The Esquires
The Esquires had first taken root at Ilseong. It made sense—the group’s nickname was “the Manager.” From the moment the seedlings showed promise, Ilseong’s Manager began to cultivate them. Top students at Seoul National University’s law school received generous scholarships from the Ilseong Scholarship Foundation. From that point on, those destined to pass the bar exam were closely managed and molded into people favorable to Ilseong. Even now, if you lined up every judge and prosecutor who had once received an Ilseong scholarship, hundreds would appear. Naturally, these Ilseong-aligned figures remained loyal, and their bias seeped into investigations and verdicts alike.
That was why the Busan Group had chosen to approach Ilseong rather than the Blue House. In such an environment, ID Group appeared in an entirely different manner. Yoo Jae-won created a space where judges and prosecutors could render decisions according to law, principle, and their own conscience without fear of reprisal. Kim Chang-wan and Jung Byung-woo—men who should have been buried and left to scrape by—now strode through the courts and prosecution offices as if they owned them, encouraging juniors and even looking after their seniors. Every meeting cost them millions in drinks and pocket money for the younger ones, yet they hosted such gatherings two or three times a week. Rumors spoke of considerable unrest within the prosecution and judiciary. After all, anyone bold enough to take a stand like Kim Chang-wan and Jung Byung-woo could count on solid backing from ID Group.
More importantly, siding with Ilseong required ignoring the legal code entirely and resorting to every manner of forced logic and absurdity. Standing with ID Group, however, demanded nothing more than following the law and its principles. How many rookie prosecutors or judges had entered the profession dreaming of leeching off a conglomerate from the very start?
“Hmm. Don’t we have matters to discuss between ourselves? Why not send these gentlemen out so we can speak frankly?”
As expected, the impatient Choi Hyun-hee spoke first.
“Mr. Chairman! This is ID Group’s office.”
Kim Hyuk-soo, clearly caught off guard by the lack of prior arrangement, protested in alarm. Yet the old man’s suggestion was rather amusing. If this was ID Group’s office, did that mean Yoo Jae-won might do something untoward once they were alone? Or was the Chairman of Ilseong Group simply projecting—worried that the people he had left behind might suffer some mischief?
“Enough. You may leave.”
“Very well. Chief of Staff Choi, please step out as well.”
Choi Hyun-hee and Yoo Jae-won spoke almost simultaneously. Choi Kang-wook nodded and rose at once. Kim Hyuk-soo lingered a moment longer before finally standing and exiting the conference room with the bodyguards.
A brief silence settled between the two men as the atmosphere cleared. Then Choi Hyun-hee let out a small sigh and spoke first.
“I have a request.”
“What is it? I hope it isn’t too difficult.”
A request?
“Of course it’s something you can grant. Since we’ve gone to the trouble of arranging this meeting, I’d prefer you speak honestly.”
Not merely candid—honest. The word reminded Yoo Jae-won of something Choi Hyun-hee had once said in his previous life at a commemorative event: that he wished the people were honest. At the time, the meaning had been unclear. Now, however, its intent was plain. No one was easier to handle than someone who appeared honest. A truly honest person would lay out every fact, allowing the other party to reap enormous gains with minimal effort. Calling it effort was generous; exploitation was the more accurate term.
“Ah, of course. I’ve been curious myself. What could possibly have brought you all the way here?”
At Yoo Jae-won’s question, a flicker of surprise crossed Choi Hyun-hee’s face. It was indeed unusual. Aside from a handful of high-ranking figures at the Blue House or rival conglomerates, most Koreans treated Choi Hyun-hee with extreme deference. Yet here was this young man—barely out of adolescence—speaking to him with such ease. Still, Yoo Jae-won had always been a being who defied common sense. While ordinary boys his age would have been struggling with unfamiliar subjects like mathematics or English, or busy playing with friends, this youth had seized control of the PC operating system and office software markets in an instant and even acquired Microsoft. He was simply not someone who could be judged by ordinary standards.
“Has Ilseong ever caused harm to your company or to you personally?”
That was why Choi Hyun-hee was all the more curious. No matter how hard he thought, he could not understand why a clever young man like Yoo Jae-won would be hostile toward him or Ilseong.
“From what I’ve investigated, there was never any direct conflict between you and Ilseong before the recent Busan Group incident.”
He had even ordered Kim Hyuk-soo and the intelligence team to dig through every possibility. Nothing had turned up—until one old memory surfaced. It had been late 1988, at the Export Entrepreneurs’ Night. Choi Hyun-hee had just succeeded his father as chairman of Ilseong Group. The succession process had been nearly complete, but his father’s death had come sooner than the doctors predicted, leaving certain matters unfinished—particularly the inheritance. His father’s hidden assets were vast, and Choi Hyun-hee had been working tirelessly to transfer them into his own name while avoiding the crushing inheritance tax. It was during that time that the President had spoken to Yoo Jae-won. The boy had replied with innocent frankness that he intended to earn a great deal of money and pay his taxes properly, drawing laughter from the President. Back then, it had seemed like mere childish innocence. Now, Choi Hyun-hee was certain that even then, Yoo Jae-won had already begun to undermine him.
At the time, Yoo Jae-won had been nothing more than the son of an ordinary family whose only achievement was successfully exporting a typewriter to the United States. Even extending the search to every relative of the Yoo family revealed not a single connection to Ilseong. Suspecting it might be anti-corporate sentiment learned from leftist parents, Choi Hyun-hee had the intelligence team investigate Yoo Jae-won’s parents as well. The results were the opposite: they were ordinary rural people whose highest education was elementary school, and they held pro-business, pro-government views. It was the university students who had been steeped in anti-corporate ideology. In the end, only one conclusion remained.
The answer lay with Yoo Jae-won himself. That was why Choi Hyun-hee had arranged this hundred-million-won meeting—to hear it directly. His face was filled with anticipation, desperate to know what reason would emerge.
Yoo Jae-won did not drag things out.
“Hmm. That’s unfortunate.”
Unfortunate. That was his answer. Choi Hyun-hee’s expression darkened with anger; clearly, the reply did not satisfy him. Yet Yoo Jae-won had spoken from the heart. There was emotion—resentment toward Choi Hyun-hee and the entire Ilseong family that no amount of apology could ever erase. Of course, Ilseong was not the only target of his vengeance, but it held the largest share. They had stolen every achievement Yoo Jae-won had built in his previous life, destroyed his social standing, and stripped him of his very humanity. He had been left alive, yet no different from a corpse. Above all, the accomplishments of his past life could not be measured in money. Their value was not merely subjective; it was simply too immense to calculate.
The greatest of those achievements had been the Machine Psychology Interpretation Module—an artificial intelligence algorithm. The twenty-first century was the age of AI. Various models competed, growing ever more sophisticated until their inner workings reached a level no human could interpret. They had arrived at the technological singularity. While humans agonized for decades over complex problems, highly advanced AI produced answers in moments. Even teams of the world’s foremost AI experts could not explain how those answers had been reached.
Yoo Jae-won had tried a different approach. He input a virtual character possessing standard human intelligence into the AI and had it explain its problem-solving process. The concept was simple; execution was extraordinarily difficult. That was why the absurd term “machine psychology” had to be coined. Still, Yoo Jae-won pushed forward with stubborn persistence until he finally succeeded. The results were astonishing. The AI began offering explanations at a level humans could understand. As a bonus, its computational speed was optimized and dramatically increased. Of course, even those explanations required experts with advanced knowledge to fully grasp, but the situation had changed completely. Humanity’s frontier of knowledge expanded alongside these advanced AIs. It was nothing short of a miracle.
So what was the value of the Machine Psychology Interpretation Module that had wrought such a miracle? It was, naturally, beyond any monetary price. Yet the offer Ilseong and the other conglomerates had made at the time was zero won. Not being measurable in money did not mean it was worthless. Their logic had been that since they had already paid research and development costs to Yoo Jae-won’s company, he should simply hand it over. The original project had been to improve AI processing capability. The Module had been Yoo Jae-won’s private research, yet they demanded it anyway. When he firmly refused such an unreasonable request, the response was to brand him an industrial spy who had stolen cutting-edge technology from a major corporation. The media moved in perfect unison, followed by the government. He was even indicted, hauled in and out of the prosecutor’s office, and instantly transformed into a traitor who had stolen Korea’s future AI technology—earning the public’s fury.
The ones who orchestrated that entire affair were the very man sitting before him—Choi Hyun-hee’s grandson—and the other third-generation chaebol heirs who had run with him. In hindsight, what they had done to him was simply what they had learned from their predecessors. If Yoo Jae-won had died immediately after falling into ruin and then regressed, he might have charged straight at Choi Hyun-hee, grabbed him by the collar, and demanded he educate his children properly. But he had not. Nor did he particularly wish to. After that incident, he had endured more than ten years, chewing over every failure in preparation for his next life. Thanks to that, even now, facing Choi Hyun-hee, Yoo Jae-won’s emotions remained perfectly calm.
“Unfortunate? In other words, you hold a grudge. Is that your entire answer?”
Oddly enough, it was Choi Hyun-hee who grew agitated. The twitching at the corners of his eyes suggested that such a simple reply had provoked considerable anger. Of course, no one could possibly understand that a single word—“unfortunate”—compressed decades of a previous lifetime. If he wanted an answer tailored to Choi Hyun-hee’s level, however, that was no problem. Yoo Jae-won had prepared for Ilseong more thoroughly than anyone. Like a vending machine, the words would come out the moment he pressed the button. If anything, he felt a twinge of pity for Choi Hyun-hee. The man had likely never heard anyone openly denounce both Ilseong and himself to his face. Yet since he had asked for it, there was no helping it.
“Ahem. Then allow me to explain in greater detail.”
Well, experiencing something novel in life at a meeting like this wasn’t such a bad thing either.