A New Commission (1)
I had a friend again.
One with a pretty big age gap, too.
Of course, that didn’t mean I could treat Kim Seokchun the way I treated Han Yu-na.
I wasn’t about to take that old man trampolining with me.
So I had to have my fun a different way.
"You bastard!? Hey! Is it really okay to hit that way!?"
"I can’t hear a word you’re saying, old man. You’re stuck in a pit and a wide-open hand."
The way Kim Seokchun talked down to me made me wonder if I couldn’t just talk down to him right back.
Of course, if anyone else saw it, they’d probably say I was some rude little punk with no parents and no manners.
And honestly, they wouldn’t be wrong.
But I was an orphan who didn’t want to live like an orphan.
So I decided to be polite.
"Don’t you ever go easy on your elders?"
"Nope. Pit hand."
"So there’s no such thing as respect for your elders, huh..."
"Nope. Wide-open hand."
I took seventy thousand won from the old man’s sulking wallet.
In a game like this, you’re not supposed to show mercy.
Consider it a valuable experience, sir.
"Sigh."
"Ahahaha!! Grandpa, you’re so much fun!!"
Hong Si-yeon, sitting beside us, burst into laughter.
"Hmm. Miss, don’t get too friendly with this boy. He’s the kind who’ll strip you down to your panties and sell the rest."
"Noah, you say? Heeey. Noah, are you planning to take my panties off?"
Hong Si-yeon narrowed her eyes like a sly fox and licked her lips.
I felt like a rabbit laid out before a fox.
"How could I possibly do that to the CEO?"
"Hehe. There you go."
"Well, I’ll be damned."
Grumbling, Kim Seokchun sipped his coffee.
The coffee he was drinking was instant mix coffee I’d bought.
And the mug in his hand was one I’d picked up at Daiso.
Right.
We were hanging out at my place.
The reason was simple.
After finding his brother, the old man had started meeting him more often, and then out of the blue he came to see me.
Normally, we’d just go to some neighborhood café, but if something happened there too, then this whole neighborhood would be out of cafés to use.
So I just invited him over.
A little later, Hong Si-yeon showed up with snacks, and somewhere in the middle of chatting and fooling around, we ended up playing go-stop together.
I’d thought about calling Cheol-hon too and making him take over the flushes and the phantoms, but to my surprise he said he’d never played go-stop before, so we just played as three.
"All right, all right. Enough. Enough."
After losing seventy thousand won, he flipped the mat over in a huff.
I’d been thinking of stopping soon anyway.
It was almost time for my broadcast.
"Ah. It’s broadcast time."
"Broadcast? Ah, right. You said you do internet broadcasts? Then we’d better be heading out."
They could’ve stayed in the living room a little longer.
"But why did you come by, sir?"
"Ahem. Well. You see, have you perhaps ever thought about going to Japan?"
"Japan?"
I didn’t even have a passport.
"If you’d come with me, I’d cover not only the travel expenses, but the lodging, too—and all the fun money besides."
"That’s not bad."
"And since you’d be accompanying an honored guest, I’d give you a separate business trip allowance as well."
A business trip allowance, huh.
"Would you pay the same amount you gave me before?"
As thanks for finding his brother, what he’d given me was none other than a company.
A small business he said he ran.
Small, maybe—but it had thirty employees, and it turned a profit every year.
Apparently, he’d originally been running it to raise money to find his brother, but now that he’d found him, there was no need to keep it going.
If I wanted, I could even hand it over to someone suitable in Japan.
I had no reason to refuse, so I took it.
"I’ll make sure you’re well taken care of."
"Then I’ll accept."
I wasn’t hurting for money.
But I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t interested in my first trip overseas, and I was also curious to see how the company I’d inherited actually worked.
"You said it was a trading company, right?"
Hong Si-yeon already knew, since she’d picked up the gist of our conversation during the go-stop game.
"Could I come along too?"
"You, CEO?"
"If it’s a trading company, I’ll be able to judge it properly. And if worst comes to worst, I’ll buy it."
"Hmm. Sure, why not."
Better to have someone familiar do the buying than a stranger.
.
.
.
Thankfully, the plane didn’t crash on the way to Japan.
If something like that had happened, I would’ve found a way to stop us from boarding in the first place.
But there was none of that nonsense. We took off normally, and landed normally.
And so, Tokyo.
I was wondering where we were supposed to go when the old man’s phone suddenly rang.
"It’s my son. Just a moment..."
He took the call and started talking for quite a while.
Then he looked at me and let out a sigh.
"We’ve run into a bit of a troublesome situation. Sorry, but I need you to head out with Hong CEO. I think I need to go take a look myself."
With that, he handed me a card.
Buy whatever we needed, he said.
"What’s going on?"
"Well... if I put it that way, it sounds like I dragged you here to ask for your help..."
"What’s a little thing like that between friends?"
"Sigh. My son’s trying to put up a building on land he bought, but it looks like there’s a bit of a problem."
"Let’s go together. Maybe I can help."
"There’s no need for you to get involved..."
The old man kept apologizing and telling us to go have fun together instead, but since we’d come all this way, it felt wrong for only one of us to drop out.
In the end, Kim Seokchun nodded.
"Come on, then."
The car he’d prepared took us to a neighborhood in Tokyo’s Setagaya area.
"Setagaya Ward has the largest population of Tokyo’s twenty-three wards."
"Oh?"
"My son bought land here and is planning to build a luxury apartment complex."
But strange things kept happening at the construction site.
Workers claiming they’d seen ghosts.
Something odd in the ground.
And on top of that, some woman who claimed to be a medium or exorcist or something came by screaming that the land was cursed.
She hadn’t just shown up once, either. She kept coming back whenever she had a chance and making a scene.
And that wasn’t all.
"This time, some bizarre protest group is showing up too. What was it? Something about digging up this vacant lot and ghosts coming out?"
"But it’s a residential neighborhood."
"Exactly. A residential neighborhood."
Anyway, with things like this happening over and over, his son was more than a little troubled.
"Ghosts, huh. There’s a saying that goes, 'I beg you, drive it off with cannon fire.' So why not just toss a few sticks of dynamite at the place?"
"Would that even work..."
Well, I hadn’t exactly expected it to.
When we arrived, the construction site looked downright desolate.
"Father!!"
A stranger in his middle years came running toward us.
With graying hair and a rigid, severe face, the broad-shouldered man with a solid build broke into a bright smile the moment he saw me.
"This is...?"
"Yes. Thanks to this young man, I was able to find my brother."
"I’m truly grateful!!"
I grabbed him before he could throw himself into a dogeza.
"Kang Noah."
"Matsumoto Ryusei. My Korean name is Kim Soo-hyun, by the way. Feel free to call me whatever you like."
"Then, Mr. Kim. This may disappoint you, but I’m just a fortune teller."
"Yes. I heard."
I’d found his father’s brother.
How could a son possibly pretend not to know his savior?
Originally, he said he should have come to Korea in person to thank me and entertain me properly, but because of this mess he couldn’t leave, so he promised to treat me right later and let out another sigh.
"May I meet the workers first?"
"Are you planning to use your power, sir?"
"I’m just going to do a little fortune-telling."
Led by Kim Soo-hyun, I went to meet the workers, and their expressions were all pretty terrible.
Some of them were even rolling prayer beads in their hands.
"Could everyone here please turn over one of these cards?"
"Yes..."
Since it was the boss’s orders, the workers flipped the cards without much resistance.
"What do you see?"
"There really are some strange things going on here."
And if things went on like this, this construction job was doomed.
When construction drags on, expenses pile up.
In the end, Kim Soo-hyun would have to sell the land for a ridiculous pittance.
For now, that was as far into the future as I could see through the workers and Kim Soo-hyun.
That was when it happened.
A crowd of strangely dressed people began pouring in, shouting in incomprehensible Japanese.
"Sigh..."
"Are those the protesters?"
"Yes. They’re saying if we dig here, ghosts will come out and the whole area will die or something. I checked just in case, but there’s no such legend in this neighborhood."
Ghosts, huh.
At this point, they might as well be waiting for the Second Coming of Christ... huh?
Wait a second.
"Mr. Kim. Could you get one of those people to flip a card for me?"
"That shouldn’t be difficult. They’re protesting, but they’re not violent..."
With that, he approached the protesters.
After talking to the man who seemed to be their leader, he slipped him some money.
The middle-aged man who came over started babbling in Japanese again.
But it was useless.
I didn’t understand a single word of Japanese!!
So I just held out the card.
He glared at me for a long moment, then turned it over.
What came up was the reversed Devil.
As always, the meaning itself didn’t matter.
"How did it turn out?"
Hong Si-yeon came over, curious, and I pointed at the man.
"All the strange things happening around here are the work of those people."
The ghost incident.
The medium.
And now the protest, along with the discovery of something bizarre.
It was all their doing.
I looked at the protest group and smiled.
"A company called Magoa is after this land. Where is it?"
Kim Seokchun and Kim Soo-hyun’s faces both twisted.
"It’s the company competing with ours. We’ve been in a bidding war for this land, and now they pull something like this...!!"
They looked pretty pissed.
To the two of them, I gave a single name.
"You should meet a man named Oda Ryuki. He looks like he could crush their boss in one shot."
I could already see it: the man leading those protesters would end up taking orders from a man called Oda Ryuki, then bowing low in dogeza and apologizing over and over again.
So all we had to do was use that.
"But who is that?"
"I know him!"
Oh. Hong CEO! I knew I could count on you!
"He’s sort of like a steward for a pretty famous figure in the Japanese private lending world."
"Private lending..."
Hong Si-yeon let out a small sigh, then went on.
"I once met his grandmother."
She was someone who’d once put in a lot of effort to expand into Korea.
Yang Chun-ja, Hong Si-yeon’s grandmother and a legendary figure in Korea’s private lending world, had flatly turned that offer down.
"She knew that if Japanese capital swallowed Korea, we’d be robbed blind."
"Well, if hidden Japanese capital flows into Korea, the Korean economy would just collapse."
Kim Seokchun said there were several private lenders from the bubble era who had predicted the future and simply kept their massive capital intact.
"Their assets were said to be beyond measure."
The question was why that man was getting involved here.
If I hadn’t changed the future at all and still saw it, then Oda Ryuki really was going to step in whether I interfered or not.
The problem was that if I didn’t change fate by getting involved, it would take a while.
And Kim Soo-hyun would take a pretty brutal loss.
So then, let’s change that fate.
"First, let’s get rid of those people."
The protesters started their so-called demonstration in front of the construction site, holding up signs and bizarre props.
Compared to protests in Korea, it was absurdly weak, but maybe because protest culture wasn’t very developed in Japan, some of the workers were genuinely startled by it.
"They’re saying this is land where ghosts sleep, so we need to leave immediately."
Hong Si-yeon translated for me from beside me.
What kind of nonsense was that?
I told Kim Soo-hyun how to make them back off.
"Tell the man leading them that if he doesn’t get lost right now, you’ll send a video of him pulling this crap here to his wife and son in Osaka."
Didn’t he say he’d come on this business trip and be a proud father for his wife and son?
Would this look proud enough to brag about?