The Only Way to Survive

“S-still… our Cheong-hyun…. It’s so good to see you sleeping like this….”

Seo Won-woo rubbed his own flushed cheeks, quietly staring at Cheong-hyun’s profile as he slept under the influence of a heavy sedative. He had heard that Cheong-hyun tried to escape—that he had easily neutralized a guard and walked right out of his room.

Before Cheong-hyun returned to this body, Seo Won-woo had no idea what kind of life he had been living. He had simply assumed it was a normal one. He figured Cheong-hyun was living a non-Guide, civilian life in a good home, surrounded by his siblings or his parents.

So, when the news reached him that Cheong-hyun had unhesitatingly picked up a weapon, taken down a Mutant, and attempted a prison break, his chest grew so fiercely hot that his hands and feet trembled, cutting off his breath for a long moment.

“O-our Cheong-hyun… did you have a hard life…?”

If he hadn’t, there was no way the name tearing from his lips as he gripped the hospital blanket until his knuckles turned bone-white could sound so utterly desperate.

“Tae… Tae-hoon-ah.”

“Who… who is Tae-hoon…?”

They had entered this place together as the founding Guides, sharing every hardship, sorrow, and joy as if they were their own. They knew each other inside out—from head to toe, every single detail. At least, that was what he had believed.

To Seo Won-woo, during a lonely childhood with nowhere else to turn, Cheong-hyun had been a sanctuary—someone whose hand he could hold to endure absolutely anything. He had been the only space where Won-woo could truly breathe. But at some point, without either of them realizing it, their bond had quietly shattered and warped.

As he slowly chewed over that timeline, a small noise broke the quiet. He turned his head toward the wall clock; it was already 3:00 AM.

After hovering restlessly around the bed, Seo Won-woo leaned his weight against the mattress. Cheong-hyun was curled up uncomfortably on his side, sleeping in a twisted posture. The neck of his hospital gown was torn open, exposing a strip of pale skin. Seo Won-woo’s prominent Adam’s apple bobbed as his eyes greedily traced the torn fabric and the dried blood clinging to the cloth.

This is exactly why… everyone keeps staring at you, Cheong-hyun.

Swallowing hard to clear his dry throat, he extended a trembling finger. Like a thief in the night, he lightly brushed the bridge of Cheong-hyun’s nose. His touch slid down to caress the edge of his eyes before pressing firmly, almost brutally, against his lips.

“Ju… Just a little bit….”

The fingers that had been crushing his lips suddenly forced their way past his teeth, sliding into the oral cavity. Savoring the hot, slick texture of the tongue wrapping around his fingers, he pushed deeper, as if trying to reach the very back of the throat. He ruthlessly ground his fingers against the hard membrane just above the uvula, mimicking the violent, probing thrust of a fiercely swollen phallus.

“Gag… Cough, cough…!”

The emaciated shoulders reacted instantly. As a violent coughing fit erupted, Seo Won-woo frantically yanked his hand back. He desperately wiped the trailing saliva onto a cloth resting on the nightstand and stuffed it deep into his pocket.

Meanwhile, the shoulders that had been violently convulsing gradually quieted down, and Cheong-hyun’s tightly shut eyelids fluttered open in a daze. His clouded pupils blinked a few times before rapidly clearing, returning to their natural, sharp focus.

“Y-you’re awake, Cheong-hyun-ah…?”

The man called out to him with a flushed, smiling face. Through the dim lighting, Cheong-hyun’s emerging gaze locked onto Seo Won-woo. Strands of messy hair parted to reveal his pale forehead. The initial daze on his face vanished in a fraction of a second, entirely replaced by sharp vigilance.

“What the hell are you doing here…?”

“I-I was worried about you, so I came. I didn’t mean anything else by it! They said you were s-sick, Cheong-hyun-ah… so…!”

Cheong-hyun immediately sat up to examine his own body. He rolled up his sleeves, inspected his torso, and pulled up his pant legs to check his limbs. After staring at the thick gauze wrapped around his palms for a moment, he scanned his surroundings. It was a massive, sterile infirmary reeking of heavy antiseptic, with blue partitions set up around each bed to divide the space into private cubicles.

It was the exact same ward he had seen before losing consciousness. The heavy steel handcuffs remained securely padlocked to the structural iron frame of the bed. He violently yanked his arm a few times, but it achieved nothing outside of sending a sharp spike of pain through his scraped, bruised wrist.

“Take this off…. Seo Won-woo-ssi, please unlock this. It’s too suffocating.”

“N-no… the Director said you’ll get hurt if I unlock it…. Besides, I came here because I h-have something to tell you, so… I have to leave soon.”

Despite his irritating, stuttering delivery, the man’s low cadence possessed a strange, melodic quality. Listening to Seo Won-woo’s voice naturally induced a sense of profound psychological comfort, causing one’s mind to grow heavy and defenses to crumble. It was the exact reason why clients visiting the Center constantly requested him by name.

The Guides were a unique, highly lucrative commodity engineered entirely by Ki Soo-hyuk’s Center. The more money a client poured into the facility, the higher their social status, and the stronger their corporate influence, the higher the quality of the Guide and detoxification treatment assigned to them.

Though Cheong-hyun was currently unaware of it, Seo Won-woo’s market value was currently among the absolute highest of any Guide stationed at the Center.

“Ch-Cheong-hyun-ah…. Starting tomorrow, you have to do the r-rounds in the treatment wing with me. Director Ki… he ordered it. He said we have to do the rounds together.”

“Why the hell should I—!”

“Food! If you ju-just waste food without working, you’re nothing but livestock. And l-livestock gets beaten….”

His eyes darted anxiously around the cubicle, yet he tenaciously forced out every single word he intended to say. A bizarre, hyper-focused light continuously gathered in his pupils, and every time his gaze drifted back to Cheong-hyun, he would offer a flushed, radiant smile—as innocent and naive as a young child.

“You d-don’t want to get beaten, Cheong-hyun-ah. It hurts so much….”

When Cheong-hyun had first thrown himself into society to build a life for his brother, the very first skill he had forced himself to master was how to blend seamlessly among crowds. Though he was fundamentally stoic and lacked the ability to smile naturally, he had learned to listen intently to others, nodding along and never backing away from any task or social obligation, no matter how uncomfortable.

He had swallowed whatever food was handed to him and forced down whatever alcohol was poured for him. That was how he had endured those hostile, jagged spaces just to secure enough contract work to survive.

Yet, stepping into this facility felt like being forced to repeat that grueling process all over again. Conversing with the people here felt like screaming directly into a solid brick wall.

He had no idea what expression he was supposed to wear or what emotions he was expected to project in this place. Everything felt entirely foreign and repulsive.

“I think… you are deeply mistaken about something, Seo Won-woo-ssi.”

A Guide who refused to perform detoxification faced severe corporate punishment. Time was pure gold inside this facility, and the clients were worth far more than gold. If a client demanded a Guide’s body, the only path to survival was to run. Yet, despite running a thoroughly oppressive, controlling empire, Ki Soo-hyuk guaranteed a strict baseline of protection and human rights to any Guide who successfully fulfilled their corporate quota.

He enforced draconian regulations regarding physical contact initiated by clients, and any customer who dared to cross the line into physical violence was ruthlessly blacklisted from the Center—even if they were a multi-billionaire conglomerate tycoon.

To him, the Guides were his prized corporate assets; he utterly loathed the idea of his premium merchandise being damaged by an outside hand. In that regard, while Ki Soo-hyuk was an absolute tyrant, he was a practical, protective merchant.

Of course, that didn’t change the absolute truth that he was a rotten, deformed monster. The verbal abuse and physical intimidation he had systematically inflicted upon Lee Cheong-hyun in the past remained an unforgivable atrocity—one that was now directly harming the current Cheong-hyun who inhabited this flesh.

“I have absolutely zero intention of rotting away in this place. Why the hell should I live here with you people? Why?”

“B-but….”

Won-woo’s eyelids trembled violently as he began aggressively picking at his own fingernails. Half of his face was completely obscured by long, overgrown hair, making him look deeply suffocating just to look at. He possessed a frame that was even more dangerously frail than Cheong-hyun’s emaciated body, standing nearly a full head shorter.

The current Seo Won-woo retained absolutely zero traces of the childhood friend Cheong-hyun held in his borrowed memories. While his clothing was perfectly pristine, a suffocating aura of heavily repressed, twisted asceticism clung to him, projecting a profoundly bleak and morbid atmosphere—closely resembling a brainwashed cultist harboring a deeply perverted sense of religious devotion.

The light reflecting in Seo Won-woo’s pupils shifted, staring down at Cheong-hyun with a look of profound, miserable pity. It was an incredibly unpleasant gaze. Suddenly, he leaned in, his voice dropping into a soft, intimate whisper. But the words that left his lips were a lethal strike.

“Y-you want to see Tae-hoon… don’t you….”

Clang—!

The heavy iron frame of the bed rattled violently against the concrete floor under a sudden surge of raw strength. Cheong-hyun’s eyes snapped wide as he violently twisted his upper body toward the man.

“How… how do you know that name?”

“Is he y-your little brother? Or a friend? Y-you two aren’t dating, right? You aren’t… giving your bodies to each other, r-right? Right? But… you caused that entire goddamn riot just to go see him. You desperately want to see that kid named Tae-hoon.”

“Don’t you dare speak his name—!”

“D-don’t scream….”

Before the sentence could even clear his throat, a pale, terrified Seo Won-woo lunged forward, slamming his hand over Cheong-hyun’s mouth to muzzle him. It was a level of physical strength that Cheong-hyun could have easily thrown off, but the sudden sound of heavy, rhythmic footsteps echoing down the corridor forced him to freeze, unable to push the hand away.

“Y-you have to be quiet…. I-I’m the only one who heard you say Tae-hoon’s name.”

The heavy thuds echoing from the hallway weren’t approaching from a distance. The footsteps were incredibly loud and weighted from the very first strike, indicating the person had been standing right outside the entire time before moving. Glancing past the blue partition, a tall shadow shifted against the frosted glass of the entrance. The footsteps ground to a precise halt right outside the infirmary doors, and a second later, the lock clicked open.

“Guide Seo Won-woo, you need to wrap it up and come out immediately. You’ve delayed the schedule for far too long.”

A man clad in a tactical stab-proof vest equipped with a leather firearm holster stood just beyond the partition, casually tapping his boot against the floor as he checked his wristwatch. Despite receiving zero response from inside the cubicle, the guard showed absolutely zero intention of leaving, maintaining his guard post by the entrance.

Seo Won-woo stared anxiously toward the partition before snapping his head back to Cheong-hyun, his eyes darting frantically between the door and the bed.

“Ch-Cheong-hyun-ah. You remember the Center’s backyard, right? The massive courtyard garden back there. B-before they erected those massive barrier walls around the perimeter, stray dogs used to r-run into the grounds all the time. Remember?”

Why is he bringing this up out of nowhere…? Cheong-hyun blinked his dark eyes, desperately trying to calculate the true motive behind the words. The backyard garden. And the stray animals that used to wander through it.

“It’s b-been about eighteen years since the Center was founded… so those dogs arrived a long time ago. Once the barrier walls went up and blocked the entrance, I assumed all the strays had starved and d-died outside…. B-but starting five years ago, one specific dog kept lurking around the perimeter. It’s a white Jindo dog… do you remember it?”