JADE 39

It reached the point where he became a byword for misfortune, like a black cat. People said that if you got involved with John Kwon, you were bound to get hurt, as if there was a curse on him.

From the perspective of someone with a conscience who knew the truth, he had no choice but to confess, but it was never accepted. Each time, it was brushed aside with the explanation that Kwon Joowan simply had deep-rooted psychiatric issues, portraying him as a poor child on a pyre, pushed there by others.

Kwon Joowan was afraid of how desensitized he was to his own dangerousness. He could distinguish between what was acceptable and what was not, but with his mind groggy from taking tranquilizer-laced suppressants again, he couldn’t actually feel the function of his conscience.

As he began to distance himself from others, he had more time to think alone and would often ruminate on the past. He particularly recalled the times when he was a monster who inflicted tangible attacks, and the expressions on his family’s faces when they got hurt or didn’t know how to handle him.

He did not consider his move to the other side of the world as being cast out. It was a solution found at the end of a search for a way for Kwon Joowan to blend in with people, as he could have caused an ethically irredeemable accident.

However, at that point, Kwon Joowan was still just a teenager who had not fully matured, so the blame kept turning back on himself.

Moreover, the influence of his misfortune was not limited to people. Pheromones were supposed to work only on the same species, but Kwon Joowan tended to be met with hostility even from animals. If that was the case, could it be that there was also a problem with his biological nature or aggression, unrelated to pheromones?

Why was a creature who was destined to be hostile to and be antagonized by the entire world born?

After some time had passed, even his emotions became numb, and it felt as if he had really become a sociopath or a psychopath.

In truth, he just wanted to be a beta. Betas did not inconvenience others with things like pheromones and were complete beings as individuals.

What purpose did a variant, harmful to both alphas and omegas, serve by existing? During a gloomy period after quitting American football, when he was pushing everyone away, regardless of whether they were variants or non-variants, Ahn Saeha, who had been interested in Kwon Joowan for a while, approached him.

In daily life, the effect was less pronounced on omegas than on alphas, so the lonely boy cautiously but gradually let the resolute omega into his life.

The one fact Kwon Joowan told him was, ‘I have pheromones that are especially aggressive towards alphas, but they aren’t detected by others.’ And Ahn Saeha seemed to believe Kwon Joowan’s words.

“Did you know cheerleading has scholarships too? It’s not about clashing and competing with other alphas, so maybe it’ll be okay.”

It was a sport where you worked together to complete a performance, so it was completely different from American football, which fundamentally required showing mutual belligerence. After trying it for a day, he found the amount of exercise to be immense, so Kwon Joowan switched sports as if mesmerized.

After that, his parents, thinking that his strangely stable progress was thanks to Ahn Saeha, proceeded with an engagement on their own. It seemed Ahn Saeha’s family was also quite well-off, so they thought their social standings matched.

However, the fact that Ahn Saeha’s feelings and Kwon Joowan’s feelings were different increasingly caused problems. Kwon Joowan was not ready but tried to respect his fiancé, and from Ahn Saeha’s perspective, the talk of premarital chastity did not feel like respect, which put him under mental pressure.

Ahn Saeha, who could not wait, seemed to have thought that if he provoked Kwon Joowan, who acted as if his whole body were tied up in every matter, he could make him burst with either emotions or desires. The clumsy act of calling him over to match his heat cycle was perplexing, but it did not make Kwon Joowan angry. Perhaps because the prescribed medication was working well, unlike when he was young, he was able to handle it calmly instead of losing his senses.

He later learned that individuals like Kwon Joowan, formerly called ‘dominant alphas,’ tend to be more influenced by their emotions in how they receive and release pheromones as they mature. So, he understood to some extent.

Then, Ahn Saeha brought an alpha who was a spotter1) to his dorm room. Even then, Kwon Joowan considered it his own fault for making his fiancé anxious and did not make an issue of it.

But to Ahn Saeha, that must have looked like a final verdict. A verdict that Kwon Joowan had no expectations of Ahn Saeha whatsoever.

He only intensified his actions to provoke Kwon Joowan. Eventually, he demanded to change stunt partners, and he was injured while attempting a move recklessly before he was in sync with the new partner.

It was not an injury so severe that he could never recover, but Kwon Joowan did not have the grit or passion to continue it alone while Ahn Saeha was recuperating. The thought that he had broken even Ahn Saeha, the one who had reached out to him first, also never left his mind.

Besides, to compete in a competition, he would have had to stop taking the medicine he was on, and he had no confidence that he could exist as a proper human being amidst others’ pheromones without the help of medication.

He quit school and returned to his home country, living quietly in a place separate from his family’s main house. His family had not completely cast him out, so he lacked for nothing materially.

Then he received a call from Ahn Saeha, with whom he was still engaged. He said there was a party with people of a similar age who were reasonably well-known, and that it would be fun. He asked if they shouldn’t see each other at least once now that he was back in the country.

If he had known that party was a swapping party, he would not have gone.

When the party was in full swing, an alpha who had come to have fun collapsed, causing the party to break up, leaving only those who were hooking up. At the hospital, they said there was nothing seriously wrong with him, and it was just due to stress and his condition. Kwon Joowan, feeling responsible for that side as well, arranged for the hospital bills and a sum of money as consolation to be delivered, and quietly broke off the engagement with Ahn Saeha.

“It must not have been easy to accommodate Joowan. It’s difficult even for his own flesh and blood, after all.”

It was obvious that Kwon Joowan’s parents believed the fault lay entirely with their own child. As a final courtesy, Kwon Joowan protected Ahn Saeha’s reputation. In truth, he had nowhere lower to fall himself.

How did he live after that? He barely remembered anything. He had been removed from the family succession line early on, so he had few responsibilities. He exercised habitually to drain his energy, ate meals, and took his medicine. When his mind was relatively clear, he read books and dabbled a little in the small business his family had given him.

He also tried to take up religion, but failed every time.

When the director of the cheerleading academy he had a connection with from his university days contacted him, he was in the middle of setting a new record for consecutive days without causing an incident. Of course, it was the result of isolation, but around that time, at the director’s recommendation and with the thought that he should at least act like a person, he opened an academy. Fortunately, no incidents had occurred since then, but that was a situation made possible because the director was also an alpha whose disposition was unlikely to provoke Kwon Joowan.

Later, when people asked about his connection with the director, he explained that he had sought him out and started the business. However, the Kwon Joowan of that time was a semi-invalid with absolutely no will to visit someone, offer greetings, and start something.

Meanwhile, regarding pheromones, the realm of what was legal was surprisingly small, and there was much that was unknown. This was because a fair amount of information was intentionally hidden, as delving into it seemed likely to result in emphasizing animalistic instincts.

If variant society had seized hegemony, they could have gilded it, but since betas were numerically superior, they had to stop at adding just enough specialty to be interpretable as a fetish.

Still, in the area of carefully studying Kwon Joowan as an individual, there had been some progress in its own way. Thanks to improved medication, the lethality of his pheromones towards alphas was significantly reduced, and while his ruts were still irregular, they came on weakly. Of course, since the research itself was only possible regarding aggression, the variant-specific reactions of his pheromones according to various emotions remained unknown.

In any case, Kwon Joowan wanted to live moderately as he was now, without hurting others, so he did not need anything else.

However, even Kwon Joowan was a human who felt loneliness, making it difficult to completely cast out someone who knew his secret and shared his past. That was why he started accepting calls from Ahn Saeha, who hovered around him, again.

In the end, Ahn Saeha became his only friend of the same age, with whom he maintained a strange distance. He was also aware that he was subtly shifting his duties towards him, as Ahn Saeha, knowing his mutually awkward relationship with his family, would thoughtfully contact them on his behalf.

The relationship was maintained because they were, to some extent, indebted to each other.

But he was lonely.

Perhaps that was why the alpha who told him to call if he felt anxious, a relationship with no debts, lingered in his mind. It had been a long time since he had become desensitized, as if a layer of opaque paper had been placed over his emotions, but after meeting him, his sense of the world would often become painfully vivid.

Most of the people Kwon Joowan had severely broken in his life were alphas, so the fact that Jin Sejun was an alpha was also frightening. No matter how much his aggression had lessened, the feeling of helplessness that he could not control his own pheromones remained.

Above all, what he feared most was that he kept finding himself concerned about Jin Sejun. Because he knew that the reason he had not caused any problems in the last few years was that he had not formed any deep relationships with others.

Jin Sejun had probably just said it as lip service, but if Kwon Joowan really contacted him every time he felt anxious, Jin Sejun would have to be on the phone from morning till night. So, after their initial greeting, he couldn’t bring himself to contact him.

Moses is a Miracle Counseling Director: Did you have lunch?

But he never thought Jin Sejun would contact him first….

During his university days, Ahn Saeha had once said that attaching a photo when sending a message made it look much more sincere. To be honest, back then, he had usually sent them as if accepting a bow while lying face down, but he wanted to make a good impression on his new friend, so he sent a picture first.

Was talking with Jin Sejun fun because he really didn’t have many people he could call a friend?

They decided to have lunch together on the very same day they resumed contact. The Jin Sejun he met again was still handsome, though making eye contact was difficult without his glasses.

Unlike his first impression or his words and actions, Jin Sejun was the type of alpha who did not show off his pheromones. It was a sense of security he felt because if he were near a belligerent alpha, Kwon Joowan could be unexpectedly drawn in and harm him, regardless of whether he found him disagreeable or not.

Liking that about him too, he found himself wanting to just go along with Jin Sejun, who wanted to make a beta friend. Since Kwon Joowan had also matured since his troublemaker days, he thought that if he took his medicine well and maintained his composure, he might be able to maintain this relationship for as long as he had with Ahn Saeha.

Like that… he wanted to remain as a friend of the same age, but for some reason, Jin Sejun’s attitude was unusual. On the day he deliberately slammed on the brakes and supported his chest, his heart was in such turmoil that he logged into his ‘beta’ account for the first time in a long time.

Why had he started doing this again? Because you couldn’t feel pheromones through video, so there was a sense of liberation…. He could not clearly remember when he first started. The him of previous days had often been dazed and exhausted from throwing himself into exercise.

No matter how much he chose isolation, it wasn’t as if he truly never left the house, so there were many people who showed interest in Kwon Joowan. Even the director, who didn’t know his circumstances, had expressed his intention to introduce him to someone several times.

But all variants just looked like dumplings he could crush with his pheromones, so apart from his mistakes as a child, he had never had a proper experience until now.