The underground parking garage of the H.R TOWER.

Vrooom.

A black sedan slowly climbed the ramp.

In the back seat, Michael Herrington looked out the window without a word.

He'd been laughing and talking at the party only moments ago, and the afterglow still lingered.

A housewarming party.

That was definitely what he'd been told when the invitation first came.

Just a few people at his new building, and a drink or two!

So he'd come along without thinking much of it. But once he was actually there, it was nothing like what he'd been told.

Faces even he hadn't expected kept appearing, and in the end Jensen Wang himself had walked in. Thinking back on it, Michael still couldn't help a disbelieving laugh.

"A housewarming……."

A housewarming on this scale was really a debut: a grand entrance into the heart of Wall Street.

It was a dazzling debut, a declaration aimed at Wall Street by a young man who'd only just set foot in New York.

Most surprising of all was Ha Tae-ung. He hadn't gotten carried away or swaggered as the distinguished guests multiplied.

Nor had his manner shifted when a guest with a big name joined.

He'd treated each of them the way you'd welcome friends dropping by your home, laughing and chatting with every one.

He was only twenty, by American reckoning. At that age, gathering people of that caliber in one place, let alone standing at the center of them, wasn't something money alone could do.

A genuine smile spread across Michael's lips.

Ha Tae-ung had given him something. It had been a big one, too.

His bet on a fall in natural gas had paid off handsomely, not just in the firm's account but in his personal one too.

There's no such thing as a free lunch.

The first principle he'd learned in his long years knocking around Wall Street was simple.

You pay back what you're given. And to someone you mean to know for a long time, you pay it back in full.

Michael took his smartphone out from inside his jacket.