Tap, tap, tap.

My fingers moved fast over the laptop keyboard.

Ding. Ding. Ding.

The stocks I’d bought sold off one after another.

“Total gravy. Gravy.”

I didn’t go to school.

No — an official diagnosis of an eight-week concussion caused by assault had won me the freedom not to go to school.

I was using a private room.

What else do you earn money for.

A time like this is when you really get to enjoy the majesty of money.

It was vastly more comfortable than being at home.

The weather was still sweltering, and a private room with the temperature and humidity dialed in put hotels to shame.

My parents brought all sorts of good food.

My little sisters doted on their oppa too.

My friends came by when classes let out and did nothing but empty the fridge.

My homeroom teacher came too, and said he was sorry.

For the studying I was behind on, I bought workbooks and ran through the material fast with internet lectures.

Korean, English, math — the subjects that had been beyond me all that time were being conquered one by one.

The way my head had come alive was no joke.

Because it was a concussion, there were no special prescriptions either.

A sign reading ABSOLUTE REST hung on the door of the room, so nobody came in on me without warning.

Using rest as the excuse, I trained my internal energy here as much as I liked.

It was a space set up for me, and it could not have been better.

And inside that absolute rest, I ran an absolutely secure gamble.

Floating the boat when the tide comes in is basic common sense.

“Money’s slapping money in the face and dragging it home. Whew.”

Today’s take alone was over seven hundred million won.

The credit game was still running.

I picked off the worked stocks in measured amounts, so as not to set off a butterfly effect.

I went into the worked small- and mid-cap stocks on KOSDAQ with an appropriate sum.

The amount was around five hundred million won.

With the rest of the capital I was aiming at KOSPI now.

I moved my battlefield.

The KOSPI index had been over the 1,400s in June, had plunged to the 1,200s, and was at the point of slowly recovering.

From here all that was left was a straight climb to an index of 1980.77 in November 2007.

It was a period when money was piling into stocks.

The crackdown on real-estate speculation left cash with nowhere to go, and it drove the market’s boom.

Scritch, scritch.

I entered the investment patterns into my own notebook, the one I’d brought from home.

It was a full bull market.

It was exactly the right season for working a stock.

It was a time when dozens of stocks hit the upper limit price in a single day.

For a while now there had been no going all in.

Busy or not, I’d started deliberately putting the credit balance in once a day, aiming at an upper limit price, then pulling it back out.

Knock, knock.

“Who is it?”

“It’s Attorney Jo Yun-tae.”

“Come in.”

The door slid open lightly with a rattle, and a dignified lawyer in his early fifties came in and inclined his head slightly toward me.

I had retained a lawyer.

Hong Seong-hyeon’s father was doing every damn thing he could to get me detained.

It wasn’t only Inspector Park Dong-seok — a disciplinary committee was being convened at the school too.

I heard through the guys that there was noise about expulsion or suspension.

This was the work of the head of the administrative office, that friend of his father’s the bastard had been bragging about.

I had gone straight to a big law firm that even Seoul took seriously and put in a request.

Samu Law, counted among the top three in the Republic of Korea.

There was nothing money couldn’t do.

A retired Deputy Chief Prosecutor from the district prosecutors’ office that had held jurisdiction over the province I lived in, and only recently at that, was assigned as my lawyer. He had been a Grade 1 civil servant.

“How are you feeling?”

“Come on, Attorney. Stop using honorifics on a high school kid. Just call me Tae-san. It’s not as if we’re strangers. This is too much.”

“Still, the firm has its policies…”

“Then I’m not talking.”

Acting like a kid wasn’t easy, but I was still at an age where it worked.

“Sh-should I, then?”

“Tae-san. Give it a try.”

“All right. I’ll call you young Tae-san.”

“Attorney Jo, you are seriously stubborn.”

“That’s why I was thrown out of the organization.”

One look said Attorney Jo was an upright man.

The sharp jawline and the bluish shave were striking.

His eyes were sharp and deep.

Money is truly great.

In my past life he was a man I would never have had occasion to meet.

Before I died I’d seen even an ordinary prosecutor only a handful of times.

Prosecutors were the kind of people who got invited to give special criminal law lectures at the universities.

And now a lawyer who had been a Deputy Chief Prosecutor had taken on my defense.

This is why I can’t help loving money.

“Still, your heart hasn’t left it forever, has it?”

“Hm. Does young Tae-san know something about the organization?”

I know. And very well.

In 2016 and 2017 the Republic of Korea got very loud on account of a man out of that organization.

A legendary prosecutor of the surname U attached himself to power and made a complete mess of the country’s standing.

And not only that — before long a new administration would come in and drive a man the whole nation had loved to his death.

The summit of the Republic of Korea’s collective power, parasitic on the highest authority and wielding force without limit.

The prosecution service.

It was a body with a hierarchy stricter than the army’s, shot through with absolute obedience up the chain and with the seniority of the entering class.

“Me? I don’t really know. But I do know that used wrong, it’s as dangerous as a sharp knife.”

“…!”

Attorney Jo was startled by my words, which had put the prosecution’s power in a roundabout way.

It wasn’t a line a high schooler spits out.

“You haven’t filed the notice of appearance yet, have you?”

“Of course not.”

“Thank you.”

“Thanks for what. If it’s the client’s wish, I follow it. I’m not a prosecutor anymore, I’m a lawyer.”

Even a prosecutor straight as split bamboo had no answer to the problem of making a living.

There was self-mockery in the word lawyer.

Back when I was studying for the bar exam, I too had once dreamed of being a prosecutor.

I don’t know all of it, but I know the prosecution service in broad strokes.

A Deputy Chief Prosecutor at a district prosecutors’ office is treated as a Grade 1 civil servant, and ranks directly below the Chief Prosecutor who commands the office.

It was one of the top ranks in the prosecutors’ organization, from which a man could rise to Chief Prosecutor and then to Prosecutor General.

That was why I needed Attorney Jo.

I wanted someone stronger than the power Hong Seong-hyeon’s father, Councilman Hong Jang-hyeok, could put forward.

“Yes. And that’s why, thank you.”

“But what exactly are you? To be using a private room like this and hiring our firm, you’d have to be the son of a considerable family…”

“But when you looked into it, my family’s poor and nothing much to speak of?”

“…”

At my directness, Attorney Jo shut his mouth.

He’d probably run a quick check on me.

He was still inside the piping-hot window of former-official courtesy. (TL Note: 전관예우, “courtesy to a former official” — the practice by which a judge or prosecutor who leaves for private practice gets favorable treatment from his old colleagues. It fades within a year or two, which is why the window is what matters.)

“I’m a smash-hit author. I wrote a work called Cloud Warrior, and it blew up and made me rich. Look it up online. The reaction is out of this world.”

“An author?”

Wow, talking like a kid with manners is really hard too.

I had to tack a polite ending onto every single sentence and read the room on top of that.

Life as a teenager in name only, and having to put on an act of innocence with it, was not as easy as you’d think.

Those protagonists in novels who regress to their teens and actually behave like children are something else.

“I’m the author called Gold River. Search for it online. We went back for another printing just yesterday.”

I’d sent the publisher manuscripts through volume six.

Writing in spare moments whenever I was bored, I had already finished through volume twenty, and from here on I planned to release one volume a month.

A little greed crept in.

Since it had come to this anyway, I got greedy to finish the work at a hundred volumes.

If it’s good, the waiting is forgiven.

“Impressive. An author who pays out hundreds of millions at that age.”

There was no belief in Attorney Jo’s tone.

Of course a former prosecutor wasn’t going to believe it completely.

But so what.

I really had become an author, and I really was making decent money.

As wrapping paper for a regressed life, it was a perfect fit.

“I said no! The attending physician said absolute rest!”

The sharp voice of the nurse assigned to me came from outside the door.

“Come now, that’s exactly why Prosecutor Kang Gyeong-jun of the branch office came along. Blocking this questioning is obstruction of official duty.”

It was noisy outside.

I’ve been waiting.

I’d been notified by text.

The illustrious Inspector Park Dong-seok had announced he would be visiting for an investigation, down to the exact time.

So I’d called Attorney Jo.

I activated the internet recording function on the bed tray.

Evidence from this side was necessary too.

“I’ll step in there.”

Attorney Jo went into the bathroom.

The back of a former Deputy Chief Prosecutor hiding in a bathroom was a sorry sight.

Well, the board is set! Come on in, all of you!

The door was yanked open with a clunk.

Intruders who hadn’t asked the occupant’s permission came into view.

“I said no!”

Three men shoved past the furious nurse and stepped in.

And they walked with real confidence.

“You can’t come in until the questioning is over.”

Inspector Park Dong-seok warned the nurse as he shut the door.

What a ridiculous combo platter.

Park Dong-seok, unmistakably a dirty Violent Crimes detective, plus a sharp-looking man of about thirty in glasses and a black suit, plus a smarmy mister. That was the set.

“What’s all this about?”

I asked with a startled look on my face.

“Gangster shit, you’re done today. Prosecutor Kang Gyeong-jun of the Criminal Division came in person to take you down! Heh heh.”

Heh heh. Isn’t that a delusion all your own, Park Dong-seok?

(End of Chapter 16)