🔊 TTS Settings
CHAPTER 03
Who Is Cha Eun-young?
My head started to pound.
It wasn’t just the shock of betrayal.
What truly stunned me was who had done it.
Gi Sung-hoon—the man I’d known for years—wasn’t the type to pull something this bold off.
Selling a company to an overseas investment group takes guts, cunning, and nerve.
You have to be the kind of person who can ignore everyone’s ruin—the employees, the artists, the fans—just to make yourself rich.
Gi Sung-hoon never had that kind of steel in him.
So if he really did it… someone must have been behind him, pushing him.
There’s no way he planned this alone.
I checked through the official reports from when the sale happened—and my blood ran cold.
The “human assets,” as they called them, were sold at insultingly low prices.
No protection for the staff who’d built the company.
When I compared the current employee list to what it had been under my leadership, the number of support staff had dropped to a third.
No wonder everything’s falling apart. No one’s left to hold it up.
Online, the company’s reputation was in freefall.
Articles and comments were full of frustration:[Turns out Joy was basically run by CEO Yoo alone. The rest of the execs were just freeloaders.]
[Can’t believe it collapsed this fast after he died—shareholders must be losing their minds.]
[Joy’s crash took half the small investors down with it.]
It was flattering, sure, but bitter too.
They weren’t wrong—hundreds of people had lost money because of that disastrous sale.
Someone had pushed Sung-hoon into selling.
I just didn’t know who.
***
But there was one thing I could confirm:
the name “Joy Entertainment” still existed.
The real company had been gutted and absorbed into a new brand run by a foreign investment fund.
What remained of “Joy Entertainment” was just a legal shell—technically still alive, but barely breathing.
And the CEO listed for that empty shell made my stomach twist.
[CEO: Cho Kwon-hyung]
…You’ve got to be kidding me.
He’d been one of our first employees—the rookie manager I’d hired when we were just starting out.
His family situation had been rough, so I’d helped him out financially more than once.
He used to call me “hyung,” promising he’d repay me someday.
And now, he was the one left holding the ruins.
***
The employee list made things even clearer.
Five people.
That’s all that was left.
Everyone else had been transferred to the new joint company, Happiness Entertainment.
Five names remained on paper—and probably not even actively working.
A whole corporation turned into a five-person ghost office.
No real operations at all.
I couldn’t just leave it like that.
Joy Entertainment had been built to protect people from the kind of exploitation I’d once suffered.
It wasn’t pure charity—but I’d made sure we did things the right way.
And now it was being used as a tool to ruin others.
No way I could forgive that.
I took a deep breath and tried to remember Kwon-hyung’s number.
Maybe he’d blocked unknown callers. I’d just have to risk sounding like a scammer.
[Kwon-hyung, you won’t believe this, but it’s me—Jin-heon hyung.
I can’t talk on the phone. Can we meet in person?]
Suspicious as hell, sure.
But it was all I could do.
***
Later that evening
The café near the quiet station was nearly empty.
A single student sat in the corner, earbuds in, textbooks open.
The lone barista was restocking cups behind the counter.
I was early.
All I could do now was wait.
Kwon-hyung will come. He has to.
Thankfully, he’d replied right away after I texted him.
First, he’d tried calling, but when I declined the call, he sent back a cautious message.
[Is this really you, hyung? You’re not joking, right?]
I’d answered immediately.
[Come on—don’t tell me you forgot the name you used to type wrong? “Ji-heon,” remember?]
He always mistyped my name—Jin-heon became Ji-heon—and I’d had to reprint contracts more times than I could count because of it.
No one else would know that.
He’d practically shouted over text—asking how a man who’d been buried and had his organs donated could possibly be alive.
I told him to meet me and find out.
So here I was, waiting.
***
A few minutes later, the doorbell chimed.
There he is.
“Hyung…?”
He stepped inside and looked around, confused.
The café had only two customers: the student—and me, sitting quietly by the window.
He went to the counter and asked the barista,
“Uh, excuse me—did a man in his thirties come in? Pale skin, kind of sharp-looking, well dressed?”
He didn’t even dare to say my name.
Poor guy. He has no idea.
I raised my hand.
“Kwon-hyung, over here.”
He turned—and froze.
His eyes went wide, searching my face.
I waved him over.
“Come on, sit. Oh—and how’s Ye-jin? You and your wife were planning to move to Hawaii or New Zealand last time we talked.
What happened to that?”
That did it.
Details only the real me could know.
He stared at me, trembling.
“W-what is this…?”
“Sit,” I said calmly. “It’s a long story.”
And so I told him everything—every unbelievable detail.
The conversation lasted hours.
***
By the end of it, Kwon-hyung just sat there, dazed.
“It’s really you,” he whispered. “You look completely different, but… it’s you.”
He said it felt like he was talking to a ghost.
Then he began to explain what had happened after my death.
Since I’d been an orphan, my assets had defaulted to the state—no heirs, no will.
I hadn’t expected to die so suddenly, and that oversight had left the company vulnerable.
What followed was chaos:
a brutal power struggle among the board members.
Sung-hoon, holding the second-largest share, became the new CEO.
But after that, he started acting strange—nervous, paranoid, like someone was threatening him.
Then, out of nowhere, he announced he was transferring his shares to a foreign investment firm.
Before anyone could stop him, he’d convinced the other directors to approve the sale.
Within weeks, Joy Entertainment was gone.
***
Worse, the company’s value had been deliberately destroyed before the sale.
Projects were canceled, comebacks delayed, sponsorships refused.
False rumors spread about artists to tank their public image.
When some tried to sue, the company insisted that “responding would only make it seem true.”
All orchestrated.
This wasn’t Sung-hoon’s doing aone.
Finally, I asked the question that had been bugging me.
“So why are you still here, then?
Why are you the CEO of what’s left?”
He looked embarrassed.
“Because… I couldn’t stand to see the name disappear.
I bought what was left with my own money.”
“How much?”
His answer made my jaw drop.
“I used my secret savings. And… I gave up my severance pay.”
So he’d blown his rainy-day fund and his retirement money to buy an empty name.
Now he was paying rent on an office that barely functioned.
“Please tell me you didn’t take out a loan,” I said weakly.
He winced.
“…About that.”
Unbelievable.
And the landlord of that office?
The same company that had gutted Joy Entertainment—Happiness Entertainment.
They’d bought the building too, and were charging obscene rent.
“But this is where Joy started, hyung. I couldn’t just give it up.”
God, this idiot.
My head hurt.
At least his debt wasn’t catastrophic—about two hundred million won.
If you could call that “lucky.”
***
So this is what they meant by “saving others.”
Apparently, the first person I had to rescue was this loyal fool who’d gone bankrupt for nostalgia’s sake.
But then another idea sparked in my mind.
Wait… what about the insurance money that should’ve gone to Cha Eun-young?
And whatever assets her parents left behind?
If I could access that, maybe I’d have a starting fund.
I turned back to Kwon-hyung, who looked like he was about to cry.
“Alright. Let me think of a plan.
I’ll contact you soon.
For now, tell no one we met. Understand? No one.”
If Sung-hoon and the old board were compromised, I couldn’t risk word getting out that I was back—even in a new body.
He nodded fiercely, wiping his tears.
Then my next step is clear.
I needed to find that so-called uncle.
The man who’d been living off Eun-young’s misfortune.
He’d cheated a helpless girl for years.
But now?
I was going to make him pay every last won.
