No Regression for the Victor - Chapter 4
A dark night. Hyun was heading somewhere after receiving a call from someone. It was a frantic call saying it seemed someone had intentionally set fire to a factory. After quickly calling the fire department, they were trying to put out the fire, but he was asked to come over to assess the situation himself.
Without hesitation, Hyun took the wheel. Whether it was the creeping anxiety or something else, his mind seemed elsewhere, but there was nothing wrong with Hyun’s driving.
If there was just one problem, it was that, despite having seized the company and made it his own in the blink of an eye with his meticulous abilities, he was, in the end, an ordinary human being with no power to avoid a van that veered out of its lane and sped toward him.
The driver, slumped over the steering wheel in the van’s driver’s seat, had been dozing off. The last scene to fill Hyun’s vision was the shattered windshield and the vivid spatter of blood. There was no doubt it was an instantly fatal accident.
‘…An existence that will grant one’s wish.’
Confirming through fragmented and disordered memories the summoning ritual the man had desperately tried to complete, Hyun let out a hollow laugh at the absurdity of it all. Me? For now, Hyun slowly lifted his trembling body and stood before a mirror covered in white dust at one side of the laboratory.
The face that looked back at him resembled his own quite a bit, yet was unmistakably different. Stubborn yet strong brows, a high and straight nose, deep-set eyes, and sharp, striking eyes made the face look almost like Hyun’s twin, but there was a distinctive air of cynicism about it. The overall impression was unlike Hyun, who had been raised under constant beatings to conceal his emotions since childhood.
A war-crazed maniac who plunged the whole nation into crisis for his own greed and revenge, a wretched noble with neither blood nor tears nor mercy—the Grand Duke of Transis.
Hyun knew exactly who he was—the heir to the vast northern territories of the empire.
‘What a preposterous situation…’
Isaac Thion Transis, otherwise known as the Grand Duke Transis, was the notorious villain of a famous fantasy novel, one that had once held an exhibition event at the event hall of the shopping complex Hyun managed.
He was a character who repeatedly challenged and threatened the legitimate imperial heir, Crown Prince Mikhail, only to fail every time and ultimately meet a tragic end.
Because the project required the greatest promotional effect in the shortest time, even Hyun, who had no interest in such outlandish stories, had forced himself to read the entire novel for research purposes.
Hyun quickly looked around. If the immensely wealthy Grand Duke Transis was staying in this worn-out wooden house… it must have been during the time when the Grand Duke had been caught attempting to assassinate the young Imperial Prince Mikhail and was exiled to the frozen lake.
‘Why is it suddenly me…?’
Later, with the help of retainers who had not yet turned their backs on the Transis family, he would escape exile and, after gathering his strength, return in the future.
Why he had summoned Hyun as the one to fulfill his wish remained a mystery. Still, Hyun could guess why he had been chosen as the most suitable existence to grant the Grand Duke’s wish.
Hyun was, after all, someone who had accomplished the revenge that the Grand Duke Transis had never managed to achieve.
An ungrateful wretch and a tenacious beast who had even bested the chairman’s own son—the best summary of Hyun was ‘CEO Lee Hyun’.
As the successor of a first-rate conglomerate, Lee Hyun was a young entrepreneur who had achieved such growth that he’d propelled the company into the nation’s top ten conglomerates and gained worldwide attention, all at a young age.
But Hyun was not the biological child of the chairman. He had known, ever since his teenage years, that he was not his parents’ real child.
“If only Yejun… if only things hadn’t gone wrong with Yejun back then…”
Hyun was merely a substitute for the chairman’s long-lost son. Brought in on the pretext of raising a child with the same birthday as the lost boy, Hyun had never once forgotten that he was not the biological child of the chairman and his wife.
If I displease the chairman and his wife, I could be cast aside at any time. Every day, Hyun worked to become the perfect successor under constant pressure. Fortunately, Hyun was a bright and quick learner.
To achieve this, he had to secretly push himself to the limit, pretend not to be in pain even when he was hurt, and hide his emotions whether he was sad or suffering. Whenever his adoptive parents expressed pride in him, he could smile as if such sacrifices were nothing—simply the way things should be.
Even the occasional slap or rebuke he received for making mistakes unbefitting an heir, but only natural for a child, he convinced himself were expressions of love from his adoptive parents to help him become a better person.
