“The funds are gone?”

“They were withdrawn from the corporate account.”

“Any trace?”

“None we can find. It looks as though he used a corporation and an account set up under a false name in a tax haven, and then closed them. As you know, the moment a closure goes through, every record disappears.”

“Mm…”

Leo Stewart, HSBC’s director in charge of investment banking, frowned at team leader Harry’s report.

The funds had vanished, and their owner was a debtor posting a rate of return that was frankly terrifying.

They had tried to get a grip on it by watching the flow through the corporate account, and he had slipped out from under them cleverly.

“He’s a professional, regardless of his age.”

“Naturally. There aren’t many individuals in the world who could borrow two hundred million dollars from our bank.”

“What would you like to do?”

“Is there anything we can do?”

“They say the balance in his own account in Korea is filling up at speed, too.”

“Where did he put the Korean money? Four hundred million dollars, you said?”

“From what we’ve quietly looked into, it appears he’s bought Google stock.”

“Return?”

“About one percent so far.”

“Google, is it… So he intends to become a long-term investor now? Or else he means to sit a beat out?”

Leo’s head was full.

He had lent the money in order to watch the transactions moving quietly through the corporate account.

But while the boy was in Hong Kong he had laundered the account and the funds through brokers.

Being in Hong Kong, Leo understood money laundering inside out.

It was like a maze with no way through.

“Harry.”

“Yes, director.”

“Tell Steven not to lose the connection. Entertain him, put gifts in his hands.”

“Understood.”

“…, I don’t know what it is, but this is a young man holding on to an enormous secret… one whose future nobody can read…”

Leo Stewart, reading it with an investor’s instinct.

That was as far as it went.

Nobody knew how far his growth would run.

“A rigged game of go-stop is the most frightening thing in the world~ heh heh~.”

I let out a villain’s laugh.

The oil price that had been shooting straight up crashed beautifully, a perfect ten out of ten.

A full twenty percent.

Thanks to the short position, I hit it huge.

An enormous profit taken in a matter of days.

Not just the March contract at settlement — the June contract crashed at the same time.

The market is psychology.

Once it broke, not only the retail investors but the traders at the big institutions and firms got scared.

For people who eat by their performance, today was fear itself.

They had to cut their losses with stop-loss selling.

I did the opposite and closed out my short-position holdings.

Unlike short selling in stocks, I didn’t have to do any short covering.

Short covering is the business of buying back the quantity of shares you sold short.

But futures are one hand of a luck-driven gamble, played over the future.

For me, knowing the shape of the graph, it was easier than sitting down and drinking a glass of water.

If a private investor gets caught in a swing like this, the futures market eats his margin and leaves him holding a tin can.

Over these few days, a lot of futures traders will have come down with gastritis.

It was obvious they had blown profits they had worked hard for in the space of a few days.

But for a man like me, who knows everything, it was nothing short of a blessing.

The Lunar New Year holiday starts tomorrow.

I got my last present, and it was a big one.

I finished the trading at home, comfortably.

I closed out everything, down to the June contracts.

The moment I put the goods up, they were falling over each other to buy.

In a single trade I pulled out twice my stake.

A twenty percent return on a full thirty thousand contracts produced a profit of $285,200,000.

With the profit from a few days ago, four hundred million dollars became my net gain.

Add in the two hundred million dollars of starting capital and it comes to a full six hundred million.

Dollars piled up in the secret account, and they piled up hot.

“Have a good Lunar New Year, everybody~.”

Saturday morning broke.

I pulled all of the capital out overnight.

I stopped my other investments.

For a while the futures market, oil included, is in a flat range.

There was little to eat.

For a few days I was going to enjoy the nation’s own holiday.

I’m Korean.

For that time I wanted to forget all of it and have a happy time with my family.

I wanted to run my mother’s errands like anybody else, fry jeon, and spend the evening over good food in a warm-hearted mood. (TL Note: jeon — savory pancakes of fish, meat and vegetables dipped in egg batter and fried in quantity, the work of a Korean holiday kitchen.)

My heart was full of a cool kind of ease.

Since meeting Nova hyung there had been a change in the way I behaved.

Using the copy function, I had inherited every ability Nova hyung had.

Special functions were installed.

I learned that playing around is something only geniuses get to do, too.

An astonishing method of playing the violin came back to me.

If a violin were put in my hands, I had the confidence to reproduce hundreds of pieces beautifully with no score in front of me.

The piano was above the ordinary level too.

Not only my grasp of music — my eye for art had changed too.

Even looking at an object, I had an eye now that went through to its essence.

Every movement of my hand had turned soft and elegant.

My way of speaking became courteous.

My understanding of mathematics deepened.

The depth of mathematical thinking I had never managed to understand.

What they taught me in school was real mathematics licked at from the outside.

My judgment on business got faster too.

And the most important function of all was added.

Everything to do with Ye-rin sunbae was filed away as a memory with an ache in it.

I learned that parting takes technique too.

Nova hyung had truly loved hundreds of women and left every one of them, and his way of leaving was all his own.

For a day, honestly, he hurt enough to cry out loud over parting from the woman.

But that was all of it.

The next day, his eyes would find women who were hungry for love.

The world is wide, and there are many women wounded by love and starved of it.

For a woman who had passed through Nova hyung’s life, one day of mourning was exactly enough.

Women who took his love in abundance, refilled the energy of their lives, and parted from him naturally.

It was the greatest parting gift Nova hyung had to give.

“Ye-rin sunbae. Let’s see each other next year.”

No text came from Ye-rin sunbae either.

No text after our eyes had met means she wants to be forgotten cleanly.

Of course I intend to clear it away cleanly for her.

Next year we become a real senior and junior at the same school.

The tie with her goes this far and no further.

It’s only one of the world’s countless partings.

I had no wish to do anything as pathetic as throwing a life away over one woman.

The reason Ye-rin sunbae had been precious to me was the lingering attachment of a past that was gone.

Now I’ve seen the ending of it.

Running a finished scene again is a stupidity this life is not going to have.

“This much for presents should do it, shouldn’t it?”

Whenever I had a spare moment I had put together presents for my parents and the twins with department store gift certificates.

For my father a warm, light padded coat and a red ginseng set; for my mother a winter coat, a luxury bag and a set of imported cosmetics; for the twins jeans, cotton tees and basic skincare.

They were presents that were neither too much nor too little for where I stand.

This was what I liked.

Having money running over doesn’t mean I want to spend it carelessly.

Preparing at a level the other person can carry is the true meaning of a present.

“Shall I head over to the house, then~.”

I hadn’t made it to the house on the day of Ye-rin sunbae’s graduation.

My parents and the twins came to my place instead.

And then we ate pork belly downtown and cleared away everything we’d been holding in.

My parents told me to study for exams and come at the holiday.

I nodded and said I would.

I’m a third-year student too.

Once I’m a college student, my life moves over to Seoul for good.

If it were up to my heart I’d have stayed near my parents longer, but a grown bird leaving the nest is the order of things.

I’ll come and see them often, whenever I have time.

I picked up the car key lightly and left the apartment.

The first holiday of my whole life that I would spend with money enough, in peace and in harmony.

The expectation made my steps quicken.

“…, the power of money is a great thing!”

Over the winter vacation I was insanely busy.

Even when I came into the city I couldn’t get out to the family home.

Buying and selling futures doesn’t get done in one quick stroke.

When I had time I met my friends too.

My parents came by now and then, so there was no hurry about it.

I dipped a toe in as the market allowed, buying a little and selling a little.

Like the stock trading window, buying and selling futures meant a staring match with the big players.

By the time I’d cleaned up, morning would be breaking.

Even training the Taegeuk Five Elements Dual Intent Mind Art, I still needed a basic amount of sleep.

Between the training and the studying and building precise program trades, a day went fast.

The new term starts soon.

I couldn’t leave the domestic stock account idle.

I pulled memories out of my head and found the stocks to invest in.

Now and then I took a loss on purpose.

Only by wearing the mask of a loser would I attract less suspicion.

My other life was busy on a scale my last one couldn’t compare with.

And so, after a long time away, my hometown.

“This is our house?”

The phrase a different age came to me all by itself.

My father had bought property on a grand scale this time.

He had bought the orchard land beside ours, which the son of the house had blown on a business in Seoul.

The family that used to swagger around our village about how rich they were had gone under completely.

They had thrown their weight around so hard that they had lost every bit of goodwill in the village.

Their house and land were about to go to auction, and my father bought them for seven hundred million won.

Apples, pears and sweet persimmon trees, over twenty thousand pyeong of them.

A large site, storage warehouse included.

Not only that — he bought the empty house across the way with the wide yard, flattened it and made a parking lot.

A big lot, room for more than thirty cars.

My father, Mom, and a few cars were standing in it.

I parked and got out.

And there it was, our house.

Our house had been the last word in poverty, and I was only now finding out it was a splendid old place like that.

The old tiled house that leaked when the monsoon rains came.

The old house where cold wind poured in through the gaps no matter how you heated it.

It had transformed completely and was showing off a fine figure.

The old roof tiles had been replaced with new ones with a smooth black gloss running over them.

The collapsing earthen wall had been redone in red brick too.

The gate had been changed for a clean steel one you could see straight through.

“Whoaaa…”

I opened the main gate and stepped in, and now I could really see the inside of the house.

Grass had been laid wide across the yard, and the path up the middle was set close with granite stones.

The faded wooden floor was gone too.

In its place, big, clean double-glazed safety glass had planted itself.

The wooden floor had become a living room.

Being the old head house of the clan, the main house alone is a hundred pyeong.

Across the whole of that main house the old windows were gone, replaced with wide ones.

It had turned into a luxury hanok resort.

The outer quarters I used to use had been extended to twice the size.

They had knocked through the side room nobody used and made it into something like a vacation house.

Even at a rough look it came to twenty-odd pyeong.

“Woof woof! Woof woof woof!”

The mutt we kept at the house saw me and barked, wagging his tail.

His house was made of roof tile and timber too, and it looked good.

When the owner lives well, a dog’s luck turns too.

“Baek-gu, is it good? It’s good for me too~.”

I left him behind me and went into the main house.

I had the paper bags full of presents in my hands.

“Father~ Mother~ the eldest grandson of this house is here.”

Nobody came out even though I’d arrived — the soundproofing must have been good.

I opened the door of the main house.

“Ohh!”

The inside was even better.

The moment I opened the door, an enormous living room came into view.

They had knocked through the wooden floor and one room of the main house to make a wide living room.

A living room with solid wood laid across the floor and ochre plaster on the walls.

In the middle of it I could see a thick solid-wood side table, a six-seat leather sofa, a big television and a display stand.

And the family photograph taken not long ago was hanging right there on the wall above the sofa.

A warm, harmonious household scene, to anybody’s eye.

A scene I had only ever imagined.

Where has everybody gone?

Past the living room I could see the room where my parents stayed.

There was no sign of anyone even though I had come in.

“Hyungnim! Help me out, just a little. The business idea is a killer! How long can a man live on a civil servant’s rat-tail salary? You’ve made plenty of money too. Save your little brother, this once!”

That’s my third uncle’s voice.

In the not-distant future he gets caught in a corruption case, is forced out of the service and goes into business.

Which of course goes under completely.

“Oppa. Lend me some money too. I’ve signed for a house and I’m short on the balance~ what are brothers and sisters for. Better to borrow from oppa than pay the bank’s expensive interest, right~?”

My youngest aunt, sly as a fox, was putting on a charm that didn’t suit her.

In the past, when my father went to her to borrow a million won for the farm costs, she turned him away at the door without even feeding him.

Ah…, the shameless woman.

“Hyung, where on earth did the money come from? Nobody in the village knows how you made it either…, surely it isn’t money Father left you separately? You’re not taking that out and eating it now, are you?”

My suspicious second uncle.

A very greedy man.

He made a living in Seoul with his own taxi.

Back when he was driving a taxi he caused an accident that killed someone.

My father settled that one by drawing his severance pay out of the company.

And when my father was the one in trouble, this is the man who didn’t want to know him.

Ah…, the shameless brother.

“Uncles, aunts, this is too much. Coming down for the holiday after all this time and starting with money… aren’t you ashamed in front of your parents?”

My mother’s voice, calm and full of anger.

That’s right, my mom has borne it a long time.

And so have I.

Now then~ shall I go and settle this once and for all, by the right of the eldest grandson of this house~.

“Father! Mother! The eldest grandson of this house is home!”

(End of Chapter 45)