The Value of Nine Hundred Million, and a Debt of the Heart
A quiet corner of a nearly empty café just off campus. Yura and I sat side by side, waiting for someone.
Yura made no effort to hide her nerves. Her legs bounced restlessly under the table, and the hands she had clasped beneath it had gone bloodless and white from how tightly she was wringing them.
I, on the other hand, lifted my cup at my leisure and breathed in the fragrance. The sweet scent of jasmine brushed my nose and settled my mind.
"Oppa… what happened with Shin Nara? She hasn't been coming to school lately…"
Yura broke the heavy silence with a forced, awkward smile. Her voice trembled, just slightly.
"It went well. Very thoroughly. Cleanly."
I set the cup down without a sound.
"You'll run into her on campus soon enough. You'll see then how much she's changed. It'll knock you over."
"Ah… really?"
She didn't seem to fully grasp what I meant, but she didn't press. Some instinctive self-preservation had kicked in — don't poke at his mood.
The silence settled over us again, heavier than before. Yura's bouncing picked up speed, the vibration traveling through the chair. She worked her lips, then finally couldn't hold the anxiety in any longer.
"Um… Oppa. Why did you tell me to call my dad?"
Her pupils shook as if the ground had given way beneath her.
"Is it… because of the contract I signed? Or… are you going to tell him to pay back the money I borrowed? Are you going to tell my dad?"
She was clearly spinning the worst possible scenario — that I was about to expose every filthy secret she had and lean on her father for the debt.
"You'll find out in a minute. Don't worry about it."
I kept the answer short and turned my eyes toward the entrance.
"Ah. There he is."
A clear little chime rang out as the café door opened, and a middle-aged man stepped inside. Yura's father — President Choi Jincheol.
Sallow skin, hollowed-out eyes, a suit so rumpled it looked like it hadn't been pressed in days. His entire body advertised how thoroughly the loan sharks had wrung the soul out of him.
"Dad…"
Yura shot up from her seat.
Choi Jincheol spotted us and approached with a lifeless smile, his steps heavy and dragging.
"Yura. And… you must be…"
He hovered awkwardly and dipped his head. Suspicion and hope sat mixed in his eyes — trying to confirm whether this was really the rich boyfriend his daughter had described, or some con artist.
"It's a pleasure to meet you. My name is Park Dohun."
I stood and bowed a full ninety degrees.
"I'm Yura's boyfriend."
"Ah…!"
Yura stared at me with startled rabbit eyes. She had never, not even in her dreams, expected me to use a warm word like boyfriend — not creditor and debtor, not master and slave.
The tension drained from Choi Jincheol's face, replaced by visible relief.
"Ah, good to meet you. I'm Yura's father. Please, sit."
We took our seats, the air still stiff. Choi Jincheol scrubbed his dry face with both hands and let out a long, deep sigh. The weight on a patriarch drowning in debt sat on his slumped shoulders; the shadows on his face were almost painful to look at.
"You seem like a busy man, so I'll get straight to the point. I've heard a great deal from Yura. I understand the company has been going through a very difficult time."
I opened.
Choi Jincheol's face hardened in an instant, stiff as plaster. For a proud businessman, laying bare his financial ruin and incompetence in front of his daughter's young boyfriend was a humiliation worse than dying.
"Ah… well… it's embarrassing to admit, but it's true…"
He couldn't finish. His head dropped. Yura took her father's rough hand and her eyes welled up.
"Sir, I won't waste your time."
I drew a thick white envelope from my jacket and set it on the table. From inside, I fanned out nine checks I had prepared in advance — one hundred million won each.
"Nine hundred million won."
Choi Jincheol's eyes flew so wide they looked ready to leave his skull. Yura clapped a hand over her mouth and stopped breathing.
"I'm prepared to lend you this money. Interest-free."
"I-is that true? You would… give me this kind of money? With no collateral? To a complete stranger?"
His voice shook. He looked like a man who had wandered into a dream. The banks had turned their backs. The loan sharks had turned their backs. Lifelong friends had turned their backs. And now some fresh-faced college kid calling himself his daughter's boyfriend was casually laying nine hundred million won on the table.
"Yes. You need to put out the fire first. Yura has been worried sick. She's been crying every night."
I looked at her and smiled, warm as anything. She stared back with eyes not just grateful but something closer to awe.
"Thank you… I truly thank you… I don't know how I'll ever repay this kindness… you saved a man's life…"
Choi Jincheol stood, then dropped to his knees on the café floor without a second's hesitation. He seized my hands, bowed his head to the ground, and broke into open sobs, utterly indifferent to the stares around us.
"Thank you… thank you so much…! You've saved us…!"
The head of a household. A man old enough to be my father. On his knees at my feet, weeping like a child. Yura threw her arms around him and burst into tears of her own.
"Dad… get up… hhk… Oppa, thank you…"
A corner of a café, drowned in tears. I looked down on the scene, calm and utterly cold, and thought:
I have no intention of ever getting this nine hundred million back.
Call me insane if you want. The math was already done. This was not an investment. It was a concrete reward for Yura luring Shin Nara in and completing my revenge — and the cost of planting a debt of the heart so enormous she would never, for the rest of her life, be able to wipe it away.
Nine hundred million. A fortune most people would never touch in a lifetime. To me — a man sitting on fourteen billion, no, looking at twenty billion now — it was just a number.
For a company already tipping over the edge, it might be nothing more than a few extra days on life support. Whether this man used the money to claw his way back, or whether it vanished down a bottomless well and the whole thing collapsed anyway, was none of my concern.
What mattered was that I had given them a chance. And Yura would spend the rest of her life crushed under the weight of those nine hundred million won, carrying the guilt and the obligation. The man who saved her father. The savior who lifted a dying household back onto its feet. That overwhelming gratitude would forge her into an even more perfect, even more loyal slave.
She had already been that. But now, no matter what I did to her — no matter how perverse or sadistic the demand — she would never be able to refuse.
A nine-hundred-million-won shackle around the soul. Not a bad return on investment.
"Please stand up, sir. People are watching. This is making things difficult."
I pulled Choi Jincheol to his feet. He kept wiping his eyes and bowing his head.
"I'm truly… ashamed. That a fine young man like you would be paired with our Yura… I must have saved the country in a past life."
He managed to gather himself and sat back down. Then, carefully, as if he couldn't hold the curiosity in any longer:
"But… if it isn't too rude to ask…"
"Please, go ahead."
"Just who… are you, that you would lend this kind of money with no collateral at all? Are you by any chance the son of a chaebol family? Or do you have a business of your own…?"
Who the hell is this guy? How does a college student in his twenties put down hundreds of millions of won like it's nothing? That was the look he gave me.
I picked up my cup, drank the tea that had already gone cold, and smiled.
"No. A chaebol? Hardly. I come from nothing."
I tipped my chin at the checks on the table.
"I'm just an ordinary college student who happens to be decent at investing. Lucky, that's all."
Choi Jincheol's mouth fell open. An ordinary college student, nine hundred million won, luck? It was a reality he couldn't process. But the checks in front of him were unmistakably real, and the salvation was happening right now. He could only stare, wearing the dazed, reverent expression of a man looking at something from another dimension.
We left the café and walked a quiet path that wound behind campus. Autumn had arrived and the wind had a real bite to it, but with Yura plastered against my arm, her body radiating heat, I didn't feel the cold at all.
"Oppa… thank you. Really. Truly…"
She had her arm hooked through mine, rubbing her soft cheek against my bicep. Her full chest pressed into my arm; her hair tickled my skin. There was no trace of the haughty, high-nosed campus goddess Choi Yura. What walked beside me now was a clingy little puppy wagging its tail, desperate for a word of praise from its master.
"I know. My ears are going to fall off. You've said it a hundred times."
I snorted. Yura beamed up at me, her eyes overflowing with respect, longing, and a blind, unexamined affection. A miracle manufactured by nine hundred million won.
Then she stopped walking.
"What is it?"
She stared at the ground for a moment, then looked up at me with a seriousness I hadn't seen before.
"This whole thing… it made me think about a lot."
"Think about what?"
"About how much of a greenhouse flower I've been. How clueless I was about the real world. I swaggered around on my dad's money and never once understood how terrifying money actually is. I was just a kid…"
She smiled, bitter.
"But you made me see it. How scary the world is. And that I can't do a single thing with my own two hands. Thank you for showing me that. And thank you for saving my dad. I mean it."
Her earnest confession almost made me laugh. She ought to have resented me. Instead she was grateful.
"Have you forgotten the contract you signed with me? The slave contract. The waiver of your body."
She nodded.
"I know. I haven't forgotten. I've got a brand on my ass, remember?"
"And you're thanking me? I hold the deed to your life."
"Honestly… at first I was furious. I felt cheated. I kept thinking, why do I have to be treated like this?"
She looked me straight in the eye.
"But if I'm being real about it, that was a fair price for the hundred million and everything you'd already done for me. And now another nine hundred million on top of that… I've been paid more than my body is even worth. It's too much, if anything."
She was rationalizing it for herself. This wasn't exploitation — it was a fair trade. She had handed over her body and her freedom, and in exchange her family was safe and the debt was gone. She'd come out ahead.
I clicked my tongue inwardly. Jisu, Yura — every last one of them. Victims I'd grabbed by the throat and driven to the edge, and they were thanking the man who'd done it. At the center of this bizarre phenomenon sat money and capability. Faced with overwhelming power, people submit, then wrap the humiliation in the language of love.
Stockholm syndrome? No. Something more primitive than that. The survival instinct, stripped bare.
Well. Not a bad outcome.
Whatever the reason, the result satisfied me. Their bodies and their hearts had ended up bound to me, and those feelings were turning more genuine by the day. At the same time, I found it almost endearing that Yura — who had been nothing but a spoiled, empty-headed girl — had woken up to reality and grown, in her own way.
"Oppa… what you said in front of my dad earlier… are we actually dating now? You and me… we're a couple, right?"
She twisted in place as she asked, hope shining in her eyes. I had introduced myself as her boyfriend, so she wanted to believe that made it official.
I shook my head, firm.
"Don't get the wrong idea."
"Huh…?"
"That was to put your father's mind at ease. It isn't real. Why would I date you? You're just my toy."
The cold, final answer froze her face. Her eyes shook hard, wounded. The old Yura would have welled up right there.
But.
"I see…"
She bit her lip for a moment, then lifted her chin, almost brightly.
"Then I just have to try harder from now on."
"What?"
"I know I don't measure up yet… but I'll get better. I'll make myself exactly what you want. And someday you'll acknowledge me as your real girlfriend."
Her eyes flashed with something like a challenge.
"I'll make it so you… no, so Master can't help but love me. So those nine hundred million won't have been wasted."
Not the reaction I'd expected. Instead of crumpling, she'd dug in. She really had changed. The greenhouse flower had taken a beating from the wind and rain and was turning into a stubborn, nasty little weed.
"That confident, are you?"
"Of course. I'm Choi Yura. Once I set my sights on something, I never let go."
She smiled, sultry, and laid a hand on my chest. Her fingers traced down between the buttons of my shirt.
"And… I want it. Right now."
"What?"
"When you laid those checks in front of my dad… I got so wet. You were so fucking hot."
She leaned in and whispered against my ear, thick and sticky. Hot breath dampened the shell of it.
"I've been soaked ever since. My panties are completely wrecked. It was running down my pussy."
She took my hand and pressed it to that secret place beneath her skirt. Wet. Just as she'd said — through the thin fabric I could feel the heat and the damp.
The taste of power that kind of money carried had put her in heat too.
"I want to serve you… right now. I'm going crazy… fuck me."
Her eyes had gone slack with want. I snorted and slid an arm around her waist.
"Fine. Let's go home. I'll check for myself how wet you are."
"No…"
Yura clung to my sleeve and hung off me.
"I can't make it home. It's too far. Right now…"
"You want to do it here? People walk through here."
A walking path, sure — but it was still outdoors.
"Over there…"
She pointed. A rundown public restroom sat in a neglected corner of the park, looking like it hadn't seen a janitor in months.
"Can't we do it there?"
I thought I'd misheard. Choi Yura — the girl who lived in a luxury Gangnam villa — was begging to have sex in a public toilet.
"In a place like that?"
"I don't care… as long as it's with you, anywhere is fine. Ah — only if you're okay with it, of course. And…"
She squirmed, her face flushed.
"Doing it somewhere filthy… I think that'll turn me on even more. Like I've actually become a whore. Like I'm a cheap slut."
This girl was completely broken. No — she had reached the stage where she enjoyed her own ruin. The transgression and the wretchedness of a public restroom were lighting up every masochistic nerve she had.
"Ha…"
A disbelieving laugh escaped me, but at the same time a heavy heat settled low in my gut. A woman draped in luxury brands, moaning on top of a piss-stinking public toilet. Even the thought of it was plenty stimulating.
"Please, Master… please… fuck me…"
Yura put on her sweetest voice and rubbed my cock through my pants, her eyes desperate.
"Alright."
I took her hand and pulled her toward the restroom.
"You asked for this."
"Yes! Yes! I'll serve you with everything I've got!"
Yura beamed and trotted after me, her steps as bright and eager as a puppy heading out for a walk.