Chapter 2

Jeong Iwon hadn’t even had time to take off his yellow floral apron, and he was still clutching a large black spatula in his hand in a rather ridiculous state of disarray. Yet as the only young man in this rural village filled almost entirely with elderly people, he couldn’t bring himself to shirk his moral responsibility.

Just what kind of idiot is wandering around threatening our peaceful village? I swear I’ll whack him with this spatula.

He strode along briskly, intending to drive away the suspicious outsider who was threatening the neighborhood.

Then, for an instant, an unfamiliar and strange scent brushed past the tip of his nose.

A cool, damp smell of earth.

It was a deeply melancholic and suppressed pheromone, like mud soaked through with a cold, biting downpour.

Huh? Is that an Alpha pheromone? What the hell is an Alpha doing in this middle-of-nowhere village?

Sensing danger instinctively, Jeong Iwon came to an abrupt stop in front of a utility pole.

At the same time, his eyes met those of an enormous figure leaning precariously beneath the utility pole at the entrance of the village, looking like a broken wooden doll.

His black hair had grown out messily, covering his eyes. His pale cheeks were hollowed out as though he hadn’t had so much as a sip of water in days. And his large hand was wrapped in a rough bandage, with blood seeping through it.

Despite looking utterly ruined, Jeong Iwon recognized the man’s identity immediately.

Holy shit! It’s Yoon Mujin!

His heart seemed to drop straight into his stomach.

Why is one of the original story’s second male leads here? And why, of all places, did he have to show up in this nameless, remote countryside village I ran away to?

A shrill siren began screaming madly inside Jeong Iwon’s head.

I’m screwed if I get involved with him.

His rational mind desperately screamed at him to turn around immediately, run away at full speed, and hide somewhere.

But his legs wouldn’t move.

Because Yoon Mujin standing before him looked so fragile and shattered that it seemed as though his breath might stop at any moment.

In that brief instant, Mujin’s unfocused gaze, which had been drifting aimlessly through empty space, landed on Jeong Iwon’s rigid figure.

And at that moment, an intense and unfamiliar sweetness he had never smelled in his life suddenly swept over Mujin’s senses, which had been dried out and cracked by unbearable pain and loss.

It was the scent of a perfectly ripe, soft white peach—fluffy and gentle, like wrapping a wounded beast abandoned alone in the middle of a freezing winter storm in a warm blanket.

“……”

Under the blazing sun in the middle of the country road, Jeong Iwon and Yoon Mujin’s eyes collided in the air.

The Jeong Iwon of the past had lived while thoroughly concealing his scent, so Yoon Mujin couldn’t even imagine that the owner of this sweet fragrance could be the vicious Jeong Iwon he had once known.

Instead, intoxicated by the warm scent that seemed to melt his frozen soul, Mujin’s unfocused eyes trembled faintly.

“Um, excuse me?”

Jeong Iwon was startled and took a step backward, about to speak.

But then—

Mujin’s enormous body, which had already been pushed far beyond its limit, collapsed helplessly toward the ground as though someone had suddenly cut an invisible string holding him upright.

Thud!

The dull sound of the huge man hitting the ground and kicking up a cloud of dust made a startled scream burst from Jeong Iwon.

“Wh-What the hell! Hey!! Yoon Mujin!!”

Without even realizing it, Jeong Iwon threw down the spatula he had been holding and sprinted toward the fallen Mujin.

It was the historic first moment when an enormous crack appeared in the perfect, peaceful country life he had dreamed of during his retirement.

Under the midsummer heat that felt capable of scorching the top of his head, Jeong Iwon dragged Yoon Mujin, whose body was far larger than his own, while screaming.

“Uwaaaah! This is insane! Seriously, what the hell have you been eating to weigh this much?!”

The weight of an unconscious adult man was beyond anything he had imagined.

And the body of a boxer close to heavyweight class, whose muscles had been trained throughout his entire life in the ring, felt like a massive lump of iron.

Jeong Iwon himself was a healthy young man of average Korean build, but hauling Yoon Mujin all the way into his bedroom under the scorching sun was nothing short of a march through hell.

“Huff, huff. Hey, lift your leg! Ah, seriously, what kind of riches and glory did I think I’d gain by doing this on a day this hot?!”

Sweat poured down him like rain, soaking through his T-shirt.

There he was, supposedly enjoying a peaceful and comfortable country life, yet somehow he had ended up hauling a darkened second male lead from the original story into his own house.

Even through the suffocating heat, a damp, cool scent of earth after rain—the smell of petrichor—continued to seep from Mujin’s body, lingering gloomily around the tip of Iwon’s nose.

This smell is seriously depressing.

After barely managing to dump Yoon Mujin onto the yellow vinyl flooring in the bedroom, Jeong Iwon sprawled out flat on his back.

He stared at the ceiling spinning above him as he struggled to catch his breath.

But after only a moment, he frowned and forced himself back up.

There was something seriously wrong with Mujin, who was sprawled out in the middle of the room.

“Just where the hell have you been, and what have you been doing to end up like this?”

Up close, Yoon Mujin looked even more miserable than he had from outside.

His cheeks, visible beneath his unkempt hair, were deeply sunken as though he hadn’t eaten for days.

His lips were cracked and dried out, with crusted blood around them.

But most alarming of all was his limp right hand.

The crude towel wrapped clumsily around it was already soaked through with dark-red blood, making it almost impossible to tell what it had originally looked like.

The skin visible through the gaps in the makeshift bandage was grotesquely swollen, and because the wound hadn’t even been properly staunched, drops of blood were falling steadily onto the vinyl flooring.

“Holy crap, the bleeding won’t stop. I need to call 119 right now!”

Jeong Iwon panicked, pulled his smartphone from his pocket, and was just about to dial the emergency number when—

Snap!

“……!”

A large, burning-hot hand shot out like a bolt of lightning and roughly seized Jeong Iwon’s slender wrist.

His smartphone slipped from his hand and skidded helplessly across the vinyl floor.

“Ah! Wh-What the hell?!”

As the tremendous grip around his wrist felt strong enough to crush the bones, Jeong Iwon cried out and looked down.

Yoon Mujin, who had been unconscious like a corpse only moments ago, had opened both eyes wide and was glaring at him like a wild beast.

His pupils were still hazy and unfocused, but the murderous hostility unique to someone wounded and the extreme wariness in his gaze were chillingly vivid.

It was the precarious look of someone who had lost everything and been driven to the very edge.

Mujin breathed heavily and growled in a cracked, metallic voice.

“……Don’t touch me. I don’t… need it.”

“What? Hey, let go! You’re bleeding like crazy!”

“Doesn’t matter. Just… leave me alone. Don’t need treatment. Don’t call 119 either.”

It was the sheer despair of someone who didn’t care whether his own hand rotted away or not.

There wasn’t even a shred of will left in him to continue living.

That suffocatingly irritable attitude finally snapped the last thread of Jeong Iwon’s patience after he’d already exhausted himself dragging this enormous man through the scorching heat.

Without even realizing it, Jeong Iwon’s pale hand shot upward—

Smack!

—and landed squarely in the middle of Yoon Mujin’s forehead with an unapologetically sharp sound.

“……?”

An eerie silence descended upon the bedroom.

Yoon Mujin stared up at Jeong Iwon with his eyes wide open and a blank expression on his face, as though he couldn’t comprehend what had just happened to him.

He had been punched by terrifying fists on the ring practically every day of his life.

But being smacked directly in the forehead by such a small, soft bare hand was an utterly unfamiliar form of violence that he had never experienced in his more than twenty years of life.

Even more strangely, the person who had slapped him was emitting fluffy, sweet white-peach pheromones, bubbling up with his anger.

A situation that should have been terrifying had somehow become absurdly ridiculous—and oddly sweet.

“You really are something else! I sweat my ass off carrying you all the way here, and instead of getting down on your knees and thanking me, you’re throwing a tantrum?! I don’t care whether your hand gets smashed to pieces, but I do care if you get blood all over my floor! You stay right there and behave. If you resist one more time, I’m going to slap you across the face!”

After firing off a machine-gun barrage of scolding, Jeong Iwon jumped to his feet and stomped out of the room.

Yoon Mujin was left sitting there alone, a vivid red handprint stamped across his forehead.

He stared blankly at the closed door, having momentarily forgotten even the desperate despair that had been eating away at him.

A little while later, Jeong Iwon came hurrying back, struggling to carry a first-aid kit nearly as large as his own torso.

“Give me your hand.”

His voice was blunt, but Jeong Iwon’s touch was endlessly careful.

He took the blood-soaked towel from Yoon Mujin’s hand and carefully cut it away layer by layer with a pair of scissors.

“……Gasp.”

When the final layer of towel came off, Jeong Iwon nearly gagged.