At Cheonghwa High School, the charity cases belong to the Shudra class. Slaves.

The constitution of this country says nobody is to be discriminated against on the basis of social standing.

It’s written down plainly enough, and it does not apply here.

A caste system exists, and there’s no arguing with it.

The Brahmins are the children of chaebol houses.

The Kshatriya are the children of politicians, generals, senior civil servants.

The Vaishya are the children of small-business owners, ordinary judges, prosecutors, accountants, doctors.

I’m an untouchable. There’s no getting into their world.

“That was a pure soul, back then. Heh.”

Today’s version of me got to laugh at the pure one I used to be.

I’d been under the impression that if I worked hard and turned up, the way it went in middle school, friends would follow.

I thought, simply, that I’d be able to mix with them without trouble.

And Cheonghwa is coeducational, with strong arts and athletics on top of it.

For a boy out of an all-boys middle school with good marks behind him, it was the perfect environment for building a fantasy.

Reality was a bust. It didn’t take long to learn in the bone that my fantasy was never going to become anything.

In the first weeks I was tall and good-looking enough to hold a conversation now and then.

Then the fact that I was a charity case got around, and the air changed.

Classmates I’d naively taken for friends started avoiding me. It was like something out of a lie.

I’m not exaggerating. The moment the charity-case label went on, I was frozen out.

The teachers were no different. A handful aside, they all kept me at arm’s length.

Good marks were the only reason it stayed even that mild. If the grades hadn’t held I’d never have lasted to graduation.

Knowing all that, I still worked myself up to trying a few times.

Every time, I got treated like a man made of glass.

My father’s family had been cold enough to build me a steel mind, and that was what carried me through. Before the regression I had not one friend from high school.

Three years of it, papered over with humiliation and trauma.

“Grandmother. This time I’m going to live it differently.”

At this point in my life, school had a hand around my throat.

Without my parents’ attention I wouldn’t have got through the period at all.

Second year.

Five of us came in as charity cases that year, myself included.

By second year there were exactly two left.

They called me a stubborn animal, and I stayed to the end and took the diploma.

High school stayed lodged in me as a complex I never worked out.

I think my grandmother sent me back to this point so I could heal my own past.

“Still can’t get over that grass. Real turf. A facility like this in the middle of Gangnam — how does that make sense?”

Standing at the main gate, the golf range is off to the right. The old main building sits in the centre, three storeys.

On the left is the five-storey building they call the new wing. It has an underground pool built to international competition specification.

Above ground: the third-year canteen, an indoor gymnasium doubling as an assembly hall across the first and second floors, third-year classrooms on the third, study rooms, the club rooms that matter.

Behind the main building, a two-storey arts hall sits in its own handsome style.

The full majesty of an autonomous private high school occupying a slab of the most expensive land in Gangnam.

People say the land share alone runs past the trillion mark.

And on top of that, the foundation runs an equestrian centre out in Yongin.

In the old life I got no use out of any of this magnificence.

Unlike me, raised on ordinary means, this lot had been laying down the basics — riding, swimming, golf — since they were small.

I spent my days with my head down, mapping the floor.

The situation now is very different.

My shoulders are open, to start with.

I went toward the classroom on soft, springing floor tiles with give in them.

“Money really is the best thing there is.”

Cheonghwa poured enormous funds into improving the place every year.

Ivy over the outside of the buildings.

Inside, the period character got kept while the facilities were replaced with something radical.

Central air conditioning, heating, air purifiers, all of it running as standard.

Any resource they needed got funded through the unofficial parents’ association.

“Looking at it now — even the slippers on these kids were all designer.”

Not a Nike or an Adidas anywhere in the racks. The second-year shoe racks in the main entrance.

Designer shoes and designer slippers, almost without exception.

Most of it is the kind of thing ordinary people never get a look at.

The three-stripe stationery-shop slippers are mine alone. And even so——

“Na na~”

I’m humming without meaning to.

There was a time I had to take a deep breath before I walked into this classroom.

I don’t feel any need for that now.

Thump, thump.

At this very moment my short position is out there fighting and breeding.

I only have to wait a month.

After that there won’t be a boy in this school richer than I am.

A quiet confidence wrapped itself around me.

Trudge, trudge.

I stood in front of the classroom. Around this time they’d redone the corridor floors in marble too.

“The body remembers everything.”

My feet knew the way to the room precisely, like a formula stamped into memory.

And so, the classroom.

“Second year, class three……”

Something between love and hatred puts its head up. My time here, stamped into this space.

The painful memories come back fresh, one after another.

I went in through the open back door.

The classroom in front of me again. Twenty students.

A large teaching screen and an electronic board. And the ergonomic desks and chairs they replaced wholesale in the same period, at cost.

For the sake of study efficiency, desks and chairs fitted to each body get supplied in bulk every new term.

Every classroom has an air purifier and a central heating and cooling unit as standard, of course.

“What did you do at the weekend?”

“What do you think? Ten hours of intensive with Choi Hyeonseok.”

“What? Choi, the top Korean-language tutor?”

“Mm.”

“Wow. I heard he’s impossible to get. How did you manage it?”

“You know how my mother is.”

“I’m jealous……”

“I’m doing it again this Saturday. Want to come?”

“Would that be all right?”

“Well…… if you want to……”

“Minju! I love you~”

Two girls, working each other.

Choi Hyeonseok, the top Korean tutor in Gangnam. I know that name too.

A famous Gangnam name said to pull in tens of billions a year.

Kang Minju, boasting while pretending she isn’t. A pretty girl with a fox’s face and a bob that suits her enormously.

Her grandfather served as director of a general hospital, and her father currently runs a plastic surgery clinic in Gangnam.

The rumour was that they rake the money in.

She’s one of the ones who used to look straight through me, naturally.

Our eyes met just now as I came in the back door, and she turned her head away immediately.

Even while she was growing she had her father’s help on her face, and it’s been shaped into the standard surgical beauty. It gives her an unpleasant look.

Kang Minju is putting out a pale pink aura.

Exactly the shade that suits a fox.

I went to my seat and sat down. Back row, by the window. The least desirable seat in a classroom full of appetite for study.

Top tutors? I don’t envy them for a second.

Barring some chain reaction out of the butterfly effect, I can hold the marks I want this time round as well.

I know every question that’s coming, not only in the second-year exams but in every exam left after them.

The university entrance test? Heh heh heh.

That one doesn’t need saying. I’m not predicting the future. I can state it.

An opportunity and a privilege in one. Absolute gift.

“Minju, me too!”

“Any spaces left?”

Students sitting in the middle of the next row hurried over.

Every one of them has their life staked on the entrance exams a year out.

Their parents invested, and their expectations scale to it.

Watching this alone tells you the upper class doesn’t maintain itself for free.

You see a gold spoon and the first instinct is to condemn them, and this lot grind hard in their own way. I’ve never heard of any of them asleep before midnight.

If she’s taking a top tutor on weekends as well, it’s obvious enough.

Games? Celebrities? Obsessive fandom?

The children I knew here in the old life didn’t qualify for any of it.

“Well……. I’d have to talk to my mother about it.”

You can see what she’s going to become. Playing politics, and still in high school.

Everything Kang Minju does is calculated.

It’s her mother’s operation. Kang Minju’s mother is a fairly well-known character actress.

Most of the drama roles she takes are sharp-eyed, ill-mannered upper-class wives.

The parents of Oh Yunseo, the girl Kang Minju reached out to first, are senior civil servants.

Her mother is a bureau director at Health and Welfare, her father at director level in Economy and Finance.

And the families of the ones who asked to join afterward are nothing to dismiss either.

Kang Minju is scanning the classmates who came running.

She’s checking whether the specific ones her mother named are attaching themselves.

Not bad work, for a fox.

In the old life I read none of the current in the room.

I read it now, obviously. The knowledge of a man who’s been through it is running.

A prickle.

Our eyes met again in that moment.

A snort.

I didn’t look away. I gave her a slight smile.

“……!!”

Kang Minju’s temper goes up. She didn’t care for that.

In the old life I’d have dropped my eyes immediately. No — I’d never have raised my head to begin with.

But I am not the Ha Tae-ung who used to shrink here.

That fox routine of yours. I can see all of it.

I put the meaning into my eyes and held them on her.

“Tch.”

Kang Minju makes a small contemptuous noise and turns away.

Fine. You’re very impressive.

“Morning.”

“You’re in early today.”

Classmates came into the room one and two at a time, exchanging greetings.

The air in a classroom at arrival time here is nothing like an ordinary school’s.

I’ve never heard casual slang or a light bit of swearing in it.

Games and otaku obsessions are outside their interest. Waving, wearing a cultured and entirely false smile, performing closeness. That’s the baseline.

I’m the exception in every category, of course.

Nobody even meets my eyes. They greet their own kind, sit down, study, or chat with the ones at their level.

An island, isolated inside a classroom scene belonging to special people.

“Tae-ung. You lived a very well-behaved life.”

A space that stayed with me as trauma.

I threw myself at studying like a madman in order to survive it.

After I got to university I thrashed about trying to forget high school.

I went into the army as though running from the trauma too.

At the training centre I volunteered for special forces.

The head surgery could have got me exempted, and instead I worked a trick to enlist as active duty.

I put my body and mind through commando training and hardened both.

That brutal service is what got me some distance from the trauma.

And the centre of the trauma was high school. Somehow I’ve come back, and it’s here.

I put a cold smile on my mouth and looked over the classroom with an objective eye.

The billion won my grandmother gave me.

Without that money, coming back like this would have changed nothing at all.

It would have been a disaster rather than a chance. As it is, there’s a great deal more worth trying.

Scrape.

Then the closed front door of the classroom opened.

Eight twenty.

Not the hour our homeroom teacher arrives.

“Hi.”

A boy came in with a close-cropped head and a black backpack over one shoulder.

Around a hundred and seventy centimetres. Small, but the body moves well.

A small skull that makes him look hard as a stone. Oh Gwangjun.

That arrogant set to his mouth is exactly the same now as it was then.

The expression of a boy with nothing in the world to fear.

A dark aura comes off Oh Gwangjun.

“There he is. Gwangjun.”

“Good holiday?”

“Me? Always fine. Hahaha.”

He let out a big open laugh and started walking toward my side of the room. And then our eyes met.

A slow smile.

He gives me a nasty little grin.

That smile. I remember it as clearly as something from yesterday.

The devil who locked me inside that dark trauma. And here we are again.

He handled me differently from the classmates who treated me as glass.

The only one who ever made a point of acknowledging I existed.

A flash.

Our eyes hit again. I didn’t look away.

Across every memory I have of this place, I kept my head down over a workbook so I’d never meet anyone’s eyes.

This morning I didn’t do that.

Trudge, trudge.

Oh Gwangjun came right up close. His seat is directly beside mine.

“You lost your sense of fear? Good rest on Children’s Day, was it? Heh heh heh.”

The devil. He’s genuinely wicked when he smiles. He fixes his eyes on mine and doesn’t move them.

I looked straight into both of his, level about it.

Under the desk, my hand calmly turned on the recorder on my phone.

“Right. It’s been far too long……”

Oh Gwangjun, who I never thought I’d face again. More than ten years since graduation.

“Has Ha Tae-ung taken something today?”

“Has he lost his mind?”

The others in the room are whispering. My reaction has caught them off guard.

Officially, there are no delinquents at Cheonghwa High School.

What there is instead is a thoroughly enforced class system.

Within it, Oh Gwangjun’s family sits somewhere between Vaishya and Kshatriya.

This one’s father came up from the provinces and got posted as a division chief at the Eastern District Prosecutors’ Office.

A Seoul district chief prosecutor, the rank at which teeth start to bite even among prosecutors.

Naturally the boy’s shoulders went back to match.

And he has a particular talent for picking out charity cases like me to work on.

A knock.

He shoved my desk with his thigh and planted himself right in front of me. And then.

“Drop your eyes, you little bastard.”

He barked it at me for looking straight at him instead of away.

However strict the rules are, there’s always an exception where a charity case is concerned.

A snort. I didn’t look away, and I smiled at him one more time.

And then.

“Drop your own. You little bastard.”

(End of Chapter 7)