“This……”

“Hmm……”

Thursday.

The midterms were over.

The Cheonghwa students had all gone home once the exams finished.

From tomorrow a principal’s discretionary holiday is added on and the break runs straight through the weekend.

For a long weekend coming up, the air in the Cheonghwa High School staff meeting room was heavy.

The second-year teachers of the major subjects were seated there, and the head of academic affairs with them.

They were looking at one person’s answer paper, and their faces were serious.

“This cannot possibly have happened. In the history of this school there has never once been a student who was fifth in his class at the last exam and took first place in the whole year at a stroke!”

It was Lee Jangyong, the maths teacher.

Behind the gold-rimmed glasses his eyes had a disbelieving shine on them.

He had agonised over that killer question, and some boy nobody had considered had smashed it apart.

Not fifth overall. Fifth in his class.

A defeat of this kind was not something he could accept.

“Well, there’s no rule that says a thing like this can’t happen, is there?”

Han Yura, the Korean-language teacher, put it in.

It was a defence of sorts.

But.

“Are you shielding him because he’s in your reading club?”

“Sorry? What a thing to say——”

“This rat has stolen it, I’m certain of it! He’s had his hands in the safe!”

It isn’t a question a high school student can possibly solve.

Lee Jangyong had run the calculation on several hypotheses and was pushing his own opinion.

“Impossible. Opening the school safe takes two keys. The vice-principal and me.”

Wang Jindeok, the head of academic affairs, glared at him.

As the man who manages those keys strictly, he couldn’t hide how unpleasant he found it.

Preventing leaks of exam papers at Cheonghwa High School in particular is managed by a state-of-the-art system.

If something leaked in spite of that, the damage would land not only on the school but on the foundation.

Consider who the parents of the students here are.

They are figures who count for something in the political and business worlds, in the law, in medicine and the rest — the people who move this country as they please.

It’s the place where the children of the upper class study and learn before they go out into society.

Let anything unseemly happen and the whole country is turned upside down.

There had been trouble of another kind in the past.

The group was put through a tax investigation, and the foundation and the school with it were left reeling.

After that the school had put a great deal of thought into security.

Teachers, too, are appointed on a signed pledge of confidentiality.

Should anyone leak a paper as a private matter, dismissal is the least of it — civil and criminal penalties would have to be faced.

“So you’re telling me you believe that boy’s score is his own ability? I absolutely cannot accept it!”

In the end Lee Jangyong shouted.

A maths teacher whose attachment to mathematics runs close to paranoia.

The disbelief in him was strong.

“……Hm.”

Wang Jindeok’s face creased at Lee Jangyong’s manner.

He had no wish to concede it easily either.

A student who had shown ordinary attainment had come first.

Not a student who had been contesting first or second.

That fact alone had made the problem complicated.

“If the parents’ association president finds out……”

The line came quietly out of the English teacher, who had been saying nothing.

Wang Jindeok’s face went black and set in an instant.

That is the situation he fears above all others.

The current president of the Cheonghwa High School parents’ association is a figure this country knows by name alone.

Ju Miju, second daughter of the chairman of Hanguk Group, which has climbed into the top ten of the corporate rankings.

Of all his children she is famous for having the prickliest and haughtiest character.

Among the chaebol families her nickname was Misery Ju.

It was a name she had earned by living from her growing years on with an arrogance backed by her house’s power.

Bzzzz. Bzzzz.

The head of academic affairs’ phone vibrated.

He checked the screen, and his face went blacker still.

He touched the answer button in haste and put it to his ear, and in that moment.

—What exactly is it that the head of academic affairs does!!

It was not on speakerphone, and still the prickly woman’s voice reached the ears of the teachers sitting with him.

“Pre— president, the thing is——”

—A charity case, they tell me! What is that student? Has the school turned a blind eye and let him dare to cheat? How can a thing like this happen!!

The parents’ association president was all but certain that cheating had taken place.

Her son is enrolled in the second year as well.

The trouble is that he is a prodigy who has never once let go of first place.

It was a situation that could well have made Ju Miju blow her top.

Is somebody talking about me?

My right ear is itching like mad.

I have my suspicions about who, so I paid it no attention.

The kids who kept their eyes on me and glared all the way through exam week.

I ignored them lightly and put my attention on my own business.

Now their looks don’t matter!

“Pff-hahahahahahaha!!”

The more I think about it the more the laughing won’t stop.

The midterms!

Full marks, exactly as planned, and first in the school.

Right about now, the teachers who hold charity cases in contempt will be gathered in one room with their heads in their hands.

Here’s a great big fuck-you to the lot of you!

The summit of a perfect score, which something as low as a charity case must never take.

Today is Thursday 12 May.

It’s late evening.

The moment I’ve been waiting for has finally arrived.

The moon fell and was torn apart, and there was no mercy in it.

Luna, which until a few days ago was sitting fifth by market capitalisation.

It carried enough grandeur to touch a hundred thousand won per coin.

That moon took a nuclear missile at high altitude and dropped straight down to the ground.

A value not even worth one won!

The thing is a scam coin, a criminal fraud at the root of what it is.

The confidence trick of a genius who tried to become a stablecoin from a position with no capital behind it.

The people who believed in it and jumped in took enormous losses.

“I’m sorry about it…… but thank you for the meal!!”

I started disposing of the coin I’d shorted yesterday.

Trading will be suspended shortly.

To know that and go on holding is an idiot’s choice.

“How are they going to find five trillion won. They’ve already decided to kill it.”

To block the dumping and give the thing any premise of recovery, five trillion won is needed at the very minimum.

But it absolutely cannot be found.

The heavyweight operators who move the coin market set the board, shook it, and attacked Luna.

In no time at all it’s torn to shreds and becomes food for the hyenas that were circling.

I already knew the process.

All I’m doing is taking a solid cut on a board that was going to break anyway.

“Done!!”

I finished selling.

A coin worth tens of trillions became a worthless scrap of data inside a few days.

“Delisted from tomorrow.”

I went into it knowing, and my heart still pounded.

A thing only possible because it had happened once already.

Back when I didn’t know the future, I got greedy the same way and went over on my face.

I finished selling with the turning point right in front of me.

And then the number I confirmed with my own eyes!!

“That’s insane……”

I’d made a rough estimate, but the number in front of my eyes is beyond anything I’d imagined.

I’d been clearing the volume as I went, disposing of it whenever I had a moment.

A two-billion-won short — one and a half billion of my own with Jiung’s five hundred million added on.

And the return on it was——

“Two— two hundred million Tether……!”

My heart leapt about as though it would come out of me.

It was a short with no leverage on it at all.

And even so the return was enormous.

Leaving aside the small change trailing along behind, the figure standing at the front is a full two hundred million Tether.

It’s pegged to the dollar, so two hundred million dollars is the profit.

Today’s exchange rate is 1,280 won.

In won that comes to more than two hundred and fifty billion.

I took a good firm bite out of a fifty-trillion-won moon.

“This isn’t a dream, is it?”

I looked the number over carefully one more time.

There it is, printed into my eyes, clear as anything.

Crunch.

Both fists tightened on their own.

“Grandmother, thank you!!”

The grandmother who let me live again, and pressed a billion won on me as a bonus on top of it.

A father’s mother I never met face to face.

Even in this moment I had the illusion that she was stroking my head, pleased with me.

“Exactly as you told me, I’m going to live it however the hell I want!”

Without the coins there’d be no dreaming of a reversal in the future at all.

“Hoooo.”

I drew breath deep into my lungs.

Two hundred and fifty billion!

Measured against the lives of ordinary people it’s on a scale you couldn’t spend in a lifetime of trying.

But I can’t be satisfied yet.

I should have lived as a gold spoon and instead I rolled about in a field of dog shit.

“Haryun!”

There’s one target!

My fucking family.

I picked up the smartphone.

The target that comes next.

“Leverage at thirty, in case……”

The funds are in place, so it’s time to start leveraged investment in earnest.

I adjusted the multiple by how much of what’s coming I know about.

Now and then there are madmen who shake it out in both directions.

“Spreading it is the textbook.”

I break into the overseas exchanges where futures trading is possible.

Out of the many exchanges I chose the ones that use a safe stablecoin.

Three in all!

Two hundred million dollars is not a small size by any measure.

Raise leverage on it and buy in one place and it can’t help but be noticed.

It could give offence to the big whale hyungs in particular.

That’s the point to be careful about.

Up to Luna, things were the same as they were in the past.

But I can’t entirely dismiss the butterfly effect I’m causing.

The coin market could act as a variable.

I dug back through the old memories.

The Luna business shakes the whole coin market for a time.

Among them I have to go for the coins you’d call the majors.

I watched the smartphone screen closely.

Pig coins, plump and nicely fattened, caught square in my sights.

“Bit and Ether! This time it’s you!”

(End of Chapter 26)