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I shouldn’t have gotten my hands on this.

There are a few things in life that a person should never do. One of them is, without a doubt, gambling; one is acting as a guarantor; and the last one is drugs. There are many others, but the three listed above are the ones that send you riding on an express train toward the abyss of life.

Siyul, of all people, laid hands on drugs, one of those three. It wasn’t that he did them himself. He just added a very small hand to the distribution.

Siyul was the type to be easily frightened. He was someone who didn’t even smoke because he didn’t know the reason to do something that wasn’t good for his body. As for why such a Siyul touched drugs, to find the reason, one would have to go back quite a bit from this point, where he was kneeling.

How far back should I rewind? Trying to find the cause leads all the way to a fundamental regret that he shouldn’t have been a sperm that settled in an ovum in the first place. Siyul bit his lips and tried to pull his mind together. The first culprit was himself for jumping into a stupid choice, and the second was the fault of a human named Kwon Yuwon, whom he grew up with in an orphanage.

Siyul was from an orphanage. The kind-hearted director hid who Siyul’s mother was, but he found out thanks to the innocent chatter of the orphanage staff. His mother was a teenage unwed mother.

Back when he was a snot-nosed child, he had even dreamed that one day his mother would return and hug him, but once he grew older, he abandoned that vain hope. His mother didn’t exist anywhere in the world. Even if he were to die and cross the Sanzu River, he probably wouldn’t be able to find her. He didn’t even know her face, so how could he possibly find her?

Regardless, the start of his life was wretched, but as luck would have it, the orphanage was a good place. The director and staff were kind, the food was good, and there was little discrimination. When Children’s Day came around, various volunteer organizations would bring presents and serve special delicious meals, so compared to a certain orphanage in the same region that embezzled donations and fed the kids rotten potatoes, it could be called heaven.

He met Kwon Yuwon there. The director gave his own surname to the children who didn’t even have names and gave them names. So, unless they were kids who already had names, their surnames were all Kwon.

In that situation, Kwon Yuwon was especially close to Siyul. Since they were the same age and were both abandoned at the orphanage as soon as they were born, they had a unique bond. Siyul hadn’t been given a single blood relative, but he still knew what the affection of brothers meant because of Kwon Yuwon.

Unlike Siyul, who was a bit slow and often spaced out, Kwon Yuwon had a fast-turning brain. He could manage above-average grades without even studying, and he earned decent pocket money by doing part-time jobs like selling cigarettes to students at school or neatly applying screen protectors to phones.

Even though they were the same age, Kwon Yuwon was just like an older brother. If someone picked a fight with Siyul at the orphanage or if a scuffle broke out, the person who would come running immediately and swing his fists was always Kwon Yuwon.

In a capitalist society, most problems stem from money. If you look at it closely, Kwon Yuwon might also be a poor victim caught up in the massive gamble of money.

It was after they reached the age where they were forced to be independent from the orphanage. There was a settlement allowance, but in this era where prices were skyrocketing to the heavens, it was truly a pea-sized amount of money. Even if they reduced their sleeping hours and worked part-time until their bones broke, making ends meet for two mouths wasn’t an easy task. On top of that, the world was even more cold-hearted toward young people without guardians.

After returning from the military, they found a single-room studio with the money the two of them had scraped together like ants collecting breadcrumbs, but the landlord claimed he’d failed to pay taxes or something and ate their monthly rent deposit and ran off. The real estate agency seemed to be in on it too, so they called, but it only rang as a disconnected number. They were robbed with their eyes wide open, and it was a time when they had no choice but to go outside and be homeless.

Saying he would absolutely pull the head off that landlord, Kwon Yuwon did his best. He reported it and, in his own way, scraped together his non-existent money to hire a private investigator. But it was all for nothing.

The ones who committed the fraud had long since fled overseas, and the police didn’t hide the look of being annoyed. They just repeated like parrots that there was nothing they could do for them. Granted, would the public authority, which remained immovable even when jeonse (lump-sum housing lease) frauds were exploding one after another, move their heavy butts at the news that a mere two orphans had lost a monthly rent deposit, not even a jeonse one?

In a hurry, they packed their bags and entered a shabby inn, where Kwon Yuwon, eyes gleaming wildly, contacted an hyung he knew. He should have noticed that what was smoldering in those eyes was madness.

‘I’ll do that job.’

Siyul didn’t know the meaning of those words. He was just stupidly tilting his head, and Kwon Yuwon told him that he would be the one to feed and support him, then rose indignantly and ran out of the house. In his bag when he returned a few hours later were several small salt packets given out by a chicken shop.

‘Don’t tell me, this…’

There was no way Kwon Yuwon, who had just been defrauded, would have brought a pile of salt to take on a side job. No matter how ignorant of the world Siyul was, he knew what this was.

In the past, Kwon Yuwon had once mentioned it in passing. That there was an hyung from the orphanage who had made a lot of money. That even if it wasn’t legal, it wasn’t as if there were no easy ways to earn money.

‘I’ll only do it until I earn back the deposit. Don’t worry.’ 

‘Hey! This isn’t it. Take this back. No matter how shitty our situation is, let’s not cross the line. Okay?’ 

‘Do you not trust me? Fucking hell, if we get kicked out of here, we have nowhere to go back to. At least we need a place to sleep. I can’t even be homeless.’

It wasn’t because Kwon Yuwon was the type to be neat. That’s just how being an Omega was. Because of his nature, he didn’t know what terrible things might happen to him if he slept among homeless people. Kwon Yuwon would say it repeatedly. That being manifested as an Omega was far more terrible than being abandoned by his parents. Saying that being an Omega was shitty, and his life was shitty.

‘What if we go to prison?’

To Siyul, who was terrified and trembling—

‘We won’t go. And there is no other way besides this.’

Kwon Yuwon’s eyes flashed as he thrust the salt packets at Siyul’s nose like a knife. The threat that if he didn’t follow along, he’d use Siyul’s head—which was practically just a decoration—instead of the landlord’s head for interior decor in the house, seemed to ring in Siyul’s ears, even though Kwon Yuwon hadn’t said it out loud.

‘Still.’

‘Either do it, or we each go our own separate ways from here, it’s one or the other.’

Kwon Yuwon was smart and calculating. He knew that Siyul would never let go of him. Even if Siyul got angry and turned away, he was the type to soften up at a single word of apology from the other. They weren’t blood-related brothers, but how could he abandon the only person in the world who was like family?

Fortunately, it wasn’t involving them very deeply; if they got a call from that side, all they had to do was drop the salt at the promised location and come back. The locations were mostly communication terminal boxes, public restroom water tanks, or the gaps in building number plates that no one would look at.

Sometimes they even did deliveries. It was a service used by regulars who usually couldn’t wait even an hour. If he knocked on the door five times, saying “Delivery,” zombies with hollowed-out eyes under their sockets would come out and take the salt.

The work was easy, and a lot of money came in. Even though it was merely a commission, to young people thrown into society with not a penny left in their pockets, it was an incredibly large sum of money. If they kept earning at this rate, it felt like they would soon earn not just the monthly rent deposit, but the jeonse money as well.

‘Are we going to become chaebol at this rate?’

Kwon Yuwon’s thoughts weren’t much different from Siyul’s. Didn’t money inherently possess the property that the more you touched it, the more your greed grew? The monthly rent deposit transformed into jeonse money, and the jeonse money transformed into the massive desire that they should probably acquire a house in Seoul.

Salt packs became noticeably numerous in the damp and secluded corners of their inn room. The number of times Kwon Yuwon entered the house decreased in inverse proportion to that. He seemed to be running around busily without a moment to catch his breath. Recently, it even seemed like he was opening up new sales channels himself.

An active attitude toward business is worthy of praise, but the business that Kwon Yuwon was putting forward was an unpleasant affair to someone. The owner of the club he had newly tapped into was exactly such a person.

A club is supposed to run on alcohol, cigarettes, dancing, and music, which is the drug allowed by the state, isn’t it? Thinking that one drug or another was the same, it was a place where Kwon Yuwon was having some subtle fun.

But of all things, really, of all things.

On that night when Kwon Yuwon had some business and left it to Siyul, the owner showed up in person to catch the rat.

Back to the present.

Siyul trembled and clenched and unclenched his numbed hands. His kneeling knees had long since lost all sensation because the blood wasn’t circulating. Still, he couldn’t change his posture. If he incurred even a bit of displeasure, he might get hit one more time by those monstrous fists.

The solar plexus where he had been hit by a shoe once, after being caught while trying to run away earlier, was still throbbing. He hadn’t kicked that hard—it was practically just lifting his leg and giving a light push—but Siyul had tumbled backward and was grabbed by the hulking men and returned to his position.

The man was sitting in a chair with his legs spread comfortably. Siyul stared only at those shoe tips for dear life. He was scared that if they made eye contact, he would get hit. They weren’t the same hulking men who had dragged him into this messy office, but just seeing the polished, glossy shoe tips and the knife-sharp creases of his trousers, a dangerous and intimidating scent wafted out.

On top of that, his feet were huge. The width was wide and the length was long. Siyul had never seen such a foot size in his entire life. Not even the person famous for being the biggest at the orphanage had feet that size.

If I get kicked one more time, I’m going to die from internal organ rupture. As the hit area throbbed again, Siyul curled his body as small as he could.