Taeo’s face.

‘That face still pulls its weight in this world.’

The community had a somewhat different mood. When I searched Muri on a rock forum, the top post read like this.

- What rock band are they? They’re just an idol band.

└ What idols? More like uncle-idols lol.

└ But couldn’t Kang Taeo pass as an idol? They’re good-looking.

└ Their vocal tone is pretty nice too.

└ Kang Taeo and the old guys. lol.

...I completely understood. I had just had the same thought.

The video comments, on the other hand, were another world.

Is Taeo really this handsome? Their live pitch is perfect. Stop forcing our guys to do rock.

Do not force a rock band to do rock? What kind of nonsense was that?

But after thinking of the song I had just heard, I could understand why they said it. It was too embarrassing to call that sound rock.

I scrolled down through the member introductions. Vocal, Kang Taeo. Drums, Baek Gibeom. Bass, Jo Wonwoo. Those were the same.

Guitar, Jeong Wooseok.

‘...Who?’

I stared at the unfamiliar face for a while. Of course I did not know them. They must have been the one who took my place after I left.

Right. That spot had originally been mine in this world too.

I remembered the audition day. It was one of the few scenes shared by both Lee Han Yongs. After telling me I had passed, Taeo had said:

“You’re Muri’s guitarist.”

Both Lee Han Yongs had heard those same words. Not long afterward, both had received the same call saying their father had collapsed.

One remained onstage, while the other sold his guitar.

I could understand why this body had avoided Muri for sixteen years too. Nobody was carefree enough to watch the place they had given up rise higher and higher.

Then I suddenly remembered something I wanted to confirm.

I typed two words into the search bar.

Breakneck Run.

Car articles, drunk-driving speeding accidents, and a webtoon with the same title.

There was no song.

Muri Breakneck Run.

I searched again with the words together. Nothing.

My fingers began moving on their own. I searched for the title track from the fourth album. Nothing. The fifth album’s title track. Nothing. The sixth, seventh, and eighth. Nothing. None of them existed.

Finally, I went through this world’s Muri discography from start to finish. There were dozens of song titles I had never seen before. Not a single song I had written was there.

Of course not. I had not been in this world’s Muri.

That obvious fact somehow made my heart beat faster.

Breakneck Run did not exist. Neither did the hundreds of original songs I had left buried in my drawer. This world had never heard the chorus I wrote while imagining a D5.

Nobody in this world had. Not yet.

There was one more thing to check. I knew the songs did not exist. But did the stage for those songs exist?

I opened the music charts. Half the top ranks were bands. A band was number one, and Muri was number two. A portal banner displayed a notice recruiting contestants for something called Rock Battle, and the popular video list had fancams of bands from high school festivals.

Right. This world was an age of bands. Everyone dreamed of becoming a rock star, and stages opened in every neighborhood.

It was a sight that had not existed in the world where I had lived. There, rock had been treated as outdated noise, and we had needed to become even fiercer to rise while overturning that disregard.

But here, things had leaned toward rock from the beginning.

The market was hot. The only thing missing was my music.

Put another way, that meant everyone here had yet to hear my songs.

“Manager Lee, what are you looking at so intently?”

Assistant Manager Kim poked their head out from the next desk. I minimized the window and answered.

“A client.”

“Muri is a client?”

“...A new one.”

#

After work, I returned to the studio apartment and sat on the edge of the bed.

The world map on the ceiling was still there today. Yesterday, I had thought it was mocking me. Today, it was just an ordinary water stain. It was a little frightening how quickly I had adapted to this dreary room in a single day.

I lifted my left hand.

When I played the intro to Breakneck Run in my head, my fingers moved on their own. Power chord, hammer-on, slide to the seventh fret, and...

It was an illusion.

My mind was already on the next measure, but my fingers could not even make the first chord shape. My pinky lagged half a beat behind what I imagined, and in the sixteenth-note passage, my fingers tangled together completely.

I lowered the tempo by half and played it again.

The fingers that had been half a beat late arrived only a quarter beat late this time. Tremendous progress. At this rate, the crowd would sing the next line in unison before I got there.

The way I flailed around in empty air was absurd. If I actually grabbed guitar strings, it would be quite a sight.

I rubbed my fingertips. I could still feel every ridge of my fingerprints. They were unfamiliar hands that made me laugh bitterly every time I saw them. I knew very well what would happen if I pressed steel strings with hands like these. I had gone through it endlessly when I was thirteen.

Blisters formed, burst, stung, and tore open again before they could harden.

I had to retake that hellish basic course at thirty-six. My mind was world-class, but my fingers were complete beginners.

What was even more ridiculous was that these soft hands had danced over Excel shortcuts like a pianist during the day. Movements practiced for sixteen years worked, while movements abandoned for sixteen years did not. The body was damnably honest.

I did the math. I got off work at seven. After showering and dinner, it would be nine. That left only three hours until midnight.

Chromatic exercises, finger independence, fingering strength, building calluses. Thirteen-year-old Lee Han Yong had spent a full year building all that. With a thirty-six-year-old body that was stiff and slow to recover, I could not even estimate how long it would take.

More importantly, I did not even have a guitar to play right now.

My hands were stiff, I had no guitar, and my account was overdrawn. It was a maddening trio.

That was when my phone rang. Three Korean characters appeared on the screen.

Big Sister.

- Hey, you alive? Why didn’t you answer your phone yesterday?

“Ah, I had a company dinner.”

- Really? Hmm. What are you doing next weekend?

“Why?”

- You know Taerin is in a band, right? Their guitarist suddenly quit. She’s a senior, so she said she’s going to an entrance-exam academy.

“...And?”

- They’re entering a competition next month. Some Best Band thing. There’s a hole in the guitar slot, so they’re in a panic. Taerin has talked about nothing but that at the dinner table for three days.

“So?”

- You used to play guitar.

Used to play guitar.

The sentence circled around in my head. It was not wrong on the resume of this timeline’s Lee Han Yong. An ordinary office worker who had put down the guitar in the winter he turned twenty, before he had even properly started a band.

‘Not just used to.’

I swallowed the words that rose to my throat. If I started bragging that I had been a Coachella sub-headliner, my sister would report to Mom tomorrow morning that I had finally lost my mind.

“I haven’t played guitar in sixteen years.”

- Isn’t it like riding a bicycle? They say your body remembers.

“Are bicycles and guitars the same thing?”

- Aren’t they similar? Anyway.

“What songs are they doing at the competition? Covers or originals?”

- How would I know? If you’re curious, ask them yourself.

The moment I asked, I realized my mistake. I was the guy saying he would not do it, yet I was already asking about someone else’s band set list.

- Anyway, an adult needs to be around when kids are practicing. It’s reassuring, whether you’re good or not. Right?

I laughed bitterly at the part about whether I was good or not. Whether I was good or not? My whole life had been about nothing but that.

“What about a guitar? I don’t even have one.”

As I asked, I rummaged through this body’s memories. The memory of the day I sold the guitar was clear. I handed it over in its case, then immediately pushed the cash I received through the hospital payment window for my father.

But something caught at the edge of that memory.

Behind a pile of boxes in the storage room at my family home. Lee Han Yong at twenty had buried the first guitar he could not bring himself to sell. A cheap beginner model.

...He did not throw that away.

You sold your main guitar but could not get rid of the cheapest one, huh?

- Hey? Are you listening?

“...There is one. In the storage room at home.”

- See? You have everything. Then you’re doing it, right? Can I tell Taerin her uncle said he would?

“Yeah. Well, anyway.”

I needed to get my fingers back in shape. Having my niece’s high school girls’ band as my rehabilitation partner was not a bad thing. It was a hundred times better than going straight onstage without a rehearsal.

- Thanks, little brother. Blood’s thicker than water.

The moment the call ended, messages came flying in.

Yun Taerin> Uncle! Are you really filling in for us?

Yun Taerin> No, wait. First, I have one question.

Yun Taerin> Uncle, you really know how to play guitar, right? (squinting emoji)

I wrote a reply, then erased it.

Did I know how to play? Who knew. These hands had once made eighty thousand people go wild, but only ten minutes ago, they had flailed in the air without managing a single chord shape.

< Yeah.

I sent the short reply, then thought for a moment before adding two more words.

< A little.

Sent.

I put down my phone and spread my fingers again. Soft hands without a single callus slowly formed chord shapes in the air.

A little, huh.

Given the state of this body, it was not wrong.

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