“Well done, Assistant Manager Yu.”

“Thank you, Team Leader.”

The VIP management team, Hyundo Department Store, Jamsil.

Yu Areum had finished the work entrusted to her yesterday, perfectly, and came in at eleven in the morning.

The team leader had put her start back on his own authority.

On a weekday the schedule would have earned her a day’s leave.

But at the weekend the VIP management team cannot rest.

Most of a week’s takings happen at the weekend.

Yu Areum came in at her leisure, and Team Leader Park Taesu greeted her with a bright face.

She had handled the VIP’s order more perfectly than anybody had looked for.

“Not even a card. Paid in full, in cash. The Director had a word of praise for it.”

“The Director did?”

Gu Jihye, Managing Director of the Sales Strategy Office, and the executive directly over the VIP management team.

She is famous for how hard she is to satisfy about staff.

And she had praise for it?

“Customer Ha Tae-ung came to about three hundred and thirty million yesterday, all told. Even I don’t put up takings like that in a day easily.”

VIPs do not spend as freely as people think.

It is generally the upstarts who enjoy sweeping a department store clean.

They arrive in a supercar, a Lamborghini or the like, throw money about, and show the upstart in every gesture.

The genuinely rich, by contrast, buy only what they actually need.

However magnificent a thing is, if they have no need of it they do not buy it on a whim.

And when they judge that they do need it, they put no limit on the price.

As Customer Ha Tae-ung did yesterday.

A professional shopper works by aiming exactly at a VIP’s taste.

And on that count Yu Areum has landed her first enormous hit since joining.

“The Director has instructed that you get the three per cent incentive. Congratulations again.”

“Th— thank you.”

Three per cent is the incentive set at a personal shopper’s ceiling.

Yesterday’s work has had her formally recognised inside the team.

And there was the bonus as well……

The ten-million-won electronic store voucher that came to her phone yesterday.

Customer Ha Tae-ung gave her that as a present, for her trouble.

In a single day she has earned an ordinary salaried worker’s year.

It is for occasions like this one that people work so hard to become personal shoppers.

VIP spending accounts for eighty per cent of a department store’s whole turnover.

It is on their spending that a store and its designer concessions are kept up and kept running.

And a good many of them, like Customer Ha Tae-ung, have the manners to pay gladly for the effort made on their behalf.

They understand what money is worth and what it is for, which is not a thing to expect of an upstart.

“See to the staff who helped, Assistant Manager Yu. Your own judgement.”

“Yes!”

Part of the incentive has to go to the few who helped her yesterday.

If she wants help next time, it is not optional.

Team Leader Park Taesu did the same for her, in his time.

“Nice for you, Assistant Manager Yu……. Congratulations.”

Oh Hyemi, her rival, put the congratulation slightly on the slant.

The envy has already settled thickly into her eyes.

“I’ll stand everyone something today.”

Yu Areum had more room in her than she has ever had.

Ha Tae-ung, the person of great fortune she had met without ever looking for him!

He is the first VVIP she has been given to manage.

If the work comes again I’ll handle it perfectly!

A loyalty to VIP Ha Tae-ung had filled her right up, of its own accord.

It still felt to her like a dream.

That she has actually taken hold of a golden rope, in fact and not in figure, has not landed on her yet.

Wow. That woman’s colour — how does it change like that?

The aura colour that belongs to a human being, which I am learning over again myself today.

When I first came face to face with the woman at the agency, her colour was plainly an ordinary ochre.

Working in property seems to put the ochre out of her.

And then, not many minutes later——

A red came over the top of it, and in a moment it was a black shit-brown.

It looks like the process of a nature being fouled and going rotten, shown in real time.

Uncanny. The light shifting from moment to moment is close to miraculous.

My jaw came open at the wonder of what my grandmother gave me.

The heaving of the aura gave me a rough sense of it.

The agency manager was showing signs of meaning to play games with Jiung and me.

So I called in help.

It is not as though I have no experience level in property contracts.

Years of the past, fitted on in the field.

This is a property contract with hundreds of millions crossing it, not one or two coins.

You do not check it roughly and put the seal on.

The five hundred million taken in Jiung’s name.

I mean to take a jeonse for him so he can study without worrying about a house.

Jiung lives with a grandmother who is old and in poor health.

For the boy’s future, somewhere comfortable to live is urgent.

A large floor area would be a burden on her.

I picked about eighty square metres, which suits two people.

Seoguk Estates, the one we came to, had the most listings at that size.

Playing the past back, house prices crash a few years on from this point.

Until then I hold off buying.

Before long a time comes when a jeonse deposit will buy a house outright.

And this one is turning her mind over about running a fraud on me?

“Come in. Attorney.”

“I’ve come on time.”

Attorney Ah Yura of Jo and Jang.

She had put together a neat trouser suit, easy to move in, the sort of thing for work outside the office.

A clean white V-neck knit under a pale grey trouser suit.

The thin silver frames give an intelligent impression and sit well with the cold, urban look of her.

The black document case in her hand and the coolness of her eyes are overwhelming.

The moment she came into the agency, even the air filling the room went tight.

I had contacted her by text last night.

The full legal service I have agreed to pay for is a considerable sum.

The attorneys of Jo and Jang are a body of people who eat by solving the needs of the upper class.

The acceptance came straight back.

“An— an attorney?”

The agency manager was thrown, suddenly.

The aura that had been a black shit-brown went a startled bright blue the instant she jumped.

The colour coming off her body shifted moment to moment with whatever she was feeling.

“Ah Yura. Attorney. Jo and Jang.”

She stated who she was in a businesslike tone.

“Jo…… and Jang…… surely not? That Jo and Jang?”

The manager’s voice shook.

Jo and Jang, the number one legal service outfit in the country, known to almost anybody who has worked a day out in the world.

“Yes. Here…… my card.”

Attorney Ah Yura handed it over.

“……”

The manager took the card, read it, and her face went hard.

The muddy force that had been rolling insolently off her broke clean off.

“Do you have a safe jeonse listing?”

I laid my voice down at my leisure and got on with looking at listings.

“O— of course. There’s one on the seventh floor of the front block. Hohoho. You’re in luck, the two of you~ The owner is a professor at Seoguk. Not a single loan on it, a clean listing.”

The agency manager changed the colour of her face as though it had never been otherwise.

And at the same time the light coming off her went back to the ochre I saw at first.

Proof that the listing is as clean as she says.

“Can we see it?”

“Of course. It’s the professor’s second house, so it’s empty at the moment.”

“If you’d be so good.”

“Yes~ Follow me.”

The four of them moved off together to look at it.

Attorney Ah Yura following quietly, and Jiung with a dazed expression he still could not hide.

With the two of them in tow I followed the manager to where the flat was.

“The jeonse is four hundred and fifty million. It was remodelled last year, so it’s like a new house. What do you think?”

Manager Lee Gyeongja of Seoguk Estates kept the smile on and did not let the tension out of herself.

She had taken them for easy students and very nearly brought something down on her head.

Whoever they are, it is no joke.

Bringing an attorney to a jeonse contract, and a Jo and Jang attorney at that, is a thing that almost never happens.

Attorneys sit in on deals in Gangnam, where the smallest unit runs past billions.

And these students had called one out for a jeonse of a few hundred million.

Taking a jeonse for a friend’s house? Is he some group’s young master?

In all her years in the business Lee Gyeongja has never met a case like it.

She has the basic tenant details.

She heard the short one say he would be living there with his grandmother.

And the other one, the one who looks like a young master, is finding him the house.

Lee Gyeongja was as careful with her words and her movements as she could be.

The Jo and Jang attorney watching her quietly was frightening.

Those eyes looked as though they were checking every word she let out without thinking, and it put fear into her.

So she showed them the cleanest listing she had.

It carries fifty million more than the others, and it is that much cleaner.

“Good. Let’s take it.”

Ha Tae-ung had gone carefully over the living room, the main bedroom and the kitchen, and then said so at once.

“Jiung. Do you like it?”

“Uh? Yes!! I love it!”

Park Jiung was standing in the place and could not believe it.

Summer is coming.

Summer in Guryong Village is dreadful.

At home an air conditioner is not something you dream of.

You get through the steaming heat on one electric fan.

But in this house the air conditioning comes with it.

She said it had been remodelled, and it is exactly like a newlyweds’ flat.

The boiler runs well too.

The kitchen is bigger than the whole house in Guryong Village.

And the heat isn’t gas.

“Then we’ll take it. I’ll see to the household things.”

“…… Thank you. Tae-ung.”

Ha Tae-ung handles everything, briskly, without being told.

It is solid.

A friend who seems to hold life experience nobody could ever catch up to.

Taking a jeonse of over four hundred million for a friend?

Ah Yura had been watching without a word, and she could not believe it.

However much money a person has, not everybody can be open-handed like this.

The upper-class people she has seen do not spend money on anybody else.

They invest only where there is use in it, and where it advances an end.

And this one spends hundreds of millions on a friend?

She was watching it with her own eyes and could not believe it.

How much on earth…… has he made on coin?

Ah Yura has a great deal of interest in coin.

Her curiosity about Ha Tae-ung, her client, lifted its head strongly.

“You’ll be taking a jeonse loan? As long as there’s proof of income——”

“It will be paid in cash, in one.”

“……!!”

Manager Lee Gyeongja was horrified all over again.

Property has shot up and asset values with it, but people actually holding cash are rare.

Everybody works a bank into it and turns the cash that way.

And in a market like that, all cash?

“Attorney. Draw up the contract, please.”

“Yes! I’ll handle it exactly.”

Park Jiung has a house to move into.

Lee Gyeongja, Ah Yura and Park Jiung all looked at Ha Tae-ung carefully.

Of the four of them, he looked like the man holding the finest ability at the real business of living.

In the eyes of the three of them at that moment, the only thing that was frightening, and suspect, and worthy of respect, was Ha Tae-ung.

(End of Chapter 48)