LSDK 06

Chapter 6

Dong-in did not trust people.

Although it had been tentatively determined that the cause was poor maintenance, the person who had tampered with the car his parents were riding in was none other than his father’s driver, whom he had always treated as closely as an uncle. And the person deeply involved in his kidnapping had been his nanny, whom Dong-in had regarded almost like a third parent.

So it would actually have been stranger for him to trust people.

The only person with whom he still maintained a close relationship was Im Sang-ah, who until recently had been his prospective fiancée. According to her, it was like this.

“Dong-in Heo, you’re a person who hasn’t been socialized properly. No. Rather than saying you haven’t been socialized, it would be more accurate to say you’re a person who has absolutely no interest in socializing. Tsk.”

Even Dong-in did not think Sang-ah’s words were wrong. Above all, he could not understand why he needed to socialize when he had only one life to risk.

Meanwhile, a security guard who recognized Dong-in opened the gate’s turnstile wide. The security guards who had already been contacted by the butler and were waiting each greeted him. As expected, they were bows, but they were polite greetings nonetheless. Dong-in passed them and entered the elevator that was already waiting in the lobby without hesitation.

While the security guard controlled the other people, the elevator doors closed. With a slight jolt, the elevator carried him straight to the 28th floor without stopping even once.

A little later, when the elevator opened, the employees of , who had been absorbed in their respective work, stood up one after another like dominoes and bowed to Dong-in as he passed by.

5:00 p.m.

At last, the British and German markets opened, and the energy of those hunting for money filled the 28th floor.

Amid that heat, the sounds of bells, phone calls, and keyboards filled the air. Not even a single sentence of any other private conversation could join them.

11:00 p.m.

Thirty minutes before the American market opened, Dong-in’s phone, which had been switched to silent mode during the meeting, lit up.

It was bad enough that his meeting was being interrupted, but according to the general sentiment of Korean people, 11 p.m. was clearly a time when calling someone was considered bad manners unless they were a particularly close acquaintance.

Even if Dong-in had effectively been a wanderer until several years ago, he knew at least that much.

His temple twitched slightly on reflex, but the movement was so small that it caused no reaction whatsoever. Not a single person in the conference room noticed his reaction.

He rejected the call and was about to turn his phone face down when he suddenly stopped.

Im Arang?

Once he checked the caller, he immediately understood.

It was not because he had become close enough to his prospective fiancée that they could call each other at any time.

It was because, when it came to his prospective fiancée, expecting manners from her was a luxury.

“Looks like you’ve made up your mind?”

Dong-in raised his index finger toward the employees to ask for their understanding, then answered the phone and immediately got to the point.

—What about you? Have you made up your mind?

What?

What happened to ‘Oppa’?

Apparently, she had only just realized the wordplay.

“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 casual tone.

For some reason, he had a bad feeling.

No matter how much he thought about what might have happened to his prospective fiancée in the meantime, her tone somehow felt different.

It was extremely dangerous to figure something out and make a definite judgment based on an uncertain premonition.

At least, that was true for an ordinary person.

But for Dong-in, who was by no means ordinary in one sense, a premonition was not a trivial matter.

It was not simply because he knew the local circumstances better than anyone except the natives, allowing him to reach a point where losing money in the international market was harder than making it.

Of course, he had been born into wealth, and he had also inherited a considerable fortune from his parents afterward.

But separate from that, if Dong-in had not possessed his sixth sense of premonition, he would never have accumulated the enormous wealth that had made him overwhelmingly the top figure in South Korea.

When Dong-in was around ten years old, he suffered a minor head injury during his kidnapping.

Looking back, perhaps he had crossed the River of Forgetfulness and somehow returned.

Instead of wandering through the afterlife as a soul, fortunately, he had survived and opened his eyes.

“Don’t give up…… huff, huff, on me. Sister, stay awake.”

A girl less than half his size was carrying Dong-in on her back, gasping for breath as if she could collapse at any moment. It was hard to tell whether she was walking or running.

“Huff, huff. Somehow, get up and crawl here, even if you have to. If you can’t, just wait there for a moment…… huff, huff. Wait for me. I’ll hide big brother…… huff, huff, and come save you, Sister.”

At the same time, she was encouraging Im Sang-ah, who could barely walk because her legs had gone numb with fear.

Anyway, after coming back to life once after nearly dying, Dong-in experienced something mysterious that an ordinary person would never believe.

After that, he began to feel as if some strange and mysterious existence whose identity he could not determine was informing him of things even slightly beyond what lay directly ahead.

It was not as if a spy-like species had entered his ears, though.

Through an unrealistic, four-dimensional sense called a premonition, Dong-in came to perceive everything around him.

As time passed, the accuracy of his premonitions went beyond mere guesses and reached the level of foresight. His intuition was so good that, if he had opened a fortune-telling shop instead, he could probably have made a fortune.

“Did a ghost possess me because I came back to life after nearly dying? Or is this like The Sixth Sense? What if I was actually a ghost all along? Ah, no, no. That can’t be. I should pinch myself. Ah…… it hurts. Right. No. I’m human.”

The Sixth Sense.

When he first became aware of these symptoms, his first reaction had been fear and denial.

In a sense, just like in that movie, he wondered whether he had actually died in reality and was wandering through this world as a spirit.

However, when such things continued happening again and again, he had no choice but to acknowledge the strange phenomenon happening to him, even while being afraid of it.

Still, when he wondered whether he should really open a fortune-telling shop, his ability was not quite powerful enough to calculate everything in the world.

Unless it was something special, he never revealed his ability to anyone.

When he was around nineteen, the first time Dong-in revealed this ability to others was when he foresaw that his grandfather had a problem with his heart.

“I’ve been having very bad dreams lately.”

Of course, he had not directly used his ability at that time either.

—Dreams? What kind of dreams?

“Over and over, my deceased parents appear in my dreams and nag me, telling me that I have to take Grandpa to the hospital. They keep saying I have to take him.”

—It’s just a dream. That’s why I told you to call more often, you brat.