“Ugh! This damned high schooler habit! Winter vacation, he says! Winter vacation!”

My face burned once the call with Robert was over.

To Robert, who calls me Boss, I’d blurted out let’s meet in the vacation.

Mortifying as hell.

A gourd that leaks inside leaks outside too, sure enough. (TL Note: 안에서 새는 바가지 밖에서도 샌다 — the Korean proverb that a person’s habits follow them out of the house; what you are at home is what you’ll be in public.)

Two years of living as a student and the word vacation had stuck to my mouth.

“Still, the last vacation is coming~.”

Time really has gone fast.

The entrance exam is not far off now.

My high school days in this second life are ending too.

“It was a time I won’t regret.”

Since regressing, I’d cleared away the traumas that tormented me up to the day I died.

For the children’s sake, I’d run a large-scale clean-up of the neighborhood too.

The city I live in was picked as the number one crime-free city in Korea for the first half of the year.

While Korea goes through a tunnel of darkness for the next ten years, this neighborhood at least will be stable.

With the rotten root pulled out, it will certainly be less polluted.

“But am I really a seventy-billion-dollar rich man? Tell me this isn’t a dream.”

Over several days I’d closed out the FX margin trades.

The four billion dollars I’d invested in pieces had come back as seventy billion.

I sold slowly, in pieces, so that no rumor would start.

That was possible because it’s a market where an enormous sum is turned over in a day.

Through the several investment corporations set up in Hong Kong, I washed it thoroughly.

It’s a money game that’s only possible in the biggest market on earth.

Every time margin profits came in, I averaged down and made the table bigger.

Because of me, FX investors and the central banks of several countries will have tasted confusion.

FX affects the short-term call funds of banks around the world too.

I’d become filthy rich, but it didn’t feel real.

I hadn’t known, when I regressed, that I’d get rich to this extent.

“I really am living modestly, aren’t I? One apartment for a house, one car… and my station is high schooler…”

This must be why they say the money in a bank isn’t money.

If the internet disappeared right now, fifty trillion would be gone too.

Fortunately, though, a world without internet never came before I died.

“Shall I run it up hard again?”

I’d become rich, but I didn’t want to leave money sitting like water in a pond.

Money loses its value if it doesn’t roll like a wheel.

“Now it’s a bigger table. Heh heh heh.”

A villain’s laugh came out of me all by itself.

Another fantastic graph came up in my head.

In a few days the euro will start to surge against the dollar.

When America is unsettled, money gathers toward a stable Europe—that’s economic theory and simple human nature.

Soon they’ll be dazzling people as though the American economy is about to collapse.

And then America will show the world, as much as it likes, that great reserve strength(?) only it has.

Big brother America, running the banknote printers and scattering the money from helicopters!

At that point the world’s flow gathers back toward safe America.

I’m the only survivor who knows it.

“The euro’s grown a lot.”

Unlike the Canadian dollar, the euro and the dollar are a different size in the market.

This fellow takes more than fifty or sixty percent of the margin money traded every day.

The daily trading amount alone is over two trillion dollars.

Even sending Robert twenty billion dollars and then splitting the remaining fifty billion into investments over several days doesn’t show.

That doesn’t mean I go all in blindly.

I picked a few whose graphs are fantastic.

Modestly, I sold ten billion dollars and bought yen.

At a reasonable size, I bought twenty billion dollars of euros and sold British pounds.

The remaining thirty billion dollars I put hard into buying euros and selling dollars.

Fifty billion dollars reinvested, no less.

Twenty billion dollars I set aside and handed to Robert.

I marked out a few futures that will climb and climb and then fall off a cliff in the middle of next year, and passed them over.

Without my permission there can be no selling.

I’d made dozens of hands and feet for myself.

No need now to sit up all night investing alone.

With this investment money and the profits, Robert’s team had become a thirty-billion-dollar hedge fund and private equity operation before I knew it.

Split across ten corporations, the amount doesn’t show.

Among hedge fund units there are plenty worth tens of billions of dollars.

Going forward, these fellows are due to split themselves further.

A hundred at minimum is the target.

“It must never come to light!”

The fellows in my own accounts were thoroughly spread out too.

The investing was done from accounts scattered not only through Hong Kong, Britain and America but all over the world.

Once winter starts, I’ll have to do more corporation and account shopping in Hong Kong.

I’d already contacted a broker, so all that’s left is to collect them.

I behaved exactly like the people who invest in secret out of the shadows.

Belonging to the group that rules the world from the darkness, I’d become an investor of the dark myself.

Showing off is strictly declined.

The moment you step out acting superior, you can become a target. For Korean netizens, who rank first in the world for jealousy, and for the men who run the finance of the dark.

That’s why I don’t spare anything on investing in American politics.

To stay alive, I had to make a lot of powerful comrades.

For catching the neighborhood dogs the grandpa in my dream spoke of, a club made of money is the best there is.

The age of talking with fists is over.

The moment mankind made the nuclear bomb, there could no longer be a war of mankind alone.

It works for threats and for self-comfort, but it can never be used for actual force.

Money is the weapon now.

Lose the economic war and you fall to a third-rate nation.

“Before all that, let’s get to school first!”

Today too I’d stayed up the whole night.

A red glow was slowly coloring the world, announcing the start of the day.

“Ssssssp.”

I sat down on the floor in the lotus position.

It’s early dawn, full of fresh yang energy.

I emptied my mind.

And naturally I began the Taegeuk Five Elements Dual Intent Mind Art.

I drew in as much as I liked of the fierce solar energy soaking into my body. Body and mind have to be healthy before you can spend money as you like.

The brilliant season of my life, coming closer and closer.

I’m preparing for it quietly and hotly.

“City hall passed the completion inspection. The formal requirements are met, so all that’s left is to move in.”

The end was in sight for the children’s home relocation too.

My mother donated generously to the home, in the hundreds of millions.

Two more social workers were brought in too.

My mother gave the art instruction herself.

My father supplied apples for the children’s snacks.

I called Jangju Supermarket too and ordered plenty of the food they wanted.

Sarangwon became the finest facility in Korea.

The school buildings turned out to be sturdier than expected, with good insulation against the cold.

With S-grade materials we renovated the children’s rooms, the dining hall, the teachers’ quarters, the indoor gym and the bathrooms.

It became something close to hotel grade.

An enormous amount of material and manpower went in over a short time.

We donated computers too and filled the place with exercise equipment.

They don’t have the most precious thing in the world, parents—but the facility and the surroundings, at least, we made the best there is.

“Thank you for your work, Attorney.”

“I keep telling you, it’s a job I’m paid for.”

“Come on. Even so, it all went smoothly thanks to you, Attorney Jo. The mayor is a famous man, after all.”

The Hanguk Freedom Party mayor is known for being greedy and arrogant.

He’s an unpleasant politician with a sharp eye for concessions who turns his back completely on anything that doesn’t bring votes.

Not knowing that, the older citizens kept voting Hanguk Freedom Party, over and over.

To a mayor like that, a children’s home would be worth less than a bone already gnawed, sucked and thrown away.

Without Attorney Jo and the law firm’s clout, it certainly wouldn’t have got a grain of traction. (TL Note: 씨알도 안 먹히다 — “not even a grain gets eaten”; Korean for an argument that has no effect at all on the person hearing it.)

“That’s true enough. The man held out stubbornly at first, and then I released one old internal-investigation file and he put his tail down at once.”

“Are you allowed to just release that sort of thing?”

“I am. They can’t open it up anyway. The next president is certain to be a Hanguk Freedom Party president, so the prosecution is keeping its head down. Even if it came out, it would be quietly buried.”

“Is the prosecution allowed to do that? If there’s a crime it should be handled strictly.”

“…The Prosecutor General is appointed by the president too. Could you report your company president to the audit team as you pleased, just because he had something dirty? They’re all in it together, and you’d only make your own life hard. Send you off to some country hole and you’d spend your life cleaning up after drunk-driving accidents.”

I knew it, but hearing it from the mouth of a former senior prosecutor made it more real.

For the next ten years this country enters a dark age for every administrative power in it.

Next year there will be a crisis with the mad cow candlelight protests. But the suppression of the press and the public-opinion campaign run through the National Intelligence Service begin. (TL Note: In 2008, months of candlelight protests filled central Seoul over the resumption of American beef imports and the risk of BSE; they became the first great test of the new administration.)

It looks like a punishment sent from heaven on the people who cast those votes.

It’s the starting point of a history in which people, blinded by property speculation, leave an enormous weight of burden to their descendants.

I closed my eyes.

I have no method for beating the foolishness of the public.

I know that nobody can save a person before they understand for themselves.

“Anyway, how did the exam go? Is it certain that CEO Jang becomes my junior?”

“Well~ I did all right on the exam.”

Not all right—very well indeed.

Exam questions I already knew couldn’t be difficult.

I’d worked through similar past questions in math, English and science with the class.

I taught them the heart of the question rather than the answer.

Probably a lot of the kids in our class this year will go to schools in Seoul.

All of it is by design.

I got exactly one question wrong in social studies.

A perfect score on the entrance exam would only follow me around like a tag for life.

To be a quiet ruler, standing out too much is forbidden.

“There’s a professor I know at the school—shall I have a word at the interview?”

“That would be cheating. I want to live my life doing business cleanly. I don’t want to leave a stain on myself with an admissions scandal.”

Attorney Jo looked at me steadily.

I let out a small smile.

“Haha. It’s a joke. If CEO Jang had asked me for that, I’d have kicked my chair back and walked out.”

I know perfectly well it wasn’t a joke.

Attorney Jo’s affection for me deepens as time goes on.

His face hid a reading that he gives unconditional love to anyone he holds dear.

“Attorney.”

“When you call me like that, quietly, it frightens me!”

“Why are you like this. I’m a rookie just out of high school. Next to a former Deputy Chief Prosecutor I’m a low-level noob.”

“A noob? That’s a game word, isn’t it? Sorry to say it, but you’re no noob—you’re max level!” (TL Note: 쪼랩 and 만랩 — Korean gamer slang, built from the English level: 쪼랩 is a beginner’s character, 만랩 one at the cap.)

Attorney Jo knows internet slang well too.

Confirmation again that he’s a man whose common sense stays open.

The world changes, and the moment you sink into the past and say those were the days, you’re cut off from it.

“I’m thinking of buying some shares in a law firm.”

“Shares in a law firm? What for? Pay them and use them whenever something comes up. That’s clean and it works.”

Attorney Jo doesn’t know my larger purpose.

“Still, if we’re family, won’t the treatment be different?”

“Family, is it… true enough. They’re not the sort to say no when money’s being invested. They’re my seniors, but they’re gentlemen who are genuinely mad for money.”

It’s a world where a crime obvious to anyone gets you out with an acquittal or a suspended sentence, as long as there’s money.

It’s only the evolved form of the rule that says money makes you innocent, which started when mankind began living in groups. (TL Note: 유전무죄 무전유죄 — “with money, innocent; without money, guilty”; a phrase from a 1988 hostage-taking that has been Korean shorthand for two-tier justice ever since.)

I have no thought whatever of refusing it.

Use it by thoroughly legitimate means and that’s all there is to it.

With the money they love, that is.

“Is buying shares possible?”

“There’s nothing in this world money can’t do. How much do you need?”

“About thirty percent would do.”

“Thirty percent… it’s a legal corporation, so of course it’s possible. And with that much of a stake you’re at law-firm representative-director level. Are you interested in law firms? They make surprisingly little money. After dividing it among the attorneys, five percent net is a stretch.”

“You take the director’s post, Attorney Jo.”

“What! M-me?”

“Foreigners are limited to a forty-nine percent holding, but there’s no limit for Korean nationals, is there? You becoming a director, Attorney Jo, is nothing at all.”

“…”

My proposal didn’t seem bad to him.

Law firm heads aren’t the sort to say no when someone comes with money to invest.

“There are two joint heads there, aren’t there?”

“That’s right. A former Deputy Chief Prosecutor and an attorney by background, the two of them as joint heads.”

“About how much would it take?”

“For a law firm the attorneys on the books matter, but the value of a name that has held up over long years matters more. Apart from Lee & Jang, the absolute power, Samu Law is one of the three great law firms in Korea. It won’t be cheap.”

I know that too.

Right up to the day I died, the Lee & Jang firm was counted as devils’ attorneys.

They took fifty percent of the legal market.

They were called the dedicated law firm of big companies and rich men.

Everyone who had anything carried their money to Lee & Jang.

Becoming the hands and feet of the powerful, they cut down the necks of anyone designated an enemy without mercy.

Even at this point, their annual revenue was over five hundred billion won.

But the other law firms are acorns measuring heights against each other. (TL Note: 도토리 키 재기 — acorns measuring their heights against one another; Korean for a contest between parties too alike, and too small, for the result to matter.)

“Would a hundred billion won do it?”

“A hundred billion? CEO Jang, that’s our firm’s whole annual revenue!”

“Their mouths would water, wouldn’t they?”

“Of course! With capital transfused they could bring in more usable attorneys, so they’d welcome it with open arms. This business is money on the table, money off the table. Bringing in a marquee ex-official means laying five billion on the floor to start with.”

“Then please tell them. Say the investment will be made in a corporation’s name.”

“Are you serious? If this is nonsense, I’ll have to leave from sheer embarrassment.”

“You may not trust me, but you can trust the money in the account.”

“…CEO Jang. Am I really taking the director’s post?”

He seems to have been carrying some grievance inside the organization.

Attorney Jo’s eyes were blazing.

“Of course. Help yourself, Director Jo~.” (TL Note: 먹다 — the Korean for eating also means taking a post or a title, so Tae-san is telling him to eat his fill and to take the job in the same words; the chapter is named for the line.)

“Thank you! CEO Jang!”

Attorney Jo held out his hand.

I took it in mine.

His hand was hot enough to catch fire.

It starts from here.

The moment the law firm bites at my bundle of money…

You’re all mine! Heh heh.

My mercenaries who fight with the law.

Another weapon bought for the big picture.

Ttiriririri. Ttiriririri.

Just then my phone rang.

An unfamiliar number, not saved.

“Who is this?”

“Oppa! It’s me! Me!”

(End of Chapter 71)