Chapter 6
Dong-in didn’t trust people.
Although the preliminary conclusion had been that his parents’ car accident was caused by poor maintenance, the person who had actually tampered with the car was none other than his father’s driver, whom Dong-in had always treated with the familiarity of an uncle.
And the person deeply involved in his kidnapping was his nanny, whom Dong-in had regarded almost like a third parent.
So wouldn’t it have been stranger for him to trust human beings?
The only person with whom he still maintained a close relationship was none other than Im Sang-ah, who until recently had been his prospective fiancée.
According to her, it was because—
“Heo Dong-in, you’re a person who hasn’t been properly socialized. No, that’s not quite right. It would be more accurate to say you’re someone who has absolutely no interest in being socialized. Tsk.”
Even Dong-in couldn’t say Sang-ah was wrong.
More than anything, he couldn’t understand why he should bother becoming socialized when doing so meant putting his one and only life at risk.
Meanwhile, a security guard who recognized Dong-in opened the turnstile gate wide.
The security personnel who had already been notified by the butler were waiting for him and greeted him one after another.
Once again, Dong-in merely gave them a polite nod.
He walked past them and entered the elevator that was already waiting in the lobby without hesitation.
As the security guards kept the other people under control, the elevator doors closed.
With a slight jolt, the elevator carried Dong-in straight to the twenty-eighth floor without stopping even once.
A short while later, when the elevator doors opened, the employees of Miracle Investment Finance, who had been absorbed in their respective work, rose one after another like falling dominoes and bowed toward Dong-in as he passed.
5:00 p.m.
At last, the British and German markets opened, and the energy of those hunting for money filled every corner of the twenty-eighth floor.
The atmosphere was so intense that the ringing of phones, the sounds of conversations, and the clicking of keyboards drowned out every other private word.
11:00 p.m.
Exactly thirty minutes before the U.S. market opened, Dong-in’s phone, which had been switched to silent mode during a meeting, suddenly lit up.
Having his meeting interrupted was annoying enough, but according to Korean social etiquette, 11 p.m. was clearly not an appropriate time to call someone with whom you weren’t particularly close.
Even though Dong-in had essentially been a wanderer until a few years ago, he knew at least that much.
His temple twitched reflexively.
But the movement was so slight that it produced no reaction whatsoever.
Not a single person in the conference room noticed his response.
He rejected the call and was about to turn his phone face down when he suddenly paused.
Im Arang?
Once he saw the caller’s name, he immediately understood.
It wasn’t because he and his prospective fiancée had somehow become close enough to call each other whenever they wanted.
Rather, he knew that expecting proper manners from his prospective fiancée was simply too much to ask.
“Have you made up your mind?”
Dong-in raised his index finger toward the employees, silently asking them to wait, then answered the phone and immediately got to the point.
—“What about you? Have you made up your mind?”
You?
Not ‘Oppa’?
Apparently, she had only just realized the wordplay he’d made earlier.
“Send me the medical certificate by email.”
Dong-in replied to his prospective fiancée in an indifferent tone.
—“Give me the address.”
Perhaps it was because of the other person’s calm, offhand manner of speaking, but for some reason, Dong-in had a bad feeling about it.
No matter how much he thought about what might have happened to his prospective fiancée in the meantime, there was something subtly different about her tone.
Trying to understand and make definitive conclusions based on an uncertain premonition was extremely dangerous.
For an ordinary person, that was.
But for Dong-in, who was anything but ordinary in a certain sense, a premonition was far from a trivial matter.
It wasn’t simply because he knew the circumstances of foreign countries better than anyone except the natives that he had reached a level where losing money in the international markets was harder than making it.
Of course, he’d been born into wealth, and the inheritance he later received from his parents was substantial.
But regardless of that, if Dong-in hadn’t possessed his sixth sense—his premonitions—he would never have accumulated the fortune that had made him overwhelmingly one of the richest men in South Korea.
When Dong-in was around ten years old, he suffered a minor head injury during his kidnapping.
Looking back, perhaps he’d crossed the River of Forgetfulness at that moment and somehow returned.
Instead of wandering the realm of the dead, he had fortunately survived.
And when he opened his eyes—
“Don’t give up…… Huff, huff. Don’t give up. Sis, stay awake.”
A little girl less than half his size was carrying Dong-in on her back, gasping for breath so hard that she seemed about to collapse. She could barely tell whether she was walking or running.
“Huff, huff. Somehow, get up and crawl over, even if you have to. If you can’t, then just stay there for a moment…… Huff, huff. Wait for me. I’ll hide Oppa…… huff…… and come save you, Sis.”
At the same time, she was encouraging Im Sang-ah, who couldn’t walk properly because her knees had gone weak.
In any case, after coming back from the brink of death like that, Dong-in began experiencing mysterious things that an ordinary person would never have believed.
It was as though some strange, inexplicable entity whose identity he couldn’t determine was giving him information about what would happen just a little beyond the present.
It wasn’t as though some spy-like creature had been whispering into his ear.
Rather, Dong-in came to perceive the world through an unreal, almost four-dimensional sense that he called premonition.
Eventually, the accuracy of his premonitions went beyond mere guesses and became genuine foresight.
His intuition was so extraordinary that, had he opened a fortune-telling shop, he probably would have made a fortune.
“Did I become possessed by a ghost because I came back from the dead? Or is this like The Sixth Sense? Maybe I’m actually a ghost? Ah, no, no. That can’t be. I should pinch myself. Ah…… That hurts. Right. No, I’m human.”
The Sixth Sense.
When he first became aware of these symptoms, Dong-in’s initial reaction was fear and denial.
In a sense, just like in that movie, he wondered whether he had actually died in reality and was now wandering around the world as a ghost.
But as these strange incidents continued happening over and over, he had no choice but to accept the bizarre phenomenon occurring to him, even though it frightened him.
Still, when he considered whether he should really open a fortune-telling shop, he realized his ability wasn’t powerful enough to calculate everything in the world.
Unless something particularly unusual happened, he never revealed his supernatural ability to anyone.
Around the age of nineteen, the first time Dong-in inadvertently revealed his ability to others was when he foresaw that his grandfather had a heart problem.
“I’ve been having very disturbing dreams lately.”
Of course, he hadn’t directly used his ability at the time.
—“Dreams? What kind of dreams?”
“I keep dreaming that my deceased parents appear and nag me, telling me over and over that I need to take Grandpa to the hospital.”
—“It’s just a dream. I told you to call more often, you brat.”
