“Whew.”

I drew a long breath in.

It’s the feeling of opening a gift basket on Christmas morning.

Exactly as I’d predicted, the graph has stretched up and up, beautifully.

Just looking at it stopped my breath.

This is the moment of opening up a gold mine with a billion dollars invested in it.

Tap-tap tap-tap-tap.

I pressed through several stages of corporate encryption keys and connected to the trading market.

“I’m shaking.”

The exchange-rate graph came up first.

A flat range had begun.

Starting today it goes back and forth for about a week, and then the Canadian dollar falls and the yen climbs.

I settled in to clear the position before that.

What I was looking at was a super compound-interest savings account holding a trillion won.

Click.

The mouse pressed the live account-balance window in the trading pane.

All this while I had kept averaging down with the investment profits.

Every few days, whenever the valuation profit in the account grew, I bought Canadian dollars and sold yen.

Dozens of times over.

The invested funds had grown hot, well past the original plan.

The magic show a billion dollars puts on!

The curtain was going up right now.

The screen changed to something plain and clear.

“Hnnngh!”

A groan forced its way out ahead of anything else.

“!!!”

At the same time my eyes went wide.

FX margin trading, the final boss of every gambling table human beings have built!

“How much in the world is this…, one, ten, hundred, thousand, ten thousand, hundred thousand, million, ten million, hundred million, billion, hundred…”

The unit of the number had changed.

The money I put in was a billion US dollars for certain, and yet the settlement due in dollars came to a full…

“Fifteen billion seven hundred and fifty-three million… dollars!!!”

It’s an enormous profit that’s hard to believe even looking at it.

It’s an investment profit you could never see in the domestic stock market.

Even if you made it, there’s no institution that could take the other side.

The interest earned through the rolled-over margin trades came to over several million dollars too.

“…”

Even while I stared blankly at the screen, the profit crept up.

I pulled myself together.

The chance to close out is only days away now.

You have to sell the goods while they’re popular.

The futures market was different from options.

If options are a department store, an official market where rights and obligations are bought and sold, the FX margin market is an enormous permanent bazaar.

Only cash on the barrel worked here.

Manipulation like price-fixing didn’t work.

Day by day the funds each country needed were bought and sold through the merchants.

That flow is so fluid that nobody dares go against the market’s current.

Even if options pay hundreds of times over, an individual clearing a trillion won in profit was a stretch.

To say somebody earns tens of trillions in one night in a market with regular rules is a lie told by people who don’t know the options market.

But in the FX margin market a profit like that was possible.

The call money moving between countries in a single day was enormous.

In a time of currency crisis like this one, the volatility of the flow of funds was tremendous.

My hands got busy.

Even an astronomical profit to come is only my money once I sell it.

Rattle-attle-attle rattle-ack.

Institutions and individuals who thought the Canadian dollar would go on strengthening took my offers up fast.

Not one of them knew that in a few days the Canadian dollar turns weak.

The world of the contest was pitiless.

My victory ran straight through to somebody else’s defeat.

It’s a cold battlefield with nothing in it but winners and losers.

The night ran deep.

When the tiredness came on I drank water and pushed harder at clearing the offers out.

I closed out my mother’s account and my own funds, both invested privately, and part of L.O.R. Investment Corporation too.

And before the night was over I…, had managed to close out almost every trade.

“…Burned the night good and hot…”

Before I knew it, far off past the window, a red glow had started to swell.

Along with the close-out I traded other currencies.

I closed out the clean domestic corporate funds along with my own margin and my mother’s.

Unlike the overseas funds, these I rolled at a moderate size.

There were a lot of eyes watching.

I had put in the reserve against a margin call at a stable level too.

Even so the rate of return was close to a thousand percent.

It looked as though the Bank of Canada would have to open its vaults to defend the rate against everything pouring out overnight.

I scattered the funds.

Expecting the Canadian dollar to weaken, I sold Canadian dollars and bought American dollars.

At the same time I bought euros and sold British pounds.

The British pound, which belongs to the European Union but keeps its own currency, couldn’t escape weakening in the financial crisis.

It falls once through the start of 2008, then holds a flat range for a few months, and then in two months it falls further than it fell in the two years before.

Everywhere, it isn’t a minefield but a paradise, a golden road flowing with milk and honey.

“Designing the next course.”

Above me there were well over several hundred of the world’s rich.

I paid my respects to the wealth they own.

And those are only the official rich.

The individuals and groups steering the world economy from inside the dark couldn’t even be counted.

I had to roll my funds more secretly.

The old man in the dream had talked about neighbors who would sneer, and I had a rough idea now of who they were.

To go up against them, I’m still at the level of a child.

The sun opening the dawn showed a brilliant majesty.

The sun, which waits out the long night’s darkness and then shows itself to the whole world!

Its enormous heat swallowed me.

I wanted to become the sun.

The enormous sun of the financial world, the one nobody dares go against.

“…Does this make any sense?”

“Does what, sir?”

“I didn’t just read the numbers wrong, did I?”

“Why? Is something wrong?”

“The FX margin accounts that were in long-term investment were just closed out. It’s a buy Canadian dollar, sell yen position… and the trading profit… is over three trillion.”

“Somebody holds FX margin as a long-term investment?”

“Three trillion???”

“Is it an institutional investor?”

At the words three trillion in profit, every member of KR Futures’ night currency trading team came over to the team leader and stared at the monitor.

It was two individual accounts and one investment corporation account.

The names were handled as confidential.

But the close-out profit showed as a number.

A few months ago several hundred billion won of funds had come in on one day.

Even at KR Futures, which runs something like a hundred trillion won of institutional money from pension funds and the rest, that was a great deal for one individual’s investment.

Among the masters working in the dark there are people running multinational futures in the trillions.

Most of them knew that the funds of black-haired foreigners are considerable.

A large share of the illegal slush funds of Koreans who acquired enormous wealth through slush funds at the time of the IMF was invested at home in the form of private equity funds.

Next to them the initial investment was small, but not now.

“Two individuals and one corporation. The way I see it, it’s certainly one and the same person.”

It’s a profit position only people at team leader level can see.

Gathered around the team leader, every one of them had a light in his eyes.

“A return of nine hundred and seventy percent?”

“My God…”

“Whoa!”

“This is…, a god of currency running. A god!”

Every one of the staff let out a groan at the enormous rate of return.

Usually he was a strict team leader, but today he was out of his senses.

Three trillion in profit from one long-term investment had never happened before.

The team leader came to himself with a start.

If a VVIP client’s return on this scale leaked, it wouldn’t be a written explanation — it would be forced retirement.

“There’d be chaos if this got in the papers~.”

“Not chaos, the birth of a superstar. Three billion dollars of that is pure foreign-currency profit!”

Just then two excited staff said what should never be said.

“What do you think you’re doing! Are you in your right minds? Don’t you know a client’s return is confidential!!!”

The startled team leader’s roar burst out.

The staff scrambled back to their seats and sat down.

“Keep it in your heads that if the information leaks, every one of us including me gets the axe! The brokerages are jumping into the futures market for real now. If this client walks out… you’re all dead!”

The team leader put the fear into them.

They had let go of their minds for a moment at an enormous rate of return, and this was the disaster that came of it.

If the company’s audit team catches it, they’re called in at once.

“Everybody keep this secret! Understood!”

“Yes, sir!!!”

None of them are fools.

They know well that an individual investor who can produce a return like this is sensitive about information.

But one of the men had an itch in his mouth.

It was certainly the investor his friend at Kaum Securities had talked about.

The friend had said he would stand him a grand drink for news of the return.

He was a friend who kept his mouth shut.

He meant to let it slip, just a little, to him alone, tonight.

“Tae-san…, no, CEO Jang.”

“Come on. Why are you like this~ Attorney Jo. Call me Tae-san, comfortably, the way you always do.”

“…”

Jo Yun-tae looked at the young CEO of L.O.R. Investment Corporation, up in Seoul on his school break, and had nothing to say.

He is not the boy Jo had known last autumn.

In the meantime he had grown taller and his shoulders had broadened out.

Even his face carried a weight that doesn’t belong to a high schooler.

His eyes in particular were out of the ordinary.

Jo Yun-tae met any number of criminals and other people during his years as a prosecutor.

Most men cower at a prosecutor’s eyes.

But the boy in front of him didn’t.

Those deep eyes did not give up what was behind them easily.

He is smiling, and the depth hidden inside it can’t be guessed at.

Even the first meeting was out of the ordinary.

He cleaned up the school violence and the local organization out of his own pocket.

Easy to say, but it’s a gutsy thing that not just anyone can do.

And today, meeting him after several months, the boy had become a bigger adult.

The corporation’s assets are over a trillion… what on earth is this boy?

It was enough to take your breath and stop your nose.

Who would believe that a self-made high school third-year is the owner of a trillion-won asset club?

Which is why he couldn’t drop easily into casual speech.

A trillion won is that enormous a sum.

Even the head of a conglomerate family doesn’t put together a trillion won in cash easily.

And yet the boy is the clean owner of that money.

“CEO Jang. I’m the auditor of this investment corporation, but…, I don’t know what this money is. Did you really earn it purely by investing?”

“It’s all in the books~. I hit the exchange-rate movements uncannily well this time. A few months back an ancestor turned up in my dream holding a great big golden maple leaf, if you can believe it. So I bought Canadian dollars on the spot. And a little while ago the ancestor appeared again and sent me a dream-omen holding a faded maple leaf, so I cleared it out. And then…, I hit the jackpot. Heh heh heh.”

At the boy’s easy, thick-skinned laugh, Jo Yun-tae shut his mouth.

He was torn over whether to believe it or not.

Who would believe that a high schooler had the world’s exchange-rate flows down cold and seized enormous luck?

But it was plainly a fact.

“I asked the accountant and he says there’s no problem with the funds at all. There’s no tax under government policy, and it’s been reinvested through an official investment firm, so he says the tax side is clean.”

“Naturally. I’m a citizen who wants to earn a lot of money and serve his country. Tax evasion is absolutely out of the question.”

He had looked at the books under his authority as auditor, and there’s nothing to find fault with.

The investments going in and out didn’t even come to more than a handful.

All that was left was the trace of funds that showed in the corporate account for a moment and disappeared.

What’s more, all the profit was in stocks and currency trading, which are still tax-exempt.

Even when profit came, it wasn’t money the state could do anything about by force.

Hidden behind an investment corporation, it was harder still to find.

“So what are you going to do with what you’ve earned? This much would feed five generations of descendants doing nothing.”

“What do you mean, what will I do~ I’ll buy beef and eat it, and if there’s some left buy a house and a car~ and if there’s still some left I ought to buy a villa.”

“It’s still too much.”

“It isn’t much. To go shopping at the big market that’s about to open, it’s short.”

“You’re investing a trillion won in shopping? Are you going to take over a group?”

“Shall I? Shall I take over a group? Then I’ll appoint you the group’s legal counsel, Attorney.”

At the high schooler’s words, which didn’t sound like a joke, Jo Yun-tae shut his mouth again. He couldn’t win with words.

No — it was already over on money too.

Funds on that scale are a fortune with plenty left over after buying a large law firm.

“Attorney~.”

“Don’t call me that so warmly. I’m afraid of you now.”

“Why are you like this. I haven’t even started yet.”

“Say it. I won’t be surprised any more.”

“Can I ask you to look into somebody?”

“Look into somebody? Why, are there gangsters left in your neighborhood?”

“No. Look into my mother for me.”

“What? Your mother? Surely you don’t—”

“It isn’t an affair or anything.”

“Then what am I investigating?”

“Please find out about my mother’s family. It shouldn’t be that hard.”

“Hmm…”

Jo Yun-tae fell into thought.

Through the law firm’s informants it isn’t that hard a job.

“How long do you want?”

“The sooner the better.”

“All right. It isn’t allowed, normally, but it’s you asking, so I’ll do it. Text me the name and the resident registration number.”

“Thank you. Attorney Jo. You’ll be blessed for it.”

“Never mind blessings, just don’t pretend you don’t know me when you’re doing well later.”

“Of course not. Just trust me. Attorney Jo, you’ll be flying around in your own private plane later.”

“…”

The high schooler in front of him said it with confidence, and Jo Yun-tae did not take it for a joke.

A private plane he really looked likely to fly in.

Jo Yun-tae knew that the high schooler in front of him was, today, definitely a frightening presence.

(End of Chapter 53)