“Who?”

“The flower shop in our building.”

“And so?”

“And so what! How many times do I have to say it! Break that household into the ground!”

“Come on, Father. Think what kind of world it is these days…….”

“You can’t? Then I give it to your brother!”

“…….”

Kang Deuksu’s house.

Kang Hongcheol, the elder son, had come to the house on his father’s sudden summons, and drew his face up at what the man said.

Fuck. The old man won’t even die, and the force in him only grows? Bullshit.

Kang Hongcheol does not like his father Kang Deuksu.

The man has not a speck in him worth learning from, morally.

With his mouth he trumpeted at his children not to covet what belonged to others, and the man himself went about doing rubbish.

If it had not been for his mother, now in a care home with dementia, ruin would have set into this household long ago.

All the years he lived with her, his father went outside the marriage countless times.

Look at him even now and the blood in him is livelier than in his own son.

Money being the only thing he holds, he goes about eating every sort of thing said to be good for the body — wild ginseng, white snake broth, the lot.

Unable to govern the blood overflowing in him, he went about seducing every woman he marked.

On the narrow Sokcho patch, anybody who does not know his father Kang Deuksu is a spy.

Disorderly rumours, uncomfortable to hear, are spread thick enough.

Kang Hongcheol, being a public official, had had many moments of shame over it, and bore them.

Lately his father’s property has come up in price and gone well past ten billion.

Naturally a competition with his brother has started over the share of it.

The whole of the father’s property passes to the two sons.

And now his father was trying to pull in Kang Hongcheol, a public official, to work off his own temper.

“Come on, Father. When did I say I couldn’t? There are eyes about, so I’m saying I’ll handle it quietly.”

“Are you?”

“Of course. Father, don’t you know me?”

“Heh heh. I know you well. Kang Hongcheol, the eldest of my house.”

Kang Deuksu heard the answer he wanted and broke into a satisfied laugh.

Putting one self-employed woman with no money and no backing in the ground is child’s play to a public official.

And this is the provinces, not a central body in the capital region.

“Han Jiyun, was it?”

“That’s her.”

“All right. I’ll look into it and take steps.”

“Good! Don’t take long over it! Leave her half dead!”

“All right.”

“I trust my eldest. How long am I going to live? Once I’m dead the eldest has to keep the Kang family property. Who else would do it?”

It is Kang Deuksu’s bait, from a man who knows exactly how to work his son’s mind.

“I’ll handle it as fast as it can be done! Father!”

A word about the inheritance added on, and Kang Hongcheol’s mouth fell open at once in a slack grin.

Kang Deuksu watched the colour change in his son’s face with the eye of an old raccoon dog.

I will have you on your knees in front of me without fail, you bitch!!

Kang Deuksu imagined Han Jiyun on her knees, begging.

And he did not doubt it in the least.

He is a man with a record behind him of putting insignificant people beyond recovery, several times over, in the course of his life.

Somebody on the order of Han Jiyun, who keeps a flower shop, he can bring down without laying a hand on her.

Tip-tick.

“Everybody’s out of their wits.”

I opened the chart window on the trading site on my phone.

Touching the screen with a finger, I let a smile onto my face.

The crash runs on, day after day.

The fragments the moon threw out as it fell have flown in every direction.

The ants have begun dumping in order to survive.

Blue lights are up across nearly every coin index.

“And somebody, even in this gap, is starting to accumulate…….”

The market has its warning lights on, and on one side of it accumulation is beginning.

It may be an individual. It may be a group.

Wall Street money in particular is sweeping it up in bulk out of the crash.

Taking this point as the mark, a great rising market arrives a few years on, as though it were a lie!

They accumulate stock and coin not in units of months but in units of years.

The ants, short of capital to begin with and weak in staying power on top of it, are built to be taken by their shaking-out work.

In a shambles like that, my account, which took a short position, is on fire.

“Hmmmm~♬”

The humming came out of me by itself, out of pleasure.

App trading is the best.

With nothing but a phone you can trade without regard for where you are.

The money spent on filial duty in Sokcho was filled back in within the hour.

“I’ll change onto a new boat soon enough.”

I closed the trading window.

The butterfly effect I had been half expecting has not happened yet.

Coin is moving exactly along the chart I lived through before.

Relief and excitement come over me at once.

“The light on people in the property trade is ochre.”

A deep ochre golden aura came off Hwang Haksu, the Sokcho land baron.

President Song Jeonggeun the broker carried a similar light.

“The contract is closed…….”

The money has not been paid in full.

Only ten per cent of the price went in.

The balance date was pushed back a month.

I mean to swell the assets sufficiently and then go shopping for Sokcho property.

A few years on, the reunification question sends property prices around Paju and Sokcho up frighteningly.

Reunification did not happen, of course, up to the regression.

Even so, a channel opened for a while and property along the front line stirred.

While flats and commercial units that had been climbing checked themselves, property in the districts nearby rode the wind of the reunification question and flew right up.

“This life round, let’s do the filial duty properly.”

I set my mind on investing in Sokcho because of Mom.

The grandfather and grandmother on my mother’s side, asleep in the water off Sokcho beach.

Sokcho is the home of the spirit that holds Mom up now.

“Mom…….”

There is a great deal hidden in the past that I went by without ever knowing.

Like the humiliation Mom took yesterday.

Bringing it back is enough to set my teeth shaking.

“Kang Deuksu…….”

Not a face that will sit still. There is more than enough in it to work some other move behind the scenes.

The risk had to be cleared.

I put an express instruction in to Jo and Jang at once.

He is a man with a crime in him if you so much as shake him lightly.

I requested the highest level of punishment, whatever the nature of the offence.

There is no need to put blood on my own hands.

On mongrels of that sort, even a sacred fist would be wasted.

Jo and Jang will see to it themselves.

Jo and Jang is a gathering of able men who manufacture crimes that do not exist.

“I’ll dry the blood out of you and kill you with it.”

A cold-blooded smile that raises the skin spread at the corner of my mouth.

Tip-ti-tick.

A light touch sound came from the direction of the front door.

“Mom?”

I set the phone down on the table.

It is the evening hour when the dark comes on quickly.

Out through the veranda window the sea off Sokcho catches the lighthouse beam and glitters.

Clunk.

The front door opened.

And the person who came in was…….

“Tae-ung-a! It’s Dad! Hahahahaha.”

Dad is back from his trip.

This is the father who had to meet a death he did not deserve, in the past.

Seen again, dependable as ever, laughing wide.

The eyes looking at me hold, entire, the warmest heart in the world, exactly as they always did.

Thud! Thud

The heart born again went madly.

I lived with the sorrow and the guilt pressed down deep in the chest, after my father died.

The worth of a solid prop, which I never understood while he was alive, I only knew after he had gone.

Streaming.

The tears burst out of me without my knowing.

Grandmother! Thank you!!

It is another present got by the regression.

Our house fell in a single moment right after my father’s sudden death.

By the merit my grandmother piled up in her life, I have come back into the family’s arms.

“S— son! Are you crying?”

Dad was thrown.

By the look of it, astonished at something he has never once been shown.

Shff. I wiped the tears away with the back of my hand.

“Seeing you after so long, the tears just came…….”

“What? Was our Tae-ung this devoted a son? Hahahahahaha.”

Passing over it lightly, Dad broke into a great open laugh.

That’s right.

Dad was this kind of man.

A gold spoon, born a descendant of one of the ten great chaebol houses.

And a man who chose love, only that, and gave up everything he had been enjoying.

And afterwards, a true romantic who has given his life to Mom and me and nothing else.

It is a side of Dad I never looked at closely in the past.

About now, Dad was at the age where the early grey sits on him this naturally.

A man who gave a whole life to the wife and the son he loved. Man to man, he is magnificent.

In Dad’s position, could I really have chosen a life like this?

“Dad! I respect you.”

“Respect? What’s this! I ought to be enormously grateful, is that it?”

I bowed my head slightly and gave him what I meant.

Ha Donghwi, the father, looked at a son unlike his usual self, with a slow grin.

“Dad. There’s something I have to say to you.”

“Son, you’re a bit unlike yourself today. Looks like you turned into a grown man while I wasn’t looking. Hahaha.”

The working habits of a man in his thirties came out.

Shff.

I picked up from the table the A4 sheet I had printed off in advance, and handed it over.

“What’s this…….”

“You’ll know when you look.”

“Will I?”

Dad looks the printout over without much suspicion.

“Eh??”

(End of Chapter 89)