The Chaebol Chairman’s Illegitimate Son
“......?”
Lee Tae-seop’s eyes had been clenched shut, but now his expression twisted hard. It was because of what Kang-to had blurted out after that.
If you want, I could buy this whole island.
I’m powerful enough to do that.
Do you know how much this yacht costs?
We could buy half the island just by selling this one.
It was Kang-to’s spirit seizure. He tilted his head at an unnatural angle and relayed the oracle.
Are you a college student from That-Freaking-Backwater University?
Do you think you’ll even get a job after graduating from some dump like that?
Come find me when you graduate. I’ll make you a job.
“......?”
Lee Tae-seop froze.
What Kang-to’s seizure had just spilled out gave him a dizzying sense of déjà vu. Shockingly, it sounded exactly like the voice Lee Tae-seop had used when he was younger.
Keep your promise.
Even that final line had not been Kang-to’s. The instant he heard it, Lee Tae-seop’s memory snapped into place with terrible clarity.
More than thirty years ago, on a yacht somewhere off the West Sea, on a night when starlight poured down like a shower of sparks. That night, when he seduced a young female college student from the island and brought her aboard. That naive country girl, whom he had taken into his arms so easily. The memory burst forth, vivid and merciless.
-What’s your name?
-Park Chang-hae.
-Chang-hae? That’s unusual. Ever been on a yacht?
That was how Lee Tae-seop’s pursuit had begun.
The young college girl was as pure as the rugosa roses blooming on the island.
No way...
As Lee Tae-seop’s mind went white,
“Ohhh...”
Kang-to let out a twisted groan of spirit possession and toppled backward.
Bad luck chose the cabinet beside him. A vase on top of it came crashing down with a thunderous racket.
Crash.
“Chairman?”
The female employee who came in after opening the door was utterly flustered. There was Lee Tae-seop, flushed and trembling violently, and in front of him... a young visitor who had collapsed foam-flecked like someone in the throes of a mental breakdown...
“What’s going on?”
Another person had arrived as well: Lee Tae-seop’s son, Lee Hyung-wook, who served as head of the Strategic Planning Division.
“Shh.”
“......?”
“Quietly... move him to the hospital where Dr. Min is. Don’t make a scene.”
Lee Tae-seop’s lips were trying to clean up the disaster, but they were still twitching.
Clink-clink.
The Chilseokgu rang.
Clink-clink.
It sounded heavy and dull.
The Chilseokgu were seven bells carved from stone. Bells are made hollow inside and fitted with beads so they can ring when shaken. These Chilseokgu had no beads. That was why they should not have made a sound. But Kang-to was the exception. And today, that exception was especially fierce.
Clink-clink.
Following the sound, the Big Dipper came falling down. One by one, they dropped into Kang-to’s eyes. With each star that fell, a white butterfly burst into being. Following the butterflies, his mother’s shamanic dance spread open before him. Today she wore a white jeogori and a white hat. Through the thin silk and her delicate fingertips, Lady Gyeongsin descended. She was the foremost of all guardian generals, so riding the shamans’ descent, she extended a hand to Kang-to.
“......?”
Kang-to’s eyes flew open. But the hand before him belonged not to Lady Gyeongsin. It belonged to a doctor.
“Can you see this?”
The hand waved before him. Over the doctor’s shoulder, Lee Tae-seop came into view, standing with someone who looked like a lawyer at his side while reviewing documents. The hand checking those papers was trembling too.
“He’s come to.”
After confirming Kang-to’s pupils, the doctor stepped back. The chief secretary, Yoon Seok-ju, followed him out as well.
“You’re Lee Kang-to?”
Lee Tae-seop called Kang-to by name.
“Am I... in a hospital?”
“Yes.”
“How long was I out?”
“It’s your sixth day.”
“......”
Kang-to pressed a hand to his forehead. When a spirit seizure took hold, it often lasted two days at most. Six days was a record among records.
“Park Chang-hae’s son?”
“......”
“Park Chang-hae is dead?”
“......”
“Explain yourself.”
When Lee Tae-seop turned around, the lawyer supplied the explanation.
“This is the contract for Chiluijae on Chilui Island. Since the balance has already been paid, all that remains is the transfer of ownership registration.”
“......”
“Please sign here. This is a pledge stating that, regarding this matter, you will not provide any interviews or articles to the press or to the internet.”
A white sheet of paper was placed before him. As it was laid down, another document behind it came briefly into view.
[K-Genetic Analysis Center]
[Paternity Test (For Personal Verification)]
[Over 99.9%...]
Kang-to’s hand, poised to sign, stopped.
His gaze shifted to Lee Tae-seop.
“Sign it.”
The lawyer’s quiet urging. Lee Tae-seop’s tense silence. Kang-to’s voice broke through it.
“I’ll ask just one thing.”
“......?”
“Are you... my father?”
“......!”
Kang-to’s question sent ripples through the room again. Lee Tae-seop’s facial muscles twitched beyond control, and the lawyer had to step in to handle the fallout.
“Lee Kang-to only needs to sign here.”
“Move.”
Kang-to shoved the lawyer aside.
“I asked whether you’re my father.”
“......”
“Answer me. Otherwise I’ll put this on the internet. I need to know before I decide whether to sign or not. Are you my father?”
As Kang-to’s voice rose, Lee Tae-seop’s expression grew more and more twisted. Kang-to was agitated by instinct. Ever since his mother had shown up with that business card and Rolex watch, something had felt off.
No, that wasn’t it.
This had been an old question all along.
Mom, why don’t I have a dad?
That had been Kang-to’s question as a child, and later, as he grew older:
What kind of man was my father?
Every time, his mother answered with a bright smile like the flutter of a white butterfly’s wings. Kang-to had taken that as “dead,” and after that, the subject became an unspoken taboo.
And yet curiosity about blood ties clung to him no less fiercely than a burning fever.
An old lighthouse keeper and a young Kang-to. In that space between them, what kind of man had the father been who should have filled the empty place?
Sometimes Kang-to imagined he had been a frail poet.
Sometimes he thought maybe he had been a master drummer at a shaman’s rite.
But.
Not once in any of those imaginations had there been a chaebol like Lee Tae-seop. Money or status didn’t matter. Kang-to had always thought his father must have been kind and warm-hearted. A broad, gentle chest that could hold Kang-to’s pain and loneliness. A man with a generous heart, even if he had been poor...
And yet.
The man who seemed, by all appearances, to be his father was armed instead with a temperament from the complete opposite end of the spectrum.
“This.”
He snatched the paternity test from the lawyer’s hands.
“You ran a genetic test without even telling me?”
Kang-to held out the results report.
“Lee Kang-to.”
“Answer me. Otherwise I’ll post this online.”
“Hey, Lee Kang-to.”
“You stay out of it.”
Flushed with anger, Kang-to shoved the lawyer back.
“......”
Lee Tae-seop’s face went red. He was the chairman of Cheonjo Group, one of South Korea’s top ten chaebol conglomerates. In a single sentence, he could make almost anything happen—except this time.
An illegitimate child of a chaebol chairman.
It was the kind of article that would become instant, explosive gossip. The moment it went public, broadcasters and YouTubers would tear into it. The company’s image would take a direct hit. If an organized boycott even started, falling sales would be a foregone conclusion. So this was not the sort of matter that could be settled with one signature, as if signing off on paperwork.
It was while he was weighing that trouble that the hospital room door opened and his son, Lee Hyung-wook, walked in.
“......?”
Even Lee Hyung-wook was surprised. The scene inside the room was that shocking. This time, it was his hand that snatched up the paternity test results from Kang-to. When Lee Tae-seop saw that, a short sigh escaped his lips.
“Father?”
Lee Hyung-wook’s address changed. It was the way he only spoke to his father in private.
“A paternity test?”
“Get out.”
“Father.”
“I said get out.”
Lee Tae-seop’s voice shook the room.
“Fine.”
Taking a breath, Lee Hyung-wook glared at Kang-to and left the room.
Lee Hyung-wook’s arrival had been the result of a careful chain of deductions. It had started in the chairman’s office. An incomprehensible situation had occurred. A country bumpkin whose poverty and grime practically dripped off him—someone entirely out of place among Lee Tae-seop’s visitors. It was shocking enough that such a man had been received there, but what followed was even more shocking. During the days Kang-to had been hospitalized, Lee Tae-seop had checked on him with excessive diligence.
It was all very strange.
While Lee Tae-seop was at the hospital, Lee Hyung-wook had gone into the chairman’s office. As his biological son, there was nothing he couldn’t do. In one of the drawers, he found an old business card, an old Rolex, and a childhood photo of Kang-to’s mother.
July 7, 1997, by the lunar calendar.
Lee Hyung-wook, who had earned his MBA at Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, was not some parachute executive who had bullied his way in through his father’s connections. He had served as a senior manager at Moody’s and at Vanguard, the largest investment firm in the United States, before returning to Korea. It was groundwork for taking over Cheonjo Group, which had passed from grandfather to father and was now headed toward him.
He was smart enough not to ignore the three clues.
The origin of the Rolex was found in an old family photo. His father had worn it until 1997, then changed watches. After that, he traced the lunar date of July 7.
[Business Trip for the Excavation of the West Sea’s Yacht Holy Land - From Jeongok Port to Chilui Island]
The hairs on the back of his neck prickled when he found his father’s business trip record. The indecent imagination snapped into place like a puzzle fitting together. An island suitable for developing a leisure hotel centered on yachts. There, he had met an island woman in her early twenties.
Ugh.
That thing from all those melodramas. Or the one romance-and-mistake that gets endlessly retold in literature. Once all the pieces were compressed together, a single truth was extracted.
Half-sibling.
The likelihood of a third-rate, bottom-of-the-barrel melodrama unfolding was basically one hundred percent.
“Oppa.”
It was around then that his younger sister, Lee Eun-seo, arrived. Lee Eun-seo worked her way through the hotel casino under the group’s umbrella before becoming the general manager of CHJ Entertainment.
“This is insane.”
Lee Eun-seo’s reaction was just as cold.
But.
Inside the hospital room, a different scene was unfolding.
“Lee Kang-to.”
Lee Tae-seop’s gaze was fixed out the window.
“How old are you this year?”
“I’m twenty-eight.”
“Twenty-eight... Your mother became a shaman?”
“......”
“Hah, so the fever was that bad... If it was going to turn out like this, you should have come looking for me.”
That was when Lee Tae-seop muttered it, and for a moment Kang-to’s face seemed to flush hot—then his spirit seizure flared again.
I did come looking.
Two months after you left, I found out I was pregnant.
By the time five months had passed, my belly had started showing, so I went up to Seoul.
Liar.
You weren’t single. You had a wife—and two children besides.
Lee Tae-seop froze. Along with the voice, the image of a young female college student rose up before him. A memory from long ago became as clear as a video that had just been recorded.
It was in front of the headquarters building. The day he was promoted to executive director. His wife had come with the children to offer congratulations. He had come out into the lobby for the evening party.
It was beside the landscaping tree, its branches covered in white snow. A woman stood askew beside it. Back then, she had been someone he hadn’t even glanced at. Tears streamed down her face as she pulled her coat closed to hide the roundness of her belly.
Tap.
At that very moment, Lee Tae-seop’s children burst into happy laughter.
“Ahahaha!”
At a slight distance, the shadows of happiness and sorrow crossed like fate. Two children clung to their father, calling “Dad, Dad,” while Lee Tae-seop kissed his daughter’s cheek with fatherly affection. After that car pulled away, the woman’s legs gave out beneath her.
Then, sensing something subtle, Lee Tae-seop turned back from the driver’s seat. He had no idea that the ambulance racing toward him from the opposite direction was there to take that woman away.
Now you remember, don’t you?
After I collapsed against the landscaping tree, a passing student helped me and took me to the hospital.
After that, I went back to the island. I thought, so this is heavenly punishment. This is the punishment for trusting people too easily.
And then... after I gave birth to Kang-to, I received my shamanic calling.
Do you understand now, Lee Tae-seop?
Kang-to emptied his mother’s voice into the room. He screamed out the final oracle right in Lee Tae-seop’s face.
“Ugh!”
Startled, Lee Tae-seop staggered back a step. Kang-to did not move forward again. He simply crumpled where he stood, one hand still extended.
“Uuu...”
Lee Tae-seop held himself together. What crashed over him next was a wind and wave like a house-sized tsunami.
Illegitimate child.
Even the thought of it was a lethal word.
But this illegitimate child seemed to know everything. Lee Tae-seop had spent his life overcoming countless obstacles, yet this one did not look as if it would be crossed so gently.