TASO | YG [✔]

01. Beomgyu

One evening in the spring, long years ago, Beomgyu had shifted and ran under the moon with other boys his age, in the ages-old celebration of the Great Wolf and all the elder Gods.

It was another life. He'd been a child, carefree and ambitious. He had plans to become an artist like the village shaman who sculpted animals out of wood and painted crazy patterns on strips of leather. He never felt he'd be able to speak to spirits or feel magic, like the shaman, but he hadn't connected the two—the shaman's abilities and his art.

Just like he hadn't connected his family's extreme poverty to his own fate, and to what it meant for his plans.

He'd been little. Stupid. Ignorant. He cried sometimes when there was nothing for dinner, as if his tears could conjure something out of thin air. Maybe that had been what had pushed his omega father, single-handedly raising a child in a gossiping, suspicious village and failing to do so, to give him away.

Sell him, more precisely.

It didn't sink in immediately. Not even after his father took him to the nearest town, through muddy streets, to a tall house, when he pulled him inside and told him to sit and wait.

When a painfully thin beta in a black suit came to stare at him like Beomgyu was some sort of livestock to be examined and purchased, he left.

When his omega father never returned, Beomgyu was whisked away in a minivan to the Lotus Omega Academy, scared to death and shaking so hard he thought his bones might break, not even the thin beta keeping him company. It had been him, the driver, and another omega who'd sat as far away from Beomgyu as possible, his cheeks stained with tears.

Beomgyu had cried, too, of course. But only when he thought nobody was looking. He kept his tears back during the drive, and afterward, when he'd been dumped inside a big room with many other young omegas, and was told that from now on he was the property of the Lotus Omega Academy. That he'd be fed and clothed and instructed in everything that made an omega desirable until an alpha became interested and paid off their debt to the school.

Until, in essence, an alpha bought them in his turn, and they became his property.

Beomgyu had shaken. He couldn't seem to stop shaking. He'd been a free wolf, with all those wild dreams, the open fields, the other kids, and his omega father waiting for him at home, even if sometimes food was scarce. He'd felt safe and protected.

He knew then, that he'd never feel the same way again.

His tantrums the nights he'd gone hungry seemed so childish and stupid now. Was that the reason his omega father had given him away? Had he upset him too much? Was it his fault?

Time passed in a blur. He was vaguely aware that he was given a bed in a room with other omegas. That he was thrown into a large bathhouse and scrubbed with brushes within an inch of his life until his skin had turned bright pink and burned like fire. That he'd been shown a blackboard with a schedule. A program. And a list of tasks to accomplish every day.

Forget technology. Inside Lotus Omega Academy, time had stopped a long time ago—in every way. The Academy was proud of it. From upkeeping traditional values, preserving old skills and traditions to providing alphas with traditionally-trained omegas who would not only know how to properly clean and cook, how to dress and move as to be desirable, but also how to properly entertain their alphas, and pleasure them. And eventually how to cope with pregnancy, birth, and caring for babies.

That came later in Beomgyu's studies, of course.

It took him more than a month to accept that he wasn't going back.

And it took him almost a year to actually believe, from the stories the other omegas told in the school, that his omega father had actually received money to abandon him there. That it was common practice among poor families. Beomgyu had caught someone's eye one day when they'd been at the town market, and the person had offered his father the opportunity to exchange his son for coins.