“We’ve arrived. Go in carefully, hyung.”
“You too, Uncle.”
And with that, Yong Cheonha came home in high spirits, washed up feeling good, and lay down on his bed — thinking about Chae Songhwa, a soft smile melting across his face.
Just thinking about him made the smile appear automatically.
But that warm, content feeling didn’t last long. On the cusp of this new almost-romance, memories of his trash exes came crashing down on him all at once.
No matter how brimming with confidence he was, no matter how much he overflowed with self-love, the accumulated weight of past failures had a way of bringing doubt and anxiety with it. And it wasn’t just once or twice — it was more than ten fingers could count.
This thing called dating, which everyone else seemed to find so easy — he hadn’t managed it even once, despite having everything going for him.
Of course, every single person he’d met so far had turned out exactly that way, so in some sense it was a relief he’d never actually dated any of them. But that was beside the point.
Yong Cheonha was a person capable of learning from experience. He couldn’t help but wonder — what if this one turns out to be just another trash ex like all the others?
The thought of that parade of trash he’d once tolerated simply because they were decent-looking enough made him anxious before anything had even begun.
There was one he vaguely remembered — a Kim something. No manners, no decency, a terrible reputation within the class — but his lashes were long and his eyes were pretty enough.
He ended up in juvenile detention, and after that, word was he’d committed another crime and landed himself in a juvenile prison. Cheonha had only heard it through the grapevine.
Then there was an Lee something — a small face, a decent nose bridge and jawline, the kind of side profile that genuinely drew gasps of admiration.
He let himself go and turned ugly, and sure enough, ended up with a Level 10 juvenile disposition.
Every single person I met as a minor turned into a criminal. It was admittedly a rough school, but I didn’t expect such a spectacular lineup.
The more he thought about it, the more it held true.
There was one who was only barely tolerable in the face and packed full of inferiority complexes. Even so, he couldn’t bring himself to let go of the material comfort and status that came with being around Yong Cheonha — put on every pretense imaginable, treated Cheonha like a walking wallet, and was ultimately cut off and cast out of the group. A complete waste of space.
Not to mention the idol trainee — embarrassing to even bring up — and even the private tutor.
And that was just what he could remember off the top of his head. These were all people he’d met as a minor, at that. If he added the adult version to the list, he might not sleep tonight.
He’d taken them in because they looked pretty on the outside, and every one of them had repaid him by acting up without knowing their place, not even giving him the chance to properly make use of them — the memory of those idiots hit him like a hangover headache.
Honestly, looking back, they weren’t even that pretty.
Still — if you took the best-looking feature from each of the faces he’d seen up until now and pieced them all together, the result would be Chae Songhwa, the person he’d met today.
“Wow……”
How does a person even look like that? The headache evaporated in an instant, and the corners of his mouth went soft again.
How did someone with a face that pretty end up being an alpha and land right in front of me? This time, even if the sky split in two, he was absolutely going to make this relationship work!
It was vacation now, so he had more than enough time. And Songhwa had said he was still an unknown actor, so they both had plenty of time on their hands, didn’t they? You have to play when you can play.
Exams were done, the semester was over, and he’d finally gotten the number of the beauty who’d been haunting his thoughts. On top of that, it seemed like that beauty was interested in him too.
Yong Cheonha was able to fall into a deep sleep for the first time in a while.
In his dream, the trash exes he’d briefly collected made their appearances one by one. This is why you’re only supposed to think good thoughts before bed.
He’d gone and chewed over those rotten memories for nothing, and now look at this.
“Ugh, ughhh……”
After the ones from his school days — those who had basked in reflected glory during what they must have considered their golden era, thanks to being around Yong Cheonha — came the adult-era trash exes, appearing in full force as if they’d been waiting their turn. Like some kind of junkyard parade.
At least the ones from his school days had a certain naivety to them. There had been at least a thread of friendship or loyalty mixed in. But these ones were genuinely repulsive.
The way they scrambled desperately to make sure they never lost out on anything — it was so off-putting. There was no way to find it endearing, try as he might.
Yong Cheonha himself had wanted a purely physical relationship, but he couldn’t stomach the way they were so blatantly materialistic while simultaneously calculating every cost and benefit.
And they weren’t even good-looking enough to be tolerated for it.
Looking at them now, I genuinely can’t believe I ever found any of that cute. Every single face was a mess. How did I even put up with any of them back then?
Because Yong Cheonha’s self-love ran as deep as his desire to claim an alpha, he had a hard limit on how much he was willing to overlook — and the moment someone crossed it, he cut them off without hesitation. Thanks to that, he’d never been truly played by anyone truly awful, but the result was that he’d never been in a relationship even once — a lifelong single from birth.
At one point, he’d considered just throwing everything to the wind and going for a purely physical arrangement first. There was that saying — body before feelings.
There had been one target he’d pursued with the intention of focusing purely on physical pleasure, setting aside anything like emotions. That had been the private tutor.
A nerdy senior-year university student who tutored him. Six years older — and yes, Cheonha had gotten into a good university thanks to him, but: I’m pretty sure you gave me a trauma because of what happened.
I was wondering why this particular trash hadn’t shown up yet, and of course he’s last. Just disappear already.
The guy’s impression was so faint that he couldn’t even remember the face, but just thinking about what had happened back then still left him dumbfounded and exasperated.
The situation had been the shocking part, not the person — so it faded quickly enough.
Still, it seemed like this dream wasn’t going to end as a nightmare after all, because Chae Songhwa appeared at the very end.
The sour mood lifted into a dopey grin in an instant. How does a person exist like that? Just looking at him was filling — like you didn’t need to eat, like the air around him radiated something soothing.
It was paradise on earth. A garden where instead of peaches, plums hung heavy from every branch.
Surely this is the sign that the era of trash is finally over.
Yong Cheonha tucked Chae Songhwa under his arm and shared easy, warm skinship with him. Every little thing made Songhwa dissolve into bright laughter, and Cheonha felt like he had the whole world.
“So cute…… though…… zzz……”
Yong Cheonha, clutching his body pillow and mumbling in his sleep, was the picture of total bliss.
Chae Songhwa, on the other hand, had a terrible night.
He’d felt fine when he lay down after washing up, but the moment he actually settled in, sleep wouldn’t come and his body felt completely drained. He seemed to be running a low fever too, with chills that wouldn’t let up.
The end-of-semester season was peak hours for the bar district near campus, so his part-time work schedule was completely packed — this can’t be happening……
They say being sick alone is particularly miserable, but he was suffering too much to even register the loneliness. He just lay there, groaning through it.
Even medicine wasn’t helping.
It was looking more and more like he was going to have to go to the hospital tomorrow no matter what.
“So you’ve come in because you’re not feeling well.”
“Yes.”
“Can you tell me what’s wrong and how?”
Chae Songhwa carefully went through his symptoms. Chills, no energy, what felt like a fever, poor sleep, no appetite, and no sign of improvement even with medication.
He’d assumed it was a simple cold and would pass quickly, but after listening to the symptoms, the doctor began asking question after question. Then he pulled several scent strips from a drawer and had Songhwa smell them.
With each answer, the doctor’s expression grew progressively more serious.
He doesn’t have some rare uninsured illness, does he? Life is already overwhelming enough right now — the last thing he needs is more weight piled on top. He felt worried and on edge.
The doctor delivered his diagnosis with a grave face. His lips parted heavily.
“You’ve been imprinted.”
“Pardon?”
“You’ve been imprinted.”
“Why are you saying that so seriously……”
“My face just naturally looks like this.”
Ah……
“And it is something that can be serious, especially at your age. I hope it isn’t, but — for now, if you receive a pheromone shower from your partner, you should recover quickly.”
The doctor spoke in a continuous, unbroken stream — like a rapper, or a monk reciting sutras, with no variation in tone or pitch.
“Um, but — who could I have been imprinted with? Who would it even be?”
“Well. If you don’t know yourself, that’s not a question for a doctor — you’d need to visit a fortune teller. Didn’t you receive special-trait education in school?”
“……I had a hard time attending school……”
The doctor’s expression, which had been serious to begin with, became genuinely serious now.
“Patient. Have you recently had contact with an omega? An omega who had their pheromones released when you met? Has there been any exchange of bodily fluids or saliva? Do you have a guardian? What do you do for work? What is your monthly income?”
He launched into an interrogation so relentless it was hard to tell if he was a detective or a doctor.
Once again he rummaged through a drawer, pulling out various documents, and quickly circled items here and there as they talked.
“This is a list of medical expense support available to low-income individuals with special traits. The only support you can receive without a guardian — aside from rare pheromone types that don’t respond to standard suppressants — doesn’t apply here. The imprint removal procedure also requires consent from your imprint partner, even if it was an unwanted imprinting. That’s the law.”
“Oh……. Then what am I supposed to do……?”
“You need to find your imprint partner and receive a pheromone shower, or bring your partner with you and have them sign the consent forms for the imprint removal procedure.”
His head was spinning. He could hardly believe he’d been imprinted at all, and now they kept telling him to bring a guardian and an imprint partner he didn’t even have.
“Even if I don’t know who they are, and even if it was an unwanted imprinting?”
“Yes. Because you’re an alpha.”
The doctor said it plainly.
“Even in the case of an unwanted imprinting, an alpha requires the omega’s consent. An omega doesn’t need to provide consent, but an alpha does. That’s the law.”
In this world, the number of omegas who have been forcibly imprinted vastly outnumbers the alphas. It’s a world where at least once a week, a news article appears about an irresponsible alpha.
One-sided imprinting is typically carried out as a forced act regardless of the other party’s wishes, and in that process, the one exposed to danger and harmed is not the alpha — it is, without question, the omega.
Just that very morning, he’d seen news about an alpha being arrested — not only for the crime of forcibly imprinting someone and using pheromones as leverage for exploitation, but for committing ugly offenses like extortion and blackmail.
At the time, he’d been too busy worrying about his younger sibling in this grim world to dwell on it — but now he was being told he himself had been the victim of a one-sided imprinting?
The characteristics of a one-sided imprinting, the doctor kept explaining, were that unlike a rut, it wasn’t accompanied by sexual arousal or a heat cycle — only physical pain. But the words weren’t quite reaching Chae Songhwa.
He’d been a victim of a one-sided imprinting, had no idea who the person was, couldn’t undergo the removal procedure, and if he didn’t have the imprint partner’s pheromones — he’d spend the rest of his life suffering like this and eventually die?
Was it really an imprinting? And if so, who would it be? Everyone he’d been in contact with recently was either a beta or an alpha.
There hadn’t been a single moment where pheromones were released and body fluids could have been exchanged——
In that instant, one person flashed through his mind.
A face so cool and sharp it seemed like it could radiate cold air just standing still, and yet — the freshman he’d found himself worrying about, wondering how someone like that was going to survive in this harsh world.
Even right up until before coming to the hospital, that person had been sending messages without pause: when’s your day off, aren’t you curious about that new movie that just came out, we live in the same area so just call me whenever you can’t eat alone and I’ll come fill the seat, I have work today and I really don’t want to go, what are you up to today — a steady, relentless stream.
Even now, at this very moment, he was sending texts. That very person.
The omega he’d met at the club just a few days ago, and had been with until just hours before.
[Work is super dead today, total jackpot lol — if you get thirsty, come hang. I’ll specially make you that frappé I hate making because it’s such a pain lol]
It was Yong Cheonha.
