I emptied two farmhand-sized bowls of rice and went back to my room.

Mom was startled when I helped with the dishes.

Don’t do that, she said — people change when their time is near.

That is how much of an unfilial son I had been in my past life(?).

I couldn’t bring myself to tell her.

That her son would die a violent death in Seoul a dozen-odd years from now.

The room I came back to was a mess, however many times I looked at it.

“Ugh! Insane. Smell that.”

After the clear air outside, the room was full of the harsh smell of male hormones.

First I opened the window and the door to move the air around.

I gathered the clothes and bedding smeared with the sludge Divine Lord Cheollyong had wrung out of me, put them in the washing machine in the yard, and ran it.

I scrubbed the room down with a rag.

I woke up the sense of cleanliness that had flared briefly after my army discharge.

Mom napped in the inner quarters in the meantime.

She didn’t have much stamina, and she couldn’t do a thing in the blazing midday sun.

Once the room was straightened up, I checked my own condition.

“What good is a head stuffed with stock information? My capital’s at rock bottom.”

My father had gone to the Nonghyup about the loan.

Around this time, a few months from now, the rice paddies would be lost to overdue debt.

That was when the family started to collapse.

My father grew apples by organic methods, no pesticides and no fertilizer.

There was no way it could work.

Organic hadn’t come into fashion nationally yet.

Households that would pay high prices for organic apples were rare.

And the apples themselves weren’t good.

Bruised and undersized — even I looked at them and had no desire whatsoever to buy one.

I felt sorry for my father.

He had once been the one talent the village had produced in decades.

There was a village legend about it: he got into the electronics department at Goyeon University and my grandfather threw a feast for the whole neighborhood.

But now he was a casualty of his era, unable to ride out the wave of the IMF crisis, pushed into early retirement.

After my grandfather died and only my grandmother was left, he came back to his hometown and farmed.

The wound the world gave him when he was let go was deep.

My grandmother died three years ago too.

A small orchard and two plots of rice paddy were the whole inheritance.

The loans on them were maxed out.

He was born the eldest son of four boys and two girls, so there were no savings either.

I didn’t know much about my mother’s family.

They were estranged.

I had never heard what kind of house my mother came from.

It was the forbidden subject in our family.

My father’s brothers stopped coming around much after they married.

My uncles and my aunt were not on good terms with our household.

The relatives liked getting things free out of a country place that had nothing.

Rice, and every other kind of food — they asked for all of it, brazenly.

For a while my father silently did the eldest son’s part.

It was what my grandmother wanted, so he bore it.

But when everything was mortgaged and he couldn’t hold out any longer, he put his hand out to his younger siblings.

Just a little help, he asked.

And after that, just like that, my father’s brothers stopped coming.

They didn’t come for my grandfather’s or my grandmother’s memorial rites either.

I remember it vividly: on the night of my grandmother’s rite, my father drank every drop of the soju that had been poured out for the offering, and sobbed in my mother’s arms.

That was when I learned that where there’s no money there are no brothers either.

“Money’s the problem. Money!”

Stock charts drew themselves across my head in a rush.

The market I could have eaten alive, if only I had the money to invest, was tormenting me.

Sadly, I couldn’t remember the lottery numbers.

What did float up were the charts of the jackpot stocks I had seen.

I had looked at them once or twice at most, and they had stayed in my head, sharp and clear.

The craving for stocks was enough to drive me out of my mind.

There is no surer investment anywhere in the world.

“Did my head get better? Or what is this?”

I wasn’t a genius.

I was an ordinary man of my times with a reasonable IQ and a willingness to work.

For someone like that to recall every chart made no sense.

No — it made sense.

The fact that I had regressed at all was already the final boss of things that make no sense.

I looked around the room.

Unlike before, my head was clear.

Even the game I used to enjoy a round of after every meal didn’t catch my eye.

I’m not enough of an idiot to come back and play games while the family falls apart.

“No loan shark is going to lend money to a high schooler against a waiver on his own body, and part-time work isn’t going to add up to much. And I’m not in a position to bring up seed money with my parents…”

There isn’t much in this life more precious than money.

Parents aside, the world was evolving into one where even the affection between family members was settled by money.

The old man in the dream had said something when he sent me back.

To live in the world happily, as much as I liked.

Having lived and having died, life really was short.

Having lived more than thirty years and then died, I had come to understand that youth isn’t all that long.

“The only investment vehicle I can actually use right now is that guy.”

The future antique of a computer, showing itself off for all it was worth, came into view.

Day labor carried too much risk.

And what you got for the effort wasn’t worth it either.

If my parents found out, it would only worry them.

“Stocks would be perfect.”

All I could do was smack my lips over it.

The regret doubled.

Only Mr. Hong Gil-dong could understand what it feels like to have the information and not be able to use it.

Gil-dong, who couldn’t call his father his father, and me, unable to call stocks stocks — the feeling was exactly the same. (TL Note: Hong Gil-dong, the hero of Korea’s best-known classical novel, was a nobleman’s son by a concubine and so was forbidden to address his own father as father. The line gets quoted so often it works as a stock joke about being denied the obvious.)

A minor can’t open a stock account whenever he feels like it.

Margin trading was out of the question, naturally.

To make money in a short time…

Countless ways of making money came up and vanished again in a rush.

“Ah! That’s right!”

That was when an outrageous idea went through my head.

A hell of a method, one anybody could make money with as long as they put in the work.

“Heh heh heh. I’m sorry, Author Jang Hui-jae.”

I hurried to turn the computer on.

In this era, whenever I got pocket money, my friends and I ran a book-rental co-op.

We borrowed fun comics and novels and passed them around.

And when we had no money, we logged on to a site called Fanpia, where you could read novels free.

It was a time of change, when reading novels was slowly shifting from the rental shop to the internet.

For a new writer, serializing on the internet was the fastest way in.

Draw a crowd and a publisher would put the book out right away.

I had dreamed of being a writer myself once, but the prose wouldn’t do what I wanted.

Writing isn’t something just anyone can do.

The gap between reading and creating is the distance from the earth to the sky.

One of my friends started serializing and actually became a writer.

He couldn’t get more than a few volumes out before he wrapped it up and crashed, of course, but he said it made decent pocket money.

“The title is Cloud Warrior!”

My heart slammed when I thought of the title.

“First volume published January 2007. Author, Jang Hui-jae. Completed… still unfinished in 2020! Author Jang, I’m sorry. But fourteen years of writing it — that isn’t right, is it!”

I sold my conscience.

But it didn’t hurt one bit.

Alongside Ice Thunder Blade, it was called one of Korea’s two great demonic tomes.

By 2020 it had reached fifty-nine volumes.

And it still wasn’t finished.

I read Cloud Warrior past love and past hate, in a state of enlightenment.

It’s no exaggeration to say it was there through my whole youth.

The fun was guaranteed right to the end.

Only, I died before Author Jang Hui-jae did.

That cannot be allowed to happen!

Now it was time to hand back the blade of love and hate a reader had been carrying all those years.

“The title stays Cloud Warrior! First to claim it owns it!”

I clattered a Hangul window open and typed the title in.

Concentration came over me like lasers firing out of my eyes.

“The hero’s name is Red! The heroine’s name is… Ju Ye-rin! The family goes completely under after the widowed father dies. The loan-shark debt is inherited, so the hero earns money through gaming and the loan sharks take it! To keep his hungry twin sisters in school, the penny-pinching hero Red logs into an artificial game by chance and… the story’s killer.”

The synopsis came out beautifully.

Astonishingly, every bit of the novel I had read came back to me.

Reproduced whole, without a particle out of place.

Tap-tap-tap-tap-tap-tap.

My fingers danced on the keyboard.

And I started writing like a madman.

Thanks to the regression bonus, Cloud Warrior reproduced itself in the Hangul window exactly as it had been.

That wildly entertaining Cloud Warrior was being born again under my hands.

It was such a masterpiece that there was nothing to fix.

“Heh heh heh. It’s good! It’s good!”

Korea’s flagship game fantasy had its quality guaranteed even on a rewrite(?).

The further the writing went, the more the smile refused to leave my mouth.

A hero who seems to have all the luck in the world and still runs a pathetic race through a garbage reality.

Exactly like me, right now.

The letters filled the screen fast.

I forgot how the time was passing.

It was a lot like the immortals’ pastime.

In one sitting, two installments’ worth filled the monitor.

I had never known writing could come this easily.

It felt like a writer’s blood had been sleeping in me.

“First, put it up on the open board! Then flood it!”

I knew exactly how a waiting reader feels.

I logged on to Fanpia.

I typed my details into a screen a long way behind the ones I knew from 2020.

Looking at the works serialized on Fanpia, I saw several I had read back then.

I could tell the hits from the flops.

Seeing the novels that had pulled me in so madly as a kid stirred something up in me.

“They really were fun.”

Smacking my lips, I made an ID.

The ID was Gold River.

A river flowing with gold appeared before my eyes like a vision.

With a click of the mouse, two installments went up.

“Ah. That feels good. This is why people become writers!”

It was Author Jang Hui-jae’s masterpiece, stolen out of the future, but my chest was overflowing with joy.

I remembered the famous line the hero Red says in the novel.

“Money has no eyes! Whoever eats first owns it! Bwahahahaha!”

(End of Chapter 4)