ATGRA 86

Jung Pureum entered the training camp right away on Monday. I couldn’t spend time with Jung Pureum right before he went in. Just in case I might affect his pheromones.

If his pheromones, which had finally stabilized, were to become unstable again due to excessive physical contact, it would be troublesome not only for Jung Pureum but for the other athletes as well. I heard there were Betas and Omegas among the national athletes for other sports, but usually, about 80 percent of the national team were Alphas.

[<A Notice to All Apartment Residents>

Please refrain from excessive public displays of affection within the apartment complex.

The facilities we all share are not private bedrooms! We strictly prohibit the act of releasing pheromones in areas used by all residents, such as the apartment elevators and emergency stairwells.

We kindly ask that you keep excessive displays of affection to your private bedrooms.
Thank you.]

An announcement like this was eventually posted in the apartment elevator. I had expected it. It was because I got swept up in Jung Pureum’s rut and failed to spray the deodorant.

How flustered must the other sub-genders living in this apartment have been when they got on the elevator after we got off? I felt a little sorry for my neighbors, whose faces I didn’t even know. I didn’t mean to cause any trouble…

Of course, even if I had sprayed the deodorant, it would have been obvious that an Alpha and an Omega had been pressed close together inside the elevator. Still, if I had sprayed the deodorant on time, an announcement like this probably wouldn’t have been posted.

Thanks to that, I felt like I was going to die of embarrassment every time I took the elevator. In a way, it was a stroke of luck that Jung Pureum entered the training camp before all sorts of rumors started circulating within the apartment.

Though I became a little lonely…

Thinking that I wouldn’t be able to see him for a few months, a corner of my heart felt empty even though I was getting video calls from him regularly.

I thought maybe my body had weakened with the change of season, so I even took a restorative herbal medicine with deer antlers, but it was no use. Even the medicine prepared by my grandfather—the god of Korean medicine, the light of Korean medicine, the greatest in the world of Korean medicine—could not cure the emptiness in my heart.

It was a relief, at least, that work at the clinic was consistently busy. It meant I could avoid thinking about Jung Pureum during work hours. However, whenever it was the time Jung Pureum used to visit the clinic, I would find myself looking at the clock.

Nam Jungyoon saw me like this and criticized me, saying it was “behavior you’d only see from little kids with their first-ever boyfriend.” I bickered and fought childishly again with my one and only associate director.

Ms. Kim Miyoung also said I looked like a girl waiting for her boyfriend to return from the military. Jung Pureum had also sniffled before entering the camp, telling me I couldn’t cheat on him, so I couldn’t easily deny what Ms. Kim Miyoung said.

“But you’re still getting calls from Pureum regularly, aren’t you?”

“They come about once every two days.”

“Wow, I bet it’s not even that often in the military.”

Whenever the military was mentioned, Nam Jungyoon would shudder. The reason was that it reminded him of his past when he was deployed to the front line because he was an Alpha.

Even Nam Jungyoon, a Recessive Alpha, was deployed to the front line.

I once again prayed desperately for Jung Pureum’s military exemption. Unless a Dominant Alpha has some connections, there’s a high probability they’ll be deployed to the front line. The training camp is already making me this anxious; there’s no way I can send him to the military.

“Director, should we close the clinic before the Olympics and go to Japan as a group? To Osaka…”

“As a group? Director, can you afford the cost?”

“We can just write it off as an expense. If I think of it as tax savings, I can afford to take the medical assistant and the associate director.”

“Sunbae… I will pledge my loyalty until you close the business.”

Nam Jungyoon, who had been quarreling with me just a moment before, immediately swore his allegiance. It was a truly fickle attitude, but I didn’t hate it. I heard that he hadn’t been on an overseas trip since becoming an adult.

“You have no idea how hard it was until I graduated from college. Not every Korean medicine student can live like you, sunbae, so I couldn’t even dream of traveling. I went to the military right after graduating. They wouldn’t even let me be a medic just because I was in Korean medicine school, I’m telling you, I thought I was going to die.”

Like a man who had served in the army, Nam Jungyoon shuddered at the topic of the military. On top of that, he went on and on with stories from his army days that nobody had asked for.

“Still, love is a powerful thing. When you were sick, you refused to close the clinic no matter what, but now you’re deciding to close just to watch your boyfriend’s competition.”

“Boyfriend? We’re not at that stage yet.”

“You’re not? I saw the two of you making out in the acupuncture room last week…”

“No, Medical Assistant, when did you see that? Are you a ninja, perhaps?”

“If you’re exposed to herbal ingredients for a long time, not only does your hearing get better, but you also become able to move without a sound.”

“…Korean medicine, for sure.”

“No matter how I listen, I can’t seem to follow this conversation pattern.”

“Oh, come on, Associate Director. When you’re talking with the Director, you shouldn’t try to understand things with your head. You just have to feel the sense, the flow.”

Still, I was glad to have these people around me. My situation was better than in my college days when Jung Pureum was the only person I could open up to.

Saying this was also part of her job, Ms. Kim Miyoung sat down in front of the reception desk and started searching for airline tickets. Seeing her skill as she navigated through price comparison sites, it seemed best to leave the ticket purchasing to Ms. Kim Miyoung.

“By the way, can we even spectate Olympic swimming?”

“Aren’t Omegas banned from spectating?”

“Wow, if Omegas are banned from spectating, I need to report this to the Human Rights Commission. I’m so upset I can’t live like this, seriously.”

Thinking about it, it did seem likely that Omegas would not be allowed to enter the stadium. After all, if someone were to suddenly go into their heat cycle during a match, it would be a bolt from the blue for the Alpha athletes.

I understood it intellectually, but just in case it was happening again! Again! I frantically searched to see if only Omegas would be banned.

Fortunately or unfortunately, for swimming, where the proportion of Alpha athletes is overwhelming, spectatorship was prohibited for anyone other than authorized personnel. In other words, Omegas and everyone else, regardless of sub-gender, were fairly barred from entry if they weren’t authorized personnel.

“Are you still going to Japan even though we can’t spectate? Wouldn’t it be better to just watch it on television?”

“Hmm, we can’t watch swimming, but we can watch other events.”

“That’s right, if we assume Korea wins gold medals in both archery and swimming, it means Korea will be sweeping up the gold in Japan. Just seeing the local reaction would be fun.”

My mood lifted just by imagining us plundering another country’s gold. It was even better because the host country happened to be Japan.

“If it doesn’t work out, we can just do some sightseeing and come back.”

Although I said that, I sat down next to Ms. Kim Miyoung and started surfing the web to check the Olympic schedule.

Jung Pureum winning a gold medal was the most important thing, but I was just as curious about the other events. It’s rare to find a Korean who doesn’t watch archery during the Olympics.

Our clinic moved busily to prepare for closing for about a week during the Olympics. Even though we decocted medicinal herbs and made Gongjindan every day, we were always short-handed compared to the incoming orders, leading to day after day of forced overtime.

I thought spies would stop coming after Wonhee Clinic went under, but since all sorts of clinics were sending spies to get their hands on the Gongjindan formula, it was still difficult to hire full-time employees.

Even among the contract workers and part-timers, there were sometimes people mixed in who were sent from other clinics. If Ms. Kim Miyoung didn’t have such an incredible talent for sniffing out spies, the Gongjindan formula would have been stolen long ago.

And it wasn’t as if I could recklessly hire people who hadn’t even graduated from college. It might be different if they were trustworthy like Nam Jungyoon, even without experience.

In the end, older medical assistants, vouched for by my grandfather, were dispatched to our clinic to handle various miscellaneous tasks. I tried not to rely on my grandfather’s help as much as possible, but I had no choice. There was no trustworthy talent available.

“If you post on the university job board, I think you’ll get a lot of applicants.”

“The university we went to? There are no diligent guys there.”

“Sunbae, you shouldn’t hold college students to your standards. And graduates check the university community a lot too, so it should be fine, right?”

“Is hiring really supposed to be this difficult?”

“It is a difficult task, but it’s not usually this bad. In our case, it’s because 80 percent of the people we hire thinking they’re okay turn out to be spies.”

“It was a stroke of luck that I hired Ms. Kim Miyoung as a starting member.”

“I think you used up all your hiring luck on that…”

To think that I had to use up all of my meager luck just to get one good person. Life is truly hard-mode content.

As Nam Jungyoon recommended, I also posted a job opening on the community site of the university I graduated from. I stated that we were mainly looking for graduates with experience, so now all I could do was pray to the heavens that just one good person would apply.

“Actually, for a clinic of our size, we should have at least one more associate director.”

“I know that in my head.”

“Or, since things have come to this, running it cozily with just us is also an option.”

A cozy operation sounds nice. However, we had too many patients because of the Gongjindan I made, so it was impossible for the three of us, including me, to run our clinic as full-time employees.

I need more staff! Even mobile tycoon games let you hire new employees when you expand your business. They don’t make three people work themselves to death in rotation!

“I don’t know. I guess we’ll just have to accept all the resumes that come in for now.”

Nam Jungyoon nodded at my words.

Nam Jungyoon’s face had also become a bit gaunt since coming to our clinic. He said the salary figure hitting his bank account provided some financial therapy, but I felt incredibly sorry for seemingly working him to the bone.

Ms. Kim Miyoung, a veteran in this field, sips her adlay tea without losing her composure no matter what happens, but Nam Jungyoon was still a fledgling, yet he was being tossed around here and there because he was the associate director.

I tried to recall my college classmates, seniors, and juniors. I couldn’t even remember the faces of most of them, so the chances of a familiar face submitting a resume to our clinic were slim.

Although I posted the job opening on the university board for the sake of employee welfare, it was also true that I was worried. To be honest, my college life wasn’t exactly positive.