"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…