A Full-Blown Windfall of Money-10
Jeong Hyeoncheol had been spending every spare moment canvassing the neighborhood, gathering intel.
Anyone cruel enough to threaten the stepmother who raised them—forcing her out the door with nothing but the clothes on her back—was bound to have treated others just as badly. And sure enough, he'd been right.
"Representative Lee Ho-young mentioned it back then, remember? That our eldest brother Jeong Hyeonsu was running a local housing redevelopment project across Geumho-dong and Sindang-dong."
"Yes, I remember hearing that."
Lee Ho-young's family was Gangnam real-estate royalty—his biological father ran a property management company outright. Even though Ho-young worked in antiques, he couldn't help soaking up real-estate news just by breathing the air at home. Eat a meal at the main house, and unless you plugged your ears, you were going to hear about property.
He'd mentioned Jeong Hyeonsu to me before, too, right there in the same room.
"You said he was taking money from both the construction company *and* the residents' association while running a local housing project—the kind of thing you wouldn't wish on your worst enemy."
"That's right. The thing about local housing associations is that you don't need to own a home. Prove you lived in the area, and you earn the right to join."
Hyeoncheol pulled a stack of documents from the dashboard and handed them over.
"Membership has to be recruited through open enrollment, and the project needs signed consent to use at least fifty percent of the land under the apartment site before the district office will even issue a permit."
"Going by these papers alone, they've got eighty percent of the landowners on board."
"Exactly. From the construction company's perspective, it's a windfall. They don't have to knock on doors and sweet-talk residents, or promise them apartments cheaper than the general market price."
I nodded along and said, "Makes sense. One more fifteen percent of consent and they can scrape the whole area flat and put up an apartment building."
"Even if some residents dig in and oppose it, construction can proceed on the strength of the majority's consent. That's why the builder jumped on board so fast."
Hyeoncheol flipped the papers over, gesturing for me to look at the back page.
"There's a trap hidden in here. Did you spot it?"
"Ah—good grief!"
Jeong Hyeonsu, Jeong Hyeon-woo, Jeong Hyeongyu. Names carrying the shared generational character were written right there among the list of landowners. They had to be Hyeoncheol's half-brothers.
"If you take those men's land-use rights out of the equation, it's not eighty percent. It's forty-five."
"Correct. If my stepbrothers refuse, the whole project approval collapses."
"Then wouldn't going ahead with the project still be the profitable move? Build the apartments, sell them off, and a fortune comes rolling in."
"That's how it works with ordinary redevelopment. This is a *local housing association*."
The trap of a local housing association was that even someone without a single square foot of land could become a member, as long as they met the residency requirement.
Jeong Hyeonsu had no intention of sharing the spoils with the propertyless. In his mind, this feast belonged to one group and one group only: the landowners, the deed-holders, the people who already had homes.
"He opened that real-estate office for the sole purpose of flushing out the homeless association members and running the project without them."
Dissolving the association, kicking out the renters and non-owners, then wriggling back in to restart the business—it was the kind of dirty trick he apparently pulled without blinking.
"His side controls an overwhelming share of the land, so even the construction company can't do a thing about it."
The moment Jeong Hyeonsu and his brothers refused land use—or simply withheld the remaining fifteen percent of consent needed to begin—the redevelopment would fall apart.
For the construction company, it was a nightmare scenario. They'd have already assembled a rebuilding team and signed contracts with crane operators and waste-disposal firms.
Same for the association members. They'd have hunted for places to move and taken out loans against their land-use rights as collateral.
If the project ground to a halt before the first shovel ever broke ground, interest costs would pile up—and the homes they'd emptied out would start falling apart around them. A house nobody lives in deteriorates in the blink of an eye. All the more so when it's a thirty-year-old multi-unit housing block.
This was exactly why people said you should never recommend a local housing project even to your worst enemy. At every single stage, failure to secure the land meant delays or outright collapse.
The construction company and the members alike would be dancing attendance on Jeong Hyeonsu and his brothers, stamping their feet in frustration.
"They're telling people to just sell their homes if they can't stand the wait—while buying up a few more houses on their brothers' land so they can redevelop *that* section by itself."
"They're genuinely vile."
For people whose entire net worth was a single home, and for those who'd lived for years in aging multi-unit housing just to qualify for the association, winning a new apartment had felt like a miracle. And now all of it was a hollow dream—worse, one wrong move and they could be fleeced of everything they had and thrown out on the street.
Had Jeong Haksu ever imagined, hauling fuel drums around on the back of a motorcycle and scraping together his fortune penny by penny, that his children would grow up to do something this rotten?
"Hhh—hhk."
Shin Okja, Jeong Hyeoncheol's birth mother, had begun to sob.
"How could they turn out so wicked? They deserve heaven's punishment."
At her weeping, the White Porcelain Grandmother snorted.
"Heaven's punishment, is it? You ought to be thinking about how to thrash some sense into them yourselves, not sitting around waiting for heaven to do it. Where I come from, backing down like this doesn't earn you the name of ghost, child."
"Master, shall I step in?"
Even Abe was waiting on my orders, apparently itching to knock some heads together.
Abe, first go scout the real-estate office. Check whether Jeong Hyeonsu is there and see exactly what they're up to. We're going to take a loop around the neighborhood and come back to this spot, so meet us at the car.
"Yes, Master."
After sending Abe off, I turned to Hyeoncheol. "You said you'd found crimes they could be sent to prison for *right now*—crimes that had nothing to do with real estate. What were those?"
"Ah, that's..."
Hyeoncheol bit down hard on his lip before forcing the words out.
"They've been collecting personal seals from elderly residents and using their land-use rights however they please. I discovered they've been forging private documents with those stamps."
He barely managed to finish, then looked me in the eye.
"But wielding public authority for personal revenge is... a bit..."
His voice trailed off. He couldn't bring himself to use his badge as a weapon for a private vendetta—or so it seemed. That was apparently why he'd never once pressed the matter of the inheritance, all this time.
Good grief. It's not just the victims who suffer—watching this from the sidelines is enough to give me an ulcer.
I asked him, "I'm curious. If someone threatened me, or tailed me—if it were *my* safety on the line—would you still say that?"
"That wouldn't even be worth debating. You're a citizen of the Republic of Korea, and you'd be entitled to police protection."
"And yet *you* won't accept legal protection, or the help of public authority?"
Caught off guard by the counter, Hyeoncheol let out a heavy breath.
"I'm preparing to hand the case over to the precinct with jurisdiction. The elderly people who entrusted their seals could be harmed, so I'm telling them to open a formal investigation."
In other words: he'd sweat through the legwork himself, then hand over the evidence to the proper station. Not as personal revenge, but in the name of public decency.
Because that was the only way a policeman could hold his head high—or so he believed.
He was a textbook specimen of the righteous detective.
But still.
"If it were me, I'd have made them get down on their knees and beg. Not that I'd have forgiven them even then."
At my words, the White Porcelain Grandmother responded with fervor.
"*That's* why I took a liking to you, young man. You and I see eye to eye."
You *liked* me?
"Did you not know?"
The White Porcelain Grandmother slipped soundlessly out of the car.
"I fancy a look around the village. Now, where are we? Sindang-dong, was it?"
I scrambled out after her and told Hyeoncheol, "I'll take a loop around the neighborhood and be back."
"I'll wait in the car. My brothers would likely recognize my face—they say I take after our father a great deal."
"Ah, right. When I saw the photos, I honestly couldn't tell you two apart."
I gave him a light smile and followed the White Porcelain Grandmother.
"What manner of place is this, that it has so many shops selling vessels?"
The White Porcelain Grandmother, being a spirit born of white porcelain herself, took a keen interest in anything dish-related. She examined every bowl, plate, and jar in every window with scholarly attention—then strolled straight past Tteokbokki Town without so much as a glance.
Well, of course. Grandmother only has eyes for food that's *pretty*.
She believed a thing had to be visually splendid—like cake, cookies, or flower tea—before its taste was even worth considering. Though she did have a fondness for the meat I grilled over charcoal for her.
So we made one grand circuit of Sindang-dong, and as we headed back toward our starting point, the White Porcelain Grandmother spoke up.
"Right then. Let's go into that real-estate place we spoke of earlier."
Jeong Hyeonsu's real-estate office?
Walk in unannounced and do what, exactly?
If Abe came back with intel, we could feed them a single decisive blow—but barging in blind was another matter.
Yet the Grandmother hiked up her skirts with a look of pure, gleaming resolve.
"If you would catch a tiger, you must enter the tiger's den. And to catch a raccoon dog, you build a fire at the mouth of its burrow, no?"
Brimming with excitement, the White Porcelain Grandmother drifted straight through the real-estate office's glass front and vanished inside.
Left with no choice, I hauled open the office door with all my strength.
"Welcome!"
Inside the office, a woman who looked to be in her forties held down the desk.
Black blazer, white blouse, black slacks—a modest, professional ensemble.
"Looking for a place? Monthly rent? Or maybe an officetel?"
The nameplate on the table read: Kim Jia, Manager.
Kim Jia looked me up and down and clearly pegged me as a client hunting for a cheap monthly rental.
Jeans and a T-shirt—hardly the look of a man sitting on three hundred billion won—so the misunderstanding was only natural.
Well then, all I could do was play along.
"You seem to have quite a few officetel rentals available?"
"Our boss owns the whole building. Everything except the ground-floor retail is officetel, and we've got exactly two vacancies right now. Shall I show you around?"
"Ah, yes please."
If I acted like a serious rent-to-lease client, there was always the chance Jeong Hyeonsu himself would stick his head out.
And sure enough, I ran into him—just not where I'd expected.
"Manager Kim, where are you off to?"
I'd left the office and was walking toward the elevator when a thick male voice rang out from the far end of the corridor.
"Boss? I thought you said you'd be in late today."
It was the eldest brother himself—Jeong Hyeonsu, fifteen years Hyeoncheol's senior.
Early fifties, dressed in full golf attire. Apparently he'd been out on the course.
"Those two are cut from exactly the same cloth, those two."
The White Porcelain Grandmother looked back and forth between Jeong Hyeonsu and Kim Jia, then declared flat-out that they were having an affair.
How can you possibly know that?
"Think carefully, child. What did you say my specialty was?"
Thrashing the wicked and then making a public spectacle of them?
"Precisely. Joseon or the Korean Empire, it made no difference—men and women carrying on was the oldest story there is. And you know what they said: when a high official kept a concubine, ruin entered the house with her."
Suddenly the Grandmother swept up to Jeong Hyeonsu and reached out, pressing her palm flat against the crown of his head.
"This one's just come from rolling around with another woman, I'd wager. His heart is hammering away at the top of his skull, and there's soap on him—cheap motel nearby, I shouldn't wonder."
Having deduced the whole affair like a detective couldn't hold a candle to her, the White Porcelain Grandmother smiled—slow and cold.
"A man who deserves the headsman's block and then some."
Abruptly, the golf bag slung over the man's shoulder jolted, and his hand shot to yank open its side pocket.
Zzzzip!
The pocket zipper on the golf bag slid open.
She can even do that?
She wasn't scribbling talismans like Abe—she was exerting raw physical force with her own spectral energy. Even No. 1 struggles to manage physical force without possessing someone's body.
But what truly boggled the mind was what came spilling out of that golf bag pocket.
A blister sheet of ten little blue pills—Viagra—with only four left in their slots.
And assorted condoms, wrappers torn, scattering across the floor.
In that instant, before any law or argument could even enter into it, Jeong Hyeonsu's life began to crack straight down the middle.
"You told me you were going golfing with the construction company's CEO! You lied to me?!"
A furious red flush spread across Manager Kim Jia's face.
"How could you do this?! You *promised*—you said you'd divorce your wife and marry me!"
Ding!
Just then the elevator doors slid open, and a well-dressed woman in her fifties stepped out. Abe stood right behind her.
"Who's divorcing whom?"
The woman who emerged from the elevator fixed Kim Jia with a murderous glare.
"M-Madam! Well, you see, that is..."
Kim Jia pointed at the things scattered across the floor, her voice breaking into sobs.
"It looks like the boss has been cheating on you, hhhk!"
Giving Jeong Hyeonsu no chance to explain himself, his lawful wife lunged and slapped him full across the face.
"You bastard! Did you promise me or didn't you?! You swore that the next time you cheated, I'd cut it off!"
People came pouring out of the shops. Passersby stopped to gawk and whisper.
Just as the White Porcelain Grandmother had promised—the public humiliation had officially begun.