—What? Grandpa?

Mom asks.

“N— no, ma’am.”

—Ma’am? Tae-ung, have you been through the army? Since when do you talk like that?

“The club seniors run a tight ship.”

I steered it away.

In our house, the word grandfather is forbidden.

The world calls him Chairman Ha of the smiling mask, for that kind face of his.

I remember what’s underneath it.

When I was small. Before I’d started primary school.

We heard my grandmother was gravely ill, and the three of us went to the old man’s house.

I was excited, small as I was.

Grandfathers and grandmothers were things I’d only ever heard about from friends. Up to then they’d been other people’s business.

The fact that I had one of each was a marvel to me.

And not only that. All those uncles the other children didn’t have. An aunt as well.

I only understood it once I’d grown.

Dad worked sales for a small manufacturer and spent every day driving the country. He was also, it turned out, an alumnus of my own university, a good many years ahead of me.

A business graduate of Yeonguk University, from a time when walking into a major corporation was easy.

More than that, he was the youngest son of the sitting chairman of the great Haryun Group.

And he went to work for a small company instead.

That was what came of marrying Mom against the family’s wishes.

Every benefit that a son of the group could have drawn on was stripped from him.

The woman Dad chose had lost both parents early and had lived on alone, an orphan in all but name.

The two of them met by chance on the beach at Sokcho and fell hard.

First love. The most beautiful feeling a person is allotted.

That was where the tragedy started. Dad had already been matched to someone in his university years.

The kind of duty that comes with chaebol blood.

Dad was the youngest of six, four sons and two daughters. The arrangement had him marrying a daughter of one of the three great press families.

He chose love anyway.

For that, the Ha family went as far as threatening to kill him. Nothing about it made sense.

Dad didn’t bend. He chose Mom.

So my grandfather cut him off on the spot.

The empire he dreamed of needed stepping stones. A child who refused to be one got discarded, coldly.

Dad’s brothers and sisters could all do the arithmetic on their own shares going up, and they welcomed the decision.

Dad never regretted it once.

The love he chose in choosing Mom carried him through a world built on prejudice.

When I think back on my childhood, our house was a happy one. Two parents who dripped honey just looking at each other, and me, the only son.

There are a lot of memories in it.

On Dad’s days off, if the sun was out at all, we went to the Han River. The three of us would rent bicycles, and afterward tear into fried chicken.

When it rained we stayed home and ate Mom’s jeon, and hers was good.

Courgette, garlic chives, sweet potato, cabbage. Ordinary ingredients, and my mouth waters at the thought of them even now.

Cheap to make, and the side dish changed with the season.

No fine wine in that house. The two of them were happy over a single cup of makgeolli.

I grew up in the shade the pair of them cast, without a worry in the world.

And it would have gone on that way, if not for the nightmare I’ll never be able to forget.

Rain, running down.

It was a day of rain.

The three of us drove out in the little company car Dad used for sales. A wealthy neighborhood in Seongbuk-dong.

Enormous houses, one after another, going on without end.

My heart went wild. I couldn’t believe I had a grandfather who lived like this.

The two of them got out in front of the house.

I can still see exactly how they stood there, unable to settle.

Mom was frightened. Her whole state came through into my small hand. I held on to it tightly for her.

That fine tremor, coming through the warmth of her palm.

I really didn’t understand it then.

Mom was genuinely afraid.

Dad pressed the bell. Nothing came back from inside.

He pressed it several more times after that.

A long while later, two well-built men opened the gate and came out.

The chairman’s instruction, they said, was that we should leave.

Dad begged them. Just let me see my mother’s face once.

That was the first time I saw my father cry.

The two men were bodyguards. They blocked the way and would not move on it.

A struggle broke out between the three of them.

Dad tried to shove past them and get through the gate. The bodyguards caught hold of him and held him hard.

He shouted until his throat tore.

Mother. Mother.

Tears and snot all over his face, still trying to get through that gate.

An iron gate, unusually high, unusually solid, standing in the way. With the bodyguards in front of it, it did not open.

Mom pulled at them to get them off him.

The struggle went on long enough that the umbrella we’d been under ended up thrown some distance away.

Rain, coming down and down. Dad and Mom and me, soaked through like drowned mice.

And then, like something out of a lie, the gate opened.

A pleasant-faced old man appeared.

Father.

Dad said it with a shake in his voice.

He looked like one of those comic masks out of a children’s book.

The gold buttons caught the eye. Yellow gold buttons, hung in a row down the front of a hanbok jacket.

“…….”

The commotion died away and a thick silence came down over it.

It was short and it felt very long.

That heavy weight spreading out in every direction was terror, to a child.

I was frightened. I couldn’t breathe.

I hid behind Mom and stole a look at him.

Lips pressed shut. Stubborn, and something nastier than that. A tiger’s eyes, without any warmth in them.

My first impression of my grandfather, and I remember it precisely. It’s lodged in me still.

It was nothing like the way Mom and Dad looked at me. It was not the way a man looks at his child.

Cold, hostile, the way you look at an enemy.

Our eyes met for a moment. Nothing at all in his.

Not one degree of warmth for his own blood.

He didn’t even look at Mom when she greeted him.

Behind him, Dad’s brothers and sisters lined up in a row.

Arranged like a folding screen.

Their eyes were no different. They looked at Mom and Dad and me, beggared and dripping, and there was arrogance in every one of them.

A few of them sneered down at the small boy I was, and I can still see those faces clearly.

And then what I heard.

“Get out! Low-born filth — do you know where you’re standing? The nerve of it.”

The shout went up.

It came from one of the women standing behind him, thrown at Mom.

“You struck yourself off the register! And you come crawling back here?”

One of the men spat it out.

That one was for Dad.

Dad pleaded with them. Just let me see my mother once.

He went down on his knees in front of the gate, in the rain.

The old man watched him do it and said nothing. The folding-screen children only raised their voices louder.

There is no dog like you in the Ha family.

Then the advice.

Come here one more time and you can forget about that pitiful little life and that job of yours.

They threw that down and every one of them went back in through the gate.

Not a single word out of the old man. He turned his back with the rest of them and was gone.

A man with neither blood nor tears in him.

Even a child could work that much out.

Dad howling, calling for his mother. Still on his knees, driving his fist into the wet ground, and again, and again.

Swallowing the sobs until they nearly took him over backward.

He cried like that a long time, shoulders going. Mom put her arms around them.

That was the day I learned my father could cry the way I could.

After that, Dad spoke a great deal less. The weight came off him fast.

Not long after, the frightening old man of the smiling mask was on television.

A funeral hall.

An interview with a group chairman seeing his wife of many years into the ground.

Crying all the way through it. Appealing to his grief.

Watching that loathsome mask, I felt everything come up in me.

I remember running to the bathroom and bringing up everything I’d eaten that day.

When Dad died, nobody from the old man’s side came.

I spent those days holding Mom while she grieved.

Thinking about it now, from then on I wiped every one of my father’s family out of my memory.

Anger filled the space where they’d been. When I thought of them, I wanted revenge.

But reality was cold about it.

I understood it clearly once I got to university.

Haryun Group was not something I could take on. Not if I died and came back could I do anything about a monster that size.

A monster you couldn’t touch even as a judge or a prosecutor.

A great chaebol group holding up the economy of the country.

Petty revenge was about all that was available.

I didn’t buy Haryun products. I wouldn’t so much as set a stick down pointing toward Seongbuk-dong.

The advertisement on the screen changed.

—It’s a modest sum, but I’m simply grateful to be able to contribute even a little in these hard times.

The beautiful lines went on.

Ugh.

My gut twisted and I forced back what came up with it.

I’ve got the strength to stand this much now, at least.

“Mom.”

—Yes, son.

Confidence came with it. The war chest the granny left me. Money to fight my own campaign with.

A snort.

A pointless little sense of victory made me laugh.

“Mom, can your son be a chaebol?”

—A chaebol? Where’s this from?

It had been the great grievance of my life. Working as an adult had only made it clearer.

This world. It’s paradise for the ones with money.

The chaebol above all.

And that old man above all.

Before the regression, at exactly this point in time, he belonged in a prison cell for embezzlement and breach of trust.

He threw money around to make it go away.

Press people bound to him by marriage and by connection covered for him on a grand scale.

He was tangled into politics from every angle, so a great crime never broke the way a great crime should, and it was smoothed over.

And that three hundred billion he announced in public never got thrown out into society the way he promised, either.

It flowed into a foundation the group controls.

Which is, naturally, also his.

The public know perfectly well he’s being generous with words alone. And they adore the old man of the smiling mask regardless.

I want to lay open what’s behind that smile, every last piece of it.

The loathsome old man and his blood, none of them fit to be called animals.

Haryun Group, spoken of in this country as the textbook example of a model chaebol.

Money, money, money, out of all of them. I want to break them with money.

—All right, son. Be a chaebol. Do everything you want to do.

Mom seems to think it’s a joke.

—One condition. Be a chaebol who’s still a person. Do that one.

I can hear the grievance in her, from a woman who learned what chaebol cruelty is down to the bone.

A chance to come back from the dead. Heaven handed me an opportunity.

No. The granny came and put it in my hand.

“A chaebol……. Mom, your son is going to take a proper bite out of it.”

“A billion won……”

Thud, thud.

My heart is going hard. A billion won is enormous money, the kind ordinary people don’t get their hands on.

Enough to buy a small apartment inside Seoul.

It’s the first time I’ve had money like this either.

“But…… nowhere near enough.”

The problem is that against a chaebol, a billion is only a billion. There’s no getting a grip on them with it.

At minimum it has to grow into tens of trillions in cash.

“Property’s finished……. Right now, if I went into American equities……. A few times over is possible……”

I steadied my breathing and worked back through the past I’d lived. Then I put the memories in order by period.

A great many of them started laying themselves out in sequence.

“…….”

Boom. Boom.

Reality I’d already lived, and from here a future nobody can know. My heart went mad.

A billion won. Small, and by no means small.

“Right now……”

I fitted the fragments of memory together. May 2022.

The catastrophe that broke over the coin market then.

A rush of it.

The finest method of investment there is, playing itself back through my head.

“Nnh.”

I was excited enough that the sound forced its way out between my lips. Their curves filling my head, riding the wave.

“Coins.”

The coins the granny said the young ones like. Coins and nothing else.

“You’re all dead.”

Now that I’ve settled the target, the granny’s gift is enormous.

If the shape of the future doesn’t change from here, then I——

Tap.

I picked up my phone. I opened Appbit, the country’s number one exchange.

I’d signed up out of curiosity to mark coming of age.

Back then I’d played at being an investor with a hundred thousand won of pocket money.

Coming back and looking at it again, everything runs together at once.

“Then and now are different.”

The clumsy Ha Tae-ung who holed up in a university club room dreaming of turning his life around is gone.

He threw himself into the coin market with no grounding at all and lost what he didn’t have.

It wasn’t only me. Classmates, seniors, juniors — nearly all of them were mad for coins.

I remember the number my holdings showed the last time I took my hands off it.

1,880 KRW.

A residue lying on the floor of the account, too small even to transfer out. A wretched position to be in.

I got liquidated several times over before I graduated.

The money I earned in shifts, the scraps I ground my soul into, all melted away into fees, and that was the fragment left behind.

“The final boss of gambling.”

The truth is a great many gambling houses went under after coins took off.

May 18, 2010. One pizza, ten thousand bitcoin.

Then in 2013 it opened at thirteen dollars a coin and touched 1,163.

A few years after that, past fifteen thousand.

The people who saw that new world started losing their minds.

I was in that mad game myself at the time.

“This time…… I take a bite too.”

However I turn it over it doesn’t feel real. That I regressed at all, I can’t believe.

A youth I’d spent fighting hard for is gone like one night’s dream.

And instead, without my having died, the future lies open in front of me.

They say a life is one night’s dream, and it seems to be true.

Me regressing makes no sense, but the graphs from the memory of my ruined life come up vivid.

Bitcoin, Ethereum, Ripple. All of it.

The highs and the lows, the timings that matter, come up beautifully.

Screens riding the wave of the graphs.

And behind them the important currents of the world economy, running on like a panorama.

Commodities, bonds, foreign exchange. It’s extraordinary.

The habit of following the world economy, the one a business graduate keeps, has come out in this form.

“An absolutely cheating buff……”

The odds and ends I picked up secondhand back then are no use. Nor the information shared around with the club seniors and juniors I lived and died beside.

The rough waves of a coin market that broke every expectation, surging and collapsing inside a single night.

We carried on like men with a great gift for investment.

Watching graphs, tearing into chicken, sucking down coffee, staying up until morning. Every day of it.

We cobbled together every indicator that gets used in the stock market and applied them.

We built our designs for profit around Elliott wave theory.

Fibonacci retracement, volume profile, trendlines, MACD, RSI, stochastics. We borrowed every auxiliary indicator there was.

All of us went at it armed with hot hearts and cold reason.

Looking back, we were far too young. All spirit and nothing else.

When one of the group got lucky and made a pile, the fear of missing out arrived and the herd trading started.

Blood came up in all of us together and paralyzed our judgement.

Everyone in that club room turned slowly into a wreck.

When we caught a rising wave our nerve failed and we couldn’t hold it.

And on the way down, strangely, we became men of iron and threw ourselves into buying.

Money melted by the second. So did reason.

What was left at the end was the wretched reality of losers and a balance lying on the floor.

“How do you beat a whale? The whole game is rigged.”

I’m going in again. As a minnow starting out, for now.

“The one who eats is king.”

This time I go in knowing. Even a giant like Ilseong Electronics gets managed and played with by the big operators.

Wall Street works the whole world’s stock market.

A minnow cannot beat men who build a game and run it for decades.

Retail investors above all. What they do is fill the operators’ pockets for them.

The perfect target for this exact moment came back to me.

“The fallen moon……”

My skin is genuinely crawling. My heart is going like something insane.

It’s still stable for now, before the collapse.

The jackpot is a few days out. A fraud coin that falls 99.9999 percent.

“Grandmother……. Thank you. Truly.”

Bitcoin’s sitting in the mid-to-high thirty millions too. In a few years it climbs almost vertically to a hundred and fifty million.

Simply holding it makes you a man worth billions.

Without a dream, I could be satisfied with that much.

But the dream I lost. I want it back.

Conquer the chaebol with coins.

“Not enough. Nowhere near.”

The chaebol spent decades building that tower solid. Their cartel across politics, business and law is their core asset.

“Capital on a scale…… that a cartel can’t come anywhere near.”

The excitement in me went cold.

“Hot heart. Cold head.”

Something Dad drummed into me over and over.

The single most important principle for getting through the world.

“I’ll enjoy the Children’s Day present.”

I like the number the day I opened my eyes falls on.

This is the year the coins that bottomed out and went to sleep rise up and start waking.

I looked at the beautiful curves of the graphs. My appetite is up.

From this point the coin market thrashes for a month.

And at the head of the collapse stood the fall of the moon. The moon my grandmother spoke of.

A crunch.

I closed my fist tight. The fall of the moon is a vast gambling table that will not come around again.

Even at the time, the number of people who took a fortune out of it short were enormous.

“I’ll put a spear through your heart.”

Tap-tap-tap-tap.

“The battlefield……. Bitnance.”

Bitnance, which will be the main theater of war for my new life.

The world’s number one exchange. A market I’d opened up and then left alone.

Along with Appbit, the world that will carry my future.

Tap-tap-tap-tap.

My hands moved fast and accurately.

Time ran quick and slow as it pleased.

“USDT purchase complete.”

Tether, byword for the stablecoin pegged at a dollar. I copied the address across and entered it straight away.

I’d spent years on this before, and it showed in the speed.

“Send.”

It went through at a speed nothing else compares to.

And then——

“Even if the future twists, I don’t go under the way I did then. And if it works——”

Boom. Boom.

My heart started throwing itself around. At last I’ve picked up the short seller’s spear, the weapon of brave men.

And——

Thunk.

I drove it into the heart of the moon.

“You’re mine.”

(End of Chapter 5)