Tying Up Loose Ends (5)
After we offered incense to Mother, we went inside Grandmother's house.
The moment we were through the door, she settled into the living room and told Hwayeon to greet her properly. Hwayeon flushed and dropped into a full formal bow.
Grandmother received the bow with a pleased look, then let her eyes rest on Franc, standing quietly off to one side, and spoke.
"Little one. You won't bow for me, then."
"M-me?! Ah, I... I'm not even a person..."
Franc hadn't expected to be singled out. She stammered, flustered, and looked from me to Dad to Mom, and Mom only smiled, set a gentle hand to her back, and nudged her forward.
Pushed on by that hand, Franc went, and what Grandmother said next turned her face bright red.
"Weren't you fond of my little puppy?"
I watched the red-faced bow from behind, then turned to Dad and Mom.
"How much does Grandmother actually know?"
"Everything she needed to. Nothing she didn't."
"Even that Franc is one of my women?"
"As a granddaughter-in-law."
I nodded and said nothing. So they'd told her all of it.
Then Grandmother caught sight of winged Hiarid, and of Miho trotting around the house taking in the sights, and asked:
"These ones are bride material too?"
I shook my head so hard I thought my brain might come sloshing out.
She'd heard we were coming, and had already slaughtered and dressed three of the big roosters she'd been raising. From the backyard she brought in a pot of samgyetang — ginseng chicken porridge — simmered long and soft, and Mom pulled frozen dongchimi, that watery radish kimchi, and young-radish kimchi from the earthen jars buried in the shaded part of the yard. Between them they laid out a belated feast for the last of the summer dog days.
After lunch, Grandmother brought out a photo album and showed me pictures I'd never seen: Grandfather, my eldest uncle, and Mother, whom I had met for the first time only recently.
In one of them, a slender, beautiful girl who looked younger than I did now had her arms wrapped around a childhood version of Dad and Uncle, laughing bright and wide.
It must have been taken before she turned nineteen. She looked a little younger than me, her long hair falling as straight as any well-bred young lady's, a dress on her white as snow. Quiet and gentle to the eye. A scatterbrain and a wild child? Not from that picture. Not a chance.
"She looks so sweet and well-behaved in the photos. Was she really a scatterbrain and a wild child?"
At that, Grandmother laughed without a sound, and Dad let out a long sigh.
"Whenever my brother and I were fishing by the stream — and I do mean every time — she'd sneak up behind us and shove the both of us into the river. I had to learn to swim, or drown."
Miho, belly round and tight from all the chicken, wavered between me and Grandmother, then swayed her six tails and crawled over to nestle into Grandmother's arms. Grandmother called her a shameless little thing, stroked that white hair, and sent Mom for the yakgwa — honey pastries — then peeled them one by one and fed them to her.
"Come winter, whenever it snowed, she'd march into our room every morning and dump snow all over us while we were still asleep. And when she went tearing through the hills and fields and took a tumble, scraping her arms and legs, she'd tell our mother — fretting over the scratches — that a little spit would make them better. Got her backside tanned for that, more than once."
"...She really was a wild child."
"Beating the tar out of any boy at school who confessed he liked her was nothing special. She was good with her body, too. Went around thrashing boys her own age, and before anyone knew it she'd become the boss of the school."
I was so thrown I nearly broke into a cold sweat. Her personality was nothing like mine.
I'd ended up with two mothers before I knew it, but it didn't feel bad. Both of them loved me truly — one still did, and one had.
What actually soured my mood was something else entirely.
Once Grandmother had heard the whole of how I'd come to know Mother, she looked at me with sad eyes and spoke.
"That child Surin wouldn't want you taking revenge for her. She hated fighting more than anything."
"Didn't Dad just say she went around hitting her classmates?"
"That was nothing more than children's squabbles. You can't set that on the same line as a fight staked on your life."
"If you go and get yourself hurt doing that, or die, Surin would hate it even more."
At my flat refusal, Grandmother — clearly loathing the thought of me fighting those demons — tried again and again to talk me down. My mind didn't move.
"If that's what you're worried about, don't be. I'll get far stronger than I am now, so I won't die and I won't get hurt. And then I'll fight dirty enough that they won't even be able to lay a hand on me."
There was no guarantee the world would run the way I imagined. But my family, who knew what I could do, could only nod in silence. Seeing that, Grandmother let out a thin sigh and closed the matter with a warning not to overdo it, and to look after myself.
That afternoon I took Hwayeon, Siha, and the two pets out to the stream beside the village. Cold water ran down from the valley, and it was a good place to escape the heat.
Grandmother seemed to have taken a liking to Franc — polite, small, and pretty — and had kept hold of her, saying she'd teach her to cook, and gone out to where the backyard jars were gathered. Franc had followed, thoroughly delighted.
Cicadas drilled at my ears. I soaked my feet in the cold water in the shade and let the idle hour drift, until a thought struck me and I turned to look at Siha and Hwayeon.
The two of them stood in the stream with their sandals in hand, kicking at the water and talking. The sight made me want to tease them a little.
"Come to think of it, does that make me thirty-one?"
Siha and Hwayeon both turned, wearing the look of people who had no idea what I was on about.
"I'm right, though. Dad was twenty when I was born, so this year I'm thirty-one."
At my grinning delivery, both of them looked utterly done with me. Siha scooped up a handful of water and flung it my way.
"Does that even make sense?"
"Why wouldn't it? My ID says eighteen, but count from the day I was born and I'm thirty-one. Go on. Call me oppa."
"Don't say ridiculous things!"
At my comeback Siha went blank for a second, then shook her head and declared it nonsense. Hwayeon, though, smiled a little, parted those small lips, and produced a word that sent a pleasant little jolt through me.
"Seoha-oppa?"
"...Ehehe."
At Hwayeon's sudden betrayal, Siha's eyes went round, and she stared at her as if she couldn't believe what she was hearing.
"This girl is utterly gone on Seoha. At this rate she'll carve out her liver and her gallbladder and hand them over too."
"If Seoha needs them, then I should give them."
"..."
Siha clutched her forehead as if the answer — delivered like the most obvious thing in the world — had given her a headache. I splashed water on her.
"Eek— cold!"
"I grew another stretch coming of age back in the medieval era, you know? I'm taller than you now, older than you, and richer than you, so I don't see what's strange about you calling me oppa."
Deciding this couldn't be allowed to continue, Siha put a sneer on her face.
"So what, you're going to go around saying you're a thirty-one-year-old high school senior?"
"...Wow. You really know how to hit back. If I admit it, I become a spectacularly pathetic person, don't I?"
Hwayeon, who'd been listening from the side, let out a soft laugh, came over, and gestured for me to stand. I did, and she checked our eye level.
I leaned in until we were nose to nose and planted a quick kiss on the tip of hers. Hwayeon looked faintly startled, then smiled softly and nodded.
"So it is true. You must be about 182 centimeters now."
"Really?"
"Yes. Our eyes look a good five centimeters apart. I measured myself not long ago at 177, so I'm certain."
Eyes like a hawk.
In truth I'd gone from 176 to 182. I seemed to have shot up a little more during those two days I spent unconscious in the medieval era, sunk in Myrdin's tale.
Siha looked at me with a nonbeliever's eyes and denied it outright.
"That's impossible. As recently as March you were a 160-centimeter runt, and you've grown twenty centimeters in five months!"
Splashing through the water, she hopped over in a voice that said she couldn't believe it, then gaped at the unmistakable difference in our eye level — baffled, and delighted all the same.
I grinned and reached out, resting a hand on each of their heads and stroking their hair. Siha jabbed me in the side and shot me a glare.
"Kyahaha!"
=It is cold.=
Miho had been splashing around until her tails and her hair were soaked through, and now she turned her ability on Hiarid — dressed in a white sundress — and started spraying her with water.
Hiarid had nothing on underneath but a pair of panties. The soaked dress clung to her and laid that explosive figure bare, pink nipples showing through clear as day.
It was the height of summer, and travelers who looked to be staying at the nearby guesthouses and pensions stopped mid-step to steal looks at that provocative figure.
...That bastard was leering at Miho? I could understand staring at Hiarid, but a kid who didn't even look old enough to start elementary school...
The potbellied middle-aged man's filthy stare left a sour taste in my mouth. I gave the two of them an order.
"Hiarid. Take Miho back and change clothes."
=Yes, Heavenly Lord.=
"Nooo! I wanna play more~!"
Hiarid gathered Miho into her arms, and her four wings — glowing pure white in the midsummer sun — beat as she flew off toward Grandmother's house.
The vacationers who'd been watching that retreating figure smacked their lips in regret, until their eyes met mine, Mana Sieve and a thin edge of killing intent gathered in my gaze. They flinched, then scrambled away in a panic.
"...Kinda gross. Should we head in too?"
Siha had seen all of it as well. She knit her brow and turned toward Grandmother's house.
We gave up on playing by the water with a freshly changed Miho and Hiarid, and were heading out for the hill behind the house instead, when this time it was Hwayeon who got caught by Grandmother — and Franc who was released, coming to my side.
A fresh green scent of vegetables mingled with apple on her skin. A strange fragrance, like a girl of summer.
"Son~ Take your mom and dad along too~."
"If you're coming, hurry up."
"Ah, Seoha. Then I'll prepare a simple lunch, so please wait just a little."
"We could just go."
"No. It won't even take twenty minutes. Please wait a little."
And so Franc quickly made a packed lunch of vegetable sandwiches, and we went up to a quiet valley in the hills behind the house, where hardly anyone else was. We swam, ate what we'd brought, and had a thoroughly good time.
An unplanned family summer vacation in that valley, and the bitter feelings that had nearly taken root in me burned away completely under the summer sun.
When we finally headed back late that night, Grandmother gave me a photograph of Mother. She was smiling in it like a nameless white wildflower.
I'll put it in a frame when I get home.
I knew that if we didn't visit my maternal grandfather over summer break, Dad would catch absolute hell from him come Chuseok, the harvest festival. So the next weekend we went — and with that, the summer vacation that had felt both long and short came to an end.
After the summer break in which my past had come to light, two months passed without incident. As promised, Lydia came to study abroad with the triplets, and news broke that the last person forcibly summoned to the Phase World had failed to return alive, bringing the mid-year summons of the 216th year to a close.
Oh, and the Grand Blue Phase Stone Refinery came into being.
Two months ago, while I was wandering around in a daze in the medieval past, the main force of Hansom Raid Team — eighth in the country — had run into a High-Tier Variant in the Phase World and taken losses close to annihilation.
Before that, Hansom's raiders had been building a refinery in order to expand the team. With their core members wiped out, they fell behind on death benefits and on the byproduct deliveries their failed contracts required, and the debt that landed on them was enormous.
According to a rumor Yeongeun had picked up, it had been someone's operation to ruin Hansom. Not that it was any of my business. In any case, Hansom Raid Team had no choice but to sell the nearly finished refinery to cover the deficit and clean up the mess.
The one who stepped forward was Aunt Hyeryeong. From Hansom's side they'd built it large with the future in mind, but it still fell short of the scale she'd envisioned. She bought the place at roughly ninety-five percent complete, purchased the surrounding land on top of that, and announced she'd expand the site into a proper factory complex.
She picked up the baton on the stalled construction, saw it through to completion, and with full operations underway pushed ahead on expanding the refinery.
That was a week ago.
When the refinery started up and held its opening ceremony, the chairmen of the country's major corporations and the heads of countless raid teams came in person, just as they had at Grand Blue's founding, bearing congratulatory wreaths and their regards.
Watching corporate chairmen old enough to be my great-grandfathers grovel to keep me sweet was genuinely sickening. In those famous chaebol web novels the chairmen are all charisma, swaggering around like they own the air — and every last one of these was a sniveling little rat...
Anyway, the now-operational Grand Blue Phase Stone Refinery began drawing energy out of phase stones and turning it into rectangular battery panels about the size of a palm.
They say the more of the work you swallow yourself, the fatter the profit. We sourced upper-grade and high-grade phase stones slated for disposal, charged them, and sold them; the stones the subjugation teams secured were made into energy panels at the refinery and put up for sale and for export. Even without selling the high-grade phase stones we'd charged and stockpiled, the revenue came to something like ten trillion won a year.
For now they were only producing the energy panels used in everyday life, but once the factory expanded they'd be able to make the large energy plates used in industrial generators. Aunt Hyeryeong said, with complete confidence, that by then they'd be able to scrape up every last bit of money in the world.
As director of the refinery they'd installed a former general, an upright and incorruptible soldier. Yeongeun said he was someone we could truly trust, so I handed him the running of the factory without a doubt.
Pumping a little goodwill into him with Mana Vision went without saying, of course.
The foundation was complete, with me as chairman and Grandfather Juhan as chief executive.
Its name: the Evergreen Foundation.
Beneath it we organized an operating committee and a policy committee, then set the foundation to run on a planning division, a policy research division, an administration division, and a projects division.
I simply dropped in a trillion won, told them to keep the work transparent and clean so that anyone who wanted to see how the money moved could see it, and took my hands off the rest. When Mom found out later, she smacked me on the back and scolded me for handling it that way.
"You think tossing money at it is the end of it? You make an audit team and check that no one's lining their own pockets!"
"Th-that's what Chief Executive Juhan will handle, I mean."
"That man is busy with other work. When would he have time for audits?"
"Then what am I supposed to do! Are you going to do it for me?"
"Leave it to Mom."
"...Seriously?"
Dad glared at me over the top of his newspaper, as if he thought I was stealing time he could have spent with her.
"With the hospital moving, the basic administrative work all got handed over to Grand Blue, and Mom's been bored out of her mind. Our son's doing a good thing, and if it's something like this, I think I'd actually enjoy it. You'll leave it to Mom, won't you?"
"...Y-yeah. If it's you, I bet you'd be good at the audit work."
When Dad had run the small hospital, Mom had managed the administration so sharply and so meticulously that they'd been able to buy a seven-story building...
Ignoring Dad's terrifying look, I left it to her — and as if she'd been waiting, she gathered her friends and her juniors and had an audit team organized in the blink of an eye.
The next day she handed me a stack of documents. When I looked, they were the audit team's personnel records and an audit report.
"You did all this in two days?"
"The foundation's already up and running, isn't it? We don't know how our son's money might leak. Of course I had to move fast!"
Ah. Right. So that's where Siha got her personality. From Mom.
I turned through the audit report at my leisure. On top of an ordinary financial statement, Mom had added notes laying out the financial position, the operating results, and the cash flow so clearly that even a fool could grasp at a glance how the foundation was running. It was that lucid a report.
So Siha really had inherited her way with work from Mom?
When I met Grandfather Juhan afterward, he laughed his easy laugh and said he was genuinely astonished by Mom's ability, praising her for cutting his burden as chief executive in half.
Seriously. Everyone in this family is a genius except me.
Once the foundation's work began, the first to benefit was, of course, Kwon Heeji — the younger sister of the bodyguard I'd called noona, the one who had died.
Heeji had no guardian, so we simply put forward a legal representative to protect her assets and take on that role.
In my heart I'd wanted to be her godfather myself, but under the resident registration law I was still a minor. Nothing to be done.
And as expected, the so-called relatives — stray dogs... no, filthy mutts — started clinging to Heeji's fortune. I'd been grinding my teeth, ready to step in front of them myself, when one day a call came from Heeji.
Relatives she'd never heard of and never seen had shown up at the door, telling her to open it. She was scared.
I grabbed staff from the foundation's security team and went straight to the decent middle-class apartment where Heera's home was, planting myself in front of the relatives pounding on the steel door. They immediately started shoving logic at me so absurd it could have blown my lid.
"Look, our Heeji's still young, and it's dangerous for her to be holding that much money, so we were going to manage it for her! Who the hell are you to stand in our way!!"
"Who, you ask. I'm the one who got the compensation out of Japan and handed it to Heeji. I went through hell to recover that money, and it puts me in a bad mood when dung flies start sticking to it."
"What... pardon?"
Wall of Space
An amber construct, manifested over the open palm.
I held it out for them to see, and spoke while soothing Heeji, who was trembling with anxiety behind me.
"I don't know what gives you uncles and aunts the right to lick your chops over the condolence money for Heeji's sister's death. The money already paid to Heeji is being managed directly by the foundation, through a legal representative."
The dung flies in human skin kept stealing wide-eyed glances at the Wall of Space. A hundred billion won, it seemed, wasn't a sum they could give up easily, and they started pushing back timidly, watching my face.
"B-but that doesn't make any sense... Even if someone's managing it, it ought to be us, her relatives. No matter how much they call you Blue Genius, you're a stranger. How are we supposed to trust..."
"How are you supposed to trust me? You're human, and you're talking that kind of bullshit? We looked into how Heeji and her sister lived, and it was a real spectacle. The so-called relatives turned their backs when the Heera and Heeji sisters were struggling, ignored them, treated them like they didn't exist — and now that there's big money, I suppose the family feeling is just now springing up."
As I sneered and needled them, the face of the lead dung fly among the seven began to redden. But knowing who I was, he couldn't very well explode.
"And even if I am a stranger, do you have any idea how much I'm worth? A measly hundred billion is what comes in if I hunt aberrants for a day or two. You think I'd get greedy over that? So don't worry. Once Heeji comes of age and can manage it herself, the foundation will open an account in her own name and hand it over directly. And if you'd truly, sincerely come to want to help, you'd help without looking for anything in return — not with it written plain across your faces..."
I clicked my tongue and looked at these dung-fly excuses for relatives the way you'd look at filthy insects. They knew shame, at least. Their faces burned scarlet.
People who latched on the moment there was money might do anything for it. I looked them straight in the eye and spoke.
"Heeji will have a dedicated asset manager and a lawyer handling all of that money. And so no one can pull anything foul on her, the foundation will assign bodyguards to protect her and keep an eye on things. So enough of this."
Shut up and get lost.
The dung flies feigning to be relatives, who'd been about to talk back, went pale at the voice laced with Mana Voice and slunk away.
"Oh, and you know that blocking Heeji's way like this, or chasing her around, falls under the anti-stalking law, right? Show your faces like this one more time and the foundation's legal team will be happy to shake you down to your very souls. I trust you won't appear in front of Heeji again?"
At that last threat they vanished as if fleeing. I watched the so-called relatives go with irritated eyes, and Heeji, who'd been hiding behind me, let out a slightly tense breath, then forced a smile and spoke.
"Th-thank you. Seoha-oppa..."
"Don't thank me. I'm the one who's sorry I couldn't protect you properly. I set this place up on purpose because I thought something like this might happen, and kept it secret so people like that couldn't find you — but humans get ridiculously competent when there's money to be greedy over."
I gave a bitter smile and stroked Heeji's hair.
A healing pulse through the hand. The pallor in her face warmed, and a healthy color returned.
"No. It isn't your fault, oppa. It's mine, for taking that much money without giving anything in return..."
"Heeji. That isn't some favor you owe for. It's the rightful compensation your sister should have received. It is absolutely not your fault, so don't say that."
"Y-yes."
At my firm tone Heeji flushed faintly and nodded, stiff. Then, after stealing a glance at me, she opened her mouth carefully.
"...I found something I want to do from now on. I'd like it if you'd watch over me."
"Hm? What is it?"
"Study hard, get a job at the Evergreen Foundation, and help people who have it even harder than I do."
...Heeji was only a second-year middle schooler, and both her eyes were shining, full of resolve. Looking into them, I felt strangely ashamed.
"Yeah. Hang in there. If you need help, call anytime."
"Yes, oppa!"
Right. If the world had people with a personality like mine, it also needed people as kind and pure as Heeji, or the balance wouldn't hold.