As If Transmigrating Wasn’t Enough, I’m Pregnant?!

The man’s voice was gruff and slick with a sleazy, wheedling tone that was unpleasant to listen to. He slowly approached Ryu Hae-sol. With every heavy step his massive frame took, the old floor creaked ominously beneath him. At the almost scream-like sound, Ryu Hae-sol swallowed hard.

“You haven’t paid us back, and you won’t even answer your phone, so here I am, making a personal visit. Been off somewhere nice, have you? You look like a goddamn beggar, but you reek of some very expensive dominant Alpha!”

Faced with the man’s threatening attitude, Ryu Hae-sol instinctively tried to back away. But all he felt behind him was the cold wall. There was nowhere to run in this tiny space. Only then did he realize that home had never been a place of refuge for Ryu Hae-sol.

“Hey, Ryu Hae-sol. You haven’t forgotten that your old man borrowed money from us, have you? The deadline for paying it back with interest passed ages ago. We came to your place, but you weren’t here, and you kept ignoring our calls. Do you have any idea how worried sick we’ve been? You little piece of shit.”

The man squatted right in front of Ryu Hae-sol, bringing himself down to eye level. Up close, his eyes gleamed as though boiling with greed and rage. He sniffed loudly, bringing his face close to the nape of Ryu Hae-sol’s neck.

“What’s with this pheromone scent? You must’ve been with someone pretty extraordinary.”

At the man’s words, the other fellow, who was lighting a cigarette nearby, snickered and joined in. His words were unmistakably laced with mockery and disgust.

“If you’ve been rolling around with a top-tier dominant Alpha, you must’ve gotten paid pretty well, huh? So, how much did you get? Is that body of yours worth a decent sum?”

The nauseating stench of cigarette smoke wafting from the men, combined with their blatantly aggressive remarks, made Ryu Hae-sol’s stomach churn. His body trembled with instinctive fear, but his eyes remained defiant, glaring straight back at them without yielding.

These were the loan sharks who had driven Ryu Hae-sol to ruin in the novel. In the original story, they subjected him to all kinds of humiliation and eventually nearly sold him off. That had been the starting point of his horrific fate. He clenched his fists tightly. He couldn’t let them do whatever they wanted to him. Even though the wad of cash in his pocket served as a reminder that his circumstances had already hit rock bottom, Moon Seong-yoon’s survival instinct refused to let him give in.

Ryu Hae-sol raised his eyes defiantly toward the man in front of him. There was a saying that even if you were dragged into a tiger’s den, you could survive as long as you kept your wits about you. Feeling like a fox trapped in front of a tiger, he pressed his lips tightly together. Moon Seong-yoon’s own stubborn pride, forged through years of hardship, burned like an inextinguishable flame.

But in the cramped single room of a hillside slum, such pride was a luxury—nothing more than a futile provocation. The man, seasoned enough to read the sharp defiance in Ryu Hae-sol’s eyes, twisted his lips in contempt.

“Look at the way this little bastard’s staring at me.”

As he muttered in a low voice, the sound of his enormous, pot-lid-sized palm slicing swiftly through the air came first.

SMACK!

A heavy, sharp crack rang out, as blunt and explosive as a violent collision, seeming to tear through Ryu Hae-sol’s eardrums. His head whipped violently to the side, unable to resist the blow.

For an instant, his vision washed out to pure white. A horrific shock slammed into his face, so intense it felt as though his brain were rattling inside his skull. A high-pitched ringing buzzed in his ears, while pain spread across his struck cheek like a red-hot iron pressed against his skin. The metallic taste of blood flooded his mouth.

“Urgh…!”

What escaped his lips wasn’t quite a scream. It was a short, involuntary cry that burst out before he could stop it, a groan forced from him by pain too intense to bear. The strength drained from his entire body, and he curled inward as if instinctively trying to protect himself. It was a purely human reaction.

All the rational, calculated plans he had made were shattered by that single act of violence. Now, all that remained was the raw, primal terror of the brutal violence this body remembered all too well.

But Ryu Hae-sol wasn’t even given the time to sit with his pain. This time, the other man, who had been watching from the side, stepped forward. He strode over and roughly seized Ryu Hae-sol by the hair as he crouched like a frightened little animal.

“Ah!”

The agonizing pain made it feel as though his entire scalp were being torn away, and Ryu Hae-sol involuntarily cried out again. The man yanked his hair sharply upward. Ryu Hae-sol’s head was forcibly lifted, and through his blurred vision, he saw the man’s face twisted with malice.

A moment later, all the rage and contempt in that expression came pouring down on him.