My Alpha Era Began with Gongjindan Chapter 1

“Hyung….”

“Pureum, I’m really sorry. I’ve committed a sin punishable by death. I must have made a mistake taking Prescription Formulation in the College of Korean Medicine.”

“Hyung has to take responsibility for me….”

“How can I take responsibility for you? All I can do is prescribe some herbal medicine good for rut. Or should I give you acupuncture? I’ll do that for free, specially.”

I didn’t make Gongjindan (拱辰丹) [the tonic]—I made Gongjindan (攻進丹) [the attack pill].

You might be wondering what on earth I’m talking about. If this is a bolt from the blue, it’s at a Zeus-grade level. Even the pharmacologists who developed Viagra while trying to make a heart medication probably weren’t as flustered as I am.

They say new things are born from practitioners’ mistakes, but I ended up creating something truly absurd.

A guy who had lived as a beta until age nineteen took one of my Gongjindan pills and suddenly turned into an alpha. I must have definitely made a mistake taking Prescription Formulation in the College of Korean Medicine.

I had spent three whole days and nights agonizing over whether to close my Korean medicine clinic or not, barely sleeping, and that was when I made the Gongjindan (拱辰丹)….

Frankly, I don’t even properly remember what medicinal ingredients I put in or how much. The biggest problem is that I gave that Gongjindan as a gift to the exam-prepping student next door without a second thought.

Korean flexibility is such that even one wrong step is a violation of the Medical Service Act. The Korean Medicine Association will never forgive me.

I looked pityingly at the large-framed guy sniffling and telling me to take responsibility.

Watching that handsome face wastefully squeezing out tears made me feel bad. To think he took my Gongjindan wrong and turned into an alpha right in the middle of the CSAT exam hall…. Considering that secondary sex usually gets determined in middle school, this is completely nonsensical. Such a thing shouldn’t happen in this world.

In my head, I thought, ‘When you were happily taking it saying it was good Gongjindan, you never complained—now you come whining about responsibility? You took it because you wanted to. Take responsibility for your own life.’ But if this guy, who had become an alpha overnight, reported me to the authorities, I’d really be in trouble.

“Alright, I’ll take responsibility. Stop crying.”

In the end, I let out words I didn’t mean and rubbed the young guy’s face, streaked with chicken-dropping-like tears, with the back of my hand.

Thanks to the fact that he manifested not as a recessive but as a dominant alpha, even to me, a recessive omega, his pheromones came hitting hard.

My body reflexively tensed up. Because my limbs went stiff, my face naturally scrunched up.

Since the guy had lived as a beta until nineteen, there was no helping it, but he didn’t seem to have a proper awareness of having become an alpha yet. Otherwise, he wouldn’t be plastering his pheromones all over me with such a bright face at my empty words of taking responsibility.

When I instinctively stepped half a step back, the young alpha who hadn’t come to his senses grabbed my arm. Just as you’d expect from a physical education major, his reaction speed was beastly.

“Really?”

“Hey, you… rein in your pheromones a bit….”

“Hyung is taking responsibility for me, right?”

Having been crying pitifully until then, he stopped crying as if he’d achieved his goal and crumpled into me, hugging me tightly.

I was horrified and tried to pull away, but there was no way I could overpower a physical education major who had gotten into university as a special talent even after bombing the CSAT like that.

Held tight in his embrace, I felt like some kind of attachment doll.

This is definitely… something that has gone wrong, thoroughly wrong.

Ever since I was young, my dream was to become a Korean medicine doctor. I never even considered anything else. Because my grandfather was a Korean medicine doctor, my mom was one, and my dad was one too.

I was, if you will, royal Korean medicine blood. The tradition of Korean medicine lived and breathed in my veins.

No one ever forced me to become a Korean medicine doctor and carry on the family line, but having grown up seeing acupuncture and moxibustion tools around and having taken herbal medicine instead of Western meds whenever I was sick, I couldn’t possibly become a Western doctor.

But even for me, who wanted to become a legendary, legendary Korean medicine doctor, trials came.

If life were a boy’s comic, I would have chuckled and brushed it off saying, ‘Ha, is this a trial prepared for me, the protagonist?’ but reality, unlike comics, only tormented me.

Inborn traits cannot be changed no matter how hard you try. I heard that surgeries to become an alpha were rampant overseas, but in Korea, they were all illegal. Moreover, such illegal surgeries had a high fatality rate.

Still, surgeries to become an alpha at least exist, but surgeries for an omega to become a beta don’t even exist.

From here on, it’s absolutely maddening. If the world truly is God’s human life game, then God is clearly an unskilled player. The racial and world composition is this unfair.

For that reason, I faced a trial that was practically impossible to overcome. At around age fourteen, I happened to manifest as a recessive omega. Seriously, of all things!

My grandfather is a beta, my dad is a beta, and my mom is a beta. Though they didn’t say it separately, they said my grandmother, who passed away a long time ago, was also a beta. Only I turned out to be an omega. This is a result that defies genetics. I was furious. As expected, Western medicine is wrong!

But it turned out that way, way back, a distant ancestor was an omega. The omega gene, diluted to the point of near extinction, happened to suddenly bloom in my generation.

Every year I meticulously prepared ancestral rites, yet instead of paving my way forward, my ancestors laid landmines. I was dumbfounded. It wasn’t Western medicine that was wrong—it was me.

In this world, besides male and female, there existed a secondary sex that manifested.

Alpha, beta, and omega were those ‘secondary sexes,’ but in reality, 90% of humanity were betas, so alphas and omegas were, strictly speaking, minorities. They were like type AB in a world where types A and O are the majority.

The real problem was that unlike type AB, which has no major issues except when donating blood, alphas and omegas were treated ambiguously.

Unlike alphas, who were physically superior to average people and received enthusiastic welcome in the sports world, omegas were treated poorly in many ways.

Omegas, of course, were rarely as physically superior as alphas, and with the heat cycle, akin to an animal’s estrus, even if their primary sex was male, there was a possibility of pregnancy.

A high probability of pregnancy is a positive trait only in agrarian societies. In modern society, where the population has already exploded exponentially, a male omega was nothing more than an embarrassing existence—no more, no less.

Humans cannot choose individuals to give birth to like bears, nor do their sexes naturally change when the leader of a group dies, like clownfish. In that respect, male pregnancy was something inefficient for humanity to bear.

Moreover, dominant omegas attracted alphas like ants to a sugar cube.

No matter how much they regulated their pheromones, omegas went through something called a heat cycle once a month. During this period, they literally went into heat and even triggered the ruts of other alphas who were living normally.

The courtship method adopted by humanity for secondary sexes is pheromones, like the Lepidoptera moths…. I really cannot understand biology.

And the only way to calm this ‘cycle,’ this animalistic estrus state, is, damn romantically, through imprinting. During intercourse, the alpha bites the omega’s neck to bond.

Really, is this an animal or a human…. They adopted pheromones like the Lepidoptera moths, so why did it develop in this way…. Humanity is indeed wrong.

So, there were incidents where alpha sports stars, enjoying their peak popularity, had their lives ruined by dominant omegas who approached them, at most once or twice a year. Thanks to that, omegas were collectively vilified and cursed for ruining their sports star lives.

Imagine this. A great national soccer player, rivaling ‘Do You Know Kimchi?,’ suddenly retires early to start a family with an omega who appears out of nowhere.

The retirement announcement is made by the soccer player, but all the insults are eaten by the omega marrying him. Even if they don’t retire, if they don’t perform as well as before, it’s not the alpha player but the omega marrying him that becomes the netizens’ bullet sponge.

Plus, male omegas were exempt from military service. One of the most criticized issues in Korea! The tragedy of a divided nation! That very military exemption that even top-tier alpha idols can’t get!

At least there were truckloads of people on the internet raising a fuss, saying they should enlist recessive omegas. Given this situation, it was common to find betas who thought it was natural for omegas to be discriminated against or picked on. I lost count of how many times I heard, ‘If you’re so upset, go to the military.’

Betas can’t sense alpha or omega pheromones at all, so it’s really only an issue between alphas and omegas, but people singled out just omegas and accused them of promoting moral decay in society.

It’s truly unjust.

It takes two hands to clap to make a sound, yet alphas are objects of admiration and omegas are objects of criticism. Discriminators, given any chance, would pick someone out and discriminate.

So, it was inevitable that when I manifested as a recessive omega at age fourteen, I went through a tumultuous middle-school second-year syndrome. At that sensitive age, to become an omega, frequently criticized by society. I wouldn’t have been as shocked even if the Black Flame Dragon had really been sealed in my left hand.

But that didn’t mean I had any intention of giving up on my future aspirations.

Fortunately, I was a recessive omega, not a dominant one, and as long as I managed the monthly heat cycles well, I could live with little difference from a beta.

Moreover, I was on the taller side, and my sharp-looking features were far from the delicate softness typical of omegas, so most people, steeped in prejudice, perceived me as a beta. To me, that was a very fortunate thing.

So, posing as a beta, I graduated from high school with excellent grades and entered the College of Korean Medicine.

Two years of pre-med, four years of main course. Without ever repeating a year, I graduated straight through the six-year Korean medicine program and passed the Korean medicine licensing exam on my first try. I scored 304 out of a possible 340 on the national exam, so I can say I graduated with fairly good grades.

While my classmates became public health doctors or took jobs as deputy directors at local hospitals, I considered going to a university hospital to become a Korean medicine specialist, but with my grandfather’s help, I opened a Korean medicine clinic in the heart of Seoul.

Up to here, everything was good. The location of the store was great, and initially, quite a number of patients came in. Even if not as much as a Western doctor, a decent amount of income fell into my hands each month.

However, this joy of mine didn’t last long.

Other Korean medicine clinics in the area started pulling all sorts of tricks to ruin my newly opened clinic.

Just like lawyers and accountants with overflowing private offices, the number of Korean medicine doctors opening private clinics was not small. Rather, they were plentiful, more than enough.

It was exhausting enough competing with Western medicine, but it was an era where even Korean medicine clinics had to compete to survive. The damn era of infinite competition.

I shed bloody tears and tried hard to get along with other nearby clinics, but life wasn’t that easy.

In the end, because another Korean medicine clinic spread the word that I was an omega, my ‘Uri Korean Medicine Clinic’ turned into a deserted establishment within half a year.

Damn competitors, damn discriminators, damn era of infinite competition…. A triple strikeout, and I was out.

Closing the business now and getting a job as a deputy director at another local hospital was one option, but my pride wouldn’t allow it.

Above all, my grandfather had trusted me and helped me open the clinic, and I couldn’t give up just because things weren’t going well after only six months.

“Fuck. Just you wait. I’ll become the best Korean medicine doctor in this area, even if I have to make a deal with the devil.”

You dog-like peers in the same industry. We shouldn’t be competing among ourselves—we should be fighting Western doctors. I muttered fiercely and set up a dispensary in one corner of the clinic.

I will succeed, no matter what.

Looking back, I was quite a madman. Even I think I was a bit crazy, but since it’s spitting on my own face, I won’t say anything more.

Anyway, to cut to the conclusion, the rumor that when a human is driven by spite, even the devil gets flustered and helps them achieve their goal—it turned out to be true.