“What is this one?”

“Who?”

“Looks like a bug with quick eyes has turned up.”

“……Has information leaked?”

“No. The plan is perfect.”

The main drag of Wall Street.

A space taking up a large floor area on the fifty-fifth storey.

A white man in his late thirties, watching a monitor, creased his face.

The handsome blond man standing behind his bulging stomach looked at the screen and smacked his lips.

The heavyweights had gathered into the coin market.

Unlike the past, when it was individuals who gathered, Wall Street and the world’s financial organisations are pouring in now in force.

They had pressed the countries of the world and built a board on which dirty money could be traded.

Swiss accounts were no longer safe either.

Which is why the preference for coin keeps climbing.

Coupled with the hidden appetites of human beings, it is settling in as a perfect dark finance.

Among the players it’s a board that has largely been agreed already.

And then a Korean nobody expected set foot on the main board.

At first they ignored him.

But unexpectedly, the boy moved cleverly.

The feeling is that he came in knowing how a stablecoin works.

At one point his coin’s price shot as high as eighty dollars apiece.

He bought bitcoin by a roundabout route and set himself a safety valve on top of it.

The financial groups made him a target at once.

And they stabbed at him with sword and spear, through indiscriminate short selling.

The organisation that had been promised to help him turned around.

The whole board was set, and then it broke.

Inside a few days the moon had fallen.

The forty-billion-dollar value it had climbed to was carved up in reasonable portions among the several organisations acting together.

“The world is wide, and there are plenty of quick-eyed, blessed bastards in it.”

“Yes. You have to grant it.”

There had been a fair number of individuals who noticed the attack and jumped into the short.

They are men who have God’s blessing on them.

“So shall we shake the next board as well?”

“The price?”

“A thousand dollars is the limit.”

“Heh heh. A good few will die.”

“You have to shake them off to fly far.”

One of the leading forces that move the coin market.

They prepared a new board, aimed at the next thing to be eaten.

“The funds left over?”

“Raw material prices have gone up too far. And stock prices are going to fall further.”

“Good.”

Wall Street’s financial forces, who will never permit money to stand still.

They realigned their direction and set about laying the board.

Moving as one, in perfect order, they did not know.

That one enormous king ant, slipped in under disguise, was riding for free on the board they had poured their hearts into!

Vrooooom.

The heavy exhaust note the eight cylinders had digested came through my whole body, low and steady.

The moment I put my foot on the pedal the body of the car took off.

I was pushed back into the seat the way a supercar does it.

Good, now I’m going to forget you~♫

You really are a madman~♬

Why are you leaving and throwing me away~♫

The inside of the car rang with sound.

The words carried a fierce message and they wound neatly into my ear.

Friday, eleven in the morning.

Olympic Boulevard, well past the commuting hour, was quiet.

Whoooosh.

Han River wind came in rough through the gap in the window I had cracked open.

“This is the taste of it.”

I took in the freedom a car of your own gives you.

The ease that belongs to a big SUV alone is another thing again from other passenger cars.

“Money is love.”

The price of the car was the price of the car, but my age meant the first insurance premium alone came to seven million won.

I’d expected it, so I paid without flinching.

The balance in the account still hasn’t moved much.

Today I mean to find out properly what a flex is.

Sliiide.

I turned right at the fork.

And the place I headed for, down a road that runs straight——

Screeech.

“Welcome, sir.”

Hyundo Luxury Department Store, Apgujeong.

As the car stopped, the valet who had been waiting came over.

I opened the door and got out, and the driver, in a clean suit, held the door for me and bowed his head briefly.

“Look after it.”

“Yes, sir! Enjoy your shopping.”

I handed him the car key without thinking about it.

A thing I couldn’t have imagined in the past.

I grudged even a few thousand won, so valet parking wasn’t a thing I could dream of.

I went into the department store.

Inside, on a Friday morning, it was quiet.

Footsteps. Steady ones.

I came through a front entrance that boasts a grand and imposing face.

A place I’d visited a few times in the past.

I’d come to buy cosmetics for the girlfriend’s birthday.

I had never once visited here for myself.

Today’s visit is for me.

“From the first floor, slowly.”

Money is a strange thing.

It leaves you handling every situation with room to spare.

When the account balance was hanging by a thread, the way department store staff looked at you was a genuine weight.

Sales staff in a department store pick up a customer’s level with maddening accuracy.

It’ll be an instinct developed out of years of dealing with people.

“How may I help you, sir.”

The accessories and fashion goods floor, ground level.

A pair of trainers that came straight into my eye stopped me where I stood.

An ivory ground with a pale tan pattern printed over it.

They’ll do.

“Size two-eighty, please.”

“Yes. One moment.”

The tag?

Why would I be looking at that in here.

“Do try them on.”

The saleswoman set the shoes down, straightened, and said it in an easy voice.

I pushed my foot into the trainer.

“……!!”

They really are comfortable.

Designer things aren’t all show over nothing.

The feel of them on the foot was completely different from the shoes I usually wear.

“I’ll take these.”

“I’ll get them ready for you.”

“I’ll wear them out.”

“I’ll take you through the payment now.”

The shopping started, smooth as still water running.

I walked a few steps in the shoes with the tag taken off them.

There are laces, but they’re in a finished knot, so there’s nothing to do with them.

“The shoes you came in wearing——”

“Throw them away.”

“Understood.”

The shoes I’d been wearing. Not a shred of regret.

Then the shopping started in earnest.

“I’ll take this.”

“I’ll wrap it for you.”

“No. I’ll use it now.”

I bought a Hermès men’s bifold in deep grey as well.

They say a wallet is the source that draws wealth in.

“The box and the certificate of guarantee——”

“I don’t need them.”

“Yes, sir.”

There’ll be no exchanging and no reselling.

If I need something, buying it again is all it takes.

If they want to take it for an upstart flinging money about, that doesn’t trouble me.

I bought the shoes and the wallet and moved to the second-floor shops.

I had only changed shoes, and the whole feel of me was different.

For jeans I had on the pair Mom bought me when she screwed her courage up to it.

Being tall, I carry most off-the-peg things well enough.

I dress cleanly as a rule, so the shirt I’d come out in was fine as it was.

And with designer shoes underneath it, the whole air of the thing came alive.

A person’s first impression settles a great deal.

There’s exactly one thing I properly learned at Cheonghwa High School.

A person’s entire first impression is decided by the level of what they have on!

Which is why I drove straight to a department store after buying a car.

Sliide.

I took the escalator up to the second floor.

“There it is, right there.”

The place I was aiming for is the watch shop.

That designer watch the wretched Go Dongyeol, from the connection I had in the past, used to treasure.

“We welcome your visit, sir.”

Women in black two-pieces bowed from the waist with smiles on their faces.

Their eyes had already run over me once, quickly.

“Show me the leather ones.”

“The leather-strap lines are over here.”

She led me to a spotless glass case without a speck of dust on it.

And in that moment, one watch caught hold of my eye.

It went into me at a glance.

“I’ll take that one.”

“Sorry?”

To say he’d buy it without asking a thing about it, not the description and not the price, startles the saleswoman badly.

“Settle it in one payment, please.”

It feels like buying a hotteok off a stall in a market alley.

Is there any need for long talk over buying something you need!

The debit card, doing several large jobs today.

Its limit is the balance in the account.

“I’ll take the payment now.”

“May I put it on?”

“Of course.”

The shopping went on without a hitch.

I put the watch straight onto my wrist.

A black leather watch, attractive in pink gold with a silver face.

Only then did the price tag come into view.

Not among the sale items, at exactly forty-three million nine hundred thousand won.

“It suits you well.”

A fresh smile bloomed brightly on the saleswoman’s face.

A customer on the scale of buying a watch over forty million won in one stroke without hesitating.

People with the experience to put a good estimate on a customer’s means.

They are the sales staff of a luxury hall.

A world where material things are the measure of what can be seen.

“The guarantee and the case——”

“Keep them for me. In a few days I intend to buy several more.”

“Sorry? Yes!! I’ll hold them here for you.”

The saleswoman’s face brightened when I let the intention of further purchases show.

Sales staff whose pay is settled as a base wage with commission added on.

I’d cleared in one stroke a quantity it would take her some months of selling to shift.

My steps went toward the fourth floor.

That’s the floor where the golf and men’s clothing corners are laid out.

“Unnie! What was that man?”

“A new actor? A model, maybe?”

“I don’t think so. Look at him once and it’s obvious — fourth or fifth generation chaebol.”

“Heavens……. Did you see? He bought it without even checking the tag.”

Women who had worked as sales staff in a watch shop for a fair length of time talked it over in excitement.

The air in the place had heated right up over a customer who had consumed an expensive product in an instant and vanished.

Designer watch sales in particular don’t run to more than a few in a day.

They get the benefit of being in Apgujeong, but designer or not, Korea’s upper class doesn’t come and consume every day.

Nor is it possible to buy a watch over tens of millions every day.

The liveliest period for consumption is the sale of gift watches during the wedding season.

“You saw him? He really is handsome.”

“He’s got that well-bred look, hasn’t he?”

“Yes, yes. There’s a smell of chaebol family about him.”

A luxury shop that handsome male actors and models go in and out of often enough.

But the air on the customer who was just here is at a level that overwhelms them.

“We should contact the protocol team, shouldn’t we?”

“Obviously. It looks as though he’d clear a hundred million a year in purchasing easily enough.”

Customers purchasing over a hundred million a year are managed as VIPs.

He falls short of that standard, but he is a customer who bought an item priced at over forty million in a single payment.

Anyone would call him a potential VIP.

Ordinary customers as a rule take care to collect the case and the guarantee.

If a situation arises where they have to resell, the case and the guarantee are essential.

But the customer who had just called in asked them to hold them, as though it were nothing much.

“Unnie, what card did he settle with?”

“Card?”

“Can a credit card do forty million in one payment?”

“Ah! That’s right……. Debit! It was a debit card.”

“Debit? He actually settled for that watch by debit??”

(End of Chapter 29)