Absolute Advantage - Chapter 26.1

First of all, she stood up to simply fill her stomach, but her eyes were spinning for a moment. The lack of food accumulates, reaching the limit.

The last thing Hae-won saw before she lost consciousness was a white ceiling and a light that turned off.

* * *

‘Dad, there’s a spider web on the ceiling.’

‘Leave it alone.  The spiders will eat the pests.’

‘Right. And the bathroom doesn’t light up. It must be broken.’

“That’s how it’s supposed to be.”

‘Yeah, I see.’

It was Manila, the capital of the Philippines, that arrived with her father who gambled away.

Haewon was 12 years old at the time. However, her growth was slow due to lack of nutrition, and her size was much smaller than that of her peers.

The first house she lived in was an old villa located in the city center. The Korean landlord manages it and the tenants are also mostly Korean, so she didn’t feel like a foreigner when she walked around the villa.

However, as her father continued to be behind in rent, the father and daughter gradually moved to the city’s outskirts. The surrounding environment has deteriorated as their movement continues.

No more Korean words were heard. It was a foreign language she had never heard before. The number of homeless people occupying the streets has also increased, and the neighbor’s clothes were either loose or bare.

‘Seo Haewon. Wake up. Get your stuff!’

‘Hm, again…?’

She still remembers the day when they ran away with only her bedding when she heard the sound of waking her up in a hurry.

The first night flight in the Philippines.

When the sea filled with trash finally unfolded before her eyes, she thought that it was the end.

The bottom of life.

The destination of those driven out of town.

To be exact, it was one of the many slums in the Philippines, but it was titled the world’s three largest slums, so the level of misery was different.

There was no concept of a floorboard or wallpaper. If you put a wall on the ground and put a lid on it, it was a house.

‘From today, this is my home.’

Her father occupied an empty shack without permission. Hae-won awkwardly laid a quilt on a rusty frame.

‘Dad, I’m going to make money. Look at the house.’

‘……Yes.’

She thought he would quit gambling now, but after that, her father managed to raise money and go in and out of the casino.

When he went to the casino, which took more than two hours to go back and forth, he always put a suit in his bag. And when she asked why he didn’t wear it, he said that if he wore good clothes in the slums, it would be taken away by gangsters.

It wasn’t empty words that people could get attacked.

And a father who left his little daughter in such a dangerous place. Once he went out, he came back a couple of days later.

However, Hae-won was more worried about his father than she was left alone.

She didn’t know, but she thought her dad was an omega. The male omega was said to be very rare and hated in Korea.

On the contrary, her father told her that the concept of Alpha-Omega is not common in the Philippines, making it easier to live.

However, even there, his father was small for a man, and there were only scary adults around him who couldn’t communicate.

Most of the people who walked around with their tops open had strange tattoos on their bodies. Their eyes were as sharp as a blade. They smoked a roll of paper every day, and when she passed by, she felt sick.

Looking back, it was hard to believe that a little girl had survived such a place. If only she had stayed a little longer if she hadn’t been able to leave even after awakening as an Omega…

On the other hand, she thought it wouldn’t have been dangerous.

She thought she was waiting for her father alone in the shack that was likely to collapse when the wind blew.

No. She wasn’t alone.

Because then next to her…….

* * *

“Uhm…….”

The closed Haewon’s eyes wriggled.

Haewon tossed and turned for a long time before waking up. When she opened my eyes, she saw a white sheet. Like the sea. Not the black sea where garbage floats, but the white clean sea.

Haewon held out her arms toward the sea.

As she shook her hands like swimming, the touch of the sheet that brushed her fingertips was soft and she felt like she was going to cry. Hae-won clutched the sheet as it was. The sheet was crumpled in the shape of a wave.

She thought she’d forgotten everything.

Often, living in the Philippines was revived as a nightmare. What would have happened if Chairman Seo had not found her? She didn’t want to imagine.

Crash!

Then there was a loud noise outside the room.

Haewon rose reflexively. As she walked toward the door like that, she wondered why she was lying in bed for a moment.

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