Chapter 9

In Jinseong’s northern hometown, crimson flowers once blanketed the terraced hills, their paper-thin petals fluttering like fire in the cold mountain wind. As a boy, he had thought them breathtakingly beautiful. The moment he learned what raw opium poppies[1] yielded, he averted his eyes whenever he walked the steep mountain tracks. Yet he could never truly escape them.

What good was a traditional remedy[2] when it could be refined into a venom that ruined entire bloodlines? The state itself had once cultivated and exported the crop through official military channels. Later, after international crackdowns dismantled the state-run operations, black-market syndicates and borderland traffickers drifted into the vacuum. Nobody seemed to know—or care—where they came from. Their dialects differed, their skin tones differed, but to young Jinseong they all reeked of the same predatory rot.

“They can rave about Indian or European gear all they like, but the white bellflower from this soil is the finest under heaven.” One of those men had gathered the villagers beneath the wooden pavilion, lecturing the elders on alkaloid[3] purity between booming bursts of laughter.

Young Jinseong had hidden behind the rough cotton of his mother’s skirts, peeking out with wide, wary eyes. The man was built like an ox, with dark, ink-heavy tattoos crawling down his forearms all the way to the wrists—grotesque beasts, weeping women, and horned demons baring rows of jagged teeth.

No matter how many ceramic jugs[4] of makgeolli[5] he emptied, the man never seemed drunk. Sleepless nights left no trace on his leathery skin. With a mouth like an insatiable ghoul and piercing sanpaku[6] eyes that seemed to bore straight through human marrow, he looked to young Jinseong like a goblin[7] dragged from an ancient nightmare. He promised the village elders unimaginable wealth; he promised that starvation was over; he promised them all salvation. His gravelly voice boomed loudly enough to make the child’s ears ring for hours.

Only years later did Jinseong learn the man’s name: Ri Cheol-joon[8], an infamous kingpin of human trafficking and narcotics who ruled the border crossings between China and the northern provinces[9].

Even with a two-hour walk each way along unpaved mountain roads to reach the township school, Jinseong became known as a prodigy. He devoured books for the pure, unadulterated joy of knowing; learning felt less like labor than like slaking a deep, gnawing hunger in his chest. Chemistry and biology came easiest, but literature and poetry mattered just as much to him.

Whenever Cheol-joon saw him sitting by the road, he praised the boy’s sharp mind and declared he was destined for greatness, patting the back of Jinseong’s head while the boy scowled in silence. Cheol-joon never took offense. He only laughed his booming laugh and thrust thick rolls of banknotes into the child’s stiff hands.

By the time Jinseong entered middle school, money beyond anything the dirt-poor hamlet had ever conceived began pouring in, exactly as Cheol-joon had promised. The entire village hung on his every word. With their loyalty bought and sealed, Cheol-joon shifted the white bellflower from raw agricultural harvest to industrialized narcotics synthesis, distributing the finished product among them. He rarely needed force. Greed, blind gratitude, and sweet poison did the work for him.

“You take this, distill it like this, refine it like that, and you get pure bliss. Take one hit, and you’ll soar above the clouds, ruling the whole goddamn world. It’s worth a fortune on the market, but I’m handing it out free because I love you all like family.”

He handed out merchandise worth millions on the street as though it were candy. The villagers, hearing only that it was rare, precious, and miraculous, reached for it with eager, trembling hands. Jinseong’s mother kept her distance, uneasy and watchful from the start, but most of the village—including Jinseong’s own father—walked willingly into Cheol-joon’s snare.

Jinseong knew none of it. He kept his head buried in his textbooks while the rot devoured everything around him. By the time the entire village collapsed into a bottomless, inescapable pit, being clever was no longer a shield. It was a curse.

* * *

Grandpa Ho packed the selected books into a sturdy cardboard box and carried it out to the sedan’s trunk, wedging it carefully alongside a clutter of spare tools and jumper cables. Jinseong climbed into the rear seat first, followed immediately by Yi-jae, and the heavy black car pulled smoothly away from the curb.

Jinseong braced himself, waiting for the rough black hood to be slipped back over his head, but instead, a heavy, calloused hand lunged across the leather.

Yi-jae’s fingers locked around his calf and yanked it upward, throwing Jinseong violently off-balance against the seat upholstery. Stripping off the cheap rubber slide, Yi-jae stared at the stained, crust-rimmed sole of Jinseong’s foot, his dark brows knitting together into a hard knot. Lifting the leg higher beneath the dome light to inspect the lacerated skin, he clicked his tongue in disgust.

“It wasn’t your thigh.”

“…”

“Are you an idiot, or can you just not feel pain?”

The sole of his foot, which Yi-jae had missed during his inspection that morning, was swollen taut, glistening red, and weeping cloudy serum. Jinseong merely blinked at the sudden venom in the man’s voice. While a grinding, persistent ache had chewed at his nerves all day, the injury had slipped to the back of his mind between the chemical testing and the trance of reading. He hadn’t examined it since dawn and had no idea how badly inflamed it had become.

“I was only trying not to be a burden,” Jinseong muttered under his breath, tugging his knee backward in an attempt to pull free.

Yi-jae didn’t yield an inch. Something in Jinseong’s flippant defense had rubbed him raw. After glaring down at him for several heavy seconds, Yi-jae pressed his thumb hard into the swollen flesh immediately bordering the wound.

A blinding agony flared straight up Jinseong’s calf like an electric shock. He bit down on his lower lip on reflex. Though he managed to choke down the scream, hot tears sprang instantly to his eyes.

As Jinseong parted his trembling lips to beg off, Yi-jae clamped down with even greater force, sending a sickening jolt of pain tearing across his lower body. “Doesn’t that hurt?”

“…”

Yi-jae’s composed, freezing gaze was terrifying in its own right. Even as Jinseong’s features contorted in silent agony, the Alpha waited patiently for an answer.

Clinging to the edge of the leather seat cushion, Jinseong’s knuckles went white. Just hours ago, this man had weighed his life purely against his chemical utility; what right did he have to lose his temper now over an undisclosed cut? Once the initial shock subsided, Jinseong forced his face into flat, stubborn neutrality. “I’m fine. It’s nothing.”

Left alone, it would heal. It had happened plenty of times before in the northern workshops. Even if it took weeks and scarred over, flesh always mended. Not that this monster would ever show the mercy of taking him to a proper clinic, but Jinseong was also guarding against a far worse catastrophe. A hospital was a death trap for him. His unregistered status was dangerous enough, but a routine medical examination risked exposing his secondary gender to the world. Jinseong yanked his leg violently to break free.

Yi-jae’s jaw tightened, and a venomous smirk curled the corner of his mouth.

“Aaargh!” A piercing scream ripped from Jinseong’s throat.

Yi-jae’s thumb gouged directly into the open wound—digging deep, grinding into the raw, shredded meat. Beyond the searing agony, it felt as though serrated blades were sawing between the delicate bones of his foot.

“A-Ah! It hurts! Stop! Please stop!”

Unable to comprehend what the man wanted from him, a wave of blind panic surged through his chest. Jinseong swept his damp bangs back from his forehead with a trembling hand, glaring upward into Yi-jae’s face.

The sight stopped the breath in his throat. Incredible as it seemed, the Alpha was exercising immense restraint. A violent, churning fury coiled behind those sculpted, handsome features. There was no easy smile, no mocking banter. It was a vicious, unstable temper that swung between polar extremes without the slightest warning.

“…”

Judging by that look, Jinseong had crossed a lethal, invisible line. Though he couldn’t understand why a syndicate executive would throw a tantrum over an injured foot, submission was his only remaining survival instinct. Jinseong lowered his eyes. The moment his gaze dropped, the tears pooled from raw agony spilled over, cascading down his burning cheeks.

“Sijin. Take us to Yi-soo.” The command was directed at the driver in the front seat.

“Yes, hyung-nim.”

The crushing pressure on his foot slowly receded. The moment those iron fingers released him, Jinseong scrambled away, pressing himself flat against the car door and curling into a tight, shivering ball. The sole of his foot was a thrumming furnace of misery. The ache that had felt manageable earlier flared to the point where he wanted to scream aloud for a doctor. His eyelids burned. Before he could raise a hand to wipe them, tears streamed in steady, scalding sheets down his face.

He had acted only out of a lifetime of endurance. In Gold Class, speaking up about an injury was an open invitation to be replaced or discarded. He had survived in an organization that didn’t care if workers dropped dead so long as the production quotas remained stable. And here? Barely a day had passed since his capture. His life was still on the bargaining table, and showing weakness could have gotten him shot in the head. What had he done that was so wrong? A wave of bitter, suffocating grief rose in his throat.

He longed desperately to pull out his mother’s photograph and touch her face, but with Yi-jae sitting inches away, he dared not draw a full breath. Pressed against the cold window glass, he wept in muffled silence, staring blankly out at the highway. The scenery as they entered the metropolitan core blurred into dizzy streaks of neon. Forests of gleaming high-rises, clean paved boulevards, and fashionable people flashed past, but to Jinseong it was all a hollow illusion. He missed Yeonjung. Then his thoughts turned to his mother, leaving a hollow ache beneath his ribs. More than anything, he missed the quiet days before his world fell apart.