Shff.

The end of the school day.

Lee Hyoju looked at the leather-strapped watch on her wrist.

An expensive present she had ended up taking before she knew what was happening.

She liked it.

Better than the watch her parents gave her.

Not a brand she has ever cared for, but a present from Ha Tae-ung.

Her mother had been astonished when she got home with the watch.

And at the news that Ha Tae-ung had given it to her, her mother's smile turned stranger still.

Invite him to the house!

It was not the reaction she had expected.

He really is quite a friend.

The Ha family always were peculiar.

Her mother added a few words to herself.

It pleases her, and at the same time it worries her.

Ha Tae-ung has shaken her feelings loose.

Next year's national exam is ahead of her.

This is a stretch of time that matters enormously in a life.

Gogeuk University, and for that matter any decent university in the country, is hers to pick.

That does not mean she can let herself go slack.

Where you stand inside Cheonghwa High School is where you will stand once you are out in the world.

The children gathered here are the ones who will fill the upper class of this country and keep it standing.

Hold them down from now, and the life that comes after is comfortable.

Something she understood when she was small.

There is high and low in work, and there is high and low in people!

She would like to make friends, see films the way ordinary children do, go to a karaoke room, walk the streets of Hongdae and shop.

But that is not a daily life a member of a chaebol house is easily permitted.

Even the people she meets are picked over.

The heart may run hot; the eyes have gone cold.

A competition she came to understand naturally, by instinct and by training.

Where the other party is a relative it works harder still.

Take, or be taken from.

A kind and yielding nature becomes…