Even after Ha Tae-ung had left, Richard Whitman stayed in his seat in the chairman's office for a while.

He took a sip of the coffee left on the table. It had gone completely cold, but he didn't feel like brewing another.

His mind was busy just looking at the empty seat across from him, where the young man had sat a moment ago.

"A gentle teddy bear……. Ha."

He laughed, remembering the young man's face as he'd dropped that last line about the beehive on his way out.

Twenty, by American reckoning. He was still in high school.

Last night at the party, he'd strolled at ease among more than a hundred prominent figures. Today he'd sat across this very table discussing how the market was going to change.

In this business, Whitman had watched liquidity drain out of one country and pour into another.

He'd watched how the people around a perfectly sound company moved when it collapsed.

He knew what was sold off first, and what people clung to until the very end.

Ha Tae-ung knew nothing of those long years. At twenty, he'd never lived in that world at all.

Yet the longer they talked, the stronger the feeling grew that the two of them were looking in the same direction.

When everyone tries to run at once, even sound assets come pouring onto the market!

Hearing that, he'd nearly dropped his coffee cup.

Keeping a calm face, he'd asked again just to be sure.

Whitman was by far the senior investor. He'd nodded in admiration again and again and heard the young man's explanation out to the end.

Young Ha Tae-ung would never know how stunned he'd been inside.

For years, precious money had been poured into the market cheaply.

Now the long era of low interest rates was ending. In the wake of the whirlpool all that loose money had stirred up, prices wouldn't be easily reined in.

As more companies failed to withstand higher rates, people's judgment would grow hurried, too.

That moment was the battlefield Whitman would leap into.

In peacetime, he…