My Alpha Era Began with Gongjindan Chapter 25

Hyung cares about me, doesn’t care about me, cares about me, doesn’t care about me, cares about me…

“Doesn’t care about me…”

As he plucked the last petal, Jung Pureum tossed the poor rose, now nothing but a stem, onto the floor. Jung Saebom, who had been watching this pathetic spectacle, clicked her tongue.

“You’ve really lost your mind.”

“I’m perfectly normal.”

“What are you talking about? You’ve always been abnormal.”

A warm sibling exchange took place. When Jung Pureum raised his middle finger at Jung Saebom, she raised both of hers in return.

“Stop dragging it out and just confess already.”

“If I confess now, there’s a 97% chance I’ll get rejected.”

“What about the remaining 3%?”

“That’s the possibility the entire universe has created for me.”

“I won’t curse at you just now because that was pitiful.”

“Thanks.”

Stop being so maudlin and keep reading your flower fortune, Jung Saebom said, tossing a flower to Jung Pureum. Since the dance performance she’d recently finished, the bouquets she’d received were being dismantled piece by piece in Pureum’s hands.

“What exactly do you like about Moon Yeonghwa?”

“Everything… he’s cute, isn’t he?”

“…”

“The more time passes, the more I like him. This is probably a side effect of the Gongjin-dan, don’t you think?”

“No. I think your eyesight has just gotten worse.”

Clicking her tongue, Jung Saebom got up and turned on the television. At least this way that lunatic would talk less nonsense.

Whether the variety show rerun had ended or not, only commercials were playing on the TV. After flipping through a few channels, Saebom gave up on finding anything worth watching and tossed the remote aside.

After sacrificing a few more roses for flower fortune-telling and getting a result that Moon Yeonghwa did care about him, Jung Pureum finally brushed himself off and stood up.

“I should go out to the hallway now.”

“At this hour?”

“If I’m lucky, I might run into hyung as he’s leaving work.”

“Ugh… you crazy bastard.”

Jung Saebom had watched her younger brother act like a lunatic over the neighbor guy for a full eight years. Not just her—the whole family had long since grown accustomed to Jung Pureum’s desperate unrequited love.

As she remembered, Jung Pureum hadn’t been this extreme from the start. Moon Yeonghwa during his college days was quite the shut-in. She heard the neighbor’s kitchen exploding about once a week, so it wasn’t easy to have a good first impression.

Besides, Moon Yeonghwa was only good at studying and bad at everything else. His lack of life skills went without saying, but his cluelessness was the worst of all.

So at first, she thought Moon Yeonghwa was playing with her brother. She wondered why he wouldn’t accept the kid who liked him and kept chasing after him, just because he was a beta.

But upon closer observation, Moon Yeonghwa genuinely didn’t know. He simply thought Jung Pureum was following him around like a real brother. He seemed like the type of person who never considered that someone else might see him as a romantic interest.

Jung Saebom looked at her younger brother’s broad back. Though he was more like a servant than a gentleman, he wasn’t the type to have to beg for scraps anywhere. She worried about how he’d ended up liking someone like Moon Yeonghwa and making such a fuss over him.

“Do I look okay right now?”

Pureum, who had been adjusting his clothes in front of the mirror, asked Saebom.

“You’re ugly.”

“Yeah, you too.”

With that final warm sibling exchange, the sound of the front door closing was heard. Leaning against the living room sofa’s backrest, Saebom let out a sigh.

Everyone except her seemed to already regard Moon Yeonghwa as their future in-law. Especially after Jung Pureum became an alpha.

But Saebom still found Moon Yeonghwa uneasy. Even though she knew he wasn’t a bad person and might even harbor unconscious feelings for her brother, it was still a problem that his cluelessness made people suffer.

“Huh?”

Picking up the remote she’d tossed aside with her foot, she flipped through TV channels and stopped.

[Fast-acting diet, right now, <Liri-tang!>]

A familiar ad copy caught her eye. Liri-tang? It was a diet herbal medicine that a classmate had recently recommended to her as well.

She’d won a trial event and started taking it, saying the effects were really good. Saebom recalled her classmate’s face, gaunt to the point where her cheekbones stuck out.

“Well, she’ll figure it out.”

Dieting that relied on medicine rarely yielded good results, but it wasn’t something Saebom needed to concern herself with. After all, it was someone else’s business.

∞ ∞ ∞

Unfortunately, the job’s tears tea bags remained in our clinic’s break room. Because ordering break room refreshments was entirely Kim Miyoung’s responsibility.

As the director, I had little authority. I was just a herb-combining machine, a face for acupuncture. The truly important tasks—stocking the break room and prescribing Gongjin-dan—were handled by Kim Miyoung and Nam Jungyoon.

Besides, I didn’t have the leisure to idly check the break room. In the brief time I’d been away, Baek Wonhee had managed to strike again.

[Fast-acting diet, right now, <Liri-tang!>]

[Safe dieting with a professional oriental medicine doctor’s healthy herbal combinations!]

[Confident summer body, consult now!]

All the ad copy was familiar. I felt like I’d seen these same phrases in other clinic’s diet herbal medicine ads too. They just rearranged the words.

On the YouTube channel Kim Miyoung played, a beauty YouTuber was promoting <Liri-tang>. The “Includes paid promotion” label at the top suggested she was an influencer hired with money.

But even though the video disclosed it was an ad, the view count was enormous. Because that YouTuber had actually succeeded in losing 15 kilograms. Losing 15 kilograms in a week? That’s definitely impressive.

Moreover, the YouTuber in the video ate very well. Eating everything she wanted while losing weight steadily. What kind of nonsensical medicine was this?

I narrowed my eyes suspiciously.

“Do you think this kind of medicine makes any sense?”

“It doesn’t.”

“No, if it were losing 15 kilograms over six months, I’d understand. But a week? This is even less realistic than Gongjin-dan that turns you into an alpha.”

“Why are you like this, Director? Our Gongjin-dan is real.”

“That’s true.”

If there’s herbal medicine that can turn someone into an alpha, there could be herbal medicine that makes you lose that much weight in a week.

For a moment, I almost doubted the greatness of herbal medicine. Possibilities are infinite. How would I know? Maybe Baek Wonhee really did discover a divine combination that only melts away body fat.

The problem was that it was doing too well. Even the people who came to our clinic for acupuncture were showing tempted reactions to the diet herbal medicine ads hanging at Wonhee Clinic across the street.

Dieting is, after all, one of modern people’s long-standing concerns. It wasn’t surprising.

In a world with such developed food culture as today, maintaining a healthy weight is difficult. As material abundance increased, so did delicious foods, so it wasn’t strange for people who had trouble controlling their appetites to seek help from medicine.

But no matter what, a herbal medicine that makes you lose 15 kilograms in a week—isn’t that a violation of medical law? I was genuinely shocked that this “Liri-tang” had actually received approval from the Ministry of Food and Drug Safety. What? How did that get approved?

Without realizing it, I rubbed my furrowed brow.

The only positive function Baek Wonhee served was making me instantly forget those three days I spent with Jung Pureum. My mind had been confused, my spirit dazed, and I kept thinking about Jung Pureum, but after seeing the Liri-tang ad, all those distracting thoughts vanished.

In fact, ignoring whatever Baek Wonhee did was better for my mental health. After all, alpha-making herbal medicine and diet herbal medicine weren’t even in the same category. Though they both fell under the broad umbrella of herbal medicine, their exact target demographics were different.

Moreover, Liri-tang was more expensive than the alpha-making Gongjin-dan. Since it was supposedly effective, there were plenty of people who’d buy it even at that price, but when I first saw the price, my eyes nearly popped out. Did they grind deer antler into gold and put it in? One dose was nearly 800,000 won.

“I guess it’s a premium strategy.”

“Just selling it outrageously expensive?”

“Luxury brands also just sell outrageously expensive, yet people line up from dawn to buy them.”

Nam Jungyoon, looking like this was going to be a headache, turned off the YouTube video Kim Miyoung had played.

If I’d known this would happen, I should have taken Introduction to Business Administration or something in college. As an underclassman, I couldn’t freely set my schedule, so I never studied that kind of marketing.

While I lamented my college days, Nam Jungyoon just clicked her tongue.

“Even if that stuff is real, the side effects must be no joke.”

That was right. All medicines usually come with side effects. This applies to both herbal and Western medicine.

People always dream of a perfect divine elixir, but the possibility that artificially synthesized chemical compounds are completely harmless to the human body is slim.

For example, something good for your eyes might cause hair loss, and something good for your stomach might cause constipation. It’s unavoidable. Moreover, the stronger and more potent the effect, the worse these side effects tend to be. Poison and medicine are two sides of the same coin.

“But surely they wouldn’t sell something dangerous?”

“We’re selling Gongjin-dan even though we didn’t properly conduct clinical trials.”

“Our Gongjin-dan has no side effects.”

“That’s true.”

Whether they just haven’t manifested yet or truly don’t exist, my Gongjin-dan had no reported side effects.

Come to think of it, forcibly changing one’s secondary sex should also have side effects. I suddenly became troubled. What if I ended up back on the legal chopping block after barely escaping a lawsuit?

“We’re fine. Your grandfather already commissioned clinical trials everywhere, you know.”

“Grandfather did?”

“You didn’t know?”

I didn’t?

I stared at Kim Miyoung with a shocked face. When did he take care of all that without saying a word?

“No, I thought the director knew everything.”

“…”

“We’ve been thoroughly verified for safety, so.”

I’d tried not to rely on my grandfather’s help as much as possible, but I’d ended up receiving it again. It wasn’t like the heavens would collapse and the world would end just because I got help from an elder, but it did make me uncomfortable.

My grandfather was truly a good person, but he had a somewhat rigid side and always worried about me, having manifested as a heat omega. He’d constantly tell me not to do dangerous things, and that if things got hard, I could just quit everything.

It was true that he supported me both materially and spiritually because of my strong passion, but this, too, was closer to him anxiously helping me out of fear I’d come to harm.

Because I’m an omega, he thinks I can’t succeed in business… in case I end up failing in this world rife with discrimination.

I felt both sorry and grateful, but also suffocated. Every time I received help like this, I felt an inexplicable sense of defeat. Like I’d never truly accomplished anything with my own strength.

“Next time, if Grandfather tries to help secretly, please let me know.”

“Oh come on, I didn’t deliberately not tell you…”

“Assistant.”

“I just did it because I was worried. Our clinic was struggling a bit in the beginning.”

Since it was my fault for not giving Kim Miyoung confidence in the beginning, I had nothing to say.

Still, seeing her avoid my gaze, flustered and apologetic, made me feel bad too. I hadn’t meant to blame her, but as I spoke, I ended up sounding like I was attacking her.

“Well, that’s not what’s important right now.”

Nam Jungyoon clapped her hands together, as if trying to lighten the mood between us.

“Should we buy some of that Liri-tang?”

“Why would we?”

“Who knows? Maybe they put something weird in it.”

“Do we really need to go that far? It stings to see Baek Wonhee succeed, but instead of holding a curse ritual to make him fail, we’re better off just focusing on our own work.”

At my words, Nam Jungyoon looked back at me in surprise. After acting like I’d chase him to the ends of hell to ruin him, this sudden sensible talk earned a look of disbelief.

It was true I disliked Baek Wonhee, but he hadn’t done me any immediate harm. He’d just upgraded the diet herbal medicine he’d been selling and released it—what could I do about it?

And wishing for someone else’s downfall, rather than striving to do better than them, is the normal response of a functioning member of society.

In this hyper-competitive society, there’s nothing uglier than desperately trying to trip others up. I just need to work harder. Even if a person has no principles, they should at least have shame. Throwing the first punch isn’t what a civilized person does.

I could hold a curse ritual for Baek Wonhee’s downfall, but going over and causing a scene is a different matter. No matter how much I hated Baek Wonhee, I couldn’t become the same kind of person as him.

“Once Baek Wonhee gets busy with his own business, he’ll bother us less too.”

“That’s true, but…”

“We just need to keep doing what we’ve been doing.”

I checked Liri-tang’s ad copy one last time.

<Effortless, healthy dieting while eating whatever you want!>

What nonsense, but someone would desperately want to believe it was true.

Right now, I also wanted to believe it was true. If the infinite possibilities of herbal medicine could make it easy to maintain health, that would truly be a revolution in Oriental medicine.