The “special” coming-of-age story of an ordinary man, bearing witness to the results of the campaign against organized crime.
These are the real stories people have heard through the grapevine: Was the man who affected both my life and a small county’s history the product of a bloody rise to wealth, or simply a man consumed by greed? Starting from nothing, he amassed hundreds of millions in assets, cultivated an underground network, and colluded with officials and businessmen, all to evade the law. Money and power converged; violence and temptation, a life of luxury and excess, a high-stakes gamble at the table, cunning schemes, and relationships built on threats and inducements: it was all for the next fortune beyond imagining.
Every step was a struggle through false affection and worldly obligations. True feelings? False pretenses? Conspiracies? Schemes? In a tangled web of sincerity and deceit, was it all careful planning, a bribe, or perhaps a plot?
An opportunity to rewrite one’s fate became an offering to fate itself. Money stained with blood gave off an intoxicating metallic stench, and everyone joined the sinful feast like flies clinging to a carcass. Greed showed in their eyes, cunning in their expressions, and schemes and calculations filled their hearts. With every manner of dark stratagem, alliances formed and broke, profits were divided, and the underground world’s hierarchy ensured that bloodshed was inevitable.
What happens in the underworld stays in the underworld.
Fear! Regret!
Fear of the law and the people, fear of losing what they had gained, fear that others would seize their resources. Yet they schemed relentlessly. They regretted falling into someone else’s trap and having evidence held against them, even as they desperately dug for evidence against others. They regretted their crimes, which haunted them like nightmares that jolted them awake at midnight. Run? Confess? Regret? In the end, none could escape the judge’s gavel.
Hei San’s betrayal was an act of redemption from fate.
