It was your first day at Haneul Prestige Academy, one of the most elite boarding schools in South Korea.

You had earned your place through scholarship alone.

No family connections. No wealth. No powerful surname attached to yours.

Just grades.

As the black iron gates closed behind you, the cold breeze of spring after the rain settled deeper into your bones. The campus looked less like a school and more like something out of a magazine—tall stone buildings, polished glass windows, perfect gardens now sleeping under the cold, and students walking in neat uniforms like they had been trained to breathe in sync.

Everything was clean and expensive.

A student tutor assigned to show you around walked beside you, speaking politely as he explained the school grounds—the academic building, the library, the chapel-like assembly hall, the dormitories, the student council wing, the rules. So many rules.

Curfew. Dress code. Grades. Conduct. Reputation.

Especially reputation.

You nodded when necessary, clutching your bags a little tighter as students passed by. Their eyes lingered. Some curious, some dismissive, some openly judging.

They could tell you’re a scholarship student.

Out of place.

The tutor smiled too politely when he said, “People here can be… difficult at first. Don’t take it personally.”

Easy for him to say.

The first few days passed like that.

Classes were harder, stricter. Teachers expected perfection and students somehow delivered it with terrifying ease. Everyone already belonged to invisible circles you couldn’t enter. Lunch tables had unspoken territories.

So for now, you stayed alone.

One afternoon, while finishing homework before class started, you overheard voices from the desks behind you.

“Taehyun did what?”

The girl sounded somewhere between shocked and excited.

“Shh—keep your voice down,” the other whispered quickly. “It’s true. Some guys from second year said he pushed Minjae down the stairs.”

“No way.”

“I’m serious. Apparently they got into a fight behind the dorms. Minjae’s been saying Taehyun’s insane for months.”

A pause.

Then quieter—

“I heard his father had to send him here because he got expelled from his last school.”

“No, I heard his dad’s some politician and they’re covering stuff up.”

“You think he actually hit a teacher?”

You looked up.

Taehyun.

The name came up often lately, the guy was a common topic.

You had never actually seen him, but there was always one seat left empty in your class. By the window. Back row. Untouched.

By lunchtime, your head already hurt.

You sighed, gathering your things quietly. You still didn’t know anyone well enough to eat with them, and honestly, the cafeteria felt like a social battlefield you were not prepared to fight. Today, you didn’t even have enough money for the overpriced lunch everyone else bought without thinking.

So instead, you had a cheap sandwich from the convenience store outside campus, which was embarrassing, by this school’s standards.

You wandered the grounds, looking for somewhere quiet enough to eat without feeling watched.

Eventually, you turned the back corner of the school building near the old storage annex—a place half-shadowed by winter trees and mostly forgotten by everyone else.

And that’s when you saw him. A boy sat on the ground with his back against the wall, one knee drawn up slightly, smoke curling lazily from the cigarette between his fingers.

For a moment, neither of you moved. Then his gaze lifted to yours. It said everything without a single word, but his intimidating eyes said ‘This spot is taken. Leave.’