The first thing that caught my eye was Baek Sahyun’s pure white instep, and next was the red blood soaking beneath it. I was surprised but also felt a surge of fear. Shouldn’t we stop the bleeding quickly?
I didn’t have the capacity to stand by like I had a strong heart while someone self-harmed right in front of me, so I got up hastily and approached Baek Sahyun.
You crazy bastard, I was kneeling down on one knee when Baek Sahyun slowly lifted his foot. Huh? His foot landed on my bent thigh. At the same time, he slowly rubbed and wiped it.
“Hey, wait a minute. You have a piece of porcelain stuck in your foot.”
When I shouted at him to remove it before it went in deeper, Baek Sahyun smiled with his eyes in a way that didn’t match the situation. Since he showed no sign of lifting it, I tried to snatch it from my side, but as if saying fat chance, he pressed down on the sole of his foot even more firmly.
“Check it quickly.”
My confusion only grew at the sweetly continuing voice. I knew full well that Baek Sahyun was a psychopath who’d be upset if he came in second, but I didn’t know he’d engage in such self-destructive behavior.
Certainly, he’d been in a very weakened nervous state since I’d been to Seo Jeongmin’s villa. He reacted extremely as if something was broken, only making the other person endlessly anxious.
“Heejae-ya, hurry up.”
At the repeated urging, I answered through gritted teeth. I grasped Baek Sahyun’s bare foot with my hand, which showed no intention of losing strength.
“First of all, you crazy bastard. I’m not Nam Heejae, I’m Jang Woohyun. Did you already forget when I kindly explained it to you?”
At the same time, I pressed down firmly with my palm as if to stop the bleeding on the injured sole.
“And hey man…, if your anger is this uncontrollable, go to the hospital. You might get better if you get treatment.”
That way you won’t cause harm to others either. To be blunt, it was because it was me that I was accepting this like this—if it had been someone else, they would have already picked up the phone and called 112.
The pants I was wearing were also soaked with Baek Sahyun’s blood, and my dry hands were also soaked with Baek Sahyun’s blood, making me feel like the protagonist of a horror movie.
I lifted the damn bastard’s foot and examined it carefully, and fortunately it seemed only the skin was torn and no piece was embedded. Just as I was letting out a sigh of relief, Baek Sahyun asked while leaving his foot in my care.
“Do novel characters bleed too?”
“……”
“Do novel characters feel pain when they get hurt?”
“……”
“Then why is it a novel?”
Aha. So that was the point. It seems he showed it through action to prove that he wasn’t a character in a novel.
Of course, the problem was that his action didn’t help at all in convincing me. If he were a real person, he wouldn’t commit such shocking behavior even in his dreams.
It’s just that every word Baek Sahyun spoke and every action he took guaranteed the fact that he was a novel character. But I was worried that if I conveyed this feeling as it was, he might throw another fit.
“Right. You’re not a novel character. I was just joking. Happy now?”
“Yeah.”
After brushing it off without any pride, I was thinking about calling an ambulance when Baek Sahyun chuckled and murmured.
“Ghost Jang Woohyun-ssi, who’s both an old bachelor and mentally ill.”
His firm hand lifted my chin. My raised head ached dully.
“Want to hear my story now?”
My eyes widened at the unexpected proposal. Baek Sahyun smiled smoothly like a fox with a hundred tails and bent his upper body toward me.
Between the thick smell of blood, the scent of the perfume Baek Sahyun wore spread secretly.
“You were curious, weren’t you? About what kind of relationship I had with the owner of that body you took over.”
It was an irresistible temptation. The relationship between the two people that wasn’t in the novel. The alpha manifestation drug found in the villa. Nam Heejae who wanted to become an alpha, and Baek Sahyun who protected such a Nam Heejae.
*Excessively Brilliant*, which was full of questions about everything.
But there was an order to everything in human affairs. I shook my face vigorously to shake off Baek Sahyun’s hand, then spoke in a calm voice befitting my seniority.
“After we go to the hospital first.”
“……”
“You have your phone, right? Hurry up and call 119. What are you going to do if it leaves a scar? You have pretty feet.”
This bastard, the bleeding had stopped but he was still badly hurt. Perhaps my answer was unexpected, as the murderous intent slightly left Baek Sahyun’s face. He stared at me persistently as if looking at some strange creature, then soon shrugged his shoulders and answered.
“There’s no emergency room nearby. We’d have to go far out to get there.”
“But an ambulance will still come, right?”
“What ambulance for being hurt just this much? Want to waste taxes?”
Just this much? Waste taxes? It seemed like an ambulance should be called at times like this, but Baek Sahyun looked perfectly carefree.
Thanks to the additional comment that followed, I came to understand why he could afford to be so relaxed.
“We’ll just stop by the villa across the way.”
It was the moment when the appearance of a new character who hadn’t appeared in the novel was foretold.
Baek Sahyun explained further.
“Heejae, your hyung is there.”
…Nam Heejae’s hyung?
“He’s a doctor. That person.”
❖ ❖ ❖
As far as I know, Nam Heejae has a total of four noonas above him.
I don’t remember exactly what their names were or what kind of jobs they had, but what’s certain is that their relationship with Nam Heejae wasn’t bad.
Nam Heejae’s noonas were all recessive alphas, and while they didn’t quite satisfy Chairman Nam Hyungman’s heart, they were people who were doing reasonably well on the road to success.
If they had even been dominant alphas, they would have monopolized the chairman’s love. And there would have been no reason for Nam Heejae, a beta, to covet management rights.
– Listen carefully, Heejae-ya. In high society, you as a beta are not competitive. You need to be at least a recessive alpha to be recognized as a member of the pack, and furthermore, only dominant alphas can aim for the position of their leader.
The head of ‘Intol’, Nam Hyungman-ssi, was a man in his early 60s who, while generous, had fundamentally patriarchal tendencies. He made the choice to raise Nam Heejae as a fake alpha, since he wanted to pass the company to a son rather than daughters if possible, and to a dominant alpha rather than a recessive alpha.
So it was all because of Nam Hyungman-ssi that Nam Heejae came to live drenched in strong pheromone perfume. Tempted by the promise that he’d be given management rights if he just pretended to be an alpha well, he began to dream beyond his station.
Nam Heejae’s noonas weren’t unaware of this fact but left it alone. Since the probability of Nam Heejae, who was practically born a beta, becoming a real alpha was close to 0, and because Nam Heejae had been cute and timid when he was young, the noonas regarded him as something like the family’s painful finger.
Moreover, before he met Baek Sahyun, a peer, at a luxurious party where political and business tycoons gathered, Nam Heejae had no inferiority complex and was literally just a well-mannered and calm mature child.
But the dominant alpha Baek Sahyun, who had things Nam Heejae didn’t have, ended up throwing him into an inferiority complex. After he started hanging around with Baek Sahyun, Nam Heejae’s inner thoughts and schemes became completely twisted.
‘But…, Nam Heejae had a hyung? What hyung?’
I had a lot I wanted to ask Baek Sahyun, but I just gasped for breath while carrying him on my back and walking to the next neighborhood. You son of a bitch. When he said it was across the way, I didn’t know we’d be going out this far to visit!
Baek Sahyun had injured his foot, and I had a hit-and-run trauma, so neither of us could drive. So in the end, I ended up carrying him on my back.
I said I’d support him so he should walk on his own two feet, but Baek Sahyun stubbornly insisted on a piggyback ride. The sight of me soaked in sweat and struggling to take steps was the result of his stubbornness.
“Is it hard?”
Baek Sahyun, whose conscience had been traded for taffy, whispered in my ear.
“How could it not be hard? How much do you weigh?”
When I asked back fiercely, Baek Sahyun giggled and didn’t give me an answer.
This bastard must easily weigh over 80kg. Because it felt like a body armed with muscles was placed on my shoulders and back, it seemed like my back would collapse before long.
“Fighting, fighting.”
Baek Sahyun only sang unwanted cheers feebly, and I carved the character for patience (忍) in my mind.
Right…, I, the adult, will be patient.
“Good job. We’re almost there.”
The place we arrived at while breaking out in cold sweat had a mansion that looked incomparably smaller in scale compared to Baek Sahyun’s villa. The yard was narrow and the house itself was small.
While I was staring at it, Baek Sahyun jumped down from on top of me.
“What the hell, you?”
When was it that he whined about his foot hurting so he couldn’t walk, yet now he stood expressionlessly on his feet.
“What?”
At his indifferent retort, I was dumbfounded.
“You said your foot hurt?”
When I shot back without backing down, Baek Sahyun shrugged.
“Yeah. It hurts.”
“But how are you standing there fine?”
“You got off, so why are you picking a fight? Don’t tell me you were planning to deliver me all the way inside?”
Of course. This man Jang Woohyun didn’t lack manners enough to abandon someone who said they were in pain just because we’d arrived at the front of the house. But I was about to turn my head away because I didn’t want to talk anymore.
“…Whatever. Let’s just go in.”
I was trying to hurry up and go see the person who was Nam Heejae’s hyung-nim, but Baek Sahyun grabbed my clothes.
“Then deliver me.”
“Huh?”
“You said you were planning to deliver me. Do it.”
What kind of bullshit was this again? When I narrowed my eyes into slits, Baek Sahyun pinched my waist hard.
“Ahhh! Hey!”
“I said deliver me.”
“Hey, fuck! That hurts!”
This hurt way more than just getting hit. It felt like the skin on my waist would be torn off, so I eventually had no choice but to surrender with both hands and feet. Baek Sahyun, who had seized victory, demanded triumphantly.
“Delivery is done princess-style. You know, right?”
What do I know, you crazy bastard? I don’t know….
