“Ch-Chairman. The market’s been in free fall since the opening bell.”

Lee Nam-gyu, the finance team leader, looked up from the stock monitors to make his report.

“I don’t want to hear it!”

Chairman Oh Seung-hyeok’s roar went off like a bomb.

“What the hell is this? You all just going to sit there tongue-tied? You’ve been stuffing your faces on easy paychecks all this time—so come up with a plan! A plan!”

The chairman’s private conference room at Ana Group headquarters was thick with tension.

The group’s key presidents and office heads had been called in first thing that morning.

The mood was murderous.

Foreign investment firms had been short selling Ana indiscriminately for a while now, and the group’s share price had been cut in half from its peak.

Day after day, the TV news hammered the chairman’s family for having no morals.

Money had been spread around, but a few outlets still wouldn’t budge.

With Ana shaken, the other groups smelled blood and came charging in.

Worst of all were the outlets in bed with rival groups; they had the Ana Group in their sights.

They knew by instinct that the Ana Group was in deep trouble.

When a group breaks apart, there’s a feast.

And when it’s a dinosaur from the top ten, the spread is that much bigger.

The press and the politicians might already have done their math.

Chairman Oh Seung-hyeok knew all that too well, and he was burning up inside.

How the hell did it all get so tangled?!

He’d taken over as chairman in his thirties and grown the group several times over.

He was a gambler who’d gone from strength to strength, and nothing had ever stood in his way.

Swallow Daeung Shipbuilding, and the Ana Group would be the ninth-largest group in Korea, in name and in fact.

Once you were in the top ten, moving up even one rung was brutally hard.

Now, out of nowhere, he’d tripped. A crisis he hadn’t seen coming.

And it had gone from bad to worse. (TL Note: The Korean phrase is 설상가상, “frost on top of snow”—one misfortune piled on top of another.)

“President Choi. Can’t Ana Life put in any more?”

“…Chairman. We’re already past the support limit. The Financial Supervisory Commission has sent us a warning. And complaints about late claim payments are pouring in.”

The president of Ana Life, which the Ana Group had bought not long ago, was sweating bullets.

More than the law allowed had gone to the parent group.

If the prosecutors came digging, there’d be no escaping charges of occupational breach of trust and embezzlement.

“What about the other companies?”

Listed or unlisted, every president in the room hung his head.

The group ran on circular shareholding, so trouble in one company spread to the next.

With the stock in free fall, the money wasn’t moving.

The spare cash had already been sucked up into the parent group.

Anything that could serve as collateral had already gone to the banks and the second-tier lenders for loans.

“Team Leader Lee, how much spare cash is left?”

“A little over two hundred billion won.”

“How long can we hold out?”

“We’re covering the settlements with promissory notes, but… it’ll be hard to last a month.”

“Hey! How the hell did you manage the money!”

“The performance bond for Daeung Shipbuilding was a big one. And another three hundred billion went into the stock stabilization fund.”

Chairman Oh knew that already. He was just taking it out on someone.

His chest was so tight it felt ready to burst.

Cold, hard cash was about to go up in smoke with that performance bond.

The way things stood, the takeover was impossible.

Sons of bitches… not taking my calls?

The bank loans had dried up, too.

Every credit line was maxed out.

Public opinion had turned.

Somehow even the details of Ana’s loans had leaked.

The new administration had won the election, but netizens in their forties and younger kept it on a short leash.

It had taken a public beating over one thing after another ever since the transition committee days.

Propping up the Ana Group now would obviously cost it dearly this early in its term.

The regime’s power brokers who’d gorged themselves on Chairman Oh’s money were dodging his calls.

“Did you try Myeongdong?” (TL Note: Myeongdong, in old downtown Seoul, is also shorthand for the private money market based there—the curb lenders big companies turn to when the banks shut the door.)

“…They want more collateral.”

“Ah! Fucking bastards! We already put in all our stock!”

A big company goes bust the same way a person does.

When the banks cut you off, you go to the second-tier lenders, and the last stop is the loan sharks.

But a big company could join hands with the politicians, get itself put into court receivership, collect all sorts of special favors, and plot a comeback.

Ana was obviously headed down that same road.

Something’s going on!

Yu Byeong-seok couldn’t shake a bad feeling. He was Oh Seung-hyeok’s right-hand man, the head of the secretariat.

There had to be an invisible hand at work.

Sure, foreign capital was pulling out of the Korean stock market, but not like this.

Only the Ana Group affiliates’ shares had become targets for indiscriminate short selling.

Add Oh Dong-seong’s insane stunt, and the synergy was truly impressive.

Chairman Oh’s past crimes had pitched in, too.

But this was too much.

Pressure from every direction.

Could it be…?

One kid’s name kept surfacing, and it left a sour taste in Manager Yu’s mouth.

Every time bad news broke, it traced back to that kid somehow.

He’s sitting on an enormous pile of stock and cash-equivalent assets. If it’s him…

He had his suspicions, but they didn’t add up.

The kid had just started college.

He couldn’t possibly move overseas private equity funds to go after a conglomerate.

And there was no way he had a huge slush fund stashed abroad.

American capital was mostly tied into American politics and business.

This game was too big for a little kid to rig.

“What are you all doing? Just going to sit there in a daze? Go meet the bank presidents and squeeze out every last won you can get! We just have to get through this. Just this once!”

The chairman’s bellow rang through the room.

The presidents bowed like machines and scrambled out as if they were running for their lives.

They were already half out of their minds.

“Unbelievable… I can change a god’s fate… Who the hell am I… Insane!”

Just thinking about it made my head ring.

Last night’s business still made no sense to me.

That voice, asking if I wanted to exchange the evil god’s dark karma points for a good god’s karma points!

The kid had been desperate.

“Hyung—no, hyungnim! I’ll be good! Only real devils live here. I want to live like a real god!”

The evil god was a mess of tears and snot.

Vladimir crawled over on his knees and clutched at my pant leg.

He was paying dearly for not living a good life.

But his bad karma wasn’t all Vladimir’s fault.

His parents had died young, and cold Russian intelligence had raised him.

He’d been raised somewhere that warped him from the start. How was that the kid’s fault?

— Would you like to exchange?

The question came again.

The moment of fate.

I wondered if the karma points I owned could make Vladimir a good god.

Drip, drip.

The evil god Vladimir was crying.

I saw how desperate those tears were.

That settled it.

I’m softer than I look.

“I’ll… make the exchange.”

— The good karma points you own have been exchanged for dark karma points.

Fwaaaash!

Suddenly, a tremendous storm of light swept through the room.

The light was so bright I had to squeeze my eyes shut.

It hit harder than any time the gods had summoned me.

“Ah!”

Then a cry of pure joy reached my ears.

I snapped my eyes open.

“Wh-where is this?”

The place had changed in an instant.

The stale air was gone; what I breathed now was fresh.

“Waaaah! Waaaaaaaaaah!”

Vladimir was howling with joy like a madman.

And then…

“A country cottage… So an evil god really can become a good god in an instant.”

I still couldn’t believe it.

We’d been whisked straight from the evil gods’ realm to the good gods’ realm.

How could it be that easy?

The place in front of us was a wooden cottage in the Russian countryside.

An ordinary house, not fancy but not shabby either, with a lawn out front.

The kid was even more innocent than I’d thought.

I’d asked him what he’d wanted to do with the money he made hacking.

He just rolled around on the lawn with a secretive smile.

Apparently there was something he couldn’t tell even me yet.

That smile of his was pure.

I couldn’t say why, but he didn’t look like the vicious hacker who’d gone after Putin’s account.

He barely thought of himself as a criminal.

To Vladimir, it had just been numbers going back and forth.

I planted a few trees around the cottage and threw in some little touches, like lamps.

Vladimir whooped over every small present.

For a kid who’d had nothing, not even bread, that was real luxury.

Even after turning him into a good god, I had points left over.

My monthly donations to the children’s home brought in a tidy haul of points.

Every time I okayed hiring staff overseas, I earned points.

Even when I treated someone to a good meal, the points never let me down.

“Regression isn’t a video game, so what’s with the level-ups? Three levels, just like that?”

When Vladimir became a good god, a level-up got forced on me.

Three whole levels, no less.

It came with a warning that the good gods and the evil gods had started watching me very closely.

“Isn’t there a bankbook for managing karma points? If I keep spending like this, I’ll end up a beggar.”

I wasn’t squandering the good deeds I’d piled up.

But if I went soft and handed them out left and right while I was alive, I had a feeling I’d suffer for it after I died.

Tromp, tromp.

My feet carried me toward the engineering school on their own while I sorted out my thoughts.

I passed Jaha Pond and the Central Library.

I’d cleared the morning music class, too.

Violin Sonata, a course for junior-year music majors.

It went the same way as the others.

I’d bought a decent used violin for fifty million won.

It wasn’t one of the old masterpieces that sell for three and a half billion won, but it sounded pretty good.

I took it with me to the music school.

The violin professor in the instrumental music department hadn’t heard my name yet, so he walked all over me without a second thought.

I got treated like some lowly law student who thought art was a joke.

I shot back with Tartini’s violin sonata The Devil’s Trill, no sweat.

He didn’t look convinced, so I played him a few of Paganini’s Twenty-Four Caprices—the devil’s violinist himself.

The professor looked like his soul had left his body.

Nova hyungnim is a real genius.

He could play anything—piano, violin, you name it.

I didn’t even have to summon the gods of music to finish off a professor.

Music class mastered, I walked on to my Wednesday afternoon class.

I could’ve driven, but I wanted to soak up the campus.

The school was huge.

And behold, it was very good.

Spring was coming on stronger every day.

The life waking on Mount Gwanak drifted down over the campus.

“Whoa…”

“Wh-who’s that guy?”

“Is he even a student?”

“No way… Our school can’t have a guy that hot.”

Yes, that’s the stuff.

A backpack with my laptop in it hung from my shoulder.

The weather was great.

My outfit: jeans that showed off every line of muscle, a light shirt, a pale blue cardigan and sneakers.

I may be a law student, but I’ve defected from law.

It worked at the arts colleges, too, where most of my classes were.

Art students’ fashion sense wasn’t much different in 2008 than in 2020.

They were overflowing with a creative spirit that didn’t chase trends.

Even there, people noticed how I dressed.

I’d lived through the 2020s, so I could read where the trends were going at a glance.

Girls walking by stopped in their tracks to look at me.

A natural reaction.

This place was part of the same world as anywhere else.

In my last life, I’d pictured Hanguk University as a fantasy world where only study monsters lived.

Now that I’m actually here, it’s nothing like that.

The place is full of girls in pretty skirts with their makeup done just right.

Dressed-up males strutted around everywhere, too.

The heat pouring off all that youth warmed the whole campus.

The college romance I never got in my last life.

It greeted me, fresh and green.

“This place is thick with a dark aura. Tsk.”

But the moment I reached the engineering school, a pitch-black energy made me flinch.

Not even Hanguk University had escaped the curse of the engineering school.

The pheromones of males who’d burned up their young lives in the labs had coated the engineering building.

The place was full of a gloom that could rival the evil gods’ realm.

On top of that, the engineering building sat deep inside the campus.

If it had been closer to the humanities or arts buildings, things might have been better.

But no such blessing was granted to engineering students.

The engineering school at the provincial university I went to in my last life was the same.

Shaking my head, I walked into the engineering building.

The general-education classes the engineering school offered weren’t exactly student favorites, either.

“Room 302, they said.”

Room 302 in the engineering building, shared by a jumble of departments.

I got a can of coffee from the vending machine and stood outside the lecture room.

Shhhk.

I slid the door open.

And right then—

“Coffee? Thanks.”

Out of nowhere, a stranger’s hand snatched my coffee.

(End of Chapter 121)