Prologue
I was sitting quietly at home when trouble found me.
"You son of a bitch!!"
A surprise slap, from a middle-aged man dressed head to toe in hiking gear. Every time my head whipped around to that sharp crack, it felt as if my soul were tearing loose.
What the fuck is this.
Set against everything I had already survived, it was nothing. I had taken an ashtray to the head from the uncle my father cleaned out — his own sister's husband. I had been hounded by a victims' association after the fake news spread that I kept my father's vault. I had even been beaten with a monkey wrench by some lunatic, and somehow I was still breathing.
These past few years I had gone around on my guard, and that caution had let me slip more than one crisis. The man who came today, though, had planned it properly. He only knocked a few times, offhand, calling out that he was from the management office, never even pressing me. When I checked the door camera there he was, one middle-aged man flicking a document folder as if the whole errand annoyed him. However I looked at him, he was the building manager.
All that, just to slap me a few times?
Maybe because I had taken the hits so helplessly, he had found his rhythm. The feeling pouring out of the man in the hiking clothes grew wilder by the moment — a fist in my collar, a torrent of abuse, and some grievance I couldn't even parse.
"Sir. Calm down, first."
"Calm down!? You motherfucking bastard, get my daughter up—!"
Words weren't going to do it. A taekwondo trophy sat within reach, and for lack of anything better I snatched it up and swung with everything I had.
A solid thock, and it connected with his skull. The impact felt good in my hand.
One blow didn't seem like enough to settle him, so I went to hit him again—
"...Wait! Wait a second!"
He folded faster than I had expected.
So he hadn't come looking to grapple with me in the first place. Watching him freeze in an awkward half-crouch, eyes darting, sizing me up, what rose in me wasn't anger so much as — what was I even supposed to call it. Emptiness. I also wanted to know why I had been slapped at all.
"Exactly how much did you lose?"
"What...?"
"You're one of the people my father— no. That bastard Choi Heejun did you in, didn't he? What I can't square is that the man's in Anyang Prison right now. He's up for parole next year, sure, but he isn't out yet... Ah. A man like him could still run a job from the inside."
"......"
"I'm asking how much you lost, to come at me like this. A hundred million won? Two hundred? ...And listen, sir. I really don't manage Choi Heejun's slush fund. If anything, I cooperated with the investigation at the Seoul Southern District Prosecutors' Office to put him away. If it weren't for me, he'd still be walking around out there."
At that the man only cocked his head, blank as a post. All that force, the kind that had started by slapping me out of nowhere — where had it gone? He even took a step back.
Had I guessed wrong?
If so, that was unexpected. Until now, everyone who had come at me had been a victim, someone Choi Heejun had swindled and ruined.
Choi Heejun, the con man. A financial criminal who had turned the Korean stock market into his personal playground and manufactured victims without end. Unlicensed fund-raising, fraud under the Act on the Aggravated Punishment of Specific Economic Crimes, market manipulation — the record was nothing if not varied. There had been a time when fans revered him as the 300 Billion Super Ant. Now he was simply a criminal.
Eight companies had been wrecked because of him, and the people who had lost money were past counting. He was old blood, at it since the dot-com bubble, and he had a favorite method for slipping the blame: provoke the very victims he had made until they crossed the line. He was deft enough at it that he himself walked free on a deferred sentence while the head of a victims' association went to prison. Getting a victim to write a petition on his behalf was routine. Trash among trash, he never spared a thought for whoever the sparks landed on.
Not even I, his son, was an exception. Whose mouth do you think the lie came from — that I was the one managing Choi Heejun's criminal proceeds? His, or someone in his circle. All of it.
If it isn't Choi Heejun... then Mom?
That was possible too. She wasn't famous; that was the only difference. Measure them by criminal record alone and she stood level with Choi Heejun. If his field was economics, hers was politics. She had worked at a multi-level marketing company in her youth, staged a sham divorce from him, and reinvented herself as a political fixer — introducing politicians to the men who held the money, rigging primaries inside the party, and collecting this favor and that in return. You could hardly call it a profession, and yet the influence was considerable. Only last year she had had a hand in the list for the president's special pardons.
"So you're someone Mom burned, then? That's a surprise. Unlike Choi Heejun, she isn't the type to work while collecting personal grudges."
"What do you keep—! H-how would I know your parents?"
Not Mom either. Then what.
A lunatic? But bewilderment was written all over the face tilted up at me, which didn't fit. He looked as if he were starting to wonder, himself, whether he had come to the wrong door.
Someone crossed my mind.
I didn't want to picture it. If he hadn't burst in because of my parents, only one person was left.
Choi Yerin. My younger sister, who worked as a nightclub MD — the one who handled the VIPs. Garbage with a promising future, same as the rest of them, and yet the two of us had gotten along well enough. Surely not.
"Choi Yerin. That name mean anything to you?"
Only then did the sharpness return to his eyes.
I had hoped it wouldn't be her. The one sibling I had still counted as family had sold me out.
"Yerin's friends with my daughter...? I asked her, and she said they were out together when her older brother showed up out of nowhere and kept forcing some strange drink on her — and, huh? She thinks he put something in it! That was you!"
"Slow down. So what happened to your daughter?"
"Fentanyl overdose. She's been unconscious for a week..."
"I've never so much as laid eyes on fentanyl. If you don't believe me, sit me down across from my sister. That's fine."
"What...?"
"Spiking drinks is how that side does business. She was probably trying to rope your daughter in, and it blew up on her. Either way, it wasn't me."
He couldn't bring himself to answer. He only looked at me, wretched. I had expected him to fly into a rage rather than admit he had been wrong, but he was surprisingly calm. I didn't think it was the taekwondo trophy that frightened him. More likely it was everything I had just laid out about my family.
"Huh?"
With that foolish little sound he left my apartment, staggering as he went. The blow to the head, maybe.
He's just going to walk out? After all that?
Then again, what use would an apology have been. The very fact that he had pulled a stunt like this meant he was probably half out of his mind over his daughter. A week in a coma from an overdose — you had to figure she wasn't waking up in one piece.
Chasing him down and wrecking him would have been the right move, but somehow I had no will for it. All that came out of me was a dry little laugh.
Me, slapped in the entryway of my own home by a man I had never seen. My family, planning a crime even at this moment. The fact that I would never, for the rest of my life, escape any of it. All of it was simply funny.
Once, every time something like this happened, I had thrashed because I wanted to live. I had gone on a tow-truck channel — one of those shows that films family wreckage — and declared on camera that I was cutting mine off. I had cooperated with the police and the prosecutors. I had shown up at Choi Heejun's door with a crowbar and put the fear into him.
But after I understood that nothing I did, however ugly, could free me from the shackle called family, even anger stopped rising.
Pointless. Those people are never going to change.
I stood there in a daze for a while, then found myself opening a novel platform. Not because there was anything I particularly wanted to read. Habit.
The moment I logged in, though, a thought surfaced.
If I had to keep swallowing this, wouldn't I be better off possessed into something else?
It was a thought that came whenever I played a game or read a novel, but today, of all days, the urge to be possessed was unbearable. I truly hadn't known my own sister would go this far.
Nothing to lose either way. I decided to tip one author and make a request while I was at it.
The work I chose was a romance novel called Even a Failing Student Wants to Be Loved.
A protagonist who had been hiding his power at an academy for reasons of his own, only to start letting his talent show once he became a second-year, trading sweet nothings with the young ladies. Of everything on my favorites list, it was the tamest.
If only I could reach a world where I would never have to look at my family's faces again. How good that would be. I put all of that desperation into it and pressed the button to post.
"If I'd known it would work, I'd have asked a long time ago."
A wish, granted far more easily than I had imagined.
For some reason, my hand was closed around a morning star. One so worn the use of it showed.