"Chairman. Are you really… all right with this?"

"All right with what? With what?"

"That is…"

Do-beom Hwang could not get the words out properly, and Tak-hyeon Lee laughed as though he found it entertaining.

"Why? I'm alive and perfectly well and I'm making a gift of it — is that strange to you?"

"…Yes. You're still in good health, and I wonder whether it's right to be talking about inheritance and gifts already."

Tak-hyeon Lee nodded and said,

"Even if we start preparing now, it could take two or three years at the shortest and ten at the longest. So we have to move quickly. And it's something that has to be done while Mun-jong is inside, too."

"Is that because Mun-jong could get in the way of it?"

"That's right."

Tak-hyeon Lee let out a light laugh and said,

"Either way, it's a fact that things are awkward with Mun-jong around. He wants to start while Mun-jong isn't there. But do you know what's more interesting than that?"

"There was an interesting… part to it?"

"There was. Option two. That is a method I truly never once thought of."

"Option two would be… you mean the madam paying the inheritance tax for them?"

"That's right. Ha ha ha. I've called him a madman as a joke before now, but that boy really is a madman. He says the thing an ordinary man can't even think of as though it were the most obvious thing in the world. How would anyone come up with a method like that without being mad? He's looking two moves and three moves ahead, that one."

Do-beom Hwang could feel the admiration packed inside the word madman when Tak-hyeon Lee used it.

And carefully he asked what it was that had made Tak-hyeon Lee admire him.

"He proposed it so that Gyeong-eun's stake wouldn't shrink if the madam paid for them — isn't that all it is? Isn't that why he proposed it?"

"That's only the reason on the surface. The heart of it is somewhere else."

"Somewhere else?"

Tak-hyeon Lee sat with one…