Filial Piety, Paid in Cash (1)
After Han Miru left, Yoo Jae-ho fell into thought.
He had brought the matter up hoping to solve one problem, only to walk away with a new one. The reason he had been able to take Miru’s advice so easily up to now was simple: from Yuseong Electronics’ point of view, there had been almost no real risk.
If one or two design firms failed to produce results, they could simply call it a learning experience and move on.
But a data center was different.
Entering that market required a massive amount of capital. If they failed, the damage would be severe. On top of that, they would be laughed at by everyone and hammered for mismanaging the company.
And yet...
It really is a good opportunity.
Cloud computing was one of the fastest-growing industries in the world. Even without Han Miru’s words, its future potential was boundless.
Until now, that market had belonged to the big tech companies. They were making enormous fortunes built on cloud infrastructure.
If Yuseong didn’t want to fall behind, it had to ride the current.
If they could get even one foot into this field, what then?
Supplying semiconductors to a data center would only bring temporary profit. But if they built and operated the data centers themselves?
That would mean continuous, stable revenue. If they played it right, it could become a new cash cow.
Snow Crash was currently the fourth-largest cloud company in the United States.
Its share was tiny compared to the Big Three, but its growth was rapid.
Could Snow Crash survive against them?
He couldn’t say for certain, but his mind was already leaning that way.
Yoo Jae-ho muttered to himself, remembering Han Miru’s words.
“The future is in the cloud...”
* * *
When Sung Yoon-ah stepped into the café, the short-haired woman who had arrived first raised a hand and waved her over.
“Over here.”
“Ah, unni!”
Sung Yoon-ah took the seat across from her and asked, “How long have you been waiting?”
“I just got here too.”
The two of them, meeting after a long time, drank coffee and talked.
Min Ah-reum held out a small shopping bag.
“Take this.”
“What is it?”
“A new perfume they just released. It hasn’t gone on general sale yet.”
“Thank you. But where did you get this?”
“I picked it up at headquarters.”
“Oh, so you went to headquarters. What for?”
“I spent the whole day begging luxury brands to let us carry them. Department stores live and die on luxury goods these days, so their noses are sky-high.”
As online shopping continued to grow, offline retail was having a harder and harder time. And yet department store sales were still setting record highs every year.
The reason was simple: luxury sales were exploding.
How many luxury brands a department store could attract was tightly tied to its reputation and foot traffic.
“Anyway, I leave on one business trip and the whole place turns upside down. That guy’s really something.”
Even though she already knew who Min Ah-reum meant, Sung Yoon-ah asked anyway.
“You mean who?”
“Miru. Everyone I meet keeps talking about him.”
Han Miru’s name first became known in business circles during the Primus incident.
Back then, he had just been a rookie who had done something reckless and caused trouble, or so people thought. This time was different. After all, he had brought down one of the country’s ten largest conglomerates.
Most people still thought of him as nothing more than a representative of Continue Capital, but the two of them knew the truth.
He was not merely its representative. He was the very founder and owner of Continue Capital.
Min Ah-reum suddenly seemed to remember something.
“Wait. Then if you met him on Christmas Day, he must have already been preparing to take over management rights, right?”
“I’m sure he was.”
The actual stock purchases had happened before that.
She clicked her tongue.
“Tsk. So Ju Hyeon-jin had no idea who he was dealing with and was just standing in front of him spouting nonsense about status and class?”
“Exactly.”
What was the point of being born into a chaebol family?
If you were stupid, there was no saving you.
Not only had he been ousted from management, he was now under arrest for drugs as well. He would never be able to show his face in the business world again.
Min Ah-reum stirred her coffee with a straw and said, “What a shame. He was one of our department store’s VIP customers, after all.”
She said it like she meant it, but there wasn’t a trace of regret on her face.
“How are the other groups reacting?”
“It’s chaos.”
This incident had sent shockwaves through the business world in two ways.
The first was the rise of financial capital.
Until now, Korea had been built on a sturdy chaebol-centered system. But now financial capital had grown to a scale no one could ignore.
Domestic and foreign private equity funds had already been raising capital at a frightening pace and launching wave after wave of mergers and acquisitions.
This time, though, they had gone so far as to pull off a hostile M&A against the holding company of one of the ten biggest groups. It was the first time anything like it had happened in either the business or financial world.
The second shock was the change in minority shareholders.
From the perspective of management, minority shareholders had long been people they could safely ignore.
In fact, most individual investors only cared whether the stock price went up. They paid almost no attention to voting rights or shareholders’ meetings.
But this time, that attitude had changed.
Shareholders had finally realized the obvious: if a chaebol chairman or CEO screwed up, they could be replaced. They began banding together and saying they would use their votes.
Companies that had long neglected minority shareholders were caught completely off guard. In a panic, they rushed to announce shareholder-return policies and started trying to soothe investors.
Maybe this was the beginning of a much larger shift in the business world.
Sung Yoon-ah sipped her coffee and thought, Did he really see this far ahead?
Min Ah-reum asked offhandedly, “When are you meeting him again?”
“I’m not sure. Why?”
“Just curious. I want to hear more about what happened this time.”
“...”
For some reason, it felt like she had another purpose in mind.
* * *
Maybe because I’d just wrapped up a major job, I felt strangely drained.
Ju Hyeon-jin’s arrest only got a brief mention on the news.
Probably because he had already destroyed his own image back during the abuse scandal, the reaction was mostly just, “Yeah, that tracks.”
His family might be ruined, but he probably still had enough money for a lawyer. If he played it right, he might even skate by with probation.
Whatever. If not, then not.
Either way, I’d settled the grudge from the chicken shop, hadn’t I?
Once I’d neatly tied up an old wound, I felt lighter. People say revenge ends in emptiness, but honestly, it felt more like a lump stuck in my throat had finally slid all the way down.
To celebrate, I was sitting alone in the living room with chicken and beer when Seonwu came home.
“Why are you drinking alone like some tragic loser?”
“I just felt like drinking.”
“Where’d you order the chicken from?”
“Hanjeong Chicken.”
“What? I thought you’d quit that place.”
“I decided to eat it again.”
What crime had the chicken committed? The guilt belonged to the person, not the bird.
I hadn’t touched Hanjeong Chicken since my regression, but now I felt like I could eat it with a clear conscience.
And man, it tasted good.
This was K-chicken!
Seonwu sat down across from me and grabbed a drumstick first.
“You’ve been coming home early a lot lately.”
At my words, Seonwu let out a sigh and said, “I think our team’s going to be dissolved soon.”
The reason was that Fantasy Tales was going under.
Development would continue until the update they had already announced, but after that, who knew what would happen.
“Then what?”
“The whole team gets split up and assigned to other teams. That means another internal interview too.”
LD Studio had the strange rule that if you wanted to move departments, you had to interview again inside the company.
“What happens if you fail?”
“Usually they give you unpaid leave and nudge you toward quitting on your own. If that doesn’t work, they start digging up everything they can—work attitude, whatever they need—to force you out.”
Back in the first timeline, after Fantasy Tales collapsed, Development Team 3, where Seonwu had worked, was dissolved as well. He was then reassigned to the Brotherhood M development team.
Brotherhood M was one of those Korean games so aggressively monetized that it had become the final boss of pay-to-win. People even joked that spending a hundred million won on it still counted as “light spending.”
Thanks to that, even years after release, it still sat at number one in Korean mobile-game revenue.
“The higher-ups have been dropping hints that I should transfer to the Brotherhood M team.”
Just as I thought.
“Any interest?”
“That team’s job has a pretty loose relationship with actual game development.”
“If they’re not developing games, what are they doing?”
“Calculating random-box odds. Studying how to squeeze as much money as possible out of users without making them too angry. The goal is basically maximum money from the maximum number of people.”
“...”
So not utilitarianism—pay-to-win-ism?
The fact that he wasn’t joking made it even stranger.
“I’ve been curious about this for a while, but didn’t people say the rates were being manipulated?”
“I don’t know. Probably only the executives know for sure.”
The shape of the global game market was changing by the day.
LD Studio was a giant company with more than four thousand employees.
And yet instead of making good games and taking them global, they had become obsessed with extracting money from players inside Korea.
Maybe someone could say that if the money kept flowing, then what was the problem? But a business model like that could never last forever.
Even so, every new release they put out was basically a Brotherhood M clone with the monetization copied and pasted, and eventually even the whales who had been spending tens of millions of won a month began cursing them out and leaving.
Then the probability-manipulation scandal broke, and in the end LD Studio collapsed and was bought by a Chinese game company. And that company would go on to make the chicken we were eating right now.
I looked at Seonwu and asked, “You’re going home tomorrow, right?”
Tomorrow was the start of the Lunar New Year holiday.
“I don’t exactly have anything to do, so yeah.”
I tossed him a car key.
Seonwu caught it and stared at me. “What is this? You bought another car?”
“Yeah.”
“Come on, there are already two Porsches at the house. Why are you buying another car?”
“Don’t let only you drive the nice cars. Give the house one too.”
“Huh?”
I kept tearing into the chicken and said, “It’s the New Year. Time to show a little filial piety.”
“So I’m supposed to give them a car?”
“What, were you planning to be filial with words alone?”
True filial piety isn’t something you do with your mouth.
It’s something you do with money.
* * *
I headed to my parents’ house for the Lunar New Year holiday.
Since both my grandfather and grandmother had passed away, the family gathered only among ourselves for Lunar New Year, while everyone came together with the extended family during the autumn harvest holiday.
While I was driving, my younger sister called me.
Han Sena: When are you getting home?
Me: I’m on my way.
Han Sena: You might be better off not coming home at all.
Me: Why?
Han Sena: Mom found out about the 150 million won you borrowed from Dad last time you were here.
Me: ...
Our family certainly didn’t have 150 million won lying around.
My father had secretly taken out a home mortgage loan to cover it for me.
Because my mother had once been hounded by debt collectors in the past, she still reacted violently to anything involving loans. She had especially made it clear that under no circumstances was anyone to touch the house.
But if she’d found out, I could pretty much imagine what the house was like right now.
By this point, my father was probably so busy reading my mother’s mood that he couldn’t even breathe properly.
The image of the household head with his head bowed floated to mind.
“Oh, no.”
Now what was the problem?
I had to save my father quickly.
I slammed down on the accelerator with everything I had.
Now, I was off to do my filial duty.