In 2009, in Busan, there was a girl named Ha-neul who was a total genius. In the most recent national mock exam, she had nailed a perfect score. To save herself a little extra time for studying, she never walked anywhere; she always ran. To avoid wasting time picking out clothes, she sorted her underwear for each day of the week in advance. To keep her stomach happy while she sat at her desk for hours on end, she ate only food that was easy to digest, and she finished every meal in exactly seven minutes.
She had to study for a full seventeen hours a day before she would finally allow herself to go to bed. For her, the happiest moment in the world was the moment she was solving math formulas. Even if her family argued loudly over the factory her grandfather had left behind, even if a full family civil war broke out in the next room, she did not care at all. She only stopped writing when her countdown timer went off.
After that, she calmly told her family to just sell the factory off, since it wasn't making any money anyway, and that it would be better to take all the cash and move to Seoul.
So she transferred to a school in Seoul. And there, she bumped into Dong-gu, another genius who had also just scored a perfect score on the national mock exam.
But a forest cannot hold two tigers, and the top spot in a school cannot be split in half. So the battle between the two of them officially began.
On her first day at the new school, her classmates were wildly curious about Ha-neul and crowded around her desk to ask her questions. Even Dong-gu was curious, and he walked over to see her for himself. But unexpectedly, Ha-neul shut him down coldly, with a single sentence.
"Get lost."
From then on, the whole class understood that Ha-neul was a true study freak, and nobody bothered her anymore, if only to avoid getting snapped at.
But when Dong-gu saw Ha-neul exercising with a book held up in front of her face so she could study while she moved, he couldn't help feeling a mixture of chills and fear.
That day in class, the teacher gave them a hard math problem. Dong-gu's pen flew across his scratch paper as he worked through the calculation, while Ha-neul simply waved her hands in the air and did the whole thing in her head.
Dong-gu got to the result very fast. But just as he was about to raise his hand, he heard Ha-neul blurt out the answer. In that moment, he had the distinct feeling that his number one spot was seriously threatened.
Not only that, but his title as the person who got to school the earliest every single day was stolen by Ha-neul as well.
He immediately chased after her, and the two of them raced each other step by step down the road to the school gate, neither one willing to give an inch.
Back in those school days, they both firmly believed that if they just tried their best like that, they would get everything they wanted. Unexpectedly, when the valedictorian spot at the prestigious Seoul Medical University was announced, it called out only one of their names.
Time flew by, all the way to the year 2023.
Dong-gu had become a highly famous plastic surgeon. Not only did he have a great reputation in the industry, he also did a great deal of charity work. His social media channel had millions of followers. Simply posting a random advertisement could easily bring in billions of won, and he owned ten plastic surgery centers under his own name.
Because there was no longer anyone in his life he needed to compete with, his days simply passed by peacefully. Until one day, a woman walked into his center and booked a surgery. The dozens of bodyguards following her were proof enough that she was no joke. At that point, Dong-gu had no idea that his entire life was about to be turned upside down by this woman.
As for Ha-neul, because she hadn't done well on her college entrance exam back then, she had only gotten into a lesser-known school. Now she was a third-year anesthesiologist. Sadly, her advising professor did not like her, and he constantly found excuses to pick on her in every possible way. The old professor also often pushed emergency cases onto her to handle, to the point where even her fellow doctors felt annoyed on her behalf.
Even though she had stayed up all night, Ha-neul still had to bite the bullet and follow orders and walk into the operating room with a completely exhausted look in her eyes. Staying up late constantly, combined with irregular eating habits, had left her tormented by stomach aches lately. She barely dragged herself home, but before she could even eat, the professor called her right back in.
She had no choice but to grab her things and run as fast as she could back to the hospital.
And on that very fateful day, both of their careers fell straight off a cliff.
On her way to meet her best friend Hong-ran, Ha-neul was hit by such severe pain that she collapsed in the middle of the street. Right at that moment, a truck came rushing toward her. Luckily, the driver swerved in time, so she narrowly escaped death.
At the exact same time, a medical accident happened during Dong-gu's surgery. The patient wouldn't stop bleeding. Even though he tried his best to save her, the patient soon lost all vital signs. While everyone else in the room was totally panicking, only the anesthesiologist, Jin-seok, seemed strangely calm.
In the end, the patient died right there on Dong-gu's operating table.
Even though he firmly believed that every one of his steps had followed medical standards, because the patient's identity was so special, the story blew up in the news almost immediately. And the weirdest thing of all was that the camera in the operating room just happened to stop working right when the incident occurred, which made people suspect that someone had deleted the footage on purpose.
Dong-gu was completely shocked that the camera footage had suddenly vanished. It was as if an invisible hand were deliberately trying to frame him.
The prosecution then found a blood thinner in the victim's body, a drug that is never used in plastic surgery.
Dong-gu's old classmate, Dae-young, watched the news on television and felt very angry and upset. Even though he had always seen Dong-gu as a rival, he was the one who understood and trusted Dong-gu's character the most. He was sarcastic on the outside, but on the inside, he was worried sick about his friend.
In court, the prosecution used the bottle of blood thinner to demand that Dong-gu be charged with manslaughter. The defense lawyer argued back that Dong-gu had never brought this type of drug into his clinic.
But then the prosecution suddenly pulled out a bottle of blood thinner, claiming it had been found right there in Dong-gu's clinic. And even worse, his fingerprints were clearly printed on it.
Dong-gu was extremely shocked. Any explanation at this point had become useless.
Just like that, he lost the case. Not a normal loss, either. He lost absolutely everything.