Suddenly, a Meeting with the Parents (1)
Suddenly, a Meeting with the Parents (1)
After obtaining permission from the Chairwoman to leave the academy,
Yujin and Sia took the luxury sedan driven by her secretary to the Cheonhwa Clan headquarters.
While exchanging messages with her father, Sia suddenly looked confused.
[Dad, I am coming to see you with Yujin.]
[Sia? Do not tell me you actually recruited him.]
[I do not know either;;]
'What in the world was happening?'
She had anticipated Yujin rejecting her advances. That much made sense.
Honestly, she had expected nothing else.
Would an upright young man like him really succumb merely because she tried to tempt him?
He'd blush, become thoroughly flustered, and leave it at that.
She'd planned to exploit that opening and bombard him with recruitment offers,
then drag him to Cheonhwa and make him stamp the contract before he recovered his senses...
[Do not strike seductive poses in front of men. Do that only for a man you have feelings for.]
'What? Why had he given me that kind of command?'
Ever since Yujin had rested a hand on her shoulder and hypnotized her, her thoughts had wandered without finding any direction.
Why had he puffed out his cheeks as though sulking?
He'd looked almost jealous.
And what had he said? That someone might mistake it for seduction? That even he had nearly misunderstood?
So she should save it for a man she had feelings for?
And finally...
What? He wanted to meet her father?
And a boy had suggested it himself?
'C-Could he actually like me? Was that it!?'
It was a woman's intuition leaping over several steps in the staircase of logic.
Sia displayed insight on an entirely different level from a self-proclaimed Second-Round Hypnosis Breeding Guy.
It was social awareness cultivated through countless romance-fantasy novels.
'No, that could not be... O-of course, I wasn't exactly small, but he had that vixen and that inverted-nipple woman around him. So many beautiful women with huge breasts...'
Her inferiority complex put the brakes on that intuition.
For the past week, whether she realized it or not, she'd constantly found herself being compared to them.
Feeling unfairly inadequate, she'd even built up that complex by secretly searching phrases like 'average Korean female breast size' and 'average female breast size worldwide.'
As for her face, she honestly didn't think she was unattractive.
If anything, Sia knew she was pretty. But...
the women surrounding Yujin were simply too dazzling.
There was Alice, the Western beauty men supposedly adored, and Aika, whose proportions were devastating in every sense.
With women like that crowding around him, could he truly have fallen for her?
Thoughts like these kept Sia from accepting the correct answer as correct.
'Leaving that aside, why was I...?'
There was another reason her thoughts were tangled.
Yujin's earlier hypnosis had ordered her not to strike seductive poses.
———But hadn't he added that she could do so for someone she had feelings for?
[Y-Yujin. Look at me...]
'I had considered that a fairly sexy pose. Why had the hypnosis allowed it?'
She'd tried the pose as an experiment to see whether the hypnosis had truly taken effect.
In her mind, the slight sway of her hips had been nearly worthy of an adult-magazine cover.
Yet she had been able to perform it before Yujin without the slightest hesitation.
Sia could only be confused.
She wondered whether that meant she had feelings for Yujin.
'Could I really like him too? No. I could not possibly be the kind of easy woman who fell for a man after knowing him for one week.'
Yoo Sia was a second-generation chaebol heiress who had never dated, yet had always been fascinated by romance.
She'd consumed countless romance stories.
Most had been aimed at women, and in those stories men might fall at first sight, but women never did.
Naturally, she'd expected to fall in love only after some dramatic event, just like a heroine in those novels.
What? I liked Yujin?
Desperate denial followed.
-Mumble mumble.
"It's not love. It only means he's a man I like. I can hardly say I dislike Yujin, so that must be all it means. Right."
"......?"
'Why was Sia muttering at her phone like that? Was she checking stocks or something?'
"Yujin, please take good care of our young lady."
"Excuse me?"
"There is that sort of thing. Hoo-hoo."
The sight was adorable enough to put a paternal smile on the secretary's face as she drove.
* * *
Perhaps the shock of having her shoulder grabbed still lingered, because Sia kept flinching whenever she looked at me. In any case...
Before long, we arrived at Cheonhwa headquarters.
An imposing skyscraper greeted us.
'Cheonhwa, as expected. The number one clan in South Korea.'
Even after my regression, its grandeur remained unchanged.
I couldn't help but marvel.
What sort of clan was Cheonhwa?
It had started as a small company that Clan Head Yoo Jeongcheol ran to support his awakener wife.
And in the end, wasn't it a major corporation boasting world-renowned technology?
Cheonhwa not only developed weapons for awakeners but also analyzed and developed artifacts obtained from Gates.
Even Công and Master commissioned custom weapons from this company. That said everything.
I entered that extraordinary clan with familiar steps.
"Your father is in the clan head's office, right?"
"Y-yeah."
"Then let's go, Sia."
'In the First Round, he had cursed me every time I showed my face.'
Before regressing, I had always felt like a criminal before my father-in-law.
My father-in-law had two sons and one youngest daughter.
He'd doted fiercely on Sia, his youngest child.
And me?
I was an utter bastard who hadn't been satisfied with her alone, but had also made Alice and Master my wives.
Of course my father-in-law had never looked kindly on me.
Whenever I visited, he routinely clicked his tongue in displeasure.
But now that I'd regressed, things were different.
I intended to make them different.
-Knock, knock.
"Chairman, Miss Sia and Awakener Seo Yujin have arrived."
"Send them in."
'Let me see... Everything I'd prepared was perfect.'
As the secretary opened the office door,
I quietly reached inside my jacket.
Feeling the solid object beneath my fingertips filled me with confidence.
And then...
-Creeeak.
"Welcome, Yujin."
"———It is an honor to meet you, sir!"
I immediately folded into a deep ninety-degree bow.
Thus began my grand campaign to raise my father-in-law's favorability.
"Y-Yujin? Why are you acting like this? This almost feels like a real meeting of the par—"
'Sorry, Sia. For now, I had to focus on Father-in-law!'
Sia muttered something, but her voice dwindled until I could no longer make it out.
Not that I would have paid much attention even if I had heard her.
As I held the ninety-degree bow, a bemused voice reached me.
"I see. I am Yoo Jeongcheol, Sia's father."
"Yes, sir! I have admired you deeply for a long time, Chairman Yoo Jeongcheol!"
"...I am pleased to hear it, but straighten up and sit down. It is unbecoming for a talent like you to bow so excessively."
"Yes!! I'll sit with thanks!!"
I ignored his discomfort and maintained my special 'polite young man before Father-in-law' mode.
Every word crisp. Every look bright and earnest. Every movement the picture of courtesy.
...It might have been excessive, but this approach worked on my father-in-law.
It was a strategy I'd learned by constantly watching my step as a man with three wives.
"First, please accept this."
"Hm? What is this?"
"It is red ginseng liquor aged exactly five years."
'I'd stolen it from the Chairwoman's private batch, but I could claim later that Haru broke the bottle.'
As though that were not enough, I launched a gift offensive.
The avid drinker could not hide the smile spreading across his face.
"You did not have to bring something like this. Any friend of my daughter would have been welcome empty-handed."
"I could not visit the father of my classmate—and a man I respect—empty-handed. It is nothing too expensive, so please accept it."
"Well, if it's red ginseng liquor rather than ordinary ginseng liquor, I shall gladly accept it."
The gift warmed the atmosphere considerably.
A gentleness entirely absent in the First Round settled over my father-in-law's face.
Sia's face, meanwhile, grew redder by the second.
-Whisper, whisper.
"U-Um, Yujin. You're not seriously..."
"What is it, Sia?"
"......!!! Ah, I-it's nothing...."
'Had even Sia noticed? That this felt like meeting the parents?'
It wasn't difficult to understand why Sia was acting that way.
Even Sia—the purest and most adorable woman in the world—wasn't entirely oblivious to matters like this.
She seemed to have noticed the meet-the-parents atmosphere I was radiating.
I decided to change course slightly.
'It could not be helped. I should shift to something a little more serious.'
I wanted to raise my father-in-law's favorability further, but it'd be troublesome if Sia noticed my intentions already.
I couldn't become the lunatic who tried to meet the parents after knowing her for only one week.
"In any case, Chairman Yoo, regarding Sia's suggestion that I join Cheonhwa... I view it very favorably."
"Ho-oh."
The atmosphere changed the moment I brought up the clan.
In less than a second, the old man delighted by red ginseng liquor became the legendary entrepreneur who'd built a major corporation from nothing.
His solemn gaze settled on me.
"Explain in detail. Why do you feel that way?"
"Every Korean awakener dreams of an exclusive contract with Cheonhwa."
"That would be true for an ordinary awakener. But you are all but certain to become the next S-rank—someone even the U.S. president desires."
"......?"
'Why would the U.S. president...? Did someone there need hypnotherapy?'
The information caught me off guard because I was hearing it for the first time, but never mind that.
I answered with equal seriousness.
"Even if they offered me a king's ransom, I would never move to the United States. I already have more than enough money."
'I had died in the First Round with trillions of won I never managed to spend.'
Money itself wasn't especially important to me.
What mattered to me was...
"I have no intention of leaving Korea, the country I love. Would a contract with Cheonhwa not be the most reasonable choice?"
'I didn't know about the others, but if I wanted to marry Sia, I had to live in Korea.'
Only my wives mattered.
The old man released a long, weary sigh.
"Patriotism, is it? That matters when the difference is modest. You seem unaware of your own value, but the signing bonus alone..."
"Cheonhwa could offer at most around one hundred billion won. The United States, on the other hand, could offer trillions without blinking."
I continued explaining calmly, without showing any nervousness.
Even a major Korean corporation could invest only so much in a single awakener.
One hundred billion won was the absolute ceiling; realistically, perhaps twenty billion was more likely.
But foreign governments, beginning with the United States?
They would stake national interests on recruiting me.
There was a limit to how often they could beg Công for help whenever an S-rank Gate erupted.
The national budget would probably support the offer, producing an extraordinary sum.
I'd actually received contracts worth several trillion won more than once in the First Round.
"...Those figures are remarkably accurate for a rough estimate. Did Seol Hayeon tell you something?"
"No. I estimated them after researching awakener contract terms."
"Hoo."
After that, my father-in-law no longer looked at me as a naive greenhorn who knew nothing of the world.
His baffled question followed immediately.
"You understand all that and still intend to remain in Korea and sign with Cheonhwa?"
"Yes."
"I don't understand. Why?"
'Because I had to marry Sia.'
I couldn't answer honestly.
If I mentioned marriage already to a father who doted on Sia, he would slap me.
So I decided to offer a plausible excuse.
I would say that I did not want to concern myself with taxes or politics.
That Cheonhwa was the ideal fit for me.
"What Sia said about ta—mmph."
'Wait. Sia and I had never discussed taxes. I had only guessed that was what she meant.'
I slammed on the brakes mid-sentence.
The comprehensive-income-tax explanation had been nothing more than my guess at what Sia intended to say.
Sia and I had never actually discussed it.
But I couldn't pull back a word already halfway out of my mouth...
"S-S-Sex...? What the hell are you saying, you complete idiot!?"
"......? ......?!!!!!"
'Sia, why would you hear it that way!?'
Because the word tax had been cut off halfway through,
The result was a serious and wildly inappropriate misunderstanding.
"I-It is not what you think! Taxes! I was trying to say taxes, and my tongue slipped..."
"Have you ever seen such a shameless son of a bitch!!!?"
"It is a misunderstanding, sir!"
"Do not call me your father, you wife-stealing thief!"
The favorability I'd painstakingly built crashed straight to rock bottom.