La vente de l’Ares Garden marks the collapse of the place that had organized Jungkook Jeon’s darkest identity and his relationship with Chen Wu. When Jungkook and Shelby Anderson Barnum encounter Chen outside the venue, Chen reveals that he has signed the papers transferring ownership. The news turns a familiar space of illegal combat into a site of loss: Chen is surrendering the business because he can no longer manage it, while Jungkook is forced to confront the disappearance of the arena in which he had become its emblematic fighter.

Causes and Background

The Ares Garden is not merely a boxing venue. It is known for illegal fights, and Jungkook has become its public face, entering the ring first and fighting until an opponent is unconscious. The venue’s atmosphere is tied to the darkness in which he feels able to release the violent part of himself. Yet even within that brutality, Jungkook retains one limit: although a fight to the death might be conceivable in such a world, he does not want another person’s death on his conscience. Namjoon Kim understands this boundary and supports him before his matches, making the arena part of a relationship of loyalty as well as a system of violence.

Chen’s decision arises from his inability to continue managing the business. He tells Jungkook that the buyer is a friend who will take care of everything with his daughter, presenting the transfer as an orderly handover rather than an abrupt destruction of the venue. That reassurance does not soften the impact. For Jungkook, the sale confirms that the space he treated as permanent was always vulnerable to forces beyond his control.

What Happens

The event takes place after Jungkook and Shelby pass near the Ares Garden during their work together. They cross the road cautiously and approach Chen, who immediately embraces both younger people. After greeting them, he explains that he has just signed the sale documents. Jungkook reacts with disbelief and asks why Chen would sell the venue. Chen answers that he can no longer run the business and adds that the purchaser is someone he trusts.

The announcement produces an immediate physical and emotional change in Jungkook. The former underground boxer does not openly display his pain at first, but the news constricts him and breaks his heart because the Ares Garden has occupied most of his time. The venue’s loss is therefore experienced as the loss of a personal territory, a professional identity, and a relationship with his mentor. His grip on Shelby’s hand weakens until he releases it completely, a small gesture that makes his distress visible to her.

Jungkook leaves before saying goodbye to Chen. He walks quickly with one objective: to discharge the emotion that he cannot express in conversation. Shelby tries to follow him, but her smaller size prevents her from catching up. She falls again, aggravating the pain in her left leg, then rises with difficulty and continues after him toward the university student dormitory. The scene converts the sale from a piece of business news into an immediate crisis between Jungkook’s uncontained anger and Shelby’s determination to remain near him.

Consequences and Aftermath

The sale removes the institutional setting that had given Jungkook’s violence a routine, an audience, and a place of belonging. At the Ares Garden, he could enter the ring, receive the crowd’s acclaim, accept dollar bills, and transform inner darkness into a recognizable role. Once Chen sells it, that role loses its established stage. Jungkook’s first response is not acceptance but flight and the desire to find another outlet for his aggression.

The event also changes the balance between Chen and Jungkook. Chen remains a mentor figure, but he can no longer preserve the environment through which that mentorship operated. Jungkook’s refusal even to offer a farewell shows that the sale feels like abandonment or dislocation, regardless of Chen’s practical reasons and his assurance that a trusted buyer will assume responsibility. The venue’s transfer thus fractures an attachment without necessarily turning the two men into enemies.

Shelby’s presence gives the aftermath a different direction. She has already recognized the darkness surrounding Jungkook, just as Sunmi Eun perceives a comparable emptiness in Shelby during therapy. Their connection is described as a bond between two lost people who search for themselves while trying to find each other. In that context, Shelby’s pursuit after Jungkook falls and hurts herself again is more than physical accompaniment: it places their fragile attachment beside the collapse of his older world. Her effort to reach him suggests that the relationship may become the new, unstable space in which he must confront what the Ares Garden once allowed him to avoid.

Narrative Significance

The sale is a value shift from belonging to dispossession. Before Chen’s announcement, the Ares Garden functions as Jungkook’s domain, however dangerous its rules and methods may be. After the announcement, the same place becomes evidence that his identity has been built on something temporary. The scene gains force from the contrast between Chen’s calm explanation of a signed transaction and Jungkook’s nearly wordless devastation. A legal transfer produces an emotional rupture that no contract can contain.

Its placement within the wider story also connects several networks of care and damage. Jungkook’s underground world is linked to Chen’s authority and Namjoon’s friendship; Shelby’s response links it to trauma, therapy, and mutual protection. Elsewhere, Shelby’s psychological treatment addresses self-harm, an eating disorder, and cannabis use, while her friends intervene when they see the physical consequences of her pain. The sale belongs to the same larger pattern: healing cannot depend on a single person or a single place, especially when that place has normalized violence.

The event therefore prepares Jungkook for a transition away from the Ares Garden’s closed circuit of darkness, spectatorship, and bodily punishment. It does not make him gentle immediately. Instead, it exposes the cost of the world that had made his brutality legible and leaves him momentarily without its structure. The later image of Jungkook and Shelby sharing a home in Los Angeles gives that rupture a distant counterpoint: the fighter’s former territory is replaced, however imperfectly, by a private life organized around attachment rather than combat.