Tak-hyeon fell silent for a moment.

And looking at Chief Do-beom, who was tidying the surroundings one thing at a time, he brought up the matter in a bitter voice.

"Did I accept it too easily?"

"Does the third daughter-in-law trouble you?"

"What is there for me to be troubled by? Unless it's the daughter-in-law who's troubled by me."

Tak-hyeon shook his head and folded his arms.

"It's only the person behind the daughter-in-law who troubles me."

Chang-jong's wife—Tak-hyeon's third daughter-in-law—was known to the outside world as roughly the daughter of a well-off family who'd majored in art.

Unlike the other daughters-in-law, who were daughters of famous figures in politics and business, she came from an ordinary family, and so her marriage had been quite the talk at the time.

But the reality was a little different.

The only daughter of Chairman Chan-pyeong Jang—said to split the Korean private-lending market in two alongside Il-gyeong Dan, the one called the pawnbroker of the business world—was precisely Chang-jong's wife, Tak-hyeon's third daughter-in-law.

Arms folded, Tak-hyeon called Chairman Chan-pyeong Jang to mind and said,

"It's the fellows behind Chairman Jang, in particular, who trouble me."

"You mean the Japanese capital?"

"Yes."

Tak-hyeon spoke with a displeased expression.

"The funds Chairman Jang has pulled in are Japanese capital. And the money of the bottom-crawling Japs at that. The sort who lose all sense at the scent of money and will use any means whatsoever—those fellows down at the very bottom."

Having roughly finished tidying, Do-beom stood before Tak-hyeon and said,

"Even so, surely there's nothing they can do to us now, is there? We're no longer a company selling fish to Japan as in the old days."

The seed from which the Ilhyeon Group grew—founded by Tak-hyeon's father, the founder—had been a company selling marine products to Japan.

In those days, Ilhyeon Trading had had no choice but to tremble before Japanese capital.

Because if the Japanese merchants who took the goods didn't come collect them, the dried fish piled in the warehouse would rot away as they sat.

Do-beom set Tak-hyeon at ease,…