The Chaebol Life Begins
Blink, blink. After blinking several times to clear my hazy vision, the objects in the room came into sharp focus one by one. First, the king-size bed I was lying on, then the clothes scattered across the floor beneath it. The rumpled garments—nothing like a cheap five-thousand-won T-shirt—each bore a luxury brand logo. Even without checking the tags, I knew each piece cost anywhere from tens to hundreds of millions of won.
Looking farther, I spotted stacks of law textbooks still wrapped in plastic, piled high as if someone had bought them on a whim and promptly forgotten about them. Beside them stood a massive desk large enough for a board meeting, topped with a gaming PC and a thirty-inch curved monitor. If my memory served, this was the penthouse right next to the law school where Kwon Ho-gyun had lived five years ago—not some rooftop studio, but the real thing: an entire floor created by knocking down walls, the kind only the ultra-wealthy could afford.
I remembered this place because I had visited it several times while attending law school. Back then, my job had been to handle Kwon Ho-gyun’s assignments, but I couldn’t do the presentation projects for him. I couldn’t exactly stand in front of classmates and professors using his name. Even though I tried to avoid classes with presentations, it hadn’t been possible throughout the three years of law school. So I had occasionally stopped by this penthouse to deliver my prepared materials and make sure he understood the content.
What I really wanted to know was why I, who had died, had woken up here again.
With my mind clear, I reached for my phone out of habit, the way I always did upon waking. My hand fumbled across the pillow and underneath it, but found nothing. Turning my head, I spotted a phone resting on the small table beside the bed. It wasn’t mine. It was the model Kwon Ho-gyun had carried five years ago.
Touching someone else’s phone felt wrong, but it was obvious that the device held the most clues about my current situation. After confirming no one else was around, I snatched it up.
Huh?
Before I could even turn it on, something strange reflected on the dark screen. Since I was holding the phone and looking at it, the reflection had to be my face. But the face staring back wasn’t Kang Min-chan’s. It was Kwon Ho-gyun’s.
Good grief. Had I been so resentful about being murdered by Kwon Ho-gyun that I’d ended up in the afterlife wearing his face?
Pressing the home button brought up the lock screen. It offered both pattern and fingerprint options. I had no way of knowing Kwon Ho-gyun’s pattern. Still, I pressed my thumb against the fingerprint sensor, thinking it probably wouldn’t work.
What?
The phone unlocked.
What on earth…?
If the face and fingerprint matched, didn’t that mean it was the same person? Half in disbelief, I quickly checked the calendar app. The date confirmed it: five years before the day I had died.
Putting together everything I had learned since waking, only one conclusion made sense.
Kang Min-chan had traveled five years into the past and become Kwon Ho-gyun.
It was far too vivid to be a dream, and the smartphone—the pinnacle of modern civilization—worked far too well for this to be the afterlife. Unable to process what was happening, I set the phone down and stared blankly for a long time.
Hours must have passed in that dazed state. After using the bathroom and grabbing water from the fridge, my body seemed to accept its new identity before my mind did. Feeling a slight hunger, I unwrapped one of the expensive chocolates sitting beside the computer and ate it. After a loud burp, I finally felt certain this body was mine.
As I gradually embraced my new identity, the words I had screamed right before dying in my previous life came rushing back.
Life is determined by who you’re born under.
And now, in this new life, I had been born under none other than Kwon Byung-do, chairman of the QS Group. The realization hit me like a jackpot. This wasn’t the old Kang Min-chan who had studied himself ragged only to be treated like dirt and forced to clean up after others. I was now the third son of the QS Group’s chaebol family, a new person carrying both Kang Min-chan’s knowledge and his ambition.
It had taken a moment to admit, but honestly, Kwon Ho-gyun was better-looking than Kang Min-chan. The perfect fusion of both men’s strengths. At this point, dying once didn’t seem so bad. As a bonus, I had become twenty-eight again, five years younger.
Wait. There was one thing that bothered me. If I had become Kwon Ho-gyun, what had happened to the Kang Min-chan of five years ago?
I picked up the phone again and searched the contacts and call logs for Kang Min-chan. There was no trace of him anywhere.
Thirty minutes later, I returned to the penthouse and collapsed onto the bed. I had just come back from the law school administrative office. The reason was obvious: to check the academic records of Kang Min-chan, Kwon Ho-gyun’s classmate. The visit had been a complete failure. There was no student named Kang Min-chan at the law school I attended. Both the phone and the academic records showed that Kang Min-chan had been erased from existence.
After that, I tried several more ways to find him. I attempted real-name verification using his name and resident registration number. I messaged Kwon Ho-gyun’s law school contacts asking if they knew anyone named Kang Min-chan. I even called the QS Group secretary’s office and casually inquired about the classmate who used to handle Kwon Ho-gyun’s assignments. Every attempt came up empty. Kang Min-chan existed neither in the system nor in anyone’s memory.
After another blank spell, I realized this wasn’t necessarily a bad thing. In fact, if the Kang Min-chan from five years ago suddenly appeared in front of me, it would only cause complications. As long as I remembered my past self, it was better that Kang Min-chan didn’t exist in this new life.
I made my decision. Since things had turned out this way, I would live as Kwon Ho-gyun, the third son of a chaebol family. Using that position, I would bring everyone else to their knees and devour this world. I would settle the grievances of Kang Min-chan, who had studied so hard only to be forced into menial tasks and ultimately discarded. Of course, the first step was taking control of the QS Group. From a chaebol heir’s errand boy to chairman of the group itself. Just imagining it already felt exhilarating.
* * *
After that, I attended law school classes while beginning the work of building a new life as Kwon Ho-gyun. On the outside I looked like Kwon Ho-gyun, but inside I was still Kang Min-chan. The experience of cleaning up after Kwon Ho-gyun in my previous life proved useful. I already knew all the dirty details about him, whether I wanted to or not. Still, that alone wasn’t enough. I needed to make sure no one could doubt that I was truly the third son of the QS Group.
The phone that had been lying beside me when I woke up turned out to be incredibly useful. I analyzed every message, call log, contact list, and social media account stored inside it—who I needed to act friendly with, what titles to use for whom, and so on. I also memorized faces from the profile pictures in the messenger app’s friend list.
While analyzing Kwon Ho-gyun’s social connections, I performed another important task: changing the passwords on all of his online accounts. In this country, a phone functions like an ID card on the internet. There’s even a service that shows every site you’re registered on with just a phone verification. Thanks to that, I was able to claim every one of Kwon Ho-gyun’s accounts without going through complicated procedures.
Now, the long-awaited moment had finally arrived. What I needed to do next was understand the full details of Kwon Ho-gyun’s assets. I had a trump card prepared for this: the wallet recovered from the accident scene, now in my possession, and the OTP card inside it that served as a substitute for a public certificate. With this, I could not only view Kwon Ho-gyun’s bank accounts but also dispose of the assets however I pleased.
Tap, tap. After typing away at the keyboard for a while, I compiled a list of assets. For a chaebol heir, Kwon Ho-gyun seemed to have made surprisingly few investments. When I casually asked why, the answer was that money would never run out anyway. Because of that, his asset structure was simpler than expected.
— QS Group affiliate stocks, apparently gifted by Chairman Kwon Byung-do, currently valued at approximately 8.15 billion won.
— Roughly 1.07 billion won in cash sitting in bank accounts.
— The penthouse I was currently in, valued at around 2.7 billion won.
— Three supercars registered under Kwon Ho-gyun’s name in the building’s parking garage, worth about 730 million won used.
That alone already exceeded ten billion won. I had also heard there was a villa whose exact market value hadn’t been confirmed yet. It might have seemed like pocket change to a chaebol heir, but it explained why the old Ho-gyun had spent money so freely without a care. Of course, things would be different from now on. These assets would soon become my precious seed money for the succession battle within the QS Group.
Then a thought struck me. Ten billion won might be enough to spend lavishly, but it seemed far too little for restructuring a conglomerate’s ownership. I felt a twinge of regret that Kwon Ho-gyun hadn’t been greedier like other chaebol children, but there was nothing I could do about that now. Instead, I had a new weapon. Since I had returned five years into the past, I knew which stocks would skyrocket in the future. Even as Kang Min-chan, I hadn’t been heavily into stocks, but I had always kept up with the news and heard about companies hitting new highs. I invested the cash I held into companies whose stock prices were about to surge. Since I didn’t need three supercars, I decided to sell two of them and use the proceeds to grow my seed money.
* * *
While carrying out the first steps of living as Kwon Ho-gyun, I soon discovered that the gift I had received wasn’t limited to this body alone. Five years ago, Kwon Ho-gyun and Kang Min-chan hadn’t yet graduated from law school, so I was still attending classes. As it was the final semester of the final year, there were countless exams—from end-of-term evaluations to mock bar exams. Of course, to someone who had ranked second nationwide on the bar exam and worked as a prosecutor, they all seemed like child’s play. But then something happened that made even those exam questions look easy.