Filial Piety, I Swear
Sung Yoon-ah still wore a look of amazement as she spoke.
"That's incredible. Just what don't you know, Miru?"
"I told you, I just guessed."
"Hmm. Doesn't seem like it."
Now that her mother had become the successor, there would be all kinds of changes in her life too.
"What are you going to do now?"
"I'll have to think about it from here."
I already knew what I was going to do.
The hardest part of investing was predicting the future. Human beings couldn't even be sure what would happen tomorrow, let alone a month from now or a year from now.
But I had regressed from ten years in the future.
Buying unlisted stock and turning it into a twentyfold windfall, exposing the rot in a fund scam—compared with what was still ahead, those things were nothing.
The chance to change my life had come right to my doorstep. If I let it slip away, I'd only end up regretting it the way I had before.
She looked regretful.
"That's a shame. It would've been fun to keep working with you, Miru."
"Yeah. Same here."
We had started together as new hires, after all, so the thought of never seeing her again left a faint ache behind.
Talking to her like this, I could understand why she was so popular. Her smile was beautiful.
Sung Yoon-ah stood up and held out her hand to me.
"We'll see each other again, right?"
"Of course."
I took her hand.
"Um...."
She looked like she was about to say something, but then other people showed up.
"Oh! Good, you're still here."
"So it's true you quit the company?"
It was Bae Geun-seok and Hwang Yeong-min, my fellow trainees.
Hwang Yeong-min looked furious as he spoke.
"How could they do that after you exposed the fund scandal? I can't accept it. Absolutely not."
Bae Geun-seok nodded beside him.
"That's right. If Miru hadn't spoken up, things would have become much worse."
"We can't just sit around after this."
"Exactly. We can't just sit around."
I looked at the two of them.
"So you'll write me a petition or something?"
They both froze, startled.
"Huh? A petition?"
"N-no, I mean... sure, let's write one!"
"Forget it."
If I tried to cover for the employee who blew the whistle, I might end up getting dragged down with him.
Seeing my classmates standing there healthy and unharmed made me feel that what I'd done hadn't been wrong.
"Thanks for everything. Take care, all of you."
* * *
One good thing about being unemployed was not having to go to work.
I was lying in bed, sleeping in, when my phone rang noisily.
Drowsily, I answered the call.
"Hello."
[It's me.]
Right. Who was "me" supposed to be?
Rubbing my eyes, I checked the screen and saw Jin Se-yeon's name.
"What's up?"
[Miru, were you the one who exposed the Primus Fund scandal?]
I'd said as much when I left that day, so it would have been stranger if she hadn't known.
"Yeah, I was."
[Did you do it because of me?]
"Huh?"
What was that supposed to mean?
[You exposed them because of me, right?]
"...."
She calls out of nowhere, and this is the nonsense she comes out with?
It sounded like she had made some spectacularly wrong assumption.
Just then, another call came in.
"Hold on. I've got another call, so I'll get back to you later."
I hung up and answered the new call.
"Hello."
[Am I speaking with Han Miru?]
"That's right."
[Yes. I'm reporter Min Hong-soo from Jungheung Economic Daily. If you have a moment, I'd like to request an interview..."]
"I don't have a moment."
I ended the call at once.
How the hell had they found out my number?
Messages were already coming in from Park Seunghun and the other trainees, along with people from all over. I couldn't be bothered to explain one by one, so I ignored them for the time being.
Rubbing my eyes again, I turned on the TV.
News about the Primus Fund was already pouring out of the news channels.
Because it was an unprecedented disaster caused by gross mismanagement, criticism of the government was pouring in, and the Financial Services Commission and the Financial Supervisory Service were busy shoving blame at each other.
President Oh Young-hwan's face appeared on the screen.
With a stiff expression, he spoke in a solemn voice.
"We ask that you respond firmly to financial crimes that harm the people. Thoroughly investigate this matter and punish those responsible so that something like this never happens again...."
Watching him, I muttered under my breath, "What a load of crap."
* * *
I headed home after a long time away.
My parents lived in Incheon.
Weekdays were too busy with work, weekends were too busy resting, and unless it was a holiday I rarely went home.
I wanted to hide the fact that I'd quit the company, but they would find out eventually anyway, so it was better to tell them myself.
When I rang the doorbell, my younger sister opened the front door.
"What brings you home?"
"You were here too?"
Her name was Han Sena.
She was six years younger than me and currently in college. Maybe because this was the first time I'd seen her since regressing, she looked incredibly young.
She really was still a fresh-faced college student.
"Why did you dye your hair?"
"What's wrong with my hair?"
Last time I'd seen her, it had been light brown, but now it was blond. That must've cost her a pretty penny.
"Are you studying hard?"
Sena answered in a sulk.
"Why do you care?"
Unlike me, who had managed to get into a top university, Korea University, Sena had barely made it into a four-year college. She didn't exactly have academic ambitions, so there was only one reason she had gone at all.
Because other people did.
As her older brother, I gave her some advice.
"You're paying expensive tuition, so you should study hard."
"Mind your own GPA."
The way she said it made it sound like she wasn't studying at all and was just running around having fun. Well, wasn't college just about getting the diploma anyway?
"If you tell me you're working hard, I was going to give you some pocket money."
At that, Sena's face lit up in an instant.
"Really? How much?"
"Nope. Just kidding."
Her expression immediately crumpled again.
"Ugh, what the hell? You're so annoying."
Yeah. This was what a close sibling conversation looked like.
If it were up to me, I'd love to hand her at least a fifty-thousand-won bill, but since I hadn't even received my severance pay, I had my own living to worry about.
Sena huffed in annoyance, shut the door, and went off to her room, while my mother welcomed her son home after a long absence.
"Oh! What are you doing here without even calling? Have you eaten dinner yet?"
"Not yet. Where's Father?"
"He'll be home soon."
While Mother prepared dinner, Sena sprawled on the sofa and played a game on her smartphone. A little later, Father came home from work.
"Welcome home."
"Miru, you're here."
The four of us sat around the dinner table together for the first time in a while.
Sena ate with one hand while continuously messing with her phone with the other. I couldn't even remember the last time I'd eaten a meal together with my family like this.
Compared to before my regression, both my mother and father looked ten years younger.
Was that only natural?
As we were eating, Mother casually held out her phone beside me.
"Take a look at this photo."
On the screen was a picture of a beautiful woman in her mid-twenties.
"Who is she?"
"She's the daughter of one of the ladies Mom goes to the sauna with. She's a middle school teacher now. Go meet her and talk for a bit."
So this was basically a blind date?
I hadn't even realized something this important was already being discussed!
Back in my first life, my parents had worried plenty because I never got married. Still, back then I was a bachelor in his thirties. This time was different.
"No, thanks."
"No, what do you mean no? She's pretty and has a nice personality. When I said you worked at DA Securities, her mother got interested too."
"...."
If I told them I'd quit DA Securities, maybe they'd lose that interest right away?
Mother kept urging me to keep meeting her when she suddenly seemed to remember something.
"Oh, right! How's your company these days?"
"What about it?"
"Didn't some guy expose the company's bad assets and cause a huge uproar? I heard several hundred billion won vanished. They're not going to shut down, are they?"
Sena, clearly hearing this for the first time, widened her eyes.
"Really? Who would do something that clueless?"
For the record, my little sister never watched the news or read articles.
"There was chaos on the news all day for the past few days. They said it was some new employee?"
"Whoa! What kind of rookie would go and do that?"
"They said he even got into a collar-grabbing fight with the chairman's son at the company. Did you see it?"
"....What?"
Sena went on, excited.
"That's insane. Was he a complete misfit? You know, the kind of troublemaker they talk about in the military? A pariah at the company? A problem employee?"
"...."
Please stop your hate campaign against whistleblowers.
Mother took my hand tightly and said, "Our son must never do that at work. Do you understand?"
"...."
I already did.
I was wondering how to explain this fact when Father spoke with grave dignity.
"What's wrong with exposing that the fund was a scam? The securities firm that sold it while pretending otherwise was the one at fault. I saw on the news that if he hadn't come forward, the bad assets would've gotten even worse. If you look at it that way, that employee saved the company and saved other people too."
Father kept up with the news and articles, but he seemed to have no idea that I was the whistleblower. That made sense, since my name wasn't on the report.
Sena tilted her head and asked, "Even so, isn't it wrong for an employee to go around exposing company business like that?"
"If something is wrong, it's only natural to correct it. That person exposed it knowing he'd suffer consequences, for the sake of his conscience and society. It's people like that who make corruption and crime disappear and turn a country clean. So our society should look at whistleblowers with warmth."
"Father...."
I felt moved enough to tear up. Sena kept pushing on.
"Then you'd be okay if it was me doing that?"
Father nodded proudly.
"Of course. If our child did that, I'd praise him for doing well."
At that, I gathered my courage and spoke quickly.
"That was me, Father."
"Hm? What do you mean?"
I explained everything that had happened to my family.
Of course, I left out the part about regression.
My family was shocked when they heard that I'd discovered the bad assets, exposed them, and quit the company.
Father looked at me with a deeply flustered expression.
"Have you lost your mind?"
"Pardon?"
"No, when something like that happens, you report it to your superiors. Why did you step in yourself?"
"I did report it. They acted like they didn't know anything."
"Then you should've acted like you didn't know anything too."
".... Isn't that a little different from what you just said?"
What happened to society's warm regard?