When starvation and poverty strikes the country, Sunwoo’s parents decide that the only right thing to do is to take in one of the less fortunate children whose parents can no longer support them for one reason or another. It is more an act of maintaining a good reputation than charity, but does intentions matter when you do something good? They find the perfect match, a boy old enough to not need much attendance, with a mother who is still alive and can take him back once times has turned. In addition, he is of the same age as Sunwoo, and they agree it’ll be healthy for their son to interact with another young boy. And that is how Junghwan ends up in the pale-yellow country manor, with only one small, torn bag to hold all of his personal belongings. 

Prologue

When it rains, it pours. First came the failed harvests. A dry spring and a wet summer left the crops miserably scrawny and greyish, just barely fit to feed a human. Then a rough winter that never seemed to want to end, followed by merciless storms in July and August that destroyed most of what had been growing in the fields that year. People were starving, and many families left their farms to seek their luck in the city. The towns were soon overpopulated and so crowded you could barely walk down a street without stumbling over a sleeping person or stepping in the filth overflowing from the sewages and waste disposal systems that had reached their capacity limits long ago.

And so came the disease. No-one was surprised really, because when things go bad they tend to go worse too. Terrible stomach aches and an inability to keep down any of the little food that you could still get your hands on struck man after woman after child. Some survived, some didn’t. There were mothers who had lost all their children and husband and roamed the streets in search for shelter or water, impossibly thin and almost ghostlike. Corpses filled out the spaces left between the homeless and the dirt. It was not a pretty view, and the stench…

Or so Sunwoo has heard at least. Growing up at the large manor far out on the countryside he has never actually witnessed this poverty and misery people always talk about. He has never been forced to go hungry for long, and everyone he’s ever met has been well fed and in good condition. These rumours about famine and suffering seems distant to him, no more than horror stories. But now, his parents have apparently decided that they are real enough that they should do something to help.

It’s not so much that we want to do it, he overheard his mother say, but that we feel it’s our duty. His aunt had hummed agreement, and Sunwoo could hear the clinking of china against china as she put her teacup back on its saucer. We have all these empty rooms and more food than we could possibly eat. It just wouldn’t be acceptable for us not to offer our help when so many are in need. Sunwoo was lurking outside the door of the west salon, the small one that is almost exclusively used for his mother’s friends’ visits. This afternoon her sister was over, to discuss something no-one had bothered to actually explain to Sunwoo, but that he felt would indeed affect him personally. That was why he was eavesdropping; because it’s his right to know what this is about. Moreover, it’ll be nice for Sunwoo to have a playmate. Sunwoo clenched his fists, creasing the soft cotton fabric of his trousers between his fingers.

Playmate. Not only is he too old for playmates – he is turning sixteen and is basically an adult – but he doesn’t want one either. He is fine with the way things are, without a snotty, filthy city kid coming here and messing things up.