Chapter 1
[Official Notice]
The authorities have confirmed that since ‘Friday the 13th’ last June, a mutant virus affecting only Omega women aged 20 and over has emerged. Characterized by an acute onset with no incubation period, the virus converts an Omega designation to an Alpha designation.
If ‘appropriate measures’ are not taken within six hours of onset, it causes severe fever and a burning sensation throughout the body, which can lead to death from nerve-damage-induced shock in severe cases.
Infected individuals who are unable to take appropriate measures themselves must visit the nearest public health center within at least 3 hours of onset. For details on public health center locations by region and appropriate treatment, scan the QR code below…
“Doesn’t ‘appropriate measures’ basically just mean having sex?”
Jihu muttered under her breath, staring at the large official notice pasted across the front door of the laundromat. She’d seen the exact same notice plastered on utility poles all over the studio-flat district on her walk over. News broadcasts had been blasting breaking reports about the virus’s severity non-stop, but people were naturally indifferent to anything that didn’t directly hit them or their inner circle.
“Even if it’s a virus, who’s actually going to believe someone can suddenly grow a cock out of nowhere?”
Jihu scoffed at the notice’s footnote on ‘appropriate measures’ and hoisted her heavy laundry basket off the ground. A full week’s worth of clothes was no joke. She’d calculated her laundry money beforehand, but now she worried she might come up short.
Gauging the cash in her pocket, Jihu pushed with all her might against the laundromat door, which was completely covered by the notice.
CLANG!
Ah, shoot. Pull, don’t push.
‘Pull. Pull.’
‘Please! Pull! Please! Pull!’
‘The door is hurting. Please pull!’
These desperate pleas had been hidden beneath the notice. Smacking her own forehead in frustration, Jihu gave the door a hard yank. It didn’t budge. Pushing it so forcefully had jammed it tight against the floor tiles.
That was just how unlucky days went. Nothing flowed smoothly. Even the smallest thing that should’ve been a breeze went completely sideways, as if someone were deliberately pulling the strings to screw with her.
“Fuck, I’m so screwed.”
Jihu set the laundry basket down and gripped the jammed door with both hands, shaking it for all she was worth. Just a little more. Come on, work with me.
The door lodged in the bumpy yellow tiles wobbled slightly, finally starting to give—
“Jeong Jihu?”
A woman inside the laundromat called out her name. Hidden behind a mask and a low-slung hat, she was unrecognizable. Or rather, it might be more accurate to say Jihu wanted to pretend she didn’t recognize her.
“Ah…”
When Jihu failed to react, the woman hesitated before pulling down her mask. At that exact second, the door Jihu had been wrestling with suddenly slid open. Suppressing an awkward grimace, Jihu forced a smile and stepped inside.
Oh, fuck. Fucking hell…!!
Jihu wanted to lose her mind from a mix of dread and pure frustration. She wanted to throw down her laundry and vanish into thin air right then and there. Of all times, why did her usual laundromat have to be closed today!
“Did the door get stuck? It does that all the time. Are you okay?”
“Yeah. Yeah, I’m okay.”
Inside the laundromat, where rows of washing machines hummed and clunked, two women stood facing each other. Jihu used her foot to nudge her basket in front of the only empty washer, hovering awkwardly as her mind scrambled for a safe topic.
“I heard you got accepted into the same university as me, but this is the first time I’m seeing you around.”
“Right… Well, our majors are different. Different year levels, too.”
“Do you live around here?”
Jihu babbled about the location of her studio apartment while stealthily shuffling closer to her washer. It was Sunday morning. She was wearing whatever was lying on her floor, hadn’t even washed her face beyond wiping the sleep from her eyes, and was still recovering from a lingering hangover after sleeping all day yesterday. Meeting the last person on earth she wanted to see in this condition was making her dizzy.
The conversation stalled. Thankfully, the woman’s phone chimed. She pulled it out and walked over to the makeshift sofa where her things were laid out. Jihu crouched in front of the machine and began tossing her laundry inside. Normally, she separated her towels and clothes, but she didn’t give a damn right now. Throwing them in haphazardly, her brain worked overtime trying to figure out the fastest way to get out of there.
The woman was Kim Yeseo—the older sister of Jihu’s best friend. She was the total package: petite, gorgeous, effortless charm, and brilliant to boot. She was the person Jihu had once been so hopelessly, obsessively in love with that it felt like a fever, and the reason Jihu realized she was a lesbian in the first place.
Jihu had never been able to forget Yeseo. She hadn’t even dared to try. Sometimes Jihu felt terrified and insecure, worried that Yeseo would hold the sole deed to her heart for the rest of her life.
And now she was stuck face-to-face with her. In a laundromat, of all places. If someone put this in a romance novel, readers would trash it for being lazy writing. Why now? Why here?
Jihu felt like crying. Even in stretched-out pajama shorts, Yeseo was still ridiculously pretty, cute, and radiant, making Jihu’s heart pound as if it were going to burst out of her ribcage. It was agony that her body still reacted like this. Completely unaware of Jihu’s internal crisis, Yeseo struck up a conversation again, as warm and natural as if they’d always been close.
“You look taller every time I see you. Yebin said you even got scouted for modeling—is that true?”
“Modeling? Yeah, right. It was nothing like that. Why does she keep telling people that?”
Jihu grumbled under her breath about Yebin while slotting coins into the machine. Next to her, Yeseo began unloading her finished laundry from the adjacent washer. Even with the air conditioner blowing cool air, Jihu was sweating profusely.
Her original plan was to wait until her clothes were washed and dried. Jihu instantly revised her strategy: she would head back home during the roughly fifty-minute wash cycle, then come back just to throw everything in the dryer. By then, Yeseo would surely be gone.
Honestly, there was a reason Jihu acted so awkwardly around Yeseo. Unable to bear the agony of her unrequited love any longer, Jihu had confessed to her at her high school graduation. Seeing Yeseo there with her parents to celebrate Yebin’s graduation, Jihu had felt an overpowering urge—an instinct shouting that if she didn’t confess right then, she never would.
Though she’d agonized over it until the very last second, youthful recklessness had done what it always did: twisted her life into a knot.
‘I’m not a lez. I don’t do that kind of thing.’
That had been Yeseo’s response. That cold rejection had ripped Jihu’s heart to pieces. Trying to hold a casual conversation after a past like that was pure torture.
“I’m gonna head home and come back later. Have a good time drying your clothes, unni.”
Jihu offered her carefully constructed exit line. For a final goodbye, she thought it sounded admirably composed. Even though they went to the same university, Jihu planned to bend over backward to avoid Yeseo, so they would probably never be alone like this again.
Starting today, I’m never setting foot in this laundromat again, Jihu thought, grabbing her empty basket and turning toward the exit.
“Ji-Jihu. Wait a second—” Yeseo called out, stopping her in her tracks.
Yeseo’s voice cut off abruptly. Something heavy dropped onto the floor with a clatter and rolled away. It sounded like metal scraping against tile—a horribly chilling noise. Jihu, who had been stubbornly keeping her back turned, instantly sensed something was wrong.
“Unni, what’s wrong with—”
“Don’t look back!”
Yeseo shouted frantically as Jihu began to turn, but before the words fully left her mouth, Jihu had already turned around. The mysterious object kept rolling across the floor until it bumped to a halt right at the toes of Jihu’s slippers near the entrance.
It was…
“U-Unni? Is this… a dildo…? Mmph!”
“Eeeek!” Yeseo shrieked, cutting Jihu off as she hurled her entire body forward, clamping both hands firmly over Jihu’s mouth. Her desperate attempt to shut Jihu up was fierce and wildly frantic.
Tangled together near the entrance, they swayed like they were engaged in some violent, awkward dance. Jihu stumbled back, completely at a loss as Yeseo threw her full weight against her. Yeseo looked ready to hold her hostage until the dildo vanished into thin air.
“I’ve never used that before. It was just a gift, and I seriously don’t know why it was in my laundry. Pretend you didn’t see it. Anyway, you saw nothing. Got it? I really don’t—I mean, it’s not sex. Anyway, I haven’t used it, and I really don’t know what you’re thinking, but…”
Yeseo rambled incoherently, tears streaming down her cheeks. In all her life, she had never felt such mortifying humiliation. Short of a ghost playing a sick joke on her, how on earth had that grotesque thing—which had been shoved into the deep corners of her closet—ended up falling out of her laundry basket?
Neither of them realized, however, that a catastrophe far worse than a dildo was waiting for them.
“AAAAAGH!”
Jihu, who had been passively letting Yeseo wrestle her, suddenly doubled over with a bloodcurdling scream. The moment she bent forward, a violent flush swept across her face and neck, and sweat drenched her skin in seconds. Still clinging to her, Yeseo realized something was terribly wrong and hurriedly stroked Jihu’s hunched back.
“Jihu! Are you okay? Did I hold your mouth too hard?”
Apologizing profusely, Yeseo checked on Jihu, only to realize her condition was horrifyingly abnormal. Jihu couldn’t even squeeze out a word, collapsing completely onto the tile floor in a pool of her own sweat. As she fought with everything she had to endure the agonizing sensation, her long, slender frame shook violently like a leaf in a storm.
“Ji-Jihu… look at all this sweat.”
Yeseo asked nervously if she should call 119, stretching her own shirt to wipe the sweat pouring from Jihu’s face. Jihu bit her lower lip so hard it nearly bled, pointing a trembling finger at the official notice posted on the door. Yeseo was already well aware of what that notice said.
“Don’t tell me you…”
Yeseo’s face drained of all color. Jihu nodded, her expression pure despair.
“S-Su-Suddenly? Right here?”
“Unni, I need to go to the public health center…”
“Are you going into shock because I dropped that awful thing?”
Yeseo was on the verge of tears. She knew catching a virus wasn’t triggered by seeing a dildo in a laundromat, but the timing was impossibly absurd. A sudden twist like this out of nowhere? What kind of novel would ever sell with a plot like this? Yet here real life was, spiraling into total nonsense!
Jihu shook her head frantically. The notice she had scoffed at earlier—the line about causing severe fever and a burning sensation throughout the body, and in severe cases, shock from nerve damage—flooded her mind. An agonizing, scorching heat was burning through her body, accompanied by a pain so excruciating it felt like her flesh was tearing apart from the inside out.
Meanwhile, Yeseo was still frantically trying to offer plausible excuses for why a dildo had fallen out of her laundry.
“Unni, stop talking about that dildo!” Jihu snapped at the top of her lungs, unable to take another second.
She didn’t want to know about Yeseo’s sex life, nor did she care to. Yeseo was her first love—the person who had painfully taught her that first love never comes true—and nothing more. Though, of course, she couldn’t stop her brain from involuntarily picturing Yeseo actually using the thing.
“I’m going to the public health center, so unless you’re going to help me, I’ll handle it myself.”
The raw, intense emotions tied to her past reignited inside Jihu. Feeling as though the space between her legs was literally catching fire, Jihu pushed herself off the ground on trembling legs. Yeseo caught her by the arm.
“I’m sorry for rambling because I panicked. But if you walk out like this, you won’t make it a minute down the street!”
“It’s none of your business, unni.”
“I heard from a friend that even if you go to the public health center with this virus—”
“I said it’s none of your business, unni.”
Jihu cut her off coldly, refusing to hear another word. Taken aback by Jihu’s harsh tone, Yeseo flinched. Seeing that look on Yeseo’s face, Jihu felt her stomach drop. She instantly regretted snapping at the one person in the world she never wanted to hurt, yet part of her felt a cathartic rush of relief.
“The ‘appropriate measures’ mean fixing this by having sex with an Omega anyway, so what am I supposed to do?”
“You’re… mad at me.”
Yeseo looked like her heart was breaking. Her eyes rimmed with red, tears brimming over in an instant. Seeing Yeseo on the verge of crying triggered a rush of overwhelming emotions in Jihu, making her want to weep too. Sorrow, indignation, and years of buried heartache surged through her chest all at once.
For the first time since walking into the laundromat, they looked directly into each other’s eyes. Carrying the deep scars they had dealt one another, they were dragged back to that graduation day years ago when Jihu had confessed.
“What did you expect from me, unni? Was I supposed to see you and act like nothing ever happened?”
“I was just happy to see you after so long, and I was worried because you’re hurting like this—”
“Why do you care about me! Why would you be happy to see me!”
“Will you stop interrupting me when I’m talking? Then what did you expect from me! Did you ever stop to think how shocked I must have been when you suddenly confessed in front of my parents and my sister?”
Jihu wanted to scream at her—to ask if Yeseo had any idea how many agonizing nights she had spent suffocating in her feelings before building up the courage to say those words. But her body was reaching its absolute limit.
The mutation into an Alpha—put simply, it felt as though an Alpha’s cock was rearing up between her legs with terrifying clarity. The unbearable pain of the organ swelling and hardening as it mutated was pure agony.
Stumbling, Jihu collapsed face-down onto the small sofa by the entrance door. Remembering the warning that severe pain could trigger fatal shock, a terrifying fear took root in her mind—if this excruciating pain got any worse, it really might kill her. If it meant stopping this torture, she would drop to her knees and beg anyone, but not Yeseo. Jihu swore to herself that she wouldn’t degrade herself like that in front of her.
“You need to have sex right now. It’s true that people can go into convulsions and die!”
“I know that! But with who? Please, just leave me alone—”
“You have me!”
What did I just hear?
Jihu froze, her mind going completely blank as her eyes blinked in total shock. The revelation hit her so hard she temporarily forgot the scorching pain tearing through her body.
“You… with me…? I mean, right now… unni, what are you even saying?”
Yeseo had no interest in continuing the argument. Grabbing the hem of her sweat-dampened shirt as if she were ready to strip it off right then and there, she stepped toward Jihu. Startled, Jihu scrambled backward, putting up both hands to hold her off.
“You said you didn’t like me! You shot down my confession without giving me a second thought—why are you doing this now?!”
“I never said I didn’t like you.”
Wait… she didn’t?
Jihu snapped back to reality. Wait, rejecting a confession was basically the exact same thing as saying you didn’t like someone, wasn’t it?
As Jihu spiraled into confusion, Yeseo threw her arms tightly around Jihu’s neck and yanked her down. With nearly an eight-inch height difference between them, Jihu’s tall frame was bent practically in half.
