The Con Artist Became a Beautiful Girl
There once was a con artist named Kang Sunwoo.
Age: twenty-nine.
If you had to sum up his life in a single line, it would be this: a life where money multiplied every time he opened his mouth.
What does that mean, exactly?
For starters, he was handsome.
People told him constantly he should debut as a celebrity or a model, and when his face made the news in big bold headlines, fan clubs actually formed around him.
And his way with words?
He was a genius at scratching exactly where people itched — a silver tongue that always knew what someone wanted to hear.
Looks and eloquence.
Those were the weapons that let an orphan who didn't even know his own parents' faces walk out into the world the moment he turned twenty and, within nine years, buy a house in Hannam-dong.
And the direction he swung those weapons… was fraud.
Age twenty.
His first job was as a host.
He made a name for himself as the ace of one of Gangnam's top host bars. Every time he whispered something sweet into the ear of some older sister or another, she would freely order a multi-million-won set of premium liquor without batting an eye.
That was when it hit him.
Ah.
Money can be this easy to make.
Just dip your hands a little in the dirty water, and it pours in like this.
Vanity took root.
The designer brands he draped himself in to impress those older women stopped being props and became habit — then hobby.
He made a lot of money.
But a host bar's income was never enough to fill that vanity. Even when the glass was full, he drained it and wanted it filled again. When one glass felt too small, he swapped it for a bigger one, or simply grabbed another glass entirely.
Once he got a little sharper, he started expanding the board for real.
Ah.
I don't even need the boss skimming off the top. I can just fleece the older sisters myself, can't I?
He changed fields.
To romance scams.
To sell the fake identity of a foreign-educated elite, he learned English until he sounded like a native. He loaded the title of a promising IT startup CEO into his digital business card app and carried it everywhere. To pitch investment opportunities in front of his marks, he stocked up on industry knowledge.
It was all on YouTube, after all.
For a host-bar ace who'd never had a single won that didn't come out of some woman's wallet, that free archive of knowledge was more than enough to pass as an expert.
After that, he approached wealthy women through social media.
Men?
Sure, they probably had relatively more money. But he wasn't gay, and getting a woman to open her wallet was a far lower difficulty setting.
"Baby. In my whole life, I've never met anyone as pure and clear-hearted as you. Why don't we invest in our future together?"
The voice that confessed love and promised a future didn't hold a single grain of truth. Everything in it was a lie, engineered to clean the other person out.
Did they fall for it?
Of course most of them did.
Plenty didn't, sure. But did you know this?
The ones who are convinced they haven't been fooled are always the easiest to fleece.
A few of those older sisters handed him those enormous sums as casually as pocket money. Even knowing he was running a scam, they paid him just so they could parade him around as a designer accessory when they met their friends.
With those women, he played the role of a rental boyfriend. The ones who actually fell for it, he cleaned out thoroughly.
"Woojin… why do you need that much money…?"
"All my cash is in dollars right now. If I convert at this exchange rate, I'd take a hit. Noona, just this once. Please."
"O-okay. Um, maybe an IOU—"
"The second this clears, we'll go look at a place to live together. Right away."
"A p-place to live together…?"
"Yeah. I love you, noona. Wait — what did you just say?"
"…Nothing, Woojin. I love you too."
One wedge of I love you and a single night. That alone stacked hundreds of millions of won into his account.
"His name is Woojin! Jeong Woojin! …What? There's no one by that name? Officer, please…!"
The moment the money hit, he vanished without a trace.
He cleaned out three or four big scores that way — and then he met her.
A club in Gangnam.
He'd deliberately gone somewhere with no connection to his old host-bar circuit, working the VIP rooms, scanning for prey. One woman lit up on his radar.
A woman in her early thirties, carrying herself with a cool, intellectual air. Wrapped in designer brands, with a sharp glint in her eyes — she looked like a wealthy madam, or maybe a chaebol daughter.
"Here alone?"
No mark of a ring on her left ring finger. He went straight into the approach.
"That wallpaper — Millet's The Gleaners, right? Are you an artist? I actually majored in fine art a while back."
"I don't think you're old enough to be calling yourself oppa."
"Well, you're not old enough for me to call you noona, either."
"…Fine, fine. Champagne first."
He tilted his glass with easy naturalness, mixing subtle touches and humor until her guard came down.
How many months was it?
More than four, easily — nights spent together, the long game of working her, keeping her just on the edge of falling so he could finally clean her out.
Pride, mostly.
And the ten billion won he'd glimpsed, just once, in her bank account.
He was thinking, just a little more and I've got her — when:
"Kang Sunwoo. I'm Prosecutor Seo Minhee."
"What the fuck?"
Turns out he was the one who'd been worked the whole time.
"Are you kidding me — a Korean prosecutor, in a club—?!"
"That's what you get for hitting on an undercover prosecutor investigating drug crimes."
"A prosecutor going undercover…? No, hang on, back then you looked like a total club girl!"
"Noona's a pretty good actress. That's how I got into the club undercover in the first place. As you can see — the face does some of the work."
She turned out to be a sitting prosecutor with the Supreme Prosecutors' Office, infamous for how relentlessly she pursued a case. Just as he had hidden his name and his truth, she had hidden everything about herself while digging up everything about him.
"You made a lot of women cry, huh? Gangnam was just the baseline — Gangseo, Uijeongbu. You even went on road trips to Daejeon and Busan?"
"Ah…"
"Still. Given everything we've been through, I didn't call for backup."
"……"
"Sunwoo. Noona's not exactly a saint, you know? So what's it going to be?"
"What's what going to be?"
"Marry me, or go to prison?"
"I'd rather kill myself than get married."
"You little shit."
And just like that, the same hands that had once stroked him with love clicked a pair of silver cuffs around his wrists.
Thoroughly, utterly cleaned out, he went to prison.
Three years.
Short if you called it short, long if you called it long. When he walked out, his wallet held not a single won. Credit destroyed. Blacklisted across the industry. The only card left for turning his life around was—
"Sunwoo. You've got a way with words. Want to work a job with us?"
Shoulders from the underworld he'd met inside.
Back when he was an orphan.
He'd always liked art, even as a kid. If you asked whether he'd piled up art knowledge just to approach women… well, that was part of it. Either way, he had a decent eye, and he knew roughly how the underworld turned.
So he signed on.
With a high-end art fraud ring backed by major gangsters.
Out of prison and straight back into scams?
"Sunwoo."
"Yes, boss."
"You pull this one off, a clean one billion drops as your cut."
That was far too much money to walk away from just to wash his hands clean.
"What am I selling?"
"Several forgeries. The most expensive one is… this. You know Greek mythology? A masterpiece of the prophetess from those stories — and this forgery is an absolute stunner."
The job was simple: play the role of an appraiser and sell a handful of forgeries to a mark at premium prices.
"Honestly, you can fail to move the rest. But this one has to sell. No exceptions."
The centerpiece was a painting of the ill-fated prophetess from Greek myth: Portrait of Cassandra.
"The ones in front are fine as bait. Those only clear one or two hundred million at best. This one's appraisal value tops five billion."
In the painting, Cassandra wore mysterious silver hair cascading down her back, her blue eyes fixed on empty air in the despair of a woman whose every word went unbelieved.
"…It really is a forgery?"
"Yeah. Why?"
"No. Nothing."
There was something strangely magnetic about those eyes.
"Was Cassandra actually silver-haired with blue eyes, though?"
"How would I know? With this stuff, the painter's name is what sets the price anyway."
"Fair enough. A modern reinterpretation of Cassandra… got it."
Artistry.
At the time, that meant nothing to him. What mattered was tens of billions in sale price — and the one billion that would fall to him as seed money for a fresh start.
"Don't worry, boss. The number of women I've cleaned out with this mouth alone could fill a truck. Getting a signature on a contract is nothing."
"I'm counting on you."
And so he went to the deal.
The day of the transaction.
In a high-end gallery set up on a remote mountain, in a room overlooking a lake, he faced the chairman of a rising chaebol conglomerate.
She was beautiful.
If she hadn't been the mark he was dumping forgeries on — if that risk hadn't been there — she was the kind of woman he might have worked and cleaned out just for the sport of it.
"Chairman. This is—"
He gave it everything.
Three years of honing his rhetoric in prison had made his speech even more precise than before. It was more than enough to take the chairman in.
He was fine.
The problem was the thugs who'd prepared the forgeries.
"Chairman! You've been deceived! These bastards are con men!"
Right before the seal hit the contract, the chairman's secretary burst in.
"We confirmed the real Portrait of Cassandra at the appraisal institute! This is a fake!"
"…These sons of bitches? Hey! Take them apart!"
Bad luck.
He'd figured that if the deal went sideways, he'd just go back to prison — but he'd picked the wrong mark.
"Break their legs. Keep the organs intact."
"Boss! You said they were just a chaebol!"
"Fuck… I didn't know!!"
Gangsters stormed the gallery. Chaos erupted, and he fought just to stay alive.
"Ghk—!"
"Make sure you grab that one."
"Aaaagh!!"
He smashed through the thugs charging him and bolted on instinct toward the windows. He yanked the curtains aside, hunting for an escape — but under the chairman's pointing finger, too many men came at him at once. He couldn't hold them all.
Thud. Crack.
Seven of them, maybe. He managed to put them down, but cornered, with more attacks stabbing in without pause, he couldn't keep absorbing them.
Crash!
Something flew through the window, and the press of bodies shoved him out through the glass.
Crack—!
The sound of shattering glass. Even now he couldn't say exactly how it happened, but his body was thrown clear of the gallery.
Outside was — the lake.
Splash!
He fell. Before he could even swim for shore, something slammed into his head.
Grrrk…
Strength drained from his whole body. His vision blurred.
What he saw was the thing that had struck his skull — a picture frame.
As painting after painting sank into the lake around him, he saw her.
Even in the deep dark of the water, even through the foam that seemed to turn red, the witch of prophecy shone bright.
Ah.
At the end of my life, the last thing I get to see is a cursed prophetess.
And then, in the instant he thought, but our situations aren't really the same, are they—
"You who spent a lifetime clouding the world's eyes with lies.
Now you shall see only the truth —
yet none shall ever believe the truths you speak."
"……!!"
In the fading edges of his consciousness, that voice tore through his eardrums — and it was the last memory he retained of his previous life.
And then.
"Congratulations! Whew — a perfectly healthy, beautiful baby girl!"
"…Waa?"
Kang Sunwoo died.
"Oh my? She must take after her mother — look how clear and blue those eyes are."
In a world without Kang Sunwoo, a newborn child was given a name: Eun Harin.
That was me.