novelraw Chapter 101 : This Was Not a Deal, but the Last Mercy I Bestowed
Chapter 101 : This Was Not a Deal, but the Last Mercy I Bestowed
Chapter 101: This Was Not a Deal, but the Last Mercy I Bestowed
The man who had been subdued let out a painful groan and failed to answer. I twisted his arm even harder and asked again.
“Last time I’m asking. Who are you.”
The man still did not answer. I grabbed him by the collar and yanked him out to check his face.
Only after dragging him into a spot where the faint glow of a streetlamp cut through the darkness did a familiar face come into view.
‘This bastard…….’
It was a face I had definitely seen before. In the secret office Jeong Tae-soo had prepared for the Daegung stock short-selling operation.
The man had been one of the subordinates who assisted Dan Tae-geon at his side.
“Why are you chasing me? Did Dan Tae-geon order you to.”
At my interrogation, the bastard spat out curses instead of an answer.
“You fucking dog……! Let go of my hand!”
Since it was not the answer I wanted, I put even more strength into the hand twisting his arm. Crack— an unpleasant sound of bone warping rang out.
“Gaaah!”
“I’ll ask again. Was it Dan Tae-geon.”
“Yeah, you son of a bitch! The boss told me to keep a close eye on your movements! To see what kind of shit you’re plotting with that Cheon Sang-do bastard!”
Driven by pain, he screamed and confessed.
“Make sure you deliver this clearly to Dan Tae-geon.”
Without the slightest concern, I whispered into his ear in a voice as cold as ice.
“Tell him never to unleash dogs behind me again. If you catch my eye even once more, then whether it’s you or anyone else, I’ll snap their neck on the spot. Got it?”
“Go tell him yourself!”
He still hadn’t come to his senses. I twisted his arm all the way through. Once again, a spine-chilling sound rang out, followed by a shrill scream of pain.
“Aaagh!”
“Next is your ankle.”
Perhaps he hadn’t expected me to really break his arm, because fear flashed across his eyes.
Trying to play the hunting dog without even that much resolve. Pathetic to the extreme.
“Tell Dan Tae-geon. Do you understand?”
The man, pale with terror, nodded his head frantically.
After looking down at him with contempt, I tossed him onto the ground and straightened up.
“Get lost.”
Clutching his broken arm, the man staggered away and disappeared into the darkness. I watched his retreating figure with cold eyes.
‘Dan Tae-geon, you petty bastard.’
Clicking my tongue, I brushed the dust off my clothes. Once the man vanished from sight, I started walking again.
My destination was the confiscated house in Pil-dong that I had obtained through Elder Hwang’s introduction.
After turning into a few narrow alleyways untouched by the lights of Myeong-dong, the dead end finally appeared.
A tall gray stone wall completely blocked out any outside view.
The building was overgrown with ivy, making it look at first glance like an abandoned house left untouched for decades. However, the heavy black wooden gate, well-oiled and solid, told a different story—that this was not a deserted place.
It seemed Ma Dong-jin had sent people to carry out minimal maintenance while I was away in Busan.
I took an old key from inside my coat and unlocked the padlock. Without so much as a creak, the gate opened smoothly.
‘He fixed it up decently.’
All the weeds in the yard had been cleared, and the old wooden porch had been polished to the point of gleaming.
The house, which had felt eerie enough for ghosts to appear when I first saw it, now possessed the bare minimum warmth for someone to live in.
I took off my shoes and stepped up onto the porch. Then, without hesitation, I opened the door to the innermost tatami room.
When I lifted a single worn tatami mat that looked fused to the floor, a chill of underground air rose up.
A secret vault, said to have been built by the Japanese to hide valuables, revealed itself. I carefully descended the narrow staircase leading down.
The underground space was wider than I had expected. There, boxes of gold bars I had purchased from Elder Hwang were already stacked neatly.
I set down the old leather bag I had brought from Busan next to the gold bar boxes.
When I opened the bag, stiff bundles of dollars appeared, along with the small amount of won I had left.
It was the money remaining after exchanging currency for President Wang and the Overseas Chinese and covering various expenses.
On one side of the underground wall, there was another safe embedded there, far sturdier-looking than the gold bar boxes.
I familiarly turned the dial and opened the heavy door. Inside were thick envelopes holding a considerable amount of dollar bundles, along with land deeds and building registration documents I had purchased through Teacher Park.
I transferred the remaining dollars from the bag into the safe.
After closing the safe and standing up, a painting leaning diagonally against the wall, covered in a white cloth, caught my eye.
Carefully pulling the cloth away, an overwhelming aura burst forth, as if the massive rain-soaked rocks of Inwangsan might come alive at any moment.
For a while, I silently appreciated the majestic presence emanating from the painting, then slowly closed my eyes.
In my mind, I began organizing the cards I held, one by one.
‘First, liquid assets.’
The dollars left in my hands amounted to about 400,000 dollars, and the won did not even reach one million. Everything else was tied up in banks.
‘Next, tangible assets.’
The 250 kilograms of gold bars safeguarded here, and the buildings and land in Myeong-dong, Seongbuk-dong, and Hannam-dong that I had purchased through Teacher Park. And the vast tracts of land in the Yeongdong area, which would become the future Gangnam.
I opened my eyes. Then I looked down at the bankbooks laid out before me.
Though they were still nothing more than pieces of paper for now, they included the bankbooks of the Busan Overseas Chinese, which would soon turn into an enormous amount of cash and return to me.
It was an amount of assets so large that it was hard to believe it had been achieved by a beggar bastard who had been rolling around under the Cheongnyangni bridge just a few months ago.
But I couldn’t be satisfied with this.
“Still not enough.”
I gently covered the painting again with a soft cloth. The air of the cold underground vault felt rather comfortable.
The next evening, I headed to the meeting place, Songjukgwan (松竹館), a yojeong in Myeong-dong. When I had asked Cheon Sang-do for a quiet place, this was what he had managed to reserve after asking around.
From the outside, it looked like an ordinary high-end restaurant, but this place was one of the hideouts Yang Sobo had hidden in Seoul. Cheon Sang-do wouldn’t know that fact, of course.
In the private room I was guided into, an old man was already seated. Once called the richest man in Gyeongseong, a giant of the business world—yet now a man who had lost everything and stood on the brink of collapse—Chairman Lee Jin-seong of Daejin Trading Company.
His expensive suit couldn’t hide his circumstances, and his deep wrinkles and unfocused eyes clearly conveyed his despair.
A table of drinks had already been set before him, but he was waiting for me without even touching his glass.
“Nice to meet you. My name is Baek Min-woo.”
I bowed my head first in greeting.
He merely scanned me up and down without saying a word. He clearly didn’t like the idea of negotiating with a greenhorn barely twenty years old.
I quietly sat down across from him. An awkward silence flowed. The first to speak was Chairman Lee Jin-seong.
“You’re younger than I expected. How old are you?”
His voice was rough, like worn-out metal scraping against itself.
“I just turned twenty this year.”
“Twenty, huh. That was my age when I first opened a fabric shop…….”
As if sinking into memories of the past, he closed his eyes and fell into contemplation.
An old man still unable to escape his former glory. Strangely, he overlapped with what I myself had looked like before I died. He opened his eyes again.
“I heard about you from President Cheon.”
“Shall we eat first, Chairman?”
At my words, the gisaeng who had been standing quietly approached and filled Lee Jin-seong’s glass with liquor.
“I’d like to dine quietly, so could you step aside.”
“Yes. Please call us if you need anything.”
All the gisaeng left. I gestured toward the table lavishly set with appetizing dishes and urged him on.
“Let’s eat first, then talk business.”
At my calm demeanor, his shoulders twitched. A hint of discomfort showed. Perhaps he thought I was mocking him.
But I had no intention of rushing. A starving beast waits until its prey collapses from exhaustion on its own.
In the end, when the Korean set meal was about half gone, Chairman Lee Jin-seong could no longer hold back and opened his mouth.
“Now then, tell me what you want.”
At last, the time had come. At those words, I put down my chopsticks and wiped my mouth with the handkerchief beside me.
“Daejin Trading Company. Sell it to me.”
“Huh……. Do you even have the ability to buy it? I heard roughly from President Cheon, but are you really saying you have enough capital to acquire Daejin Trading Company?”
Instead of answering, I took a document envelope from my chest and slid it across the table. It was a summary of Daejin Trading Company’s assets and liabilities that Cheon Sang-do had organized.
Lee Jin-seong’s expression hardened stiffly as he took out the documents and checked them.
“Daejin Trading Company’s total assets, including the headquarters building, amount to about 200 million won. If you add the bank debt and the fines owed to the government, it exceeds 80 million won. On the books, there’s over 100 million won in net asset value, but…….”
I looked straight into his eyes as I spoke.
“At this very moment, the value of Daejin Trading Company is negative. It’s nothing more than a pile of debt no one will buy, and a political time bomb the government could detonate at any moment.”
Humiliation and defeat were clearly etched across Lee Jin-seong’s face.
I brought my glass to my lips and drained it in one go.
“With your credit, Chairman, raising emergency funds in the Myeong-dong private lending market would’ve been nothing. If you were the Chairman from a year ago.”
But reality was cruel. The timing, too, was atrocious.
“Right after the currency reform, even the Myeong-dong private lending market suffered a cash crunch. The only one still lending was President Dan Tae-geon, backed by Jeong Tae-soo. Of course, he demanded murderous interest rates.”
I paused for a moment. Even during that brief silence, Lee Jin-seong’s expression changed several times.
“Even that Dan Tae-geon would’ve flatly rejected your request. A greedy man like him would never act against the wishes of his backer.”
That also meant Dan Tae-geon’s capacity was small. If it had been me in the past, I would’ve lent the money without hesitation—and then stripped not only Daejin Trading Company but even the last grain of rice left in Chairman Lee Jin-seong’s storehouse.
“For someone once called the greatest tycoon in Gyeongseong, it must’ve felt like the world had completely changed.”
“……Are you mocking me right now?”
“I have no intention of mocking or criticizing the path you walked, Chairman.”
I placed a small leather bag I had set aside onto the table.
With a click, I released the lock. Inside the leather bag was two million won in the new currency, the ‘won’. It was money I had managed to obtain with difficulty through Cheon Sang-do.
To a man whose funds were all frozen by the currency reform, that crisp bundle of cash must have felt like the devil’s temptation.
“I’ll take on all of your burdens for you. The bank debt, the fines owed to the government—I’ll handle everything.”
I slid the bag toward him. He alternated his gaze between the leather bag and me, then let out a hollow laugh.
“Haha……. Two million won? Young man, are you mocking me now? You’re saying you’ll swallow all of Daejin Trading Company with money that wouldn’t even cover the suit and shoes I’m wearing?”
“This isn’t mockery. This isn’t a transaction—it’s the last mercy I’m extending to you.”
At my icy words, the smile vanished from his face.
“You have no other choices, Chairman. You can take this money, forget everything, and leave—or you can lose everything and end your life in a cold prison. One of the two. Ah, before that, all your private assets will be confiscated.”
A heavy silence fell over the room again. Chairman Lee Jin-seong stared straight through me with a face full of thoughts.
“The choice is yours. Take Daejin Trading Company with you into hell, or spend the remainder of your days in peace.”
I drove the final nail in firmly.
“I’ve heard you can’t even pay wages, so all the mines and factories have shut down. You should think about the employees who are still left.”