The Servant’s Awakening
Tap. Tap.
The sound of the young lady rapping her teacup reached my ears.
"What do you think you're doing? Can't you see the cup is empty?"
Ah, damn.
I still wasn't used to a servant's mannerisms, and I'd just been standing there like an idiot.
I poured. The tea whispered into the porcelain.
"Tsk. Uneducated trash never have the right habitus to begin with. No refinement whatsoever. When you make a mistake, an apology is supposed to come first. That's simply how it's done."
The mouth on this bitch.
"...I apologize, miss."
"Hah. Forget it."
Haaah...
Lee Yohee, you fucking bitch.
A villainess packed into a pair of massive tits, stuffed with nothing but spite and arrogance. I was going to give her a proper education. That was a promise.
I filled the cup and drew myself back into a proper standing posture. The two of them seated across the tea table promptly started their little performance.
"Miss Yohee, please accept this — a token of my feelings."
The brooch case alone looked like it ran into the hundreds of thousands. They could dress it up as high-society networking all they wanted. One of them was dying to bury his cock in her, and the other was dying to extract maximum pussy-value in exchange for getting fucked. That much was obvious.
It was a fact I'd been feeling in my bones ever since I woke up inside a chaebol family's servant.
In the end, people with money were the same as everyone else.
"Oh my~ whatever should I do! Isn't this terribly expensive? I'll gratefully accept it~"
"Hahaha! I'm so glad it pleases you. The gemstone on that brooch... it's incredibly expensive, you know?"
A warm, convivial atmosphere, at a glance. There wasn't a speck of actual affection in any of it. And of course there wasn't....
"Hohohoho!"
"Miss Yohee, even your laugh is beautiful, as expected! Hahaha!"
I'd been seeing this garbage floating in the air since the moment I walked in.
And ever since I'd botched the tea, the Head Maid had been glaring at me like she wanted me dead. A secret-account post was hovering over her head too.
"Mr. Kim Sunghyun... come to the training room. Separately."
So that's what she'd been up to yesterday.
The woman who always swaggered around like she wanted to eat me alive was, behind closed doors, a degenerate with a rape fantasy. Unbelievable.
"Haaah..."
Right after the body swap, I'd been happy. Happier than I'd been in years. Above all else, the body worked. I wasn't a cripple anymore.
But having these disgusting alt-account posts pop up over people's heads at all hours was its own special kind of hell.
Hold on...
The filthy undersides of all these people playing at refinement — I could see every last one of them.
I might be able to paint a pretty interesting picture with this.
Right after I came of age, I took every last coin I'd scraped together from years of hard labor since I was a kid and dumped it all into a little office in a fish-stink back alley of Gangbuk.
A private investigation firm, if you wanted to be polite. A detective agency, if you wanted to sound cool. Strip the paint off and call it what it was: a fixer shop. Across the water in the Japan Territory, they apparently called the same kind of place a benriya — an errand center.
The work was aimed at wealthy husbands and their wives, so the fees came in at tens of thousands a job without anyone batting an eye. The money was excellent. I had a genuine talent in two particular directions — digging up dirt, and conditioning people — and within a single year of opening the office I'd touched more cash than ten years of breaking my back had ever earned me.
Some people called me the finest conditioner in the back alleys. Others called me the private detective who knew everything. For a man who'd wrecked one of his legs doing manual labor, it was a stroke of luck I had no right to complain about.
But the first real winning streak of my life didn't last.
Shunk!
"Ghhhk!!"
A long sashimi knife, buried in my gut.
If there was a mistake, it was that I'd been too good at my job. I'd made a client nervous.
Did that bastard dig something up on me too?
That flavor of anxiety and suspicion was what had led to a decision like this.
"Finish it."
Shrrk!
"Uweeegh!"
The blade twisted left and right inside my belly, still buried to the hilt, and tore through my spleen, my stomach, my aorta — all of it.
"Khulk! Uwegh!!"
Every time I coughed up blood, the muscles in my abdomen clenched. And every time they clenched, the blade carved deeper. It hurt like a son of a bitch.
They say when a knife goes into a man's gut, the strength drains out of his whole body and his knees give way on their own. Turns out that's exactly right.
Slick.
A sensation both ice-cold and searing at once, and then the blade came free. Blood poured out of me in a sheet.
"Ghhhaaak!"
"Boss Kim. I told you to do the job you were given. Why go picking up garbage you weren't asked to touch?"
Lee Jungu, chairman of the Samjung Group, was talking nonsense I couldn't follow.
"Uweegh! Wh-what the fuck are you... talking about..."
"...This is why you don't try to have a civilized conversation with uncultured trash. Listen. We already know you dug up information on the Angel Dust matter."
Angel Dust...?
What the hell was he talking about?
"Tsk... If you'd just confessed how you accessed our family's data, I was going to let you die easy. But you'd rather refuse the cup of honor and take the cup of punishment."
A dying brain spins at a terrifying speed. I had no idea what this Angel Dust thing was, but it was clearly information that would be fatal to the Lee family of Samjung Group — number one in the business world. There was no other reason a man of the chairman's rank would come down here in person to interrogate me.
But I genuinely didn't know what it was.
The only reason I'd been able to take dark commissions from rich husbands and wives and still keep my head attached was a principle I'd followed without exception: never get curious about a client. Never ask the extra question.
Lee Jungu, that son of a bitch, had somehow gotten it into his head that I'd unearthed information that would hurt his family.
Which meant this was probably a trap someone else had dug.
Someone pinned this on me?
Who the hell...?
"Leave him. I can tell just by looking — he's the tight-lipped type."
"Daddy, wouldn't it be better to finish him off properly...?"
Come to think of it, a girl with overwhelmingly large breasts had been watching me this whole time with a strange little smile. She was calling Lee Jungu "Daddy," so she had to be his daughter...
Had that bitch been the one pulling strings?
But why? What grudge could she possibly have against a man she'd never even met...?
"Yohee. Daddy may not have held a knife himself, but he knows a thing or two about the human body. With bleeding like that, do you really think he'll live? Just leave him. Letting that insect die knowing exactly what he dared to touch — that's a fitting punishment."
Listen to this asshole play the gentleman.
This erectile-dysfunction freak used to make the weirdest requests — find out some mistress's sexual preferences, develop her a little further, condition some other girl for him — and now he was putting on refined airs in front of his own daughter.
Creeeeak—
Thud....
Lee Jungu and his people filed out of the warehouse and shut the door behind them.
He could say whatever he wanted. He'd be on the phone with the "cleaners" before the latch even clicked, telling them to dissolve my corpse.
"Khulk, khulk... Son of a... bitch..."
Lee Jungu. Lee Yohee. Samjung Group. Angel Dust.
The names of everything that had driven me to this death spun through my skull in a nauseating loop.
Was this it...?
I entertained the childish hope that someone might come and save me. What I actually saw was the inside of the warehouse, collapsing into a narrowing tunnel of darkness.
"Lee... Jun...gu... Lee... Yo...hee... you... pieces of... shit..."
Shaking with the cold of massive blood loss, I closed my eyes.
.
.
.
"Excuse me. Mr. Kim Sunghyun. Are you in your right mind? It's already five-thirty. You should have finished the young lady's laundry and had it in the dryer long ago — and you're still sleeping?"
Nngh...
What the hell was this woman talking about...?
Who was she? There were no women at my fixer shop...
I dragged up eyelids that weighed a thousand pounds. What I found was a woman of indeterminate age in a maid uniform.
A neat bob cut level with her shoulders. One of those maid headbands they call a kachusha. And a maid outfit that looked like it had walked straight out of a comic book.
What was this? Was she some rich household's attendant?
"Wh...o...?"
I stared at her face in a complete daze. Something rose into the air above her head.
Huh...?