It had been thirty years since Cheon Sejoo was abandoned in front of Angel Orphanage.
As the bell announcing the start of the New Year rang out and many people smiled, wishing for a happy beginning, Sister Maria, the head nun of Angel Orphanage, was praying with the other nuns when she heard a loud cry coming from outside the door.
She hurriedly threw on her clothes and went out, only to find a newborn baby lying alone on the cold ground. The child who arrived on New Year’s Day was wrapped in a thick blanket, his face red as he cried at the top of his lungs, as if he were trying to shake the whole world. It was a cry that summoned Maria toward him—begging for someone to recognize his existence, begging to be saved.
Maria urgently took the baby into her arms and kissed his forehead, thanking God for granting her yet another chance to save a life. And to the baby who was announcing his presence to the world with a noise loud enough to deafen, she gave the name Sejoo—“master of the world”—as if to say, then become the ruler of it.
That was how Cheon Sejoo was born.
From a young age, he was naturally gifted. He started walking before he was even ten months old, and before he turned two, he was speaking in fluent, flowing sentences. Because he was more intelligent than anyone else, Sejoo accepted his circumstances early. As a result, he was the first among the children at the orphanage to grow up. Even in kindergarten, he never fought with his classmates, and he understood and acted with consideration toward Sister Maria and the other nuns. He was a child who took meticulous care of himself from early on.
The first time such a child as Cheon Sejoo ever got into a fight was the year he turned eight.
It was a summer so rainy you couldn’t see ahead of you. Eight years after abandoning Sejoo, the same woman left another baby in front of the orphanage and fled. By coincidence, the one who discovered the child was none other than the boy she had abandoned the first time.
Sejoo had been on an errand for Sister Maria, wearing a raincoat on his way back from the store. At the orphanage gate, he found a small bundle of blanket left beside an umbrella. When he got closer, he saw a baby with a pale face sleeping soundly with eyes closed. Sejoo thought the baby was very cute, and pulled out the postcard tucked into the swaddling cloth.
Raindrops poured down endlessly, slipping inside the umbrella that covered the child. As the rhythmic patter of rain echoed in his ears, Sejoo read aloud the note the baby's mother had left.
"This is Sejoo’s younger sibling. Please raise them as family. …I’m sorry."
On that day, with the rain falling white and thick, Cheon Sejoo gained a sibling.
The woman already knew that the child she had previously abandoned had been named Sejoo. Perhaps their mother had once been one of the women who came to volunteer at the orphanage, avoiding Maria’s eyes. But Maria didn’t bother trying to find her. She didn’t pity her by assuming her reasons for being unable to raise her child. She simply gave thanks that Sejoo would no longer be utterly alone in the world, and placed a sibling in his arms.
He wasn’t a mother or a father—but he now had family. Sejoo was genuinely overjoyed by that and swore to God that he would protect his younger sibling. From that day on, the child became the pillar supporting Cheon Sejoo’s life.
The baby, whose umbilical cord hadn’t even fallen off yet, was completely different from Sejoo, who had cried so loudly. This child didn’t cry much—not even when hungry, or soaked in a wet diaper. If you looked away for a moment, thinking they were fine, you’d come back to find formula spit up all over their clothes, yet they remained silent. So the nuns had no choice but to pay even more attention to that baby. Maria named the child Hyein, meaning “wise and kind.” Hyein was a child born with the wisdom to survive in the world.
At Angel Orphanage, there were more children like Cheon Sejoo and Cheon Hyein—left by their parents—than those who had actually lost theirs. The children there waited every day for parents who might return to take them home. In that environment, Sejoo, who suddenly gained a sibling, became the target of envy.
The other children teased him, saying that now that his mother had even left him a sibling, she would never come back for him. But at the same time, they envied him—envied that his mother knew her child was there. Sometimes their own parents would cut off all contact as if they had forgotten the orphanage even existed.
At the time, Sejoo was a head taller than the other kids, so instead of picking a fight with him directly, the more mischievous ones chose to bully Hyein, who couldn’t even speak. They pulled away the blanket covering the child, snatched the bottle from their hands, and threw it aside.
Sejoo didn’t stand by and watch. For the first time in eight years, he had something to protect. One day, he grabbed a rock lying around the back yard of the orphanage and slammed it into the head of the kid who had been tormenting his sibling.
Maria was deeply shocked by his outburst of violence, but when she realized it had been for the sake of protecting Hyein, her worry eased. Rather than scolding him, she taught him how he ought to protect his sibling. She told him that violence was a temporary measure, and that to protect someone, he had to become someone greater, someone better. From then on, Sejoo yearned for the day he could become an adult capable of protecting Hyein.
Until Sejoo became a middle schooler and Hyein turned six, their mother never came to the orphanage. As the lives of more stable parents improved, they came back to reclaim their children, and friends disappeared from the orphanage one by one. But the two siblings remained until the end.
One day, Sejoo realized—suddenly—that their mother would never come back for them. And he came to understand that he had to take on the role of Hyein’s parent. From that moment on, Sejoo began to study.
Though he’d been born intelligent, keeping up with classmates who had the backing of parental support wasn’t easy. But Sejoo stayed up all night memorizing entire textbooks and pored over every punctuation mark in the reference books his teachers gave him.
He set his sights on entering medical school—not because he had some grand mission to save people, but simply because Hyein believed that being a doctor was the best job in the world. It was because of Hyein that he dreamed that dream.
To his natural intelligence, Sejoo added relentless effort. By the time he was nineteen, he was accepted as the top student into the medical school of Hanguk University—the one with the highest entrance scores in the country. Because his birth had been registered on January 1st, he had enrolled a year earlier than most. Thus, he was able to remain at the orphanage until the end of his freshman year.
But once he turned twenty, he had to leave. With the 5 million won settlement support he received, plus 10 million won from an anonymous sponsor, and the money he’d earned over a year of tutoring whenever he could, Sejoo rented an apartment in the city. And then he brought Hyein out of the orphanage. Enjoying the story? Read on at NovelPing.
Hanguk University was in Seoul, while the orphanage was in Suwon. Since he could have stayed in a dorm, there was no real need to get his own place—but Sejoo wanted to give Hyein a true home. He wanted to give his younger sibling a space of their own—one not shared with anyone—especially during that sensitive stage of adolescence.
And so, Sejoo lived in the dorms while attending school and returned home on weekends to care for Hyein. In the meantime, Hyein, now a middle schooler, remained in the apartment he had rented. It had been Sejoo’s desire to create a home just for their family. But that desire ended up leaving Hyein alone in an empty house. It made her an isolated person. But at the time, Sejoo didn’t realize it.
Becoming a doctor required studying even during hours others spent sleeping. Sejoo was no exception. And since scholarships and sponsorships weren’t enough to cover everything, he also tutored to scrape together spending money and living expenses for Hyein.
And so, six years passed. After graduating from medical school and passing the national exam to obtain his license, Cheon Sejoo became an intern at Hanguk University Hospital. As an intern, he barely had any personal time. Though he was physically closer to Hyein than he’d been while living in the dorms, he only managed to see her maybe two or three times a month. Because of that, Sejoo failed to notice the changes happening to her.
Whenever Cheon Sejoo wasn’t around, Hyein had to eat her meals under the wary gazes of the other kids from the orphanage. With that upbringing layered on top of her inborn temperament, she grew into someone who didn’t easily reveal her inner feelings—even to her older brother, Cheon Sejoo. Hyein never told Sejoo that she was being bullied at school.
Because she didn’t want to burden her brother who had become a doctor. Because she didn’t want to make him worry. Because she didn’t want to get in his way. Because she didn’t want to become a weight dragging down his future. That’s why Cheon Sejoo only learned that Hyein had been bullied—after holding her funeral.
Sejoo had decided to become a doctor solely because of Hyein. Because she had once asked him to become a doctor and help people like them—the poor. But over the course of six years of study, from pre-med to med school, Sejoo developed goals of his own.
Even then, it wasn’t out of some noble altruism to save lives. He just started wanting to give Hyein nice things, seeing professors driving expensive cars and wearing fine clothes. A house so big her eyes would go wide, a home that didn’t let in a draft, meals eaten for their taste rather than to stave off hunger, clothes that were both well-designed and functional—and expensive.
And now, here it all was. Everything he had ever wanted to give Hyein, all gathered in one place. But the person receiving it wasn’t Cheon Hyein. It was someone else. And worse, that person had a sour look on his face, as if he couldn’t be less impressed.
“……”
Cheon Sejoo sat with his chin resting on one hand at the table, staring holes into the boy across from him, who was shoveling food into his mouth while glancing up at him every few seconds. If you’re going to eat that much, you might as well look like you’re enjoying it. But no—he looked like he was chewing through a punishment, as if he wanted the whole world to know this wasn’t delicious. That contrast made it all the more ridiculous.
After the snide joke Sejoo had made in the elevator, Kwon Sejin had dashed off and holed up in the room until Sejoo came back with a packed course meal. Even after he knocked, the kid didn’t come out, so Sejoo peeked in and found him sound asleep on the bed. That was thirty minutes ago, when he woke him up and told him to eat something.
When Sejin sat down at the table and saw the food Sejoo had laid out, he had a face like, “What kind of gangster gets takeout course meals? You’ve got to be kidding.” But then, without waiting for Sejoo to even pick up his chopsticks, he devoured everything by himself. Sejoo had already noticed the boy’s appetite when he polished off two whole chickens earlier—but for someone with such a small frame, he ate a lot.
“Stop staring. Are you trying to make me choke?”
Finally losing his patience, Sejin glared at him and snapped. His height was short, his hands were small, his lips were small—and his manners were nonexistent, too. Not even a shred of the usual polite suffixes. Cheon Sejoo ignored his reaction, kept drinking his beer, and asked:
“Why do you use honorifics with the manager at Ihwagak but speak to me informally?”
Kwon Sejin and the manager at Ihwagak, Han Jiwon, had only met once—last Wednesday. Sejin had been fed, housed, and helped by Sejoo, but he’d gone out of his way to be polite to Han Jiwon while throwing barbs at Sejoo every chance he got. It wasn’t that Sejoo was angry or offended. He was just genuinely curious what kind of answer Sejin would give.
“You’re supposed to speak formally to people you respect.”
“Who said that? Your kindergarten teacher?”
With a scoffing laugh, Sejoo threw it back at him. Sejin shot him a look and continued.
“She’s someone who works in the service industry. People who do that kind of work deserve respect. They bow their backs and serve people like you.”
He bit his lip halfway through, probably realizing too late how that might come across—but Sejoo didn’t mind. It was an oddly specific standard. Nodding, he emptied the rest of his half-full beer can and poured himself a cup of sake. Then he grabbed the last slice of grilled tilefish that Sejin had been reaching for and popped it into his mouth. He drained the sake in a single gulp and smiled as he asked:
“Don’t you think I deserve some respect, too? I’m doing all this for a little brat like you.”
Sejin scoffed.
“Like hell. I wouldn’t waste a single syllable of politeness on you. You dragged me here against my will—how could I respect someone like that?” This chapter was taken from novelping.com without permission.
Sejoo burst out laughing at the sullen look on his face. Judging by Sejin’s consistent attitude, Sejoo must rank as some irredeemable piece of human trash in the kid’s mind. And yet, here he was—sitting quietly in front of him, eating everything he was told to eat. Sejoo could imagine how much that must be wounding Sejin’s pride.
To Sejin, Cheon Sejoo probably looked like just another loan shark from Shinsa Capital who dragged his mother away. There was no way Sejin would believe she’d gone willingly—more likely, he thought she’d been taken by force. No wonder the kid was wary and hostile. It made sense.
And from what Sejoo had heard, it wasn’t even Sejin’s mother who signed the loan paperwork. So from his point of view, these people had pinned a false debt on a perfectly normal woman and taken her away. The fact that he hadn’t pulled a knife and tried to kill Sejoo on the spot made him practically saintly.
And yet, all Sejin had done so far was speak informally and shoot dirty looks—all to protect his mother. To Sejoo’s eyes, it only made him seem more pitiful. More endearing.
As Sejoo continued to stare at him, Sejin grew increasingly irritated and finally set his chopsticks down. Most of the dishes were already empty, so it wasn’t like he could pretend he’d lost his appetite—but regardless, he clearly didn’t want to eat anymore.
He grabbed his water glass, took a long gulp, and said:
“I told you I didn’t want to come. You dragged me here against my will. So don’t expect me to do anything.”
It seemed Kwon Sejin still wanted to live by his own rules. It was practically a threat, but Sejoo just shrugged and replied:
“Fine, do whatever you want.”
That casual response made Sejin narrow his eyes again. Then, with a subtle edge in his voice, he revealed what he really meant.
“I’m not cleaning. I’m not cooking either. Kick me out if you don’t like it.”
“I’m not telling you to do anything. Do whatever you feel like.”
“I—I’m not even going to lift a finger!”
“Didn’t I just say, do what you want?”
“……”
It was too obvious what he was trying to do. Leaving Sejin to glare at him in frustration, Sejoo picked up the phone beside him. At the very least, if they were going to live in the same place, they needed each other’s contact information.
But just as he was about to hand it over so Sejin could input his number, he remembered what Sejin had said back at Ihwagak. Something about his phone being disconnected because he hadn’t paid the bill.
Sejoo jerked his chin toward him.
“Where’s your phone? Let me see it.”
Sejin, who’d been quietly eyeing the leftover meat pancakes on the table, flinched and looked up. With his usual sullen expression, he dug into the pocket of his worn hoodie and pulled out his phone.
“……”
But what he placed on the table barely qualified as a phone. It looked more like an artifact or a piece of junk.
Sejoo, face twisted in disbelief, pressed a finger against the screen—taped over with multiple layers of clear film. The glass was cracked, and even the display flickered with static lines. How was this even usable? When Sejoo was in school back at the orphanage, even he had had something better than this.
He stared at the wallpaper for a moment—it was a photo of Sejin and his mother, cheek to cheek—and then silently handed it back.