“First item: Basic Stance and Posture.”
Instructor Meihe had Haruka stand in front of the mirror in the practice room.
“Stand naturally, feet shoulder-width apart. Let your arms hang at your sides.”
Haruka did as she was told.
Meihe walked around her, her gaze scanning from head to toe like a scanner.
The tilt of the head, the symmetry of shoulder height, the curvature of the spine, the position of the pelvis, the direction of the knees—
“Your left shoulder is about one centimeter lower than your right,” Meihe said.
“Probably a compensatory posture after the left arm fracture. Not serious—it can be corrected with subsequent training. No other obvious abnormalities.”
She wrote a few lines in her notebook.
“Second item: Balance test. Stand on one leg—right foot, eyes closed. Hold until you can’t anymore.”
Haruka lifted her left foot and closed her eyes.
Her body began to sway slightly.
Five seconds… ten seconds… fifteen seconds…
At the eighteenth second, her body tilted to the left—
“Ahhh—!” She quickly opened her eyes to steady herself.
“Eighteen seconds.”
Meihe recorded it.
“Before the accident, your result was over forty-five seconds. Quite a gap, but within expected range.”
She said that last sentence in a tone that implied ‘It’s not your fault,’ and Haruka let out a sigh of relief upon hearing it.
“Switch to left foot.”
The left foot was worse—it started swaying at twelve seconds.
“The left side is the injured side, as expected.” Meihe wrote a string of numbers in her notebook. “Core strength has dropped noticeably, and the left-right disparity is large. Targeted training will be necessary.”
As a professional dance instructor and rehabilitation trainer, Meihe understood well the importance of balance.
It was the most fundamental foundation of dance.
In idol dance, movements like spins, single-leg supports, and rapid direction changes all relied on the stability of the core musculature and the precise feedback of the vestibular system.
If balance wasn’t up to par, all subsequent dance training would be a castle in the air.
“Third item: Basic dance moves.”
Meihe walked over to the speaker in the corner of the practice room and picked up a remote control.
“I’ll play a basic training track. Follow the beat and perform basic moves—steps, arm swings, turns. No need to do a full choreography; just do individual movements. Go by your feel.”
The music started.
The tempo wasn’t fast—it was quite slow, as if specially adjusted, roughly a little over half the speed of Haruka’s usual performance pace.
Haruka took a deep breath, and her body began to move with the music.
As luck would have it, she had practiced this very dance last night, so she hit the mark by accident.
Following the rhythm from her memory, she raised her right hand—stepped forward with her left foot—turned—
Those three moves were fine.
Her upper body rotated, and then…
Her lower body lagged behind.
Just like last night, her lower body was about half a beat late.
A visible “disconnect” appeared between her upper and lower halves, as if her body had been cut in half at the waist—the top half moved first, and the bottom half chased after.
Meihe saw it.
Her eyebrows twitched slightly, but she didn’t say anything.
Instead, she rewound the music, the meaning clear.
Haruka stopped her movements and started over.
Her arms began to swing, perfectly matching the beat.
There was even a natural sense of rhythm in her wrists’ arcs and her fingertips’ extensions—these were details formed by years of training.
But when the arm swings needed to coordinate with the footwork, her hands arrived first, and her feet came a full second late.
On the third try, her feet arrived, but her hands were late.
‘My body and brain are fighting again…’
Haruka grumbled internally.
Her current state was no different from last night.
It was like: Brain: I got this. Limbs: No, you don’t.
Meihe observed all of this from the side, nodding as if confirming something.
“It’s not a muscle problem or a bone problem,” she muttered to herself in a voice only she could hear.
Clearly, Haruka’s muscles remembered the shape of every movement, and her bones’ range of motion showed no obvious restrictions.
The completion of individual moves within each dance segment far exceeded her expectations.
Given the severity of the injuries on her admission report, achieving this level after a month in bed was nearly a miracle.
If she looked at the movements themselves, the problem most likely lay in the coordination of her nervous system.
Meihe believed it was because the signal transmission between Haruka’s brain and body had a “delay.”
She had seen this before in patients with severe brain trauma.
Simply put, for such patients, the brain could normally issue the command to “do A and B simultaneously,” but the command reached Site A and Site B at different times, resulting in a delay in movement execution.
If she could reestablish the neural pathways through repeated practice, Haruka would certainly recover.
But it would take time—weeks, months, or even years, possibly leaving a permanent “lag.”
For an ordinary person, that lag could be ignored.
But for an idol who needed to perform complex dances in front of ten thousand people, that lag was undoubtedly fatal.
The music stopped.
Haruka stood in the middle of the practice room, a thin sheen of sweat on her forehead.
The intensity of the moves just now wasn’t high—at best, it was a warm-up level.
But because every movement required extra energy to “correct” the discrepancy between her brain and body, she felt mentally and physically exhausted.
She looked at Meihe.
Meihe’s expression showed no fluctuation.
Neither the disappointment of ‘too bad’ nor the comfort of ‘not bad.’
She simply wrote calmly in her notebook.
“…How was it?”
Haruka asked in a tentative, small voice.
Meihe put down her pen and looked up at her.
“As expected.”
“As in… not good?”
“As in ‘matches the severity of your injuries and recovery time.’”
Meihe’s tone was flat but not cold.
“You just survived a car accident that nearly killed you, and you spent a month in bed. Forget about doing those moves—just standing here alive and kicking is a hundred times better than I expected.”
Haruka blinked, seeming a little pleased as if she’d been praised.
“Really?”
“Really. The completion of your basic moves is higher than I anticipated. The form of individual moves has almost no major issues. But that’s all thanks to your physical foundation—I can only say that your years of training weren’t wasted.”
Haruka’s expression brightened a little more.
“But—”
Meihe shifted the topic, “the coordination of your consecutive movements has noticeably declined. Especially the cooperation between upper and lower limbs, the fluidity of weight transfer, and the transitions between moves. These all need time to be rebuilt. Your current movements are ‘correct,’ but they’re not ‘alive.’”
“‘Alive’?”
“Every move you make is like a single frame cut from a video. Each frame is right, but the frames lack the in-between transitions.”
Meihe explained in a practical way.
“Good dance isn’t a patchwork of a hundred correct poses—it’s a continuous flow. Your ‘flow’ is broken now. It needs to be reconnected.”
Haruka nodded silently.
She felt relieved inside—because the “issues” Meihe mentioned were exactly what she had discovered herself last night.
That meant her judgment was on point, and more importantly, these problems could be explained by the car accident, and Meihe clearly understood them that way.
In short, she hadn’t blown her cover.
“So next I should—”
“Hold on.”
Meihe raised a hand.
“Let’s do this first.”
She walked over to the speaker and swapped the dance training track for another one: the instrumental version of Haruka’s Sunflower.
“Sing it once.”
Haruka froze.
“Huh? Here?”
“Here. No microphone, no full song—just the A-section and chorus a cappella.”
Haruka stood in the middle of the practice room, facing the mirror wall—a sixteen-year-old girl in practice clothes, a ponytail, and a small bandage on her forehead was reflected in the mirror.
Behind her was the empty room and Meihe sitting in the corner.
The accompaniment began.
The guitar’s intro echoed in the practice room, the sound clean and warm, like sunlight filtering through leaves.
Haruka closed her eyes.