Ha Tae-ung. What are you doing here?

Lee Hyoju was badly thrown.

The place he said he was having his first time out.

What were the odds on it being Shale CC, in Chungcheong?

Ha Tae-ung, run into again inside a single day.

He is wearing the golf clothes her mother picked out for him at the department store yesterday.

Ha Tae-ung, in the cap they chose to finish the outfit off, appearing out of thin air like a ghost.

Seen outdoors, he looks like one of the lean men on the professional tour.

“I said, what are you!”

Lee Jeongho, who is afraid of nothing in this world, raised his voice.

Irritation came up in him at the uninvited guest who had cut in out of nowhere.

He had been worked up at the thought of shaking Lee Hyoju out properly, now that he finally had her.

And then this obstruction, turning up and knocking the whole thing over.

The moment he saw the silhouette his mood went bad.

Lee Jeongho’s height stops somewhere around a hundred and seventy centimetres.

But the uninvited guest, standing with the sun behind him, has a body long as a model’s and a good-looking line to his face.

Enough that at a glance you could mistake him for some entertainer doing well for himself.

In the circumstances, Lee Jeongho’s voice, full of irritation, could only come out loud and without preamble.

“We’ve only just met…… and it’s casual speech?”

Ha Tae-ung, who has known about Lee Jeongho for a long time.

He gave a short laugh and poured petrol over the sparks that were already snapping.

“So? I’m speaking casually. What are you going to do about it!”

Sport has built the basics into Lee Jeongho, and by nature he has never looked at what is in front of him or behind.

His older cousin taking an interest heated him further.

And on top of that, Lee Hyoju was in a position where she had to confess she has no friends.

And at that exact moment an uninvited guest appears, wrecks the mood, and acts as though he knows her.

What is this bastard? Lee Hyoju came up through a girls’ middle school.

Lee Jeongho went through a private primary school in Gangnam alongside her.

In those days there were a fair number of friends around Lee Hyoju.

Then one day, whatever wind it was that blew through her, she cleared every one of those relationships away.

Something among the friends had hurt her, by the look of it, and she shut her heart on it.

After that, middle school was a girls’ school.

And now there’s a boy she knows?

Ordinarily Lee Hyoju does not mix even with the royal families of the other groups.

“Short in the height, short in the speech. Is that because the cerebrum came out small to match, and the cerebellum with it?”

Ha Tae-ung was provoking him.

Short and ignorant are the two things Lee Jeongho hates hearing more than anything, at the best of times.

“You want to die! You son of a bitch!”

He couldn’t keep his nature down. He rolled his eyes at him and threw the words out rough.

At this much out of Lee Jeongho, most people dropped their eyes in front of him.

“Have you got it in you?”

“What? You fucking bastard!”

He couldn’t hold it, and the fist came out——

“Lee Jeongho! What do you think you’re doing!”

Lee Hyoju moved fast and put herself in front of Ha Tae-ung.

“Move! I’m killing that bastard today!”

Lee Jeongho was born with a temper like a fire.

What he feels toward Lee Hyoju has rolled up like a snowball, and his eyes have gone right round.

“Have you forgotten Grandfather’s inside?”

“……”

One line from Lee Hyoju and Lee Jeongho came to himself with a jolt.

Grandfather detests violence above all things.

The first article of the household’s teaching is non-violence.

“Grrrrk.”

Lee Jeongho couldn’t get the anger down, and ground his teeth on it.

“Hyoju. Who’s this?”

Lee Hyoeun asked it, going for the gap.

What is he? Good-looking. And there’s something about him.

Lee Hyoeun is in and out of clubs more often than her own house, and anywhere that gets hot she goes and sees it for herself.

Once she got into the university the family had been hoping for, she was granted a certain freedom.

Since then she has enjoyed a life nobody interferes in.

With her looks worked over by surgery, she has taken almost every club around Gangnam and Hongdae.

She mixes thickly with children her own age from the other groups who lean the same way.

Lee Hyoeun meets all sorts, and even to her eye Ha Tae-ung’s look stands right out.

“I’m Ha Tae-ung. A friend of Hyoju’s, same class.”

“The same class at Cheonghwa High School?”

“Yes.”

“Oh my. Then you’re my hoobae.”

“Unnie, Tae-ung is——”

Lee Hyoeun’s forward interest was more than Lee Hyoju wanted to carry.

The fact that he is a charity case must not come out here by accident.

Her head ached with all of it, and Lee Hyoju bit her lip.

“Hyoju.”

“Uh? Yes.”

“Is Mother inside?”

“Yes, she is. But——”

“Then I should go and pay my respects.”

There was nothing in Ha Tae-ung’s way.

“Oi, you little bastard! Who the hell are you to pay respects!”

Lee Jeongho’s temper had twisted right over, and his voice was full of hostility.

Ha Tae-ung turned back to him and grinned.

“Look at you. Adorable.”

“What? What did you say?”

What is this bastard? Ha Tae-ung? He’s at our school?

Each year at Cheonghwa High School is made up of ten classes.

Twenty or so pupils to a class is the full complement.

The arts and sports stream are put into class ten from the start of the first year and stay there.

So Lee Jeongho had no interest whatsoever in any of the ordinary classes.

That there was a Ha Tae-ung at Cheonghwa High School he learned for the first time today.

And Lee Jeongho does not deal with anyone who is not of his own sort.

To have anything that could be called a conversation with him, you had to be at roughly his level.

Lee Jeongho has lived, and goes on living, thoroughly inside the royal family mind.

I’ve seen him somewhere…… I think.

However hard he turned it over, the name Ha Tae-ung was nowhere in his memory at all.

“What are you doing. Let’s go.”

“Tae-ung……”

Ha Tae-ung went ahead without hesitating and carried his steps into the halfway house.

Thrown, Lee Hyoju followed behind him without a word.

“What is he?”

With the look of somebody who has found an interesting toy, Lee Hyoeun moved off after them too.

“Fuck.”

Lee Jeongho had decided he was being ignored, and swore.

“Hyung. Let’s go too.”

Lee Jeonghun, the youngest, turned quietly to his brother like a hyena and gave him a wicked smile.

Something interesting looks like it’s about to happen……

A brother who always behaves like an idiot.

Lee Jeonghun has been carrying the thought of breaking him one day.

And he led that brother of his off toward the halfway house.

Before the regression I was never much tangled up with Lee Jeongho.

This time round he has taken up a hostility toward me.

A greenhorn without the basics in him, who comes straight at a man without working out first who he is.

He picked a quarrel with Lee Hyoju that made no sense at all, and drove her into a corner with it.

His mental age is under the standard.

The first time through I avoided a situation like this absolutely.

No — a situation like this never had occasion to arise.

But the board is different now.

Even at this moment my coin account is burning.

The confidence a full pocket makes you a present of, with something underneath it.

And it isn’t only that.

My heart doesn’t shrink, as though it had always been this way.

I don’t want to admit it, but I am one of the Ha family.

Haryun is a house with bone in it, a century of wealth piled up in this country.

I am Haryun Group’s fifth generation.

The youngest runner in the line of succession.

The force of a chaebol house running in the blood!

It is what is underneath, and it can’t be hidden.

Getting tangled up with Lee Hyoju over and over like this, there must be a bond between me and the Oyang house.

In the past I lived through, Oyang Group had in fact slipped to somewhere around the hundredth in the chaebol rankings.

Level with Daeryong Group, where I worked.

Oyang Construction was smashed in the fallout from bad project financing, and it took the rest down with it.

Chemical missed the moment for restructuring and never got clear of loss.

The leisure business went headlong as complaints from domestic customers piled up on it.

Doa Ilbo, of the same house, had no pulse in it either once the administration changed.

For one reason and another, Oyang Group was walking the road down.

And the succession blew open on top of that, and lawsuits between the affiliates were thrown about without restraint.

Just before my regression, the news came up that the chairman had died of the illness that comes of swallowing rage.

Sliiide.

The automatic door at the entrance to the halfway house opened.

It is a place to rest partway round, but the facility is not a small one.

It is built on a scale that would seat thirty or so to a meal together.

Good tables and chairs, set out with plenty of space kept between them.

The marble floor and the modern feel of it are not a step below a five-star hotel.

And.

“Father. Is the food to your taste?”

“You managed to get hold of the makgeolli I like.”

“I had it brought up in advance.”

One setting, two tables pushed together.

The healthy-looking old man in the head seat came into view.

And the middle-aged men placed round the long table.

And behind them, a whole row of middle-aged women in well-cut golf clothes.

Oyang Group’s royal family.

Footsteps. Steady ones.

I walked toward them.

Oyang Group’s future successors trailing along at my back.

The talk had been going round the middle of the table, and every eye at it turned naturally onto me.

“Oh!”

And Lee Hyoju’s mother was the first to react.

She made me out and started.

“Tae-ung!”

She came straight over, glad to see me.

“Mother.”

I stopped where I was and bowed my head to her, properly.

A well-mannered young man, to anybody looking.

Snap.

Oyang Group’s chairman, seated at the centre, runs his eyes over me carefully.

Snap! Snap!

The rest of them the same.

I didn’t shrink and I wasn’t thrown. I looked back at them squarely.

And I didn’t forget the smile either.

“Daughter. Who is this?”

Oyang Group’s chairman asks it.

I don’t know his name yet.

Before this or after it, his name has almost never been put out directly in the press.

The face I am seeing today for the first time.

The first impression gives you an obstinate temper, straight as a split cane.

Assembling not just his children but his grandchildren on a weekend worth gold is enough on its own to guess the character from.

“……”

I looked the old man straight in both eyes.

A meeting with Oyang Group’s chairman, which the Ha Tae-ung who was a charity case the first time through would never once have had occasion to have.

Shff.

I bent from the waist again, properly.

And.

“I’m in the second year at Cheonghwa High School, a friend of Hyoju’s. My name is Ha Tae-ung.”

Come back again, I gave the three syllables of my name clearly, one at a time.

(End of Chapter 43)