Second-Round CEO's Reincarnation in the Central Plains
Getting stabbed was a hell of a lot more fucked up than I'd ever imagined.
As I thrashed and writhed in pain beyond any words I could form, the man looked down at me with cold eyes and a sneering little smile.
"You should've just stayed put and lived quietly instead of coming back, Chairman."
"You think… you bastards will get away with this…?"
It hurt. It hurt. It hurt!
Everything simply hurt. I was terrified. The wound burned and froze at once. My body shook, and I couldn't draw a proper breath.
That I still refused to scream in ugliness—was it resignation in the face of death? Or the last scrap of dignity as the head of a conglomerate?
"Even now… if you reconsider…"
"Twenty years. That's the going rate for murdering the world's richest chairman. No covering it up. No pulling strings with retired prosecutors. Twenty years.
"But in exchange, our families get to live long, happy lives. Not a bad trade, really.
"A decade or so down the line, after a couple of presidents have come and gone, we might even catch a quiet special pardon."
A dizzying, whitening sensation raced down my spine.
Even so, I clung to a thread of hope and forced the words out.
"I'll give you ten times as much. Whatever those bastards… paid you, whatever you took… ten times. A doctor…"
"And if I call one? You'll pretend none of this happened?"
"Of course… I will."
"Chairman. Do you really think I'd believe that?"
The man had made up his mind.
He had no intention of letting me live.
His words said so. His eyes confirmed it.
Even knowing that, I worked my stiffening tongue one last time.
"If I go… the company dies. You've already run it into the ground once… you know that."
"True enough, Chairman. The moment word got out you were leaving, the whole group started rattling. Every affiliate's stock is in free fall right now."
"Then…!"
"But so what? The company will go under eventually, sure—but it'll take time. In the meantime we collect everything we're owed, grab everything we can, and jump ship right before it sinks."
Thunder seemed to crash inside my skull.
It wasn't simply fear of dying.
It was the shock, the terror, the despair of knowing that the company I had built over a lifetime would be destroyed.
"You… you son… of a… bitch! How dare you…! How dare…!"
"We've chatted long enough. I'll pretend I never heard a last will."
The blade that had been buried in me slid free with a wet sound.
He reversed his grip on the knife and raised it high.
"…!"
My life flashed before my eyes.
Memories of starting with a tiny construction firm of five employees and building an empire with nothing but bare hands.
Memories of expanding it into the world's largest big-tech company and defense contractor.
A dazzling life spent doing business across the globe, called "Steelman" or "the real-life Johnny Stark," far beyond the borders of Korea.
And this was how it ended.
—Thuk!
Several years passed.
Years since Jeong Pansu, chairman of Eclipse—the world-class big-tech and munitions conglomerate with countless affiliates—had died.
Years since the boy Dang Hui-yeom, rightful heir of the Sichuan Dang Family, had been born and begun dreaming of his previous life.
At last Hui-yeom recovered every memory of the man he had once been: Jeong Pansu.
"…So I reincarnated into a wuxia world, huh?"
Hui-yeom stared down at his tiny hands.
Everything suddenly made sense—why he had been called a prodigy since early childhood, why knowledge no one else possessed kept surfacing in his dreams.
"Ugh. Why did all those miserable memories have to come back…"
He shook his head and looked up at the plaque hanging over the hall.
Sichuan Dang Family.
Whether he had once been the CEO of Eclipse or Jeong Pansu, he was now Dang Hui-yeom of the Sichuan Dang Family.
And the moment that fact settled in, the seven-year-old child vanished. In his place stood the gaze of conglomerate chairman Jeong Pansu, coolly appraising his own clan.
Come to think of it, our family was a complete mess, wasn't it?
The clan into which Hui-yeom had been born as the legitimate heir had, for generations, been one of the Nine Great Noble Families of the Central Plains.
Now its fortunes had declined so far that it teetered on the brink of expulsion from those Nine. Some already sneered and called it "Dang-ga-ta"—not even a proper noble house, just another village of the Dang surname.
"A family on the verge of collapse…"
Hui-yeom suddenly remembered Eclipse from his previous life.
Clan and company.
Business ties and blood ties.
They were wildly different—yet both were slowly sinking. A strange kinship stirred in him.
And so the veteran CEO who had spent a lifetime managing, dismantling, and analyzing corporations began, almost automatically, to dissect the Sichuan Dang Family.
The root cause of the Sichuan Dang Family's decline is the extinction of the Hidden Weapon School.
Everyone knew the family's glory had been built on hidden weapons and poisons.
But decades earlier a bloodbath had wiped out most of their secret manufacturing techniques and the art of throwing them. The greatest loss of all had been the Dobansamyang-gwiwon-shingong, the internal energy method passed only through the direct line.
In their desperation to restore the lost techniques and martial arts, they had poured every last resource into the effort—and that was what had driven them into decline.
They're already short on capital, yet they're going into debt just to throw money at reviving dead techniques. Of course they're going under.
But the Sichuan Dang Family is still a martial house. They need some form of force.
So what if I fill that gap with the future technology I know?
What rose in Hui-yeom's mind at that moment was gunpowder.
"Now that I think about it… this place doesn't even have gunpowder."
This strange world possessed real martial arts, so its history diverged from the Earth he remembered.
The broad strokes were similar, yet there was no Ming Dynasty—instead a nation called Jing. And black powder, which should have existed long before the Song, still hadn't been invented.
Because martial arts exist, the drive for technological progress is weaker?
Cranes had been invented so people could lift what human strength could not. Cars so they could move faster. Here, a martial artist trained in internal energy served as the crane, and one who had mastered lightness skill outran any horse.
Gunpowder was the same.
With martial arts you could shatter boulders and slaughter hundreds without it, so no one had ever felt the need to research and develop it.
No gunpowder? Then if I create black powder—no, smokeless powder—and build firearms and cannons to arm the people of the Sichuan Dang Family…
First-rate masters? Pour enough bullets into them from a distance and they won't stand a chance.
Diamond-body invulnerability? Hit them with something on the level of a bazooka that can tear open a tank and it's over in one shot.
Lost hidden-weapon arts? Lost supreme internal energy methods? But what if they're armed with modern firearms?
Guns and grenades that would be terrifying even in ordinary hands…
What if the Dang clansmen used them as "hidden weapons"?
"…It works."
The instincts of the conglomerate chairman who had launched countless successful ventures, cut the failures, and raised Eclipse to the top of the world were screaming.
"This will work!"
Moreover, the civilization and legal system of this era resembled the Ming Dynasty.
No annoying fair-trade or antitrust laws. And like the guanxi-minded Chinese, most problems could be smoothed over with the right connections.
Executives who just ride coattails and then try to seize control?
None.
Shareholders who can't see past the next stock price and panic at every dip?
None.
A press that screams about everything and activist funds that try to take a bite out of every deal?
This world had none of that.
No Fair Trade Act, no Labor Standards Act, no Unfair Related-Party Transaction Act, no Securities and Exchange Act, no Financial Supervisory Service, no disclosure regulations for the stock market… All the laws that hobble a businessman don't exist? What is this place? Heaven?
And the moment he realized it, a profound enlightenment bloomed in Hui-yeom's mind.
Family management—true family management—was the path to real happiness.
Hui-yeom wrote "Family Salvation Project" across a sheet of paper, then at the very top listed "Guns" and "Explosives."
"To make these, gunpowder is important, but steelmaking technology is essential too."
Directly beneath "Artillery" he wrote "High-quality steel," and under that "Metallurgy."
"And mass-producing firearms and cannons ultimately takes money… Hmm. Maybe sell the steel? Or use the nitric acid and nitrates lying around in the Dang Family's Poison Hall to make nitrate fertilizer?"
He added "Money" and "Chemical fertilizer" to the list, then folded his arms.
"Whatever I do, first I need the support of the adults who can give me real authority."
No matter how much of a second-life genius he appeared to be, he was still a seven-year-old brat.
A child couldn't run research, development, and factory construction alone. He would need adult help, direct or indirect.
And no adult was going to take a seven-year-old's business talk seriously without some solid results to back it up.
Ah. Right. The family's management structure is a disaster too.
In their obsession with recovering the lost Hidden Weapon School and martial arts, the direct line had bankrupted itself. Collateral branches that had stepped in to fund them had wormed deep into the Sichuan Dang Family.
The result was a bizarre structure: the direct line remained the nominal core, yet nothing could be done without the collateral branches' money.
"So in the end it's a money problem… How do I put together a decent track record…"
He rubbed his chin for a long while. Then an idea struck like lightning.
"That's it."
Hui-yeom shot to his feet and went to find his father—Dang Un-sang, current Family Head of the Sichuan Dang Family.
As always, Dang Un-sang sat frowning over documents.
Eight years already since he had taken the seat of Family Head, and still the clan's fortunes only continued to sink. Anxiety gnawed at him.
Developing new hidden weapons, refining new poisons, restoring lost techniques—every one of them was a monumental undertaking that devoured mountains of wealth.
Worse, word had begun to spread that the Sichuan Dang Family's martial strength was no longer what it once was. Unorthodox thugs who once would never have dared breathe near them now quietly provoked the house.
Punishing them required still more poison, and poison was an expensive commodity.
Restoration work crawled forward with no real progress. The purse grew thinner by the day, and the household showed no sign of improvement.
Even the movements of the Elder Council—now dominated by the collateral branches—had grown unsettling.
"Isn't there some good solution… any good solution…"
Just then the steward announced that his son had come. Dang Un-sang set the papers aside and smiled.
"A short rest would be good."
He and his wife had worried for two full years after their marriage before a child finally came. How could he not dote on his firstborn son, Dang Hui-yeom?
Moreover, the boy had shown extraordinary talent from infancy.
Most children only began expressing themselves at three or four and could converse freely at five.
Hui-yeom, at three, had already been articulating his opinions clearly despite a childish lisp. By four he had finished the Thousand Character Classic. By five he had nearly mastered the Four Books and Three Classics.
Lately he had moved beyond the Seven Military Classics and was already dipping into the Doctrine of the Mean and the Great Learning. How could a father not pin high hopes on such a son?
And now that precious firstborn had walked into his study of his own accord for the very first time. How could he not be delighted?
"Father, this son Hui-yeom has something he wishes to discuss with you, and so I have come."
At the unchildlike formality, Dang Un-sang's smile grew warmer.
"Very well, Yeom. What is it?"
But the next words from Hui-yeom wiped the smile clean from his face.
"I would like to propose the manufacture of an all-purpose salve—Manneunggo—that can be used in a great many ways."
It was an absurdly bold, outlandish suggestion.