The Vault-Keeper's Test
“Is this the place?”
The taxi had stopped at the top of a steep hill in Seongbuk-dong. A high wall, a firmly shut gate — and the nameplate beside them caught my eye.
Kim Seok-jun
No mistake about it. It was exactly as I remembered from the single time I'd followed my father here in my past life. I drew one long, deep breath, then pressed the bell.
Bzzzz—
The mechanical whine of the intercom cut through the stillness.
“Who is it?”
A woman's voice, edged with wariness, came through the speaker.
“Hello there. My name is Kang Seon-woo. Is this Managing Director Kim Seok-jun's residence, by any chance?”
“My husband's name is Kim Seok-jun, yes... May I ask where you're calling from? Do you have an appointment?”
“If you tell Managing Director Kim Seok-jun that Kang Tae-jin's son has come to see him, he'll understand.”
After my answer, a brief silence hung over the line. She was likely confirming things inside.
Clunk.
A moment later came the sound of the gate's locking mechanism releasing. I smoothed down my clothes and pushed through. Passing through a yard lined with neatly kept garden trees, I found the front door of the two-story Western house already open, and a middle-aged woman — evidently the owner of the voice I'd just heard — there to greet me.
“Good afternoon. My name is Kang Seon-woo.”
“Welcome. Go on inside — he's waiting for you in the living room.”
“Thank you.”
The living room I stepped into, following her lead, held a single man. A gray-haired elder gentleman with a back held ramrod straight.
“Well, look who it is. You've grown so much already. It's been a long time since I last saw you as a child.”
Kim Seok-jun.
A loyal retainer who had served my grandfather, the previous chairman, like a shadow — and the man who had gripped the group's lifeline of capital during the financial crisis of the early nineties and pulled Sunjin Group back from the brink. Within the group he'd been called Sunjin's vault-keeper, a legendary hand at planning and strategy. When my father had taken the chairman's seat and tried to keep him on, he'd chosen to step down without hesitation, saying new wine belonged in new bottles.
I bowed respectfully at the waist.
“How do you do, sir. It's been a long time.”
“Well now, do you remember me?”
“Yes, sir. I remember coming here with my father when I was about twelve, and watching you play baduk.”
Kim Seok-jun put on a good-natured smile and gave my shoulder a couple of friendly taps.
“Sharp memory, I see. Chairman Kang — that is, your father — I did visit his funeral hall, but you'd stepped out for a spell, so I never laid eyes on you.”
“Ah... I was, at the time...”
“I heard. Collapsed from the shock, didn't you? Suffering something like that at so young an age — well, of course. Tsk, tsk. Come now, don't just stand there. Sit.”
At Kim Seok-jun's urging, I settled onto the sofa. Shortly after, the housekeeper brought out a glass of sikhye, the sweet rice punch, with shards of ice still floating in it.
“Thank you.”
She smiled at my thanks and withdrew, and Kim Seok-jun raised his glass.
“So. You must hardly have a moment to breathe, with the funeral and all. What brings you to an old man's door so suddenly?”
“You came to the funeral hall, but I never got the chance to greet you in person... so I've come to offer my thanks, even if it's late.”
“Hohoho. Resourceful lad. To think you'd come all this way just to say that. You've really grown up.”
Kim Seok-jun gazed at me with a contented warmth — the kindly eyes of a grandfather doting on a grandson. I set my glass down on the table and carefully broached the real reason for my visit.
“And... there's something I came here to tell you.”
“Something to tell me?”
“My father left words with me while he was alive.”
Working in a theatrical gulp, I went on.
“He said that if anything should ever happen to him, I was to find Managing Director Kim Seok-jun, without fail.”
It was, of course, a lie. My father had respected Managing Director Kim, but he'd always hated burdening a man who had already retired. What I needed now was a justification.
“Chairman Kang Tae-jin... sent you to me?”
“Yes, sir. He said you were the only person who could help me in this situation.”
At that, Kim Seok-jun burst into hearty laughter.
“What help could I possibly offer? I hear Representative Kim Ja-young has already decided to start going into the office tomorrow. The board made that call, didn't it? Under Sunjin Group's articles of incorporation, once the board decides, she can serve as representative straight away, can't she?”
For an instant, the back of my neck went cold. That could only mean my mother had turned down Chairman Kang Tae-yong's proposal today and declared she would take the reins herself. A fact not yet made public — and a man retired for over seven years already knew of it.
Well, well. Look at this old man.
It meant he still had threads reaching into Sunjin Group — its core lines, no less. My judgment had not been wrong. He still held power.
“About my mother... I haven't heard a word yet, either.”
“Is that so? Well, your mother is no ordinary woman — she'll manage just fine. Which means there's no need to go borrowing an old man's hands.”
Kim Seok-jun drew the line with practiced grace. The company's affairs would be my mother's to handle; he was telling me not to drag a retired man back into it.
But I had no intention of retreating.
“It's not Sunjin Group I need help with. I need someone to help me — Kang Seon-woo.”
“...I beg your pardon?”
“I need your help, sir.”
At the firmness of my voice, Kim Seok-jun's expression began, slowly, to change. The kindly neighborhood grandfather who'd been chuckling a moment ago was gone without a trace. In his place remained only a cold gaze that seemed to see straight through me.
“Why should I have to help you?”
“Because I need an elder to guide me.”
“Hahaha. Me? Plainly put, I'm a stranger to you. And haven't you an uncle and several quite capable uncles besides? It's they who will help you. Why should I...”
“They'll see me as nothing more than a child who needs protecting.”
I did not evade Kim Seok-jun's eyes. I met them head-on.
“And am I any different?”
“Aren't you different? That look you gave me just now — you weren't sizing me up as a child. You were evaluating me as something worth measuring.”
At my words, Kim Seok-jun's brows twitched.
“...”
“And my uncle, my other uncles — and further still, my grandfather's own brothers — they are no longer my family. They are my enemies.”
“Huh.”
“By now they're probably racking their brains over how to wrest Sunjin Group away from my mother and me.”
Kim Seok-jun set down his teacup and leaned back in his chair. The corner of his mouth curled upward, faintly, as if intrigued.
“My, my... I do hear all sorts of things out of a high schooler's mouth.”
“I don't intend to let it be taken.”
“So?”
“And I know how to make sure it isn't.”
At my audacity, Kim Seok-jun let out a short, scoffing laugh.
“Hahaha. Pardon me. You were simply so earnest about it. So then — you know how to keep it from being taken?”
“Yes, sir.”
“And how would that be? Go on, let's hear it.”
Kim Seok-jun still took it for the willful prattle of a boy too big for his britches. I steadied my breath, then spoke — slowly, and with perfect clarity.
“We sell the Resort and build up the Sangsa.”
“...What did you say?”
Kim Seok-jun's eyes wavered.
Was I dreaming? A mere high schooler, holding a conversation with me from the same vantage.
Silence hung over the living room. Kim Seok-jun had not moved a muscle in the time it took for the ice in his glass of sikhye to melt away entirely. The voice of the eighteen-year-old boy who had filled this room only moments before still lingered at his ear like a phantom.
“Grow the Sangsa, you say...”
It had been when Kim Seok-jun raised his objection.
“As you know, the era of the general trading company is over. These days the manufacturing subsidiaries handle their own exports. There's no future in living off brokerage commissions.”
“That's true. The Sangsa as a simple offer broker is dead.”
Seon-woo had affirmed Kim Seok-jun's point. But what followed twisted common sense on its head.
“But the Sangsa as a supplier — that has only just begun.”
“A supplier?”
“Sunjin Motors, which my uncle took. Sunjin Heavy Industries and Construction, which my younger uncles took. When they build cars and ships and put up apartment blocks, what is it they absolutely cannot do without?”
“That'd be steel plate, oil, and parts, wouldn't it?”
“Exactly. And that is the leash we must hold.”
Seon-woo's eyes had gleamed, bright and hard.
“Until now, the Sangsa has been treated as a subcontractor — someone who merely sells what other people make. But if we move first to secure overseas mines, oil fields, and steel mills, the story changes.”
“...You're proposing resource development?”
“Not development for its own sake. A monopoly over a chain that generates money. Anyone who wants to build a car, anyone who wants to launch a ship, must find themselves unable to procure so much as a single screw without going through our Sunjin Sangsa.”
Kim Seok-jun's breath had caught in his throat.
“While the manufacturers bleed and claw up front, we sit in the rear, supplying their raw materials and collecting the toll. That is the future of the Sangsa as I see it — and the only bond strong enough to tie Sunjin Group back together as one.”
The pickaxe and the shovel. The old Jewish maxim: it is not the men rushing off to dig the gold mines who end up rich, but the man selling them their pickaxes. And this child had taken that timeworn adage and applied it, perfectly, to the Sunjin Group of 2003.
“Profit isn't the point. Once this structure exists, my uncle and my younger uncles will have no choice but to mind the Sangsa's mood. Because if they try to step outside the markets we monopolize to source their materials, they may end up paying a great deal more for it.”
“Hah...”
Thinking back on the conversation just now, Kim Seok-jun felt gooseflesh rise. A boy of barely eighteen had pinpointed, with precision, the lever that could flip the group's entire power structure. And not the one-dimensional answer, either — buying up shares to defend control of the board.
Seize the leash of the real economy, and render the struggle for management rights irrelevant.
It was a far more ruthless, and far more realistic, strategy. In the moment he had met those eyes, a chill had run down Kim Seok-jun's spine — because of a familiar feeling of déjà vu.
“...He resembles him.”
It had been the late 1980s, when Kim Seok-jun was serving as a director at Daeseong Industries, a rival of Sunjin Sangsa. Sunjin was then staggering under the weight of its octopus-like expansion, and Kim Seok-jun had made a habit of skewering its bloated management in private company.
Then one day it happened. A burly man kicked open the door of the Daeseong Industries office.
It was Chairman Kang Man-ho, founder of Sunjin Group.
“You're Kim Seok-jun, are you?”
As the entire office froze at the sudden arrival of a rival chairman, Kang Man-ho planted himself squarely on top of Kim Seok-jun's desk.
“I hear you've been chewing our company apart over drinks. Go on, then — chew it apart in front of me. Tell me what's wrong with it.”
The young, audacious Kim Seok-jun refused to be cowed by the man's bravado and took him apart point by point. After spending a good long while pouring out his sharpest venom, he expected to pay dearly for it. Instead, Kang Man-ho slapped his knee and roared with laughter.
“Damn right! Not a single word of it wrong!”
“...Chairman?”
“As of today, you write your resignation. And tomorrow morning, you come to my office.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“If you can see the problems, you must know how to fix them. Show up for work with solutions in hand. I'll put the key to my vault in your care — now go on, fix it however you please!”
That sheer nerve — strolling into the heart of enemy territory and poaching the very man who'd been cursing him out. That beast-like instinct — pouring his entire fortune into a venture everyone jeered at as lunacy and then making it succeed, just to watch their faces. That was the kind of man Kang Man-ho had been.
“...”
Kim Seok-jun slowly lifted his head and looked at the empty seat where Seon-woo had been sitting.
“Heh heh. Well, well. So I've been swept up in it all over again.”
It was an energy he had never once felt from Kang Tae-jin, who had always seemed so mild and unassuming. The boy took nothing after his father, Tae-jin — he was carved straight from his grandfather, Man-ho. No. If anything, he was more polished. Sharper, too. If Kang Man-ho had been a sledgehammer, that boy was a finely honed pickaxe.
“Heh heh. Really now.”
A smile spread across his lips — bittersweet, and laced with a strange, unaccountable pleasure. His heart, silent since the day he'd retired, had begun to pound again.
“When you passed, Chairman, I thought Sunjin Group's lifeline had ended with you...”
Kim Seok-jun murmured softly, to a room with no one in it.
“Blood will tell, it seems, Chairman. Perhaps I'll finally be able to hand over what you left in my keeping. And perhaps I can finally set down that heavy burden of mine.”
“Ha...”
The sigh came out on its own — because of the homework Kim Seok-jun had assigned me after our meeting yesterday.
“You said you had no wish to be treated like a child, didn't you? Then prove it — go out and earn money with your own two hands. Whatever you do, if you can bring me a million won within a month, I'll recognize you as an adult.”
I had pitched Kim Seok-jun with the knowledge I carried and the regrets of my previous life — above all, the part about selling the Resort. In my past life, I had come to that realization far too late. As though the Resort were never really mine — as though it were something Seon-ah was meant to have, and so my hands had to stay off it. Thinking that way had tangled every plan of mine into knots, and I had ended up divesting the crown jewels of the business one by one.
The problem is where in the world I earn a million won.
Truthfully, a million won was easy enough to scrape together. But what Kim Seok-jun had said was earn it. I could have found a part-time job on the spot, but...
Is that really what Managing Director Kim wants?
He was a man whose gaze had changed from the moment I'd asked him for help — a man who now looked at me the way one evaluates, the way one looks straight through. Which meant the assignment was really about how I solved it, not whether I did.
I'll have to take a different route.
Not fixating on the million won itself — fixating on the how.
I had been sunk in thought for a long while when —
“...Seon-woo?”
Someone gave my shoulder a careful poke. I turned to find a clean-cut boy standing there, worry written across his face.
“You all right?”
I glanced at the name tag pinned to his chest.
Lee Min-jae
Now I remembered. The class president. We had never been particularly close, but he was responsible to a fault, and he'd often looked out for me — the kid who drifted through school in silence.
“Oh. Yeah, I'm fine.”
“That's a relief. The teacher said you can skip classes for the time being — you should just rest at home.”
“There's not much point in sitting around the house.”
“I suppose not...”
The class president scratched the back of his head, looking a bit awkward, then checked his watch as if to change the subject.
“Club activity period's about to start. You not going? Everyone's already heading over.”
“Club activities?”
Sunjin High School. Perhaps because my grandfather had founded the place, even in 2003 it emphasized a well-rounded education in the manner of the autonomous private high schools that would come later, and club life was thriving.
What club was I in, back then?
I rummaged through my memories, but nothing surfaced. No — there had been nothing to surface in the first place.
“Oh, right. You never joined a club, did you, Seon-woo?”
The class president must have read my expression, because he hurriedly added — and I smiled wryly.
“Yeah. Clubs weren't really... my thing.”
The grandson of the man who had endowed the school's foundation. Third-generation chaebol. That label made the teachers and my classmates alike uneasy around me, and I loathed the stares enough that every activity period, I would bury myself in a corner of the library and sleep. The days when I had walled myself off. But things were different now.
A club, huh...
In my head, a puzzle piece clicked into place.
That's right — this school had someone like that, didn't it?
I slowly curled the corners of my mouth upward. There had been a way all along. They say the darkest place is right under the lamp — what I'd been searching for had been sitting inside this school the whole time. And so had a way to make money.
“Class president.”
“Huh?”
“Where does the stock investment club meet? I'm pretty sure I saw one around here before.”
At my question, the class president's eyes went round. He stared at me as though I'd said something out of the ordinary, then hesitated before answering.
“Um... why do you ask about our club?”
“Our club?”
“I'm in the stock investment club.”
Bingo.
I sprang up from my seat.
“Perfect timing. Let's go.”
“Huh? Where?”
“To club activities.”
I picked up my bag and flashed a wide grin.
“Lead the way, class president.”