Even so, he still tried to comfort himself with the thought that at the very least he still had friends who believed in him. Unexpectedly, his close circle of friends also turned their backs on him. In a single night, he lost everything, from his friends and his career all the way down to his money. Dong-gu scratched at his head in frustration, unable to understand why he was being wronged this badly.
At this time, his old senior, Kyung-min, came to comfort him, saying that the most important thing right now was to find a way to appeal and clear his name. Kyung-min introduced him to a few lawyers who specialized in medical lawsuits. Although Dong-gu was very grateful, the tough part was that he was carrying a compensation debt of hundreds of billions of won.
Kyung-min said he would step up and borrow money to help him hire a new lawyer, and told him to just sell off whatever properties were under his name to handle things for now.
Back to Ha-neul. After fainting in the middle of the road, she was taken to the hospital and diagnosed with acute gallbladder inflammation, and she had to have her gallbladder surgically removed on the spot.
But what she cared about the most was something else entirely. At the moment the truck came rushing toward her, a thought had flashed through her mind.
Maybe it's better to just die and get it over with.
That thought haunted her constantly, and her feet unconsciously carried her to the psychology department. Standing outside the clinic door, her mind was heavily torn, and she was stuck in a dilemma, not knowing whether to go in or not.
In the end, she still decided to walk in. She told the doctor about the impulsive thought she'd had in that moment. The doctor thought that dealing with too much mental pressure for too long had accidentally brought on symptoms of depression. So they advised her to take a test.
Sure enough, after answering a long series of questions, the results showed that Ha-neul really did have depression.
This made her unable to believe her own eyes. She clearly felt that she was still completely normal. The doctor advised her to get treated with medication. Ha-neul spaced out for a long time, deeply rejecting that diagnosis in her heart. She was sure she was totally fine.
So she threw the bag of medicine away and carried a few cans of beer home instead.
As soon as she got there, hearing her mother and her younger brother bickering, she instinctively felt terribly depressed and wanted to avoid everything. Ha-neul walked straight up to the rooftop, and unexpectedly, there was a man standing there. She walked closer to ask who he was, but when the person turned around, she was shocked to realize it was Dong-gu.
Two people who used to be mortal enemies during their school days had now accidentally run into each other, right when they had both hit rock bottom in life.
It turned out that not long ago, because Dong-gu had gotten stuck with a huge debt of tens of billions of won, he had suddenly lost everything overnight. From a medical god at the peak of his career, he had been forced to drift back down and live in a tiny rental room on this rooftop.
Right at that moment, his mother called. Not to comfort her son, but simply to confirm whether the rumors on the internet were true or not. The reason was that Dong-gu's father was a candidate for the president of the Cardiology Association in America, and she would not allow her son's scandal to ruin the big plan.
Feeling like his life had never been so dark, Dong-gu had walked out onto the rooftop to complain about his twisted fate, and the tears had just kept pouring out.
Right then, a female voice rang out from behind him. It was his enemy, Ha-neul.
Both of them froze, because they were so shocked. Ha-neul was stunned to see Dong-gu show up at all, but what gave her goosebumps the most was that he had actually rented the exact room on her own family's rooftop.
Dong-gu immediately called to blame Kyung-min, because this place had been recommended by Kyung-min's junior. Coincidentally, Ha-neul's best friend, Hong-ran, had also just arrived. Hong-ran was the one who had recommended this house to Kyung-min.
Both Ha-neul and Dong-gu felt incredibly annoyed. Running into his old rival right when he was at his most miserable was something Dong-gu just could not accept.
Hearing that Dong-gu was losing his cool, Kyung-min teased him. "Could it be that Ha-neul is your first love?"
Dong-gu brushed it off right away. "First love, my foot. She's an enemy, and my biggest enemy at that."
School memories suddenly came rushing back. Ever since Ha-neul transferred in, the class had held two national first-place spots. Their classmates admired Ha-neul's competitive spirit, while also placing bets on who would take the top spot in the upcoming midterm exam. This put a massive amount of pressure on Dong-gu.
As a result, for the first time in his life, he dropped to second place. Looking at the scoreboard, Dong-gu was so shocked that he fainted right there on the spot and had to be carried to the nurse's office by his friends like a soulless corpse.
That incident made him lose face and fired up his fierce competitive blood. From then on, he had to compete with Ha-neul in everything, from zooming past her on his scooter at top speed in the morning, to copying her habit of chewing raw coffee powder to stay up all night studying.
The two of them had spent years having life-or-death battles like that.
Right now, Ha-neul was also complaining to her friend Hong-ran about that past, full of drama as it was. Hong-ran joked that this looked exactly like an enemies-to-lovers script, the kind where the two of them would eventually fall in love. Ha-neul firmly stated that Dong-gu, with his sky-high ego, would definitely move out soon.
Sure enough, Dong-gu really did want to leave. But when he found out the deposit would not be refunded, he bitterly compromised with reality.
He went to find Ha-neul and told her that if she wasn't too happy about seeing him, she should just try to endure it a little, because even after selling all of his assets, he was still carrying a debt of 3.7 billion won on his shoulders.
Ha-neul was a bit stunned to hear that, but she still coldly told him she hoped he would move out soon.
That night, a man snuck up onto the rooftop. Just as he got close to Dong-gu's door, the motion sensor light suddenly switched on, and he ran away in fear. Dong-gu came out to check, but he didn't see anyone around.
The next day, Dong-gu still tried to find a new place to live, but because of his reputation as a scandal-hit doctor, every last landlord rejected him.