"At least a hundred gold coins apiece? Whoooa..."

A five-hundred-thousand-won watch had crossed one dimension and turned into a luxury piece worth hundreds of millions of won.

Here, even the finest Swiss watches bent the knee to Made in Korea.

First dwarf goods, now elf goods—that was what my wares had turned into.

Sabina was so sure of herself that I didn't bother to deny it.

"Elves, huh..."

I could only hope to meet real elves someday.

I wanted to see whether they were as beautiful as the elf queen, Nova hyungnim's lover.

"Subspace, I love you like crazy!"

All thanks to subspace's magic, which turned five-hundred-thousand-won goods into hundreds of millions.

"I should trade for gold too, not just spent mana stones."

After the global financial crisis ended, gold prices crashed.

But in 2020, gold shot back up in a crisis on the scale of the Great Depression.

It all started with the global trade war of 2018, between America, China, Europe and the rest.

Trump, angling for reelection and courting the people of America's industrial belt, went full thug in ways nobody had imagined.

China pitched in, big time.

Once it had money to spare, China pushed into the semiconductor business the developed countries had monopolized.

But it didn't have the technology.

So it pulled the same old trick: it granted permits for factories in China and demanded the chip designs in return.

On top of that, it teamed up with Taiwanese firms to sue American chipmakers in Chinese courts.

Behind the scenes, it was frantic to poach talent.

Blueprints of every kind and high-end technology were carried off wholesale.

Worst of all, China stole the data on America's stealth fighters and passed it off as Chinese-made.

Through hacking, threats and headhunting, it picked off, one by one, the intellectual property the developed countries had worked so hard for.

It was fraud on a national scale, run by the state, not by companies.

Its pride wounded, America slapped China across the face.

China, not knowing its place, kept mouthing off.

That was how the trade war started.

Naturally,…