“A jeonse contract?”

“Yes, Attorney.”

“Ha Tae-ung’s own place?”

“No. It was a jeonse on a friend’s place.”

“And the deposit?”

“Four hundred and fifty million.”

“Hmm……”

Kim Gyeongmin, the senior attorney, heard out what she had done on the outside call and went into his own thoughts.

Ha Tae-ung, the client, had contacted her directly on a Sunday off and put the work to her himself.

VIP client or not…… he calls an attorney out to settle a jeonse of four hundred million?

If the level above him heard of it, it would not be looked on kindly.

An attorney on a retainer can of course carry out a conveyancer’s work in somebody’s place.

But it is not at a level a Jo and Jang attorney takes on.

“The sum isn’t large, but I think the money came out of Customer Ha Tae-ung’s own pocket.”

“Did it?”

The more you learn of him the stranger the client gets.

Barely of age, and still a pupil at Cheonghwa High School.

He looks like the son of a house of standing, and none of it has been confirmed.

Something like an illegitimate child?

There are still a fair number of chaebol children born outside a marriage in this country who have never been brought to light.

Nobody scatters them about thoughtlessly the way they did when the country was industrialising, but the phenomenon has not gone away.

Work on the reserved portion, with such a child taken into account, comes down now and then.

A hidden one surfacing can change the control structure of a whole group.

And you cannot force a vigorous masculinity down by law.

An appetite that close to instinct is not an area governed rationally enough to keep the future in mind.

Well. We’ll know soon enough.

The request has already gone to Jo and Jang’s client information team.

The team’s reach stands level with the National Intelligence Service, a state body, and with Ilseong Electronics.

They have drawn in investigators who handled almost everything that passed through the legal world, so the spectrum is wide as well.

The client’s piece of business is large, so digging into his background is not optional.

Once the information team moves, most clients are placed before long.

Detail on everybody who deals with Jo and Jang accumulates by exactly this process.

On Customer Ha Tae-ung, it could be in his hands as soon as today.

“And the fee?”

The full legal service is paid for by the retainer.

Everything beyond that is charged per matter.

“It’s to be taken next week, when the lease is registered.”

The basic fee alone is not a figure that can be set beside what a conveyancer charges.

“We’re not booking it to the firm, so take it yourself. Pocket money.”

He does not know what the client will pay, and Kim Gyeongmin means to close it off at the point where Ah Yura is looked after.

She is still the only person under him.

He does not hold much work, so there is almost none to do.

The case he was defending until recently has closed.

He had been looking for something new.

Luckily, the work Customer Ha Tae-ung put to them has bought a moment’s room.

You have to know how to be generous at a moment like this if you want to be treated as a senior.

“Thank you.”

“Nothing to thank me for. The client picked Attorney Ah out by name and asked for her exclusively.”

That is the way the world runs.

Man or woman, you have to be impressive first, and then the work does not stop coming.

Practising as a Jo and Jang attorney takes ability and a face to back it, both.

That much is weighed and tested before a contract is drawn up.

Among the firm’s attorneys Ah Yura is unquestionably in the top three for looks.

And she has a head for work, as a Seoguk graduate ought to.

It is a pity she has never sat as a judge or served as a prosecutor, but she has specialised into finance and is evolving by the day.

There is the shoot of something large in Ah Yura’s future.

Ping.

Ah Yura’s phone sounded a notification.

“Oh!”

She read the message and started.

“Something wrong?”

“Attorney……. An instruction has come in.”

“An instruction?”

“From Ha Tae-ung-nim…… He says a matter has arisen at Cheonghwa High School that requires legal assistance.”

“What? Cheonghwa??”

Even Kim Gyeongmin tightens at the name.

This…… feels like something has properly got hold of my ankle.

Difficulty settled thickly over Kim Gyeongmin’s face.

I expected something to go off at some point.

It is one of the reasons I hurried into a contract with Jo and Jang last Friday and paid a great sum for it.

It is more than Attorney Kim Jeongryul can carry.

You need to be at Jo and Jang’s level at the least before a word of yours lands at Cheonghwa.

I called the attorney in by text on the spot.

“What are you doing! I’m talking to you and you’re off at something else? You cheating little shit!”

Lee Jangyong poured it out with no regard for what was in front of him or behind.

The first time through, at this point, he taught mathematics to another class.

Not my class, and he still called me out and ground me down whenever it suited him, because I was a charity case.

I took mathematics at university on purpose, to get that off me.

And the chance to pay it back has arrived like this.

He held his head in both hands setting those questions, and I solved them handsomely for him.

Which the first time through I could not even have gone at.

This time I had played the paper back, so I understood it perfectly and solved it.

And he takes hold of that as a handle and grinds me down again.

There is somebody behind Lee Jangyong.

Not the principal, who has caught on to what I am.

Several faces came up in my head.

Cheonghwa is not simply a high school.

It is a scale model of the social structure the upper class enjoys.

A charity case, whose standing is next door to a slave’s, is never acknowledged.

And of the faces going past, the one I suspect most is——

“Did the president of the parents’ association put you up to this?”

“……!!”

I dropped the line on him.

He had been rolling his eyes and pouring abuse, and his face locked.

The parents’ association armband works inside Cheonghwa and nowhere else.

Outside it, the armband does not pass.

And it is certainly no match for a man who has been through fire and water by this point in his life.

“What’s the president of the parents’ association doing in this?”

“Is he saying——”

“What on earth is the reason??”

The class still has no grasp of the situation.

It is a moment that badly wants somebody to explain kindly.

“Why — does it aggrieve you that I got a hundred in mathematics? Or has full marks in every subject put you out of temper?”

I kept my manners and used the polite forms, every one of them, exactly.

He is a piece of rubbish, and I have no wish to become one myself.

“A— a hundred?”

“Ha Tae-ung did?”

“Full marks? What nonsense is that?”

A rising murmur.

The room went into confusion in an instant.

Full marks went from mouth to mouth like a fire through dry grass.

Kids. Your hyung did all right.

I sat back where I was and enjoyed the noise of them.

It is a rite of passage, and a necessary one if the rest of my school life is going to go smoothly.

There is not an eye in this school that looks kindly on a charity case.

“You! Out here! Insolent charity case bastard, flapping away just because you’ve got a hole in your face!!”

Nothing about the way he speaks is refined, and he shows the perfect type of a man with no character left in him.

He does not dream of it.

That this is the last time he will raise his voice in this school.

“What do you think you are doing!!”

A voice came ringing in from the corridor at exactly that moment.

Our homeroom teacher, coming in for the Monday morning register.

The same yong in both names, and Lee Jangyong and Kim Changyong could not be less alike in character.

He had both eyes wide as a tiger’s and looked as though he would take a bite out of him.

“What am I doing! I am taking an exam cheat to the guidance office.”

Lee Jangyong shouted it squarely at him.

“A cheat? Who?”

“That one. The charity case, Ha Tae-ung!”

“Tae-ung?”

He looks at me with disbelief on his face.

Eyes as unmixed as those could never suspect a conspiracy among people with power.

“That charity case bastard cheated his way to a hundred in mathematics — no, to full marks in every subject.”

“……!!”

His eyes went as wide as an ox’s.

Astonishment mixed with admiration in them.

“R— really?”

“The results couldn’t be posted because of this sly charity case. The head of academic affairs has instructed me to dig this matter out!”

He named the head of academic affairs and squared his shoulders, higher on it than before.

A halfwit confessing on his own account that he has joined hands with the schemer.

The head of academic affairs, who has his eye on the seat of a principal a year from retirement.

He has gone and joined hands with the president of the parents’ association, and there is no doubt of it.

The real power at Cheonghwa High School at present is Ju Miju, one of Hanguk Group’s royal family. The Nation’s Bitch.

I know her too.

Second daughter of the chairman of one of the country’s ten largest groups.

She is famous across a generation for a number of incidents.

The representative one being the beef jerky service aboard a Hanguk Airlines flight.

It had not been warmed, so she threw it and laid hands on the crew.

Cabin crew were injured.

It was hushed and covered over with the public, and then a video went about and she was cut from her executive post.

The penalty went exactly that far and no further.

Opinion turned against her, and mounted the image of her like taxidermy.

The Nation’s Bitch. Ju Miju.

She hardened into the byword for upper-class power-tripping in its purest form.

Hanguk Group has certainly risen into the ranks of the top ten, and even so it could not disregard opinion when opinion would not be reasoned with.

And that Ju Miju, of that house, is president of Cheonghwa High School’s parents’ association.

Her son is in the second year here.

The first time through I never once met his eye. He was the honours pupil who kept first in the school to himself.

This time the son who was her pride has been pushed down by me.

Ju Miju has been properly scratched.

The years I put in out in the world were not wasted, and they finished the scenario off plausibly enough.

“And so?”

Our homeroom teacher has taken some measure of me, and he pressed hard and gave no ground.

“And so? Teacher Kim! The head of academic affairs has specially——”

“Does the principal know about this?”

“What?”

“I asked whether the principal knows!!”

Our homeroom teacher has got brave.

(End of Chapter 51)