What’s with that look? Does it taste strange?

In the middle of the cooking I experienced a state of no-self.

I hadn’t known my hands could prep vegetables and boil ramyeon and eggs that fast.

The image that rose in my head turned into action immediately.

Raid the Fridge‘s chefs cook to a fifteen-minute record, and this was close to it.

Astonishingly, in the middle of the cooking I lost track of time passing.

The energy inside my body went into the food.

While I cooked, the Taegeuk Five Elements Dual Intent Mind Art ran itself.

I could feel the energy going into the food.

At the same time my heart turned clean and clear.

A good heart settled into me, purely wishing health on whoever tasted this dish.

And then the dumpling rabokki, there in front of me.

What turned up was less a snack-shop dish than a lavish steamed-seafood platter.

Whoa…, I about wet myself.

“Oppa…, hnh.”

Ju-hui called me all of a sudden, and a single tear rolled down her face.

Violent emotion seemed to have clubbed the girl over the head.

“Wh-What’s wrong?”

“Waaaaaaah! It’s so moving! Oppa!!!”

Ju-hui burst into tears out of nowhere, shouting that it was moving.

And she grabbed my right arm tight.

“Oppa! This is a jackpot! How on earth did you make it! You didn’t put drugs in it, did you? Let’s file a patent!”

“Tae-san oppa…, you have to take responsibility for me. I’ll never think about any other rabokki for the rest of my life.”

“What are you talking about! Tae-san oraboni, I have been ready this long while. To be a wise mother and a good wife hath been my dream since birth~.”

The twins’ friends drew little hearts popping in their eyes as they looked at me.

They fought with each other, speaking seriously, in period-drama mode.

The twins are pretty even to my eye, and their friends were no less so, with looks well past the baseline.

The principle that a man who lies down beside ink comes up black applies here too.

The twins’ friends had fallen for me completely.

I remembered the saying that a man who cooks is more wicked than a bad man.

This was a fatal skill where women are concerned.

“It’s all going to get cold. Eat up.”

“Oppa! This rabokki is love!”

“Let me finish high school and go into the rabokki chain-store business with you. I’m candidate number one for the bride who’s ready — Seo A-in. I place myself in your hands.”

“You eat with us, oppa.”

“All right. Let’s eat together.”

One dish had turned the mood warm and easy.

I had made plenty of rabokki.

It was enough for five of my pig friends to pile onto.

I picked up chopsticks and put a tteokbokki rice cake in my mouth.

I was curious about the taste myself.

“Ah!”

Admiration burst out of me before I knew it.

Exactly as it looked, the rice cake was taut and springy.

The chili-paste-and-tomato-ketchup sauce, soaked in just right, clung to the mouth.

The touch of sugar stirred the flavor.

The spice going around my mouth blew my tiredness clean away.

My chopsticks headed for the ramyeon noodles, their bodies twisted voluptuously.

I had rinsed the slightly undercooked noodles in cold water, and the extra spring in them came at the inside of my mouth and hit it.

This is insane…, I made it myself, but it’s a killer.

Nothing special had gone into it.

The vegetables Mom had put in the fridge and a few supporting seasonings like sugar were all of it.

It was my first time using them and the recipe came up in my head.

I took up the spicy, sweet sauce with a spoon.

Slurp, slurp.

Without a word, the girls emptied the rabokki fast with their chopsticks.

They were still rich in digestive enzymes and had no need of a diet, and their hands moved without hesitation.

They were the female version of my pig friends.

That they eat like that and keep slim waists is one of the world’s ten great mysteries.

“Oppa! Let’s put rice in it!”

“I’m in too!”

Before anyone noticed, the girls had demolished every solid thing in the dish.

They were combative enough to get sauce on their mouths.

Truly a tremendous appetite.

“Shall I fry the rice for you?”

“Really?”

“Of course~ put a few drops of sesame oil in here, crumble seasoned laver all through it, and…”

“Kyaaaaaah!”

“Oppa! We love you! We mean it! We mean it!!!”

The screams of girls already happy on imagination alone decorated the house.

The sight of it was deeply good to me.

An evening’s late-night snack with girls in the flower of their youth.

This too is a beautiful memory.

And then!

— Karma points acquired.

“Karma points…, haah, what on earth is this? It isn’t even a game.”

I came back to my room in a daze.

I fried two bowls of rice for my flower-pig sisters and their friends.

And even then the girls smacked their lips and said it wasn’t enough.

My fantasy image of girls was ruined, and ruined thoroughly.

I got apples ready for dessert…

I pared them more neatly and more perfectly than my own mom does.

The more I experienced the abilities of the gods, the more tremendous they were.

And the strange new ability I had gained left me with nothing to say.

A karma point alert had sounded in my ear.

The voice was flat and dry, but it was better to hear than anything else in the world.

I don’t know what it is, but I had definitely grown one stage further.

It’s the new ability Madam Dae Jang-geum said I had gained.

Now I knew exactly how Madam Dae Jang-geum had managed to become a god.

Food that moves anyone who tastes it enough to bring tears is the shortcut to acquiring karma points.

I was sincerely grateful to Madam Dae Jang-geum.

“So you get them when you grant what somebody desperately wants.”

I felt I understood the principle, more or less.

Karma points produced an effect much like money in the real world.

“It looks as though I got karma points for goodwill and for undoing the ghosts’ bitterness too.”

The shouting old man I met in that first dream said as much.

He said he had been able to bring me back because of the good deed of saving a little kid when I died in the traffic accident.

After that I undid the bitterness of the girl who was killed by the gangster boss.

I’m certain I got points from the ghost parents of the Jangju Girls’ High student who met her graduation alone.

Filling the bellies of my pig friends is another secret of accumulating points.

To those boys there is nothing more important than chicken and pizza.

Cleaning out that Hong boy, the villain of the school, helped too.

So did the purification project on the gangsters downtown.

“It means there’s a strict order to the giving and the taking. The gods’ way of calculating, which we don’t know about.”

They were exchange-of-equal-value points, invisible and easy to reduce to a pattern.

It whetted my appetite.

Even so, they couldn’t be taken by force.

And I didn’t want to do things my heart wasn’t in.

“Points are points and money is money!”

I’m not a god, I’m a human being.

I was a being that lives by the material called money.

Before I noticed, a virtual world had opened again in the market that stays bright as day all night.

It’s night here, but the American Chicago futures market opens from now.

Red and blue numbers threw off light in every order book.

It’s the signal that somebody at this moment is losing an enormous amount of money, or winning it.

I couldn’t be resting.

I got impatient.

The blind money of the world was calling me like mad.

“The wise men of old had a saying. Earn like a farmhand and spend like a minister.”

After I learned about karma points I figured out the hidden meaning of it.

The surest weapon in the modern age for saving a person’s life and for ending it!

That is money, exactly.

“Right! The table is open. Money in, money out! Let’s run again today!”

The world market, cracked by the financial crisis out of America, was making the sound of rupture all over.

The Canadian dollar in particular was moving steeply.

With the exchange rate surging, the quality of life of the Canadian people was certain to fall.

It showed ultra-strength against the American dollar.

At the same time it was ultra-strong against the yen.

At a surge on that scale, living costs go up by around fifty percent.

But to me it was El Dorado.

The exchange-rate graph came up vividly in my head.

On the international exchange market the American dollar had gone blue in the face against the Canadian dollar and was in vertical descent.

I knew when that descent would end.

Even now the units in the buy and sell windows were changing in jagged jumps.

Prey had entered my hunting ground.

I aimed at its throat with a hunter’s eye.

“I gathered money the way I did for today. Heh heh.”

My heart had that good tightness in it.

The most galling thing at a gambling table is when your stake is small and you can’t build the pot.

Catch a royal flush and if your stake is small, you have to eat small change.

It’s the same with FX margin and the currency futures market, the two pillars of the foreign exchange market.

In the case of FX margin, the funds traded in one day were dozens of times the trade of every stock market in the world.

I was after that one.

FX Margin Trading.

The value traded, as of April 2007, is three trillion two hundred billion dollars a day.

At the 2007 exchange rate, something close to three thousand trillion won moved here and there in the course of one night.

It’s the last-stage gambling table human beings have built with legality for a disguise.

Next to this table a casino is a playground for sages and gentlemen.

The instant your stake is cleaned out, there isn’t a single won handed back.

Unlike at home, I was after the overseas trading market, where the table is big and leaves no traces.

The biggest markets opened in Hong Kong, America and London.

Unlike futures, FX trading has no separate, stable exchange of its own.

The world’s major prime banks handled the settlement guarantee.

It’s an enormous table with banks and other financial institutions, corporations and individuals all taking part.

Any number of futures brokerages became the middlemen.

It’s a product built by taking only the advantages of spot trading and futures trading.

Apart from the surcharge called the spread, the trading commission is free.

Weekends excepted, the market opened twenty-four hours, all over the world.

“Leverage…, fifty times!”

I placed the bet boldly.

The screen caught the futures brokerage taking my order.

A moment later the graph swayed a little.

The target is the Canadian dollar, which is holding its strength.

The Canadian dollar had climbed steeply in value against the yen and the American dollar.

I bought the Canadian dollar and sold the yen.

The trades filled and the lights came on, blinking.

The unit of a single trade was called one lot.

Usually a hundred thousand was the minimum trading unit.

One lot of euros meant a hundred thousand euros.

Apart from the yen, the pip, which is the unit of profit, meant the last of the four decimal places on a currency rate.

A change of one pip alone produced ten dollars of profit and loss on the euro and the dollar.

If a contract like that were set at fifty times leverage, a movement of two percent alone could wipe out the principal and bring a margin call down on you.

Even for me, drawing a big picture, it’s a burden.

A falling market could not help but swing hard.

Which is why plenty of ammunition is needed.

Time went by fast.

My funds were not small.

The market was smaller than the big trades like the euro and the dollar, so it took time to get in.

I ran two trades at the same time — buy the Canadian dollar and sell the American dollar, buy the Canadian dollar and sell the yen.

Rattle, rattle-attle-attle.

My hands went back and forth fast.

My eyes stayed fixed on the screen while the trades went through secret corporations here and there.

Even while I was buying, profit in the hundreds of thousands of dollars came up in the settlement window from the pips rising.

“The alley-boss games end now.”

The Age of Exploration had begun.

Out of ten billion dollars, five billion went in at fifty times leverage.

Enough that the graph swayed several times because of me.

One billion dollars went into the Canadian dollar and yen market.

Four billion dollars I shoved into the Canadian and American dollar market, where there is plenty of trade.

The remaining five billion dollars I left as margin against a margin call, in case of anything.

Even aggressive investment should always leave a minimum defense.

“Whew.”

I was sweating.

It took more out of me than I expected.

When the margin trading was finished, I opened the domestic investment corporation, my personal account and my mother’s account next.

The domestic stock market has entered a boom period, but I have no lingering attachment to it.

I had no wish to play in fresh water with a big net for catching sea fish.

I started putting the domestic funds too into the big table of exchange rates, where volatility runs at its highest.

From 2005 it had been possible to invest from inside the country too.

Apart from the funds invested in Google, I put in every other fund I had.

A few days ago I sold every stock I owned.

The two hundred million dollars borrowed from HSBC I deposited into the repayment account, with the interest calculated exactly.

My tied-up funds were released.

Now I’m free.

The good thing about FX margin trading is that it has no term.

There was no settlement day of futures trading — three, six, nine, twelve.

“Lay me golden eggs, plop plop!”

Every trade was done.

The first-stage underdrawing I had planned goes this far.

The monitors that had been hot seemed to be cooling slowly.

I had my sights on the prey that would be with me for months.

The domestic funds I let fly at fifty times leverage too, through KR Futures.

Back in 2007 there aren’t many restrictions.

It’s the time when individuals too were learning the taste of futures and currency trading for real.

I hid myself among any number of shadows.

The transfer trading tax wasn’t imposed until 2016, so there’s no tax problem on the profits either.

Until my money-bees fill the honeypot full of honey…

“Aargh! Faster! Go by, time! Go! I want to throw money around too!”

Watching money disappear into numbers left a bitter taste in my mouth.

This Hong Gil-dong of a world, where I’m a minor, so I have money and can’t call it money.

I waited on tiptoe for the day I turn adult to hurry up and come.

I wanted to throw money around so badly that relic beads were about to come out of my whole body.

“Is the Spending God not in? If you are, come down next time and let’s spend hot and hard together!”

(End of Chapter 51)