Baekhyun didn’t have much time to sneak off to the library to follow up on Junmyeon’s cryptic advice regarding their family history. Mr. Shin kept him plenty busy. In addition to studying manners, etiquette, and regular coursework, he was also schooling Baekhyun in business in anticipation of him taking over the family company. Baekhyun’s free time was extremely limited.

When he did have the occasional free minute, he spent it in the library. While he figured it would be frowned upon if anyone caught him snooping there, no one had expressly told him the library was off limits.

Aside from his lack of time, there was another problem that Baekhyun faced: the sheer size of the library. There were shelves upon shelves of books of varying shapes and sizes and contents. They were all meticulously organized by author, almost as if there had been a librarian employed there at some point or another. The filing system was helpful if Baekhyun knew what he wanted to find and who it was written by, but it wasn’t like he had a catalogue number for the books he was looking for. Hell, he didn’t even know what he was looking for. Junmyeon hadn’t been exactly specific when he’d told Baekhyun to search in the library for clues to the secrets everyone in the family seemed to be hiding.

Not having the faintest idea where to start looking, he began to move through each section of the library, scanning all of the titles. He pulled out the ones that looked promising and flipped through them; when they proved to be useless, he replaced them. The further along he moved, the less interesting books he found. Despite Junmyeon’s dark assurances that Baekhyun would find something out in the library, it looked like his search was hitting a dead end.

It was late in the afternoon one day when he stumbled across what he was looking for. It was a small section of books, nearly impossible to find because there was a big, comfortable armchair pulled up right in front of it. The books were shoved far back on the bottom shelf in the corner, hidden by the armchair and the dim light of the alcove.

With his heart thrumming with excitement, Baekhyun shoved the chair out of the way and grabbed all the old, dusty books hiding there. It looked like nobody had bothered these books in ages.

He wasn’t exactly sure he was allowed to be doing what he was doing, so he sneaked them up to his bedroom to examine when he had more time. He had just managed to hide them in his old backpack – he didn’t think the cleaning staff would bother them there – when Yixing came in to announce it was time to get ready for dinner with Mr. Shin.

Dinner that evening was almost excruciatingly long. Whenever Mr. Shin chastised him for slurping his soup or not using the correct fork or resting his elbow on the edge of the table, Baekhyun just sighed and rolled his eyes. His mind was upstairs with the dusty books. He wondered what was inside them. It was killing him knowing that he might have some real answers that very night.

Eventually Mr. Shin dismissed him and Baekhyun scurried up the stairs, nearly knocking over a couple of startled maids carrying clean linens in his hurry. Yixing was nowhere to be seen, so Baekhyun grabbed the books from their hiding place and settled down on his bed to look through them.

There were four books altogether, all faded and dusty and ancient-looking. The first three were pretty much useless to Baekhyun. They were records of the household finances from 1835 to the mid 1980s, when everything was probably transferred to electronic documentation. These records were intriguing to the historian in Baekhyun, but right now he didn’t care much about how many sheep his ancestors had owned or how many servants they had kept.

The fourth book, the thickest, proved far more interesting. It was a family Bible, so old that the cover seemed about to disintegrate. Of course most of the pages were taken over with Bible verses, personal notes scribbled into the margins here and there in barely legible writing. Some of the notes were in a language Baekhyun didn’t even recognize. But in the back of the Bible, there was a detailed family tree.

Baekhyun had seen his family tree before, of course. Mr. Shin had made sure of it during his extensive lessons, which was how Baekhyun had known that Junmyeon’s mother was no longer in the family and that Minseok’s mother had died young. But this family tree told him so much more, and the more he looked at it, the more he realized that something was off.

The first unusual death was in 1855 with a distant great aunt, Kim Soonkyu, who drowned in a lake that used to be on the property despite being known as a great swimmer. According to the family history, her body was unable to be shown at the funeral. The document didn’t say why this was so, and Baekhyun found himself burning with curiosity.

The next unusual death happened just two years later, when Kim Soonkyu’s mother, his great-great-great-great-great grandmother Namjoo, was poisoned. She had been just a few years shy of forty. Baekhyun’s curiosity was further piqued. Why on earth would someone have wanted to poison his great grandmother? What had she done that warranted such an extreme situation?

Then, in 1875, Namjoo’s younger sister, Kim Eunjoo, was killed when she was thrown from her horse. Her husband outlived her by many years, but he suffered a crippling dementia a decade before he finally perished.

Eunjoo and her husband had had three daughters: Sojin, Solee, and Somin. All three of them died young. Kim Sojin had committed suicide, Kim Solee had died during childbirth, and Kim Somin had gone mad and been committed to an insane asylum before her untimely death.

All three of Eunjoo’s daughters had gone on to have children of their own, each of whom met their own horrible demise. Sojin’s daughter also committed suicide when she was nothing more than a child, and her son had died of cancer before he reached his fortieth birthday. Solee’s son, the one she had died giving birth to, died in a horseback riding accident when he was only nine years old. Somin had had twin daughters, one of whom died in infancy. The other died of a premature , and her three young sons all perished in a fire that seemed to have never been adequately explained.

As he searched the family tree, Baekhyun realized that he himself was a direct descendant of Sojin. Her son, Daesung, had died of cancer, but not before he had married and fathered a child himself. His wife had drowned, but his son Jiho, Baekhyun’s great grandfather, had managed to live for quite a long time before he died of what the documents claimed a “mysterious unknown illness.” Unlike most of the Kim family, he had managed to live to be seventy-three. His wife, Dahae, hadn’t been so lucky. She’d died during childbirth.

According to the family tree, Jiho and Dahae had had three children, a boy and two girls. The boy, Hyojun, was Baekhyun’s grandfather, the one whose death had brought him to live there, though the death had not been recorded in this family Bible yet. Baekhyun wasn’t sure if it ever would. The elder of Jiho and Dahae’s daughters, Hyojin, had had a , managing to live past the typical age of death like her father. She and her husband had had two children: Narae, Junmyeon’s disowned mother, and Junho, Minseok’s father. The youngest daughter, Baekhyun’s great aunt Hyomin that he had met, had only had one child, his distant cousin Junhyung, who was Jongdae and Jongin’s father.

Baekhyun sat back, chewing on his lower lip thoughtfully. Out of all his ancestors, he could count on one hand the number that had lived to a proper age. Everyone else had died – most of them violently. This had to mean something, he thought to himself. Maybe this was what Jongin’s friend Sehun had alluded to before.

Yixing came in then, carrying clean laundry to hang up in the wardrobe. He was halfway through asking Baekhyun a question about his dinner lesson with Mr. Shin when he caught sight of the family Bible open on Baekhyun’s bed. His expression immediately hardened. “Where on earth did you find that filthy thing?” he demanded.

“The library,” Baekhyun replied, almost defensively. “No one told me I couldn’t go there.”

“Of course you can go there,” Yixing replied dismissively. “The question is why you would want to. What do you want with that old thing?”

“I want to know more about my family,” Baekhyun answered honestly. “Did you know that almost everyone in this family dies young. Not just my parents or Minseok’s mother. Almost everybody. Did you know that?”

Yixing was extremely evasive with his answer. “It happens sometimes.”

“I know you know something you’re not telling me, Yixing,” Baekhyun said firmly, getting off the bed and walking over to his friend. “I’m not stupid and I know I’m not crazy. There’s something going on with this family.”

“It’s none of my business,” Yixing said firmly, hanging the clothes up neatly in the wardrobe. “And you shouldn’t bother with it anyway.”

“But if this is something that affects people in the Kim family, then it’s going to affect me, too,” Baekhyun pointed out. “If everyone dies young, then it means that I’m going to die young too. And I don’t want that. I’ve got my life to live.”

Yixing sighed and finally turned to look at Baekhyun. “What’s the point in knowing about it?” he asked. “It’s not going to change anything.”

Baekhyun felt both elated and horrified at the same time. “So there is something going on with this family,” he muttered.

Yixing closed the wardrobe doors. “I’m not saying anything else about it, Baekhyun. And you shouldn’t worry too much about it. There are certain things that just can’t be changed. It’s better if you make peace with that fact now.” 

Okay, so I know the family is confusing right now. I introduced you to a ton of names this chapter. Don't worry about keeping them straight. More will be explained about them in the upcoming chapters ;)