A Lord of This Earth
Once I'd let off enough steam, I walked straight out of the house. Before anything else, I ran through what the plans ahead would actually require.
The first place I went was a rental-car company. Whatever I meant to do, doing it in any comfort was going to take a vehicle. I already had a domestic SUV, but work I needed to keep quiet called for something else.
A new car would have been fine on its own. Spending a large sum out in the open, though, was no different from standing on a corner and begging someone to come pick me up. My accounts already held more than enough—tens of billions of won taken off jeonse fraudsters, the deposit-lease scammers, among the rest of it—but I hadn't dragged in high-interest loans to buy those villas for nothing. In this world, money going out and money coming in had to match, front to back and side to side, or suspicion was inevitable. A rental car was just another way of slipping past it.
I made a point of finding a branch run by a major conglomerate. That got me a lot of expensive metal to choose from, and after comparing them I signed for one to start: a Carnival limousine. There were plenty of them on the road among domestic models, so it wouldn't catch the eye, and the rear seat was more comfortable than most genuine luxury cars.
I signed the contract and transferred the deposit. The employee, who had been smiling obligingly the whole time, placed the keys in my hand himself.
"Drive safely, then, sir."
Being able to take the car the moment the papers were signed was another advantage of renting. With that settled, it was time to get moving in earnest.
I drove out to the third-phase new town in the capital region, where an apartment stood in my name, and went around the complex putting the unit on the market. Selling it was one piece of the groundwork for gradually bringing assets home and converting them. The broad shape of the scheme was loan and payback. Borrow first. Repay later. Cash I had piled up without end, so I would put up the bare minimum of my own money, pull the rest in as loans, and swell the asset base fast. Afterward I would quietly wipe the debt clean with the cash I'd been stacking in secret. On paper, the proceeds from the apartment would become the seed capital of my transformation into a man of means.
The next stop was a real estate office in a district lying between that new town and Seoul. A neighborhood I'd had my eye on for a long time. A handful of recent apartment sales had started a faint stir, but the place was still written off as the outer edge of Gyeonggi Province. Even so, watching the way the capital region kept spreading, I was certain the sprawl would have to reach it eventually.
I'd been interested in property for years. I knew that grinding through a whole life as a salaried man was no way to ever see the light, and the moment I stepped out into the world I'd devoured every real estate broadcast and every book I could find. Then I'd gone on site inspections across the country and checked it all with my own eyes. Out of that, I'd come to pride myself on having grown something like an eye for land.
Of course there was no guarantee I was right every time. But even if my eye failed me, then and now were entirely different. Buy wrong once in the old days and I'd have been crushed under debt for the rest of my life, straight down into ruin. A failure of that size was something I could recover from whenever I pleased.
The moment I stepped inside, the owner welcomed me warmly.
"Come in, come in."
"I'm looking at land."
"Land? How much?"
"What's the market doing around here these days?"
"Market? There isn't really one. Still, it's climbed a lot. Used to be three hundred thousand a pyeong, five hundred thousand, somewhere in there. Now the floor is a million to a million and a half. You know how it is. This is a planned subway site..."
"I heard that fell through."
At an answer that made it plain I already knew the score, the owner looked briefly thrown. Every so often you had to let the air out of a man like that. Don't get cute and try to take me for a ride.
"Well, talk like that did go around for a bit. But it'll happen in the end, won't it? Only a question of time. Anyway—how much are you looking to buy?"
"Bigger is better, but it depends on the location. I'd prefer something on the road."
"All right. Let's see what we've got."
Listings began to trickle out one after another, and I compared the terms. The land itself was not the real goal. What I wanted was to raise a building on it with my own hands. I could have bought something already standing, of course, but if I meant to make the most of the cash I was holding, this route was safer. The money for the land would come out of a loan, and the construction funds could be handled by cycling loans and repayments in sequence. Wasn't construction the crowning glory of a slush fund?
Then, in the string of parcels being walked past me, one lodged hard in my eye.
"Right now this is a rice paddy. But look at the location. Eight lanes, right out front. That road runs straight through the middle of the new city here. I don't know if you noticed on the way in, but apartments keep lining up along both sides of it. More are coming. Follow it west and—you know the place, right? Five Star Electronics. Under ten minutes from here. You think they're going to leave a rice paddy sitting in the middle of that? And even before all this, they were saying the subway would come through this way..."
The rest of it slid straight past my ears. My eyes were already fixed on the cadastral map of the parcel he'd just put in front of me. The location was good, and so was the shape. It fronted a major road, and just as the broker said, apartments were coming in on every side—left and right, above and below. A spot practically made to grow into a central commercial district. The only wonder was that a place like this had sat as a paddy all this time.
"Thing is, this one's a little big. Just under a thousand pyeong. Let's see—978."
"How much a pyeong?"
"Hm? This one? They're asking 1.6 million, but if I talk to them right I might get it down to 1.5."
"We'll take this one."
"Hm? This one? You're sure?"
Nine hundred seventy-eight pyeong—a little over three thousand square meters. At a million and a half won each, acquisition tax included, call it 1.5 billion. Already I could see my building standing over that paddy. If the zoning was changed to commercial and nothing more, the floor-area ratio usually ran from eight hundred percent to twelve hundred. Take the land as roughly a thousand pyeong, and that meant a building of eight to twelve thousand pyeong in total floor area. A tower, more than twenty stories. Not one of those dinky little buildings in Gangnam. The owner of a real tower. Master of the landmark of a new city still to come. The thought alone had a grandeur to it.
If the other world had its lords, then this one had its building owners.
The Choongsik Building. No—that was too rustic. CS Tower, maybe.
While I sat there savoring the daydream, the broker was quietly excited himself at landing a real client for the first time in ages.
"Th-then should I actually call them?"
"Yes. Sound them out. Haggle it to something reasonable. If they're of a mind to sell, they'll sell even if you knock the price down. If they're not, they won't sell even if you pay over the asking."
"Ah. Right. Young man, you really know your land. I mean, I saw you pull up in an expensive car, and sure enough the people who actually have money are the smarter ones. Folks like us, with nothing to our names—even when we've got the money, we're too scared to do a thing with it..."
I left the rest of the chatter behind me and walked out of the office.
After leaving the matter with the broker, I drove toward a family court out in the provinces. The divorce suit was already finished. I'd come to meet someone.
In front of the court I stepped into a modern building whose face was crowded with law-office signs.
Noh Seungri
Divorce & Corporate Litigation
The attorney who had handled my divorce. For a name that promised victory, the outcome of the suit had been simply clean. Near the end, when Go Yumi disappeared, the whole thing had nearly snarled—but I'd moved the schedule up at once and finished coordinating with the court beforehand so the findings wouldn't twist out of shape. That was how the divorce had closed out cleanly.
A person who handled one matter cleanly handled the rest the same way. There was no reason to go looking for someone else when I already had a man I could trust.
He had the solid build of a man entering his mid-forties, gold-rimmed glasses, a comfortable look about him. Hearing what I had in mind, he considered it a moment, then asked back.
"Setting up a corporation?"
"Yes. Something along the lines of a Korean branch of an overseas company."
"That isn't difficult in itself, but have you left your job?"
"No. I'm on sick leave at the moment. I'm in psychiatric treatment. I expect to go back sometime next year."
"Ah. Yes. I'm sorry. If you were still with the company as things stand, incorporating could be a problem. Most companies, as I understand it, have a clause forbidding outside business."
"That's right. There's something like that in the company rules."
"And you're still comfortable establishing a corporation?"
"It's in the internal regulations. It isn't in the law."
Attorney Noh nodded.
"Well. That's true enough."
"If I'm caught, I'll take whatever the company rules hand down. I don't imagine you'd be the one to tell them, Counselor."
"I have no reason at all to do that. Well. It's doable. Before that, though, a few things are needed. Who the representative will be, to start with. Where a corporation's registered address will sit. What the business lines will be. There are parts that are awkward for me to settle purely as your proxy."
"I'll find the representative and let you know. The address should sort itself out in time. For the business, make it trading for now. And add construction and real estate to the categories."
"Real estate? Are you thinking along the lines of a leasing business?"
"Yes. I'm planning to put a building up myself. You handled the divorce, so you know how it is. You only live once. I thought I'd try being a building owner."