Chapter 48

Spotting a taxi pulling up to the hospital entrance, Gi-hyeon immediately reached for the door handle. But before he could pull it open, someone sprinted up from behind and slammed the door shut again. It was the tennis player who had caused the accident.

“…What is your problem.”

“I told you I was going to take you home. Get in my car.”

“…”

Gi-hyeon’s head throbbed violently. Come to think of it, hadn’t the guy literally just confessed he was terrible at driving? The taxi driver rolled down his window and yelled, “Hey, are you getting in or not!” Bowing his head in a quick apology, Gi-hyeon marched past the athlete.

Taking that as a silent acceptance, the man immediately hurried after him. Staring straight ahead, Gi-hyeon spoke.

“On the condition that we stop somewhere first.”

“I don’t mind.”

Shaking his head, the man quickened his pace until he was walking shoulder-to-shoulder with Gi-hyeon.

Arriving at the parking lot, the two men climbed into the car. Once again, Gi-hyeon took the driver’s seat. The moment he confirmed the man had fastened his seatbelt, Gi-hyeon threw the car into gear and sped off. He didn’t even bother turning on the navigation system. His destination was crystal clear.

“Uh, this is…”

Clearly recognizing the route, the man trailed off as he stared out the window approaching the intersection. Refusing to answer, Gi-hyeon aggressively pressed the accelerator.

The car jerked to a halt in front of Haeseong Rehabilitation Centre Clinic. Flicking on the hazard lights and pulling over to the shoulder, Gi-hyeon turned to the man.

“You can leave first.”

With that, he threw the door open and stepped out. He vaguely heard the man say something about waiting behind him, but Gi-hyeon didn’t look back, marching straight into the hospital and stepping directly into the elevator.

Because the night-shift nurses caring for the ward patients had absolutely no reason to come down to this floor, the athletes’ lounge was plunged in darkness. Even the therapists who usually stayed late to prepare for case conferences seemed to have clocked out, leaving the floor suffocatingly silent.

Gi-hyeon booted up Team Leader Lim’s computer. The moment the startup screen vanished and the EMR (Electronic Medical Record) window popped up, he logged in and immediately typed his own name into the search bar.

“…”

The results populated instantly. Gi-hyeon immediately clicked on his most recent medical record. The FM (Family Medicine) chart expanded across the screen.

Rapidly scanning through the blood sugar levels, red blood cell counts, and a massive list of metrics, Gi-hyeon scrolled down until his breath completely stopped in his throat.

[Pheromone Test Findings: Presentation Mutation Anomaly – Omega/Recessive]

“What the hell is this…”

He blinked his dazed eyes.

There was a very specific reason he had rushed straight to Haeseong Rehab the moment the ER doctor delivered the news. Desperately praying the doctor had somehow misdiagnosed him, he had intended to re-check the results of the blood test he had taken here just days prior.

But the results were absolutely identical. So Gi-hyeon had undergone a complete gender presentation mutation from Beta to Omega. And to make matters worse, he was pregnant.

“Ugh—!”

The exact moment the agonizing reality fully registered, a violent wave of nausea surged up his throat. Sprinting to the bathroom, Gi-hyeon threw the door open and gripped the edges of the sink. Having eaten absolutely nothing, his empty stomach only violently purged thin streams of bitter bile.

“Uurgh—.”

Despite having nothing left to throw up, the dry heaving refused to stop. Staring into the mirror, he could see the whites of his eyes had turned a violent, bloodshot red from the spiking pressure in his skull.

Suddenly, Gi-hyeon let out a breathless, utterly baffled laugh.

“Hah, seriously…”

He simply couldn’t stop laughing. Manifesting as an Omega? Right, it wasn’t as if he hadn’t fantasized about what would happen if he actually were an Omega.

If So Gi-hyeon had been an Omega, how would Jo Yeon-oh—who was ‘kind’ enough to fake-date a Beta he found repulsive just because he was terrified of losing their friendship—have reacted?

The answer was always exactly the same.

If So Gi-hyeon had been an Omega, Jo Yeon-oh wouldn’t have even maintained a friendship with him. Whether in high school or college, Jo Yeon-oh’s method of treating Omegas was entirely uniform. He always drew an absolute, ruthless line between what he was willing to give an Omega and what he expected in return.

Omegas were allowed to exploit Jo Yeon-oh’s wealth and status, but they were never, ever allowed to receive his actual heart. Watching from the sidelines all those years, Gi-hyeon had seen it with agonizing clarity.

Jo Yeon-oh’s lovers had always been violently jealous of Gi-hyeon. It’s your friend or me, choose. Every single one of them had eventually spat out that exact ultimatum. And every single time, Jo Yeon-oh—a man who valued countless things far above romance—had unfailingly chosen Gi-hyeon. Therefore, even if So Gi-hyeon had been an Omega, the outcome would have been exactly the same. In fact, Gi-hyeon probably would have lost Jo Yeon-oh much faster.

“Haha…”

Yet, the agonizing humiliation remained exactly the same. His entire life was nothing but a cosmic, sick joke. Mutating into an Omega was one thing, but the fact that he was pregnant was so profoundly absurd it defied logic.

“This fucking… brutally accurate bastard, how the hell did he manage it in one shot…”

He even threw out curses directed at Jo Yeon-oh. He was actively laughing, yet feeling a strange dampness on his cheeks, he looked in the mirror and realized tears were streaming uncontrollably down his face.

And then, suddenly, a strange thought crossed his mind.

Maybe this wasn’t entirely a bad thing.

“…”

Gi-hyeon slowly rubbed his lower abdomen. To think that beneath his flat, rock-hard stomach—maintained through relentless, daily exercise—something other than himself was actively breathing. He would need a detailed ultrasound to confirm, but Gi-hyeon’s shattered mind was slowly piecing itself back together, returning to harsh reality.

What was meant to happen had happened.

The catastrophic event had already occurred in the past.

Even if he had been living in a completely oblivious daze only to be brutally blindsided by reality, he had no choice but to endure it. Because the person who had willingly pressed his lips against the cheek of a feral, mindless Jo Yeon-oh was none other than So Gi-hyeon himself.

“…If a man causes an incident, he has to take responsibility.”

He subconsciously muttered the words to himself. Having spoken them aloud, he didn’t actually hate the sound of them. He had always desperately wanted a family. Not goldfish, not his distant father, not Jo Yeon-oh—a real, actual family.

Gi-hyeon aggressively wiped his cheeks. He had a mountain of things to do. Wandering aimlessly in despair after a crisis had already struck simply wasn’t in his nature. The day he realized his ankle was permanently destroyed, So Gi-hyeon had spent exactly three hours agonizing over it before immediately turning his focus to securing a medical discharge.

This was the exact same scenario. He had absolutely zero desire to abort the child, and if he had mutated into an Omega, he just had to figure out how to survive as one. Ruthlessly simplifying the problem was the most crucial task for Gi-hyeon right now.

It was a psychological occupational hazard he had ingrained into his very bones during his time as a military officer. During the execution of any military operation, the absolute first step was brutally separating what needed to be done immediately from what was non-essential.

Gi-hyeon believed human emotions functioned exactly the same way. Once he established his absolute highest priority, he actively trained himself to swiftly discard any lingering regrets over the things he couldn’t fulfill.

For the past seven years, his relationship with Jo Yeon-oh had operated on that exact principle. Jo Yeon-oh had been his absolute highest priority. To protect that position, Gi-hyeon had willingly sacrificed his own emotional stability and drained his own life force.

But the hierarchy had violently shifted. Between yesterday and today, the absolute priority So Gi-hyeon needed to protect above all else had irrevocably changed.

Using the back of his hand to wipe away the tears still clinging to his eyelashes, Gi-hyeon turned on the faucet and splashed cold water over his face. In the mirror, a man with a dripping wet face stared intensely back at him.

“You need to steel your heart.”

Gi-hyeon whispered the warning to the man in the mirror. He desperately hoped that man would endure it well. Giving birth and raising a child was a terrifying, monumental task he had never once considered, and he had no idea how much energy it would require.

When the future felt this suffocatingly bleak, the absolute best strategy was to systematically eliminate the tasks right in front of him. Yanking out a paper towel, he aggressively dried his face. Because he had forcefully swallowed his tears, his nose was constantly running. Blowing his nose with a loud honk and tossing the paper towel into the trash, Gi-hyeon marched straight out of the bathroom.

Stepping back into the office, he closed the EMR window, shut down the computer, securely locked the door behind him, and stepped into the elevator. Pulling out his phone, he shot a text to Beom-hee.

[I’m heading to your place.] 08:24 PM

The small ‘1’ indicating the message was unread didn’t disappear immediately, but if she didn’t see it, he could always just call her later. Thinking nothing of it, Gi-hyeon stepped out of the elevator the moment the doors slid open on the first floor with a soft chime.

Just as he was heading for the main entrance, a night-shift nurse passing by called out to him.

“Oh my, Dr. So. What brings you here at this hour?”

“I accidentally left something in the athletes’ lounge.”

Gi-hyeon offered a gentle, practiced smile. Seemingly satisfied with the answer, the nurse nodded with an ‘Ah, I see.’ Telling her to have a good shift, he walked past her.

He didn’t run into a single other person until he pushed through the main entrance. Stepping outside, the weather was surprisingly crisp and cool, considering summer was right around the corner.

The evening breeze carried the scent of a flower—a fragrance he was intimately familiar with from years of smelling it, yet had never learned the name of. Breathing it in, his chest felt incredibly hollow. Utterly empty. It was a profound, devastating void. It felt as though the wind was blowing straight through a gaping hole right in the center of his ribcage.

“…”

Gi-hyeon paused his steps for a moment, simply letting the wind hit his face. He stared blankly up at the night sky. There wasn’t a single thing physically blowing in the wind, yet the breeze felt overloaded with so many invisible weights that his mind went entirely blank. Right now, Gi-hyeon desperately wished he could simply scatter into the wind.

It’s fine. I just need to fill the void with something new. 

Looking back on his life, it had never been a smooth, easy path. He had lost his mother at a young age and had been forced to completely abandon his career path due to the obsessive malice of others. And now, his very biological gender had mutated. He had every right to be completely exhausted, but Gi-hyeon simply didn’t have the luxury of collapsing. I’ll let myself hurt later. I’ll make time to be sad later, he coldly rationalized to himself.

He was just about to head toward where the tennis player had parked the car. Why did his ankles feel so impossibly heavy, as if massive lead weights were chained to them? Just as Gi-hyeon was about to stop walking, a voice echoed from the crosswalk directly across from the hospital.

“So Gi-hyeon.”

It was an agonizingly familiar voice.