Han River View
“Deputy Manager Yu, how was he?”
“Pardon?”
“That guy the team leader photographed.”
Deputy Manager Oh Hyemi, who worked alongside her on the VIP management team, edged closer as she asked. She was both a friend of Yu Areum’s and a rival.
The competitive gleam in her smiling eyes alone was enough to show just how strong her curiosity ran. A single well-managed VIP could change the unit of your end-of-month performance bonus.
“Apparently he goes to the same school as the Oh Yang Group granddaughter.”
“School? University?”
“……No.”
“Then? Grad school?”
“……Cheonghwa High School.”
“What—a high, high schooler?”
“Whoa, for real?”
“Oh…….”
Exclamations burst from the other team members who had been openly eavesdropping. Even on screen, he hadn’t given off a high-school vibe at all.
This is confusing.
Unlike her teammates exploding with interest, Yu Areum’s head was a tangle of thoughts. The VIP she had taken charge of today defied prediction in every way.
The name, phone number, and address recorded on the customer card. From the conversation she had overheard, it seemed he lived alone in the Signiel. And a high schooler living alone at that.
The price range of the residence was no joke for a kid trying to live independently. Without a guardian or companion, he had swiped a debit card for a watch worth tens of millions of won. Even for the child of a well-off family, it was not a sight you saw every day. He hadn’t so much as blinked at luxury gifts costing over ten million won.
“Which family is he from?”
Oh Hyemi asked with an envious look. Even a rough calculation put the scale well into the stratosphere. Most royal families didn’t throw money around carelessly. They paid only where the investment was worth it.
“I don’t know.”
“The name is…….”
“Ha Taewoong.”
“If it’s the Ha surname…….”
“Haryun?”
“Really?”
These were staff who had the VIP name list memorized cold. One mention of the surname Ha and they immediately thought of the Haryun Group.
“No. Their youngest is a university student.”
“That’s right. He’s not with the Haryun Group.”
Direct family members of the Haryun Group were of course registered as department store VIPs. Unless you were brand-new, most employees had the personal details of direct-line figures from the top ten groups committed to memory as a matter of course. Form a connection with any of them and you would never have to worry about losing your job.
“A collateral branch, maybe?”
“Could be.”
The Hyeondo Department Store VIP management team staff began floating every possibility they could think of.
Right then—
Beep.
A text notification chimed on Deputy Manager Yu Areum’s smartphone.
“Ah!!”
She startled in a way that was completely unlike her usual self.
“What’s wrong?”
Oh Hyemi asked from beside her.
“Yejin, Joohee.”
“Yes, Deputy Manager!”
Yu Areum called the names of the team members in a trembling voice.
“Tomorrow…… I need you to help me.”
“Pardon?”
“It’s a VIP order.”
“Who?”
Instead of answering, Yu Areum checked the text on her phone again.
This was a message entrusting her with an entire household setup. Instantly a list of appliances and furniture worthy of both the Signiel and a VIP scrolled through her mind.
Yu Areum’s eyes sparkled with a flood of thoughts. This was no trivial text. A major opportunity had just arrived. He had entrusted her not only with the household but with clothing that required careful selection to match personal taste.
That was it!
Unlimited budget!!
An order that said she didn’t have to worry about price. Someone who didn’t know better might take the request as high-handed. But Yu Areum received it as a blessing. One thing was certain: this was a future VVIP in the making. His first test of her.
Tap-click.
Yu Areum quickly connected to the internet. She searched for the Signiel complex, a place she had never once looked up before. For someone whose dream was to become a personal shopper, her fingers flew. Her eyes shone brighter than ever, and her mind raced at top speed.
“Attorney Ah.”
“Yes, Attorney.”
“What do you make of him?”
“Pardon?”
“Ha Taewoong.”
“……He seems like an unusual person.”
“Person? Haa…… I was holding back tears of self-loathing.”
“Why?”
“At that age I was burying my head in bar-exam prep at university. Freshman year and already determined to succeed. These days they’d say I couldn’t even make real friends. I clawed my way to this position and my annual salary is barely a billion won. After taxes and everything, a measly six hundred million. And he just burns through 1.2 billion on simple legal services?”
Kim Gyeongmin and Ah Yura, who moved as a team at Cho & Jang. They had sealed a contract with a big catch as if bewitched by a goblin. The legal review team call had wrapped up in one smooth flow. Finally, even approval from Cho & Jang’s managing partner, Jang Muyeol, was complete. Live or die, they were locked in now.
“Still…… something feels off.”
“About what?”
“The ban on dual representation. That was the part he stressed right to the end.”
“That’s possible. Our firm is that famous, after all.”
“It’s not that. My instincts are telling me something very…….”
“Instincts about what?”
“How to put it. Like we’re about to get thrown into a blood-soaked battlefield.”
Former senior prosecutor Kim Gyeongmin. His uniquely sharp instincts were starting to fire.
“Nothing changes. The contract is already done.”
“True enough. The ten-year penalty is a hundred billion. And if they sue us in the States, who knows how much…….”
Even Cho & Jang didn’t carry much weight against American courts. Moreover, America converted even the crime of being annoying into cold cash and hit you with it.
“He seemed incredibly sharp. Almost like a university student, right? Though I still don’t know who he really is.”
“Now that it’s come to this, we’ll be seeing him often enough anyway.”
Ah Yura fell into thought as she recalled their client Ha Taewoong. Just as Attorney Kim Gyeongmin had said, her own mind was complicated. He was young, yet he gave off the impression of a super-rich. Information on him was far too thin.
“How much do you think he’s made? To throw around 1.2 billion a year, at minimum…….”
“At least hundreds of billions, I’d guess.”
“It could be more. Even in Korea they say there are trillionaires on the coin side.”
“Tril—trillions?”
“Yes. In ’21 a foreigner who invested seven thousand dollars in Shiba made seven trillion, you know.”
“……Holy.”
In college Ah Yura had briefly been called the high priestess of coins. She had the history of crypto down cold. Even now she still held the coins she had owned back then as investments. That was why Ha Taewoong’s claim of profits from coin investing had caught her ear so keenly.
“And on foreign exchanges, not domestic ones, you can do futures trading at over a hundred times leverage. Becoming an overnight multimillionaire is entirely possible.”
“And the opposite! You can go broke just as fast.”
“That’s the guts of it. Skill and luck.”
“Attorney Ah, do you know a lot about coins?”
“I don’t not know…….”
“Can coins even become assets? They’re just electronic scraps.”
It was a reaction typical of senior attorney Kim Gyeongmin, who had never tasted coins at all.
“I expect coins will become one of the core investment assets of the future.”
Unexpected conviction rang in Attorney Ah Yura’s words.
“Really? Then if you spot something good, tip me off too. Let’s get rich together.”
“Yes~”
She answered that way, but there was absolutely no chance she would share. Back in university Ah Yura had already ballooned her assets into the tens of billions. A single momentary lapse in judgment had wiped out everything she had inflated—though that mistake had been the result of losing her discernment to a senior she was close to. Ever since, Ah Yura neither recommended nor accepted recommendations from anyone.
I’m curious……. Just what did he invest in?
Her curiosity about the residual impression left by client Ha Taewoong had spiked vertically.
“Be careful with client Ha Taewoong.”
“Pardon?”
“His face is worth more than the price of admission.”
“…….”
She agreed with that; Ah Yura acknowledged it as well. Height and looks rare among ordinary people, plus overflowing confidence. He was a mass of charm any woman would fall for.
And decisively…….
That hot gaze that had locked straight onto her eyes.
Was he captivated by me?
Recalling Ha Taewoong, Ah Yura’s face flushed the color of a peach.
Beep.
The front door opened.
In that instant, the view straight ahead.
“Ha!!”
A short exclamation burst out of me on its own. Money really was good after all.
After finishing business at Cho & Jang, I had visited the real-estate office again. In the meantime the agency manager had handled a pile of tasks and even completed the move-in registration.
Lotte Signiel, where you needed a registered resident card just to enter. The rooftop room that had already started to bake with heat was not a place I wanted to stay even one more day. With enough capital, there was no need to scrimp. In my past life I had never once spent even two hundred thousand won on myself. A flex for that version of me!
There was no moving truck. Textbooks and school uniforms were everything. The rooftop room held nothing worth taking. I had thrown it all away.
My new home—the Signiel!
The entrance was finished in high-gloss black. The floor was non-slip marble in the same color family. Beyond the wide-open hallway and living room, a panoramic view of Seoul unfurled.
“There’s quite a lot I’ll need.”
It was full-option, yet the miscellaneous daily necessities I needed right away were completely missing. Barely a built-in refrigerator, washer and dryer, and a bed frame. That was it.
I immediately texted Deputy Manager Yu Areum of Hyeondo Department Store, whose card I had received. I judged that getting an expert’s help would be more efficient than running around myself. This was a time to treat every minute like gold. The eyes of a deputy manager who handled department-store VIPs would be sharper and more accurate than mine. In moments like this, leaning on a professional was a hundred times better.
I lined my shoes up neatly and stepped inside. A usable area of sixty-two pyeong. Given the nature of an officetel, the exclusive living space wasn’t that large.
“So this is what a Han River view feels like…….”
The location was perfect. Directly below, Lotte World, the Han River, and Namsan Tower stretched out in a continuous line. The landscape that filled my vision alone made my chest feel wide open. I thought I finally understood why people sang the praises of a Han River view so relentlessly.
“……Nice.”
The miracle of my life unfolding in a matter of days. Not a single won I had spent purely on myself felt wasted.
“The truth will come out soon.”
The parents who had been in the principal’s office. Those were battle-hardened ajummas. They would already have finished digging into me without a sound or rumor. And they would have confirmed it. The moment they realized I had completely fooled them, they would attack every which way. I had already taken preemptive measures for that moment. When the time came, Cho & Jang would be the hidden card rather than Attorney Kim Jeongryul.
“If they try to intimidate me, I’ll return it at least tenfold! Up to a hundredfold!”
I erased the soft, spineless version of myself from the past and steeled my heart with venom. I hadn’t endured every single moment before, but in this life I would endure even less. A world that treated kindness as an open invitation to walk all over you.
Ssshk.
I picked up my smartphone. I opened the exchange screen. The moment the display changed, a graph rocketing upward in red and a deposit balance whose units had completely shifted filled my vision.
“Insane…….”