Chapter One: Before the Storm

Minji Park had built her world out of logic.

Her days were framed by neatly structured timetables, her notebooks filled with perfectly aligned handwriting, and her thoughts always one step ahead—planning, calculating, dreaming. She didn’t live in fantasies. Minji lived in facts.

Wake up at 6:00 a.m.

Run for exactly twenty minutes.

Breakfast: one boiled egg, one banana, green tea.

Attend lectures. Study. Volunteer at the campus clinic. Study more.

It wasn’t discipline. It was survival. The medical field was competitive, and she wasn’t just trying to succeed—she had to. Her parents had poured everything into her future, and she’d sworn to make it worth it.

Unlike most of her peers who floated between clubs and confusion, Minji walked with quiet certainty. The world to her was not chaos—it was a puzzle to be solved, a body to be understood, a life to be lived with purpose.

And yet, for someone so focused, she loved the little things too.

The smell of fresh ink on a new journal.

The way the trees near the campus shifted color with the seasons.

The soft click of her pen when she figured out a diagnosis before her professor said it aloud.

These were her pleasures. Simple. Silent. Satisfying.

She had only one indulgence outside her books—Mia.

Mia was like a walking contradiction to Minji’s order. Her roommate, her best friend, and the tornado to her still water. While Minji folded her laundry the second it dried, Mia’s half of the room looked like her closet had exploded in protest. She sang in the shower, painted her nails with glitter, and flirted with campus baristas like it was her part-time job.

“You know you’re terrifying, right?” Mia once told her, watching Minji dissect a frog in the lab with surgical precision. “Like… quietly dangerous. If you ever decided to kill someone, I’m convinced you'd get away with it.”

Minji had simply smiled, “That’s comforting. You’ll be my alibi?”

“Hell yeah. Just don’t forget to mention me in your Nobel Prize speech.”

They balanced each other. And together, they had created a kind of sanctuary—a safe, predictable world where Minji could chase her dreams in peace.

That day began like any other.

The sky outside was overcast, the air tinged with spring rain. Minji had just come back from her physiology lecture, her notes meticulously highlighted, her thoughts still running through the stages of cellular respiration. Mia, meanwhile, was trying to convince her to watch a horror movie later.

“It’s for science,” Mia insisted. “You’re studying the brain, right? Let’s observe fear responses in real time.”

“My fear response involves hitting pause and never returning,” Minji replied dryly.

“You're no fun.”

“I’m focused.”

Mia rolled her eyes and collapsed onto her bed, her phone glowing with a campus group chat message. She sat up suddenly, her expression turning from bored to buzzed.

“Yo,” she said, waving her phone, “tomorrow’s seminar? You’re not gonna believe this.”

Minji looked up from her textbook, eyebrow raised.

“Guess who’s attending in person this year? That anonymous corporate guy who donates millions to the university hospital fund. Apparently, he never shows up. But this time… he is.”

“So?” Minji asked, unfazed.

Mia leaned in, whispering like it was national gossip. “He’s hot. Like, chaebol-level, dark-suit-wearing, never-smiles hot. My cousin works in media—he said the guy owns half of Gangnam’s skyline.”

Minji blinked. “Sounds like capitalism with extra steps.”

“You’re impossible,” Mia groaned. “What if he sees you and falls madly in love? You’d make a hot power couple. Brain and billions.”

“I’m allergic to arrogance,” Minji replied, flipping a page. “Besides, those men don’t fall in love. They collect. Women. Businesses. Enemies.”

Mia grinned. “Sounds like you’ve thought about this.”

Minji shrugged. “I read psychology.”

But even as she spoke, there was something unsettled in the air.

It wasn’t fear. It wasn’t excitement. It was shift. As though something was quietly watching her carefully constructed world and beginning to move the pieces without her consent.

She didn’t know it yet, but the rules she lived by—the logic, the control, the certainty—were about to be challenged by someone who didn’t play by any rules at all.

And while she slept that night with her books stacked by her bed and dreams of a surgeon’s life in her mind, another mind, far colder and darker, had already marked her.

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