Deciding to take the prince’s side in the study might have been the best decision I’d made since coming to this world.
And it was a good thing I’d done it before the prince learned my weakness.
This abnormal constitution of mine looked like exactly the kind of thing that got you dragged into conspiracies. Especially a constitution that could see even hidden magic without missing a thing.
You could argue that now that I knew I had ability, all that was left was to eat well and live well—but if I acted cocky without any backing, I’d end up on the execution platform immediately. If the king was the kind of man who would send a spy off with even a national treasure just because the prince had powerful pheromones, then yes, that was more than plausible.
It didn’t seem like my employer had actually been quietly shut away doing nothing, but what mattered was that at least, on the surface, that was how it looked. It meant the king was suspicious even without any real pretext.
“I’ll have to alter the butler’s memories. There’s no need for him to remember that you’re insensitive to pheromones.”
When the prince gave permission, I bowed my head to him from the bottom of my heart.
“We can make him remember that you were able to approach my room during rut because you’re a fearless little wildling. It’s not wrong, either.”
At that, I had no choice but to jerk my lowered head up. The eyes looking down at me were like, Are you unhappy? I quickly lowered my head again, though.
“Stop acting like some clumsy attendant and lift your head.”
“The reason I look ill-mannered is because you want me to, my lord Duke. Isn’t it?”
The prince didn’t answer. It was as good as admitting it. It felt like I’d returned to ordinary life again, out of a bleak world where conspiracies steamed and smoldered.
Before I knew it, I let out a small laugh. The prince clicked his tongue at me again, but in the end, even the line of his mouth turned into a smile.
“Then focus on mana again. With your talent, it makes no sense that you can’t even light a fire.”
Still smiling, he turned into a tiger of a teacher.
I had to spit out orange and red flames until my mana was completely wrung dry.
“You’re being too greedy. Stop trying to raise the temperature and stabilize it.”
When I tried to keep the amount of oxygen I was feeding in from overflowing, like he said, the flame above my palm just fizzled out.
I couldn’t get a feel for exactly how much mana I was supposed to use.
In the end, I was reduced to a wreck and sprawled out on the floor. Even I knew it was irreverent, sticking to the ground like dripped candle wax right in front of my employer while he sat there with eyes wide open, but it was out of my hands. I truly didn’t even have the strength to sit.
“You’ve only been doing mana breathing for a little over two months now, right?”
“Yes…”
I answered in a voice that sounded like a candle flame about to go out. I couldn’t even tense my stomach, so I couldn’t speak loudly—and if I forced myself to answer in a strong voice, it was obvious he’d say, So you still have energy left to talk? and squeeze me again.
“Your mana runs out after you form fire about ten times.”
For a second, irritation flared and I tried to lift my head, but then I stuck back to the floor. The tiger teacher really had planned to squeeze my mana all the way down to the bottom.
“About how much talent do I have for magic?”
I still needed to satisfy my curiosity. Making the stupid mistake of using a genius as my benchmark because I didn’t know the average—once was plenty.
“Looks like you can do one more.”
Damn it.
“No. I can’t. Seriously.”
“Even if there’s a man in front of you with a sword, and the only way you can fight back is magic, you’d still say you can’t?”
I closed my eyes as I was. I forced up the tiny speck of mana that felt like it was stuck to the very bottom of a bowl. Unfortunately, his point wasn’t wrong. I had to know my limits exactly.
But did it really have to be fire on my palm? Would a villain politely wait while I held my hand out and swung it honestly at them?
I gathered mana below my solar plexus. It wasn’t just mana that got squeezed down to the bottom. My willpower hit its limit, too. In my fogged-over head, I saw the image of a giant robot spewing fire from its chest.
I’d seen it because of my older brother, who was a social butterfly humanities kid and an old cartoon freak. He loved cartoons that had come out before he’d even been born.
Thinking of that giant robot flamboyantly burning its enemies, I recited the ignition word.
The flame that came from my chest didn’t burn an enemy to ash in an instant. It didn’t even burn firewood. It only flashed a fragile spark and then fizzled out.
My consciousness went out, too.
I was standing in a dark room. I’d definitely passed out trying to manifest magic, so where was this? It was a cramped space that couldn’t even compare to the prince’s estate and that lavish banquet hall.
A display cabinet that filled the wall was crammed with blue cat robots of all different sizes and materials. Even on the TV—the only thing lighting the dark room—I could see a blue cat robot, singing a bright, hopeful song that didn’t match my brother’s gloomy atmosphere at all.
I see. This was a dream. I realized it.
The one who liked blue cat robots was my older brother.
He was already gone from the world.
I sat down beside him. I looked at the side of his face as it changed color with the flicker of the TV light. But he didn’t know I was beside him. Right. This was a dream only I was having.
It was a dream I’d had many times already. It was also something that had really happened.
I always regretted that day. Even in a dream, I tried to stop the me from that day, but I had never succeeded even once.
“What are you doing? Watching that again?”
The door suddenly opened and an insolent voice came in. A black-haired me—young, but in a way that made him more adult than the body I had now—Han Jae from that day looked down at my brother like he was pathetic.
That day, my brother was deeply depressed. If he’d been the kind of social butterfly who couldn’t stand being bored, he would’ve met up with friends he ran into and gone to the Han River to eat chicken and drink beer to blow off steam. Instead, like a little kid, he was buried under a blanket watching a blue cat robot friend pull all sorts of things out of its belly.
That was my brother’s habit whenever there was something he wanted but couldn’t bring himself to say so.
Our patriarchal father hated it when my brother even watched cartoons, so there was no way he could say he wanted to buy a toy robot. Not that he was even asking for money—he’d saved up his allowance. But if he got caught playing with a toy robot, he’d be banned from the cartoons he was only barely allowed to watch as long as he stayed number one in the entire school.
After he got accepted into university, he started filling his room with all kinds of merchandise, but even then, that habit didn’t go away. Not when he got his master’s degree, and not even after he entered a doctoral program.
I knew it. I knew my brother wanted to quit school. He’d once let it slip, half-jokingly, that he hadn’t even wanted to go to graduate school in the first place—the slave-training camp.
But to our father, who believed the greatest resentment in life was being uneducated, it was an absolutely unacceptable thought.
He was the kind of father who had barely graduated elementary school, learned a trade while eating humble pie and metal dust, and opened a respectable jewelry shop in Jongno—yet he was prouder of my brother attending the best university in the country than he was of his own shop.
He didn’t like that I’d been hanging around the jewelry shop since I was little, either. He scolded me, asking why I never studied and only played around. But I could never be as good at studying as my brother. Whenever I scribbled down accessory designs and showed them off, he would shout first, asking why I was doing something so pointless.
Unlike my brother, I didn’t submit to our father. I signed up for art academy instead of math cram school, and whenever my father tore up my design sketches, I drew even harder on purpose. When he broke my right arm with a golf club, I held my colored pencils with my left.
In the end, my father said he’d pass the jewelry shop down to me—probably because he was worried his immature late-born child might actually go hungry.
My brother wanted that jewelry shop. The truth was, the reason he’d gone into business administration was because he wanted to run our father’s jewelry shop properly. It was a dream he buried without ever being able to bring himself to speak it out loud to our father.
If my brother had said he wanted to do an IT startup, our father would’ve sold the jewelry shop he’d promised to leave to me just to support him. Our father’s dream and my brother’s dream were that mismatched.
My brother didn’t have the talent to be a craftsman like me. But he had an incredible knack for picking designs people would love. Back then, I couldn’t understand why he only chose obvious designs.
That’s what it was like then. Now I know.
Now I know what an outstanding merchandiser he was.
Looking at my brother’s back under the blanket that day, I said,
“You take it. The jewelry shop.”
Unlike when I was a kid, once I became an adult, I didn’t like my father’s jewelry shop. It wasn’t refined or elegant.
Ah. If I had the blanket my brother was under back then, I could shake the dust out of it so hard it would put a dryer to shame.
Back then, I wanted to become a world-class designer and craftsman. I didn’t want to copy luxury designs, or make the trendy designs you could find in any jewelry store. I wanted to be the one making luxury.
I’d planned to keep my dream secret for a few more years—at least for as long as my father was paying for my study abroad. But watching my brother dry out day after day, I couldn’t make him wait that long. I generously yielded what I had to him.
“What are you talking about? Then what are you going to do?”
Hearing my arrogant words, my brother worried about me.
“Don’t worry about me for no reason. Worry about yourself. Even if you quit school, Father won’t make you work at the jewelry shop right away.”
“Jay.”
That day, there had definitely been a sense of superiority in what I felt as I looked down at him. I had never once been acknowledged by our father the way my brother had. But without my concession, my brother was someone who couldn’t do what he truly wanted.
Even so, it was also true that I genuinely pitied him.
“If you’re really that worried about me, then help with the study abroad costs. Looks like it’s a lost cause trying to get it from Father.”
I knew how to make my father give up on me.
The next day, I participated in the queer parade being held in Jongno. Wearing nothing but a pair of tiny hot pants that clung to my body.
When the parade passed through the area where all the jewelry shops were gathered, I met eyes with my father, who stood there with his arms crossed and a displeased expression.
I was a homosexual—something my father despised.