“A log? ……Fuck.”

Yang Susan shivered all through.

He brought back what President Kang had whispered at his ear.

Sell you off as a log and I’d still be out of pocket!

What he borrowed did not come to three hundred million.

And the interest attached to it is a billion already.

A bare few months gone, and the interest on the private lending has come to more than the principal.

It is unlawful, and there is no arguing it at law.

Before that he would be taken and removed without a trace.

Yang Susan knows well enough what President Kang meant by a log.

The trade’s word for a body cut open for its organs and sold.

Driven into a corner by the addiction as he is, a life is precious to anybody.

Yang Susan sat out the night in a cold office.

Two packets were burned through by morning.

The chief’s room filled with grey smoke, like a sealed room thick with fog where nothing ahead can be seen.

His father gave a whole life to building the company solid and handed it down, and in a bare few years he has made an empty tin can of it.

There is no reviving it now.

“Cambodia? No. The place is crawling with thug bastards too. The Philippines is dangerous as well…… Fuck! Where do I bolt to?”

Yang Susan’s eyes are shot through red with the extremity of his fear.

“……Still, it could be worse. Hand the Donghwi bastard over and they’ll write the interest off, they say.”

Once he has handed Donghwi over he cannot set a foot down and live in Korea anyway.

The thing has tangled more complicatedly than he thought.

Think about it as he likes, yesterday’s game was a hand he was going to take and be done with.

Is it the gods playing!

Two billion flew off in one sitting.

The skill he has polished at the game is not so bad as that.

Count the period up and the days he came out ahead were many.

But the blow taken on yesterday’s last game was far too large.

Covering the bill coming due at the end of this month, he could have held out a few months more behind it.

Thanks to Ha Donghwi running the selling well, the accounts are being kept.

Let a capitalist only invest and he could have grown the business off the pledged cold stores as a stake.

And a game’s result turned the whole of it to froth.

And a future gone with it.

He has bought time, at least.

“Donghwi-ya. I don’t like you.”

Yang Susan knows the history of Ha Donghwi’s house well.

Honestly, he called Ha Donghwi in because he judged there was use to be had of him.

A direct descendant of Haryun Group, so he thought there would be something put away somewhere.

And having got him there, the man was penniless.

He could not throw him out because the selling was worth having.

On the pretext of expanding the business he put him up as a registered director first.

He needed a hole to push the responsibility through if something unseemly broke later.

To build the trust up he allotted him one per cent of the equity as well.

Ha Donghwi trusted Yang Susan as the one friend he had, and put his seal to a joint surety on the private lending too.

And Yang Susan has not liked that Ha Donghwi since their days at the same university.

Ha Donghwi will have thought of him as a friend. Yang Susan did not.

Wherever he went, Ha Donghwi gave off light.

At university too he had most of the women students’ attention to himself.

The crown prince of Haryun Group!

Good-looking, and his manners good with it.

He never fixed on anybody and went with her.

He was only a good sunbae, and a good hoobae, and a good contemporary.

He did his service on active duty as well.

After he came back to his studies, when Ha Donghwi appeared on campus the women who were keen on him came along in a crowd.

Ha Donghwi was near enough the equal of a popular star.

Yang Susan did well enough himself in Donghae city, and there was no comparing him with Ha Donghwi.

Ha Donghwi did not know what was inside Yang Susan, and took him for a friend.

Yang Susan hid the jealousy, and became a friend beyond compare to Ha Donghwi.

When Ha Donghwi was put out of his house, Yang Susan supported him with a great sum, and the two of them grew firmer for it.

A rich house takes three generations to fall!

Yang Susan believed the proverb.

And Ha Donghwi slipped past his expectations every time.

“And still he comes through with something. Heh heh heh.”

Yang Susan sold the last piece of conscience he had left.

He is sorry, and even so he means to hand Ha Donghwi the repayment of the private lending and every debt attached to Pacific Fisheries.

“Now…… there’s only the burial mountain left.”

It is a mountain near Sokcho his father bought up whenever money came in.

A mountain he made into the family burial ground by moving the ancestors’ graves onto it.

It is the last property left, and even Yang Susan had worked at not touching it to the end, for conscience’s sake.

“Sold in a hurry, five billion or so…….”

His head, a good deal lighter, turned over fast.

He has no lingering attachment to life in Korea any longer.

A burial mountain that would take ten billion easily if the right owner were met.

Clearing it quickly, given the time he has, he would have to take the loss.

“Laos is hot these days, I hear.”

Yang Susan made up his mind.

There is no future in a Korea without Pacific Fisheries.

“That aside — how did this Ha Donghwi bastard get tangled up with a private lender?”

The whole of this plan was a condition President Kang put forward first.

Hand every responsibility to Ha Donghwi and leave Korea!

Shff. Shff.

A report held in my hand.

I am back at the Seoul flat.

And called Attorney Ah Yura at once.

She arrived at the summons and looked the place over out of the corner of her eye.

The content is too sensitive to go through in an open space, so I called her to the flat.

In Sokcho I held it in.

Here, where my parents are not, there is no need for that.

The old lecher who put shame on my mother!

I cannot forgive it.

Attorney Ah Yura brought the material she had commissioned on Kang Deuksu’s particulars and his household.

“Mm.”

A short sound broke out of me at what the report said.

It is more serious than I had guessed.

Kang Deuksu’s elder son a Sokcho city official, and the second son…….

I know him.

The private lender who came to the house right after my father’s death, in the past, and turned the household upside down.

I knew nothing then, and I was frightened out of myself and shook with it.

The killing intent and the sneer in that man’s eyes!

The man with his eyes wide, making threats!

That man’s name is Kang Hongdong!

By whatever trick of fate, Kang Deuksu’s second son is him.

Out of the seed of a rotten stock a devil was born.

“This doesn’t look like a matter to be handled lightly.”

Attorney Ah Yura said it to me as I looked the content over.

As she says, there is something serious in it.

“Kang Hongdong threatened Yang Susan, and there is somebody behind him. Is that it?”

“Yes……. The information team got that far.”

“Which means…….”

“That there is a designer to this, and the designer is not an ordinary person.”

Haryun!

Every misfortune that came down on our house before the regression was connected to Haryun Group.

The trouble is.

The butterfly effect.

There is still a year to go before the point of my father’s death.

Yang Susan’s company holds out a while yet.

Yang Susan was said to have sold the burial mountain to put up the company’s operating funds.

Things are twisting on the flow of time.

And the reason is…….

“It’s because of me.”

Going by the flow of time as it was, these things ought to be a year from now.

Had I lived quietly, as though dead, the misfortune would have come a year on, as it did then.

But I made my presence felt, and the flow of time has quickened and events are twisting.

The future is not fixed!

The scale of the board being twisted is still small.

The wave my moving has made is not enough to shake the world.

Only, the misfortune that ran through my family has certainly picked up speed.

And that is fortunate!

The man I am now is not the man I was.

“The Cheonghwa High School business was not a small thing. It’s exactly the sort of issue the upper class likes putting in its mouth. And…….”

Attorney Ah Yura let the end trail off.

She did not put Haryun into her mouth specifically.

“Is there a plan?”

“Sorry?”

“A plan capable of protecting my parents.”

The service to me and to my direct lineal ascendants is set down plainly in the contract.

I had not expected to be putting Jo and Jang’s power to proper use this quickly either.

“To start with, there are several protection firms under contract to Jo and Jang. I think we should give the task to one of them.”

Ah Yura put a finger on the heart of the question.

The most important matter to me is my parents’ safety.

Thugs have my parents in their sights.

“And after that?”

This is not all of it.

What I want of Jo and Jang is not an ordinary protection method anybody could predict.

“…….”

Ah Yura looks at me steadily.

“At this size I think it would be right to add dedicated team members.”

It is going past the level two people can settle.

If the Haryun Group family has entered this war, Jo and Jang must strengthen its own force too.

Which is why I paid a great sum and contracted them.

“Add them.”

On that I agree.

The more attorneys assigned to me alone, the firmer my standing as a Jo and Jang client becomes.

“Kang Deuksu, Attorney Kim and I are enough for. But to face the forces connected to Kang Hongdong we’ll need help from…… higher up the line.”

“Do it.”

“Sorry?”

I answered coolly.

Ah Yura cannot hide her astonishment at the agreement on the spot.

By higher up the line, Ah Yura means people in the prosecution service and senior positions in the courts.

The moment they join in, a great cost arises.

“Attorney Ah.”

“Yes…….”

“Anybody who touches me or my parents…… I will forgive none of them.”

I said it in a voice settled heavy, with what I meant loaded into it.

“Smash them until they would sooner be dead. Use every power Jo and Jang has……. Sweep them away without a trace!”

“……!!”

(End of Chapter 93)