The Delinquent Grandson
The chairman arrived with his grandson in tow.
An elderly man whose remaining hair had been dyed black, half his forehead bare, round-faced and bespectacled. Kim Seong-Cheol, chairman of SB Group—one of Korea’s top ten conglomerates—offered a warm, personable smile and extended his hand to Jeong-Hoon.
“We already exchanged greetings earlier, didn’t we? I’m Kim Seong-Cheol, chairman of SB Group.”
“Ah, yes. Lee Jeong-Hoon, chairman of Lumen.”
Jeong-Hoon took the offered hand and shook it, then allowed the faintest frown to crease his brow. Earlier, when the grandson had committed that outrageous discourtesy, this man had not even glanced his way. Only now did he come to offer greetings—his intent was transparent.
“At my age, one gets a little flustered. My apology is late. Forgive my grandson’s rudeness.”
“Ah, yes. Don’t give it another thought.”
It was clearly an apology, yet the way Chairman Kim Seong-Cheol looked down on him left a bitter taste in Jeong-Hoon’s mouth; he quietly averted his gaze. Kim Seong-Cheol was a man in his seventies, so the age difference alone made the tone unsurprising—yet as fellow chairmen, Jeong-Hoon could not help feeling subtly dismissed.
“Congratulations on Lumen’s entry into the dungeon development business. That took real resolve. When you start a venture, you have to be prepared to take losses at first.”
“……Thank you.”
Taking Jeong-Hoon’s averted eyes as victory in their silent contest of wills, Kim Seong-Cheol clapped him on the back and burst into laughter.
“Which brings me to my point. SB Group has more experience in dungeon development than anyone. Why not collaborate with us? I’ll even personally pass along our know-how!”
“……Ah. I appreciate the offer, but I’ll have to decline.”
Jeong-Hoon had already seen through the man’s purpose. He shook his head and cut the proposal off cleanly. This was nothing more than a scheme to snatch, for free, the dungeons Jeong-Hoon had spent a fortune to win at auction.
“A young fellow who challenges something with nothing but enthusiasm will always hit a wall. My grandson here made that exact mistake earlier, didn’t he—letting enthusiasm run ahead of him?”
When the chairman casually dragged his grandson’s name into the conversation in an attempt to persuade him, Jeong-Hoon’s expression crumpled completely. What had happened earlier was no mistake. Yet the man was casually rebranding it as one, reducing the whole affair to something trivial.
“Young men make mistakes when they do business, of course. But preventing those mistakes is the job of an old man like me.”
“……Excuse me. You’re calling that a mistake?”
“Yes, a mistake. Everyone makes them as they go through life. Young people make them all the more, don’t they? That’s why you accepted the apology earlier, isn’t it?”
Kim Seong-Cheol simply rode the momentum, shoving his words forward without even thinking about what he was saying. Jeong-Hoon let out a long, weary sigh.
“Chairman Kim Seong-Cheol? I’m sorry, but that grandson standing behind you is considerably older than I am. To me he isn’t a ‘young fellow’—he’s an ajusshi.”
At twenty-nine, the man held a team-leader post and could, if he wished, paper over a certain amount of misconduct as the common blunders of a workplace novice. That excuse did not work on Jeong-Hoon. Jeong-Hoon was not a middle-aged conglomerate chairman in his mid-forties. He was a twenty-year-old kid.
“When that ajusshi entered university, I was still in elementary school. You ought to know that.”
“You little—!!!”
Hearing himself called “ajusshi” twice, the third-generation chaebol heir exploded. Jeong-Hoon simply fixed him with a cold stare and quietly unfurled his killing intent. It was the genuine article—killing intent that only someone who had crossed the line of life and death countless times, who had actually taken lives, could produce. Jeong-Hoon might not be an Awakened, but forged in the crucible of real combat he ranked among the strongest non-Awakened humans alive.
“Want to try me?”
“H-hyeek!”
Exposed head-on to that aura, the chaebol heir’s knees gave out; he sank to the floor, a dark stain spreading across his crotch. Kim Seong-Cheol’s face flushed crimson. His grandson had just committed the one disgrace that must never be shown—and he had done it in front of a gathering of the nation’s top hunters and businessmen.
“The boy looks exhausted. We’ll take our leave!”
“……Spare clothes are sold at the convenience store in Lumen’s basement. Feel free to stop by!”
Jeong-Hoon tossed the teasing remark after Kim Seong-Cheol as the chairman hastily spun around and dragged his grandson away. A look of pure satisfaction settled on Jeong-Hoon’s face.
“An excellent response, Gaju. I never even had a chance to step in.”
Butler Ju, who had been quietly watching the entire exchange, wore a proud smile. With a handling like that, no more fools would come sniffing around for scraps.
The next morning, Jeong-Hoon woke up, realized exactly how much he had spent the day before, and shuddered from head to toe. In the heat of the moment he had lost all sense of reality; after a night’s sleep that sense came crashing back.
“……How much did you say?”
“Five hundred thirteen trillion, thirty-three billion six hundred million won.”
One S-class dungeon, four A-class, seven B-class, plus assorted leftover dungeons that had failed to sell—like the ones Engine Guild had been stuck with. Nineteen dungeons that had gone on the block the previous day, every last one of them monopolized. That was the price tag.
“W-we’ll have to tighten the family finances for a while, won’t we……?”
“Would removing a single five-hundred-won coin from an LPG tank stuffed full of five-hundred-won coins even be noticeable?”
Treating five hundred trillion as pocket change on the scale of five-hundred-won coins left Jeong-Hoon staring with his mouth open. Butler Ju shook his head at the reaction. No matter how he looked at it, Jeong-Hoon was a living embodiment of desirelessness—someone who simply did not understand the concept of luxury. Of course, knowing Jeong-Hoon’s upbringing, one could see he had not been born that way; he had become a saint of austerity simply to survive. In truth he kept a private bucket list and filled it little by little, so he was not entirely free of desire. But those were the small hungers of an ordinary citizen, never the extravagance a family head was entitled to enjoy.
The pressure that came with being Gaju was enormous. One’s own life was no longer one’s own. A single decision by the head of the family could snuff out the lives of thousands of vassals. Every previous Gaju had suffered under that crushing stress; even Jeong-Hoon’s late uncle—the previous head, a man of remarkably gentle temperament—had indulged in considerable luxury simply to vent it. Yet the burden Jeong-Hoon now carried dwarfed anything his predecessors had known. First, there was no one else who could serve as Gaju. Second, Jeong-Hoon’s life was the remaining time allotted to all of humanity. He was holding up well for now, but no one knew when the weight would finally break him. That was why Butler Ju had come to believe Jeong-Hoon needed luxury.
Unfortunately, a man born and raised inside the family could not give a clear answer if asked what luxury actually was. He was simply too accustomed to a household that treated five hundred trillion as pocket change. Therefore Butler Ju concluded that Jeong-Hoon required a special instructor who could teach him the meaning of luxury.
“Butler Ju? What’s on your mind?”
“……I was thinking that to recommend the luxury Gaju needs, we require a special instructor.”
“An instructor? You need a whole instructor just to waste money? What, am I supposed to call in some professor and take classes?”
At the mere mention of luxury, Jeong-Hoon pictured ordering fried chicken and eating only the skin, or ordering a cheese-crust pizza and eating only the crust—then snorted.
“Not a professor. There is someone in my circle who is perfectly suited to teach what luxury truly is.”
“……There’s someone like that?”
“Yes. I hate contacting him, but it seems even dog dung has its medicinal uses.”
Butler Ju scowled with open distaste, yet his expression was strangely complicated. Jeong-Hoon could only tilt his head in puzzlement and nod.
Ju Yong-Ha—Butler Ju’s grandson and Min-Ha’s twin brother—had been dropped from the vassal-candidate program during middle-school basic training after Jeong Si-Min judged his ideology too dangerous. Excluded from the family, Yong-Ha now lived a dissolute life on a monthly “allowance” that was really living expenses paid by Butler Ju.
“Yo! Grandpa, you really gonna load me up with that allowance, right?”
“Yes, I’ll make certain of it. Just see that you do not commit any discourtesy toward the Chairman.”
A boy with short, bleached-white hair and baggy clothes—Butler Ju’s grandson yet bearing not the slightest resemblance to him—lifted a fist toward Jeong-Hoon.
“Whoa, Chairman! Seen you a ton on TV. Ju Yong-Ha here!”
“Uh, so… you’re Butler Ju’s grandson, right?”
“Yo! That’s right! You already heard, YO!”
Jeong-Hoon lightly bumped fists with him in greeting, then found himself wondering whether this really was Butler Ju’s grandson. He had heard the stories, but the reality was worse than expected.
“You’re the one who said he wanted to become a rapper?”
“OK, OK. Wanna hear my rap real quick?”
“No, I wasn’t planning to—”
“Hey! Don’t be like that, just listen. My rap! One listen and you’ll fall in love! Everybody points fingers and calls me a freeloading parasite living off Grandpa’s money, a total delinquent—but one listen and they’re hooked!”
Yong-Ha ignored the refusal completely and launched into an awkward string of rhymes. Jeong-Hoon’s face hardened into stone.
“This is exactly why I was against this.”
Min-Ha, forced to listen alongside them, shook her head in exasperation and sighed. Butler Ju’s face had turned scarlet; he looked ready to crawl into a hole.
“……YO! How was it? Fire, right?”
“I don’t know about anything else, but you’ve got zero talent. Quit.”
The noise pollution had been so ear-splitting that Jeong-Hoon’s entire face contorted as he muttered the verdict. Yong-Ha only smirked and sneered.
“Aww, Chairman doesn’t get rap. ……Ah, hold up a sec.”
Mid-sentence, Yong-Ha’s phone rang. He raised a hand to cut the conversation short, retreated to a corner, and took the call in a low voice.
“Butler Ju, having a grandson like that must be worrying.”
“……As long as Min-Ha grew up well, that is enough.”
Even for his own grandson, Butler Ju could find nothing complimentary to say; he simply shook his head.
“But Butler Ju—aren’t you curious who he’s talking to right now?”
“Yong-Ha is entitled to his own private life. Why the sudden interest?”
Butler Ju looked puzzled as Jeong-Hoon’s gaze stayed fixed on the boy murmuring in the corner.
“No particular reason. Just a weird feeling. Can we look into it?”
“No need to investigate. We simply ask. The allowance I give him is his lifeline.”
Butler Ju spoke as though the matter were hardly worth the effort and waited for Yong-Ha to finish the call. The moment the boy returned, the question came.
“Who was that just now? Sounded like someone with money.”
Even at a respectful distance the call had been crystal clear to an SSS-class like Butler Ju, so he asked bluntly.
“Ah. Some hyung named Kim Gi-Yeong, grandson of the SB Group chairman. Wanted to know if I was coming to the weekend hangout.”
Yong-Ha answered as though it were nothing, yet Butler Ju instantly realized how accurate Jeong-Hoon’s intuition had been. Kim Gi-Yeong was the very third-generation chaebol who had wet himself after being hit by Jeong-Hoon’s killing intent at the dungeon auction. No one had expected the connection to surface so quickly.
“You’re close with that Kim Gi-Yeong?”
“Eh, not really. We just grab a drink at the occasional meetup. Even I keep my distance from a delinquent like that!”
Kim Seong-Cheol himself was personally mentoring the boy and bringing him along on business, yet Kim Gi-Yeong was infamous throughout the business world as a notorious wastrel. Yong-Ha drew a clear line—but he had already gotten on Butler Ju’s last nerve.
“Ha… Grandpa? Look, I’m only F-class, but I’m still an Awakened, so I can feel that nasty aura you’re putting out. Why all of a sudden…?”
Faced with Butler Ju’s murderous presence, Yong-Ha switched from casual speech to polite language and began edging backward. Butler Ju took one heavy, mana-weighted step after another toward him.
“After your father passed, I never raised the rod against you. I thought, how great must the grief of a child who lost his father be? But I see now that was my mistake.”
“M-Min-Ha? C-Chairman? I don’t know why Grandpa’s doing this, but could you maybe stop him? I think I’m gonna die!”
“If you don’t even know what you did wrong, just die, idiot.”
“Y-you’re eighteen, right? A minor? Since you’re Min-Ha’s twin.”
Seeing that Yong-Ha truly had no idea what he had done wrong, Jeong-Hoon opened his mouth to spell it out, one careful step at a time.
“Exactly! So you should stop Grandpa even more! I’m a minor!”
“And that same minor just told his grandfather, to his face, that he goes around drinking—and still doesn’t realize he did anything wrong?”
“Come on, people make friends and have a drink now and then!”
“Yeah. That’s exactly why you’re about to get beaten by Butler Ju.”
Until now Jeong-Hoon had never understood why Min-Ha called her brother an idiot. There were far more contemptuous nicknames available if pure scorn was the goal; choosing “idiot” specifically had always puzzled him. Now he understood. Ju Yong-Ha, grandson of Butler Ju, was a genuine, textbook idiot—the word fit him perfectly.