“I hear there was a great commotion at the school today……”

The office of the Cheonghwa Foundation’s chairman.

The decoration was in fashion some decades ago, and it shows.

Expensive solid mahogany gave off an antique, heavy air.

A woman sank into an excessively thick leather chair and asked it quietly.

Gu Jayeon, youngest daughter of Gu Jaeyeong, founder and chairman of Cheonghwa Group.

She turns sixty this year, and being thorough about the management of herself she looks somewhere in her late forties.

A round face, and a permed bob that suits it well.

Gold-rimmed glasses as befits her years, and behind Gu Jayeon’s indifferent gaze there was a hidden depth.

She was pushed down the order of succession, and took on the chairmanship of the foundation behind Cheonghwa High School.

That does not mean she gave up the appetite along with it.

Her eldest sister and her brother each run a decently large affiliate.

The eldest son, Gu Seongmin, being the boy, was given Cheonghwa Construction and MBS Media Group tied together and made chief executive of Cheonghwa Holdings.

The eldest daughter, Gu Suyeong, runs Cheonghwa Logistics, which holds the group’s core shareholding.

The youngest, Gu Jayeon, meanwhile, carries out the chairmanship of the Cheonghwa Foundation, which is nothing but an honorary post.

The Cheonghwa Foundation, which has not the slightest connection to running the group.

She has slept on brushwood and tasted gall and watched for her chance, and the board has never run the way she meant it to.

Her father Gu Jaeyeong has the typical male mind of the old generation.

He has made it plain, openly, that he means to hand the group to his eldest son and nobody else.

Money enough to live on and a little honour cut off for the youngest would do, in his view.

She has nearly given it up by now, and the will to go at it if a chance ever comes is still there.

She had plans of her own for her children’s future.

Gu Jayeon’s husband comes from a heavy political house with its ground laid in the Gyeongsang region.

He served three terms in the National Assembly, and was pushed out by other people’s connections and unseated at the twenty-first election.

Since then he has spent his time at the edges of politics rather than at home, struggling on alone to widen his connections.

There is not much strength to be expected from her husband’s position now.

Her plan is that her children should have the full benefit of what Cheonghwa Group gives, even from the mother’s side of it.

Which means that while the chairmanship is hers, Cheonghwa High School has to be run more impeccably than it ever has been.

Every year the children of the upper class leave Cheonghwa and are put into society.

As Cheonghwa graduates they are bound into the existing upper-class network by school ties, without effort.

A league of their own, near enough perfect!

Cheonghwa need make no separate effort to attract new pupils or to raise operating funds.

On that count it is a foundation that sits still and takes the honey.

The money graduates donate through the Cheonghwa Foundation as scholarships is beyond imagining.

More than the alumni giving at most well-known universities.

Not all of the donations are passed on as scholarships, naturally.

Most of the money is used for investment.

But funds put into ventures of various kinds more often than not fail to come back and disappear in the end.

And a portion is set aside as a slush fund, obviously.

A school that ought to have been quiet today too, with nothing particular happening.

And a noisy business broke out.

“Chairman, about that——”

An Jongwuk was summoned by the foundation chairman the moment the great hall business had been cleared up.

One quiet line from her and a cold sweat ran down his spine.

Go back over it and the great hall business was still a dizzying thing.

There had been no time to weigh anything, with the idiocy Lee Jangyong had set going.

Word that Haryun Group’s young master had been dragged off to the great hall turned his eyes right round.

An Jongwuk, whose motto in life is no trouble and an easy time of it.

And Lee Jangyong had turned a school atmosphere he had barely got settled clean over.

Fortunately the young master put the situation in order, cleanly.

Jo and Jang attorneys appeared on the spot.

And with that Lee Jangyong’s future was smashed to bits.

“The pupil in question was a charity case, you said? The name——”

“Ha Tae-ung, second year, class three.”

“Ha Tae-ung……”

Chairman Ha Cheolgon’s blood, then?

Gu Jayeon had had no intention of coming in today, in fact.

But her right hand, the head of administration, called her in some urgency, and she came.

She took a report on the whole affair and summoned the principal, An Jongwuk, straight afterwards.

“Young Ha Tae-ung’s father’s name is Ha Donghwi.”

“Ha Donghwi??”

For a moment Gu Jayeon called up the contents of a tip-sheet that had gone round in the past.

The youngest son of the Ha house’s four sons and two daughters was, one day and without warning, taken off the group’s succession list altogether.

The word going round was that he had defied an order from the stiff-necked Chairman Ha Cheolgon and been cast out of the house.

The rumour spread quietly, with the Gangnam upper class at the centre of it.

The children of the top ten groups are the timber that will lead the Korean economy in future, so they take a great interest in that kind of thing and are themselves the object of it.

That was the rumour that leaked from the Haryun Group side at the time.

It seems to have been true, because from just after that Ha Donghwi’s name was wiped from the roll of the Ha family.

“He is certainly Chairman Ha Cheolgon’s youngest grandson.”

An Jongwuk had looked into it closely himself, over the earlier business.

Using the school record Ha Tae-ung submitted on admission, he had gathered as much information as he could.

Gangnam is always thick with outfits that will handle any sort of business for money.

“I see……”

Then why? Why has it stayed quiet until now?

Gu Jayeon set the wisdom a life had taught her to work.

She had a strong feeling that this was not a simple matter but something else entirely, and that she had been drawn into it.

Succession inside the groups that make the top ten is more complicated than people suppose.

Whatever it looks like, behind it there is blood flying and bone being broken up.

The commonest thing is a rival for the succession removed by an accident or a scheme.

Money is the simplest medium there is for confirming the bottom of human nature.

And the succession contest is fiercest of all at Haryun Group.

After the group was split, Chairman Ha Cheolgon took an iron face on himself deliberately, to get the old glory back.

He has hardened into what he is now, the cold blood of the business world.

The business with the youngest son was put in order the same way at the time.

A marriage of convenience was pushed for the group’s sake, and it came to nothing against the resistance of the man himself.

Most people in the groups guessed that was what he had been cast out for.

And the blood of that erased Ha Donghwi had been admitted to Cheonghwa as a charity case.

Not a thing Gu Jayeon could have imagined in a dream.

“He had Jo and Jang attorneys with him, you say?”

“Yes! They addressed him as young master, punctiliously. Their bearing was respectful too.”

“Young master……. Haa.”

With the particulars confirmed, Gu Jayeon’s head began to throb.

One of the Haryun Group family who had been put out, enrolled here, hidden, as a charity case.

A slush fund, presumably.

The children of chaebol houses each have their own means of growing an estate.

Even one put out to the outside world is bound to have a basic inheritance he can draw.

Gu Jayeon herself turns assets on the order of a hundred billion won at the least.

“…… How would you like it handled?”

The principal An Jongwuk read the trouble in the foundation chairman’s face and asked it at the right moment.

There’s something in this……

An Jongwuk has enough about him to read a room, and his eyes went busily round.

The lives of people at the very top are more complicated than ordinary people suppose.

Lives that common people could die and wake again and still never know.

They are people living lives more like a novel than a novel.

“Send in Wang Jindeok, the head of academic affairs.”

“Understood.”

“You may go.”

“Rest well.”

Gu Jayeon’s order to leave the room took a weight off An Jongwuk, and he bowed his head and withdrew in haste.

Shff.

Gu Jayeon rose from her seat and went over to the window.

Under the great trees of the grounds, which have begun to put out leaves, pupils were strolling the paths in time with the lunch hour.

In threes and fives here and there, deep in gossip.

What it looks like is close to the scene at an ordinary high school, and it is nothing of the kind.

What those ones are saying to each other is what their parents say to each other.

Talk with substance in it, and money at the centre, and mostly political.

And……

“The charity case Ha Tae-ung……. What is he really……”

It has been a long while since a pupil drew the foundation chairman’s interest, and Gu Jayeon was curious.

“Whether he really is a new crown prince or only a mongrel pup……. It’ll be settled soon enough.”

Spring ripening, and summer soon to come.

A vast typhoon was warming up to break over a Cheonghwa that had been quiet.

Tae-ung sunbae?

Lee Hyoju was the first to turn her head at the familiar voice.

“Oh!”

She was startled.

The face she found was a hoobae she knows.

Or, to be exact, a relative. A second cousin.

A face she sees exactly once a year.

At the memorial rite for their great-grandfather.

They are at the same school, and even so there is not much occasion to see her.

The one child in the family permitted to work in entertainment.

“Hyoju unnie! Hi~”

Their eyes met and Lee Hyorin waved, pleased to see her.

Being of the same degree, the two of them carry the same generational syllable in their names, Hyo.

“Hyorin…… what are you doing here……”

Lee Hyoju asked it, puzzled that Lee Hyorin should appear at all.

A sudden move like this one is outside anything she would have imagined.

That is how peculiar Lee Hyorin’s character is.

The truth is she is an ill-bred little shit whose own parents have given up on her.

By what she has heard, there is a story going about that even their great-uncle has given up on Lee Hyorin.

For a Lee Hyorin like that to greet Lee Hyoju this warmly, quite unlike her usual self, was strange.

“I came to see Ha Tae-ung sunbae-nim.”

“Tae-ung?”

There is no possibility the two of them know each other.

Until the business this morning Ha Tae-ung was a charity case everybody disregarded.

And now…… sunbae?

Lee Hyorin’s soft way of speaking put the impression on her of a fox with its tail swishing gently.

A pretty face with more than enough allure in it, and that odd look of hers went to Ha Tae-ung.

“Yeah.”

Lee Hyorin answered as she came toward the two of them.

Her eyes, as she came, did not leave Ha Tae-ung.

“Sunbae. You’re something else.”

She lifts the corner of her mouth in a smile and speaks straight to Ha Tae-ung.

In Lee Hyorin’s eyes he was a man who really did give off light.

Better-looking than any male idol she has seen at the agency or the broadcaster.

Most of them are surgical faces and short with it.

And not real men, only pretty boys.

Whatever she looks like, inside Lee Hyorin there is a great deal of rebellion and a roughness.

She grew up among fiercely competing royal families, and the ones dressed up for broadcast held no attraction for her.

Greenhorns without so much as a beard on them.

Lee Hyorin has not yet had a first love to heat her heart.

And today she opened her eyes on a new world.

“Thanks.”

Ha Tae-ung answered it lightly.

What? He doesn’t know me?

Ha Tae-ung’s reaction was flat, unexpectedly, and for a moment Lee Hyorin was thrown.

There is not a boy at Cheonghwa who does not know her.

And Ha Tae-ung’s reaction was——

“Sunbae, don’t you know me?”

“I know you.”

“What? You know me…… and that’s all?”

“What else?”

Ha Tae-ung looked at Lee Hyorin with nothing moving in him at all.

“Hyoju.”

“Hm?”

“Let’s go and eat.”

Ha Tae-ung’s voice went to Lee Hyoju, and it was kind.

“R— right.”

Lee Hyoju was up out of her seat before she knew she had done it.

The manner of the two of them threw Lee Hyorin.

On looks Lee Hyorin has always worked better on men than Lee Hyoju.

And Lee Hyoju was thrown quite as much as Lee Hyorin was.

Lee Hyorin’s looks did not seem to work on Ha Tae-ung.

Tramp, tramp.

Ha Tae-ung and Lee Hyoju stepped past Lee Hyorin without a thought and went out of the room.

“What? Did I just get shot down?”

The first time in her life Lee Hyorin has been disregarded, and it happened in front of her.

“So he wants to make a contest of it?”

She watched the two of them go, and her will to fight caught alight.

And at that moment.

A familiar face had just come into the classroom.

“Oh? What are you doing here??”

(End of Chapter 63)