“Preparations are finished. From here on it’s war!”

I finished the morning training.

It hadn’t been long, but the training had settled into my body.

Barely a week, and the effect was enormous.

The internal energy Divine Lord Cheollyong planted in me went past anything I had imagined.

My spindly bones had turned solid.

A reasonable amount of muscle had come onto me.

My head was clear and light all the time.

Even the math I had half given up on made sense to me now when I looked at a formula.

English words and sentences went in fast too.

This was a whole new world.

As the waste came out of my body, it felt like the grease packed into my brain had drained out along with it.

At the same time, the Taegeuk Five Elements Dual Intent Mind Art grew more familiar by the day.

Divine Lord Cheollyong, my illegal-tutoring teacher, had said something about it.

At a certain stage, he said, you can split your brain in two and use both halves.

I wasn’t at that stage yet.

Since I was up early, I cut the grass in the orchard with the brush cutter.

It was a small orchard, so an hour finished it.

It was my first time playing the dutiful son.

Unfamiliar, but it didn’t feel bad.

My parents were astonished to see me coming in from cutting grass.

At the sight of them… I did a lot of reflecting.

Born the son of an orchard farmer, I had made being a bad son my hobby.

My father’s eyes actually welled up, and I was simply ashamed.

The twins made a racket about the sun coming up backwards today.

In the past I used studying as an excuse and never came out of my room.

But all I did in there was read books and surf the internet.

Dying and coming back changes a man’s personality too.

It’s a good thing… but not one I can recommend.

“It’s been a while.”

A chart more beautiful than any masterpiece delighted my eyes.

The colored lines were enchanting.

Stocks begin with the chart and end with the chart.

It was a picture of the world drawn by the rings and the ants, by the events of an era and by human desire.

I had my digital certificate issued yesterday.

I installed the brokerage program the antique computer was going to struggle with.

The HTS program, as they call it.

Drawing on my career at a brokerage, I optimized the program to suit me.

The setup was done.

I opened Hyoungmun, the Kaum Securities platform individual investors used most.

Blue and red and yellow lines welcomed me.

Looking at a chart made my heart pound the way a first love does.

Even for a minor like me, Kaum opened a credit account on my parents’ guarantee.

Unlike in the future, the brokerages were still on my side.

But there were plenty of restrictions.

In 2006 you were a minor until twenty.

I still didn’t know how many days of three meals I would have to get through to reach adulthood.

“Straight into credit from day one!”

I coated myself head to toe in nerve.

I opened the order book for Planet 77 on the KOSDAQ, the one I had been after.

Planet 77’s chart came up in my head.

The filing hadn’t come out yet, so trading was calm.

The manipulation ring would have secured its position long before this.

Planet 77 was delisted from the KOSDAQ a year after this operation.

A pity, but I couldn’t breathe a word of it.

The stock market was a legal gambling house the state had licensed.

Everyone in it carried the duty of bearing the risk.

It was a market of devils wearing the mask of finance.

There are people who have never touched stocks, but nobody who has touched them only once.

Addiction.

The only human who can stand up to that name is a saint.

“Hah, they’ve stacked buy and sell volume up in piles. Cute, boys.”

The classic tool for pressing a price down.

“So the game’s rigged, is it? You’re all dead today!”

It’s a technique of hanging volume at the upper and lower limit prices to hold the quotes in a fixed state.

Ants with no information were pressed down by the volume and didn’t dare come near.

It was a stock with no particular good news, so there weren’t many investors either.

And on top of that, today was the working day.

I could feel from the chart and the order book how heavily they were guarding against another ring coming in.

“Shall we go in?”

I started buying, lightly.

A small-cap that opened on a down market at 2,250 won a share, with a market cap of fifty billion won.

This one gets inflated several times over.

Perfect for playing with right now.

Tap-tap-tap-tap-tap. Tap-tap-tap.

The brisk sound of typing rang around the room.

Ding! Ding.

My fingers closed buys fast, the way a securities man’s do.

Slowly, I teased the stock the way an angler chums the water.

The ring would be on edge, so there was no harm in being careful.

And so, two hours before the morning session closed, I pulled the forty percent margin requirement all the way on twenty million won of capital and completed fifty million won of purchases.

That was the magic worked by a credit balance.

Because of me, a falling market turned into a rising one lit up in red.

At a final average price of 2,500 won, I bought exactly twenty thousand shares.

“They’ll have flinched, the boys.”

I could picture the ring’s confusion.

To my eye, a student of sharply rising stocks, the whole situation was plain.

Fifty million won of buying settled over a single morning was enough to run a chill through a small-cap ring.

Beginners in stocks didn’t know it.

That behind every explosive rise there are manipulation rings operating with the major shareholder’s blessing.

“Much obliged to you, then. Boys.”

I closed the trading window.

Price charts, trend lines and trend channels, moving averages, candlestick charts, stochastics, Bollinger Bands, volume-by-price, psychological lines and all the rest of the indicators are worth nothing whatsoever.

Every indicator is made by the rings.

Knowing that, I quietly took out a math workbook, still perfectly clean.

Mountain air drifting in through the open window.

Waiting for the jackpot to blow open, I sank into a discipline of my own.

“Money moved at Kaum!”

“How much!”

“Roughly twenty thousand shares.”

“Hmm… some bastard noticed and came to pinch a piece.”

“What do we do?”

“What do you mean, what! The filing goes out shortly. We can share out that much. Whoever he is, he’s a lucky bastard.”

The workroom, in an officetel in Gangnam, was full of heat.

A taut tension hung in the air.

This operation was expected to bring in something like tens of billions of won.

Even split with the major shareholder, the financier would take plenty.

The stock market was hot.

Money coming out of the housing market was crowding into stocks.

The manipulation rings knew that working at a time like this left no aftermath.

The Financial Supervisory Service kept its mouth shut in a bull market too.

When everyone was mad for stocks, poking at it would only earn the public’s resentment.

“Other bastards might come in. Watch it closely. If this falls apart here, we’re all dead!”

The team leader scowled and threw out a warning.

Loan-shark capital had come in.

If the thing went wrong, ten or so people would have to bleed before it ended.

I hit the sell order.

I threw it at the limit price into the buy side massed at the top of the order book.

Ding! Ding!

The sell orders completed with a brisk ring.

“That’s it!”

I looked at the Kaum Securities account screen and clenched my fist.

Time went by fast.

Having died once, I knew what a single day in this period meant.

It’s the preparation time you’re given before you go out into the world — more than enough of it, and never enough.

I kept to a regular schedule every day.

Following Divine Lord Cheollyong’s advice(?), I stayed away from baseball videos too.

I got up early, went up the mountain to train, and came down.

Before the sun rose I stopped at the orchard and cleared the grass.

We were growing organic apples, so pesticides were out.

A crop is born into the world with a farmer’s drop of sweat for fertilizer.

I lived with the mind of a devout monk.

I worked through the workbooks I had bought and stacked up and never opened.

The drool stains where I had used them as a nap mat shamed me.

Not one or two pages either — the textbooks and workbooks smeared with the oil off my face were the self-portrait of my young days.

“Th-this is all money?”

The red figures in the settlement column turned my heart red.

A jackpot!

By the close of the third trading day I had cleared out all the Planet 77 I had pulled on full credit.

It was the harvest the magic of credit trading had produced.

Three straight days at the limit.

Three straight days at the limit, on a filing announcing that the company had developed a biometric diagnostic device jointly with the Korea Electronics Technology Institute.

Unlike the thirty percent of the future, the maximum right now was a single day’s limit of fifteen percent.

Even so, it was a jackpot.

“Haa, forty-six million won in three days… That’s really frightening.”

Twenty million won of capital had laid a golden egg.

Even after settling the credit, three days had left twenty-six million won of profit.

That’s what was left after paying commissions and credit interest.

This is why stocks are frightening.

There was research finding that stock addicts get hooked on the same hormone as gambling addicts.

I stared blankly for a while at the number forty-six million won.

Money I had never once held in my whole life.

“Hoo-oooooo.”

I took a long, deep breath.

The churning in me settled down.

“I haven’t even started.”

If money like this moves me, I ought to hand the regression back.

“Pull it tighter! I’m… hungry.”

The fighting spirit blazed up.

The more money the better.

I hadn’t forgotten the days of eating one meal because there was no money.

The Noryangjin days, when a double order of cup rice was a wish.

“Today you’re the winner!”

Money is only money when it goes around and around.

Out of the charts filed away in neat order, I pulled one fellow.

The one that gets a new-drug filing next week.

Sky New Pharm.

A lovely chart shooting up into the sky drew itself.

I never knew studying sharply rising stocks would be this useful.

My chest was full.

Even in my securities days there had been no windfall like this.

A stock cheat code handed to me alone.

If I can’t eat with this, I’m a damn fool.

“Full credit!”

The magic of the credit balance, created by the stock system, is the rope that will pull me into the world of wealth in short order.

The timing was excellent too.

Article 89, paragraph 1 of the securities market business regulations, enacted in 2007, didn’t exist yet.

There was no rule suspending a credit user for a month.

The window was already short.

“Credit balance, you know I love you fiercely, right?”

I swept up stocks on credit, busily.

A back room in a country house where the height of summer hadn’t cooled.

In an old back room that looked ready to fall down, the legend of an ant was being written.

And its hero was me.

(End of Chapter 8)