I pressed my lips tight and closed my eyes. I’d only read the thing in patches, so fishing out just the parts I needed, like scooping with a net, took concentration.
He couldn’t recall it clearly, but he had a rough sense that there’d been something useful in a comment? A reply to a comment...?
It was like ignoring Harry, Hermione, Ron and Malfoy in Harry P*tter and liking Umbridge instead. The sort of peculiar taste that always turns up in any crowd, at least one person’s worth.
Astonishingly, that one person existed even among the readers of a B-grade novel.
Best | honestly though I kind of didn’t hate Dan Hanbyeol ㅠㅠ I wanted a survival-IF side story so bad that I went and asked the author on her SNS.
[I figured there had to be others with the same taste as me, so I braced for the hate and took one for the team. I am absolutely NOT defending what he did, so don’t get it twisted!!!
Full text of her answer below ↴
Actually, early in the serialization I’d already chosen a partner for a Dan Hanbyeol redemption route. But the response was so much worse than I expected that I decided I couldn’t put it in the main story and just killed him off instead.
Since it’s a discarded setting anyway, it feels like a waste not to share it, so: Hanbyeol was originally a Namer (prospective). I’m a hopeless fatalist, and having gone to the trouble of putting in the Nameverse setting, I wanted to make use of it somehow. (To think I planned on giving the villain something I didn’t even give the main couple... even I have to admit I knew far too little, first work or not.)
His partner was an executive-level figure at Taeseo’s rival group. Not a huge age gap, but on the slightly older side; I was loosely thinking managing director, though nothing was final. I just figured it would take someone out of the ordinary to live with that lunatic mutt, so I built his image as a tremendous romantic. He isn’t a bad person. If he’d been beside Hanbyeol while Hanbyeol was still alive, he’d have reined him in before he went off the rails.
After Hanbyeol’s death, he struggles for about five years with depression of unknown cause, and after that I imagine he pulls himself together and lives a normal life. Though since it’s a point where the name hasn’t appeared yet, he won’t even know his own destiny is dead. By the same logic, he’ll never find out why the depression came, either.
If the two of them had ended up together, the gong probably would’ve tucked him away in his house and kept him all to himself, don’t you think? If Dan Hanbyeol had turned his life around, honestly, I think those two would’ve made a pretty cute couple.
I have no plans to cover any of this in the side stories either, so I’ve rambled it all out here. It was a decision I made because I thought it’d be divisive, so please bear with me.
Thank you.]
↳ ah f*ck, what is this? Mom, no, you can’t just let us taste it and walk away ㅠㅠ your daughter is starving to death, please give us more...
↳↳ Stand on your own two feet.
↳↳↳ Not a chance, Mother. I have become hungry.
↳↳↳↳ I said STAND ON YOUR OWN!!!!! Independence!!!!!
↳ huh? way too good for Under the Sea if you ask me?? I think I get why she scrapped it lolololol
And Under the Sea, of course, meant—
...hey, you devils!
I puzzled over what that was supposed to mean for a moment, then flared up and stomped my foot. The sound must have startled the man in the driver’s seat, because a scolding came flying back at once.
“Young master.”
“Yes...”
“If I have a heart attack with my hands on the wheel, the two of us become traveling companions on the road to the next world. Even granting that it’s about my time, it’d be a bit early for you, wouldn’t it? You don’t even have a license yet.”
“...Grandpa, you don’t understand how I feel!”
“Oh dear. Sulking again.”
Secretary Kim shot that back as placidly as if he were remarking that Ppoppi next door certainly was a fine barker, then gave a small shake of his head. I wilted and buried my face in both hands.
Under the Sea? I know I’m the villain, but hanging a mocking nickname like that on a guy who got packed into a drum and sunk is way too much!
Meanwhile, here I was with a chill running down my spine, shivering from head to toe even inside a car with the heater blasting.
I felt the tip of my nose start to sting with hurt feelings. A man’s pride wouldn’t survive crying over something like this, so I bit down on my lip through sheer spite and grit. I swear I hadn’t been this weepy before; ever since I’d turned into an omega or whatever, my hormones seemed to have lost their minds too.
Around then, the car that had been racing along the road gradually slowed. When the sedan came to a stop in front of the officetel where I lived, I promptly popped the door open and climbed out.
I didn’t forget to bow my thanks to Secretary Kim, of course. Straightening back up, I went straight through the shared entrance and into the building.
Shhhk.
Synced to my phone, the elevator doors slid open on their own. My floor was already lit up, too.
...All at once I felt even more depressed.
Getting home had reminded me all over again that my allowance had been cut off down to the last won.
“What’s the point of being reincarnated as a chaebol if I’ve got no money!”
My cards had been killed ages ago, and I blew through my allowance the instant it landed, so I was flat broke. They’d said they’d keep covering the officetel rent and the maintenance fees, which at least meant I wouldn’t be out on the street, but as of right now I had nothing to eat for lunch today.
Having memories of a past life didn’t help much when I’d spent that entire life keeping a safe distance from housework; none of it came naturally to my hands. It fell well short of being usable on the spot, and all I could manage was a sigh. Up until now, the cleaning, the laundry, the cooking — the housekeeper had come twice a week and done all of it.
“I really did have it easy...”
It hit me fresh. And with all that, I’d had the nerve to cause trouble every single day and throw fits about my allowance getting cut.
I was so hopelessly immature that it was frankly a wonder nobody had ever beaten the dust out of me, rainy day or not. I let out a long sigh and opened the front door.
“...”
And then I saw it.
D-brand dress shoes spilled out of the shoe cabinet and lying wherever they’d landed in the entryway. G-brand sneakers. H-brand sandals.
P-brand trousers sprawled down the hallway that ran from the entry to the living room. A C-brand cardigan. An L-brand belt. A V-brand school bag, and so on, and so on.
A banquet of designer goods — just the ones that had entered his field of vision in about three seconds came to tens of millions of won without breaking a sweat.
A shiver ran through me and my vision flashed white. I felt like I’d been clubbed over the head.
That’s right.
Cash isn’t the only kind of money, is it...?
“Wow! Wow! Whoa!”
I clapped my hands and stepped inside, looking for all the world like a caveman who’d just discovered fire.
A high-end two-room officetel, a good seventy square meters, rent in the millions of won a month. And one of those two rooms was nothing but closet.
I yanked the closet door open and there it was, packed wall to wall and glittering away: clothes of every description, coats, accessories. Most of them worn once or twice, or still wearing their tags.
And those boxes shoved into the corner any old way were probably full of more expensive clothes forgotten the exact same way, all huddled together and crumpled.
Hold on.
...Then maybe?
“P-phone. Where did I put my phone? I’ve got it on silent, so if I call it will I even hear it— ...ah. It’s in my hand.”
I went straight into my banking app and checked the balance of every account I had. I’d been sure my allowance was long gone, but it turned out zero wasn’t quite zero.
Ones, tens, hundreds, thousands, ten-thousands.
There were more than five accounts I’d written off as empty and abandoned, each holding less than a hundred thousand won. Pooled into one place: 330,000 won. And an account I’d forgotten even existed, unopened for years, had a whole 540,000 won sitting in it. Total haul once I’d scraped it all together: 870,000 won.
A month’s pay from somebody’s part-time job!
“Jackpot!”
Clutching the phone tight, I broke into a huge grin and bounced up and down where I stood.
The old me would have spent three days and nights in despair, weeping that nobody could possibly live on this.
The old me would have ground his teeth over his cards being cut off and not a single new designer piece coming in that month, would have thrown a fit about selling off his things: what, so I’m supposed to go around in a burlap sack I picked up off the street?
But not now. Not with my past life back in my head.
“...Long live the chaebol! Long live! Long, long live!!!!!”
Being rich really was a wonderful thing. Only now did I finally understand the saying that a rich family can go under and still coast for three generations.
Overcome, I reverently pressed my palms together and offered up a prayer.
Thank you, God... I promise to live a good and decent life from now on.
“Ah, my laptop!”
With that worry out of the way, I didn’t waste a second: the laptop came first. I snatched it off the table, hurried back, and planted my butt on the sofa.
I’d thought up my way out on the ride home from the hospital, so it was only right that I put it to work.
I had no way of knowing exactly who my name match was, but with his company and his position, I basically had him already. Taeseo’s group had exactly one rival, and the age gap between us was ten years at the outside, generously counted. Narrow that down to executive level and you could count the candidates on one hand. With information like that, pinning down the man and digging up his basic details with nothing but an internet search was no work at all.
A short investigation built on everything I’d remembered, and there he was: my destiny, or fate, or whatever he was supposed to be.
“Name, Cha Jueon. Age thirty. Eldest son of the chairman of HS Group, managing director at headquarters. Notable details, graduated from Hanguk University, business administration. Dominant alpha... wait, he went to the same school as me?”
Out of nowhere I remembered going in for my interview in the dead of winter. Or rather, maybe I’d been shaking so badly that the memory had simply evaporated, because from the first semester of my third year of high school right up to starting university, I couldn’t recall a thing.
Anyway, that wasn’t what mattered right now.
“Cha Jueon. So, Cha Jueon.”
For all the portal articles overflowing about him, finding an actual photo of his face was so hopeless that I gave up fast. But one thing I understood perfectly well: latching onto this man was the only thing that would nudge my odds of survival up, even a little.
Decision made, I knelt solemnly on the sofa and bowed my head deep toward the monitor.
Hello, ajusshi. I don’t even know your face yet, but I’m counting on you.
I’ll seduce you shamelessly and latch on for dear life.
Sure, we were both men with the same thing dangling between our legs, but to stay alive, what wouldn’t I do?
A dominant alpha who was effectively the designated heir? There was no chance nobody had tried to work an angle on him. A man like that obviously couldn’t be reeled in by ordinary methods, which meant I needed a plan drawn up in advance.
Clack-clack-clack-clack. I hammered away at the calculator in my head.
And then, finally.
“Honored Mother, honored Father. Your son shall now show you something.”
I shall endeavor to keep my neck firmly attached and inherit the family business in one piece.
And so, the method I chose was...!
