"It's really funny how he thinks he owns the world."

"Is he wrong."

"Of course he is. I own the world!"

"That you do."

"Would you like to come with me to the meeting with Nam Hee-seo tomorrow?" ...less wishy-washy. "I think it would be a good idea."

"- if you think it would be a good idea, sure. I don't exactly know how to comport myself in this situation, though."

"I think... the strategy that would serve us best would be for you to be aggressively yourself, except probably you should use the right honorifics."

"In this limited sandbox of a situation I can but you will have to tell me what they are unless we are planning to conduct the entire meeting in Japanese and I can get away with universal -san. Aggressively myself as in not the slightly mass-market version I present to cameras and dungeon victims?"

"Right. The version of you that could run a company."

"In what version of reality do I wind up running a company?"

"In the version where I do stick as Kang Jaehyuk's heir and you marry me, of course." Unless Haru doesn't want to, but Jaeha doesn't want to add this caveat because—well, because it would come off as insecure, of course, but also because it's obvious and because Haru is likely to actually want it and even if he doesn't he will probably be able to tell from context clues that Jaeha will not be foisting companies on him nonconsensually.

...he needs to stop overthinking his interactions, he thinks.

"Companies are like monarchies in this way? I didn't think it worked like that. - okay, what industries is this conglomerate even in," Wikipedia, help him.

Lots! The subgroup Haru might be most familiar with that is owned by Jaeha's family is Samsung Group, which includes Samsung Electronics (electronics), Samsung Heavy Industries (mostly ship building), Samsung Engineering (construction and project management), and Samsung C&T Corporation (construction and engineering), but there are several others that Haru might also be familiar with, depending on how much he's seen of Korea, including one of the three largest department stores in Korea (which also happened to have been the first credit card company in Korea), some pharmacies and supermarkets, and so on so forth.

"Phew. I assume it can't possibly be a requirement to run this whole shebang that a person be an expert in all of the relevant subfields but there's probably all kinds of logistics and finance information that I would have if I'd gone to business school and instead don't have because I didn't even go to university."

"Oh, no, not at all. Kang Jaehyuk's job is focused on the much more macro level, helping to manage alliances and trades and sales and mergers. My job as his heir, if I take him up on it, would be to spend a year or two watching the work of the CEOs of a choice subset of those companies so I could understand what's what, learn who's good and who isn't, which decisions turn out well and which don't, et cetera. I'm sure Kang Jaehyuk will at some point want to test me and ask me to choose a CEO to fire out of some CEOs that made mistakes recently, that sounds like him."

"How charming. Isn't it sort of farcical if he gives you the shortlist, suppose you found something to object to in another CEO who hadn't done anything he personally identified as a mistake?"

"He might give me the list and expect me to decide that it's someone not on the list. He might be willing to be argued about it. I expect it will in fact be a test and while he's not a good people manager he has managed not to run Kang Moon-il Group to the ground so the man must have some skill."

"Or competent underlings. I guess not firing his competent underlings is a skill, albeit a skill easily reproduced by a rock."

"Delegation certainly is a skill he'd want me to pick up, yeah."

"If companies are like monarchies in this way do I also get to run this delightful gauntlet at some point?"

"I think probably companies in general aren't necessarily, but—this is Korea," he shrugs. "I'm not sure. I'm really not sure what he'd make of you, I wasn't really thinking that he would think of you as one of his heirs, just that I value your insight and think you would do good work if this sounded like something you wanted to do with your time."

"You could talk me into it," he has thirteen Wikipedia tabs open and is scrolling through the shipbuilding company one now, "though I imagine it'll cut into our dungeoneering schedules something awful."

"Yeah, I'm not sure how those things would fit together. He would certainly love to get me to stop going into dungeons altogether."

"But wouldn't it be so funny if we attended meetings in between dungeons while making out on the couch?"

"I think that would make it pretty hard to pay attention to the meetings!"