“The Rune language…, the Rune language.”

Chris Barnsdale’s talk of a Rune language kept my curiosity going even after I was back in the real world.

The Rune language I know is the language used for magic in novels and games.

Strictly it was the language the Germanic peoples used in their sorcery, but that mystery of it got transformed into magic.

And yet Chris Barnsdale, a god, said the ancient language humanity had lost was the Rune language.

Something touched my instincts.

Judging by that self-satisfied look on his face, it was definitely a jackpot.

“It surely isn’t a real magic language, is it?”

Reasonable suspicion rose in me, but I shook my head.

It’s nonsense.

Magic, in this world…

“They say there were plenty of magicians in Egypt…, they say the magicians turned a staff into a snake and made fire and so on…”

Magic comes up in the Bible too.

But even so, it won’t be real magic the way I imagine it.

“He said he’d call me soon, so I’ll find out if I wait.”

The one who’s short on karma points is Chris Barnsdale, a god.

I turned my head and looked out the window.

This is school.

With the third year, my classroom moved up to the fifth floor.

Third year, class four.

A good many of my friends from the second year ended up in other classes.

That didn’t change the friendships any.

We’re in the humanities track, so we’re all crowded onto one floor.

The noisy lunch hour passed, and I took my time over the view of a school with spring coming on.

Life had filled up the thick plane trees.

The sky was clear, and there isn’t a cloud in it.

These are beautiful days that will never come again in a life.

I’m living it a second time, but this is the first time I’ve had hours as ample and as easy as these.

It was the change that had come to the school once that Hong boy disappeared.

“Wh-What’s wrong with the tree! This is the pine the board chairman is so fond of!”

“It doesn’t look as though anyone put anything in it, either.”

“Dried right out in a single night… if the board chairman finds out about this…”

The first floor is in an uproar.

The principal and every senior figure in the school below him had gone yellow in the face.

The original of the pine I had planted in the god Chris Barnsdale’s yard had withered to death in a single night.

The pine that stood for the school along with the board chairman’s statue.

The tree had been in fine health the last time I saw it, and it had turned into a perfect mummy.

“…”

My conscience gave me a needless jab.

Guilt came over me, as if I were the one who had done it.

All I did was imagine an image…

Why did that pine have to go and die on me!

It also crossed my mind that I’d better be careful.

I don’t know exactly how, but the human world and the divine world are definitely connected.

A pine with the life drained out of it, like a sacrifice.

Rather than live in the human world getting bugs and pesticide smeared all over it, I wished it happiness in the garden of the gods.

“What are you staring at like that?”

“Spring’s nice.”

“Punk, is spring getting to you? Is heat shooting up in your chest? Want me to set you up on a blind date?”

Kang Hyeon-su, who wasn’t close to me in my first life, came over.

He’s the boy who ran at the top of the whole school.

He was good-looking and his temperament was open and easy, so there were friends around him all the time.

He’s the all-rounder type, good at his studies and rich in friends.

He’s the son of an elder at a big downtown church, so his network of church girls was no joke.

“Forget it. I’m not a kid.”

“A third-year is still a kid. We’ve got every right to enjoy ourselves.”

“Midterms are coming. I made a mess of my school grades up through the start of second year, so I have to make it up.”

“You keep coming first in the whole school and you still can’t get a grade one?”

“Looks like a grade two.”

“You’re going to Hanguk University, right?”

“Probably.”

“Hmm… they say the school can recommend up to four for the regional balance this year… that’s a shame for you.”

“You go for the regional balance. I’ll just take the regular round. From what they’ve announced, the regular round treats school grades as full marks all the way down to a grade two.”

“Ohh! The regular round — you’re confident?”

“Obviously~. I’m Jang Tae-san~.”

This year Hanguk University allowed four places per school in the regional balanced development intake.

Ours is a regional elite school, so most of the students out of it passed in the regional balance intake.

It’s a sure thing.

But I’m pushed out of the running by my school grades.

However many full marks and first places I took from the second semester of the second year on, the floor under me was too thin.

“Tae-san. You’ve changed a lot lately. You’re a third-year and you’re not nervous? Why are you this sure of yourself?”

“I’ve got a fair amount.”

“Listen to this arrogant little— my father’s doing all right too, you know!”

That’s not it — I mean I’ve really got a lot!

Imagine five trillion won parked in a foreign bank account.

Anybody at all would just turn sure of himself.

Ding-ding, ding-ding-ding~♬.

The bell rang for fifth period.

It was a shame, the time going by.

I knew perfectly well that once this moment passes, it doesn’t come again.

Which is why the memories of this moment were more precious to me than to anybody.

“I’m still hungry…”

School ended and I sat down in front of the computer again.

On the monitors, the futures and stock prices and exchange-rate graphs of every country in the world, which never rest, shone in every color there is.

A single one of those lines moved units that ran from a few hundred won at the small end to a few trillion at the large.

I had blown a five-trillion jackpot, but in front of that enormous current I was still small.

By the figures published in 2010, about twenty-one trillion dollars was hidden in tax havens.

In Korean money, twenty-four thousand two hundred trillion won.

It’s no different for being 2007.

My five trillion was nothing but a paper boat in the world of enormous money.

I could have stopped here.

I could live throwing money around until the day I die.

But I can’t do that.

To know and not act — that was a sin.

It’s the chance heaven gave a man who died and came back.

The old man in the dream said so.

He told me to show the power of the firstborn and live as I pleased.

Those words were still vivid.

“This year the people of the Republic of Korea are going to elect a historic figure.”

The 2007 presidential election is coming closer.

The curtain began to come down on the Participatory Government of President Ju Mu-hyeong, the man the people would later call the only president in their hearts.

Officialdom was reading the mood of the government that was about to be born.

Choe Byeong-bak has no rival.

Public opinion and the vested interests took the Ju Mu-hyeong government apart completely.

Bold policies that were half-cooked put stress on the people, and the people turned away from them.

The ruling-party National Assembly members, with no room in their heads for anything but factional fighting, did their part too.

For the sake of individuals and organizations rather than the country, and beyond that for the interests of groups and vested interests, they end up electing the worst president.

Riding the worldwide low interest rates, a real-estate frenzy swept through.

Instead of IT or the next thing to eat, a con man who wants to reproduce the glory of the age of the shovel becomes president.

He grew the conglomerates by manipulating the exchange rate.

He claimed a trickle-down effect, but the conglomerates, with their bellies full, abandoned the domestic market with the people’s money and invest in other countries like China and Vietnam.

Right through to President Jo Geun-yeong, who was removed from office, the Republic of Korea now enters ten years of darkness.

Watching it was not enjoyable.

The election of the worst presidents, brought on by human greed and nostalgia for the past.

But it was a necessary evil.

For people to understand how frightening corrupt power is, the evil they chose was a good.

Rattle, rattle-attle-attle.

I wiped politics out of my head.

I needed a lot more power than this.

To keep from being affected by half-baked politics, all I had to do was get strong.

The world’s economic markets ran busily today too.

Inside those countless graphs I could see the flow of the world.

Everywhere you looked, they were pitching.

The subprime mortgage rot had begun in force to open a hole in the enormous dam of finance.

As a stopgap it had bankrupted the bear I hunted.

The world still hadn’t detected the crisis of the financial crisis.

Crude oil and every other kind of raw material kept climbing in price.

The bursting of an enormous bubble, starting in August 2008.

Until then the world enjoyed a toast of overflowing money.

The way the people of the Republic of Korea did until the IMF blew up.

But the designers in the dark will be expecting it well enough.

My enemy was…, exactly them.

Ding-a-ling-ling, ding-a-ling-ling, ding-a-ling-ling.

The cell phone rang with that low-grade chord I never get used to, however often I hear it.

“Ju-a, is something the matter?”

It was my younger sister Ju-a.

“Oppa~ are you busy?”

“No, why?”

“We’re going to make a late-night snack — is oppa coming over too?”

“A late-night snack?”

“I suddenly want dumpling rabokki so badly. Why am I this hungry since I came up to high school? Oppa, you’re hungry right now too, aren’t you? Aren’t you?” (TL Note: rabokki — instant ramyeon noodles cooked into the sweet chili sauce of tteokbokki; with mandu, the dumplings, thrown in.)

Ju-a, whose temperament has turned lively, chattered away.

It’s the house right next door, but mine is absolutely off limits.

A writer’s workroom has to be kept quiet at all times, my mother said.

Since then only my mother has come and gone.

And that much is only the occasional trip to clean the living room while I’m out.

She doesn’t know what it is, but she’s the only one who has noticed something of the change in me.

My father asked nothing further.

There’s nothing he can say to a son who moves funds beyond the limit of what he can imagine.

He only sends me an apologetic look now and then.

My sisters simply think I’ve become a famous writer.

They still don’t know how the world works.

“Who’s come over?”

“Hehe. A-in and Hye-seul~.”

My sisters commuted to school from the house next door.

At dinner time, if my father wasn’t busy, the two of them would come over and we’d eat together.

The laughter never left the place.

Once spring came my father was busy with the farm work.

My mother helped my father for a while or made paintings and poems in her workroom in the old house.

Everyone in the house had come to peace.

In that atmosphere the twins settled smoothly into school life too.

Ju-a, who had a talent for art, was getting special tutoring from Mom.

Ju-hui, whose dream had been to be a veterinarian, had changed her goal to Korean medicine.

The fate of the twins had turned out different from the past.

My sisters got on well with their friends too.

And when the friends came over, the twins called me.

I had become the great contributor to those two building their network.

The twins’ cooking is terrible, though…

Spicy dumpling rabokki drew itself in my head.

I got hungry myself, and my mouth watered.

But the answer didn’t come readily.

These are twins Mom hasn’t handed the cooking secrets down to yet.

Cooking myself was out too.

My own level is barely boiling ramyeon.

“Oppa~ you’re coming, right?”

Ju-a asked carefully.

My friends say a younger sister is a devil, but not for me.

Unlike in the past, the twins respected me.

They know perfectly well that their oppa is the boy breadwinner of this house.

“Did you get the ingredients ready?”

“Yes. Oppa, you just come and eat. Your chef sisters will take care of everything~.”

“All right. I’ll come.”

“Oppa, thank you. You know I love you, right? Kee hee hee.”

Satisfied, Ju-a threw love around freely and hung up.

I’d promised, but I smacked my lips over the regret of it.

Ju-a and her friends’ dumpling rabokki, which was obviously going to be full of greasiness instead of spice.

“Couldn’t somebody give me cooking lessons?”

Now and then, working at dawn, there are times when I get a little hungry and want something other than ramyeon.

Every time, I wanted to pass on convenience-store food smeared with seasoning.

I got sick of it during the Seoul life of my past existence.

After eating it my stomach felt heavy and I put on weight.

I thought of a chef who could make food that was good for the body and good to taste.

If I had the time, it looked as though I ought to go to a cooking academy or something.

Fwaaaash!

Just then a storm of light suddenly whirled up in front of my eyes.

It was intense enough to blind both eyes.

“Hah!”

All at once my body slid across into an unfamiliar space.

And then a strange space appeared.

“Where… is this?”

It’s an enormously large kitchen.

It’s packed neatly with every kind of cooking implement — high-grade stainless steel frying pans with a gloss on them that owes a hotel kitchen nothing, then turners, rice paddles and the rest.

At a glance, it’s the space of a great cook.

In it, a graceful middle-aged woman with a gorgeous flowered apron tied on neatly is looking at me and smiling.

Her face is familiar, like one I’ve seen many times somewhere.

“Come in, then.”

There was gladness in the voice, as though she had been waiting for me.

“Who are you?”

“I am Jang-geum.” (TL Note: Jang-geum — the cook of the Joseon royal kitchen whose name in Korea is shorthand for a legendary cook.)

“Yes? J-Jang-geum!!!”

(End of Chapter 49)