—Fuck! Which son of a bitch said Dongmyeong was going under?!

—What do I do with my borrowed shares?! I don't have any stock to pay them back with!!

—Even at limit-up my buy orders won't fill! Fuck!!

—Garbage fucking junk stock…… ptui!

Screams erupted all over the internet stock forums.

Just a few days earlier, the mood had been the exact opposite.

The three major foreign rating agencies had put the Dongmyeong Group affiliates' credit ratings under review for a downgrade.

As the news spread, the share prices had collapsed miserably.

Unconfirmed rumors of bad news spread through the market too, and the bombs went off one after another.

E. coli found in processed ham sold by Dongmyeong Foods!

Rumor sheets full of every kind of rumor went around. Word also spread that a famous female singer at DMC was being sponsored by a young chaebol, for a fortune.

Bad news followed bad news.

Dongmyeong is going under!

Talk like that spread through the whole market.

Not just institutions but big day traders and retail investors had jumped into short selling to pick Dongmyeong's bones.

September 21.

Everything flipped.

The three major foreign rating agencies abruptly withdrew their downgrade review of the Dongmyeong Group.

And that wasn't the end of it.

They announced that an urgent due diligence review had found the Dongmyeong Group's financial soundness and capital capacity better than expected. They would even consider a possible upgrade going forward.

The market reacted instantly.

The Dongmyeong Group's listed affiliates shot up all at once.

Then the afternoon session. Every one of them was limit-up!

From then on, the trouble broke out somewhere else.

The institutions and big day traders who had bet on Dongmyeong's fall rushed into short covering all at once.

To pay back the shares they had borrowed and sold, they had to buy them back somehow.

But there were no shares to buy.

The sell orders had vanished, and buy orders for millions, tens of millions of shares were stacked up in layers at the limit-up price.

You could hit buy at limit-up and still…