The Fundamentals of Politics (1)
It had been nearly a week since the two of them began training.
Over that time, Seo Yoon's regimen had revolved around basic conditioning and the transfer of hard-won know-how. Rather than rushing her into live combat, Lee Jun was making sure she drilled the fundamentals into her bones first.
And so, Saturday morning.
"Hmm."
Lee Jun stood gazing at the house, its roof now fully repaired, and sank slowly into thought.
Maybe I should expand it.
This was no longer his home alone — it was the dormitory for his management agency. He'd be running a small, elite operation for the next several years anyway, so why bother finding a separate building when he could simply renovate this one? Truthfully, the two-story house was already large enough to house ten with room to spare, but a little more comfort never hurt anyone.
"The lot here is approved for up to five floors, anyway."
One word to the Director of the Technical Bureau, and the man would have it built in no time. He technically belonged to the Association, but he ran a few private construction firms on the side — perfect for a job like this.
With that thought, Lee Jun cracked an egg into the frying pan.
He spread it wide, gave it a few stirs, and laid a slice of cheese on top. As it cooked, he pushed the egg to one side and began tapping the pan's handle with practiced ease.
Tap — tap—
A few rounds of that, and a mouthwatering omelet had somehow materialized.
It was then that footsteps echoed down from the second floor.
Thump, thump—
No prize for guessing who.
"...What are you doing?"
"Oh, you're up? Me, I was just making breakfast."
Seo Yoon had been consistent for over a week now. Neatly pressed clothes, glasses that lent her an air of quiet intellect, and her hair pulled back in a single tidy ponytail. It wasn't quite the full battle-ready setup from her first morning, but it was still far too composed for someone who lived here.
Utterly immaculate, she spoke with a faint look of helplessness.
"I told you there was no need to go this far."
"I was going to make mine anyway. Besides, you're not exactly relaxing either, are you?"
The training Lee Jun put her through was brutal. He never pushed her beyond what was physically possible, of course, but it was undeniably a far cry from anything ordinary. To be fair, every bit of it was designed to make her stronger.
That said, a certain self-interest of his was mixed in, too.
The faster her skills grew, the faster the agency's name would spread. Which meant that as hard as he rode her, he intended to take just as good care of her on her days off.
Cracking another egg into the pan, Lee Jun started a pot of soup at the same time. Seo Yoon watched him with a vaguely troubled expression, but he paid it no mind.
"Go sit down. It'll be ready soon."
This time, too, he was swift and precise. He whipped up a second omelet and began setting the table — not that "setting the table" amounted to much beyond omelets and soup.
Even so, the two of them lingered over their breakfast.
"Oh, right. Did I mention there's no training today?"
"No, you did not."
"Then let me say it now. No training today."
"...Is there something else instead?"
Hmm, good question. There was something else, but calling today a rest day wouldn't have been wrong either.
"From today on, I'll be walking you through the actual development plan."
"Mm."
Seo Yoon lifted her spoon and stopped mid-air, saying nothing.
What was that about? It wasn't exactly shocking news.
As he puzzled over it, Lee Jun noticed her gaze had settled on one spot.
Ah.
"Go ahead and use it."
Sniip—
It was the ketchup sitting at the edge of the table.
"...Thank you."
Embarrassed, was she? Her face was as expressionless as ever, but the tips of her ears twitched, just barely.
Even the greatest poker face in the world apparently couldn't control that. Fearing she might give herself indigestion, Lee Jun made no further comment and simply focused on his meal.
Seo Yoon, for her part, scraped the rest of her omelet clean and even polished off every last drop of soup. A non-combat hunter through and through — the girl could seriously eat.
He'd fed her a proper dinner last night; if he hadn't, she probably would've eaten five times this much.
Breakfast was over in ten minutes.
They weren't close enough yet to linger over small talk between bites, and as her employer, Lee Jun had no intention of closing that distance any further.
This much distance is just right.
Relationships bound by contracts worked best when they didn't get too cozy. That was experience talking.
Just as he finished the thought, Seo Yoon rose from her seat a beat before he did.
"Then... allow me to make the after-meal coffee."
"You really don't have to push yourself."
"No. I will make it."
She vanished into the kitchen and reemerged moments later with two cups of coffee in hand. Apparently she'd served as the vice-guildmaster's secretary during unofficial operations back in Seolwon, so this sort of thing was well within her wheelhouse.
"Here you are."
"Ah, thank you."
With the warmth of the cups between them, the two sat at the table and discussed the road ahead.
First, Lee Jun explained why today's training was cancelled.
"We need to sharpen your instincts for real combat. It's time to start entering gates in earnest."
"Going by your previous interview, I understood you had no intention of taking on gate contracts yourself."
"I have no plans to claim a jurisdiction, of course. Officially, we're not even a guild, so that would be impossible anyway. What I'm after are the ownerless gates."
Ownerless gates.
The term referred to gates that spawned overlapping multiple guilds' jurisdictions, leaving their rights hanging in limbo. Not an official designation, but it was what everyone in the industry called them.
So why did such gates go unclaimed?
The reason was simple: the procedure became a nightmare.
When a gate or dungeon spanned two jurisdictions, the byproducts had to be divided — eight parts to whichever guild raided it, two to whichever sat on its hands, or a fifty-fifty split if they worked together. Under those rules, naturally, neither side wanted to invest anything.
Then, ten days after a gate like this formed, ownership automatically reverted to the Association. And with the Director of the Technical Bureau keeping a live map of every gate in the country, there was no gaming the system.
Lee Jun intended to bid on exactly those gates — the ones released into Association ownership.
Having heard the whole plan, Seo Yoon seemed to have something she wanted to ask.
"This law was... um..."
"Was created by...?"
"How should I put it... what should I call you?"
Oh, right.
We never sorted out what to call each other, did we?
Seo Yoon had been addressing Lee Jun without any title at all this whole time.
"Call me whatever's comfortable. Just so long as it's Vice Chairman."
"Then... I'll call you Boss."
"Hmm. I like it."
Now that he thought about it, Boss was technically accurate. Being called by the title for the first time put him in oddly good spirits.
"So, what was your question?"
"This law — I understand it was something you drafted yourself. Is that correct?"
"That's right. My bill."
"It's been on my mind for a while. How did this law ever come to pass? The guilds must have opposed it fiercely."
She was right.
Under normal circumstances, the guilds would have fought this bill to the death.
Under normal circumstances.
And that meant —
"This thing? There was barely any pushback."
"That is surprising."
In truth, the setup had been excellent.
It started with the jurisdictions assigned to each guild. Typically, jurisdiction maps were drawn as clean circles, but Lee Jun had deliberately overlapped the outer edges with neighboring guilds' territories to leave no gaps. That part was easy — after all, there could be no unclaimed ground.
"But in that case, wouldn't you simply draw a border line down the middle?"
"You could, and it would be perfectly precise, with no overlaps. But people love unearned income, don't they?"
When Lee Jun drafted the original jurisdiction provisions, he'd simultaneously rigged the rules governing those overlapping zones. Any guild whose territory merely brushed against a gate — not the one actually raiding it — was entitled to skim a small cut of the byproducts.
"They were planning to sit on their hands anyway. In practice, that was the smarter play."
At its heart, the reason guilds dealt with gates at all was simple: it was their obligation when one appeared inside their territory. Whatever byproducts or levels came out of it were just pleasant bonuses. In reality, once a hunter passed a certain threshold, the monsters in ordinary gates and dungeons contributed nothing to their growth at all.
Which meant lower-rank gates had to be staffed by lower-rank hunters — and for safety's sake, that required committing a considerable number of personnel. The end result was that low-rank gates did nothing but gnaw away at a guild's resources. Byproducts kept the ledger roughly balanced, but even up through C-Class and D-Class gates, guilds were running at an outright loss. It was open industry knowledge that a gate had to be B-Class or above for a standard party rotation to turn a profit.
"So eventually, the guilds hit a dilemma. Do you send your nonstandard assets after the low-rank gates, or the high-rank ones?"
Guildmasters, vice-guildmasters, department-head-class hunters. Those people could absolutely smash B-Class gates — and beyond — solo. These days, the guildmasters of the so-called mega-guilds could solo an A-Class given enough time. Yoo Tae-sung of Samhwa, Yoon Seol of Seolwon, Kang Tae-san of Taesan, Yoo Ha-eul of HIM — the heads of guilds whose stock prices climbed higher by the day.
"In the early days, everyone knew that sinking manpower into low-rank gates was a losing game in the long run, so the guildmasters postponed the high-rank raids and threw themselves at the low-ranks. That's the choice most guilds made."
But they caught on soon enough.
And that was precisely why Lee Jun had set the window at exactly ten days.
"...I heard about it from the Vice Guildmaster myself, back in Seolwon. She said it was a bill that should have been opposed from day one."
"Well, that's true from the guilds' point of view. But if you wanted to prevent monopolies, this was the best option there was."
Ten days.
An awkwardly precise number.
A single jurisdiction typically had more than ten gates active at any given time. With bad luck that could spike to twenty, but even with good luck it never dropped below ten.
"No matter how strong a guildmaster is, smashing through several low-rank gates back to back demands rest."
Which meant they could never have both.
A handful of high-rank gates and a mountain of low-rank ones — by design, one side or the other had to be handed over to the Association.
"I'm sure they thought at first they'd clear it all eventually. That even if they couldn't now, their guild members would get stronger later."
But the monsters pouring out of the gates only grew stronger with each passing year.
And the frequency of gate spawns climbed right along with them.
"Calling that a blessing is... well, the future's a bit of a problem, but for now, the check on the guilds has been an unqualified success."
The upshot was that this system sowed a numbers game between the guilds while steadily increasing the number of gates flowing into the Association's hands. And that, too, was only possible because Lee Jun could monitor the status of every gate in the country in real time.
This was always Lee Jun's role — the architect. As for raw power? Well, you cover that by putting people of the right caliber in the right seats.
"...Astonishing. To think you'd planned it out to this depth."
"Ah, no, I didn't build all this with my retirement in mind."
These days, the internet was crawling with conspiracy theories that could generously be called the "Lee Jun Mastermind Theory." Something about how if you stitched together all the bills he'd planted over the years, they formed some grand design. It was about as credible as the tabloid claims that some variety show could predict the future — half-joke by any measure — and yet there were people who genuinely believed it.
"You don't believe that too, do you, Seo Yoon?"
"Mm... of course not. Naturally not."
You do, don't you.
"Let me make this clear up front: I am not the kind of person who operates on that level."
In his last life, he hadn't even retired. All of it was a misunderstanding.
But Seo Yoon seemed entirely unwilling to accept the explanation. In her head, Lee Jun had apparently solidified into some kind of hyperintelligent mastermind — which, again, he was not.
"Anyway. Clearing these ownerless gates is free and open, party by party, so long as you win the bid."
"Then which will we pursue — the high-rank gates or the low-rank ones?"
"I'll have to see which gates come onto the market first."
That was what he said, but Lee Jun had already picked his target.
A gate that didn't even exist yet.
But then, Lee Jun knew how the previous timeline played out. Assuming the future hadn't drifted too far off course, it would happen soon—
One S-Class gate is about to be released.
An S-Class gate dropping loose inside Taesan's jurisdiction. Something quite valuable lay sleeping inside it, and he intended to strip-mine the place for all it was worth.
With that thought, Lee Jun took a sip of his coffee.
The instant the liquid touched his tongue, a jolt shot through his brain.
This is...
"...Mm."
Sweet.
Absurdly sweet.
He half suspected she'd swapped the syrup and the water.
And then Seo Yoon, too, lifted her own cup and took a sip. Setting it down with impeccable grace, she savored the flavor.
"The beans are excellent."
"......."
...I suppose it's good, then.