A question?

Professor Lee Dong-jin stared at the student who'd raised his hand. Was this kid serious?

Students didn't fire questions at a professor at the start of a semester—least of all on the very first day.

Normally they took one look at the curriculum he'd just handed out and sighed.

Today was for knocking them down a peg.

The plan was to carpet-bomb their half-baked presentations and toughen them up.

Studying in America had terrified him.

He'd arrived used to Korean-style lectures, and the presentations had given him panic disorder.

The PhD program at New York University hadn't been easy.

He'd dug through so much material it made him sick.

His field, global strategy, was business administration boiled down to its essence.

Put simply, it studied how to compete in the world and how to survive in it.

He'd earned his doctorate and joined the Hanguk University faculty to hand what he'd harvested on to the students coming up behind him.

And he'd torn up the old way of teaching.

No more passive, by-rote learning. He wanted classes where students thought for themselves.

He'd gone the Spartan route: train every soldier to take on a hundred.

By graduation, his students could drop the Hanguk University name anywhere without embarrassing it.

Hanguk University's business students went far at company after company because of it.

The society of the future would demand active inquiry and problem-solving above all else.

He wasn't about to be known as a professor who didn't know his stuff.

By the end of every semester, a few students stood out.

He gave them extra attention, then pushed them toward academia or introduced them around at companies.

Nothing about the job was more rewarding.

Out of nowhere, a young man had raised his hand and said he had a question.

A handsome one, the kind you rarely saw in the business building.

The face was familiar. He'd seen it somewhere.

Jang Tae-san, from law?

He knew who it was.

The prodigy who'd rescued the law department from its endless losing streak against the business department.

"This is the…