'Midas Touch' | Aespa Winter x Male Reader

Act 3 | Year 2023: It's in my DNA

July 2023,

DNA. It was just an abbreviation of the scientific name Deoxyribonucleic acid. It sounded cool to be honest. But, it was the theme of our comeback song. When I wrote the song, all that I can think of was the DNA strand that made up the human body.

Whether you like it or not, a DNA strand can only happen when a polymer composed of two polynucleotide chains that coil around each other to form a double helix. I saw it as poetic that you need two strands instead of one. That's where I got the lyrics for the song.

AJ actually helped with the choreography. Especially the beat drop where the seven of us created a double helix. The dance itself was very creative to our dance teacher/producer. Tobio had finally put a hand on the production of the music. He learnt from Woozi hyung and this was his first ever composing a song.

The album itself was our best yet. This was our first studio album where everyone put a hand to create it. But the number of songs were low compare to other studio albums, but we were focusing on quality instead of quantity.

And the day opens up with our first album sales, mind you last year our first day sales was 901.6k but this year. It climbed up to 1.84 million sales. And to our first week sales, it went up to 3.04 million sales.

Saying we were shock was just an understatement. We did not expect our album sales to be this high in numbers. At most we put our expectation up to 2 million but it hit 3 million in the span of one week. Now, the only group that hit the 3 million album sales history were just Stray Kids (3.71 million), SEVENTEEN (3.69 million) and Babylon Garden (3.04 million).

[784, -033] Holy cow, this definitely deserve Album of the Year.

[320, -007] When I heard the boys created this album, I knew it will be an instant hit.

[917, -701] I love how the message is portrayed in a beautiful way.

[521, -360] You know it's a good group when they just debuted 2 years ago and already at the top with the veterans. The 'It' Group delivered as always.

And the news of the huge chunk of the album sales actually came from international waters. China and Japan were big contributors, but also the western countries. The west consists around 31% of the total album sales. The highest in history.

Talking about western culture, our album charted for the first time in the Billboard Charts. We were ranked 9th and 12th in album and song consecutively. It was a huge achievement for our group. Since a little number of kpop group made it that high.

On the first week, we managed to win all of our music showcases. Indicating that our comeback was a massive success. Our MV had beat our old record of 31 million views to a view count of 47 million. It was so massive that we were getting recognition left and right.

Our members were overwhelmed. Happy but a little overwhelmed. Everyone was talking about us. Billboards around South Korea had our face. Even our company, PLEDIS Entertainment did not expect this kind of receive by the netizens.

SEVENTEEN sunbaenim had a party for our success. We immediately asked for their advice seeing this was the first time we had this kind of success. SEVENTEEN as a group had achieved this milestone and being the kind senior they are, they gave us advice.

Mingyu: To be honest, we did not expect you guys to blow up this early.

Jeonghan: Please don't be tempted by the fame around you. Keep your head leveled. Always remember that.

Dino: Plus, you have Killian to set you guys back on the road.

Seungkwan: Wah. What did the company do to land such talented guys like you five. Two years and already made to the billboard? It took us years.