The eighteenth floor of Ilseong Town in Seocho. The senior managing director's office of the WM division at Ilseong Futures.

It is Tuesday morning.

"There is a matter I have to report urgently."

Managing Director Choi Dongil, head of the derivatives sales division, began his report in a shaking voice.

Fzz!

The contents of the report came up on the meeting screen.

Client name: Ha Tae-ung. Product: overseas WTI crude oil futures. Matter for special report: liquidation profit of 1,356,724,530,000 won accumulated over the last fifty-four trading days.

"Mm……"

"Th-that cannot be……"

"……" After the sounds of astonishment a silence settles at once.

An individual has made a profit of one trillion three hundred fifty billion?

"This isn't a system error, is it?"

The team leader in charge of risk asked it carefully.

He could not take his eyes off the screen, with the look of a man who could not believe it.

"We checked. The executions are normal."

"……" At Managing Director Choi Dongil's firm answer, everybody taking the report with him fell silent again.

"And the open interest?"

Out of the silence, Senior Managing Director Na Giseok of the WM division asked it in a heavy voice. He is fifty-one this year.

He graduated from the business school at Seoguk University, then from the graduate business school at the University of Pennsylvania in America — the one people call the Wharton MBA.

He joined Ilseong Futures straight out of graduate school.

Posted to the New York branch, he closed several large deals with Galdman Sachs.

He came back to the head office in Korea a few years ago. He was promoted to department head younger than anybody had been, ran the risk management team as its division head, and now holds the top post in the WM division.

Even at a futures house, where surviving at all is hard enough, he is rated as a man who made himself.

He was left with nothing to say at the material being reported. In all his life he has never seen an individual record an investment profit like it.

Ordinarily,…