"How do you suppose I feel?"

A hard question. He has served his lord more than twenty years, and reading the man's mind is still not easy.

Chief Ju Gangmin, who will take office as the Hanguk Group's chairman before long.

His face was odd in a way it had never been. He had come straight back from the banquet hall and emptied several glasses of wine without a word.

It is one of the habits Chief Ju Gangmin shows when he has a great deal on his mind. The drink he chose was sweet port.

He drank it cold, over ice. More than half the bottle has gone that way already.

And nothing to eat with it but jerky.

"I could not say."

Yun Seobeom, the head of strategic planning, said honestly what he thought.

He had stood at his lord's side and seen with his own eyes what the man ran into today, and he could not believe it.

A young man who is nothing more than a high school pupil had gone straight at the family that owns the Hanguk Group.

It was a thing nobody in Haryun Group's own direct line would do.

And yet the schoolboy son of a man the group threw out had put Chief Ju Gangmin off his stride.

"I found it rather interesting. Heh."

Ju Gangmin said it and laughed to himself, his eyes full of curiosity.

"Sir?"

"It cleared something out of me, you could say."

"I am not sure what you mean…… He was rather an impudent young man……"

"No, no. It reminded me of being young and getting caught seeing a girl behind my father's back."

"Sir?"

"I was serious about her. Really serious. She was a girl who never looked at my background. The first time and the last, as it turned out."

"……." "Three years younger than me, and we suited each other. Oppa this, oppa that, at the end of every sentence. She would take my arm anywhere and never mind who was watching. Not a scrap of an act about her. Happy with tteokbokki…