“Assistant Manager Yu, how was he?”

“Sorry?”

“The gentleman the team leader marked out, I mean.”

Assistant Manager Oh Hyemi, who works alongside her on the VIP management team, came up close and asked.

She is on friendly terms with Yu Areum and a competitor at the same time.

The competitive spirit held in her eyes while she smiles!

That alone is enough to feel how strong her curiosity is just now.

One well-managed VIP changes the order of magnitude of your month-end performance pay.

“Apparently he’s at the same school as the Oyang Group granddaughter.”

“School? University?”

“……No.”

“Then? Graduate school?”

“……Cheonghwa High School.”

“What, a high— a high school student?”

“Wow! Really?”

“Oh……”

Sounds of astonishment came out of the other team members, who had had their ears pricked at the two of them talking.

It had been on a screen, but that was not a high school student’s presence.

This is confusing.

Unlike the team members whose interest was exploding, Yu Areum’s head was complicated.

The VIP taken on today cannot be predicted in any respect whatever.

The name recorded on the customer card, the phone number, and the address.

From the conversation she had heard beside her, he seemed to be living at the Signiel alone.

And a high school student, at that, alone.

It’s a residence at a price range that is no small matter for a young fellow to live independently in.

With no guardian and nobody accompanying him, he put a watch of tens of millions through on a debit card.

However comfortable a family’s son might be, it wasn’t a sight you commonly see.

He hadn’t blinked an eye at a present costing over ten million either.

“Which family is it?”

Oh Hyemi asked with an envious look.

Even a rough sounding-out gave her the size of it.

Royal families as a rule don’t spend money carelessly.

They pay out only where there’s value worth investing in.

“I don’t know.”

“His name is——”

“Ha Tae-ung.”

“If the surname is Ha……”

“Haryun?”

“Really?”

They are staff who have the VIP name lists threaded through their fingers.

At a stroke, on the one surname Ha, Haryun Group came to mind.

“No. The youngest there is a university student.”

“That’s right. He isn’t a Haryun Group person.”

The direct family of Haryun Group are naturally registered among the department store’s VIPs too.

Unless you’re very new, it’s common sense that most staff have the information on the direct lines of the ten great groups threaded through their fingers.

Form a connection with any one of them and losing your job doesn’t arise.

“A collateral branch, perhaps?”

“That could be it.”

The Hyundo Department Store VIP management team staff, beginning to speculate with every possibility left open.

And then.

Ding.

A message tone sounded on Assistant Manager Yu Areum’s phone.

“Ah!!”

Startled badly, which isn’t like her.

“What is it?”

Assistant Manager Oh Hyemi, beside her, asked.

“Yejin. Juhui.”

“Yes! Ma’am.”

Yu Areum called the names of the management team’s junior staff in a trembling voice.

“Tomorrow…… help me with something.”

“Sorry?”

“It’s a VIP order.”

“Whose?”

Instead of answering the question, Yu Areum checked the message on her phone again.

—Please arrange the complete set of appliances and household furniture suited to a Signiel 90E type. You may leave out the refrigerator, the washing machine and the dryer.

This is a message handing over the whole of a household.

In a moment a list of appliances and furniture fit for the Signiel and for a VIP came pouring up in her mind.

—For clothing as well — suits, everyday wear, training wear and so on — fill it out as you see fit. And give some thought to slippers for wearing lightly at school.

Yu Areum’s eyes shone with a great many thoughts.

This is absolutely not a trivial message.

A large opportunity had come.

Not only the household — he had handed over clothing as well, which has to be chosen carefully to fit personal taste as closely as possible.

—There’s no limit on cost. The place is empty from nine in the morning. Please have it finished by six in the evening. I’ll speak to the concierge about access.

This is the thing!

No limit on cost!!

An order saying there’s no need to weigh up the price.

It’s a request somebody who didn’t know better might take for power-tripping.

But Yu Areum received it as a blessing.

What is certain is that this is a being who will become a future VVIP.

His first test with Yu Areum as its subject.

Tap-tap. Click.

Yu Areum got onto the internet fast.

Searching the Signiel complex, which she has never once been inside.

The hands of Yu Areum, whose dream is to be a personal shopper, sped up.

Her eyes shone as they never had, and her head turned fast.

“Attorney Ah.”

“Yes. Sir.”

“What do you make of him?”

“Sorry?”

“Ha Tae-ung, I mean.”

“……He seems to be an unusual gentleman.”

“Gentleman? Haa……. I just held back tears of self-disgust.”

“Why?”

“At that age I had my head buried in studying for the state examination at university. First year, and set on succeeding. Couldn’t make what they’d call a real friend these days. I came to this seat that way and my salary is barely a billion. Take this and that off in tax and it’s a bare six hundred million. And he burns 1.2 billion on a simple legal service?”

Kim Gyeongmin and Ah Yura, who move as one team at Jo and Jang.

As though bewitched, they had finished the contract with a big fish.

They had got the call with the legal review team wrapped up without a hitch.

And last of all, the approval of Jang Muyeol, Jo and Jang’s representative attorney, was done.

Now, live or die, they’re stuck fast.

“All the same…… something nags at me.”

“What does?”

“The prohibition on dual representation. It’s the part he stressed right to the end, isn’t it.”

“That’s understandable. Our Jo and Jang is famous, after all.”

“It isn’t that. My instinct says something very——”

“Says what?”

“How to put it. It feels as though we’re going to be driven onto a battlefield with the blood flying.”

Kim Gyeongmin, formerly a division chief prosecutor.

His own sensitive instinct had begun to fire.

“Nothing’s going to change. The contract is complete already.”

“It had better be. The ten-year penalty for breach is a hundred billion. And if he litigates in America, who knows how much——”

Jo and Jang can’t bring much force to bear against an American court either.

What’s more, America converts even the crime of being insolent into money and hits you with it.

“He was tremendously smart, though. Like a university student, wouldn’t you say? Whatever he is.”

“Things being as they are, we’ll be seeing him often enough in any case.”

Ah Yura fell into thought, turning the client Ha Tae-ung over.

As Attorney Kim Gyeongmin had said, her head was complicated too.

He’s young, and the impression she took was of a super-rich.

A situation in which the information about him is far too thin.

“How much do you suppose he’s made? To burn 1.2 billion a year, at minimum——”

“Several tens of billions at the least, I’d say.”

“It could be more. They say there are even trillion-won rich on the coin side in Korea.”

“Trill— trillion?”

“Yes. They say a foreigner who put seven thousand dollars into Shiba in 2021 made seven trillion.”

“……Good grief.”

Ah Yura, who was briefly called the coin priestess in her university days.

She had the history of coin threaded through her fingers.

Even now she holds the coins she had then, unliquidated and still invested.

Which is why Ha Tae-ung’s saying he’d made a profit on coin investment caught her ear all the more.

“And overseas exchanges, not domestic ones, allow futures trading at over a hundred times. It’s possible to become suddenly rich overnight.”

“And the reverse! You could be ruined.”

“That’s the nerve of it. It’s ability, and it’s luck.”

“Attorney Ah, do you know about coin?”

“It isn’t that I don’t……”

“Can coin be an asset? When it’s nothing but a scrap of data?”

It was a reaction fitting a senior attorney, Kim Gyeongmin, who knows nothing whatever of the taste of coin.

“I expect coin will be one of the core investment assets of the future.”

Unexpectedly, there was force to be felt in Attorney Ah Yura’s words, which were full of conviction.

“Is that so? Then if you’ve got a good one, mark one out for me too. Let’s live well together.”

“Yes~”

She answered that way, but there will absolutely never be any sharing.

Ah Yura, who already has the experience of swelling her assets to tens of billions in her university days.

Although she lost the whole of what she’d swollen through one moment’s misjudgement.

It was a mistake committed after losing her discernment to the coaxing of a sunbae she was close to.

Since then Ah Yura neither recommends to anybody nor takes a recommendation.

I’m curious……. What on earth did he invest in?

Ah Yura, whose curiosity had risen vertically on the afterimage the client Ha Tae-ung had left.

“The client Ha Tae-ung — be careful.”

“Sorry?”

“That’s a face that will get full value out of itself and more.”

“……”

On that she agrees; Ah Yura grants it too.

He’s a man with a height and looks rare among ordinary people, and confidence overflowing on top.

He’s a mass of appeal any woman would inevitably fall for as well.

And decisively——

That hot gaze that had looked straight into both her eyes.

Was he captivated by me?

Ah Yura’s face, turning Ha Tae-ung over, coloured peach.

Beep.

The entrance door opened.

And in that moment, straight ahead——

“Ha!!”

A short sound got out of me on its own.

Money is good, and no mistake.

I called in at Jo and Jang, finished my business and visited the agency again.

The agency manager, who had dealt with a number of matters in the meantime.

She had the occupancy registration finished as well.

The Latte Signiel, which you can’t enter until a resident’s card is registered.

The rooftop room had already begun to hold the heat, and I didn’t want to stay in it another day.

There’s sufficient money, so there’s no need to make a virtue of hardship.

In the past I had never once spent so much as two hundred thousand won on myself.

And so — a flex for that self of mine!

There’s no removal load either.

Textbooks and a uniform are the whole of it.

A rooftop room with nothing to gather up.

I threw all of it away.

My new home, the Signiel!

The entrance hall is finished in high-gloss black.

The entrance floor is laid with a non-slip marble in the same range of colour.

Beyond a corridor and a living room where the view opens right up, the whole face of Seoul spreads out in a panorama.

“There’s quite a lot needed.”

It’s fully fitted, but the odds and ends of daily living needed immediately are entirely absent.

A built-in refrigerator, a washing machine and dryer and a bed frame are barely the whole of it.

I sent a message straight away to Assistant Manager Yu Areum of Hyundo Department Store, whose card I’d taken.

It came from the judgement that taking a professional’s help is more efficient than wearing out my own shoe leather.

It’s the moment to use time like gold.

The eye of Assistant Manager Yu Areum, who deals with a department store’s VIPs, will be more careful and more accurate.

At times like this, taking a professional’s help is a hundred times better.

I set my shoes down neatly and went inside.

A space of about two hundred and five square metres of actual floor area.

Given the nature of these serviced-apartment blocks, the space for exclusive use isn’t all that large.

“So this…… is what a Han River view feels like.”

The position is good.

Below my feet, Latte World and the Han River and Namsan Tower ran on one after another.

The view that came into sight opened my chest up on its own.

I think I understand why people sing that song of theirs about a Han River view, a Han River view.

“……It’s good.”

The miracle of my life, happening inside a few days.

The money spent wholly on myself isn’t a waste in the slightest.

“The truth comes out soon.”

Those parents who were in the principal’s office.

They are women worn smooth by long use.

They’ll have finished their digging into me without a sound or a rumour.

And they’ll have confirmed it.

The moment they learn they were roundly deceived by me, the board is set for them to attack whatever comes to hand.

I’ve taken advance measures against that moment.

Then Jo and Jang, rather than Attorney Kim Jeongryul, will be used as the hidden card.

“Threaten me and I return it ten times at minimum! A hundred times at maximum!”

I wipe out the soft, spineless self of the past and set my mind hard.

It isn’t that I put up with every moment of it, but this life I won’t put up with any more.

A world that takes you for an absolute mug if you come out nice.

A smooth motion.

I picked up the phone.

I opened the exchange screen.

As the screen changed, a graph shot high in red and a deposit figure whose order of magnitude had changed came up.

“That’s insane……”

(End of Chapter 36)