Kneel! (3)
“A jeonse contract?”
“Yes, sir.”
“For Ha Taewoong’s place?”
“No. It was a jeonse contract for a friend’s house.”
“How much was the deposit?”
“Four hundred fifty million.”
“Hmm…….”
Senior Attorney Kim Gyeongmin listened to Ah Yura’s report on her field work and sank into thought.
Ha Taewoong—the client who had personally called them in on a Sunday off to hand them work.
VIP or not……. He called a lawyer out just to close a four-hundred-fifty-million-won jeonse deal?
If the upper floors found out, they would not look kindly on it. Of course, a firm attorney could handle judicial-scrivener work on a client’s behalf. But it was not the kind of job lawyers at Cho & Jang were meant to take.
“The amount isn’t huge, but I’m pretty sure that money came out of Client Ha Taewoong’s own pocket.”
“Is that so?”
The more he learned, the stranger this client became. Barely of age, still a student at Cheonghwa High. He had the air of a scion from some prestigious family, yet nothing had been confirmed.
An illegitimate child, maybe?
There were still quite a few undisclosed chaebol illegitimate children in Korea. People no longer casually scattered bastards around the way they had during the boom years of industrialization, but the phenomenon had never gone away. Work involving statutory inheritance shares for illegitimate children still dropped onto their desks now and then. A hidden heir’s sudden appearance could even rewrite a group’s control structure. And yet no one was about to force a man to suppress a vigorous male appetite. Sexual desire, close as it was to instinct, was not a domain of pure rational control with an eye on the future.
Well. We’ll know soon enough.
He had already put in a request with Cho & Jang’s intelligence management team. Their intel capability stood shoulder to shoulder with the National Intelligence Service and Ilsung Electronics’ own networks. They had even recruited investigators who had once handled nearly every kind of information across the legal world; their spectrum was broad. For a client with a pie this large, digging into Ha Taewoong’s background was mandatory. Once the intelligence team moved, most clients’ information came into focus quickly. The fine-grained profiles of everyone who did business with Cho & Jang were built up through exactly this process. At the earliest, he might have Ha Taewoong’s file in hand today.
“And the fee?”
The comprehensive legal-service retainer equaled the deposit. Everything beyond that was billed case by case as commission.
“We agreed I’d receive it next week, at the same time the jeonse contract is finalized.”
Even the base fee was an amount that made ordinary judicial-scrivener rates look like pocket change.
“I’m not going to process the fee as firm revenue. Take it personally—consider it spending money.”
He had no idea how much the client would actually pay, but Kim Gyeongmin intended to wrap this up by looking after Ah Yura. She was still the only team member under him. Their caseload was light; work was almost nonexistent. The defense matter he had been handling until recently had just closed. He had been hunting for new business when, luckily, Client Ha Taewoong’s jobs had bought him a brief stretch of breathing room. Knowing how to be generous in moments like this was how a superior earned the treatment of one.
“Thank you, sir.”
“Nothing to thank me for. The client specifically asked for Attorney Ah as his dedicated counsel.”
That was how the world worked. Man or woman, you first had to look the part or the work dried up. Even practicing as a Cho & Jang attorney required both ability and the right face to back it up. When contracts were drawn, that factor was weighed and verified. Among the firm’s lawyers, Ah Yura’s looks easily ranked in the top three. True to her Seoguk University pedigree, she was sharp at the work as well. The lack of a judgeship or prosecutor’s career was a regret, but she was specializing in finance and evolving by the day. Kim Gyeongmin could already see the makings of someone who would go far.
Ding.
Ah Yura’s phone chimed. She checked the message and startled.
“Oh!”
“Something wrong?”
“Sir……. We’ve received a request.”
“A request?”
“From Mr. Ha Taewoong……. He says an incident requiring legal assistance has occurred at Cheonghwa High.”
“What? Cheonghwa??”
Even the name was enough to put Attorney Kim Gyeongmin on edge.
This…… feels like we’ve stepped into a proper snare.
A deep look of dismay settled over his face.
I had expected him to cause trouble sooner or later. That was one of the reasons I had rushed last Friday to sign a contract with Cho & Jang for a fortune. Attorney Kim Jeongryul would be overwhelmed handling this alone. It took at least Cho & Jang’s level of weight before anyone at Cheonghwa would listen. I messaged for a lawyer at once.
“What the hell is wrong with you! I’m talking to you and you’re zoning out? You cheating little bastard!”
Lee Jangyong hurled abuse without the slightest restraint. In my previous life he had been the math teacher for another class around this time. Even though I wasn’t in his section, he had hauled me out—the Sabaeja—and ground me down whenever he felt like it. I had deliberately taken mathematics in college just to shake off the trauma of those days.
And now the chance for payback had walked right up to me. I had cleanly solved the math problems Lee Jangyong had sweated over setting. In the past I wouldn’t even have dared approach them. This time I had reconstructed every question; I understood them perfectly and solved them cold. And he was using that as an excuse to grind me down all over again.
Someone was behind Lee Jangyong. Not the principal—he already had an inkling of who I was. Several faces rose in my mind. Cheonghwa was no ordinary high school. It was a miniature of the social structure the upper class enjoyed. A Sabaeja, barely better than a slave, would never be acknowledged.
Of all the people who flickered through my thoughts, the one I suspected most was—
“Did the Parent Association president put you up to this?”
“……!!”
I tossed the line out casually. Lee Jangyong’s face, which had been bulging with rage and curses, locked up for an instant. The Parent Association president’s armband only carried weight inside Cheonghwa. Outside these walls it meant nothing. Especially not against me—not in this life, after everything I had already survived.
“Why would the Parent Association president come into this?”
“Right now…….”
“What the hell is your reason??”
The kids in class still hadn’t grasped the situation. This was the perfect moment for a little friendly explanation.
“What is it? Are you upset that I scored a hundred in math? Or did a perfect score across every subject get under your skin?”
I kept every syllable polite, speaking in careful formal speech. He was garbage, but I had no desire to become garbage myself.
“A—a hundred?”
“Ha Taewoong?”
“A perfect score? What kind of nonsense is that?”
Whispers. Within seconds the classroom dissolved into chaos. The claim of a perfect score raced from mouth to mouth like wildfire. Kids, your big brother put in a little work. I lounged easily in the back row and enjoyed the uproar. It was a necessary rite of passage if I wanted the rest of my school life to go smoothly. No one in this school looked kindly on a Sabaeja.
“You! Get over here! You insolent Sabaeja bastard running your mouth like that hole was put there for free!!”
Lee Jangyong’s unfiltered speech laid bare the classic profile of a man with a shattered personality. He had no idea. This was the last hour he would ever raise his voice in this school.
“What do you think you’re doing!!”
A booming voice rang out from the hallway just outside the door. It was our homeroom teacher, coming in for Monday morning assembly. Both men shared the syllable yong in their names, but Kim Changyong and Lee Jangyong could not have been more different in character. Our teacher’s eyes blazed like a tiger’s, ready to tear into someone.
“What am I doing? I’m taking a test cheater down to Guidance!”
Lee Jangyong shouted back at him without a shred of shame.
“A cheater? Who?”
“That one—the Sabaeja, Ha Taewoong!”
“Taewoong?”
Homeroom looked at me with a face that could not believe it. Those pure eyes would never suspect a conspiracy among the powerful.
“That Sabaeja bastard cheated his way to a hundred in math—no, a perfect score in every subject.”
“……!!”
For an instant Homeroom’s eyes went as wide as an ox’s. Shock and admiration tangled together.
“R-really?”
“Because of that scheming Sabaeja, we couldn’t even post the grade announcement. The academic affairs director ordered me to dig into this case!”
Lee Jangyong threw out the academic affairs director’s name and squared his shoulders even higher. The idiot had just confessed, without realizing it, that he had joined hands with that political schemer. The academic affairs director had his eyes on the principal’s seat—the principal who was about to retire. And of course he had linked up with the Parent Association president. That much was certain.
The real power at Cheonghwa High right now was Ju Miju of the Hankook Group royal family—the woman known as the National Bitch. I knew her. Second daughter of the chairman of one of Korea’s top ten conglomerates. She was famous across generations for incident after incident. The classic example was the Hankook Air in-flight beef-jerky service scandal. She had thrown the jerky and started hitting people because it hadn’t been heated. Flight attendants were injured. They tried to hush it up, but video leaked and she was stripped of her executive post. The punishment stopped right there. Public opinion, however, had permanently branded her image: the National Bitch, Ju Miju—the living synonym for the classic upper-class abuse of power. Hankook Group might sit among the top ten, but even they could not simply ignore a storm of public anger.
And that same Ju Miju was the Parent Association president of Cheonghwa High. Her son was a second-year here. In my previous life he had been the school’s undisputed top student—someone whose eyes I had never once met. This time her pride and joy had been shoved aside by me. Ju Miju had been thoroughly scratched. Years of social combat experience put together a scenario that held together just fine.
“So?”
Homeroom, who had already sized me up to some degree, did not back down. He pressed hard.
“So? Teacher Kim! This matter was specially—”
“Does the principal know about this?”
“What?”
“I asked whether the principal is aware!!”
Our homeroom teacher—he had gotten brave!