He narrowed his eyes, relaxing his grip on the man’s shoulder.
“What do you mean by that?”
The man grabbed his wrist, pulled it off his shoulder, and spoke quickly.
“This isn’t a short conversation. Let’s talk at your place.”
His voice was a condensation of anxiousness and fatigue, as if he were being chased, with no energy or time for a war of attrition. The man didn’t even check if he had prior engagements. The atmosphere suggested that whatever this was, it had to take precedence over any other plans.
They drove to his house in their separate cars. Throughout the drive, he mulled over the man’s words, but he couldn’t begin to guess what he was about to hear once they arrived.
If it was a matter serious enough for the man to show up at his hospital unannounced, it could only be related to Yeehyeon these days. His prediction was correct up to that point, but what the man had said in the consultation room was a complete mystery.
Have you ever, as an Alpha, been tied down to a single Omega?
It was the kind of question he thought he would never hear in his lifetime from a man who held the instincts of Alphas and Omegas regarding reproduction in colder contempt than anyone, a man who could control his pheromones to a near-perfect degree. It was even more absurd if that question was related to Seo Yeehyeon, a Beta.
Above all, the man’s grave demeanor, the likes of which he had never seen before, weighed on his mind. This was not a man who would act serious over nothing. His second prediction—that his friend was caught up in some unfittingly sweet and sour dilemma after falling for someone ten years his junior—had been spectacularly wrong.
A persistent anxiety clung to him, forcing him to gnaw on the back of his hand the entire drive.
The man had arrived first. When he got off the elevator and rounded the corner, he was standing there, leaning blankly against the wall next to the front door like a phantom. Though he was clearly sober, he looked as disheveled as if he were drunk, and he wasn’t in the mood to make his usual jokes. Tsk, he clicked his tongue, punched in the password, and opened the door.
This was the man’s second visit since he had moved in this spring. Though they could be called each other’s closest friends, they rarely visited each other’s homes—especially the man coming to his.
He had the man sit at the dining table in front of the kitchen, which was as desolate as a model home, with almost no trace of housekeeping or life. He asked if he wanted a drink, and the man nodded, asking if he could smoke.
He looked like he needed a stiff drink, so he brought out whiskey and ice. The man, who had shown little reaction to the alcohol, took out a cigarette from his jacket pocket and lit it as if he’d been waiting the moment he was given a plate to use as an ashtray.
The man remained silent until the cigarette had burned halfway down and the whiskey they had each poured on the rocks was half-empty.
“Say something, you crazy bastard. Did you kill someone?”
He spoke first out of frustration. The man let out a dry, brittle laugh, slowly clenching and unclenching the hand that lay limply on the table. It looked like the kind of laugh that said it might not be much different from killing someone… and he tightened his grip on the on-the-rocks glass.
“Things like pheromones.”
His voice was like that of someone who had burned away all human emotion, leaving only the inner framework.
“They felt like proof of being an unevolved beast… From the moment my first presentation began and I felt their effects, I never liked them. The fact that my body wasn’t under my control… that I was being swayed by the reactions happening in my body… it was shameful, humiliating… I was determined to prove that it was all just an excuse made up by Alphas and Omegas with weak wills. As a boy, I was full of venom.”
He, too, of course, remembered the man from his boyhood. The man had been peculiar. He came from a family that possessed wealth, honor, and legitimacy, second to none among the children of East Asia’s wealthiest Alphas and Omegas gathered at H.M.I.S. Judged to have a more than 90% chance of developing into a Golden Alpha upon his presentation, the man had no reason to feel inferior as an Alpha, yet he was desperate to become a Golden Alpha for entirely different reasons than his peers.
There were factions who, seeing this, were jealous and envious, calling him a snob who looked down on non-Golden Alphas and Omegas, but the man at the time couldn’t have cared less about the opinions of his trivial peers.
To be precise, the man hadn’t wanted to become a Golden Alpha, but simply to escape the dominion of pheromones. He was one of the few friends from his school days who understood the man to that extent.
“The attraction between an Alpha and an Omega? An Alpha’s instinct for an Omega? I used to scoff, asking if everyone was living in the Middle Ages. I refused to live a subhuman life… one where instinct, disguised as the excuse of pheromones, took precedence over reason, a life that seemed to prioritize reproduction above all else…. And, in reality, I was able to grow up almost unaffected by pheromones, even during my unstable boyhood.”
There was a time when he, too, had not understood the man who tried so hard to be perfect in his fight against pheromones. As long as one could afford high-end suppressants, being born an Alpha or Omega, especially one with the qualities of a Golden, was an advantageous condition.
He used to shake his head at the man, thinking how tiring his life must be, wondering why someone at the pinnacle of the Alpha hierarchy would reject his given circumstances so vehemently, unlike someone in a disadvantageous position.
But perhaps, deep down, he had felt inferior about the man’s attitude. He himself had never had that much passion for anything. He had never wanted something so badly, hated something so intensely, or exerted his abilities to their maximum potential.
He had been judged to have a 40% chance of developing into a Golden Alpha, and 40% was a number that held plenty of promise depending on one’s effort, but he had never felt the need to go that far.
In the end, he was now stuck in a mediocre middle ground, able to control his pheromones to some extent, but neither a Golden nor a regular Alpha who had to rely on suppressants.
There were likely various reasons behind his habit of compromising at a moderate level. It wasn’t that he couldn’t guess. But he couldn’t whine and blame his environment at this age. Nor did he have the will or energy to re-examine himself from the ground up.
While shrugging off the man’s self-control in his fight against pheromones—as if he were shouldering some solemn duty—as an unnecessary resistance, perhaps he had, in fact, held that fierce struggle, so contrary to his own life, in high regard. That was probably it.
“The attraction, interest, or sexual desire that pheromones evoke… I thought it was all just disgusting and unpleasant, and in fact, I’d never found anyone’s pheromones seductive, but…”
The man, who had been speaking slowly while staring down at a spot on the table, widened his eyes as if he had discovered something astonishing on the plain white surface and shook his head.
“In the end, I was just an Alpha too. At least… to one person.”
When the man looked up at him, only his blue eyes, in his weary face, glinted with a bestial hunger. It was a radiance that made his earlier listless appearance, like that of a man who had lost everything, seem like a lie.
“Make sense. What does that have to do with Mr. Yeehyeon?”
Barely listening to him, the man took out a new cigarette and lit it.
“Why I tried so hard not to lose to pheromones, why I wanted to deny the very condition that everyone else envied. I have to start from there.”
“This is driving me crazy.”
He picked up his own glass and swallowed the whiskey as if pouring it down his throat.
The man took a deep drag of his cigarette, his cheeks hollowing, then exhaled a long stream of smoke and asked.
“……How much do you know about Ghosts?”
Through the cigarette smoke, the man’s eyes had changed color in the interim, seeming desolate, hollow, and empty. Thinking that these eyes, with their emphasized ashen gloom, looked more like a ghost’s than the ones that had seemed more intensely blue just moments before, he waited for the main point that was about to begin.
An unbelievable story followed.
The friend he had grown up with for so long had become a stranger, sitting in his house. But before he could even fully accept his friend’s new identity, the shock of what the man had done completely overwhelmed the initial shock.
“You’re joking, right?”
The shock was so great it felt unreal, so his voice, as he asked back, held not a trace of doubt. It was almost cheerful. But the man’s hardened expression was not telling a joke.
“A Ghost? Hey… isn’t that going a bit too far? Ghosts are ancient history. They’re so extinct that even Wikipedia only gives them three lines, no, they’re something that only appears in the oral traditions of European royalty, something that can’t even be verified to have ever truly existed…. There are probably very few Alphas or Omegas who even know the term ‘Ghost’ anymore. Liu Weikun, you’re special enough without having to drag in a legend like that.”
“……”
The man’s eyes, staring at him from across the table, were unwavering. He knew. He knew it. This was not a man who would make up such a story. What he had just blurted out was just a way of confirming the kill.
“If what you just said isn’t a joke and is all true… then you’re a completely crazy son of a bitch.”
His tone changed as he spat out the words coldly. He poured more whiskey without adding ice, downed it like it was cold water, then slammed the glass on the table with a loud thud and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand.
“Fine, you’re a Ghost. Let’s say you can turn a Beta into an Omega by creating a chemical reaction in your semen during knotting through some trained sense of control, like releasing the safety on a pistol… and by consistently ejaculating that… into their rectum or vagina. Since the working principles of Alpha and Omega pheromones haven’t even been scientifically proven, it would be ridiculous to insist that such a mutation is impossible.”
The more he spoke, the colder his head became, but separate from that, rage surged within him. He didn’t even have the leeway to censor himself, to question whether he had the right to be angry about the situation at hand.
“But you said you were trained. You said that’s why you were in the States for two years when you were a kid. So why did you release that safety with Mr. Yeehyeon?”
As he cornered him with a sneer, an immediate answer followed.
“I’ve never failed. Not once until now. Not with anyone. Forget Changing, I’ve never even failed to control knotting. Since you can only trigger a Changing during a knot, there’s no risk of even attempting a Changing if you don’t knot.”
“But you couldn’t control either the knotting or the Changing… not with Seo Yeehyeon!”
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