Chapter 0 - Prologue

Yoongun Jung was Pluto, pushed out of Kyuyoung Seo’s solar system.

She stripped him of his planetary status, and there was nothing Yoongun could do but wait. If he had to become a dwarf planet, desperately holding onto Kyuyoung with what little gravity he had left, then so be it.

To her, he was an accident. A disaster caused by the collision of unfortunate atoms, a veiled mass of deceit. He was the root of her suffering and cold rage. Having fallen into his trap and gotten caught in the rain, Kyuyoung was… probably crying.

That night, as he pictured her tears, colder than ice, Yoongun’s world froze over. They were not the kind of tears that fanned the flames of his hidden desire.

Yoongun liked the way Kyuyoung looked when she cried. When he saw her dark eyes well up with glistening tears, the back of his neck grew hot and his jaw twitched. He felt an unquenchable thirst, an insatiable hunger. When Kyuyoung reached her limit and finally let her tears fall, Yoongun felt a supernova explode within him. Unbeknownst to him, Kyuyoung was at the center of his blurry, formless universe. The traces of her that she’d left behind were so deep and bold that he couldn’t help but keep chasing her down. When that happened, he took off his mask of pretenses and hunted her instinctively, completely taken over by his gluttonous desire to possess her.

Yoongun felt his regrets tighten around his throat until he could not breathe, sinking their fangs into him repeatedly. Without his knowledge, a fever began burning within him. His heart felt as if it was going to explode from the pressure and heat. Yoongun realized that this was the fever of lovesickness, but it was too late. He did not have the strength to hold onto her any longer.

During the three-day moratorium that Kyuyoung had placed, Yoongun’s stable world had lost order, and the reality of being alone was far more desolate than he had thought. His underdeveloped affection was obsessive and selfish, a far cry from the rationality that he held himself to. His twisted logic and distinct cruelty escaped the boundaries of the law. These slight twists in his being had broken Kyuyoung. Yoongun had everything except for her, and that had put him at risk of losing all that he already had.

It was easy for the Yoongun of the past to get whatever he wanted. He had taken it for granted and grown arrogant. However, despite having everything and displaying the highest level of intellect, one person had pushed him into a sweet poison.

Happiness, anger, sadness, excitement, envy, greed… and love. Yoongun, who had been forced to bury his emotions, classified these unfamiliar feelings as a threat. In front of Kyuyoung, who threatened him in this way, he became a sly, wild beast. Yoongun’s subconscious form of affection had been aberrant, twisted, and excessively cruel, and it had led him to the present moment.

He didn’t have to deduce anything to know what was coming next. She would leave him.

That night, Yoongun orbited around Kyuyoung as always. He used to hate imperfect things, and now he had become the most inadequate man in the world. He knew nothing. He didn’t know how a romance budded, how to keep it alive, or what was at the end.

To Yoongun, love was nothing but an unsolved algorithm, a maze without a map, misunderstanding disguised as understanding. It was an unprovable hypothesis and an abyss of depths unknown.

He had thrown a rock into it to see how deep it was, but it had come back to strike him in the heart and make him bleed.

Love laughed at him.

---

※ IP licensed to WordExcerpt. The rights of this work belong to the copyright holders. No portion of this work may be reproduced, transmitted, copied, duplicated, or modified in any form without written permission from the copyright holders.