The Chairman's Secret
"Min-chan."
No matter how long I stared at the A4 sheet, the characters written there refused to change. It wasn't "Ho-gyun," but "Min-chan."
A brief, dazed sensation passed, as if my thoughts had momentarily frozen, and then a memory surfaced—the words Han Seung-woo had once spoken.
It had been after we rescued Han Seung-woo's daughter, Han A-young, from her kidnappers. Over drinks, I had asked whether he knew anything about my erased past, and the sudden mention of Chairman Kwon Byung-do's name had startled me.
I took a deep breath and steadied myself. The fact that Chairman Kwon Byung-do knew this name was not entirely unfamiliar to me. Yet the way my heart had pounded moments ago was because he had addressed me directly by that name.
Since when had he known that I was Kang Min-chan? From the exact moment I entered Kwon Ho-gyun's body and regressed five years into the past? Back then, the existence of Kang Min-chan had been erased from the world except in my own memories, and I had been too disoriented by suddenly becoming the chaebol heir I had always dreamed of.
Still, I vividly remembered the feeling of hitting an invisible wall the first time I met Chairman Kwon Byung-do as Kwon Ho-gyun. He had threatened to strip me of all my shares and erase me from the family register if I failed the bar exam. It was the kind of ruthless declaration he could only make while seeing me strictly as the incompetent Kwon Ho-gyun, not as Kang Min-chan.
Moreover, the bar exam questions he had thrown at me, telling me to memorize them before entering the testing hall, still made me laugh when I thought about them now. Not accepting them on the spot had been my stroke of genius.
After that, I had sensed his attitude toward me shifting, little by little. He tested me at first, but at some point, he began to trust me. I passed the bar exam, founded Law Firm Seungbaek from nothing, and consistently delivered results beyond his expectations in every task he assigned.
Yet there had been one moment when even that was not enough to erase the lingering doubt in his mind—when he appointed me as head of the Central Management Division's audit team. If the division head managed the bright side of the group, the audit team head was responsible for its darker aspects. In a sense, he had entrusted me with half of the group's affairs.
I could not deny that it was from that position I had advanced from a mere lawyer toward the center of the QS Group. Though I could never fully read his thoughts, it must have been around that time he realized I possessed a self that was not Kwon Ho-gyun.
A small smile touched my lips as the first gear in my heart aligned with the man I had once regarded as untouchable as the sky. At the same time, I recalled the flustered figure he had shown today when he returned from the brink of death. Anyone would react that way, yet because it was Chairman Kwon Byung-do, the sense of inner closeness I felt toward him grew stronger.
Simultaneously, I found myself wanting to draw even closer to him—and perhaps to whatever lay beyond. Fortunately, there were still more Morse code messages left to decode.
I exhaled slowly. Even though I was not particularly skilled at Morse code, it had taken far too long to decipher this short message. When I set down my pen and checked the clock, nearly an hour had passed since I returned to the division head's office.
The time had not been consumed by the difficulty of the task itself. If this had been work for someone else, it would have been a trivial five-minute job. Even for my own matters, I would not normally have struggled this much. The shock from the first decoded line—Chairman Kwon Byung-do calling me "Min-chan"—had simply been too great.
I closed my eyes briefly, then opened them and calmed myself before looking down at the letters written beneath the pen on the A4 sheet.
- P W 4 7 3 8 2 3 4 - B O O K R O O M
After all that effort, the result was so short it almost made me laugh. This was the message Chairman Kwon Byung-do had wanted to convey to me—even if it cost him his life—with every ounce of his remaining strength. More precisely, not to Kwon Ho-gyun, but to Kang Min-chan.
I had converted the Morse code into letters and numbers I could read, but further interpretation was clearly required. "PW" likely stood for Password, and the numbers following it were probably the code to enter. "BOOK ROOM" left more room for interpretation. Literally, it meant "book room," but where exactly?
The first place that came to mind was the library on the first basement level of QS Tower. It was roughly the size of a mid-sized bookstore, stocked with so many business-related volumes that it could rival most university libraries. But would Chairman Kwon Byung-do have poured every last bit of his strength into directing me to that library? It did not seem right.
The library was open to any (QS) employee or affiliate staff member who wished to enter. It was far too public a space for a secret conversation between Chairman Kwon Byung-do and me. Though occasionally opened to the general public for events once or twice a year, it was still too exposed.
Moreover, if he had meant the library, he would more naturally have written "LIBRARY" rather than "BOOK ROOM." Even though Chairman Kwon Byung-do belonged to a generation more familiar with Japanese than English, he would have known the English word for library.
Above all, considering the password he had mentioned alongside it, it was clear that the place I needed to go was not the first basement level of this building. No matter how I thought about it, there was no special device there that would require a password.
Perhaps because the tension had not yet faded, the more I tried to continue my reasoning, the deeper I seemed to sink into confusion. Chairman Kwon Byung-do had clearly wanted me to find this location, so the answer could not be something difficult to deduce. Places like the private reading room in the National Assembly Library or the bookstore I visited as a child were all wrong.
I needed to think simply. There was no point in overcomplicating an elementary-school-level arithmetic problem with square roots, logarithms, and calculus. I picked up the pen again and wrote down the clues that might help me deduce the destination beside the decoded Morse code.
- M I N C H A N A H → A place where Chairman Kwon Byung-do and I share a personal connection
- P W → A place with a hidden device that requires a password
- B O O K R O O M → A place with books
As I stared at the memo, my mind suddenly went blank—then one location emerged that all the clues pointed to. The study in the main house.
Chairman Kwon Byung-do had always summoned me there whenever he treated me not as an employee of the QS Group, but as his son. Whether it was when he granted me the enormous privilege of heading the audit team, or during our first drinking session together, I had been in that room.
Furthermore, the study in the main house was a space Chairman Kwon Byung-do used entirely alone, and aside from his office at QS Tower, it was where he spent the most time. As befitting the private quarters of a chaebol chairman, it was quite spacious, making it highly likely to contain a hidden device requiring a password. And while it was too modest to be called a "library" or "Library," it still housed a considerable number of books.
There was no longer any doubt. The place Chairman Kwon Byung-do had told me to go was here.
Once my reasoning was complete, I hurried out of QS Tower and headed straight for the main house. It had been a long time since I last visited; after Chairman Kwon Byung-do collapsed and was hospitalized, our father-son drinking sessions had naturally come to an end.
When I pressed my fingerprint to the front door lock and stepped inside, the house felt eerily quiet, as if no one else ever came here. With all the lights off except for the automatic sensor lights that had activated upon my entry, it felt as though I were stepping into a vast cave.
Even after fumbling along the wall to turn on the living room lights, the desolate atmosphere lingered. The housekeeper came once a month to clean, and the place was spotless, like a model home put up for sale.
Then it struck me—the other source of this hollow feeling. Though I had no particular attachment to this house, there was one thing that felt unmistakably unfamiliar: this was the first time I had come here without Chairman Kwon Byung-do present.
It was not so much the house itself, but the emotional emptiness I felt. Hoping that confirming the message he had wanted to leave me would ease this sensation, I made my way to the study.
Click.
The study door opened with a simple turn of the handle; there was no additional lock. Now that I was here to search for something, every corner of the room I had never paid attention to before came into focus. The large south-facing window designed for natural light, the landscape painting on the wall, the orchid on the table beside the sofa—I took them all in.
Then my gaze settled on the desk Chairman Kwon Byung-do had used. Every time I entered this study, we had only ever spoken on the sofa; I had never given the desk much thought. Yet it was undoubtedly the place where he spent the most time. If he had hidden something deeply personal, it was most likely nearby.
Step by step, I approached the desk, feeling the tension rise once more. As I looked around, something glinted in the corner of the large space beneath the desk—a space large enough for a person to lie down in. I took out my phone and shone the flashlight on it, immediately recognizing what it was.
It was a safe, sturdy enough to survive being dropped from the top of QS Tower, fixed to both the desk and the floor so it could not be removed. And just as my reasoning had predicted, a keypad for entering a password was attached to it.
Now that I had come this far, there was no reason to hesitate. I pulled up the photo of the decoded Morse code on my phone screen and entered the numbers written beside "PW" without pause.
Click.
The moment I pressed the final "4," the keypad flashed, and a heavy sound echoed from within the safe as the locking mechanism disengaged.