A Despicable Little Man

1. I'm a despicable little man who only cares about money.

As a Beta, it's not easy to move among the wealthy. But because I'm a Beta, good-looking, and don't require any commitment, they all like to use me.

I got by just fine with the help of these men. Who knew that one day I'd slip up, sleep with someone I shouldn't have, get beaten up, and be dumped on a street corner?

2. When Chen Hanjing found me outside a convenience store, I was sprawled on the ground like a dead dog, covered in blood.

He was a very handsome Alpha, but for some reason he looked so broke. He pulled up in front of me on a battered electric scooter that rattled and clanged, then asked cautiously, "Sir, it looks like you can't walk. Should I take you to the hospital?"

He took me back to his rented room, applied medicine to my wounds, cooked for me, and kept saying things I couldn't understand.

But he was too poor. I couldn't bring myself to feel anything for him.

Yet when Chen Hanjing pinned me to the creaky bed in that rented room, he bit the back of my neck for the first time.

Betas don't have glands, but I felt as if something had marked me.

The men from before had never done anything like that. They said I didn't need a mark anyway, and that they wanted to save it for someone they loved.

But Chen Hanjing marked me.

He must have liked me too much to control himself.

That night, curled in his arms, I told him everything I'd never said in the first half of my life. I even said, "I want us to build a life together."

How ironic. A Beta everyone despised had started wanting a quiet, settled life.

But I thought we were a good match.

A down-and-out, poor Alpha and a filthy, despicable Beta, living together like that. It was pretty good.

3. Only later did I find out.

The people who beat me that night were his men.

And Chen Hanjing wasn't really called Chen Hanjing.

His surname was Fu.

Fu Hanjing, heir to the Fu Group in District One.

I'd made too many enemies in that circle. Five years earlier, I happened to offend him.

I can't quite remember exactly what I did.

I only know he must have hated me. Otherwise, he wouldn't have gripped me by the throat and smiled as he said,

"How could someone like you deserve to be treated well?"

He kept me like a pet, had people inject me with gland stimulants, and tried to forcibly turn me into an Omega, pumping me full of his pheromones.

When he finally got tired of me, he stopped the stimulants.

But the artificial gland didn't go away. I could smell pheromones now, too, and from then on, whenever he came near, my body would cling to him against my will.

But he left me anyway, and sent me back to my old world after he was done changing me.

4. Fu Hanjing saw Song Zheran again at the entrance of a hospital in a remote county town, six hundred kilometers away.

The person he'd thought about and searched for over the past five years was leaning his head against a caregiver's shoulder, waiting for them to lift him into a car.

He sat in a wheelchair. It seemed he couldn't use either leg, and they hung from him like limp rags.

Fu Hanjing thought Song Zheran had always been fooling around with one person after another, and this time he'd probably been used up and gotten what was coming to him.

But it didn't matter. Fu Hanjing could afford to take care of him.

He'd made up his mind. Even if Song Zheran was a complete wreck, he wouldn't let him go again. This time, they'd build a life together. What could he do? He loved that despicable little man. He'd accepted it.

But Fu Hanjing only learned later that repeated injections of gland stimulants left Betas, whose bodies were already weak, with irreversible aftereffects. And since ordinary suppressants didn't work on an Omega who'd been altered this way, every heat was an agony worse than death for Song Zheran.

What Fu Hanjing didn't know was how Song Zheran had survived every year he was gone, or how much courage it had taken Song Zheran to dig out the gland at the back of his neck with his own hands before trying to end his life.

Reading guide: 1. First-person narration. The top is a virgin, the bottom isn't. Includes original worldbuilding.

2. Neither lead is a perfect person.

Theme: Even in hardship, you should persevere and face life bravely.