“A large issue came up among the upper class today.”

“What sort of thing?”

“A matter to do with a charity case enrolled at Cheonghwa High School.”

“Do I need to know about charity case matters as well?”

“That charity case is Ha Tae-ung.”

“Who? Ha Tae-ung?”

“Yes, madam.”

“Somebody I know?”

“…… Yes.”

“Who is it? One of our house?”

“Yes.”

“Is that so? It’s a name I’m hearing for the first time.”

“The thing is……”

A top-grade villa in Cheongdam.

The sale price here alone was eight billion won.

It has drawn attention lately as a residence with an asking price pushed up to somewhere around thirteen billion.

The home of Ha Eunhui, Chairman Ha Cheolgon’s youngest daughter.

Living apart from her husband, she was taking a report from her woman secretary.

She has a son and a daughter by her husband.

Of the two, the elder is at present working as a new employee at a Haryun Group affiliate.

The second is studying in America.

The house is so large that the staff member hired as steward and secretary to manage it was her only company in conversation.

Ha Eunhui had just come back from the sauna and was about to have a glass of wine.

The secretary, who had been waiting for the timing of the report, watched her mood and delivered the situation.

“Why? Go on. Has my father got himself a late child or something?”

Ha Eunhui’s manner shows not the least respect or affection toward her father, Chairman Ha Cheolgon.

She too had had her life pawned by a marriage she did not want.

She was young, just out of university.

She sat a matchmaking meeting under her father’s compulsion, married straight afterwards and made a household.

She spent the whole of her youth in hell.

Everything in the house ran the way her father Chairman Ha Cheolgon planned it.

Her father-in-law was a Supreme Court justice.

Her husband a hidebound judge.

While her friends were enjoying trips abroad and clubs and parties, she lived in hell.

From the birth of her first child she gave herself to raising it in earnest.

Her judge husband gave no help at all, on the excuse of work.

The nature of his profession meant people were not lightly let into the house, so she had to bear the whole of it alone.

Her mother-in-law, who involved herself down to the smallest thing, made things hard for her too.

She had lived like a princess until she left home, and now she was a housemaid, plain and simple.

Having taken on a household through a marriage she was not ready for, she went as far as attending a cookery school.

The nagging about not being able to cook, at every turn, was the easier part of it.

Her husband being the eldest son, every family occasion large and small fell to her.

Her marriage had been a trade between her father and her father-in-law.

She could not make a peep about it, naturally.

At the time her father was getting direct benefit from her father-in-law over an illegal matter at the group.

So Ha Eunhui resented her father Ha Cheolgon, over and over.

Time passed and her husband’s parents died.

Her husband, with the shade over him gone, was posted to a provincial high court as a judge, and they went into living apart about then, naturally enough.

Neither he nor she had made a household because there was love in it, so there was no feeling about it and no complaint.

The same went for affection toward the children.

Ha Eunhui’s maternal feeling was not strong either.

She did take responsibility for the minimum of a mother’s part.

Even now Ha Eunhui hated her father Ha Cheolgon dreadfully, at the mere thought of him.

Her youth was taken as security, and what she inherited for it was one Haryun Group affiliate.

A life in which she need not go through any economic difficulty.

From about ten years ago she took a lover as well.

“Mr Ha Donghwi’s son, madam.”

“What? Donghwi’s son??”

Ha Eunhui, who had looked close to bored, started violently.

The younger brother she had lived by making an effort to look away from.

That name, which became a forbidden word in the house from a certain point on, had jumped out.

The youngest son their mother had to bury in her chest right up to the moment she died.

Her father Chairman Ha Cheolgon, obstinate and cold-blooded with it.

For the reason that his own order had been defied, he struck her younger brother off the family register.

“He was enrolled at Cheonghwa High School on the charity intake……. It seems he has caused something this time that turned the school upside down. And over that…… the rumour has already run right round.”

“What rumour?”

“That the charity case was Haryun Group’s hidden crown prince……”

“Haa……”

Ha Eunhui let out a short sigh.

A thing out of the past came suddenly back to her.

It was when their mother was gravely ill.

The day Donghwi, of whom there had been no word since he was cast out, came to the house.

A day when a great deal of rain fell, and he could not get over the threshold of the gate.

Turned away at the door, in the plain sense of it.

Ha Eunhui, who could do nothing but watch it happen.

Unlike the other brothers and sisters, Ha Eunhui had been close to Donghwi.

They grew up in affection together, Donghwi following her about calling her noona.

Kindergarten, primary school, middle school, high school, and even Yeonguk University, which they both left.

To her younger brother, Ha Eunhui had been family and a senior at school and a senior in living.

My brothers will turn over when they know.

Crown prince is not a word anybody gets to hear.

Even inside the Ha house it is a form of address permitted only to the direct line of the blood.

So there is no possibility of their showing mercy to a rival for the succession who was thrown out.

It is why Ha Eunhui, brother and sister with them as she is, keeps her distance and lives with her breath held.

Even now she kept herself as small as she could, so as not to get outside her father’s good books.

“How would you like it handled?”

The secretary asks.

“…… Watch it.”

There is no action Ha Eunhui can take.

She gave the instruction as a formality and quietly closed her eyes.

She called back memories of the younger brother she had kept covered over, pretending for years to have forgotten him.

Swallow.

Red wine, close to the colour of blood.

She put it down in one.

Tarot…… cards?

What the bartender had brought out was a set of tarot cards.

A shaman, and what is he doing with tarot cards……

Ah Yura thought it absurd past all reason.

A shaman ought to be holding a fan or bells!

And instead, tarot cards of all things.

“I understand that expression. Put the fixed idea down.”

“……?”

“Tarot is only another means by which a god passes a message.”

“Yes……”

Ah Yura shrugged her shoulders and drew her neck in.

“Your name is……”

“Ha Tae-ung.”

“Have you ever been to my shop before, sir?”

“If I say I have, that is right, and if I say I haven’t, that may be right as well.”

“…… I see.”

What are these two talking about?

The bartender and the crown prince, passing a strange conversation back and forth, and it is not quite a monk’s riddle.

Snap.

The gooseflesh came up on her skin, and she felt the force of the two of them colliding oddly.

“Hmm……. Our spirit general says so.”

“……??”

“That it is good to see you again.”

“……!!”

Didn’t he say it was his first time? What! Good to see him again?

Ah Yura was confused by the situation.

She cannot possibly follow the conversation between the two of them.

When he gave her the place, the crown prince plainly said it was a whisky bar he knew.

And in fact it is his first visit.

The bartender has no acquaintance with him, and the god the bartender serves knows the crown prince?

“……”

Ah Yura, who takes pride in being a lawyer with a higher education and a twenty-first-century intellect who believes in science.

She finds this table thoroughly confusing.

Her profession is the law, so she knows the affairs of the world are various, and even so a case like this is a first.

“Thank you for remembering me.”

The crown prince smiles.

The first pure smile she has seen since meeting him as a client.

Thump.

Ah Yura’s heart reacts first and beats strongly.

In plain fact he is a high school pupil, and somehow it feels like facing a real man.

“That the past does not rule the present or the future, and the future does not govern the present and the past…… people who are not present do not know it. Hahaha.”

Plain speech?

The bartender, carrying on suddenly in the low form.

It is not the well-mannered, courteous manner he showed when he first dealt with the crown prince.

As though a wholly different being——

“……!!”

In that instant Ah Yura’s mind came sharply awake.

The bartender in front of her is a shaman who serves a god!

That his eyes and his way of speaking have changed like this means——

“May I offer you a glass?”

“Haha, I’d like that! I’m very fond of this place. The scent of drink runs sweet here at all hours. And those big-noses’ tunes are good to listen to~”

Ha Tae-ung picked up the thirty-year whisky as though it were nothing.

And the bartender took out a fresh glass and held it forward.

Trickle, trickle, trickle.

The whole thing unfolded far too naturally.

The two of them looking as though they were in another world.

Ah Yura, watching with her breath held, went white inside her head.

It had gone unimaginably past the territory of anything she could picture.

Ting!

The two of them touched glasses.

And.

“Khaa! This deer drink is like antler velvet to me. In the old days people would often make soju themselves and bring it as an offering. These days they show no such care at all. There are creatures everywhere who begrudge a bottle of makgeolli with the boiled pig’s head. And expect blessings on top of it……. Tch.”

The bartender showing admiration and regret at once.

A pig’s head? Makgeolli?

From what the bartender said the combination is easily guessed at, and so is the one being it fits.

“My lord. Shall I draw a card now?”

“Yes, draw! You draw too, girl. The wheel of fortune has started to turn. This is when you have to choose well.”

“……??”

She had only wanted a drink today, that was all.

A table she had come out to partly to firm up a connection with a crown prince who will become a large client.

And now the wheel of fortune has started to turn?

Ah Yura hesitated a moment.

Then, under the eyes of the two of them, she took her courage and carefully touched one of the dozens of cards laid out in front of the bartender.

“Open it. It’s your fate.”

“Yes……”

She drew the card her finger was on and turned it over.

And what came into her eyes in that instant——

“Oho!”

(End of Chapter 72)