WeTried Translations
Translator/Editor: Arsène
Discord: https://dsc.gg/wetried
◈ The Conglomerate Heir Just Wants to Fail ◈
Chapter 23
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A thin snore slipped from Chairman Choi’s lips.
Once the situation had been settled, the attending secretary bowed politely to me.
“There was a brief disturbance. Please continue your meal, Vice Chairman. We will take care of the Chairman.”
After making a call, two more sturdy men entered. They carefully supported the sleeping Chairman Choi and led him from the room.
It had all happened in an instant.
I sat there blankly for a while, until the sweet scent tickling my nose snapped me back to my senses.
‘...So can I eat this or not?’
There was probably a negotiation involving trillions of won underway in the Financial Services Commission chairman’s office, and just moments ago, the founder of a major conglomerate had wept bitterly in front of me before falling asleep.
And I had become his maternal grandson.
In the middle of all this unreal chaos, only one thought ruled my mind.
I was hungry.
I glanced around.
Only Chief of Staff Lee Jinju remained standing there.
“Let’s eat together.”
“I’ve already eaten.”
Lee Jinju closed the door and left again.
Alone, I carefully picked up my chopsticks and took a piece of braised short rib that looked especially meaty. The tender meat slipped smoothly from the bone in my mouth, and sweet juices burst across my tongue.
It was delicious.
Right. Eat first, think later.
Ruining the company and sorting out this absurd family history could all wait until after I ate.
I began working my chopsticks in earnest.
It was the strangest, and most delicious, meal of my life.
.
After finishing my meal, I headed straight for Daeseung Medical Center, where my grandfather was hospitalized.
At the very top floor of Daeseung Medical Center.
When I opened the door to the VVIP room, Grandfather was still looking perfectly healthy as he swung a golf club.
Nice shot!
As a virtual golf ball traced an arc through the air to a cheerful sound effect, Grandfather merely glanced sideways at me as I entered.
“So. Is that what Choi Geonyeong said?”
I pressed him about the secret of my birth that I had heard, but that was all the reaction I got.
“What does it matter?”
“Grandfather!”
He did not so much as blink at my shout.
He set down the driver in his hand, then slowly turned to face me.
“Do you remember what your parents looked like?”
“...”
Of course I did not.
They had both died in a traffic accident when I was two.
My parents did not exist in my memories. Parental affection was something I had only vaguely understood from books and films. Ah, so that was what it was.
“Sure, you might be curious about what sort of people your parents were because they were your parents. But what does it matter that your mother was Choi Geonyeong’s daughter? Did you think she was just the daughter of some ordinary person, and now that you know she came from a conglomerate family, you feel more attached to her? More sorry for her? Or do you plan to claim shares in Hanseong Group now?”
“That’s not what I mean!”
I raised my voice again, but Grandfather was not shaken in the slightest.
“Then what do you mean? I don’t know what Choi Geonyeong told you today, but so what? Has anything changed? Your father was my son, and your mother was that man’s daughter. They fell for each other and ran away, had a child, then went to the next world before us. That’s all there is to it.”
“What do you mean, that’s all? You hid who my maternal grandfather was from me my whole life.”
“Hidden it? What did I hide?”
Grandfather asked coldly.
“Did you ever ask? Did you ever once ask me who your maternal grandfather was? That’s what I’m asking. You never cared one bit about your parents. You only ran away because you hated me and felt suffocated at home. And now you think your life is some grand tragedy?”
Grandfather slowly approached me.
“Choi Geonyeong lost one child among countless sons and daughters. But I, Kang Sinsu, lost my only son!”
Grandfather’s shout cracked with a metallic rasp.
For a moment, I stopped breathing.
This was not the grandfather I knew.
A crack had appeared in that expression, solid as an iron fortress, which had always made it impossible to tell what he was thinking. An emotion I had never seen before was erupting from him.
“...”
“Now you’re all I have left. You are Kang Sinsu’s grandson. Daeseung’s only heir. That’s all you need to remember.”
.
I did not remember how I got out of the hospital room.
As I rode down the elevator and passed through the hospital lobby’s revolving doors, every sound in the world seemed far away.
Chief of Staff Lee Jinju had the car waiting in front of the hospital and stood there without moving as she waited for me.
She studied my face for a moment, but asked nothing. She simply opened the rear door for me.
The car glided silently toward the Gangnam penthouse.
The city lights flashed endlessly past the windows, but none of them entered my eyes.
Grandfather’s appearance and his words kept replaying in my head.
‘I lost my only son.’
‘Now you’re all I have left.’
The penthouse living room was silent.
Seoul’s nightscape beyond the windows felt distant, like the view of another world that had nothing to do with me.
I collapsed onto the sofa and stared up at the empty ceiling.
Complicated thoughts tore through my mind.
My father had been Grandfather’s only son, while my mother had been the daughter of his enemy.
They had thrown everything away and eloped for love, and I had been born as a result.
Then they had died futilely.
The past of my parents, which I had only vaguely known about until now and honestly had not cared much about, unfolded before me like a cliché novel.
“Rest well.”
I called out to the Chief of Staff as she was about to leave me behind and depart.
“Jinju-noona. Did you also know, noona, that my mother was Chairman Choi Geonyeong’s daughter?”
“...Yes.”
“Since when?”
“Rather than since when... it is one of the rumors known to the public, though it is not particularly famous.”
Something that could be learned so easily.
Then why had I not known this all this time?
Perhaps, as Grandfather said, I had been too indifferent toward my parents.
The truth was, I still did not know how to face parents I could not even remember.
Then what about Grandfather?
His only son had eloped for love with the daughter of his enemy, then died in an accident overnight.
And all that remained was one grandson who carried his enemy’s blood.
Maybe Grandfather had not known how to treat me either.
Damn it.
I swallowed the curse to myself.
I forcibly crushed the sympathy trying to rise within me.
Fine. Even if that were true, so what?
Did that change the fact that Grandfather ignored all my wishes and tried to force me to become Daeseung’s heir?
.
The next morning, after staying awake all night, I sat on the living room sofa with hollow eyes.
“Vice Chairman, I will report the results of yesterday’s negotiations at the Financial Services Commission.”
Chief of Staff Lee Jinju was suddenly standing before me, as neat and composed as ever.
I merely nodded without a word.
I was not in the mood to hear a report, but I did not have the energy to stop her either.
Lee Jinju paused as though assessing my condition, then began her report in her usual calm voice.
“Based on the compensation plan proposed by Hanseong, our working-level team has completed the detailed negotiations. Broadly speaking, the terms are no different from what was discussed yesterday.”
Turning the first page of the report, she summarized the key points.
“First, Daeseung Securities will acquire Hanseong Securities’ entire IB division and asset management division. Second, Hanseong Securities’ headquarters building in Yeouido will also be acquired under Daeseung Asset Management’s name. Both transactions are at an unprecedented rate of 70 percent of book value.”
‘So we are taking all those prime assets in the end.’
“However, in the case of Hanseong Securities’ headquarters building, we agreed to lease some floors back to them to suit their reduced scale.”
According to Lee Jinju, Hanseong Securities’ existing headquarters building was physically the closest building to the Korea Exchange, or KRX.
I wondered what that mattered in an age when all trading was done online, but it was apparently far more important than I thought.
“For institutional investors engaged in scalping or high-frequency trading, physical distance from the exchange servers is critical. The closer they are, the slightly shorter the data transmission delay.”
When stock orders have the same price, they are filled in the order they arrive.
In online trading, data travels through cables as electrical signals nearly as fast as light. But the speed of light was still finite, and a signal originating from even a slightly closer location would arrive 0.001 seconds earlier.
“That 0.001-second difference can determine profits of hundreds of millions, even billions, of won. Hanseong Securities’ building was Korea’s best location for precisely that kind of low latency. Once we own the building, we can collect enormous rent from other securities firms or asset managers who want that location.”
Still, we had agreed to lease part of such a place back to Hanseong Securities.
I supposed that was our own way of showing the winner’s generosity.
“Now, the most important matter, the stock repayment amount. We maintained yesterday’s proposed condition of payment at 250 percent of market price. However, there was an additional agreement regarding the method of payment.”
“An additional agreement?”
“From the total stock payment, we agreed to offset the portion of the sale price for Hanseong Securities’ IB division, asset management division, and headquarters building, excluding bank loans, against the stock repayment amount owed to us.”
Put simply, we had agreed to cancel out the money they owed us against the money we owed them.
“That will reduce Hanseong’s immediate cash burden, while allowing us to recover the debt quickly instead of waiting ten years. The remaining balance has also been changed to short-term repayment within three years.”
...It sounded reasonable at first, but what mattered was that the money Hanseong owed us was payment for Daeseung Life shares we had already bought and were now selling to Hanseong at an inflated price.
In the end, did this not mean we would swallow all of Hanseong’s prime assets for free, then collect the debt in full within a short period as well?
“We also avoided making it appear, on the surface, as though we were pushing Hanseong too harshly. As a result, cooperation from the government is expected to proceed quickly.”
This was supposed to be the merciful solution?
Things that were completely outside my common sense kept happening.
“As the chairman promised yesterday, our Daeseung Consortium has effectively been selected as the preliminary licensee for the third internet-only bank project. An official announcement is expected within the week. With this, Daeseung Financial has established a foothold to become a true comprehensive financial group encompassing retail banking, corporate finance, and the platform sector, the core of future finance.”
“...You worked hard.”
I barely managed to force out the words.
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