The Chairman's Secret Safe (2)
The moment I saw the contents, a storm raged through my mind. Judging by the terms of the contract Kwon Yanghwa had made, the beggar boy could only have been the reincarnated Pyongyang Shaman. Thanks to the shaman's cursed fate, he must have lived a wretched life begging from childhood. Since his ability to see the future had not yet manifested, unlike the previous shaman, he could not have opened a fortune-telling shop. And according to that contract, he had possessed Kwon Seong-wook, one of Kwon Yanghwa's children and the future chairman. The contract did not end with a single generation. The documents in the safe, which could now be called Kwon Seong-wook's memoir, stated that reincarnation and possession repeated with each generation. In short, Kang Min-chan, who had grown up in poverty without knowing his parents, was also a reincarnation of the Pyongyang Shaman.
To put it even more simply: I was the Pyongyang Shaman, Chairman Kwon Seong-wook had been the Pyongyang Shaman, and Chairman Kwon Byung-do in between was the same person. Now it made perfect sense why Chairman Kwon Byung-do had given me the authority to seize control of the QS Group. He and I were the same person, and he had already guessed that I could somehow see the future. Even setting aside personal feelings, he must have been certain that I was the one best suited to lead the group.
* * *
Up to this point, the documents in the safe were mostly Kwon Seong-wook's reconstruction of what he had heard from his father, Kwon Yanghwa. From here on, however, they shifted into Kwon Seong-wook's own perspective, more like a personal memoir or recollection. Interestingly, the pages seemed to have been added gradually over time. Each time I turned a page, the paper grew slightly brighter, the proportion of Chinese characters decreased, and the vocabulary and grammar gradually approached modern usage.
The contents revealed that the beggar boy, who had grown up homeless, was most obsessed with the price of houses and land. Even after he grew older and began working as a laborer, he always asked the villagers the same questions: how much it would cost to buy the house they were eating in, or how much a plot of farmland was worth. That obsession did not change even after he entered Kwon Seong-wook's body. Because of it, the inherited ability to see the future manifested in that direction. After the possession, whenever he looked at a house or plot of land, its future price would appear right before his eyes.
This explained why my own ability to see the future had manifested in the form of court verdicts. If the beggar boy had longed for a home, then Kang Min-chan, as a prosecutor and lawyer, had been deeply interested in the outcomes of legal cases. At the time, real estate was the primary source of wealth for any individual or family. With this powerful ability, Kwon Seong-wook took the cash his father had accumulated through rice speculation and traveled around inspecting nearby land prices. Thanks to his gift, he was able to make substantial profits even through short-term trades, something considered nearly impossible in real estate investment.
Even so, real estate transactions were not as active as they are today, and Kwon Seong-wook grew frustrated with how slowly his wealth grew. Just as there were blurry sections in the verdicts I saw, not every land price Kwon Seong-wook saw was 100 percent accurate. Prices in the near future were easier to predict, and the more he knew about a plot's history, the clearer the price became. Kwon Seong-wook devoted himself to studying real estate prices while trying to see further into the future, searching for a way to earn a massive sum all at once rather than scraping together small profits through short-term deals.
Then something extraordinary happened. After years of effort, the land prices he saw grew ever more distant until, at a certain point, they vanished completely. It was not that they became blurry; the prices simply disappeared. Since he could still see near-future prices, his ability had not vanished. Kwon Seong-wook pondered what could possibly happen in the distant future and gradually expanded his search northward. Yet the result was the same. Even when he reached the Hamgyong region near the Chinese border from Pyongyang, the phenomenon of future land prices vanishing continued.
I couldn't help but chuckle. Knowing modern history, the cause was obvious to me. After liberation from Japanese colonial rule, the Workers' Party regime north of the 38th parallel had banned private ownership of all land. With no private transactions possible, land prices naturally ceased to exist. Of course, that was my perspective from the present. At the time, Kwon Seong-wook must have been deeply despairing. The documents noted that he had considered going further north but ultimately gave up. Japan was invading China through the Korean Peninsula, establishing Manchukuo and waging the Sino-Japanese War; traveling north would have been risking his life. Instead, he turned southward to safer regions, where he encountered another ominous sign.
In the south, he could see prices that remained normal for longer than in the north. But at a certain point, the prices abruptly dropped to zero. From a modern viewpoint, this was clearly due to the Korean War. In the chaos of war, normal transactions on bombed-out land were impossible. He could not invest in land whose price would one day become zero. Despite possessing such a powerful ability, Kwon Seong-wook found himself caught in the turmoil of modern Korean history and fell into despair. He continued traveling farther and farther south until he finally reached the southeastern tip of the peninsula, where the sea came into view. There, at last, he found land whose price neither vanished nor dropped to zero. It was Busan and its surrounding areas, which had held the Nakdong River defensive line against the Chinese forces during the Korean War.
Kwon Seong-wook felt relieved that he would not need to cross over to the land of Wa. He immediately liquidated all his assets in Pyongyang and moved to Busan, where he bought up every piece of land he could afford. The greatest windfall came from the enemy-owned properties left behind by the Japanese after colonial rule ended, which he acquired almost for free. The real estate he purchased soared in value after the Korean War, and the profits became the foundation for what would become Kwon Seong Industries. Kwon Seong-wook later expanded his operations to Seoul, amassing even greater wealth through real estate, and eventually turned his attention overseas to Tokyo and New York, where he earned enormous sums. During the IMF crisis, when major corporations were collapsing one after another, there were rumors that the QS Group had an endless supply of mysterious funds keeping it afloat. That money had likely come from these investments.
This was the story of Kwon Ho-gyun's great-grandfather, grandfather, and the zeroth and first generations of the Pyongyang Shaman. The QS Group they built had passed through the second shaman, Chairman Kwon Byung-do, and was now about to pass to me, the third.
Thud.
I had nearly finished reading Kwon Seong-wook's memoir when a single loose sheet slipped out from between the cover and the final page. There were no holes along the right edge, suggesting it had not fallen out but had been placed there separately from the beginning. The paper looked extremely old, its color darkened to a deep yellow, and it contained more Chinese characters than Hangul. I took out my phone again and searched as I deciphered the text. It was the document left behind when the Pyongyang Shaman made the contract with Kwon Yanghwa. Though crude, it was written in the stiff tone of a formal contract, detailing the same terms mentioned earlier: the shaman would reincarnate and possess one of Kwon Yanghwa's descendants, and in return, that descendant would gain the ability to see the future.
That much I had already understood from the memoir. What caught my interest was what followed. The shaman had listed the names he would bear across his reincarnations:
- 1st: Gaetong-i (Dog Dung)
- 2nd: Park Je-sik
- 3rd: Kang Min-chan
So Park Je-sik must have been the name Kwon Byung-do bore in his previous, wretched life before possessing his current body. Below that was a set of precautions left for his future selves. Translated into modern language, they read roughly as follows:
- Until the possession occurs and the future-sight ability fully awakens, minimize interference in the reincarnated life's affairs.
- The future-sight ability must awaken on its own; external interference may delay it indefinitely or prevent it from manifesting in that lifetime.
- However, since those destined for such cursed fates are involved, provide secret assistance to ensure they do not starve to death before the possession takes place.
With this, the puzzle pieces that had been floating around finally clicked into place. Chairman Kwon Byung-do had ordered Secretary Han Seung-woo to find someone named Kang Min-chan because he had been worried I might starve. Once I was found, he had provided financial support under the pretext of having me complete Kwon Ho-gyun's assignments while I attended law school. This next part was speculation, but during my university years after leaving the orphanage, my part-time jobs had never been cut off. I had worked for a long time at a convenience store affiliated with QS Retail. That, too, might have been Chairman Kwon Byung-do's consideration. At the same time, he had withheld this memoir until now, when my ability to see verdicts had clearly manifested, out of fear that external interference might prevent the ability from awakening.
The only remaining question was why the final page listed no names beyond the fourth shaman. Could it be that the cycle of reincarnation and possession would end with me? This was a question better asked of someone who had known the truth far longer than I had and had pondered it deeply. According to the neurosurgeon who performed the operation, Chairman Kwon Byung-do had a high chance of recovery. Once he was moved from the ICU to a regular ward, we would have much to discuss, including this question. As the second and third shamans, or as Park Je-sik and Kang Min-chan.
Come to think of it, I was also curious about how Chairman Kwon Byung-do saw the future. Chairman Kwon Seong-wook had seen land prices, and I saw court verdicts. What did Chairman Kwon Byung-do see? I removed the remaining items from the safe that would make for good conversation topics with him, then sealed the memoir back inside, breathing in its rich scent of aged paper once more.