“Ha Cheolgon’s grandson……”

A great house standing on the upper part of Pyeongchang-dong, where the city comes into view at a glance.

An old man of dried-up build, standing and gazing out through a large window, murmured it to himself.

He is bald, with a little white hair left.

Hands clasped behind his back, he looked at the pines in the garden, which the sparse street lamps lend a certain air to.

His two eyes looked indifferent, and out of his mouth came Ha Cheolgon’s name.

For a moment a shadow of Ha Cheolgon seemed to pass across those eyes.

“Of all people…… Ha Cheolgon’s grandson…… tch.”

The old man clicked his tongue at once, as though displeased.

His name is Kang Pilseong.

His late parents were great merchants of some name in Pyongyang.

When the puppet regime took hold of the North they suffered persecution of every kind.

In a single morning the goods and the house they had built up, and the land with them, were all taken away.

A house that fell from a great merchant family to a life below a bondservant’s.

When the war broke out on the twenty-fifth of June they joined the refugee road and came south.

The truce line was drawn and Kang Pilseong’s parents settled in the South.

They had left home having already lost everything.

His parents went all the way down to Busan and started selling the stew boiled up out of army leftovers.

Even in the middle of a war, merchants’ blood built a fortune.

A merchant house for generations back, and it was as though the money-ghost had found its proper master.

Kang Pilseong’s parents grew money without a check and piled up wealth, and then ran into another hardship.

The affairs of the world do not turn only as one wishes.

It was wartime, so the place was thick with vagrants after one big score.

Discharged soldiers and local layabouts joined them, and they took the couple’s money off them at every turn.

His parents suffered bitterly at it for a period, and then gathered refugees from their own province to add strength to their side.

They put a day’s food and a little money into their hands and set them to work.

The refugees had left their home country and had nothing to lose, and they were hard.

Not all of them had wanted to settle in the South either.

To survive, for their one life and the family left to them, they would put up even a life they did not have.

In that way the men who had been troubling his parents were dealt with, one by one.

Even the organised gangs who had worked Busan as natives since the old days feared the Kang house.

As the years went on the Kang house spread its power and became the unseen central force of Busan.

The scale of it grew and they naturally put a foot into moneylending, where money earns money.

It got so that not so much as a minnow could borrow the Kang house’s money and fail to repay it.

While the rivers and mountains changed a few times over, the Kang house established itself as the great hand of the Korean private lending trade.

It reached a point where among the many companies in Korea it was hard to find one that had not used Kang money.

Kang Pilseong had always watched the way his parents turned money.

He took over the lending business naturally, in the spirit of carrying on a family trade.

Kang Pilseong, elite enough to have studied in America.

Educated as he was, he turned the funds more coldly, on a capitalist’s logic.

He grew the stake his parents had built up well.

And then something happened.

Kang Pilseong had built friendships with the people of every administration that passed through, on generous bribes.

He had run his business boldly enough not to fear heaven itself.

Whether the country was in boom or in slump, he took hold of enormous money every time.

The same when the real-name financial transaction system was brought in under the Jo Yeongsan administration.

He heard the information ahead of the policy coming into force and opened accounts abroad under borrowed names, and moved it there.

The IMF broke.

The state’s financial policy changed.

He turned a lending trade that was a source of money in the shade into a savings bank in the sunlight.

He moved the flow of funds to the capital region and bought up cheap buildings all through Gangnam and central Seoul.

He was given the property policy information as each announcement came, and disposed of and bought property at exactly the right moments, and grew his estate.

Kang Pilseong reached a level in funds that nobody could disregard.

And he did not stop. He put his strength into growing the estate further, doggedly.

And then one day a thing came on him like a bolt out of a clear sky.

He lost his son and his son’s wife at a stroke.

It was heaven’s punishment, in the plain sense of it.

That was when he understood.

He lost his child, and everything he had came down with him.

A precious child, and an only son.

His son and his son’s wife went and left one granddaughter behind them, the one drop of his blood.

Kang Pilseong is still living like this because of the granddaughter, Kang Ari, left behind on her own.

Had it been otherwise he might have ended his own life.

Only after losing his one son did he learn how fearful money with blood on it is.

Afterwards, to wash even a little of that account away, he gave a considerable part of his estate to social works.

The only thing he wants is that his granddaughter should grow up without harm.

An Aram is the daughter of the driver, his right hand, who died along with them in the accident.

He had that child put beside his granddaughter as a friend and a guard both.

Whatever his granddaughter Kang Ari wanted, he gave her.

A granddaughter raised as gold and jade, with all his care——

“Ha Tae-ung……”

He has been planting informants in every quarter for his granddaughter’s safety for a long time now.

Naturally there is a hand at Cheonghwa High School taking that work on.

Which means he is watching everything that happens at the school, every day.

Nothing particular had come up until now, and lately the name of a pupil, Ha Tae-ung, has begun coming up.

The boy is the blood of Ha Cheolgon, who is famous among the chaebol for having a thoroughly foul character.

“Meet him myself and I’ll know……”

His granddaughter is showing a liking for a boy for the first time.

Kang Pilseong will not permit his granddaughter a speck of dust’s worth of pain.

“Spring has gone already. It’s summer, just like that.”

Kang Pilseong, gazing without expression at the night view of central Seoul.

He knew from the dark clouds coming over the far sky that summer was close at hand.

The Magician!

A card with a magician in a red cloak over his shoulders, one hand raised.

Standing full of himself in the middle of a field of flowers.

“The Magician upright, then……”

The bartender — the shaman.

Before that, the low voice of the god possessing him came down.

“……”

Ah Yura, the spirit thoroughly out of her and every nerve tight, kept her mouth shut and watched nothing but the bartender’s lips.

I have never exchanged names with the bartender.

Before the regression I came to this place exactly once.

It was when I was running about day and night to bring off even one contract.

Meetings every day, work outside and work at night, and a going-in to the office that repeated without end, like a wheel in a cage.

There was no time to meet my girlfriend either.

I left the office late and got to the rooftop room with barely enough in me to fall over.

The condition I had built up serving in the Special Forces was what held me together.

And then one day.

A team dinner ran on to a third round.

Unlike other days it went past one in the morning.

That day, oddly, I did not want to go home either.

My girlfriend was not much in contact at the time.

The few friends I had were all busy living in their own worlds.

It had been past a few months since I had spoken to my mother in Sokcho.

It felt as though I had been left alone in the world.

The drink went in and the loneliness and the solitude came over me thicker.

More alcohol was needed if the mind was going to be numbed.

Drunk, I walked the Gangnam streets at night.

The place I came into then was here.

A basement whisky bar with no sign to speak of.

The moment I sat down I ordered by cheap and strong, and nothing else.

I was drunk already and my tongue twisted about as it pleased.

I remember the bartender then giving a broad smile at the sight of me.

The look in those eyes was not a person’s.

There was something deep and empty in it, like a nebula in the far deep of space.

The one in front of me. It is him.

I took whisky in an on-the-rocks glass then.

Cold whisky mixed with clear stones of ice.

I put it down in one without hesitating.

At the moment I was feeling the whisky scent go thickly up through the nose, a voice came with it, like something in a dream.

—The wheel of fortune is a realm of the gods, which no man can stop……

Straight after I heard that voice, memory cut off.

When I opened my eyes again I was in the rooftop room.

I had been very drunk, and I remembered the whole situation.

The bartender, who looked at a drunk man and told him to go home.

I heard it and got up from my seat like a corpse walking.

I never came here again after that.

Partly because of the strange smile he wore looking at me drunk.

And it was only after a certain amount of time that I found out.

It was through a video broadcast.

What this whisky bar is.

Among certain people it was known as a place where a man who owns a building worth tens of billions is the bartender.

More astonishing was that the bartender dealing with the customers is a shaman.

The word is that he has real power, and a great many come in for a reading.

The drink comes second.

A bartender who owns the building and is not in want of money.

So there was no small complaint among the visitors that he picks and chooses whose readings he will do, by whom he takes to.

As with a hall standing empty, the way it is now——

Today was when this place came back to me.

Why it came back today I do not know myself.

I turn over what the words that voice carried meant.

The wheel of fortune is one no man can stop.

It is a realm of the gods.

The wheel of fortune I am going to set rolling.

It may be that the wheel led me here.

It is the second meeting, and it feels like having known him a long stretch of years.

I think I dimly know who the being speaking through the bartender’s mouth and eyes is.

He is——

“Thus says the goblin……. One born to the fate of the Magician is a being who shines of himself and holds a particular quality that is his own. The moment he forgets that rare quality and nature, the beauty permitted to him goes as well. So he has to notice the fact that he is himself precious and of worth. And at that moment the whole universe comes to hold the one of the Magician’s fate dear, and to love him.”

The bartender — the goblin lord — setting the pointer of Attorney Ah Yura’s fate with a single card.

The gods existed like this, mixed in among human beings, in every corner of the world.

In the past, before the regression, would I have half believed it?

And now I believe it entirely.

I am a man who has had an experience that cannot be imagined.

As the party to it, I believe in gods absolutely.

The life given back to me, which my grandmother allowed.

“And at the same time, hold the people of the world dear as you hold yourself, take trouble for them and give out love, and it comes back to you several times over. Child.”

The goblin lord looked steadily at Ah Yura.

“Yes? Yes……”

Attorney Ah Yura blinks her large eyes and answers in a shaking voice.

“The upright meaning this Magician’s fate carries is the beginning of a new relation in your life at present. Your new fated one will make you shine, and it proves that fate’s new project has begun. In order to bring out the shining and beautiful talent permitted to you in this life……”

The goblin lord cut the words off a moment and looked at me.

“You need only follow young Ha here.”

“……!!”

For an instant I was so startled I nearly went over backwards.

He knew exactly that my surname is Ha.

“……”

Attorney Ah Yura turns to look at me.

She has the eyes of somebody hit by a thunderbolt out of a dry sky as well.

She came out for a light glass.

And at that table she is getting her fortune read by a shaman.

Her eyes with something complicated and subtle mixed into them.

“Act……. And it shall be brought about……. This is my blessing and my curse.”

A fearful thing to say.

It says that if you do not act you will be cursed.

It is a threat that prophesies a fate.

“And young Ha…… you.”

Through the bartender’s eyes the goblin lord looks straight at me.

(End of Chapter 73)