Chapter 80
Helping the EST Group was something James could hardly have imagined.
“My brother is going to handle Dad’s work?”
“Why? You think I can’t do it?”
“You’re a magician.”
She had no idea what a magician could actually do.
“Which means I can make even magical things happen.”
“Then just tell me. How exactly are you planning to get on my parents’ good side? Hm?”
James leaned in as though he were about to whisper in her ear, then murmured softly, “It’s a secret, you lovely little lady.”
“Hmph. Tch!”
Su-ji pouted as if she were offended, but the corners of her lips gave her away; she was smiling, unable to hide her delight.
“If Su-ji asks for my number, Chairman Kim might call me in. If that happens, I’ll dress up properly and go.”
“Ugh... just thinking about it makes me miserable.”
Just picturing her father summoning James and glaring at him made the sky seem to darken.
“That could be the end of us right there.”
“That won’t happen.”
There was nothing impossible for the magician who moved the world.
Chairman Kim Seong-oh is one of my targets. There’s no reason to save my magic for later.
James was the only magician in the world who could bend people to his will.
“I want to know the reason you’re so confident! Just tell me a little!”
“Nope. If you know everything, it won’t be fun.”
“Aah! You’re impossible!”
“If you’re frustrated, then let’s go eat! Your brother’s treating.”
“That’s something you say when you’re broke, not when you’re frustrated! If I’m upset, shopping is the answer!”
“Really? Then should we go shopping instead?”
“James!”
Su-ji hadn’t exactly been in the mood to go shopping idly, but once James offered to buy her something, even she ran out of words.
“I’ll buy you a decent car.”
“……”
At the mention of James buying her a car, Su-ji remembered what he had said about being rich.
“Brother. Forget everything else and just tell me this honestly.”
“What?”
“How much? Just how much money do you have?”
“Hmm....”
James estimated the scale of the wealth she thought he had, then answered. The only wealth Su-ji knew for certain was the twenty million dollars he had earned from selling King Arthur’s gold coins.
“At the level of assets you know about me, maybe multiply it by a hundred? That is, if you’re excluding the house I bought in Seoul.”
“A, a hundred times?”
“I’m still nowhere near done. I’m only going to keep growing from here.”
“……”
After confirming the scale of James’s assets, Su-ji sprang to her feet and grabbed his wrist.
“What are you waiting for? Let’s go!”
“...Where?”
“My house.”
“Huh? What are we going home for right now?”
“We need to introduce you. I’ll say, ‘This is James, the guy I’m seeing!’”
Before she knew how much he had, she hadn’t been confident. But now that she understood the scale of James’s wealth, it seemed stranger that she wouldn’t be allowed to date him.
“Pfft. You’ll only make things worse if you do that. Do you think they’ll be happy hearing you were seeing someone before you even introduced him?”
“...Tch. Maybe.”
But Su-ji clung more tightly to James’s arm, as though she had no intention of letting him slip away.
“Don’t go running off anywhere. Stay right by my side!”
“Where would I even run off to....”
“Now that I know your secret, I’m worried!”
She had seen the possibility. The possibility that he could be someone she might promise her future to. That was why she was clinging to James even more fiercely.
“That’s why I told you not to ask.”
“Tch. Tch.”
“Let’s go buy that car. I’ll pick something sturdy and safe.”
Now that she understood James was rich enough to give her a car, Su-ji didn’t refuse.
“Pick me something pretty that suits me! You can drive the sturdy car, brother.”
“No. A sturdy car that can keep my lovely princess safe!”
“...Pfft. Fine, I can’t help it. I’ll allow it, Prince.”
“Hahaha.”
Thanks to the mana changes caused by Su-ji’s wildly shifting emotions, James was practically dazzled.
Now there’s only a single golden sun shining.
Su-ji’s feelings, which had swept away even the smallest worries lingering in her heart, were full of deep love and hope for the future.
“Let’s go!”
“Let’s go!”
The two lovers walked out of the cafe with brisk, eager steps. Their fingers were tightly interlaced, as though neither intended to ever let go of the other.
◇◇◇◆◇◇◇
James signed for the large SUV he and Su-ji had chosen together, then returned home.
The vehicle cost more than three hundred million won, and Su-ji had tried to stop him, saying it was too expensive, but James simply held out the VIP card issued by Citi Bank and paid in full. He even ordered two of them, saying he wanted them as a couple’s set, so the total came to more than six hundred million won, but James didn’t feel the slightest pinch.
“Hah.”
Just thinking of her made him smile. No matter how much he spent on her, it seemed he would never regret a single won.
“I really am hopeless.”
That was the moment he realized just how deep his feelings ran. But even that realization felt good. Admitting that he had genuinely fallen in love was itself a happy thing.
Bzzt. Bzzt.
When he checked the call coming in, James answered in a bright voice.
“Chief of the Office? Good evening.”
“James! What in the world happened here?”
It seemed the events James had set in motion at Bari Port in Italy were only now being brought under control.
“Well... I can’t say I know the details myself.”
“Sigh.”
“I was curious too, actually. Would you mind explaining?”
“You really don’t know?”
“Would I be asking if I did?”
After that, Joseph, the chief of the office, began to lay out everything he had managed to confirm.
“On the day I was contacted by you, brother James....”
Trusting James’s words, Joseph had immediately asked the Italian police to dispatch officers to Bari Port, and information had come in that intruders who had broken into the Vatican Museum were hiding there.
If it had been an ordinary citizen reporting it, the Italian police might not have bothered to move so quickly, but the fact that the call had come from the Vatican’s chief of the office changed everything. Officially, Vatican City and the Italian authorities were separate states, so there was no need to explain the finer details, and the Italian police were able to send the Bari regional force to the port.
Then, in the course of that operation, further reports arrived that civilians who had heard gunfire at the docks had already called the fire department and the police station, and the situation escalated to the point that a special unit was dispatched as well.
“...So they moved in, arrested the men, and began questioning them, and it was determined that an unknown figure had fought them. Someone who single-handedly crushed an armed criminal organization.”
“Oh? A remarkable hero appeared, then?”
“Ahem. In any case, all of the Vatican artifacts stolen by the criminal organization were recovered. However....”
During the investigation, Frank’s escape from the dock warehouse was captured on CCTV, and they even confirmed that he fled out to sea on a jet boat.
“...The problem is that an explosion was detected along the maritime route taken by the head of the criminal organization. A satellite surveillance camera caught the scene, though only faintly.”
“……”
James hadn’t expected satellites to come into the picture.
Am I caught?
“Apparently, when an explosion above a certain threshold occurs, the satellites keep watch. But because it happened so suddenly, the timing was delayed a little. Still, they did confirm the boat sank after the blast.”
“Ah....”
Fortunately, it seemed the moment he used magic had not been captured by the satellite.
“The Italian police checked his final call records and the boat’s GPS location left at the harbor center, and confirmed that it matched the explosion site. They also determined that he had taken the Holy Grail and the Holy Paten separately....”
“Good heavens. Then the Holy Grail is in the sea....”
James had already guessed that the Italian police would discover Frank had the Holy Grail.
That much they should obviously be able to figure out. That’s what makes them police.
“It will probably take years to search the sunken boat on the Adriatic seabed and recover the Holy Grail. There’s no guarantee it can even be retrieved. If the current drags it away... it may be lost forever.”
“Still, I’m glad the artifacts were found. The Vatican will surely recover the Holy Grail as well.”
He didn’t know when, but the Vatican would eventually get back the Holy Grail and the Holy Paten.
“I believe the hero who dealt with them was you, James.”
“That’s a stretch, isn’t it? I was on a plane that evening.”
“...Yes. It doesn’t make sense. But I can’t think otherwise.”
Otherwise, there was no way James could have known their location or that gunfire had broken out. Besides, James had mentioned that he’d been practicing shooting lately.
“Chief of the office. Right now, I think you should be thinking about the future, not the past. What difference does it make who dealt with them?”
“That is true. The future matters most. So... His Holiness the Pope has ordered us to provide unlimited support to Brother James, who rendered great service in recovering the Vatican Museum’s lost artifacts.”
The future James had spoken of meant strengthening security and controlling the insiders so the same thing would not happen again, but the “future” Joseph was talking about was repayment to James, who had played a major role in resolving the incident.
“...Oh. Did you report this to His Holiness?”
“It is an undisputed fact that Brother James reported they were hiding at Bari Port.”
“Is that all?”
“Of course, I added a little of my personal inference to the report.”
It was an inference that James had faced the criminal organization alone, neutralized everyone, and then informed Joseph directly.
“Ah... that’s a bit....”
“It has already been reported.”
“……”
But James didn’t want anything from the Vatican.
“Unlimited support, huh... I don’t really need much support, though. It’s not as if I did something so great that I deserve repayment.”
“You also helped recover the Holy Grail before, and we still haven’t repaid you for that....”
Although the Holy Grail and the Holy Paten had entered Vatican hands, they had been stolen by the criminal organization.
“Let’s leave out the Holy Grail that ended up at the bottom of the sea.”
And James had already recovered it again.
“And there was the matter of helping us rescue Cardinal Augustino....”
“I had no idea he was even alive.”
Thanks to that bastard David, who had disguised himself as Cardinal Augustino, the criminal organization’s plan had been stopped in advance, but James himself had not known that Cardinal Augustino was alive. More than that, even after James stopped Plan A, the criminals had still executed Plan B and succeeded in stealing the Vatican relics.
Of course, I did stop them again in the end....
“And there was also the matter of using the miraculous healing holy water on Father Stefano.”
On that point, even James could not deny his contribution.
“...Ah. That was indeed a serious matter. A priest’s faith was restored, too.”
“...That is embarrassing to admit, but yes.”
“If the Vatican is offering help, I’ll think about what I might need help with.”
“His Holiness was quite explicit. Provide unconditional, unlimited help.”
James had not even been seeking help, yet he already felt grateful.
“Haha. Then perhaps I should send my regards to the Holy Father sometime.”
“As long as it isn’t prayer time, I’m sure he’d be happy to receive you.”
“Still, ‘unlimited help’ is a little awkward. I can’t even imagine what I should ask for.”
At that point, James had no idea how he could make use of the Holy See.
“First, there’s the Vatican’s international influence.”
“Would I ever need to use influence against a nation? I’m just a private citizen.”
“...That is true.”
Joseph then brought up the material side of things, which might not have seemed so important.
“As a man of the cloth, it is a little embarrassing to say, but the Vatican’s financial power is world-class.”
“Ah. Good for you.”
“...The Vatican National Wealth Fund is among the best in the world. Each individual portfolio begins at no less than five hundred million dollars, and if you add all the separate funds together, it’s on the order of fifty billion dollars.”
“Yes. Yes....”
James already had a rough sense of how much wealth the Vatican held. With branches, so to speak, across the globe, the monthly donations it received were comparable to the tax revenue a nation collected from its people.
...Wait. A national wealth fund? The Vatican’s national wealth fund that can provide unlimited help without asking questions or making a fuss?
A fund like that could be useful in his plan to swallow TY Group whole.
“The fund is usually managed by a financial firm, but the actual oversight is handled by me....”
“Chief of the office. I think I may have something I’ll be asking you for soon.”
“Is that so?”
“I’ll contact you again when the time comes.”
“I’ll be waiting with pleasure, Brother James.”
James ended the call with Joseph and walked over to the whiteboard set up in his room. On it were TY Telecom’s current share structure, the stakes he needed to purchase, and the Citi Bank deposits that would serve as his source of funds. And now, alongside them, he added the Vatican National Wealth Fund’s fifty billion dollars.
“I don’t think I’ll ever run short of acquisition capital.”
All that remained was to move forward once Park Jin-tae brought back his plan.