<CHAPTER 10 >

“Gwangjun Oh, damn, your cheek is something to look at. Hahaha.”

“A guy who supposedly boxed got his ass handed to him by a walking skeleton?”

“Your mom’s gonna flip when she hears about this.”

“Shut the fuck up!”

Cheonghwa High School had strict rules, but there were definitely areas where exceptions were quietly tolerated.

One such place was the physical education equipment room tucked away in a corner of the school grounds.

Not every student who attended Cheonghwa High School was a genius.

When their academic performance wasn’t good enough, the school steered them toward admission to prestigious universities through athletic programs.

Horseback riding, golf, ice hockey, canoeing, and so on.

Students could freely choose from a handful of sports that were only realistically accessible to those with the financial means to support them.

Naturally, these were specialized athletic programs that ordinary families couldn’t even dream of affording, designed primarily for the children of the upper class.

Even if they couldn’t be called academic prodigies, they could preserve their social standing by turning toward elite sports and dedicating themselves to them.

First, they would get into a prestigious university through an arts or athletics program where competition was relatively low.

Then, at an appropriate point, they would change majors, effectively laundering both their university background and their field of study.

In that regard, Cheonghwa High School, which was unrivaled in this area, could be called the birthplace of specialized athletic education.

It wouldn’t be an exaggeration to say that most of the specialized sports departments at Korea’s prestigious universities were filled with graduates of Cheonghwa High School.

“Don’t stress about it. Here, have a smoke. He’s just an outcast, anyway.”

“We’ll stomp that bastard for you! Hahaha.”

“That’s what brothers are for!”

Oh Gwangjun had come to meet the students in the physical education department during lunch.

These guys often soothed their frustration with cigarettes instead of the cafeteria food, which rarely suited their tastes.

Vrrrrrrrrrrr.

The air purifier fan roared as it struggled against the thick cigarette smoke.

The PE equipment room was an unofficial smoking area tolerated by the school administration.

“Fuck. Hyojoo Lee told me not to make things difficult for her.”

Gwangjun ground his teeth.

“Hyojoo Lee?”

“You and Hyojoo Lee are seeing each other?”

“What the fuck are you talking about? If her family found out, they’d lose their minds.”

The boys who often hung around with Gwangjun came from families of roughly the same social standing.

Their fathers were the owners of private hospitals, regional savings banks, and small-to-medium-sized accounting firms.

They were children who had been meticulously groomed by their mothers, who had managed every aspect of their lives from beginning to end.

Yet even these arrogant, self-important kids instinctively feared Hyojoo Lee.

They perceived her as belonging to an entirely different social tier.

They practically placed her among the gods.

She was the kind of person you gained nothing by provoking for no reason.

“Hey, you’re not just gonna take this lying down, are you?”

Yang Cheolgyu asked around the cigarette between his lips.

“Me? I’ve got a plan… A plan. Hooooooh.”

Gwangjun took a long drag from his cigarette.

A sinister, vicious smile slowly spread across his lips.

—

“…?”

Jiwoong Park stared blankly at the person who casually took the seat across from him.

Ha Taewoong?

One of the five students admitted to Cheonghwa High School that year through the outcast admission quota.

Three of them had already dropped out.

Only two remained.

They could have grown close for the sake of mutual support, but instead, they had been busy avoiding each other.

When outcasts associated with one another, it only drew more attention to them.

Everyone would inevitably mock them as some kind of gathering of untouchables.

One by one, the weaker-minded students had dropped away.

Jiwoong Park was from Guryong Village.

He was an extraordinary case—someone who had clawed his way from the absolute bottom to Cheonghwa.

Guryong Village was the only remaining shantytown in Gangnam, a place virtually every Korean had heard of.

Jiwoong had buried his nose in his books and studied with everything he had, determined to escape the slums.

His dream was an ambitious one.

His father had been a detective, stubborn and upright as a steel cable.

But cruel fate had thrown Jiwoong into the harsh world all alone.

His parents had died in a car accident while driving at night after returning from a relative’s funeral in the countryside.

Before they had even finished mourning their parents, debt collectors came barging in and ran rampant through the house.

Then the police showed up.

They claimed his dead father had taken bribes.

It was complete and utter nonsense.

They tore through the entire house, claiming they were searching for evidence.

There had been four people in the family, all living on nothing but his father’s single monthly paycheck.

His father had no other source of income whatsoever.

That father had endured years in the violent crimes division in a pair of worn-out police boots.

He had never even put himself in a situation where he would have needed to accept loan-shark money or bribes.

His payday was the day the family got to eat meat.

That was how frugal his parents had been.

Even ordinary seasonal fruit was something they could only afford when it went on sale.

Throughout the year, kimchi, bean sprout soup, and fried eggs were the dishes that appeared most often on their table.

On top of that, they were also supporting his grandmother.

Yet his mother had always been the kind of person who talked about what they had to be grateful for before mentioning what they lacked.

Thrift had become second nature to her.

She even took part-time jobs because she wanted to save enough money to at least provide a rental deposit when her only son eventually got married.

That was how painstakingly she had scraped together her little savings.

Then, when both his parents were gone, Jiwoong’s family fell apart overnight.

His grandmother was a woman of another generation and knew virtually nothing about how the world worked.

With nothing but a few million won in her hands, she was forced to flee to Guryong Village as though she had been driven out.

Jiwoong, who had grown up normally like any other ordinary commoner, experienced life at the very bottom from that moment onward.

And there was another problem.

His father had been an only child too.

Left alone with his grandmother, Jiwoong had not a single relative he could turn to for help.

They began surviving day to day on the minimum living expenses provided by the district office.

But Jiwoong refused to associate with the other kids his age from Guryong Village.

He couldn’t fall down the wrong path.

Not after everything his dead parents had done for him.

So he clung desperately to his studies.

As Jiwoong grew older, doubts began to take root in his mind.

The more information he accumulated through studying, the more suspicious details he discovered.

A suspicion began to grow inside him.

Perhaps someone had been involved in his parents’ deaths.

Around that time, memories he had overlooked in the chaos back then began resurfacing one by one.

Several years after the accident, one of his late father’s colleagues came to see Jiwoong.

That man only deepened his suspicions.

He had traveled all the way to Guryong Village just to tell Jiwoong one unexpected thing.

“I’m sorry.”

That was all he said.

Then he left behind an envelope and walked away.

Jiwoong had never once lost the top spot in elementary or middle school.

Like the hidden truth that always surfaced in revenge movies and dramas, he became convinced that someone was lurking behind his parents’ deaths.

Once that suspicion had taken root, he gritted his teeth and devoted himself even more fiercely to his studies.

He needed power to uncover the truth behind his parents’ deaths.

His excellent middle school grades had earned him an easy opportunity to enter Cheonghwa High School.

It was an opportunity he had obtained only after repeatedly pleading with the principal, who had strongly tried to dissuade him.

The principal was worried about him entering through the outcast admission quota.

Jiwoong didn’t care.

Living without his parents had taught him that the most painful thing in life was having neither money nor connections.

Cheonghwa High School was practically a playground for the children of the wealthy.

He wanted to get in somehow, build friendships with them, and use those connections as a ladder to climb out of his circumstances.

But reality wasn’t so easy.

It had been a naïve, foolish choice.

An outcast…

That was all he was at Cheonghwa High School—a member of the untouchable caste.

And he was treated exactly that way.

To students who had grown up wanting for nothing, an outcast was little more than foul-smelling garbage.

Academics were no different.

He had attended a middle school in Gangnam and had been an excellent student, but the actual gap was enormous.

No matter how relentlessly he studied, he couldn’t catch up.

There was an invisible wall between them, like a sheet of reinforced glass.

These days, Jiwoong had been struggling with the same question over and over.

Was there really any reason to stay at Cheonghwa until the end while being treated like this?

Was it worth sacrificing several years of his life?

He had reached the point where he even cursed himself for his own foolishness in thinking he could build connections with people whose power he could someday borrow.

“Don’t agonize over it.”

“…?”

It was Ha Taewoong sitting across from him who said it.

He was staring at Jiwoong while picking up a generous portion of bulgogi with his chopsticks.

“You look exactly like half-and-half chicken.”

“W-What?”

“What? Thinking about dropping out?”

“…”

Chomp.

Taewoong stuffed an entire mouthful of bulgogi into his mouth and chewed with genuine enjoyment.

Even Jiwoong, who had no appetite, found himself salivating as he watched Taewoong eat.

Despite stuffing a huge bite into his mouth, Taewoong somehow didn’t look the least bit gluttonous.

Gulp.

He quickly swallowed the food in his mouth.

His chopsticks never stopped moving.

Next came a generous helping of sweet and spicy spicy pork.

He looked like he could be filming a mukbang.

“The CSAT is only a year away. If you give up here, your parents will be sad.”

“……!!”

Taewoong even closed his eyes as he savored the food, looking genuinely moved by its taste.

What the hell is this guy talking about?

The rumor had spread all over school since that morning.

Outcast Ha Taewoong had beaten up Oh Gwangjun, the school bully!

Jiwoong was glad to hear it.

At the same time, though, he thought Taewoong was an idiot.

If overwhelming someone with force were enough, Jiwoong would have stepped forward himself long ago.

His police officer father had taught him taekwondo and trained his basic physical strength from a young age.

His father, who was also a practitioner of several martial arts, had been extremely strict in his training.

Even Jiwoong’s sturdy build came from his father’s genes.

He could easily hold his own against the boys from the physical education department.

But there was a clear reason he had never rashly stepped forward.

Real power didn’t come from fists.

It came from the pen.

Anyone with even a little common sense knew that.

Yet Ha Taewoong, as though he didn’t understand that basic fact, had chosen to use his fists.

He had endured it for a long time, though.

Taewoong had probably been ignored and humiliated just as much as Jiwoong had.

But after what happened today, Taewoong’s life at this school was finished.

“Feeling sorry for me?”

“…”

What the hell?

Was this guy a mind reader?

Taewoong had somehow snatched Jiwoong’s thoughts as if he really could read minds.

Feeling uncomfortable, Jiwoong immediately lowered his gaze.

“You should try it sometime too. It feels fucking great.”

Taewoong was acting like an elementary school kid.

“Fuck off.”

Jiwoong merely glared at him from beneath raised brows and spat out the words.

“That’s Ha Taewoong, right?”

“The outcast actually had the nerve to throw a punch?”

“Isn’t Gwangjun Oh’s dad a chief prosecutor at the Eastern District Prosecutors’ Office?”

“He really doesn’t know his place…”

“Birds of a feather.”

Students from every grade gathered around, whispering as they watched the two.

Within half a day, the rumor had spread so quickly that hundreds of students already knew about it.

It was that big of a story.

And the very person at the center of it all was sitting right in front of Jiwoong.

“Scared?”

“…”

Taewoong smirked and asked again.

“I don’t have time to sit here running my mouth with you, so get the fuck out of my face!”

Jiwoong’s eyes burned.

If this was a joke…

His fists tightened.

Then—

Thud, thud.

Soft footsteps approached from behind Jiwoong.

The first thing that caught his attention was the school uniforms.

Three girls had rolled up the waistbands of their skirts, hiking them considerably higher than regulations allowed.

They were three of the most notorious girls in school for openly ignoring the rules despite the administration’s attempts to crack down on them.

“Seriously, even if it’s the only free meal you get all day, aren’t you stuffing yourself way too much?”

The girl lifted her eyes sharply and sneered.

From the beginning, it was obvious that they had approached specifically to pick a fight with Jiwoong.

“Sora, give him a break. My dad says guys like him have holes in their stomachs.”

“The cafeteria food tastes awful anyway. It’s better if someone eats it up like this.”

“Even so, our little bear is eating way too much. Whatever’s left gets sent off as animal feed. What if those animals don’t get enough to eat and go hungry?”

“Still, the bear the school raises should come first.”

“Then should we let him off?”

“Good girl Sora, hold yourself back. Animal welfare and all that. They have the right to survive on their own.”

“Fine, I’m feeling generous today. Eat up, you filthy outcast. Oink, oink. Hahahaha!”

Crack.

Jiwoong lowered his head and clenched his fists.

His teeth ground together so hard that his jaw trembled.

It was a humiliation that was unbearable every single time, but he had to endure it.

Oh Sora, a girl from his class, made a point of provoking Jiwoong every lunchtime.

She was the daughter of the owner of the land on which the unauthorized house in Guryong Village stood—the very house where Jiwoong lived with his grandmother.

With midterms approaching, her hysterics had only gotten worse.

Jiwoong had always outperformed Sora academically.

Yet Sora’s attitude toward him never changed.

She treated him like a modern-day serf.

But today…

“Ohhh~! Looks like the idiots are having a bumper harvest of bullshit today~.”