Even just a dozen or so years ago, Haebam Corporation wasn’t a company at the forefront of child sponsorship business. However, it was a famous story that after the chairman saw his grandson, he realized how precious a child’s existence was and began taking great interest in the field of child sponsorship. Children with disabilities, children from low-income families, young patients with incurable diseases, young household heads, war orphans and refugees from distant foreign countries, even starving children. The Haebam Foundation, launched by Haebam Corporation, spared no donations. And when the foundation announced that they wouldn’t stop at donations but would directly create safe havens to sponsor children, and had just established their first orphanage, I was sitting in front of the orphanage door with a single piece of paper in my pocket that read “Chiwon, 4.”
Now it has the modifier “Number 1” attached to it, but back then it was just Haebam Orphanage. It only had a name and was just starting out, so there were only two people including the teacher and the director, and there weren’t any children yet. Having become the orphanage’s first child, even though my name and age were written on the paper, my surname had to be newly created, and the director who had been in charge of operations from the orphanage’s establishment until now gave me her surname. Since the director’s name was “Yoo Jeongsuk,” my name became Yoo Chiwon. It was a bit of a complex when I was young, but now I felt mostly grateful. How many people would readily offer a connection to a child with no ties?
For one year after I entered, no other children came to the orphanage. It would have been fortunate if it was because there were no children to protect, but that wasn’t the case. It just seemed like something had happened within the foundation. I was too young at the time so I don’t know the details, but I heard that initially they planned to send me to a different orphanage too. However, if they did that, talk about problems in the foundation would leak out somehow, so the two teachers had to raise me with minimal support.
Finally, when I turned five years old, the orphanage officially opened. Other children and new teachers came in, and with full-scale support, the orphanage began operating normally. However, since they were all younger children than me, I naturally became accustomed to playing the eldest sibling role as easily as breathing.
The teachers seemed to feel sorry for the young child who yielded and endured everything, but from my own perspective, it wasn’t that difficult. After entering elementary school, I always helped with meal preparation and bathing the children. Because I knew the teachers had a hard time, on the once-a-week deep cleaning day, I would talk with my younger siblings and have them clean their rooms and hallways themselves and wash their own shoes. My younger siblings were so good-natured that they followed along well without me having to say much. Because it was admirable how they suppressed their desire to go out and play and took rags in their hands, on deep cleaning day nights I would take the initiative to read books to them. They fought with each other all the time and caused tremendous trouble, but they were cute younger siblings nonetheless.
As I grew older and only became better at reading the situation, I knew that the teachers always saw me as a sore thumb even without asking. It wasn’t bad that they cared, but to speak honestly, I really was okay. Since my younger siblings were cute, yielding to them wasn’t difficult. But while I readily gave anything my younger siblings asked for, there was one thing I kept in my pocket. It was the bear-shaped jelly inside the snack gifts that came once a month.
On the 16th of every month, the chairman of Haebam Foundation sent gift boxes containing snacks to the orphanages he owned. I heard it was because his grandson’s birth date was the 16th. The snacks inside the box always varied, but the bear-shaped jelly never failed to be included. That jelly, which was a bit hard and had a sour taste, didn’t seem particularly appealing to the young younger siblings, but I really liked the jelly. Part of it was that my younger siblings didn’t covet it, but the main reason was that the jelly shape was my favorite teddy bear shape. Later on, when the snack boxes arrived, the teachers would set aside my jelly first before distributing to the children, and the perception that the bear-shaped jelly was mine had formed. I was embarrassed but felt good.
And in the spring of the year I turned thirteen, the chairman visited Orphanage Number 1. Unlike before when he came quietly with just a few attendants, he came with many people. It was a time when two more orphanages had been established following Orphanage Number 1 and had just stabilized, so it wasn’t without promotional purposes, but the chairman stroked my head even after the reporters with cameras had left. The chairman’s hand was warm. The chairman smiled as he watched my younger siblings, each missing a front tooth, greeting him loudly. He even laughed while talking with someone nearby about how his grandson had been missing front teeth like that until recently and how adorable it was.
Perhaps because he was a busy person, he usually just left the snack boxes and returned, but on that day the teachers warned us not to make a fuss since he would watch us receive the snacks before leaving. When the people beside the chairman personally carried the snack boxes, my younger siblings, who were standing and waiting politely thanks to the teachers telling them in advance, gave thanks and immediately rushed to the snack boxes. Standing one step behind and watching to see if there were any fighting or crying children, I only approached the boxes after my younger siblings each had a snack in their hands.
Among the snacks still remaining, I saw a bag of bear-shaped jelly. Since the name was written in a foreign language that wasn’t even English on the wrapper so I couldn’t read it, I arbitrarily called it teddy bear jelly. Seeing me take that teddy bear jelly and put it in my pocket, the chairman approached. Since I didn’t expect anyone to be watching, I was a bit flustered.
“Do you like that jelly?”
Hesitantly, I nodded my head.
“It’s jelly that my grandson likes, so I always include it in the gift boxes. But only from here, there were reports that children didn’t eat this sour jelly, so I thought there must be another child with similar taste to my grandson. So it was you.”
The chairman smiled and patted my head. I lowered my head to hide my slightly reddened face. Speaking of the chairman’s grandson, I had picked up talk that he had been exceptional compared to his peers since childhood. Tall, handsome, smart, good at sports—lacking in nothing. He was the same age as me, so he would be thirteen now, but I had also heard the news that he had already manifested as a dominant alpha more than two years ago. My heart pounded at having something in common with such an amazing child, so I kept my head lowered.
“I can’t touch them at all because they’re too sour, but my grandson stacks them up this much to eat. Don’t you like other snacks?”
“I have many… younger siblings. Because my younger siblings like them…”
The words wouldn’t come out well. Even at an age where his hair had turned completely white, the chairman looked very healthy with a large build and a benevolent smiling face, but I stammered as if I were frightened. Since the awareness that I was living this well because the chairman had provided for me was already established in my thirteen-year-old head, I was ashamed of myself for not being able to speak well even while struggling to answer.
“You’re accustomed to being the eldest.”
“Yes.”
“But you’re still young… It’s admirable that you know how to yield, but you should also know how to take care of your own happiness in moderation.”
The chairman said that. That was fine. I took out the teddy bear jelly from my pocket and held it in both hands, smiling slightly to hide my bashfulness.
“I’ve already taken care of my happiness.”
Hearing my answer, the chairman laughed heartily. From then on, the snack boxes delivered to Orphanage Number 1 contained three bags of teddy bear jelly. My happiness tripled.
After that, two more orphanages were created, making a total of five orphanages operated by Haebam Foundation. Because privately-run orphanages operating systematically on such a large scale were rare at the time, it even appeared on the news. Whether it was the power of the news or not, for a while there were quite many sponsors visiting every weekend, and there were also frequent visits from Haebam Foundation or the chairman. After a few months, sponsorships decreased again like before, but there were still people who remained consistent sponsors until now, and some children were adopted and left the orphanage.
After entering middle school and turning fifteen, I came down with a fever. It was the manifestation fever that children my age would have already experienced. At fifteen, by the standards of today’s fast-growing children, I was quite late. To the teachers who had been worried because I wasn’t beta but wasn’t manifesting at all, my belated manifestation must have been welcome news. However, the fever that usually ended in three days at most continued for over a week. Since I had no memory of the time I was sick, I heard about it later, but even though the teachers took me to every hospital in the area, even the doctors couldn’t identify the cause. The teachers could only take comfort in the words not to worry as fever sometimes lasted longer, and after several days of anxiously waiting, my fever finally ended after two weeks. And I became an omega.
Perhaps because the fever lasted four to five times longer than usual, my pheromones were very faint. Although the pheromone glands grew with delayed secondary sex characteristics as the year passed and the scent became a bit thicker, that was all. It was fortunate for me.
I was also insensitive to smelling other people’s scents, barely able to detect pheromones at best. I couldn’t even dream of covering and erasing others’ pheromones with my own or intentionally making my pheromones permeate objects. My heat cycle also came infrequently enough that three times a year was considered frequent, and the doctor diagnosed me as an extremely infertile omega, saying I would probably have difficulty having children for my entire life.
As if they had been waiting for my late manifestation, only after I manifested did my younger siblings who weren’t much younger than me manifest all at once and bloom their pheromones. Because I, the first child, had manifested as an omega, Orphanage Number 1 naturally came to take in only omega children. Since there were very young children in the orphanage, separation was unavoidable. Children who were beta or manifested as alpha were sent to other orphanages, and there were also children who manifested as omega at other orphanages and came to Orphanage Number 1. Later, the regulations changed so that when children entered the orphanage, they would receive diagnosis at a hospital under Haebam Group and be sent first to the place with the highest manifestation probability. At first there were children who couldn’t adapt to the new environment and caused trouble, but before long, those children too became cute younger siblings who played pranks and laughed brightly.
[To be continued in the next episode…]
