The day after Park’s little dinner rebellion, he woke up feeling strange.

He had replayed some of the things he’d said and found several places where a wiser, calmer, significantly less pissed-off person might have chosen different words, but he didn’t exactly regret walking away either.

What bothered him was something much harder to explain.

Ever since he’d stood there telling the Bennett family how fifteen years of their shit had felt, the line between himself and the old Park had become harder to see.

It reminded him of those reincarnation novels where the protagonist spent two hundred Chapters believing he’d stolen somebody else’s body, only for some ancient immortal grandma to eventually reveal that, surprise, they had actually been the same soul all along.

Sometimes the previous life had been a dream

But sometimes the author went completely drunk on fantasy and explained that two halves of one soul had lived separate lives before finally becoming whole again.

For one uncomfortable night, Park had genuinely wondered whether something like that was happening to him.

He threw the idea away the next morning because, frankly, he already had a broken System, impossible talents and a locked forbidden path in his life.

He did not need to start diagnosing his own soul on top of everything else.

Still, the feeling remained.

That night at dinner hadn’t felt like Park speaking on behalf of some dead boy whose memories happened to live in his head. The anger had been his, the hurt had been his and even that stupid little memory of being three years old and taken from doctor to doctor because Alexander wanted to make absolutely certain some toddler hadn’t masterminded the greatest paternity scam in Imperial history had felt horribly, intimately his.

Park decided not to think about it anymore.

Naturally, he solved this by making himself too busy to think.

The first morning he went straight to the estate gym and stayed there for almost three hours. Alexander found him somewhere near the middle of it and stood watching for long enough that Park became painfully aware of every movement he made. Neither brought up dinner. Park eventually greeted him with a simple, "Morning, Father," and Alexander answered with a grunt before watching another set and leaving without explanation.

Park considered that an excellent conversation by Bennett standards.

Afterward he showered even his ice routine Quinn was a sweetheart to prepare for him before he spent most of the day writing music. Quinn brought breakfast because Park had apparently exercised long enough to make breakfast become brunch, and Emmie appeared not long afterward, made herself comfortable in his room without asking and stayed for hours. They talked, argued over songs, messed around with his socials, stole bites from each other’s food and eventually ended up cuddling in his bed doing absolutely nothing important.

It was probably the most peaceful part of his day.

The NX call never came.

On the second day, Park repeated almost the same routine, except he added the Foundry that evening. Perfect Crown became slightly terrifying again... the first few serious training sessions had left him feeling like somebody had beaten him with professionally certified equipment. This time he trained hard, returned home and realized his body had handled it frighteningly well.

Sore, yes. Destroyed, no. J

im had already noticed how quickly Park adapted and even his body changes so fast.

Then, on the third day, NX Arc finally called at around four in the afternoon.

They wanted him in for his contract.. Park arrived expecting paperwork but he had underestimated paperwork.

The stack waiting for him looked thick enough to defend a small castle.

Noah was there as New Talent Manager, along with a senior A&R executive from Music, an acting representative responsible for the screen side of his career, the Head of Artist Management, and a lawyer from NX Business Affairs.

Five people, one nineteen-year-old rookie and enough legal language on the table to make Park briefly miss being hit by a car.

They walked him through the broad terms first. NX wanted to represent him across both acting and music, develop him as a dual-career talent, provide access to its studios, producers, training network, casting relationships, promotion machine and all the other expensive little advantages that came with being one of the Empire’s largest entertainment companies.

Then Park started reading.

Golden Mic woke up almost immediately.

The first major problem was his music.

NX wanted both careers under the same broader agreement, which Park had expected.

What he hadn’t expected was how aggressively the original draft treated everything his musical brain might produce. Under several clauses, songs written through NX assignments could be treated as company-controlled works, especially when created for other NX artists. The agency could request material from him, place that material with its singers and take the overwhelming majority of the commercial benefit while Park received only limited writer compensation unless another arrangement was specifically negotiated.

There were publishing hooks too, broad enough that a careless rookie could surrender control over compositions without fully understanding what he’d given away. Songs created for other artists could be pushed toward work-for-hire style treatment, meaning Park might receive a fee while the company walked away owning most or all of the valuable rights attached to the song.

There were his own recordings where they gave him only a 10% master ownership.

Park stared at that number for a while.

The master was basically the ownership of the actual finished recording people streamed, downloaded, licensed into movies, used in advertisements and commercially exploited for years afterward.

Park could write the lyrics, build the melody, compose the song, sing the damn thing and become the reason anyone cared about it, yet under the opening draft NX would own nearly all of that recording while he kept ten percent.

Golden Mic didn’t like that at all, neither did Park.

There were other hooks buried throughout the agreement: broad exclusivity, long option periods, recoupment language that could let NX recover certain costs from money Park earned, and enough cross-career wording that one bad section on the music side could eventually become everybody else’s favorite excuse for controlling something unrelated.

Park didn’t think NX was evil.

That would’ve been childish.

They were a business staring at a golden goose that had wandered into their lobby without another agency already owning it. Of course they wanted as many eggs as possible and Park wasn’t even against laying so many for them, either:

If NX gave him studios, promotion, producers, distribution, films, contacts and a machine capable of turning Nathaniel Park into a household name, they deserved to make money.

They simply weren’t getting the whole fucking bird.

After almost an hour, the Business Affairs lawyer finally asked, "Any immediate questions?"

Park closed the contract.

"A lot."

The man smiled. "That’s normal."

"Good." Park tapped the stack. "Because I’m not signing this today. I’m taking the full agreement to independent counsel, having every page reviewed, and then I’ll come back with revisions."

That produced a very small change around the table but nobody gasped dramatically because the rookie had discovered lawyers existed. But Noah looked faintly pleased, while the A&R executive studied Park a little more carefully.

The lawyer simply nodded. "That’s exactly what you should do. Take your time."

Park smiled.

Maybe they thought he was a kid trying very hard to look sophisticated or maybe they thought he was smarter than expected.

Their opinions belonged to them.

Golden Mic belonged to him.

They did settle several smaller issues before he left:

NX had no objection to Park hiring his own assistant, and they were equally willing to let him choose a personal manager as long as the company retained its own Artist Representative to serve as the official bridge between Park’s team and NX.

That was normal enough:

Some artists used agency-provided managers, others hired their own. What mattered to NX was that schedules, projects and company decisions didn’t disappear into some private-management black hole.

Park would also need his own independent entertainment lawyer, which he already intended to get. Once careers became valuable enough, having personal counsel wasn’t some celebrity luxury. It was basic self-defense with nicer stationery.

That same afternoon, he officially stopped using Mick.

To Park’s surprise, Mick looked almost as happy about it as he was.

NX had reassigned him to another young actor whose previous runner had recently been fired, and although the guy was still relatively new, his name was already growing quickly.

It meant to Mick’s career as better prospects, better future pay, more important sets and, judging by Mick’s grin, considerably more opportunities to casually mention famous people he’d met while pretending not to flex.

Everybody won.

NX also raised Park’s social media. He could continue managing the accounts himself or hire somebody to do it, provided he followed the agency’s restrictions regarding confidential projects, sponsorship conflicts, unreleased material and the usual ways celebrities accidentally turned a harmless Tuesday into a PR emergency.

That part amused Park because his accounts were already moving without NX touching them.

Jessie’s posts kept including him, oither girls (Emmeline’s friends) from the Empire Mall outing kept tagging him. New followers behaved like somebody had handed them a salary and instructed them to spread Nathaniel Park across the internet.

Park wasn’t complaining.

A day earlier, he’d crossed 50,000 followers.

But that was a disaster for another Chapter.

Because now, on the fourth day since his family’s spectacular dinner collapse, Park was standing outside the office of the independent entertainment lawyer who would help him decide exactly how much of Nathaniel Park NX Arc was actually allowed to own.

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