The Fake Younger Brother.
“ It was an honor to meet the Director of Baekil Entertainment!”
“ No, the honor is mine.”
“ Wow, I didn’t realize you were this tall and handsome! Our agency kids went wild. Wild!”
“ Haha. Is that so.”
“ Mr. Geonho, think it over. I booked a really great place for round two….”
“ Unfortunately, I have another engagement. I’ll take my leave.”
With a formal smile, I cut off the middle-aged man’s chatter.
Leaving the disappointed man behind, I hurried my steps with everything I had. A young man waiting right nearby slipped in after me at once.
“ Looks like someone spiked your drink. No wonder they brought a bunch of girls.”
“ …If I sleep it off, the effect should wear off.”
“ I’ll take you to a hotel right around the corner. Do you need an arm?”
“ Thanks.”
My vision spun and cold sweat streamed down. A dull, strange heat slid up my spine.
I felt I might stumble, so I didn’t refuse my secretary’s support.
We hurried toward the underground parking garage, and then the secretary suddenly stopped walking.
“ Jaeuk?”
I called my secretary’s name, but the voice that answered wasn’t his.
“ …Older brother.”
A low, deep voice.
“ Disgusting.”
From the dim shadow of the garage, a figure stepped into view.
“ Whose scent did you smear on yourself this time?”
“ Baek… Seolheon?”
“ You make it impossible to relax. Over and over.”
He came up as if it were the most natural thing, gently pushed the secretary aside, and took me into his arm.
He was a whole hand taller than me—despite me being well over 180 centimeters—so my shoulder naturally rose up under his.
“ You’re off for the day.”
At his words, the secretary flinched and handed the car key to the young man.
The young man took the key as if used to it, scooped me up lightly, set me in the front passenger seat of a black sedan, and started the engine as if it were the most natural thing in the world.
As the midsize car slipped smoothly out of the building, a suffocating scent quickly filled the cabin.
“ Your scent….”
“ The aroma you like. I just sprayed it.”
A sharp, heavy scent pressed my whole body and turned my head to mush.
This wasn’t aroma.
It was dominant Alpha pheromones.
“ We’re going to the hotel, right? Let’s go together.”
“ Y-yeah….”
“ You must be exhausted after meetings all day. I’ll give you a massage when we get there.”
A hand stroked from cheek to chest, from chest down toward my legs.
That wasn’t a massage.
It was caressing.
“ You don’t have to go this far….”
“ I’m your younger brother.”
Dousing me in pheromones,
and running his hands over me…
was nothing a younger brother should do.
“ Only on paper.”
I saw Seolheon Baek’s grin.
That smile was so unbearably beautiful it made me burn up worse.
“ Not tonight… don’t….”
At the words I forced out,
Seolheon Baek nodded and smiled gently.
“ No.”
“ You’re extra dramatic today.”
From below to above,
a surge climbed hard and fast and I couldn’t come to my senses.
“ Did you get drunk on pheromones?”
“ U-hn, hhn…!”
“ Not even mine, someone else’s?”
Something thin and long churned roughly inside.
Like a kid fiddling with a toy, the finger stabbed me irregularly, then spread like tongs, prying wide left and right.
I hated the wet, squelching sound that leaked through the opened rim.
“ That won’t do. Older brother.”
“ Ah—!”
In that instant, my vision went pure white.
As the finger jammed in deep, white semen splashed up to my chest and under my jaw.
“ You go off every time I stir. Tough, isn’t it?”
What had been scraping fast inside slid out.
…Just as I let out a breath of relief, thinking he’d finally stopped—
“ …!”
Something far thicker drove straight in.
Without warning, Seolheon Baek rammed the weapon in, lifted me easily, and began to piston his hips like a machine.
“ Bear with it a bit. I’ll fill you up inside with mine, right away.”
“ Ah, ah! Agh, ngh! Kh—!”
“ Shh, don’t bite your lip. You’ll hurt yourself.”
My mind went far away. The speed was too fast from the start.
Every time my insides were ground hard, pheromones crashed over me like waves. They invaded not only my skin, nasal passages, and throat, but also the gap where his sex pushed in, rough and relentless.
As the pheromones kneaded my brain, a chill of something beyond description crawled over me.
I’d rather be punched. That would be easier to endure.
“ S-something’s wrong. This, hhn, this is…!”
“ What’s wrong?”
“ I… I don’t… with my younger brother… with you… this! Ah, ugh!”
Each time he hit a place I couldn’t tell was tender or sore, my reason slowly thinned into fog.
My ragged breathing and a voice I couldn’t believe was mine poured out of my mouth however it wanted.
“ There’s nothing wrong. It’s just rehab.”
Meanwhile, Seolheon Baek spoke in a calm voice without a single breath out of place.
“ Think of it as treatment to ease your abnormal constitution.”
“ Hh, hahk, uht!”
“ You need this. So.”
A feather-light kiss landed on cheeks smeared with tears and fluids.
“ There’s nothing wrong at all.”
…That sweet voice and those gentle reassurances.
I’d already fallen for that how many times now.
“ Here we go. I’m going to press a little harder.”
“ Ah, ahh!”
“ I know it’s a sensitive spot. Sorry. But it’s necessary.”
And so I, again,
led by my younger brother,
would sink into that deep, dark, wet, sweltering mire.
“ You let out a lot. Good job.”
“ I… I’m empty… nothing left….”
“ Not enough yet.”
I knew, and still I couldn’t stop it.
“ Be an adult and learn to bear it.”
How could a mere human stand against a surging tidal wave?
“ Older brother.”
Again, he poured pheromones deep, deep inside.
Through my blurring sight, I saw that pretty smile.
Damn these pheromones…
Right before I blacked out,
I wept rivers inside
and shouted at the world yet again.
Damn this Omegaverse world—
“ Hah, this cursed debt. Will nobody take it off my hands.”
That day too, I was doing part-time work loading and unloading parcels.
Recently the delivery volume had exploded, so I worked until my back felt broken, then sprinted down the sidewalk like mad so I wouldn’t be late to my next job.
“ Huh?”
Suddenly everything went dark and I smashed my forehead on the pavers.
When I opened my eyes—
…I was a five-year-old kid.
“ Waaaah, Teacher! Jiyeon stole my chocolate!”
“ Nu-uh! It’s my chocolate!”
“ You two! Fighting again!”
“ ….”
In the mirror covered in cartoon stickers, a boy I’d never seen before blinked at me.
I scratched my head, looking around the orphanage with its peeling wallpaper, thinking, ‘What kind of dream is this?’ when—
“ Are you Lee Geonho?”
“ We finally found you! You can rest easy now!”
A handsome young couple appeared and hugged me with tear-streaked faces.
They each grabbed one of my hands and practically dragged me, and soon we arrived at a luxury apartment where you could look down on the Han River and Seoul Forest.
“ From today, you’re Baek Geonho!”
“ Welcome to our home, Geonho!”
Pop, pop!
As they fired confetti and shoved a three-tier cake under my nose, I forced my mouth to move.
“ …So I’m adopted?”
“ Yes! From today, you’re our son!”
That’s when I realized.
I, who had worked myself to death, had died after all.
And then—
Thank you, God, Jesus, Buddha, and Zeus!
Some merciful deity had granted me a second life!
Hallelujah!
Unlike my first life as a forsaken orphan buried under debt, Life 2.0 was very, very comfortable.
“ Geonho, is there anything you want to eat?”
“ Anything you want to have?”
“ Anything you want to do?”
My affluent adoptive parents were nothing if not devoted.
I stuffed my mouth with gold-leaf desserts I’d only ever seen on YouTube in my past life, they filled my over-20-pyeong bedroom with a whole limited-edition block-toy collection far too pricey for a five-year-old, and we even spent eight days and seven nights on a hotel-vacation in a five-star penthouse favored by famous actors!
I had only joked about it, but they actually did all that?
Even for adopted family, to treat a child with not a drop of shared blood this well—It made me wonder if they were after something, so I asked carefully.
“ Why are you doing all this for me? I’m not your biological child.”
And then the couple—suddenly… burst into tears?
“ O-ohhh! I’m sorry, Geonho! I haven’t given you enough trust to call me Mom yet!”
“ Yeonhee. He’s just not used to it yet. Getting a new family….”
“ No, honey! It’s because I’m lacking as a mother!”
“ No, I’m the one lacking as a father…!”
“ Uwaaaah!”
Then the two clung to each other and sobbed together.
What on earth is this situation.
After a while, Yeonhee Baek—my adoptive mother—cooled her reddened eyes with an ice pack my adoptive father brought, then faced me.
“ Whew, I suppose it’s finally time to tell you. Don’t be startled.”
What she told me, after a pause, was this:
“ You’re the son of an employee who worked for the Baek family.”
Choosing words a child could understand, Yeonhee explained slowly and carefully.
To summarize what she said…
Yeonhee Baek is a member of a leading domestic chaebol called Baekil Group. (Judging by being the second of the chairman’s two sons and two daughters, she seems to hold quite a high position.)
Back in the home where she lived as a child, there was a cleaner—a young live-in housekeeper named Lee Jiyeong.
Lee Jiyeong was like an older sister who doted on Yeonhee, and also her benefactor.
Lee Jiyeong had a child out of wedlock, and just keeping up with debt was so crushing that she ended up sending the child to an orphanage.
That child was me. “Lee Geonho.”
No wonder I’d taken my mother’s family name. So there are still matrilineal setups or live-in son-in-law arrangements these days. I couldn’t help being quietly impressed at how progressive Korean society was.
“ Not long after we got married, Jiyeong was hospitalized with pancreatic cancer… and she begged me to take care of you, Geonho… she begged, and then… she went up… to heaven… u-uuh!”
“ Yeonhee, don’t push yourself.”
“ No, these are words I have to tell him myself….”
After a few deep breaths, my adoptive mother gave me a tender, aching smile.
“ Between Jaeseo—my husband—and me, we hadn’t had a child for a long time… and then, like an angel, you appeared to us.”
What a twist of fate.
“ I’m an imperfect mother, but will you become our family?”
I answered:
“ Yes, Mother.”
“ G-Geonho!”
I’d lived a life where betrayal, fraud, and lies were the norm. I know.
There wasn’t a single lie in her tears.
And even if there had been, I wouldn’t have cared at all!
“ Sorry we’re such lacking parents!”
Lacking parents? What are you talking about.
You are already top-tier parents! In heart, and in wealth!
“ Oooohhh!”
The three of us clung together and cried tears of joy.
The couple celebrated the birth of a new family.
And I celebrated my new life!
…However.
That joy
didn’t even last a full year.
Two months later.
Outside the windows of our high-rise apartment, the wide-open view of Seoul was pure white.
December 24. White Christmas Eve.
“ Happy sixth birthday, Geonho!”
“ Here are your birthday presents from us!”
Apparently my birthday in this life fell the day before Christmas.
Presents from my parents… for my birthday…
In my past life, I had no memory of anything like that.
Even though I had received countless gifts already, emotion surged up new and raw. I barely got myself under control and tore into the wrapping.
“ ….”
A cutting-edge computer whose graphics card and components alone must easily top a thousand.
A high-end racing wheel rig that car-racing gamers go crazy for.
At yet another extravagant gift, the tears that had been pricking my eyes sucked right back in.
“ You were so into watching that circuit race broadcast! So I splurged big.”
“ Father….”
“ Oh? Is my devotion moving you?”
“ No, it’s just… I’m not tall enough, so I don’t think I can use this.”
“ W-what?!”
A racing wheel is a kind of large gaming rig that replicates a real driver’s seat, and of course the seat was far too big for a six-year-old to sit in.
They should have just bought me a kiddie toy car. Truly an absurd man.
So one gift went to my room, and the other went straight to storage.
While my adoptive father moped, my adoptive mother came over with hot cocoa and sat lightly at my side.
“ Geonho. The truth is… in exactly one week it’s my birthday.”
“ Oh—your birthday is right after mine?”
“ My, you even know to say ‘birthday.’ Just like my older sister said, you really are clever.”
Smiling like she could die from how cute I was, she gently pinched my cheek.
Then, unlike before, she spoke with a tense face.
“ There’s one present I really want from you then.”
“ Just say the word. I’ll get you anything!”
For the record, my bank balance was exactly twenty times higher than the peak I ever hit in my past life. I’d been saving my monthly allowance from my adoptive parents without touching it. Honestly, sometimes it gave me whiplash—but whatever, good things are good.
Let’s just enjoy it. Grow up with nothing lacking under chaebol parents, and be the perfect picture of a wonderful family of three!
That was the goal of Life 2.0.
“ Geonho. What I want isn’t a thing.”
Right then, with a warm smile, my adoptive mother asked for a present I never expected.
“ Will you give a name to the younger sibling who’ll be born next year?”
“ Pardon?”