Son Yowan felt like an ancient royal family king who was buried before the World Funeral and then excavated. I was well buried under a dirt blanket, so don’t excavate me, you damn bastards!
Ha, damn it.
However, Son Yowan was always quick to shift his thoughts. So while looking at the radio tuning knobs looking down at him from all directions like hundreds of eyes, he settled accounts of his past time.
It was good.
It was really fucking amazing sex.
It was so violent that not everyone would be satisfied, but at least it was killer sex that completely grasped Son Yowan’s preferences and erogenous zones and hit them. If only he didn’t have the memory of first meeting his partner here, Son Yowan would have suspected that the Detective was originally acquainted with him and had taken time to thoroughly explore his body and had sex that best matched his preferences. It was crazy sexual compatibility to that degree.
It was so good that even if he went to the afterlife like this, he could write “Had fucking amazing sex” on his “List of Things to Boast About from My Lifetime.”
However, Son Yowan had a goal he wanted to write at the very top of his “List of Things to Boast About from My Lifetime.” Son Yowan could absolutely not die before achieving that goal, “Making Chairman Son Go Bankrupt.” But as of the current point in time, Son Yowan hadn’t achieved that top priority goal, so—
Bolt upright!
This wasn’t an onomatopoeia for someone getting an erection between their legs. It was an onomatopoeia for Son Yowan, who had been sprawled out limply like grilled rice cake on a grill, sitting his upper body up.
“…Ugh, shit…”
He briefly suffered from the throbbing pain in his lower back, but even that pain couldn’t stop the determined Son Yowan. Actually, it wasn’t just his lower back that hurt, so it wasn’t particularly special pain either.
Oh.
Even when he looked around again as he’d suddenly realized earlier, it was quiet everywhere—Goyo. Eventually Son Yowan’s gaze turned to the side. On the chaotic bed, a man was sleeping. Son Yowan, who had just awakened to his new sexual preferences a while ago, wasn’t the type of student overflowing with passion for learning who wanted to skip grades while at it, so that man was naturally the Detective.
…But.
Son Yowan unconsciously brought his finger under that man—So Yeowon’s—nose. After staying like that for a moment, he nodded his head.
Fortunately, he was alive. He’d been so motionless with his eyes closed, and there was no snoring sound or even wheezing breath sounds, so he’d been momentarily scared.
Tsk. If he knows his own complexion, the polite thing would be to make some sound while sleeping.
Son Yowan grumbled inwardly while slowly climbing down from the bed. It was to avoid making any sound as much as possible.
The opportunity that had been so hard to catch had come. The perfect opportunity to search the radios while avoiding So Yeowon’s eyes, without the danger of being killed by the culprit—whoever they were—or the Goeidam.
Ha, it really was a time of hardship.
That guy, with the face of a graduate student who’d stayed up for three nights straight, wouldn’t sleep no matter what—he’d endured and endured again the desire to smack the back of his head and knock him out.
Thus, Son Yowan, who just a few minutes ago had been reminiscing about the fucking amazing sex worthy of being a life achievement but then threw himself into the freezing hell reserved for lewd sinners, inwardly praised his own patience.
Having gotten off the bed, he took a fresh look around at the radios filling the room.
Oh.
Son Yowan, who had been stealthily approaching them for a closer look, realized the radios weren’t stacked on top of each other but were placed in display cabinets fitted precisely against the walls. That fact itself wasn’t surprising at all. Unless the surprising part was that such a large cabinet existed.
Very high up, the radios displayed like towers were diverse in appearance. From antique radios made like solid wood furniture, to small round radios that for some reason had explanations written on small plaques by themselves, and conversely square-shaped or flat rectangular radios… At some point the decorative elements disappeared and ‘modern’ (it’s ridiculous to describe items from an already bygone world this way, but that’s still the term used in academia) design radios appeared with only speaker holes and circularly arranged numbers on a white background or minimal dial buttons, then at some point vintage radios with mahogany or bamboo and other wood finishes reappeared, small in size only but seemingly regressed to the past.
If enthusiasts saw these exhibits, their eyes would light up talking about crystal radios, vacuum tubes, transistors, Zenith, Wells Coates’s monumental radios, but Son Yowan was just an ordinary person.
Square shapes are the most common.
…That was his impression after looking around the forest of radios displayed up close.
Son Yowan reflected on the conversation he’d had with the VIPs when he proposed he’d look for an opportunity to find the radio the Godfather mentioned.
“Isn’t there some hint? You folks can’t enter Captain So’s room, and I can’t bring all those radios either, can I?”
It was addressed to everyone there, but was actually directed at the few people who had direct acquaintance with the Godfather.
“Teacher, do you have any idea?”
Sure enough, the Director came forward to persuade the Teacher, whose displeasure was still evident.
“Actually, though all the VIPs are guests directly invited by the Godfather, not everyone is the same, right? These young people here are merely representatives of their family elders… The Director and the Second Young Miss… No, she’s Madam now, here she’s the Assistant. Anyway, the Assistant and I were also back then, at that time, naive youngsters like these young people here.”
Son Yowan perked up his ears when meaningful words like ‘back then’ and ‘at that time’ were mentioned, but for now didn’t ask and left it alone. He was certain it would be quite an interesting story, and the more so, the heavier the information in hand needed to be to make a deal.
“So the only adults who can properly tell us are these two—the General and the Teacher.”
“Ahem.”
“But Teacher, aren’t you the Teacher?”
“What do you mean by that?”
“No, I mean all the names used here are names given by the Godfather, aren’t they? Since he invited everyone. Then shouldn’t we see it as containing the Godfather’s perspective on how he views that person? Well, someone like me would roughly be Director based on my outside profession.”
Son Yowan thought the Director used a fox-like manner of speaking unlike his appearance. Perhaps because of his profession, he had a way with words from sweet-talking investors.
“Doesn’t the Godfather regard the Teacher as his own teacher? Isn’t the Teacher actually the person the Godfather most frequently calls in for private conversations? So in a way, the Teacher is no different from the Godfather’s advisor or mentor role…”
“Enough. Enough.”
By that point, the Teacher’s mouth opened too.
“I can see you’ve rarely socialized privately with the Godfather. A teacher, you say. The Godfather greatly dislikes words like teacher and disciple. He’s been even more so recently.”
“Recently! So you met him not long ago too. As expected of the Teacher. But why does he especially detest teacher and disciple talk these days?”
“Well… Isn’t it because there are so many ungrateful bastards? As you know, the talented people he’s taken in and raised aren’t just one or two, right? Even just Goyo, they’re all individuals who received his selection one by one. Privately, they’re no different from teacher-disciple relationships. But even though he bestowed grace and gave opportunities to learn, it seems there was a bastard among those closest subordinates he raised who harbored disrespectful treacherous thoughts. He said in passing that at this rate, he worries he might die like some teacher who committed suicide three times before finally dying, unable even to leave a will.”
The Teacher, who had been blabbering even about trivial conversations with the Godfather after the Director buttered him up a bit, finished speaking and immediately frowned in distress.
“There’s absolutely nothing I can guess…”
Clap!
Then the Director forcefully slapped his own thigh, cutting off the Teacher’s words.
“As expected of the Teacher!”
Fortunately, the Teacher didn’t commit the foolish act of fumbling and asking “What, what is?”
“Didn’t Yohan-gun say the forest is the radios displayed in Captain So’s room and the tree is some specific radio? But the ‘teacher who committed suicide three times before finally dying’ that the Teacher just mentioned is none other than Seneca, Emperor Nero’s teacher. He was ordered to commit suicide but even after cutting his veins and drinking poison his breath didn’t stop, and he finally died only after his breathing became difficult in the bathhouse.”
Like a reader interpreting words a poet casually scattered like a sage, interpretations flowed smoothly from the Director’s mouth too.
“And? Say more.”
The Teacher spoke with a deliberately solemn expression stiffened like a professor evaluating a student’s problem-solving process. Son Yowan was honestly certain he was thinking inside, ‘Let’s hear it first and criticize if it doesn’t seem right, and if it seems plausible say my opinion was the same.’ then…
“Of course it’s a very far-fetched guess, but if both the forest and tree are radios as Yohan-gun interpreted, there’s some connection to my answer.”
He briefly tilted his head. Because he wondered whether that should be called his own interpretation. Wasn’t that fellow the one who responded by pouring out three or four times what he’d said himself as soon as he opened the ball, as if he’d been waiting?
