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# Chapter 3
"So, you're saying that Oracle's CEO, Yoo Taekyung, rejected our proposal?"
The air inside the conference room of a major guild headquarters in the heart of Gangnam turned icy cold.
Oracle Consulting's information power within South Korea's Awakener ecosystem was absolute.
With even a single piece of information from CEO Yoo Taekyung, who could see through the causality of unexplored dungeons and pinpoint the perfect strategy for conquering them, even a small- or medium-sized guild could grow into a major corporation overnight.
"Yes. Even after I offered to triple the amount, he cut me off without hesitation."
"That arrogant bastard. Does he intend to take everything for himself?"
The guild master glared out the window while irritably chewing on his cigarette.
Everyone feared Yoo Taekyung.
And everyone craved what he possessed.
People called him "a machine without blood or tears" and "a predator born without emotions."
But they did not know.
They had no idea how brutally Yoo Taekyung had been forced to crawl through the mud and be ground down in order to acquire the perfect, icy rationality he possessed now.
The winter of Taekyung's sixteenth year, when he was in his third year of middle school.
The glass of the magnificent greenhouse surrounding the Yoo family shattered into pieces.
It began with his father's debt guarantee.
His father, the hopeless romantic who had willingly abandoned his successful position as a police detective and entered the business world for his wife, had one fatal weakness.
He trusted people far too easily.
When an acquaintance he had trusted betrayed him, the company went bankrupt overnight, and tens of billions of won in debt descended upon the family like a tsunami.
The birth in a VVIP hospital ward.
The silk dresses made by famous designers.
The social gatherings beneath glittering chandeliers.
All those dreamlike luxuries disappeared like a mirage alongside the red auction stickers plastered over their possessions.
The family was thrown out of their mansion in Gangnam and forced into a rooftop room atop an old, mold-smelling multi-family house.
Where the greenhouse had collapsed, people's true nature began to reveal itself.
The person who changed the most was his mother.
Once the mask of the elegant society lady had fallen away, she transformed into a hysterical, irritable woman.
His mother opened a shabby snack bar in a corner of the marketplace to make a living.
She had once lived without lacking a single thing.
Now, with a knife in her hand and red pepper paste being stirred into tteokbokki, the anger that had built inside her subtly changed direction.
It turned toward the family.
And the person who took the full force of those shards was none other than Taekyung.
"Yoo Taekyung! What are you standing there like an idiot for?! Hurry up and wipe the tables!"
His mother's sharp shout rang through the cramped snack bar.
Whenever vacation began, Taekyung had to go grocery shopping with his mother from early morning.
Even in the middle of winter, when temperatures dropped below minus ten degrees Celsius, Taekyung endlessly washed mountains of dishes and wrung out rags to wipe the tables after customers had finished eating.
Meanwhile, Taejin sat in a corner of the restaurant, warming himself by the heater with earphones plugged in.
His mother's scolding never reached him.
To his mother, Taejin was the only remaining source of pride and the perfect trophy that would compensate for their poverty.
The only place where she could find comfort for the ruined family and her own miserable circumstances was the report card showing Taejin ranked first in the entire school.
The poorer they became, the more pathologically obsessed his mother grew with Taejin's studies and appearance.
"Our Taejin shouldn't stay here and smell this place. Hurry and go to your academy. Mom already paid for the special lecture, so sit somewhere with good air conditioning and study."
His mother took off her stained apron and wiped her hands before handing Taejin several ten-thousand-won bills.
"Don't feel intimidated around your friends. Buy something delicious to eat after your academy class, okay?"
"Yeah! I'll be back, Mom!"
Taejin hurried out of the restaurant, sniffing at his nose as though worried the smell of food might cling to the clean long padded jacket he was wearing.
Taekyung, rubbing his hands together beneath the cold water in front of the sink, quietly watched his younger brother's retreating back.
He remembered the days when, even after their father brought home two toys, he had inevitably been forced to surrender the better one to his younger brother.
Back then, at least, there had been an apologetic look in his father's eyes.
But his father, having lost everything and become powerless, had long since turned into a bystander who simply clung to bottles of soju.
Why am I the only one who has to work?
We're brothers.
"What are you staring at?"
His mother's cold voice snapped him out of his thoughts.
"You don't have the brains for studying anyway. Taejin is the pillar and hope of this family. Since you're the older brother, help out here while your brother studies. If you think it's unfair, then rank first in the entire school yourself."
Her careless words stabbed repeatedly into Taekyung's chest like rusty nails.
In truth, Taekyung's grades were not lower than Taejin's because he was less intelligent.
Taekyung was equally gifted at digging into the essence of written material and concepts.
If he actually put his mind to it, ranking first in the entire school would have been easy.
But without even realizing it, Taekyung had been watching his mother's mood and deliberately stepping away from the correct answers.
The curse of sacrifice that had begun when he was six, when he had been forced to give up what belonged to him in order to receive praise, had even affected his grades.
An unconscious fear suppressed him.
If he took away Taejin's position as first in the school, his mother would become sad, and conflict would arise within the family.
On top of that, his mother never bought Taekyung his own study guides or dictionaries.
He could only study during the time left over after his younger brother finished studying.
When they had so little money that buying two copies of the same book was considered a waste, Taekyung became even more helpless in the face of reality.
And so, throughout the entire vacation, Taekyung devoted his time and labor to the snack bar from dawn until night.
One evening, Taekyung stepped outside the restaurant to throw away a garbage bag.
At the far end of the alley, he saw a familiar group approaching.
"Hey, Yoo Taejin. Isn't that your brother?"
It was Taejin and his friends, who had just finished a special lecture at an expensive cram school.
Taejin, wearing a clean school uniform and a warm padded jacket, was laughing with a chicken skewer in his mouth when he suddenly froze.
His shabby older brother stood there wearing a stained apron and rubber gloves, holding a foul-smelling garbage bag.
For Taejin, a first-place student who lived and died by other people's opinions, Taekyung's existence was a blemish.
A source of shame.
"Uh... Hey, no. I think you have the wrong person. Let's go."
Taejin hurriedly pushed his friends from behind and abruptly turned his head away.
His younger brother's back grew smaller as he fled as though he had seen something he was never supposed to see.
Taekyung simply stood there, holding the garbage bag.
He wasn't angry.
He wasn't sad.
His chest simply felt cold and hollow, as though something deep beneath his solar plexus had been emptied out.
When he returned home that night, another event was waiting to pour ice water over his already frozen heart.
"Taekyung, hurry up and wash yourself and come over here."
The rooftop room was cold and dreary.
His older sister, Yoo Jooyeon, five years older than him, pinched her nose and spoke irritably.
Jooyeon was the only person in the family who could overpower Taejin.
Beautiful and having never once surrendered her position as the top student in her school, she had grown up as the family's first great source of pride, receiving their father's blind affection in abundance.
Her only complex was her below-average height.
But her arrogant and selfish personality was a perfect copy of their mother's.
"Big sister, Brother got the smell from taking out the trash on my padded jacket. Ugh, this is so annoying!"
"Oh, seriously. Do you have to stink up the place while your sister is studying? Hurry up and wash!"
Even after the family went bankrupt, Jooyeon had completely avoided housework under the pretext of focusing on her studies and becoming independent.
To her, poverty was a muddy pit she needed to escape as quickly as possible.
And Taekyung was nothing more than a useful disposable tool who cleaned that mud away for her.
"You're a good little brother, aren't you? You don't even care much about studying. If Taejin and I succeed, our family will rise again, so you just need to put up with it. We're family, after all."
His sister's casual contempt.
His younger brother's selfish irritation.
And even his powerless father, drinking soju in the corner of the room while staring blankly at the wall.
There was no place for Taekyung anywhere.
Taekyung silently gathered his clothes and entered the cramped, freezing bathroom.
He turned on the cold tap and vigorously scrubbed away the grime of the day clinging to the backs of his hands.
His hands grew numb from the frigid water.
But there was an even more horrifying truth circling inside his mind.
Family?
Taekyung's wet eyes reflected in the mirror suddenly became unnaturally cold.
Then tears began to stream down young Taekyung's face.
No.
I'm not family.
I'm nothing more than a worn-out scrap of cloth, existing solely to polish the trophies of that beautiful Yoo family.
It was the moment when the sensitive emotional nature characteristic of an INFJ began transforming into a cold, merciless rationality.
Deep within Taekyung, the first signs of a doorslam were beginning to form a massive crack.
The doorslam that would make him abandon all expectations of people and shut the door forever.
It was the eve of a cold and violent storm.
The storm that would herald his true awakening.
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