“That fucking bastard! A boy his age, and what was it — a corpse?”

The young one’s foul talk from his tenant’s flower shop last night was still ringing sharp in Kang Deuksu’s ear.

The day came up and the anger had not gone out of him, and he ground his teeth.

He had left the curse behind him and got out of the place as though he were being driven from it.

And gone straight to the bar he uses.

The rage had burst in him and he could not go home like that.

He drank as much as he could hold, got as drunk as a man gets, and spent the night with the woman who keeps the bar besides.

Kang Deuksu has been working off an old man’s ungovernable greed with the help of pills.

From the moment the dementia came on the wife who was like a tiger, there has been nobody to watch out for.

The money he holds in assets alone runs past ten billion.

The rents that come in from commercial buildings here and there come to better than twenty million won a month on their own.

Spend it and spend it again, and money is the thing that is left over.

The elder son is at present serving as an official of Sokcho City.

A post that follows on behind Kang Deuksu and carries a fair bit of weight in Sokcho.

The second son is in the private lending trade in Sokcho.

Local fists with hard heads on them stand behind him.

So Kang Deuksu is a man with nothing in the world to fear inside Sokcho.

There is no place in Sokcho where the power his money holds does not work.

And a boy with the blood not yet dry on his skull had put the fear on him.

“Ruin three generations, would he? The nerve of a little nobody! I’ll break your household right through!”

Kang Deuksu had pushed himself all night on what was in the pills.

Late in the afternoon he got himself together, cleared his head with a hair of the dog, and went to his flower shop tenant again.

He meant to torment the woman who keeps the flower shop properly this time.

The threat of clearing the unit out that same day would work.

“A beggar’s household without a won in it, and they’ll square up to me? I’ll show them properly how frightening money is——!”

Kang Deuksu, snorting, reached the building.

He came face to face with the flower shop and set solid where he stood.

Up to yesterday the unit had plainly and openly held a flower shop.

“I’m not seeing things……. What is this!”

Empty.

Nothing left in it at all.

Even the sign, and the coloured vinyl that had been stuck to the glass, are peeled off and gone.

It has even been cleaned, neatly, as though it had stood empty from the beginning.

His own building, and not a trace of a flower shop left on it.

“Chairman! You’ve come.”

The owner of the sashimi delivery place in the next unit spotted Kang Deuksu and greeted him.

“President Oh! What is this?”

“What is what?”

“Here. Where has the flower shop gone?”

“They moved out this morning. Surely you knew, Chairman?”

“M— mooooved?”

Kang Deuksu asked it back, dumbfounded.

“Yes. Early this morning ten or so men from a firm swept the lot away in two big lorries.”

“Grrrrrk.”

Kang Deuksu rolled the whites of his eyes and ground his teeth.

The pressure came up in the back of his neck and the anger went nearly to madness.

The woman of the flower shop had bolted.

He had meant to torment her until the blood dried right up in her, and she has vanished without a trace.

“Where did they go?”

“Moved to a unit over by the terminal, they said.”

“The terminal? The rent’s dear over there.”

“It is.”

“Where would she find the money?”

“That I couldn’t…….”

“Fucking hell!”

Kang Deuksu spat the filth out without hesitating.

“Run all you like, you’re still in the Buddha’s palm! I’ll have you without fail——”

Kang Deuksu blazed the anger out of the whole of his body.

He did not know.

What a huge and finely made snare was being got ready and turned toward him!

“I’ll sell. I like the look in the young fellow’s eye.”

This is exactly how men who have it trade.

The way of talking of men with convictions.

If they take to each other, any contract at all is closed on the spot.

No pushing and pulling to shave a few coins off.

The figure put forward is a fair price.

A trade neither buyer nor seller objects to.

“Thank you.”

“Thanks for what! I’m taking the going rate and selling.”

Chairman Hwang’s reaction is a cool one, from a man who does not know the future.

It looks like the way he has lived his life up to now.

Take to the other man, find the price reasonable, and say nothing twice about buying or selling.

On that, we are the same.

“Our young master is in luck. There are several parties queued up to buy that.”

President Song laid out the patter of a proper middleman.

Which made me want it more.

With property in particular, I have heard, the luck has to fall right before a thing comes into your hands.

Take to a place and miss it once, and the chance is hard to come by again for years at the least, and sometimes for decades.

And decisively, it is the best possible spot for Mom’s flower shop.

A place where she can begin the day and pass it saying hello to the grandfather and grandmother on her side, scattered in that sea.

And the coffee shop that will go in after the remodelling.

That will hit it colossal.

Take the whole east coast line and there is no shore as clean as Sokcho beach and as close in to a town centre.

A blue chip of the future, coming up past Gangneung for certain.

“Chairman, would you have any other land?”

Things were coming loose smoothly and I rode the run of it and let some greed in.

With the chance here, I wanted to buy more before the froth came up.

By the feel of it, the elder Hwang Haksu had the smell of a Sokcho land baron about him.

Not by design, perhaps — but a reasonable suspicion arose that he had held a good deal of the choice property in his hand for a long time.

“Other land??”

Hwang Haksu blinks a few times.

“If you hold anything on the sea side among your property, I would like to buy that as well.”

I said it straight.

Turning small tricks over in front of a man with years of life on him only costs you.

“Young master, how did you know that most of our Chairman Hwang’s land looks over the sea?”

Bingo!

President Song of the agency widens his eyes and is astonished.

Curiosity settles into the elder Hwang Haksu’s eyes too.

By the look of it, from where they sit, a man who takes a listing worth billions off them this lightly is not an ordinary thing.

“Y— young master! You’ll be looking at other property as well?”

Chief Kim Juhui was astonished too, at a situation past anything she had expected.

Here too, the crumbs falling in front of her off an introduced listing would come to a good deal.

“Is it the house that’s buying?”

Hwang Haksu, who owns the land, asks it.

The house?

I am the one investing, so it is my house that buys, right enough…….

Three pairs of eyes fix on me at once and stare right through.

The look of people who know who I am.

Their seriousness got a snort of a laugh out of me, inside.

The moment to put their suspicion to rest.

“Yes.”

Short and thick, the answer.

Sokcho and the shore near it, where development has not yet properly begun.

A few years on, the government changes, an air of reconciliation with the North is built up, and it rides a fast current.

After the motorway, the high-speed railway opens.

It pushes Jeju Island aside and becomes the country’s tier one seaside resort.

Commercialisation peaks and Gangneung is pushed into second place.

When the traffic is light it can be cut from Gangnam inside two hours.

An inland hotspot with no troublesome aeroplane needed to reach it.

A few years from now it jumps to several times the value it has today.

Prices have come up a good deal already, and Sokcho held out stubbornly even through the property crisis.

And Seoraksan’s scenery, which counts among the finest in the country, cannot be left out of it.

The best possible thing to buy with coin turned into cash.

The properties best suited for making something real out of nothing.

“And roughly how much would the investment be??”

President Song asked it obliquely.

The bait has been taken and the proper biting has begun.

Snap-snap-snap.

Every look is fixed on me and does not move.

I look young, and in their eyes I am no longer an ordinary young man.

I held a light smile at the corner of my mouth.

These are situations I could not have dared even to dream of in the first life round.

“For a start, I’m thinking of one big note.”

One big note, thrown out lightly!

The three of them trade looks, fast.

Their heads looked very busy.

“A— a hundred billion?”

Chief Kim Juhui was the first to guess at the figure.

I shook my head slightly.

“Ah!!”

The guess had gone outside her unit, and Chief Kim Juhui let out a cry.

“Then! A t— a trillion?”

President Song, who had been holding his composure and carrying some weight with it, widened both eyes and asked.

His voice shook as he named the trillion.

“Yes.”

I admitted it readily, with a face that made nothing of it.

“Ah!”

“Oh!!”

“The Ha family, of course!!”

The three of them cried out as though what they had guessed had proved right.

The elder Hwang Haksu looks at me hard, with a burning eye.

“I’ll sell the lot! If it’s the Ha family investing…… I’ll sell every piece of land I hold!!”

(End of Chapter 87)