The King Likes Men

•48•

A week. They have a week to study. Study for what? Hoseok didn't quite understand.

The next event was a Question and Answer segment. They'd have a week to study for it, having access to request books from the king's personal library and to the internet.

It was great to have internet again.

Technically, the palace has had wifi this entire time, but the candidates weren't allowed to have access to it. Something about them taking pictures of secret things and uploading them to social media and whatnot.

Cellphones had been confiscated since the very beginning. Even now the only way they could use the internet was under supervision.

One wrong click and you're out.

Hoseok didn't exactly know what to start studying on. The Royal Queen dowager was going to be the one asking questions and it could literally be about anything and that frightened the heck out of Hoseok.

He still wasn't interested in winning, but he had to keep Taehyung in the competition because of the condition he was in. It was best to keep him here and have the best medics in the country to tend to him because he was a possible spouse for the king than to have him at a regular hospital where he was just another patient.

And if Hoseok gets disqualified, he'd be worried as hell over the kid.

Or at least, that's how he works everything out in his brain.

"What are you going to focus on?" Choi Junhong asks him in the lounge. Most of them are already on computers, a soldier watching over their shoulder as they Navered information regarding various subjects.

"I don't know," Hoseok says honestly. "There's so much."

"Yeah, I get you," he says. "Politics, religion, wars, personal experiences. They're really not giving us a lot of information, it's completely unfair."

Hoseok can't help but agree. If they weren't going to narrow down the subjects then they might as well just base this stuff off of common sense and leave it at that.

But he couldn't risk it. "What are you studying?"

"The effects of global warming."

"Interesting," he says. Not really. He glances around the room. Nope, not asking Jackson. "Suwoong-ssi, what are you studying on?"

Suwoong gives him a sheepish smile from across the room, a laptop on his lap and a soldier right behind him with his eyes glued to the screen. "Suicide. We got quite a high percentage of people committing suicide within our country. Ages range from like eighteen to thirty. I think it could be something that might pop up."

That was impressive, he didn't know that. "Jaehwan-ssi? You?"

"Other forms of governmental structure," Jaehwan replies, not looking up from his book.

Hoseok scrunches his nose at that. "Really? Why?"

"You never know if a question like that could come up," he shrugs. "Are you not going to study anything?"

A good question, really. "I just don't know what to study. I might just end up winging it or something."

They all look at him like he's crazy. Maybe he was.

"What are your friends studying?"

Were Jimin and Tae even studying? He couldn't help but wonder about that. Jimin did come early to request some books, then left with like five of them in hand. "I don't know."

"Well just pick something," Junhong suggests, "better to know a lot about something than just go and wing it."

He had a point.