Click. Tssss.

Ah Yura was back at the serviced-apartment block near the office.

The heat boiling up inside her had not cooled by the time she got home.

A stomach that had got used to cognac and whisky is wanting a little more drink.

The moment she was home she ran to the refrigerator and took out a cold can of beer.

The sound of the can opening rang through the quiet flat.

She took a light mouthful of beer and went over to the window.

Outside the window the city’s lights were embroidered across the dark, splendidly.

An appetite once lit does not go out.

It is past midnight and there are still a great many cars on the roads.

Every one of them looked to be running to satisfy an appetite of its own.

“A broker……”

Ah Yura has envied the few seniors working as brokers.

Put coldly, they are legal brokers who satisfy the appetites of upper-class people by proxy.

Being a Jo and Jang attorney alone gets a person treated as a top-rank Korean broker.

“Riding the tiger.”

She took a large mouthful of beer and murmured the four-character phrase she had heard earlier.

She accepted the work the crown prince proposed.

She knows how the world turns as well as anybody.

Ah Yura had done her own best to gather information on her crown prince client.

And just before leaving the office today, she received an email.

“The son of the unlucky prince driven out of Haryun Group……”

The first email sent through did not hold a great deal of information.

And that alone was enough.

“So he grew his capital by investing in coin……”

It is still only a guess and not exact.

But living in a residence as expensive as the Signiel and contracting with Jo and Jang directly clears the doubt on its own.

The service costs and the money the housing needs alone are not at a level an ordinary person could carry.

“The look in his eyes wasn’t a lie. And……”

Even now, bringing it back put a shudder through her.

“A goblin shaman. Ugh.”

Ah Yura’s body gave a small shiver.

She had never once gone to a shaman’s house for a reading.

She was busy studying, as a student and as a lawyer both.

She has heard that most successful people are born to the chart for it.

Those people do not bother going to a shaman either — they walk their own road themselves.

But then there was the goblin lord she came up against today.

She heard the reading and her thinking changed.

The goblin’s message of blessing and warning, passed to the crown prince through the bartender’s mouth, is still ringing at her ear.

“Crown prince. I’ve decided. Grow me, as you promised.”

Build a lawyer’s career up neatly and, with luck, a chance to be appointed judge or prosecutor comes along afterwards.

The road need not open that way either — with one rope well caught, a person can stay a top-flight lawyer on tens of billions a year.

An assistant is the thing absolutely needed as a foothold for social success.

Swallow. Swallow.

The more her thoughts multiplied the drier her throat got.

Ah Yura emptied the beer she was holding in one.

“But today I…… wasn’t up to much?”

An evening out she had thought of as a date, with a full face and the dress code seen to.

It felt a pity that it seemed not to have caught the man’s eye at all.

He is a high school pupil, and he is a grown man with it.

It was a table where she could have made her appeal well enough.

“…… Tch.”

At the pointlessness of the thought, Ah Yura’s lips pushed out in a sulk.

Trickle, trickle, trickle.

Red wine filled a clear glass drawn in a fine narrow line.

Wine…… with ramyeon?

Seo Dahui thought it inwardly, watching the wine filling the glass in front of her.

Wine is ordinarily drunk alongside a Western set meal.

Pairing wine with ramyeon cannot be imagined.

Seo Dahui does not have a great deal of experience either, and she has heard plenty from the people around her.

And today, though——

“Looks good, doesn’t it?”

“Sorry? Yes……”

It was not the picture Seo Dahui had asked for.

Ha Tae-ung had pointed at the wine cellar behind her.

Seo Dahui had only swallowed at the taste coming back to her the moment she saw the wine.

Things being hard lately, she had been hungry for drink as well.

The ramyeon took the emptiness off, and the alcohol pulled at her naturally, that was all.

At this hour, wine drunk while looking at the night view was a pleasure even to think about.

“Drink.”

The man’s actions have no check in them.

And he does not lose his manners with it.

Natural and squarely himself, he is good to look at.

“Yes……”

Seo Dahui, with thirty right in front of her.

Her voice shook like somebody in her first year of work.

In all her time in entertainment this is the first man with manners.

Ting.

They touched glasses lightly.

A mouthful held in the mouth and swallowed——

“……!!”

It’s good!

Seo Dahui was startled inwardly.

It is a wine that suits the soft ramyeon broth with the egg beaten into it perfectly.

It coated her mouth with a clean, fresh grape scent.

“It’s good, isn’t it?”

“Yes!”

“It’s the first time for me with this combination too.”

“What??”

A man who is perfect down to the way he drinks wine says ramyeon and wine is a first.

“But today it felt like the combination to drink.”

“Wh— why?”

Seo Dahui wondered.

It was a remark that could easily be taken the wrong way.

A deep night, a man and a woman who are strangers, eating ramyeon.

The ramyeon hour, which proves there is something between a man and a woman.

And wine at a table like that?

A textbook point with no way around it.

Seo Dahui’s heart began to beat, thump thump.

She had been so hungry she had put shame aside and asked.

And it has become a meal with more atmosphere to it than she expected.

An hour going past twelve at night.

The night is deep and the mood is soaking through with it.

It is not as though she does not know about men and women.

Seo Dahui, who does not lightly permit her body.

And today, somehow, it feels like a mood in which she might.

At one mouthful of wine Seo Dahui felt her blood heating.

Those eyes…… this is maddening.

The man’s eyes are deep and shaded.

Every time she meets his clearly shining pupils Seo Dahui is impressed inwardly.

Unlike a face that looks quite young, the eyes were deeper than that by some way.

“It seems as though you need more help from me…… don’t you?”

“……!!”

Personally I am a fan of Seo Dahui’s songs.

It is a second meeting with her.

For me it is a particular bond.

Before the regression I had no interest in singers and only listened to the songs.

Mostly words with an aching account of love and parting in them, going right into the ear.

Listening on a day when the rain fell in particular was a killer.

The tone went into a person’s heart along every grain of it.

Objectively she was a woman solo singer with a perfect three-beat of looks, tone and feeling.

At present she lives next door to me.

I had not known I would end up living as her neighbour.

Meeting Seo Dahui brought a thing out of the past back to me.

Before the regression, watching a video channel, I happened to learn about her case.

The bad-contract case with her first agency.

It drove her to the very edge at the time and public feeling was loud about it.

Her dealings with the people round her, and every part of her private life, were things to be managed.

Her meals were thoroughly restricted too, of course.

In an interview at the time, Seo Dahui said that she had even thought of ending her life.

The present point is fortunately the one where she is holding out, having refused to re-sign.

Afterwards she came back with songs of her own again, as she did with her first one.

That is three years from now.

In the meantime Seo Dahui bears a long, long stretch of silence and pain alone.

Knowing her past as I do, I want to put out a hand.

Fan’s heart aside, as one human being to another.

“Hh-hk……”

Suddenly Seo Dahui broke into crying.

Nothing I had intended at all.

For a woman who will have been starving, I boiled the ramyeon as soft as I could in case it stuck.

You must not eat food quickly on an empty stomach.

Which is why I deliberately ate with her, to control the pace.

An emptied stomach is more fragile than people think.

Especially a woman who collapsed only a short while ago.

When something strongly flavoured comes suddenly, more care is needed.

The wine was chosen deliberately, to serve as a buffer for letting the tension go.

“……”

I looked at her with the tears broken out.

It seems that one line, tossed out, has burst a sealed grief.

Alone, how hard must it have been.

The pain each person has to bear is known only to that person.

I did not know it when I came across the interview in the past either.

I was under the weight of my own life at the time.

So I do not know it well.

What I can do instead is confirm it now, in the colour of the pain showing off Seo Dahui’s body.

Blue, mixed into a transparent light!

And laid over it, one more layer of Black!

An aura of darkness where pain borne alone and depression exist together.

Eating away at her like a moth, moment by moment.

Which is why I kept asking whether there was anything to help with.

Shff.

I got up from my seat quietly.

“Hh-huuk. Hh-hk…… hk.”

Tears once broken out do not look likely to stop easily.

I went over beside her slowly.

“It’s all right now. I’ll help——”

A rush.

I put a hand lightly on her shoulder, and——

I had only meant to pat her and comfort her, and Seo Dahui suddenly got up out of her seat and threw her arms round me.

“……!!”

For a moment I was thrown.

“Hk…… hh-huuk.”

Seo Dahui, holding on to me and crying more bitterly.

Her tears wetting my chest went right into my heart.

Shff.

I wrapped both arms round her.

At the hardest moment, somebody’s arms become the medicine that lets a person live.

It is the way human beings share pain between them.

Pat by pat, I patted her back lightly.

With the hand and the heart of a mother soothing a small child.

“Hk……”

Slowly the sound of her crying died down.

Tok-tok. Tok! Tok-to-tok!

Just then came the sound of raindrops knocking at the window.

Through the specially soundproofed glass, the hard sound of rain leaked in — the last of the spring rain, perhaps, or the first of the summer.

“Haa……”

Seo Dahui, her crying stopped, drew one long breath in against his chest and let it out.

(End of Chapter 79)