Chapter 115

After confirming that both of his grandparents still wanted to keep raising Suhyeon, Gowon left their bedroom.

He had stepped out so they could get some sleep, but Grandma and Grandpa probably would not be able to sleep tonight either.

...What do I do?

They would be thinking the same thing Gowon was, just as helplessly unable to reach an answer.

Ever since earlier, Gowon had been plagued by a dizzying sensation of falling.

Even with both feet planted firmly on the floor, it felt as though he were plummeting endlessly.

A couple of hours later, once the night had fully given way to the early hours of morning, Sua quietly emerged from her room.

“Gowon, I need to tell you something.”

Gowon turned his exhausted gaze toward his younger sister.

“...I... asked AI about it, and it said there’s no right that overrides parental authority, so just because Grandma and Grandpa want to keep raising him doesn’t mean they automatically can. They’d have to go to court.”

Court.

It was a word Gowon had never imagined entering his life.

“But if there’s a lawsuit like that... wouldn’t it be bad for your image?”

“.......”

Gowon knew nothing about any of this either, so he could not answer.

“So just... send Suhyeon to her.”

Gowon, who had been staring with sunken eyes at the blotchy wallpaper, frowned and turned toward his sister.

“...What?”

“If you don’t want a lawsuit, sending Suhyeon there is the only option, right? You said there’s nothing above parental authority.”

“Sua, you—”

“But I’ll go with him.”

She spoke with determination, but she could not hide the tremor in her eyes.

“I’m still a minor too, right? If she’s going to claim she’s your mother, then she should have to claim the same thing about me. At least I’m taller than that woman. If she tries anything with Suhyeon or me, I can stop her. And how long do you think someone like that could really raise two kids properly? She’ll get sick of it in no time and dump us again. When she does, I’ll take Suhyeon and leave.”

“.......”

Gowon had at least lived in society long enough to know immediately that what she was saying made no sense.

But watching her grope through complete ignorance all by herself, desperately constructing a foolish answer by piling her own sacrifice on top of it....

It felt exactly like looking into a mirror.

“...No. No, Sua. That’s... no. I’ll figure something out.”

“That’s exactly why I’m saying this! Stop trying to figure everything out yourself!”

Sua shouted, and at some point her eyes had filled with tears.

“What else are you supposed to sacrifice? You worked part-time jobs because of us and barely even got to go to school properly, and now you’re finally living well instead of scraping by in that miserable way. Why would you throw that away? I hate it! I hate being a burden like that!”

“.......”

“Do what I said.”

“Gowon... Sua....”

Footsteps approached them.

Suhyeon, normally so mischievous and carefree, had gone pale.

He came up to the two of them, hesitated helplessly, then grabbed the hem of the sister’s clothes he had spent his whole life bickering and playing with.

“S-Sua, am I going somewhere?”

“.......”

“Don’t send me away. Don’t abandon me. I-I’ll be good from now on. Okay?”

“We’re not abandoning you! You’ve been our family all this time, and if there are two people on earth more disgusted by people who throw away their own family than me and Gowon, I’d like to meet them. Why the hell would we abandon you?”

Sua bit down hard on her lip, then released it.

“You being our little brother isn’t going to change, so stop worrying about stupid things and go back to sle—... ha....”

“Waaah....”

In the end, Suhyeon burst into tears.

Gowon saw the bedroom door open a crack and then quietly close again.

Everything was collapsing.

***

Kwon Taeyoung sought advice from the most trustworthy family-law attorney he knew, someone with effectively zero chance of leaking the story.

Attorney Baek Junhee, who had a large office in one of the best buildings near City Hall Station, the prime business district in Daejeon.

And for more efficient communication, Kwon Taeyoung had someone very close to Attorney Baek contact her.

“...So, Mom. What do you think?”

His mother’s first response was firm.

“If she has parental authority, custody usually goes with it. Judging by her attitude, there’s a good chance she really is the biological mother.”

“.......”

“The fact that she carried him for ten months and gave birth to him still gives her an advantage. You can’t ignore that even now.”

“...Mm....”

“What makes this case genuinely difficult is that if the grandparents had been related to the boy, it wouldn’t be nearly this bad. But if those kids really are half-siblings, then his maternal grandparents are ultimately complete third parties with no blood relation to him at all, right? No matter how deeply attached they are, it’s difficult for them to compete with his biological mother. And there’s another serious problem. You said their financial situation isn’t good?”

“As far as I know, they’re around the level of public-assistance recipients. Right now, it seems the entire family is living on the money Gowon gets from the company.”

“In that case, it would actually be better to put forward the older brother as the prospective guardian.”

“Oh. Then does that give us an opening?”

A long sigh came through the speaker.

“He just turned twenty. He’s only been a legal adult for a few months.”

“Uh....”

“And his profession is entertainer. Plus, everyone saw on television that he doesn’t even live with the child—he lives separately at your place, Hanje. In other words, he isn’t personally caring for his brother, is he? Every one of those things will work against him.”

“.......”

Hanje thought back to <Same Sky>, the variety show he had filmed with Gowon.

The producer had edited the episode kindly, smoothing over the rumors surrounding Hanje and Gowon at the time and presenting them as an entertaining senior-and-junior pair.

Thanks to that, Gowon had also left a good impression on Spades, Young Ace’s fans.

By every visible measure, the show had brought nothing but good results.

And yet, at the end of the broadcast, the quest window had told him—

What was it? That popularity and goodwill don’t necessarily lead to good outcomes...?

“...So what you’re saying is that if we put Gowon forward, the other side has room to attack him for being too young and not having an environment suitable for raising a child properly?”

“Exactly. Ha... this is complicated.”

He had called his mother for the first time in a while only to dump a case on her that had already made her sigh over and over again.

Some son I am.

Attorney Baek had been practicing for years. When it came to lawsuits involving catastrophically dysfunctional families, she had seen just about everything there was to see.

The fact that even she was struggling this much was probably because having an entertainer for a son let her see the situation from far more angles than most attorneys would.

The real key was resolving the fight quietly against people who had obviously contacted Gowon because they wanted the money of a rising star.

And she understood just how difficult that really was.

“Mom. You know what the situation looks like. Forget useless possibilities or comforting me by saying it’ll work out. What is the best option for Gowon right now?”

“Pay them off, settle, and buy their silence. They don’t actually want to raise that child anyway.”

Hanje’s eyes squeezed shut on their own.

“Endure it like that for a while. Then once Gowon is older and firmly established, take custody for good. If the situation becomes one where the other side is clearly exploiting his brother to extort money from him, restricting their parental rights may become possible too. By the time he has that much seniority, a media attack won’t hit as hard as it would now, when he’s still a brand-new rookie. And your company can prepare in advance.”

“Ah....”

“Out of everything I just laid out, what bothers you most?”

“...The kid’s had a rough life.”

“You think he won’t understand paying money to make the problem go away?”

“It’s not really that. It’s just... the fact that yet another adult has shown up blatantly trying to bleed him dry. It makes me feel like the world’s gone too far.”

After being kicked around by greedy adults his entire life, fairness demanded that every adult Gowon met for at least the next twenty years be Kwon Taeyoung One, Kwon Taeyoung Two, Kwon Taeyoung Three....

Hell, even I went through biological parents who abandoned me before I was eight and adoptive parents who abandoned me a second time, and in return I got Mom, CEO Yang Okmi, and the Young Ace members I have now.

“People get it into their heads that celebrities will hand over everything they have just to protect their image. And if they make a lot of money on top of that, people start thinking, Maybe I can squeeze some out of them too. When that phone call between you and me was briefly shown on TV before, all kinds of people contacted me.”

“What? You never told me that.”

“Didn’t I? I must’ve gotten annoyed enough to erase it from my memory.”

“...It wasn’t something like an ex-husband contacting you, was it?”

“Worse.”

“There’s something worse than that?”

“My former father-in-law.”

“...Wow.”

With Mom’s personality, she probably decided he wasn’t worth dealing with and incinerated the memory on the spot.

“I ended up getting sidetracked. Anyway, I’ll look for more precedents that might help.”

“Yeah... please.”

“Well, if I had to give you even one tiny piece of good news, you said the other side already has an attorney, right? Then they’re unlikely to suddenly drag the child away. Doing that would immediately make them look terrible once the case went to court.”

“Mm?”

Why is she suddenly telling me this?

“People who don’t know much about these situations get scared and keep the kid locked inside the house. It would actually be better to take him somewhere and let him calm down a little. He’ll be dealing with family-court investigations and plenty of other stress soon enough.”

“Ah.... Got it.”

After ending the call with his mother, Hanje relayed the not-particularly-hopeful assessment to Kwon Taeyoung.

“Understood. Please give your mother my thanks.”

Even so, Kwon Taeyoung responded calmly.

Whether the situation looked hopeful or hopeless, he clearly intended to protect Gowon either way.

After finishing the two phone calls, Hanje sprawled across the living-room sofa.

It was the same sofa where Gowon sat tucked into the far corner every day as though he had claimed the spot for himself.

The cushion left there by itself had sunk slightly.

In such a short time, it seemed Gowon had already left a deep impression on both this house and Hanje himself.

As though adding to the oppressive mood, rain had been falling outside all day.

“...Hey. Hurry up and give me an emergency quest. The kid’s in this state right now. Who gives a shit about confessions?”

Q. Crush the schemes of rotten adults and keep walking the awesome path of a celebrity.

“Give me a quest like that.”

But the quest window remained silent.

“...Ha....”

The fact that it had been silent all this time had already given Hanje some idea of what was happening.

He was no Yunjin, but after dealing with this system himself for so long, there were times when he could glimpse its intentions.

The reason the bastard was saying nothing now was—

...Because this isn’t Gowon’s crisis.

Strictly speaking, it was only a crisis involving Gowon’s brother.

Just as the system had once judged Newton’s downfall as something that would “benefit Gowon.”

“Still, this is too much. Can’t you give me one mission on the basis of punishing evil or something? Gowon’s head has to be a complete mess right now too.”

Previously, when Hanje had whined like this, the system had grudgingly given him a task to go interfere with Executive Director Choi.

Today, it remained completely silent.

Then at least open his status window.

The first piece of information that caught Hanje’s eye made him frown.

Gowon

Stamina 51%

“...This is a guy who can practice all day and still bounce off the walls. Why is he like this when he’s at his family’s place?”

There was nothing to be done about his thoughts being a mess, but couldn’t he at least let his body rest?

Gowon

Current Status: ■d.

...What is he thinking right now...?

It was short, yet so broad that it left far too much room for speculation.

Gowon

Stamina 50%

“Mm?”

His Stamina slowly dropped by one percent.

At that exact moment—

Rumble—

Thunder rolled outside.

Rain lashed violently against the windows.

Something that could slowly drain the Stamina of a guy whose toughness was second to none.

...■d.

...Cold?

“......!”

That bastard is outside in this weather.

Hanje hurriedly pulled up Gowon’s number.

Before the call could even begin ringing, an automated message told him the phone was turned off.

Hanje shot to his feet and ran out the door.