“Oh Gwangjun, that cheek of yours is a sight. Heh heh heh.”

“A guy who says he boxes, taking a hiding off a skeleton?”

“Your mother finds out, she’ll go through the roof.”

“Shut up! Fuck!”

Cheonghwa’s rules are strict, and there is a clearly marked range in which exceptions apply.

The PE prep room, off to one side of the sports ground.

Not everyone who enrols at Cheonghwa is a prodigy.

When the grades won’t hold, the school steers them toward elite universities as athletic specialists.

Riding, golf, ice hockey, canoe. They can choose freely among a handful of sports that are only teachable when there’s money behind them.

Specialist athletic subjects no ordinary family could attempt, run naturally enough for upper-class children.

Nobody may ever call them gifted, but they get diverted into elite sport so their social position holds.

First they’re placed at an elite university through arts or athletics, where few apply and the odds run in their favour. Then at a convenient moment they transfer internally and launder both the university and the major.

On that count Cheonghwa is unmatched, and can fairly be called the cradle of specialist athletics.

It’s no exaggeration to say the specialist PE departments at this country’s elite universities are filled with Cheonghwa alumni.

“Don’t let it get to you. Here, have one. He’s a charity case at the end of the day.”

“Your big brothers will stamp on him for you. Heh heh.”

“Loyalty.”

Oh Gwangjun had used the lunch hour to come and see the PE students.

This lot often settled their stomachs with cigarettes rather than food that didn’t suit them.

Whirrrrr.

The air purifier fan spins furiously at the smoke.

The PE prep room is a smoking area the school tacitly allows.

“Fuck. Lee Hyoju says don’t make trouble for her.”

Oh Gwangjun ground his teeth on it.

“Lee Hyoju said that?”

“Is there something going on between the charity case and Lee Hyoju?”

“What are you talking about? That family would turn upside down if they heard it.”

The boys who run with Oh Gwangjun come from families of much the same order.

Sons of private clinic owners, a regional savings bank, a mid-sized accounting firm.

Children their mothers managed from first thing to last and turned into finished works.

Arrogant as they are, even they carry an instinctive fear of Lee Hyoju.

They recognise her as belonging to an entirely different order from themselves. They’d placed her, quite literally, in the heavens.

Not the sort you gain anything by touching.

“Hey. You going to take it and leave it at that?”

Yang Cheolgyu asked it with the cigarette still in his mouth.

“Me? I’ve got a plan……. A plan. Hffff.”

Oh Gwangjun draws long on the cigarette. A rank, wicked sneer spreads slowly across his mouth.

“……??”

Park Jiung stared at the figure settling into the seat opposite as though it belonged there.

Ha Tae-ung?

One of the five admitted under Cheonghwa’s charity-case intake in the same year.

Three of them had withdrawn. Two were left.

You’d think they would have grown close for the support of it, and instead each was desperate to avoid the other.

Charity cases seen together only drew more eyes. It worked against them.

They’d have been mocked as a peasants’ club, obviously.

The ones whose minds gave out first fell away first, in order.

Park Jiung is from Guryong Village.

A rare case of reaching Cheonghwa from the absolute bottom.

From the only slum left standing inside Gangnam, the one most people in the country have heard of.

To get out of it, Park Jiung set his teeth and dug into his books.

His ambition is a large one.

His father had been a detective, upright as steel cord.

But unlucky fate flung Park Jiung out into a rough world on his own.

His parents had been driving home at night from a relative’s funeral in the provinces when the accident took them both.

Creditors barged in with their demands before the funeral could even be held.

Then the police came as well. They said his dead father had taken bribes.

It was nonsense that made no sense at all.

They turned the whole house over looking for evidence.

Four people had lived on a salary that came in once a month.

His father had no other income whatsoever.

A man who’d held on in violent crime in a pair of worn-out boots.

He never created the kind of situation that would require a loan shark or a bribe in the first place.

Payday was the day they tasted meat. That was the measure of how frugally the two of them lived.

Even ordinary seasonal fruit they got only by timing the sales.

All year round it was kimchi, bean sprout soup and fried egg that came up most often as side dishes.

And they were caring for a grandmother on top of it. Even so, his mother spoke about what made them happy before she ever spoke about what they lacked.

Thrift was in her bones.

She took part-time work too, saying she had to at least set her only son up with a place of his own when he married.

The little purse of money had been gathered that doggedly.

With the two of them gone that way, Park Jiung’s household came apart overnight.

His grandmother was of the old generation and understood nothing of how the world ran.

They went into Guryong Village with nothing but a few million won in hand, as though driven there.

Park Jiung, who’d had an ordinary childhood like anybody else’s, began living at the bottom from that point.

The problem was that his dead father had been an only child as well.

He was left with his grandmother and not one relative to ask for help.

Life began of scraping through each day on minimum living support from the district office.

He didn’t run with the boys his own age from Guryong.

For the sake of his dead parents, he was not going to fall into bad ways.

He clung to his studies, doggedly.

As Park Jiung got older, the doubts began.

The more he studied and the more he understood, the more of it looked suspicious.

The suspicion started to grow that somebody might have had a hand in his parents’ deaths.

Around that time, the things he’d missed in the chaos began coming back to him one at a time.

Some years after the accident, a colleague of his father’s came looking for him.

That man made the suspicion grow further.

He came all the way out to Guryong Village, and what he said, out of nowhere, was that he was sorry.

He left an envelope behind and went.

Park Jiung had never once lost first place through primary or middle school.

Like the hidden truth that turns up without fail in every revenge film and drama, he became certain that somebody stood behind his parents’ deaths.

With that thought hardening in him, he set his teeth and drove himself further into study.

To unravel the secret of their deaths, he needed power.

His excellent middle school results comfortably opened a place at Cheonghwa.

It was a result he’d got by clinging to a principal who had tried hard to talk him out of it.

The principal was worried about coming in on the charity-case intake.

He didn’t care.

Living without his parents, he’d learned the bitterest thing there is: a life with no money and no backing.

Cheonghwa, a playground for the children of the wealthy.

He wanted in somehow, wanted to build friendships with them, wanted to make a ladder out of it.

Reality wasn’t so accommodating. It had been a naive and stupid choice.

Charity case……

Inside Cheonghwa it meant the untouchable caste, and nothing else. He was treated exactly that way.

To people raised lacking nothing, a charity case was so much stinking filth.

Academic results were no different.

He’d come from a middle school inside the Gangnam district in his own way, and the actual gap was enormous.

He could study without rest and still not keep pace.

Something like an invisible wall of reinforced glass stood there.

Park Jiung has been turning it over a great deal lately.

Is there any need to stay at Cheonghwa to the end, handled like this?

Is it worth pledging several years of his life against?

He’d reached the point of blaming his own stupidity for trying to build connections he could borrow power from.

“Don’t agonise over it.”

“……??”

The words came from Ha Tae-ung, sitting opposite. Chopsticks loaded with bulgogi, looking straight at him.

“You’re sitting there like a half-and-half chicken.”

“Wh— what?”

“What, are you packing school in?”

“…….”

Chomp.

Ha Tae-ung shoves the bulgogi in whole and chews it with genuine relish.

He ate so well that Park Jiung, who’d had no appetite, felt his own mouth water.

Even with a mouthful that size, nothing about him looks greedy.

Swallow.

He got through it quickly.

The chopsticks didn’t stop. Next he lifted a great pile of sweet, spicy stir-fried pork.

At a pace that would carry an eating broadcast.

“A year to the entrance exam. Give up here and your parents will grieve.”

“……!!”

Ha Tae-ung closes his eyes to savour the food, moved by it, entirely sincere.

What is this guy talking about?

The rumour had gone round the school since morning.

The charity case Ha Tae-ung had stamped on Oh Gwangjun, who’d been playing at being a thug.

He’d been glad to hear it. And at the same time he’d thought it stupid.

If the thing could have been settled with force, Park Jiung would have stepped up long ago.

He’d learned taekwondo from his policeman father and built up basic conditioning from childhood.

His father held black belts in several martial arts, and his instruction had been very strict.

The good frame is his father’s genes too.

He could deal with the PE boys easily enough if it came to that.

But the reason he hadn’t stepped up rashly was clear.

Real power doesn’t come out of a fist. It comes out of a pen.

Anybody with a working head knows that much.

And Ha Tae-ung, stupidly, apparently not knowing it, had used his fists.

He’d endured a long time, right up to this morning.

Ha Tae-ung, who’d been disregarded no less than he had.

With today’s business, Ha Tae-ung’s life is finished.

“You feel sorry for me?”

“…….”

What is this, mind reading?

Ha Tae-ung had snatched the thought straight out of him, as though he were doing it deliberately.

The discomfort of it made him drop his eyes.

“You should try it. It’s bloody satisfying.”

Ha Tae-ung is behaving like a primary schooler.

“Get lost.”

Park Jiung raised only his eyes and spat the word out.

“That’s Ha Tae-ung, isn’t it?”

“A charity case threw a punch, with no fear in him at all?”

“Isn’t Oh Gwangjun’s father a division chief at Eastern District?”

“He can’t read his own place……”

“Birds of a feather.”

Students from every year had mixed together to watch the two of them and whisper.

Inside half a day the rumour had travelled fast enough that hundreds of them knew.

That was the size of the thing.

And the man chiefly responsible is sitting in front of Park Jiung right now.

“Scared?”

“…….”

Ha Tae-ung asks it back with a snort.

“I haven’t got time to run my mouth with you, so get out of my sight.”

Park Jiung’s eyes blazed. If this is a joke——

His fist tightened on it.

And then.

Footsteps. Soft steps.

Shadows coming up behind Park Jiung.

Uniform skirts hitched short at the waistband catch the eye. Three girls. The definitive ones, who don’t care that the school polices it.

“Even if it is one meal a day, isn’t he shovelling in rather a lot for something free?”

The girl sneered it with her eyes raised sharply.

From the start it looked like an approach designed to pick a fight with Park Jiung.

“Seora, let it go. My dad says kids like this have holes in their stomachs.”

“The food isn’t even good. Better it gets used up somehow.”

“Even so, our bear cub is stuffing himself far too much. If it’s left over it goes out as animal feed, and then there’s less for them, and if they go hungry, what then?”

“Still, the bear cub the school keeps comes first.”

“Well then. Shall we let it go?”

“Kind Seora, be patient. Animal welfare. They’ve a right to survive on their own.”

“Fine. I’m feeling generous today. Eat up, charity case. Oink oink. Hohoho.”

Crunch.

Head down, Park Jiung closed his fist.

He bites down hard enough for his jaw to tremble. Every time it’s a humiliation hard to bear, and every time he had to bear it.

Oh Seora, a girl in his class, who goes at Park Jiung whenever the lunch hour comes round.

The unlicensed house in Guryong Village where he lives with his grandmother. She’s the daughter of the man who owns the land it stands on.

With the midterms coming she’s been more hysterical than usual.

Park Jiung’s marks are always better than Oh Seora’s. Her manner, as though handling a serf out of another century, never varied.

But today.

“Oh ho. Quite the bumper harvest of nonsense out of you.”

(End of Chapter 10)