The man with the inked arms tilted his head at Jin, his gaze heavy as if trying to carve into his bones. "You've got an interesting face... reminds me of—"
His words were cut short as a guard rushed in, bowing low. "Sir, the program is about to start. You have to come."
The man clicked his tongue and turned away. "Bring the boy to the auditorium," he ordered.
And just like that, Jin was taken along, swallowed again by corridors of marble and chandeliers. As he neared the grand doors, he caught whispers fluttering around him.
"They say the chairman's grandson will appear."
"...But he's half-foreign, isn't he? Will Kang Do-hwan allow him his father's name?"
"Leonel D'Souza's boy, right? The Portuguese fighter... died with Do-hwan's daughter in that crash."
Jin didn't understand most of it. A name here, a half-heard rumor there. But the weight in the voices told him this wasn't ordinary gossip.
The story lingered in the background, a silent history: Leonel D'Souza, a Portuguese underworld legend, one of the five heads of Seo Min-jae's Shadows—the strongest crime syndicate in Asia. His fists kept order where armies couldn't. But love drew him into the Kang family, and a tragic crash took him and Do-hwan's daughter, leaving behind a single boy.
The auditorium hushed as the spotlight found a child. A twelve-year-old stepped forward, his blonde hair catching the light, his skin pale against the black suit, his eyes a sharp blue-green like the sea. A foreign face in the heart of Cheongrim.
"My name is Diego D'Souza."
The words struck like stones. Gasps rippled, and a few even scoffed aloud.
At the head of the hall, Kang Do-hwan's lips curved in pride—then froze. His smile slipped, stiffening into something unreadable.
Diego continued, his voice firm but raw with the honesty of a boy too young for masks. "I don't like this. These stages, these claps. I hate being treated as something special because of who my family is. I want to stand on my own."
The audience shifted uneasily. Some sneered, some whispered, some leaned closer in disbelief. The surname D'Souza echoed louder than the speech itself, like a wound reopened in front of them all.
Jin's chest tightened—not with fear, but with something else. The walls, the lights, the voices—it all pressed down on him. He slipped away, his feet moving of their own will. Through corridors, past lantern-lit gardens, until the thunder of water reached his ears. The waterfall.
He stood before it again, mist cooling his face. The pull was stronger now, as if the river itself was calling him back. It wasn't suffocating. It wasn't frightening. It was simply inevitable. And Jin, without knowing why, felt that somewhere in its depths lay the answer to who he was meant to be.
The banquet rolled on inside the glittering auditorium. Diego leaned closer to Ryu, lowering his voice to a whisper. "I'm going out for a bit. Come with me."
Ryu's sharp eyes flicked toward the guards, then back to Diego. Without another word, the two slipped past the security, shadows melting into the crowd until they disappeared through a side door.
Meanwhile, at the waterfall, Jin stood frozen. The sun struggled to hold the sky, its last orange rays stretching like trembling fingers across the rushing water. A strange wind whipped through the clearing, sharp and restless, as if a storm was waiting in a clear sky.
The tall grass swayed violently, hissing like snakes, and Jin's chest tightened. He hated snakes. He couldn't even step closer, though the waterfall pulled him with an invisible weight. His eyes, however, pierced farther than normal.
On the other side, beyond the mist and foam, a rock jutted out. It looked ordinary—until he noticed the scar. A clean cut, at least seven inches deep, as if some impossible weapon had split stone with one strike. Jin's breath caught.
"Who could do that...?" he whispered. His gaze narrowed, and words carved into the rock seemed to flicker alive beneath the fading sun: For our people.
The phrase dug into his mind, leaving a silence heavier than the roaring falls. He stared so long that the world dimmed without him noticing. Only when the last light died, when the sun finally surrendered, Jin blink back into himself.
He turned—and froze.
Two figures were running toward him. One with blond hair, eyes burning with a foreign light, the other taller and sharper, his presence older than his age. For a second, Jin thought he was hallucinating. The banquet's hero—the chairman's grandson—was right in front of him.
Diego stopped, a careless grin spreading across his face. "Didn't think I'd find anyone else hiding out back here. What are you doing out in the cold?"
Jin hesitated, then said flatly, "Nothing. Just looking."
Diego tilted his head. "At what? That forest over there?"
Jin's eyes flicked back to the mist, the grass, the scarred rock. He answered quietly, "You don't need to know. It's just a forest, after all."
Diego's grin widened, warm and easy. "Then let's keep in touch. From now on, you're my friend. Talk to me like you're talking now—no masks, no acting tough. Just us."
He glanced at the taller boy beside him. "What do you think, Ryu?"
Ryu Seong-jin didn't say a word. He only gave the slightest nod, his expression unreadable, his eyes glinting as if he already knew more than either of them.
Jin thought Diego was joking. Friendship, just like that? At a place like this?
But the truth of it would come sooner than he expected. The next day, everything began to change.