[Baek Jeongwoo: Hey]
[You know what happens if you don’t come, right?]
[Forget and you’re dead]
Today, as always, there was a message from Baek Jeongwoo.
Of course, I lightly left it on read and put the kimchi stew Lee Haram prepared into my mouth. Delicious.
“See? I told you the movie was really sad, didn’t I?”
I’m sorry to Lee Haram, who shrugged his shoulders with a triumphant face, but that movie was just so-so.
I was just shaken because wounds from my past life that I’d forgotten came to mind.
Of course, I didn’t need to tell Lee Haram this story.
“Yeah. It was sad enough for my pheromones to come out.”
“I knew it! I won!”
“Who are you fighting with?”
An empty laugh came out at Lee Haram’s appearance of rejoicing while clenching his fists.
Still, it was fortunate that thanks to Haram, I was able to safely get my first spoonful.
‘I would have died if Seolheon wasn’t there.’
‘Don’t do reckless things like pheromone practice either.’
Along with dizzying memories, a voice full of worries and concerns floated up in clouds, but I shook my head and tried to shake it off.
My conscience stings from lying, but it can’t be helped.
This is all a matter directly connected to my survival and a problem where Seolheon’s future is at stake.
“Right, Gunho hyung. Your pheromones suddenly got stronger, was it okay? Don’t you also feel repulsed by your own pheromones?”
“I’m fine now. My pheromones did run wild, but it was resolved well.”
“What?! That’s not fine at all! How are you even alive?!”
Lee Haram opened his mouth wide with a pale face.
“With hyung’s constitution, a pheromone rampage—you almost died, didn’t you?!”
“I survived thanks to a cold water shower.”
“Huh? Cold water? Shower? What are you talking about? What does that have to do with a pheromone rampage?”
“You don’t know either, Haram. Emergency treatment.”
“What emergency treatment?”
I added an explanation to Lee Haram, who tilted his head. My voice became unnecessarily proud and my shoulders shrugged.
“Cold water showers are effective for pheromone rampages. They say middle and high school students these days even learn this kind of emergency treatment.”
“Th-this is news to me.”
Lee Haram answered immediately with a dumbfounded face.
“I’m in the Physical Education department, but I’ve never heard of it, really.”
“What would you learn in your first semester of freshman year?”
“No, that’s…… is that so?”
Lee Haram tilted his head with an uncertain expression.
Since he’s still a freshman, he’d have a long way to go before learning the recently revised curriculum.
There’s no way our Seolheon would have lied.
“Then you resolved everything by yourself while in pain? That must have been hard……”
“Ah, that. Seolheon……”
“Seolheon?”
I was about to speak but closed my lips.
Recalling my younger brother who took care of me, I felt both sorry and ashamed, so I couldn’t easily speak.
“……He helped. Seolheon came home just in time.”
“That’s a relief. Seolheon must have been really shocked too.”
I pressed my brow, recalling the middle door that had barely maintained its form.
That was all thanks to my younger brother’s big heart worrying about his hyung…… By the way, the middle door construction was scheduled to proceed during this week.
“It’s really fortunate that hyung lives with Seolheon. I want to help too, but I’m an alpha, so……”
As Lee Haram trailed off with a slightly gloomy face, I immediately opened my mouth.
“There are areas where you can help because you’re an alpha.”
“Me?”
“I’m counting on you again today. Pheromone teacher.”
“……Ah! Yeah! Of course!”
Only then did Lee Haram nod with eyes full of vitality, as if regaining his energy.
“Okay, anyway, so now hyung’s own pheromones are bearable?”
Even if the concentration gets thick and it’s nauseating, it’s much better compared to when they ran wild.
I don’t really know the principle, but wasn’t it roughly like shock therapy? Like how someone who can’t eat spicy food builds up tolerance after eating extremely spicy ramen…… Since both Haram and I are laymen when it comes to pheromone studies, let’s decide to ask the attending physician about the details.
“Then shall we move on to the next step!”
“What should I do now?”
“Here.”
A familiar paper was held out in front of me.
[STEP 2. What kind of pheromones are my pheromones?
Find out what scent your pheromones have and what they feel like!
Shall we also find out what characteristics your friend next to you’s pheromones have?]
It was the same content he’d shown me before.
“We already did this.”
“That, the last line.”
“My friend next to me’s…… pheromones?”
“Turn to the next page.”
As I turned the page as Lee Haram said, the next step appeared.
[STEP 3. Feel your friend’s pheromones and your pheromones at the same time, and find the differences!
Warning! You must not have a pheromone size fight! Having more pheromones ab-so-lute-ly does not mean you’re stronger!
(A clumsy drawing of the public mascot characters ‘Alphy’ and ‘Omegi’ arm wrestling together is cropped and attached.)]
“Friend’s pheromones?”
“You need to be able to feel others’ pheromones in detail to objectively gauge the amount and characteristics of your own pheromones. Hyung, even this morning, you had no idea what state your own pheromones were in.”
“Then, that ‘friend next to me’ role is……”
And then I looked at Lee Haram.
“Well, I can’t ask someone else.”
Lee Haram said hesitantly with a face tinged with a faint blush for some reason.
“Hyung, I’ll do well. So you won’t get hurt, gently……”
That line, said while twisting his body with that face, feels somehow strange.
“……Please be gentle.”
“Okay!”
And so the second day of pheromone lessons began.
* * *
Trash.
Trash.
Trash.
Nothing but trash everywhere.
An unpleasant rotten smell vibrated in all directions.
After passing through a luxurious corridor finished with black stone and a chandelier so flashy it hurt the eyes, he arrived at a certain door.
“Hey, you Baek Jeong bastard!”
When the small-framed man kicked the door vigorously, a spectacle unfolded.
“How dare you call me to a place like this?!”
In the center of the spacious room, eight naked men were sprawled on a wine-colored sofa.
All of them were omegas. Some even had an unstable pheromone scent mixed in, as if they were in heat.
“You’re here, Lee Yeongwoo. And call me hyung. How rude.”
Baek Jeongwoo, sitting majestically among those naked bodies, smiled faintly while pouring and drinking wine with his body where sleek muscles stood out.
Lee Yeongwoo’s fists trembled at the bizarre appearance of him wearing brown sunglasses while precariously covering his lower body with a shirt belonging to who knows whom.
“Why do you order me to come and go! Am I your servant?!”
“I called you because I have something to talk about.”
“Where did you sell your phone?!”
“How disappointing. I called because I wanted to see your face after a while.”
“At least send the players out before calling me!”
“Don’t be jealous. You’ll get wrinkles if you keep getting angry.”
“Should I really kill you?”
“By the way, these aren’t players.”
Baek Jeongwoo shrugged his shoulders and pointed at the sprawled omegas one by one.
“This one’s a young master from Korea Airport. This one’s the bastard child of a three-term assemblyman’s mistress. And this one’s the only son of Daejung Construction.”
“Wh-what……?”
“And that one was help I called from the bar. Exclude those three. Everyone’s lucky they took drugs and blacked out, otherwise they would have gone wild if called players, right?”
“Baek Jeongwoo…… I wondered if you were crazy from way back……”
“Scraps who’ve fallen out of favor with their families. I’m collecting them.”
“Are you really truly insane?”
“I should start gathering forces too, shouldn’t I?”
Rather than a conversation, they each just continued what they wanted to say incoherently.
In the end, Lee Yeongwoo, unable to bear it any longer, retorted first.
“Shit gathering shit is just a shit pile! Why did you call me to this shit pile?”
“You’re friends with Baek Gunho, right?”
Huk. Lee Yeongwoo gasped at the completely unexpected words.
“To be precise, were you friends in elementary school?”
Lee Yeongwoo hurriedly shook his head.
His reddish-brown curly hair shook vigorously left and right, but he couldn’t hide his eyes that had grown as large as marbles and his reddened face.
“Baek Gunho, that bastard. Is he worth his looks? Even the great Lee Yeongwoo is smitten.”
“D-don’t be ridiculous! Sm-smit-smitten, what nonsense! We were just classmates……! Huk!”
Lee Yeongwoo hastily covered his mouth, but the glass had already been thoroughly spilled.
Baek Jeongwoo smiled fishily and joked around.
“Actually, you see, I also became friends with Baek Gunho. How about it? A friend’s friend is a friend, isn’t it?”
“What? You and Baek Gunho……?”
“Let’s get along well together.”
When he took off his sunglasses, eyes curved like a crescent moon were revealed.
“The precious omega young master who receives a-bun-dant love from Chairwoman Lee Hanna of LK Group, Lee Yeongwoo.”
Precious omega. He didn’t like the bizarre neologism, but Lee Yeongwoo furrowed his brow at the expression ‘love.’
Even though Baek Jeongwoo was originally a guy with one screw loose in his head—no, dozens of screws loose—he never dreamed he’d reveal his ambitions so soon.
Moreover, for that name to come out of his mouth……
“Are you going to keep acting lukewarm like Baek Gunho?”
And now of all times, over 10 years later.
At a time when he was forgetting his face.
“If you’re going to keep your mouth shut…… Fine. Should I bring up to the elder about our engagement that was set and then canceled?”
“Hey!”
“I’m not against being connected to you. With your family background and that face, you’re worth having.”
“You fucking bastard! I don’t want to!”
Lee Yeongwoo jumped up and down, expressing his refusal with his whole body, but Baek Jeongwoo pretended not to notice and downed the remaining liquor in his glass in one gulp.
“Lee Yeongwoo. Come see your friend’s face after a while. You know there’s a party at your hotel this weekend, right?”
“D-don’t tell me! You invited Gunho there?!”
The party.
Who wouldn’t know about the place where the young 10-20 generation of Korea’s political and business circles gather together?
The grand establishment goal of being a social venue where next-generation talents who will lead the nation’s sustainable future expand their capabilities through communication and exchange has long been thrown to the dogs, and frankly speaking, it’s a gathering where children of wealthy families get together to play and eat.
Not only second and third generation chaebols, but also various entertainers, actors, and people from the entertainment district were invited, so the scale has swelled several times and has now solidified into a kind of mega-event.
The most prominent characteristic was the gender ratio.
Betas were only about 10%. All the rest were alphas and omegas.
Therefore, the scene was dominated by pheromones, and all the suite rooms on the lower floor were fully booked…… A kind of animal kingdom unfolded, and that was the ‘party.’
“Are you crazy?! With Gunho’s physical condition……!”
“Huh? What about his body?”
“……N-no.”
Lee Yeongwoo immediately closed his mouth.
“Why are you stopping mid-sentence?”
“It was nothing. Forget it.”
Baek Jeongwoo didn’t seem to know about Gunho’s constitution.
Lee Yeongwoo fell into thought for a moment.
He couldn’t carelessly let out information that might be sensitive to Baek Gunho.
‘Yeongwoo, you’re really good at drawing.’
He could still vividly recall it.
That kind voice.
His kind childhood friend, Baek Gunho.
In the year they were fifth-graders in elementary school, after parting awkwardly, he was always curious about him.
What does he look like now, how has he grown?
Has his constitution, which made him faint as soon as it touched his pheromones, gotten better?
Even knowing all of this was Baek Jeongwoo’s design, Lee Yeongwoo nodded with difficulty.
“……I’ll hang out with you just once.”
“Oh. Good thinking.”
“In exchange.”
But there was just one thing.
There was something that bothered Lee Yeongwoo.
“His younger brother…… is he coming too? To the party?”
“What younger brother? Don’t you know I’m the youngest?”
“Not you! Gunho’s younger brother!”
As his voice rose, only then did Baek Jeongwoo clap.
“Ah. That younger brother? Well, I didn’t invite him separately? It’s not the right time yet to bring him into my line.”
“Then, to that party…… he’s not coming?”
“Huh. Lee Yeongwoo, this—don’t tell me. Are you trying to have the brothers as a don dish side by side? You’re a bigger horndog than me.”
“Wh-what bullshit! That kid is just……!”
Lee Yeongwoo was about to shout but closed his mouth.
A faint shadow fell around Lee Yeongwoo’s eyes as he was continuing to speak.
“……I find him uncomfortable to look at.”
In his light brown eyes, an old scene from over 10 years ago was flickering.
