Major Announcement
Butler Ju's training was grueling, but it wasn't an all-day affair.
At only about three hours, Jeong-Hoon finished before noon and sprawled across the sofa in his suite, staring intently at the speech draft the butler had handed him.
"So you want me to read this?"
"Not read it, sir. You must memorize it."
"Who wrote this?"
"I did. Is there something that doesn't sit well with you?"
"No, it isn't that."
It was surprising that a butler would handle something like this, yet with Butler Ju, some baseless certainty made it entirely plausible. And it was well written.
Even to Jeong-Hoon, who knew nothing about speeches, it was clearly excellent. It had even polished his past as chairman to a dazzling sheen. Reading it, one would conclude that the man named Jeong-Hoon had, from before middle school, built the present-day Lumen through terrifying shrewdness—a monster of ambition.
"I'm the one who has to say this, but it doesn't feel like me. It's uncomfortable."
"I judged that it needed to be at least this much for people to accept it."
Disguising himself not as some lucky boy who suddenly inherited a family, but as someone who had possessed a fearsome mind since childhood—yes, that would be more convincing. But Jeong-Hoon's life had never been this glamorous or clandestine. He had only been an ordinary boy swept up by a world that had changed.
"When I was ten, our house was just a normal family home."
When Jeong-Hoon was ten, the world changed. Dungeons opened, and monsters poured out of them. Society fell into chaos for a moment, but recovery was swift. Awakened with superpowers appeared, and the monsters that spilled out could still be handled with modern weapons. Jeong-Hoon's family, however, was ruined. The company his father worked for collapsed when the dungeons opened. It wasn't a conglomerate—just a middling small-to-medium firm—so bankruptcy came in an instant.
From then on, Jeong-Hoon's life went downhill. A company wiped out overnight; a society that, even after the dust settled, had permanently changed. His father's reemployment remained a distant hope, and eventually his father drove as a substitute chauffeur while his mother washed dishes at a restaurant just to get by. Then both parents Awakened at the same time. They were only F-class, but the pay beat substitute driving and dishwashing, so they became hunters.
Three years ago, when Jeong-Hoon was a high school student, both of them died in a dungeon. At the time, dungeon-clear fatalities ran roughly even with traffic deaths. They simply became part of that number. Afterward, Jeong-Hoon entered an orphanage with a meager condolence payment. He lived there, graduated high school, gave up on college, became a day laborer—and then became Gaju. That was Jeong-Hoon's life.
"But here, I lose my family in an accident at ten, inherit a vast fortune, and use it to build the conglomerate we have today. A born entrepreneur."
This wasn't just whitewashing; it was industrial-grade laundering. Jeong-Hoon clicked his tongue. Cleverly written, too—enough that anyone who had once known him would, upon meeting him again, decide that this was a completely different person who merely shared the same face, age, and name.
"Thinking about it, though—wouldn't anyone who originally knew me dig up my family register and see that this is a lie?"
"I have already finished arranging that matter, so you need not worry."
Jeong-Hoon had no idea how, but he was certain some measure had been taken. The Jeong-Hoon the people he knew remembered no longer existed in this world; the Jeong-Hoon who matched this speech now did. Given how the story ran back to the moment the world changed, the guess was easy. However quickly order had been restored, forging a single document amid the chaos of those days would have been trivial.
"But doesn't this talk only about the past? It's a major announcement, yet there's no ambition in it."
The speech introduced who he was, yet the most important piece was missing. When Jeong-Hoon pointed it out, Butler Ju offered a troubled smile. He was right—the reason for holding a major announcement was a blank. Butler Ju had agonized over that section, but there had been no helping it.
"That part must be filled by you, Gaju. I could not presume to invent the reason you have decided, after concealing yourself all this time, to step into the world."
It would set the family's direction going forward. Butler Ju could not decide that lightly. It belonged solely to Jeong-Hoon as Gaju.
"In other words, do whatever I want. That's a problem."
He had no grand goal. If he wanted anything, it was simply to eat and drink delicious things to his heart's content and live comfortably. Suddenly being told to decide the destination for the family's colossal wealth left Jeong-Hoon genuinely at a loss.
"Do I have to decide this right now?"
"You may decide when you give the announcement, or not at all. In the end, you need only do as you wish, Gaju."
"…I'll think about it."
Butler Ju had said he didn't have to, but Jeong-Hoon knew that without something, this would become the most awkward major announcement in history. He let out a long sigh.
The grand banquet hall that Lumen, which prided itself on being the world's finest, boasted as its showpiece.
The facilities matched that pride—opulent beyond measure. The vast space felt less like a hotel ballroom and more like a royal palace's dance hall. Footfalls on marble floors; chandeliers casting a soft, glowing light. The dais where an orchestra would normally perform had been arranged for the major announcement, and the hall was packed with Lumen staff, hunters, entrepreneurs, other notables, and reporters.
Every one of them had been invited to Lumen's major announcement. Faces that did not move easily for just anyone were scattered among the crowd. The reason such proud, time-poor people had come was simple: the one making the announcement was Lumen.
Lumen was a conglomerate that had built vast networks while running its hotels. By law, corporations could not own guilds, and guilds could not expand into businesses outside dungeon clears and monster subjugation. Clearing a dungeon did not drop items like a game. Killing monsters did not instantly produce cash. But dungeons were treasure houses of resources—oil might appear, or gold mines. Corporations inevitably salivated over them, yet the law barred them from running their own guilds. Guilds, for their part, could clear those treasure houses but were legally barred from developing them themselves.
In the end, corporations and guilds played an extremely delicate tug-of-war—and Lumen was where that staring contest found its mediator. Lumen did not actively step in to mediate; the phenomenon arose naturally from the peculiar nature of Lumen hotels as gathering places for both entrepreneurs and hunters. The better one looked in Lumen's eyes, the easier it was to catch a trading partner's notice. Official mediation, management, and oversight belonged to the government, of course—but people did the work, so people mattered.
"The top ten guilds, entrepreneurs I've only seen on the news, even government officials… This is no joke."
From the staging area behind the dais, Jeong-Hoon surveyed the guests and broke out in a cold sweat. The pressure of having to stand before people like that and give a speech was crushing. He felt in his bones that stress alone could kill a man.
"Would you like a calming pill, sir?"
Butler Ju offered a bitter smile and held out a small round tablet to Jeong-Hoon, who looked ready to faint from nerves. Jeong-Hoon snatched it and swallowed it whole. The effects would take time, but simply having taken the medicine steadied him a little.
"Then, Gaju—I will go out first, explain the situation to the guests, and you may enter after that."
In case the tense Jeong-Hoon had forgotten, Butler Ju repeated the sequence once more, then stepped smoothly out before the dais.
Ba-ba-bam!
Timed to the butler's entrance, an orchestra waiting out of sight struck up music. Watching Butler Ju walk in time with the rhythm, Jeong-Hoon thought he looked less like a butler and more like a true chairman. Applause from the guests only deepened the sense that he was watching another world.
"Thank you all for gathering here today. I am Joo Yeong-Cheol, a director of Lumen."
With a courteous self-introduction, Butler Ju allowed a faint smile. It was not merely a pleasant expression; it was the pride of a man whose master was about to reveal himself to the world.
"As you all well know, I have long served as Lumen's spokesman under our chairman's direction."
The crowd nodded—and their expressions hardened. No one in that hall failed to grasp what this major announcement meant after those words.
"And now, our chairman has decided to step forward in full. Allow me to introduce him. The chairman of Hotel Lumen Group—Chairman Lee Jeong-Hoon!"
As Butler Ju finished, the orchestra swelled again—a performance far more majestic than the one that had ushered him in, a piece so commanding that listeners instinctively shrank before it.
"…Chairman. Chairman, you must enter."
Jeong-Hoon had been staring blankly at the music when Butler Ju's voice crackled through the earpiece, snapping him back.
"Ah. My turn."
Whispers rose through the grand music. These were patient people, yet they were murmuring—Jeong-Hoon realized how long he had delayed and started walking.
"…Chairman Lee Jeong-Hoon of Lumen. Please welcome him with your applause."
As if by design, the majestic music crested in perfect time with Jeong-Hoon's steps. Aided by the score, he took the dais and gripped the microphone.
"Uh—um. I am Lee Jeong-Hoon, chairman of Lumen."
He offered a brief greeting, felt his voice tremble, and groped for what came next.
"So…"
Every gaze locked onto him. Everything he had memorized vanished. The speech flowed through the earpiece, but none of it reached his ears.
"I have gathered you all here today to announce that I am the chairman of Lumen."
So Jeong-Hoon simply spoke, buying time to gather his thoughts. At this point, the written speech no longer mattered. What he pushed back against were the dismissive stares fixed on him. He knew those looks. Because of that, he knew exactly what he wanted to say to them.
"Some of you must be thinking—why is someone this young the chairman? How old is he, even?"
He swept the room with his eyes and caught people nodding in quiet agreement.
"That doesn't matter. The only thing that matters is the fact that I am the chairman of Lumen."
It was a statement that disregarded the very people who had assembled, yet heads nodded all the same. With Lumen's wealth and power behind the title of chairman, such things truly did not matter. That was the world they lived in. In truth, they had not come to see some green kid named Lee Jeong-Hoon. They had come for Lumen's major announcement; for the moment, they were simply looking at Lumen's chairman.
"So I will say only this."
The ambition Butler Ju had spoken of—whether what he was about to say even qualified as ambition, Jeong-Hoon did not know. But he wanted to say it. From the moment he began speaking his own words, the earpiece fell silent.
"From now on, Lumen will change. Beyond guilds and corporations, we will move so that the world remembers the name Lee Jeong-Hoon. That is all."
When he finished and looked back at Butler Ju, the butler bowed his head with solemn respect—a greeting for the Gaju who had laid bare his ambition. Jeong-Hoon's declaration was nothing like the original speech. It was not words spoken on a whim.
An orphaned laborer who could have vanished from the world without anyone noticing. This was Jeong-Hoon's refusal to live that life any longer. A declaration that he would leave his name upon the world.