RCKS 7

Both families had also switched from salaried jobs to their own businesses around the same time. The adoptive family and the other family sometimes consulted each other on their respective fields, so they kept maintaining a group chat room. And during the time that group chat room was maintained, many things changed.

The most representative examples were that each family’s business had gone through ups and downs and grown, and the children had also grown.

And the biggest recent issue was Hwang Haekyung’s kid model activities. Usually, when a child started gaining fame as a kid model, people would flock to them. The “kid model parents” in the same industry did that, and people from agencies or the kid brand industry did that.

In addition, the attitudes of the parents who used to hang out while camping together also changed little by little. As the child’s recognition increased and income came in accordingly, most people were trying to build friendships that matched that.

However, Lee Yoonsan’s adoptive parents took a clearly different approach. They did not add any particular comments about Hwang Haekyung’s kid model activities, fame, or income. They did not show jealousy or subtly encourage Lee Yoonsan to hang out and play more with Hwang Haekyung.

They just often asked about Hwang Haekyung’s well-being. Just as they had been doing since Hwang Haekyung was very young.

Hwang Haekyung, who had stepped into kid model life with his pretty face and unique atmosphere, sometimes received inexplicable checks from kid model parents of his age group, and sometimes received excessive attention. He even said that the attitudes of his friends at school toward him seemed a bit different. All of it was a side effect of becoming too famous in a short period of time.

But Hwang Haekyung was too young to understand such things. Although he shot pictorials wearing cool clothes with his pretty appearance, Hwang Haekyung was just a child who simply liked running around and playing, and liked soccer.

To such a child, adults’ demands like “The next pictorial shooting is coming up, so refrain from outdoor activities so your skin doesn’t get tanned” or “Don’t let him do rough sports because he can’t get scratches from injuries” were incomprehensible things.

Height was the same. The words checking the rapidly rising kid model Hwang Haekyung were mostly malicious remarks picking on “height.” Since they could not find any faults at all in his pretty face from a young age or his talent for making expressions in front of the camera, the majority pretended to worry about Hwang Haekyung’s height and made scratches.

Things like “By the way, how tall is this kid supposed to be?” or “No matter how pretty or handsome boys are, if they’re short, it’s useless” or “Did you go to the hospital to measure expected height? How much is it? Are the kid’s mom and dad tall? Then you can roughly estimate it” flew like daggers to the young child and his parents.

Instead of Hwang Haekyung’s SNS, which was not run separately, people left such remarks on Hwang Haekyung’s parents’ SNS. At least, since they kept leaving such remarks on the SNS that they used personally just for camping records, it was inevitable that it would bother them.

Hwang Haekyung, who had entered the upper grades of elementary school, could now read the comments on SNS quite well. It was not a problem that could be solved by Hwang Haekyung’s parents turning the SNS private.

On the day Hwang Haekyung’s parents turned the SNS private for the sake of the child’s emotional well-being, the kid model parents’ community chat room flipped out as if something had happened. They started making numerous speculations just from turning the SNS private.

Things like now quitting kid model activities, or the kid getting his face injured, or no more castings coming in because the height isn’t growing anymore, or the kid manifesting as an omega so hiding and protecting him, or the parents being too money-grubbing so maybe they got caught on some weakness.

None of it had any basis, and it was not something to say about a mere elementary school child and his family.

The biggest problem was the fact that the child got hurt by the keyword “height” that they brought up to make scratches. Hwang Haekyung’s height was 149 cm, which was only about 2 cm taller than last winter.

This was a height smaller than the average height for 10-year-old boys, and a value a full 4 cm smaller than the average height for 11-year-old boys, which was Hwang Haekyung’s age. It had been the same at 10 years old, but the fact that the gap with the average value was widening even as the grade level increased little by little made Hwang Haekyung despair.

“Mom, Dad, am I really short?” From some point on, Hwang Haekyung started asking this question much more frequently. He also wondered about passing boys his age, saying “How tall is that kid?”

It was a change in the child who used to live off his own excellence and did not know how to compare himself with other kids. And since last winter, he had also often become curious about Lee Yoonsan’s height.

“How tall is Lee Yoonsan?” Hwang Haekyung had often asked after his parents talked on the phone with Lee Yoonsan’s adoptive parents.

“If Haekyung loses interest in taking photos, we’ll make him quit right away.”

“Yeah. It’s not something to do while stressing the kid out.”

“If the parents’ community fit a bit better, it might be different, but it didn’t fit at all. After all, we only have Yoonsan.”

As Hwang Haekyung’s parents laughed in a hollow way, Lee Yoonsan’s adoptive parents shook their heads excitedly and laughed. The two couples matched well in many ways because they had known each other for a long time.

“Is Yoonsan doing well in school life?”

“Well, yeah. I guess the kids tease him a bit for being chubby and act mischievous sometimes.”

“Yoonsan will all grow into height. Don’t stress the kid with fat, just let him eat well what he wants to eat.”

“I’m worried the kid might get stressed by kids his age. It’s around the age to start caring about appearance.”

“Yoonsan is so handsome. There’s nothing to worry about.”

“Doesn’t it feel like our sons got switched?”

In the continuing conversation, laughter eventually burst out between the two couples. Hwang Haekyung’s parents excitedly boasted that they had prepared various skewer meal kits to feed Lee Yoonsan, and Lee Yoonsan’s adoptive parents said they had prepared both sunblock and sunscreen to apply on Hwang Haekyung, so they would have to apply it once more later.

“By the way, the number of people is a bit small this time? Is it just our two families?”

“No, not exactly. We just arrived a day earlier. It’s about time some families start dropping out.”

“…Ah.”

“It’s the kids’ manifestation period.”

Around the time they set up the table and ground the coffee beans, Hwang Haekyung’s mother looked around and expressed doubt. And the response to her doubt was something unexpected.

“Taeho manifested as alpha, so he can’t come.”

“Yeah, now the kids are in the secondary sexual characteristics period, so it’s that time.”

In addition to the primary gender revealed by external genitalia from birth, the secondary gender that manifests during the secondary sexual characteristics period was starting to manifest little by little. The children participating in camping with the two couples were mostly around Hwang Haekyung’s age, and at Lee Yoonsan’s age, which was one year younger than them, it did not manifest easily.

Usually, secondary sexual characteristics for boys occur mostly after 13 years old, but in cases of having a secondary gender like alpha or omega, they undergo changes earlier than general beta children. The period when the secondary gender manifests along with secondary sexual characteristics is most commonly from 11 years old, and during this time, specific genders like alpha or omega manifest.

The majority of the world’s population is classified as beta. These are also people unrelated to the secondary gender, and they have the Jacobson organ, an auxiliary olfactory organ for smelling pheromones, degenerated and non-existent. Therefore, they cannot smell pheromones, and as a result, they are ordinary humans unrelated to the heat cycles triggered by that.

However, alphas and omegas are a bit different. They have the apocrine glands secreting unique body odors and pheromones, and the auxiliary olfactory organ called the Jacobson organ for smelling pheromones is highly developed, and usually, this is expressed as knowing how to smell pheromones.

This Jacobson organ exists around the middle inside the bridge of the nose, and it enables pheromone reception and communication thereby possible among animals or insects. It is possible because the auxiliary olfactory organ that all know how to smell pheromones has not degenerated but is developed.

In addition, those with secondary genders like alpha or omega have their own unique body odor and pheromones, like fingerprints. This is also body odor and pheromones secreted from the apocrine glands, but different from general people (betas) in composition, it emits an individual-specific scent.

This unique scent can only be smelled through the auxiliary olfactory organ called the Jacobson organ, and since it is different from general body odor, it is often expressed synesthetically.

So, usually, if a scent feels “heavy” or the scent feels “cool” in a synesthetic way, that means it is not a general smell but the body odor or pheromone scent that an alpha or omega has.

The secondary sexual characteristics of alphas and omegas is the period when the auxiliary olfactory organ capable of smelling these pheromones fully matures and starts to become sensitive, at the same time as the sex hormone secretion of alphas and omegas becomes active, and the reproductive organs latent in the body rapidly grow and the body settles into place. And usually, from this period, detailed education and management regarding heat cycles are carried out.

In other words, for omegas, it is the time when sex hormone secretion becomes active, the latent uterus grows and matures, and for alphas as well, due to sex hormone secretion, the reproductive organs greatly develop.

“Alpha….”

The absolute majority of humanity is beta. Even combining alphas and omegas, it is one in a thousand, so 999 out of 1,000 are the majority classified as beta.

And the sex ratio within that minority of alphas and omegas approaches 140. It means that for every 100 omegas, there are 140 alphas. Considering that the natural sex ratio of general beta men and women in a natural state is 105, it is clearly a very extreme figure, but that was the reality.

In the case of alphas and omegas, and especially alphas, since the hormone secretion level and feedback mechanism differ from general betas from birth, the majority of physical conditions were innately superior. They had evolved rapidly, leaving only superior genes as if existing for superior reproduction and survival.

Therefore, the majority of people wanted to give birth to an alpha. Although they all looked the same when born, the gap that opened up with ordinary people during secondary sexual characteristics was at an unignorable level.

And this preference of the majority created the extreme sex ratio of 140 over generations. —In the case of alphas and omegas, after 12 weeks of pregnancy, it is possible to infer the possibility of secondary gender manifestation through hormone production and its levels.—

Furthermore, in the case of omegas, regardless of the primary gender of male or female, they have bodies capable of pregnancy, and since they have heat cycles just like alphas, they also experience various prejudices and preconceptions as a gender.

Unlike alphas where sex hormone development greatly affects the entire body, it has a greater impact on the restoration of internal reproductive organs, and because they receive influences from those reproductive organs again, the reason they are less intimidating in appearance was large.

Since from the primary gender they have reproductive organs capable of having children, generally, women manifest as omegas more often, and conversely, men with reproductive organs capable of impregnating manifest as alphas more commonly in reality.

However, the opposite cases also exist. Cases where those born as women manifest as alphas, and those born as men manifest as omegas were occasionally seen.

Since secondary genders like alpha or omega are mostly traits passed down genetically, cases where the primary and secondary genders cross like that often had genetic factors. Cases where there were many omegas in the previous generation, or many alphas.

Anyway, it was a time when such stories would come up. The children busy running around happily at the camping site were growing day by day, and since among the friendship gatherings of families in similar environments, there were often alpha or omega parents.

“The kids are growing up little by little.”

It was precisely the time when the children were growing. And depending on that manifestation, groups would divide again. Alpha children would gather with households having alpha children, beta children with households having beta children, and omega children with households having omega children. Schools would also divide that way naturally.

Even if society lived mixed, invisible lines existed, and hierarchies would form naturally. Moreover, in an era like now where children were becoming ever scarcer, those boundaries became even more distinct easily.

“…I hope our kids can grow up well together.”

“Yeah, really.”

Regardless of alpha, omega, or beta, the time when the children gathered and ran around brightly together was fading away.

*

“Haekyung!”

“What.”

Lee Yoonsan, who ran up to Hwang Haekyung who was picking up pine cones under the pine trees around the car camping site, had an expression that was a bit excited. It seemed less because he wanted to talk to Hwang Haekyung and more because he was simply excited by the scenery visible around him.

Hwang Haekyung made a sullen expression while looking at such Lee Yoonsan. The tall Lee Yoonsan also had a build twice his own. So, unnecessary feelings of inferiority welled up. “Do adults ask him about his height too?” The thought that came first seemed because he had been tormented too much lately.

“What are you doing?”

On the other hand, Lee Yoonsan was in a state a bit excited as per his expression. The fact that this place was Jeju Island was good, and the sea visible far away was good. Hwang Haekyung’s mom who had held him and rocked him back and forth for a long time was good, and above all, this time Hwang Haekyung being alone was a bit satisfying and exciting. It was amazing that Hwang Haekyung, who was always surrounded by friends, was for some reason picking up pine cones alone.

“Picking up pine cones.”

“Why this?”

“Dad told me to pick them up. He said to use them when lighting the fire.”

“Me too! I want to pick them up too!”

“…Do whatever you want.”

Hwang Haekyung ignored Lee Yoonsan who was following closely beside him and picked up pine cones. Lee Yoonsan was a bit annoyed at such Hwang Haekyung but still devoted himself to picking up pine cones. If he picked up a lot of pine cones, his uncle would like him for sure.

Lee Yoonsan excitedly even hummed a tune while looking around for pine cones. The pine grove where hot wind blew was a bit dark, but since it was not far from the car camping site, it was not scary.

Moreover, although it was the object he disliked, Hwang Haekyung was there a bit away, picking up pine cones and putting them in a small net bag. Of course, Hwang Haekyung would abandon him and go when friends he could play with arrived again….