It started as a whisper in half-lit basements and cluttered cafés. A single leaked rooftop video. A demo passed hand-to-hand on scratched USB sticks. A few scattered lyrics, scribbled on bathroom stalls or printed onto knock-off hoodies by kids with more courage than money.
Minjun watched it all spread like wildfire from the cracked screen of Jiwoo's ancient laptop. No manager. No label. No stylists fussing over his hair or telling him how to stand. Just his voice — hoarse, imperfect, unstoppable — bouncing between hidden chatrooms and shadowy corners of the city that Starline had never cared to control.
After the rooftop riot, Seoul's underground youth didn't just listen. They answered.
One night, Jiwoo dragged Minjun out to a parking lot under a half-collapsed overpass near Sinchon. Someone had hacked a dozen portable speakers together — zip-tied to broken street lamps and graffiti-coated concrete pillars.
Kids in black hoodies and thrift-store boots passed out cheap hot tea in paper cups, their breath fogging the winter air as they pressed QR codes into shivering hands. Minjun recognized his own voice bleeding through the crackling speakers — that last defiant chorus from the rooftop, warped by cheap Bluetooth, echoing off the damp concrete like a secret anthem.
Miri materialized out of the shadows, backpack slung over one shoulder, phone clutched tight.
"You see this?" She jabbed the screen in his face. "It's not just Seoul anymore. Osaka. Manila. Even Jakarta. They're holding rooftop shows too. They're calling it The Underground Chorus."
Minjun tried to laugh, but the sound caught in his throat. The word underground made him shiver — not with fear, but with a raw thrill he hadn't felt in any practice room or dorm back at Starline.
When he stepped up to the makeshift mic that night — nothing but a karaoke microphone duct-taped to an old amp — the kids pressed closer, hungry for every note. Jiwoo's guitar snarled through the static. Someone banged an empty oil drum like a war drum.
The ground trembled under their feet. Minjun's voice cracked and roared, and the kids screamed it back at him, fists pumping the freezing air. They weren't just fans. They weren't just an audience. They were a chorus.
The shows spread faster than anyone could track. Word-of-mouth only. No flyers, no online schedules. A whispered time, a rooftop code, a basement back door. One night it was an abandoned movie theatre. The next, a cramped university lecture hall with the lights killed and the security guards bribed with instant noodles.
Sometimes there were twenty people. Sometimes two hundred. They paid what they could — coins, crumpled bills, old snack vouchers stuffed in cracked tip jars. Nobody got rich, but everyone felt richer.
One night, they played under an old train bridge by the river. The pillars were covered in neon graffiti — MINJUN SAVED US — sprayed in sloppy Hangul that made him blush when he first saw it.
Jiwoo started playing an unfinished track Minjun had written on a napkin in that greasy noodle shop. Minjun hadn't planned to sing it yet — it was raw, just words and scraps of melody — but the echo under the bridge made it sound bigger than it was, like the pillars themselves were humming along.
He closed his eyes and sang anyway. No choreography. No fancy light rig. Just his voice bouncing off stone and river water, carried away by the wind to kids who might be too scared to show their faces but never too scared to listen.
The press called him reckless.Foolish.A bad influence.
Starline's official statement painted him as an ungrateful rebel who spat on the hand that fed him. But every time they tried to kill the noise, the kids sang louder.
Jiwoo joked that they'd built a hydra — cut off one rooftop, and three more rose up in its place. Miri laughed every time she saw Starline's lawyers trying to scrub leaks off social media.
"Too late," she'd say, tapping her battered phone. "It's out there now. It belongs to them."
At first, Minjun worried about the kids. The risk. The raids. The inevitable pushback from a machine that had devoured him once and would happily devour them too. But every show ended the same — new faces, fresh bruises sometimes, but always more voices.
He learned their names one by one. Hyunwoo, who ran sound from an old laptop missing half its keys. Sora, who scrawled Minjun's lyrics onto stickers and plastered them all over subway cars at 3 AM. Daeun, who stitched homemade patches onto jackets so the kids would recognize each other on the street — a secret uniform for a secret chorus.
One night, after the crowd had drifted off into the last trains and shuttered alleys, Jiwoo and Minjun sat on a concrete ledge by the river. Jiwoo's guitar rested between them like a quiet promise.
"You ever wish we'd stayed?" Jiwoo asked, voice soft, eyes on the black water.
Minjun didn't answer right away. He watched a stray train rattle across the bridge overhead, its lights flickering like a heartbeat in the dark.
Finally, he shook his head. "We'd still be singing. But we'd be alone."
Jiwoo chuckled. He leaned over, bumping his shoulder against Minjun's. "Now look at you. You're a leader."
Minjun scoffed. "I'm just loud."
Jiwoo grinned. "Sometimes that's enough."
When they packed up that night — guitar zipped tight, amp hoisted onto Jiwoo's back — Minjun glanced at the fading graffiti on the bridge pillar: We Sing Because He Did.
It wasn't about him anymore. It never really had been. The city was humming with voices that could never be put back in a box.
The Underground Chorus was out there now — unfinished, imperfect, unstoppable. And Minjun knew, deep in his bones, that this was just the opening verse.