Chapter 1
Chapter 1
Back then, I wasn’t afraid of anything.
I cursed at cowards, and whenever I saw injustice, I stood up to it.
When a friend got hit, I went to get revenge with him. If a friend had something stolen, we fought to get it back.
Since I kept getting into fights, I was always scolded by adults. They even told others not to hang out with kids like me.
It didn’t matter. We had our own sense of justice.
No matter what the adults said, we stood together as one.
But that kind of reckless stuff only worked when we were in elementary school.
We started to learn that we were responsible for our own actions. That obvious rule began to apply to us too.
Plus, if I got into trouble, I wasn’t the only one who got punished. My friends who were with me also faced consequences.
We couldn’t keep acting by our own sense of justice anymore. Now, we had to follow the rules made by adults.
The troublemakers went their separate ways.
The smart ones turned to studying, the fast ones went into sports.
Our wild instincts were tamed. Even I, who had once been like a monkey in the mountains, was socialized.
Just like everyone else, I went to school, studied, and got into college.
I became an adult—or you could say I became “human.”
It wasn’t particularly good or bad. It was just the way things were supposed to go.
The person I became accepted this flow as natural.
I had forgotten about it for a long time. Memories of those monkey days had faded.
At least, until I met him again.
“Hey! Jjooji King! Are you the Jjooji King?!”
A girl with bright-colored hair, who at a glance was anything but ordinary.
My old friend from the monkey days had appeared in front of me as a woman.
