“Sir! I offer up a bribe unto you! I beg you, do not fire this frail and comely maiden, not for all eternity~.”

“A comely maiden? Where is there a maiden like that here? Are you seeing ghosts?”

“Sir!!!”

The Lunar New Year break was over.

This New Year holiday was one for the record books.

Under my father’s roaring and his coaxing, my uncles and my aunts all came around.

That evening they drew up debt contracts with me.

Lend it just like that and money turns into trouble even between brothers.

Instead of simply lending the money to buy the chicken place, we agreed to register a provisional lien over the property in my mother’s name, in place of a note.

It was the same with my youngest aunt.

A provisional registration went on the apartment.

Every one of my uncles who needed money finished not only a written undertaking but a notarized acknowledgment of the debt.

Legally, it was sealed to perfection.

All of it together didn’t even come to seven hundred million won.

It fell a long way short of a single day’s earnings in my mother’s account.

The effect showed up immediately.

The moment their consultations(?) with me ended, every one of them raced back up to Seoul.

Except for the youngest aunt, who had to go to her husband’s family, the whole of the junior households came down.

And every one of them treated my parents with careful respect.

Even my young cousins were so well-mannered I had to wonder whether these were the cousins I knew.

Through the New Year holiday my father showed his full dignity too.

As eldest grandson he bestowed a million won apiece on his brothers’ wives as an encouragement payment.

The cousins got New Year money by age, anywhere from tens of thousands of won up to hundreds of thousands. (TL Note: sebaetdon — the cash an elder gives a child on Lunar New Year after the child performs the deep New Year bow.)

The discipline of the house was set, and set hard.

Once again I felt the power of money to the bone.

My aunts by marriage moved like soldiers at my mother’s instructions.

The way they laughed and simpered and flattered…

The aftershock of it came to me too.

For the first time in my life, the twins and I got New Year money from each of my uncles in turn.

The cousins called me eldest-grandson hyung or oppa and waited on me with care.

I shot a hundred thousand won of pocket money at each of the cute little things.

Their eyes rolled around in their heads when they saw my car.

Every one of them hung off my pant legs begging for one ride.

My stock price shot through the sky.

It was a Lunar New Year holiday tied together by money, but it was a warm one.

There was food and to spare, and in the evening there was drinking and a game of go-stop.

It was not the scene my father kept talking up, a house of good bones with its heir at the head, but it was full of laughter.

I thought about my grandmother a great deal.

Our grandma, who wished all her life that her children would not fight one another.

If only with money, I had taken some of her worry off her.

And here was one more person waiting on me with great care.

“Team Leader Yu, what is this?”

“Well…, I went to Australia with my mother this time…, and the people there say this is very good. You stay up all night every night, sir. So…”

“What does it do? Kangaroo essence… If I take this, do I go bounding around the roads like a kangaroo?”

“I-I don’t know! It was expensive, all right! Just take one a day, faithfully! They say the effect on men is a perfect ten!”

At my question Team Leader Yu Se-ra went red as a ripe persimmon and hurried out.

The trip had left a healthy energy on her, and it came off her now.

“Pfft!”

Once she was out I let go of the laugh I’d been holding in.

Anybody could see this was medicine Nova hyung needed, not me.

A potency drug I have no use for yet.

It looks as though an innocent mother and daughter went to Australia and got their wallets shaken out by a guide.

“Bye-bye to life in Seoul for a while, too~.”

Living as a high school student is really hard.

I got a driver’s license and a car and the first lock came off the shackles, but it didn’t satisfy me.

In a matter of days the third year starts.

I had to be faithful to my classes.

I’m raking in an enormous amount of money, but for a citizen of the Republic of Korea nothing matters as much as the sign over your head.

To make a bigger dream real, the school on your record is a requirement.

“What am I going to tell Team Leader Yu noona? Hahaha. If she finds out I’m a high schooler…, will she quit?”

Since I picked up Nova hyung’s skills I can read a woman’s eyes far deeper than before.

Team Leader Yu noona has shown strong feeling toward me.

She only holds it in because she knows how young I am.

But a high schooler would be another matter again.

In 2007 this was not yet a world that took an older woman as lightly as 2020 does.

“Little by little…, the hour of destiny is coming closer…”

In 2007 and 2008 and 2009, an enormous typhoon turned a quiet world upside down.

The American financial market, which everyone thought was the absolute strongest, gets smashed to pieces.

If the American Federal Reserve Bank, the FRB, hadn’t printed dollars like a madman under the name of quantitative easing, the world would have come close to facing another Great Depression.

The final boss of ignorant money-throwing, which only America could manage.

I have to catch my full share of the crumbs off that money-throwing.

Now is the chance.

Upheaval is what gives birth to another hero.

For a few days I laid out a plan.

I drew the big picture out of what was stored in my head — the stock indexes of every country, the various futures, the international interest rates, the exchange-rate charts.

An underdrawing only I know about.

I established my investment method systematically.

I completed a close investment plan for the funds at home and abroad.

For the time being I have no intention of taking over real estate or collapsing companies or anything of that kind.

Real estate is an asset that doesn’t move.

It leaves a lot of traces.

It could make me a target for enemies with their eye on me.

Companies were the same.

There would be no direct ownership.

I would only rule them from inside the dark.

My dream was not to be a lord who owns a castle he can’t even eat, but a ninth-circle mercenary mage who is held in awe by anybody.

The one thing that rules the world is money!

It’s finance.

Even an enormous company in the black goes under if its money gets tangled for a single month.

That age was close.

It wouldn’t be as bad as the IMF, but there would be plenty of countries left reeling.

I was not going to spend myself stewing and frying inside the domestic market on a small scale.

Only the man holding abundant funds would enjoy the glory.

And I…, will become the master of the money nobody can see!

“What in the world is the CEO? On the corporate card… what kind of pizza and snacks does a person buy like this? Pizza isn’t stock…”

Yu Se-ra, the only employee of L.O.R. Investment Corporation, was filling in the corporate card statement when she tilted her head.

When March came the CEO went off on a long provincial business trip.

All she got was word that the work had piled up so badly he would only visit occasionally on weekends.

What he did was beyond her grasp anyway, so she let it be.

Even with the CEO away, the company rolled along fine.

Now and then the people in charge at the brokerages and banks came by or called, and that was all of it.

Yu Se-ra enjoyed a honey of a job, like something out of heaven.

In on the dot, out on the dot, guaranteed every day.

Yu Se-ra never once let her guard down.

Thinking this company she couldn’t identify would be her only workplace until she died, she never missed a day.

One of the company’s important duties was putting the corporate card records in order.

She printed the card records and passed them to the accounting office every month.

But the card records were suspicious.

The CEO’s card records for the whole of last month, March…

“Pizza places, fifteen times; chicken shops, eleven; snack shops, twenty… ten monthly PC-room subscriptions? What is this? Is he planning a new business? Is he getting ready for a chain of pizza or chicken or snack shops or PC rooms? He must be going around this hard to pick up the know-how for running them, right?”

Each visit sent out hundreds of thousands of won in pizza and chicken.

The cost of eating came out to roughly the monthly salary of a section chief at a decent big company.

“He didn’t go alone… with a girlfriend? No, the quantity is too big for that. Quantities like this are only possible for high schoolers with pig stomachs… Could the CEO…, have given the card to his younger brothers and sisters? Or else is he a sports college student out in the provinces? …, he doesn’t have to hide it from me. What’s there to be ashamed of about a school record…”

She spread the wings of her imagination.

Yu Se-ra still hadn’t figured out what the CEO was.

When she asked Attorney Jo Yun-tae, who had been appointed as auditor, he only laughed.

It was a puzzle that would not come apart, and Yu Se-ra shook her head at it.

And then, for the first time in a long while, she threw herself into the company’s work with everything she had.

The CEO, whose face she hadn’t seen once this month.

She prayed and prayed with all her heart that he was happy in a world with no women in it.

“These sickening bastards…, working off their stress with pizza… Now the thought of pizza alone turns my stomach.”

I sat down at the desk.

Five monitors on the desk looked back at me all at once.

I took my eyes off the screens for a moment and thought about the past month.

Opening day at a boys’ high school starts, the way it always does, with welcoming obscenities.

The year had changed and so had the classroom and the class, but human beings do not change.

Last March was spent supporting pigs.

The scent of males, grown more mature, filled the classroom.

For me, who had spent the vacation in a hotel suite, it was harder labor still.

I prayed for this curse to end soon.

The moment vacation ended, my friends came after snacks with every kind of threat, aegyo, scorching USB bribes(?) and low-grade friendship.

Once they hit the third year, every one of them had a lot of stress.

They worked it off with food.

The school lunch had been put right, but the stomachs of super pigs are bottomless.

The rumor spread far and wide that our family had gotten rich.

My mother had driven up to the school in the Mercedes.

It was a visit to get counseling about my college course.

My mother, arriving in a dignified long-skirted suit, with the luxury bag I had given her.

Our mother shone.

It was like the progress of a high-class Gangnam lady.

Unless the kids were blockheads, they’d figure out the state of our house right away.

They still didn’t know I was the author of Cloud Warrior.

I only told them my father had struck it rich in stocks.

They asked nothing more.

What I got more of was friends clutching their growling stomachs and giving me the face of a pig that hadn’t eaten in three days.

I recognized the boys’ pure acting.

If not now, there’s no telling when I’ll see these boys again.

They aren’t asking me to cosign a loan.

Every day when school let out we went around the pizza places, the chicken shops and the snack shops like a pilgrimage route.

They aren’t pilgrims, but the boys tasted the grace and the moving power of pizza and chicken and snack food, evenly and all of it.

Not one of them worried about my pocket.

That much, at least, was a mercy.

Because they didn’t know the snacks they were stuffing down came to over five million won.

“Tonight, at last…”

I looked at the screens again.

The morning of April 3, when the American market opens.

Half past ten, Korean time.

American summer time had moved the opening an hour earlier.

Five minutes to the countdown.

For the first time in a while I was really tense.

For today I had been loading up on live rounds all this time.

In oil futures there had been no market of sharp rises and falls at all.

They went up and down modestly, two or three percent every few days.

I cut the proportion I held in margin and invested aggressively.

The accumulated profit was considerable.

Right now the funds stacked up in accounts here and there came to a billion dollars.

A trillion won in Korean money.

Today those funds are going to be popcorned in a single shot.

“Today is my option debut.”

While I was piling up funds with futures all this time, I hadn’t laid a hand on options.

The leverage is enormous next to futures.

I held back too.

Sell a call in a collapsing market, and the moment the seller’s obligation catches you, you’re out in a single shot.

But sell call options in a collapsing market and buy put options…, and it was a super, super jackpot.

“My heart’s shaking~.”

I drank a cold canned coffee.

Today, all the firepower was concentrated.

The way a hunter handles a big bear, I laid nets everywhere and dug traps.

For a week now I had been short selling the stock of New Century Financial, America’s second-largest subprime mortgage lender.

At the same time, from a week ago, I sold the individual call options and bought the put options on several stocks in the same industry, New Century included.

One shot aimed at a collapse.

As a rule traders settle an option contract the same day; that is the character of them.

Unlike futures, they don’t like carrying it over the day as a long-term investment.

Plenty of traders were left holding a tin can by an event nobody could resist, like the terror attacks of September 11, 2001.

But I loved gambling.

I emptied out every fund I had left and took a short position in individual stock futures trading.

I aimed at the enemy’s windpipe.

It’s a sixty-billion-dollar great bear whose windpipe gets cut inside this month anyway, starting from today.

The tastiest cut of meat on that bear was mine.

“10, 9, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2…, 1!”

The American stock market opened.

And then…

“Yes! Yes! Yeeeeeesssss!”

I shot up out of my seat.

The subprime mortgage market, where the signs had been strange for days.

With the opening it plunged sharply, leaving a blue tail behind it.

American stocks, which unlike Korea have no limit on how far they can fall.

Not only New Century Financial but NovaStar Financial and Fremont General and the rest of the same industry all fell out of the sky.

Truly an enormous drop.

In an instant the stocks fell tens of percent.

Rattle, rattle-attle-attle.

As the stocks fell, the futures market fell with them at the same time.

The options market went into an uproar too.

I could hear the screams of the call buyers and put sellers who had booked a rise, right there in the graph.

And the other way around, I had the illusion of hearing the laughter of the call sellers and put buyers in my ears.

It was the same with the futures.

I seemed to see the blank, ruined faces of the investors who would be holding the stocks.

The great American black bear, down at last.

Fast and without wasting a second…

I swept the bear’s gallbladder into my pocket first.

(End of Chapter 47)