Chapter 30
I made another friend.
A friend with a pretty big age gap.
Of course, that didn't mean I could treat Old Man Kim Seok-chun the way I treated Han Yu-na.
I couldn't exactly take that old man onto a trampoline.
So we had fun in a different way.
"You punk!? Hey! Is it okay to play like that?!"
"I can't hear you over someone who's been dealt pi-bak and gwang-bak."
I figured that if Old Man Kim Seok-chun spoke down to me, maybe I could talk down to him too.
Of course, anyone who saw that would call me a rude bastard with no parents.
It wasn't exactly wrong, either.
But I am an orphan who doesn't want to live like one.
So I decided to keep being polite.
"You don't even go easy on your elders?"
"Nope. Pi-bak."
"So there really is no respect for your elders..."
"Yep. Gwang-bak."
I took seventy thousand won from the old man's dejected wallet.
In games like this, you can't afford to hold back.
Old man, just consider it a good experience.
"Sigh."
"Ahahaha!! You're so much fun, old man!!"
Hong Siyeon, who was sitting beside us, laughed out loud.
"Hmm. Miss. Don't get close to this guy. He'll strip you down to your underwear and take everything."
"Noa? Heeey. Noa, are you thinking of taking off my panties?"
Hong Siyeon half-closed her eyes like a sly fox and licked her lips.
I felt like a rabbit placed right in front of a fox.
"How could I ever do that to the boss?"
"Heehee. There you have it."
"Honestly."
Grumbling, Old Man Kim Seok-chun sipped his coffee.
The coffee he was drinking was the instant mix coffee I bought.
And the mug he was holding was one I'd bought at Daiso.
Yeah.
We were hanging out at my place.
The reason was simple.
After finding his younger sibling, Old Man Kim Seok-chun had been meeting them often, then suddenly came to see me.
Normally I'd just go to a neighborhood cafe, but if something happened there again, there'd really be nowhere else left for the cafes in this neighborhood.
So I just called him over to my place.
And a little later, Hong Siyeon showed up with food. After that, we ended up playing go-stop while chatting and hanging out.
I was going to call Cheolhon over too and tell him to take the gwang or whatever, but surprisingly he said he'd never even played go-stop, so the three of us just played.
"Aigoo. Enough. Enough."
After losing seventy thousand won, he grumbled and overturned the board.
I was already about to stop anyway.
Because it was time for my stream.
"Ah. It's stream time."
"Streaming? Ah, right. You said you do internet broadcasts? Then we'll head out."
They could've just stayed in the living room, though.
"So what brings you here?"
"Ahem. Well... have you perhaps thought about going to Japan?"
"Japan?"
I don't even have a passport.
"Of course, if you come with me, I'll cover not just travel and lodging, but entertainment expenses and whatever else comes up."
"That doesn't sound bad."
"And since we'd be escorting someone important, I'd also give you a separate travel stipend."
A travel stipend, huh.
"Will it be as much as you gave me before?"
In return for finding his sibling, what he gave me was none other than a company.
A small business he ran.
Small, he said, but it had thirty employees and made a profit every year.
It had originally been a business he ran to raise money to find his sibling, but now that he'd found them, there was no need to keep running it.
If I wanted, he said I could hand it over to someone suitable in Japan.
I had no particular reason to refuse, so I accepted.
"I'll take good care of you."
"Then I'll accept."
I'm not short on money.
But it's also true that I'm interested in my first trip abroad, and that I want to see how the company I received actually operates.
"You said it was a trading company, right?"
Hong Siyeon already knew too, since we'd roughly gone over the gist while playing go-stop earlier.
"Could I come along too?"
"You, President Hong?"
"If it's a trading company, I should be able to get a good look at it. And if need be, I'll buy it."
"Hmm. Sure, let's do that."
If someone he knows buys it, they'd probably value it higher than if it were a stranger.
.
.
.
Thankfully, the plane didn't crash on the way to Japan.
If something like that had happened, I'd have done everything I could to stop us from boarding.
But nothing like that happened; it took off and landed normally.
And so, Tokyo!
I was wondering where we should go when the old man's phone suddenly rang.
"It's my son. Hold on..."
After answering, he began talking for quite a while.
Then he looked at me and let out a sigh.
"We've run into a rather troublesome problem. Sorry, but you'll have to go with President Hong. I think I need to head out."
With that, he handed me a card.
Along with telling me to buy whatever I needed.
"What's going on?"
"Well... if I say it like that, it'll seem like I brought you here to ask for your help..."
"What's the big deal? That's what friends are for."
"Sigh. My son is trying to put up a building on the land he bought, but it seems a bit of trouble has come up."
"Let's go together. Maybe I can help."
"You don't really need to get involved..."
The old man kept apologizing and telling us to just have fun by ourselves, but since we'd come together, it would be a bit awkward for only one of us to bow out.
In the end, Old Man Kim Seok-chun nodded.
"Let's go."
We rode in the car he had prepared and arrived in a neighborhood in Tokyo's Setagaya area.
"Setagaya Ward is the most populous of Tokyo's 23 wards."
"Oh-ho."
"My son bought land here and is trying to build a luxury mansion."
But strange things keep happening at the place where the building is being constructed.
Like workers seeing ghosts.
Or something strange in the land.
On top of that, some woman claiming to be a medium came by making a scene, saying this land was cursed.
She didn't just do it once and leave; she keeps coming back whenever she gets the chance to cause trouble.
That's not all.
"This time, some weird protesters are supposedly coming too. What was it? Something about ghosts coming out if you mess with that vacant lot?"
"I thought this was a residential area."
"Yeah. A residential area."
Anyway, with this kind of thing happening over and over, my son is in more trouble than he can handle.
"Ghosts, huh. Since there's even that saying, 'If it's a ghost, please defeat it with cannon fire,' couldn't we just toss a few sticks of dynamite in there?"
"Would that even work..."
Come to think of it, I hadn't thought it would work either.
Anyway, when we arrived, an eerie construction site came into view.
"Father!!"
An unfamiliar middle-aged man ran over.
Graying hair.
A stern-looking face.
The man, broad-shouldered and solidly built, broke into a bright smile the moment he saw me.
"This is the one...?"
"That's right. Thanks to this friend, I was able to find my younger brother."
"Thank you so much!!"
I grabbed him before he could throw himself to the floor in a dogeza.
"I'm Kang Noa."
"I'm Matsumoto Ryusei. My Korean name is Kim Su-hyeon. Call me whichever name is easier."
"Then, President Kim. I may disappoint you, but I'm just a fortune teller."
"Yes, I heard."
You found my father's younger brother.
As his son, how could I possibly pretend not to know such a benefactor?
Normally he would have gone to Korea himself to thank him and host him, but he said he couldn't leave because of this matter, so he'd properly host him later, then let out a sigh.
"May I meet the workers first?"
"Are you going to use your powers, sir?"
"I'm just going to do a little divination."
With Kim Su-hyeon's guidance, I went over and saw the workers' expressions were pretty grim.
Some of them were even rolling prayer beads.
"Would everyone come over and flip over one of these cards for me?"
"Yes..."
Maybe because it was the boss's order, the workers flipped the cards without much resistance.
"What do you see?"
"There really are strange things happening here."
And at this rate, this construction project will fail.
A longer construction period means that much more money spent.
In the end, Kim Su-hyeon would have to put the land up for sale at a ridiculously low price.
For now, that was as far as I could see into the future through the workers and Kim Su-hyeon.
Then it happened.
A group of bizarrely dressed people started gathering, shouting in Japanese I couldn't understand.
"Haa..."
"Are those the protesters?"
"Yes. Something about ghosts coming out if they dig here and this whole area getting ruined... I checked just in case, and there was no such legend in this neighborhood."
Ghosts, huh.
I'd almost rather it be the Second Coming of Christ... huh?
What the hell?
"President Kim, could you get one of those people to flip a card for me?"
"That shouldn't be difficult. They're protesting, but they're not violent..."
With that, he approached the protesters.
Then he talked to the one who seemed to be the group's leader and slipped him some money.
The middle-aged man who came over started yammering in Japanese again.
But it didn't work!
I don't know Japanese at all!!
I just held out the card.
He glared at me for a moment, then flipped the card.
What came up was the reversed Devil.
As always, the meaning itself doesn't matter.
"What did it come up as?"
At Hong Siyeon's curious question, as she came closer, I pointed at the man and said,
All the strange things happening around here were done by those people.
The ghost incidents.
The medium.
Plus the protests and even strange things being discovered.
They did it all.
I looked at the protesters.
Then I said with a smile,
"A place called Magoda Trading is after this land. Where is that?"
Old Man Kim Seok-chun and Kim Su-hyeon's faces twisted.
"They're a company competing with ours. We were competing right up until the bid for this land was settled... and to think they'd pull something like this...!!"
They seemed pretty angry.
To the two of them, breathing hard with rage, I gave them one name.
"Go meet a man named Oda Ryuki. He looks like he could easily crush that company's boss."
I could already see a future where the boss who was giving orders to the man leading the protesters would do dogeza before a man called Oda Ryuki and apologize over and over.
Then we just use that.
"But who is that?"
"I know him!"
Oh. President Hong! I knew I could count on you!
"He's kind of like a steward for a pretty famous man in the Japanese loan-sharking world."
"Loan sharking..."
Hong Siyeon let out a small sigh and continued.
"I met my grandmother once before."
She was someone who had been trying hard to expand into Korea.
Hong Siyeon's grandmother, Yang Choon-ja, a renowned eccentric in Korea's loan-sharking world, had flat-out refused the offer.
It was because she knew that if Japanese capital swallowed Korea, it would simply be taken away.
If Japanese capital entered Korea, the Korean economy would collapse outright.
Old Man Kim Seok-chun said there were some loan sharks from the bubble era who had predicted the future and kept their enormous capital intact.
Their assets were said to be beyond measure.
The question was why that person was getting involved in this.
The fact that I could see that future even though I hadn't changed anything meant that Oda Ryuki would step in even if I left it alone.
The problem was that if I didn't intervene and change fate, it would take quite a while.
Mr. Kim Su-hyeon would end up taking quite a loss.
Then let's try to change that fate first.
"Let's start by driving those people out."
The protesters started doing something like a demonstration in front of the construction site, holding placards and bizarre tools.
Compared to protests in Korea, it was absurdly weak, but perhaps because Japan's protest culture wasn't very developed, quite a few of the construction workers were horrified.
"They say this is land where ghosts are sleeping, so get out right now."
Hong Siyeon, who was standing beside me, told me.
What kind of nonsense are they spouting?
I told Kim Su-hyeon how to make them leave.
"Tell the protest leader that if he doesn't get lost right now, you'll send a video of him making a scene here to his wife and son in Osaka."
You said you'd come here on a business trip and be a father your wife and son could be proud of, right?
Would this sight here really be something to be proud of?