The Power Couple Has Arrived [Entertainment Industry]

(The author isn’t a full-time writer, so updates are irregular, usually before midnight. Upcoming works are listed at the end.

The sunny academic: cheerful, friendly, steady, dependable ✖️ The moonlit producer: confident, bold, emotional, romantic

Kwon Jiyong had a classmate who was a complete academic ace, basically the top student in every subject except music.

One morning, after staying late to practice at the company the night before, Kwon Jiyong stared at the homework due that day, scratching his head. “Why is this so hard? It’s harder than dancing, harder than rap, harder than singing, and a hundred times harder than songwriting.”

His deskmate, who’d already started her morning reading, heard him fussing and pulled out her homework with practiced ease. “You can copy up to 80%. Mark the questions you don’t know before the long break, and I’ll explain them to you.”

Kwon Jiyong cupped the homework in both hands. “Ne! Kamsahamnida!”

With a month to go before final exams, Kwon Jiyong happily watched the semester’s once-a-term look of anguish spread across his deskmate’s face. He handed her his earphones. “Let’s sing this song for finals this year. Listen to it this week, then sing it for me next week.”

His deskmate reverently put on the earphones and used the music in place of English listening practice. “Ne! Kamsahamnida!”

*

The most outrageous thing Kim Seungseok ever did was date Kwon Jiyong, who in the public eye was a rebellious, flamboyant nonconformist.

The thing Kwon Jiyong did that most astonished everyone was go from being friends with Kim Seungseok, who was always methodical and focused on academics, to becoming her boyfriend.

One late night, Kim Seungseok returned from the library and found her celebrity friend outside her home, fresh from wrapping up a concert in Nagoya.

“Why aren’t you coming in? You know the pass, ”

“Will you go out with me?”

Kwon Jiyong’s voice trembled clearly in the late-night hallway.

“Kim Seungseok, will you go out with me?”

The superstar, who had just been surrounded by celebrities at his concert, was standing in the hallway of an apartment building in New Haven, confessing his love to his longtime friend.

His eyelashes fluttered unevenly. He wanted to look away, yet stubbornly kept his eyes on her, waiting for an answer.

*

On September 1, 2015, Dispatch published a story about a celebrity relationship early in the morning.

[Breaking | G-Dragon caught kissing longtime female friend in a car, returned to apartment together late at night amid dating rumors.]

“Is this the longtime friend who graduated from Yale with her bachelor’s degree, stayed there to pursue her PhD, and just published an SSCI paper and an A&HCI paper?”

“Is this the iron-willed friend who runs a YouTube channel with a million subscribers?”

“Is this the deskmate who once studied on a YouTube livestream for six hours, outlasting three waves of viewers?”

A final note:

A story about two overachievers pushing each other to the limit, competing with each other, and climbing to the top of life together.

All information comes from the internet. All events exist to serve the plot and may differ from reality. Please don’t flame the author if you dislike that.

Blurb for The Tea Seller and the Shoe Seller Tie the Knot [Entertainment Industry]:

[A tea seller who only wants to lie flat × a shoe dealer who’s practically retired]

Song Zhiyin is the most rebellious youngest daughter in a family that has been in the tea trade for three generations.

The Song family has been tea merchants along both banks of the Zhi River for three generations. Her grandfather carried a shoulder pole from street to street; her father ran a small tea shop. They grew, roasted, and sold tea, taking one steady step at a time.

No one expected the third generation to produce three children who had lost touch with their roots.

The eldest, Song Jingyin, took over the family business. He seemed calm and reliable, but was full of tricks and loved to set up his younger sister.

The second, Song Qingyin, seized the opportunities of the internet boom and gave the old tea shop a new lease on life. Beneath her cool exterior, though, she was sharp-tongued and devious.

But in the end, they both returned to their hometown and took up the family trade.

Only the third child, Song Zhiyin, was lazy and unambitious, wanting nothing more than to lie flat and retire.

Yet this same lazy Song Zhiyin, after eighteen years of following the rules, insisted on studying in Korea against her family’s wishes. To do it, she borrowed 500,000 yuan from Mr. Song Chengming, head of the Song Family Bank, with a five-year repayment term.

In June 2020, Song Zhiyin graduated from university. With just one year left before the loan was due, the pandemic and strict restrictions kept her cooped up in her rental apartment, watching time slip away.

At last, Song Jingyin, the current head of the Song Family Bank and son of its former head, hired Song Zhiyin to manage the Korean distribution of Shouyinzai tea as a way to repay her debt.

To protect her credit standing within the Song family businesses, Song Zhiyin negotiated every advantage she could and opened a tiny tea shop in Seoul called Yinchai.

For the first thirty years of his life, Kwon Jiyong had been surrounded by the clamor of crowds, dazzling nightlife, cameras, and gazes. After temporarily saying goodbye to the stage and taking off the “GD” halo, all he wanted was to get away from the noise and live quietly for a while as an ordinary person named “KWONGJIYONG.”

So he fell in love with cycling, sitting quietly in meditation, and slowly brewing a pot of tea, listening to the wind, the rain, and his own heart.

In those hours when no one was watching, he was no longer the dazzling superstar onstage, just an ordinary man longing for a simple life.

Song Zhiyin, a lazy tea seller who only wanted to lie flat and retire after years of following the rules, then suddenly rebelled. She met Kwon Jiyong, the shoe dealer who’d spent ten years embodying rebellion but now only wanted to live a slow and peaceful life.

No halo, no adulation, just a cup of tea, a quiet moment, and a gentleness left undisturbed.

Theme: The years steeped in bitterness quietly lose some of their searing pain when you walk beside me.