By Zephyria Lee Do-hyeon, who came out while shaking his wet hair with a towel, checked his cell phone first and foremost. He had received quite a few calls while it was discharged. He didn’t expect much, but there was no contact from Ryu Jeong among them.
While taking a sip of strongly brewed coffee and checking the piled-up messages, the screen changed to the phone reception page, and Chief Yoon’s name popped up. Lee Do-hyeon pressed the receive button right away without hesitation.
“Hello? President?”
“Speak. I’m listening.”
After switching to speakerphone, he walked to the living room window and stood there. He leisurely drank coffee and looked down at the bridge visible outside the window. Looking down from the high floor, all the cars running on the bridge piers looked like toy cars.
“Did you have a good visit to the center?”
“Yeah.”
“Why did you suddenly visit the center? When I checked, you still have a few weeks before your rut.”
“I’m just a little tired.”
“Ah. Sometimes that happens when you’re tired.”
Chief Yoon wasn’t an Alpha of Excellence, but he was an Alpha, so they communicated well. Judging by the way he spoke, it seemed that Professor Kim had kept his promise to remain silent. Chief Yoon, who had only checked briefly, didn’t ask any further and moved on to the next topic.
“I quickly found out what you asked me to look into.”
In the middle of Chief Yoon’s words, the sound of paper rustling could be heard.
“Seomin Mat-chum Capital is registered as a legitimate loan company.”
“It’s illegal, right?”
“Well…”
He asked back as a matter of course, but strangely, Chief Yoon trailed off.
“Well, even though the company name looks a bit illegal, it’s not that illegal. They don’t induce loans in strange ways like other companies, and the interest rate doesn’t exceed the legal maximum interest rate. You could really say it’s tailored for the common people?”
“What?”
Lee Do-hyeon frowned. At the same time, scorching sunlight poured in through the floor-to-ceiling windows that were much taller than Lee Do-hyeon’s height. When he asked back loudly, Chief Yoon also continued speaking vaguely, as if he suspected something.
“I was so suspicious that I looked into it several times. But there was really nothing to find fault with. It’s clean.”
“…That can’t be.”
Then what were the documents he had seen? ‘Seomin Mat-chum Capital’ was clearly written on them, and the terms of use were written in complicated words. It was something that could be easily overlooked if you didn’t read it carefully.
“Did you look into a completely different place with the same name?”
“No. There was only one loan company with this name here.”
“Why, you know how some places have one store but operate under several different names like a octopus?”
“I checked the office location, and that was the only registered corporation there.”
A hollow laugh came out on its own. Lee Do-hyeon leaned back on the sofa and swept the inside of his cheek crookedly.
“What else?”
“Ah, I also looked into Ryu Jeong’s debt. It’s still the debt his parents left behind. His father borrowed a lot from various places because of gambling, and it seems that it all went to this company. He should have given up the inheritance…”
He probably didn’t know. He was only twenty-three, a young age, and he had taken on the debt when he was much younger, so he probably never dreamed that there was a system for giving up inheritance.
“Anyway, the remaining principal is about 500 million won. The interest rate doesn’t exceed the legal maximum interest rate, but it’s still high at 19%. At this rate, it seems like it would be difficult to pay the monthly interest? There’s also some overdue interest…”
“19? Not 40?”
When he interrupted and asked, Chief Yoon gasped and inhaled sharply. He raised his voice at Lee Do-hyeon, saying that in this day and age, how could anyone extort money with such heinous interest rates.
“I heard that the terms and conditions have been revised this time, did you check that far?”
“They say they haven’t revised the terms and conditions. Even before the law was revised, there weren’t any places that took 40%, were there? That’s like telling them to die.”
Ignoring Chief Yoon, who was nagging in his ear, Lee Do-hyeon sighed with a serious expression. If it wasn’t this or that, then what on earth was it?
The documents were full of illegalities, but the company itself was running cleanly, which didn’t make sense. He couldn’t figure out where all the money that the young man had earned day and night was going. 1% may seem small when looking at it alone, but the debt that Ryu Jeong had was large in principal, so even if you only looked at 1%, it was a considerable amount. But there was a difference of 21%, not 1%.
Where on earth is that money going…? Lee Do-hyeon, who was continuing his thoughts, suddenly stopped.
“…Why didn’t I think of this?”
Double book. It was a word that flashed through Lee Do-hyeon’s mind.
According to what Chief Yoon had found out, the money corresponding to the legal maximum interest rate would be subject to accounting work, and the remaining amount subtracted from the percentage he saw in the documents would not be recorded in the accounting books and would all float in the air. On the surface, they were deceiving the public by pretending to be a glossy company, and to the debtors, they were extorting money by applying murderous interest rates, as Chief Yoon said. Wouldn’t it be perfect for creating slush funds?
“Pardon? I can’t hear you well. What did you say?”
“Chief Yoon. I’m sorry to ask you to do the same thing, but I think you need to dig a little deeper there.”
“How much deeper can I go here… Don’t tell me, President, did you get a loan here? No, right?”
“Don’t talk nonsense.”
Lee Do-hyeon drank the remaining coffee in one gulp and roughly wiped his wet lips with the back of his hand. If it had been like before, it would have been a story that had nothing to do with him, no matter who was begging and living in what way, but he felt strangely bad when he thought that Ryu Jeong was involved. It wasn’t because of a sense of justice born out of compassion. If it wasn’t Ryu Jeong, he still wouldn’t be interested in the lives of other people.
If it weren’t for that damn debt, he would have kept Ryu Jeong, who would have been tired from being dragged around to the center and restaurants in such a short time, from going anywhere and let him rest. Lee Do-hyeon was in a very unpleasant state right now, as if he had been unnecessarily disturbed. What should he take care of first? There was only one thing.
“What’s the name of the representative there?”
Ryu Jeong, who was planning to stop by his house to change his clothes, couldn’t just change his outerwear and went back into the bathroom completely naked.
“……”
Even though he lived alone, he quickly threw his underwear into the washbasin in case someone saw him. The underwear, crumpled like a rag, was already wet before it even touched the water.
Ryu Jeong bit his lip tightly as he looked down at the underwear, which was darkly stained only on the buttocks. He had definitely taken out a new one and put it on this morning… He was so embarrassed that he couldn’t even sigh.
The underwear, which had been fine all day, started to get wet from the moment he got out of Lee Do-hyeon’s car and stepped into the alley leading to his house. He was momentarily flustered by the viscous liquid that gushed out, thinking that his heat hadn’t ended yet, but having experienced it once, he realized that it wasn’t because of heat. Ryu Jeong, who didn’t know why his back was suddenly wet and didn’t know what to do in the middle of the alley, realized that there was nothing he could do but go home and quickened his pace.
However, as he climbed the high stairs and the steep hillside, his underwear became more and more damp. He wondered why, but he felt like he knew when he saw it with his own eyes. This wasn’t his. He vaguely thought it would be absorbed into his body, but that didn’t seem to be the case.
Not knowing what to do, he hesitated with his bare feet on the cold bathroom floor, then bent his knees and squatted down. The brick-colored washbasin, which was about the height of Ryu Jeong’s knees, was half-filled with steaming hot water. It was water that he had boiled as soon as he got home.
Ryu Jeong scooped up a generous amount of hot water with a dipper and poured it over his underwear. Then he turned on the faucet and received cold water. After adjusting the temperature to be moderately warm, he grabbed his underwear with hesitant hands and rubbed it. It was so viscous that he fumbled a few times, but the hand washing itself wasn’t difficult. It was only a moment before it became clean after lathering it with laundry soap and rubbing it.