The Substitute Young Master's Secret Identity Is Exposed

[Power Couple|Reunion After Years Apart|Mutual Redemption|Six-Year Age Gap]

Seventeen years ago, on the eve of an explosion at an experimental facility, the eleven-year-old boy knocked out the seventeen-year-old big brother and hid him in a ventilation duct, then drew the pursuers away himself.

“Big brother, live well.”

Then he vanished into the sea of flames.

Seventeen years later.

The seventeen-year-old returned to the country as the illegitimate son of a wealthy family. He was the “Silver Needle Yama,” feared throughout Southeast Asia’s underworld. With a silver needle in hand, he could save lives or take them. He had come to reclaim the inheritance of his dead friend, and, more than that, to find the person he kept calling out to in his dreams.

Across from him, the twenty-three-year-old head of the Shen family approached at an unhurried pace. His face matched the boy in the dreams, and beneath the scar on his left wrist, the number 09 was faintly visible.

He remembered that number. It belonged to the person who had taken every blow for him when he was six.

But the other man looked at him as if they were strangers.

Until one night, when his old illness flared up and he murmured unconsciously in the grip of a nightmare: “Big brother... live well...”

The bedroom door swung open. Someone knelt beside the bed and took his hand with trembling fingers.

“I heard you. I survived. This time, I’ll protect you.”

What they didn’t know was that twenty-one years ago, their grandfathers had arranged a childhood betrothal for the two boys. But later one went missing and the other was kidnapped, and no one ever mentioned it again.

Now they have both returned.

In this country, same-sex couples may marry, but only once they turn twenty-two.

He is seventeen. The other is twenty-three.