CH 104

“If you understand me, don’t ever show your face again.”

Jang Beom-hee was speechless. Kwon Chae-woo, the man who would storm an area the moment he saw blood, was now being so polite. Just the thought of it made him cringe.

Kwon Chae-woo left without looking back and Jang Beom-hee frowned at him while holding his aching arm.

He felt his cellphone vibrate and he reached into his pocket to get it.

It was an unsaved number, but he already knew it all too well. It gave him a headache just looking at it. It was a text from someone that he had accidentally spent the night with. She had been messaging him for a few days now and it was starting to get troublesome.

You may forget my name, but I know that you remember my body.

Jang Beom-hee scratched the back of his neck as he read the text, then he looked back up at where Kwon Chae-woo had disappeared to.

Nothing was going his way.

***

“He should be ashamed of his name!” They were in a Korean barbeque restaurant and the conversation was loud and wild.

“Director, did you know that tigers mate 100 times?” Joo Dong-mi asked without care.

“Huh?” Lee-yeon’s eyes widened as she spluttered and coughed out the water she was drinking.

“That man, his name was Beom—it means tiger,” Joo Dong-mi drawled. “He was as sweet as an herbivore!”

Lee-yeon nodded, a little confused. “Sure, okay.”

“It’s not possible, it’s not!” Joo Dong-mi exclaimed. She raised her glass and spilled some of her drink on her hand. She licked it up.

Lee-yeon could see the half empty bottle of soju past Joo Dong-mi and looked back at the woman who was red in the face and blurting out nonsense. She thought back to the past few weeks and tried to remember how they got to this point.

The tournament had been canceled thanks to the landslide. The Spruce Tree Hospital and Mi Hospital received a new subject for the tournament about three weeks after the natural disaster occurred.

The subject was to cure the spirit tree, which was known to have a ghost living within it—

“Are they crazy? Do they know what kind of tree that is?” Choo-ja had slammed the table and glared when Lee-yeon told her.o

Lee-yeon had shrugged. “Maybe they’re just scared of us,” she had suggested.

“Don’t be so naïve!” Choo-ja had growled.

The thing about the tree was that, in the past, all the doctors that had tried to treat it encountered some form of misfortune or other while they tried to complete the task. From their children failing their exams to divorce to investment scams to all kinds of psychological illnesses and physical accidents imaginable.

All the tree doctors in Hwaido knew about this, which was why they avoided the tree as much as they could.

“You definitely can’t do this,” Choo-ja had said. “You’d be putting yourself in terrible danger!”

Lee-yeon had played with her teacup and stared at the leaf pattern on the table.

“I hear all the other hospitals were relieved to hear it,” Choo-ja had continued. “I’m so pissed!”

Lee-yeon’s face had fallen as she became worried. No matter how hard she thought of a way out of this, there was no solution. She had also started to feel like, for some strange reason, she was being assigned some of the more difficult tasks, the avalanche included. But she tried to ignore that.

There was a little temple beside the 500-year-old spirit tree. The townspeople were trying their best to save the protector of the town but nothing seemed to work. Because of the ever-growing rumors surrounding the tree, the perfect time for it to be treated had ended already and now it was about to die.

Lee-yeon thought that the forest ministry had chosen some annoying case.

“I can’t do anything about it,” she had said. “I have to try. Have you ever seen me pick my patients?”

Choo-ja had frowned at that.

“You should pick your friends but not your tree,” Lee-yeon had continued.

Choo-ja had scoffed and looked at her with narrowed eyes. “Of course,” she had said, rolling her eyes. “It seems like it was only yesterday when you were pissed about that dangerous man in his vegetative state. You were always saying how much of a pest he was and you made me lie as well. But now you’re with him.”

Lee-yeon had flinched and quickly drank her tea.

“But, of course, you must pick your friend but not the tree,” Choo-ja had mocked her, laughing.

Lee-yeon had tried her best to hide her face behind her teacup.

Another thing that had happened since the landslide was that Kwon Chae-woo had become an intern at the Wildlife Rescue Center, his rank right under Joo Dong-mi’s. He was the backup for rescuing injured animals and transporting them, and he was very busy going to rescue sites as well as studying. Thanks to that, he and Lee-yeon spent a little less time together.

But, surprisingly, they still had three meals a day together. He would always come to see Lee-yeon during their lunch break. She knew how ridiculous this was from a perspective of view so she always tried to send him back, but he would never listen.

Lee-yeon had become scared of lunchtime. She got anxious every time the door opened, worried that it would be Kwon Chae-woo coming to get her.

On top of that, every night, he would bully her so much that Lee-yeon felt like her back was being broken every day. Some nights, he wouldn’t even let her sleep a wink and she would go to work the next day without any sleep.

Something was wrong. They were both earning income but Lee-yeon knew that something was a little off!