“Team Leader.”

“What?”

“What do you make of this one?”

“A whale turn up or something?”

Appbit.

It had launched modestly as an early crypto exchange and then taken a place at the top of the industry in a single stroke.

The company had built securities software before, and it showed — from launch it drew people in on the strength of a clean interface.

It raised its profile further by partnering with Bitnance, then sitting at number one in North America.

Unlike other exchanges, a wide spread of altcoins traded there.

Word went round among the coin users who keep their ear to the ground, and they came in force.

Solid funding behind it let the company add servers and widen its market at leisure.

Word travels like wind. These days the daily volume runs well past the trillion mark.

Aggressive money meant the app’s convenience got promoted hard.

Appbit served it up clean and easy, built to look like the stock platforms users already knew.

One of the night team’s traders called the response team leader over.

“Somebody just fired a load across to Bitnance in USDT.”

“How much?”

“About a billion won.”

“Traitor. He should be trading domestic where the premium is. Every man and his dog is on the foreign exchanges.”

“Korea doesn’t have a futures market.”

“That’s true. Fucking hell.”

The team leader felt that absence himself. He clicked his tongue, sour about it.

The IT industry being what it is, he wasn’t old for a team leader.

Lately men who’d hit it enormous on coins kept surfacing, one after another.

Bitcoin’s price had been quiet, and recently it had started showing signs of coming back.

For all that he was nominally a team leader at an exchange, he couldn’t bring himself to jump into the coin game.

From what he’d watched at close range, the coin market wasn’t sound.

He thought there was a great deal of fraud in it, and that judgement came from the nearest seat in the house.

Among the company’s early founders were several genuinely dangerous men.

And if he ever got caught out on insider dealing——

Nothing could be guaranteed.

“…… Who is he?”

These were not people who troubled themselves about protecting individual transactions. At a coin exchange, trust goes into a landfill the moment you sign up.

For the internal monitoring staff, any coin transfer over a billion won gets flagged.

Tap-tap-tap-tap.

The man who’d called him over worked the keyboard fast.

“Name, Ha Tae-ung.”

“Never heard of him……. What year was he born?”

“He’s nineteen.”

“What? Nineteen?”

Tap tap. Tap tap.

I’d been up all night. Sunlight pushed in through the window.

“Insane……”

A young body really is good. A whole night through and not a trace of tiredness in me.

My head’s as clear as if I’d knocked back a run of energy drinks.

I’d been extremely busy with it. I’d been sorting the past information crowding my head, the material that’s going to become my future.

Not only the Korean market. The American market, exchange rates, the spike in crude, the spike in gold, and the great surges across a range of coins.

There was no getting to sleep on it. Or rather, sleep never came.

Even now the fact that I regressed doesn’t land as real.

“Grandmother……”

I was born with chaebol blood in me. That much is plain.

And I lived a life below a dirt spoon’s anyway.

To a man like that, my grandmother gave a chance.

It must be the return on the good she built up over her life.

I have no intention whatsoever of taking that chance and fumbling it.

“Haryun.”

My teeth grind harder without needing a reason.

The beating I took in the alley blind spot when I was small.

There’s every chance somebody Haryun bought did that too.

What kind of lunatic clubs a child on his way to school with a length of timber?

Only now can I see the puzzle fitting together.

Dad’s accident. Mom’s grief afterward, alone.

The men who built all of it were Haryun. No question about it.

They’re wicked people. In the future about to unfold again, there’s no chance they’ll be any different.

This is war.

“Quietly, and on a grand scale. I’ll take all of it.”

I laid the plan out cold.

“For the time being, investment means coins. Nothing else.”

Coin futures — only possible on foreign exchanges.

I could see the graph, bitcoin and half a dozen others rolling at once.

Having lived through a stretch of time doesn’t mean knowing all of it. And I wasn’t clever, on top of that.

But one thing is certain. Luna collapses.

Of the whole future, that much at least I know.

“That alone is enough.”

The meme coins that surge hundreds and thousands of times over are loose change next to it.

The coins you can trade with leverage come down to a handful.

“Hoo.”

Wound all the way up, imagining the future about to unfold, I’d gone straight through to daylight.

I opened the trade short. Simple. Clean.

“We’ll see soon enough.”

The moment still won’t feel real. I settled a heart that was carrying on however it liked.

Whrrrrr.

Wind leaks in through the gap in the window frame. A rooftop room thrown together out of prefab panels.

Vulnerable to heat and cold, inevitably.

“First thing, I’m moving out.”

The moment I’m back, rooftop rental life is finished.

I’ve got money now. I don’t want to sleep clutching a worn-out blanket.

And I’ll pass on running coin trades looking like a man with nothing.

“Moon, oh moon. Please, fall.”

The result I want is coming. I prayed for it hard anyway.

Last time around I did nothing but run from this enormous wave.

Naturally someone earns and someone loses. A cold zero-sum game.

All that matters is that the one losing isn’t me.

“Coins……. Futures.”

Just imagining the outcome sets my blood going.

“Leverage. That’s the real thing.”

What I need first is to grow the stake. That much isn’t in question. There’ll be a reason I came back this way.

And the timing is perfect.

Up to this point the national restrictions were still weak. Free of tax complications as well.

“Filial duty gets postponed a while.”

Mom, whom I let things go distant with in the last life.

First I have to grow the money my grandmother gave me. The chance to be a decent son to her will come soon enough.

I’m not stupid enough to blow the capital being a good son with it.

Beep beep beep. Beep beep beep beep.

The phone alarm went off. One of the routines that used to run automatically.

My eyes went to the wall without my meaning them to. And in that moment——

“……!!”

A school uniform, hanging right there on the wall.

I snap fully awake.

“Y— you have got to be joking. Then I’m going back to high school?”

I’d been dreaming of a killer whale carving up the Pacific. And the reality is one small blue mackerel.

“Haah……”

A sigh formed somewhere deep in my gut and leaked up through my throat.

Trudge, trudge.

My steps are heavy. Not because a night without sleep has wrecked my condition.

Whatever bonus the granny slipped in, an all-nighter leaves my body and my head clear and easy.

The school is twenty minutes’ walk from the rooftop room.

A working adult who’d got used to off-the-rack clothes, put back into a uniform without warning.

The way it sits close against the body is strange, and it’s a thrill too.

Cheonghwa Arts High School.

A school foundation launched on endowment money from Cheonghwa Group, somewhere around fortieth in the corporate rankings.

An elite private school.

Official tuition runs to about thirty million won a year.

More expensive than most private universities. The environment is close to perfect to match it.

The school is only forty years old, and its alumni are already deployed in force across the country’s upper class.

They were gold spoons from the day they were born, so it’s a natural enough result.

Business, law, politics, medicine, culture and sport. There’s nowhere the line doesn’t reach.

You can’t discount what happens when private-school people run together from kindergarten through primary and middle and high school. Those networks set hard.

“I must have eaten rat poison that year.”

The bravado I showed in middle school comes back at me fresh.

One day I went out to Gangnam to knock about. I saw Cheonghwa students for the first time on the streets there.

The first thing I felt on running into them was that they had a different finish on them.

The uniforms weren’t off-the-peg brand pieces.

Every one of them was wearing a uniform cut to their own build.

And not only that. Somehow all of them were handsome, all of them pretty.

They only walked past me, and the money came off them in waves.

I got the feeling right then. My school record was good enough to get in.

My middle school average was 199.9 out of 200.

Then I hit reality while filing the application.

The tuition caught me by the ankle.

Given the state of things at home, the money wasn’t there.

A luxury private high school isn’t somewhere you get into on grades alone, whoever you are.

For me, living below what ordinary people live on, it was a high wall.

But heaven lent a hand. There was a way, as it turned out.

Our family was living in a rental apartment in Gangbuk at the time.

My parents tried to talk me out of it. Their reason was that I’d feel out of place there.

I pushed hard that I wanted in, and I got permission.

“Meeting again, I see. Arrogant lump of rock.”

I’d arrived in front of the main gate while I was thinking.

A gate in the style of Independence Gate, raised out of enormous slabs of granite.

Cheonghwa. 淸化.

Beneath the school name, in large gilded relief, the school motto. 先照高山.

The light strikes the high mountains first.

“What absolute arrogance.”

Seeing it again, the motto has gone past arrogant into something with real gall in it.

Meaning: the better sort get the sunlight before anybody else does.

Cheonghwa Group itself worked that way too.

They rubbed hands with the political world and took nearly every public contract going.

Growing on an unbroken run of work, they came to own golf courses, a leisure business, and CBC, a full-service broadcaster on top of it.

Cheonghwa Group can never be looked at apart from politics and business.

The school system runs on the same principle. It has served its purpose well as a special training ground for the upper-class children who’ll take the lead roles later.

Screeeee. Screech.

The near lane in front of the school gate was congested with cars, the way it always was.

Luxury sedans pulled up one after another and students came out of them in a line.

Not a domestic compact or midsize anywhere in sight.

All of it top-grade, full-size.

The students who got out passed through the gate as though it cost them nothing.

The height of elegance. The problem is——

“What is this? Why is everybody coloured in?”

Something is wrong. I don’t know what it is that I’m seeing.

It’s clearly not a passing thing, either.

On the way here I’d seen a peculiar light on the people I passed in the street.

I thought I was imagining it. Red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, violet, and more colours beyond those.

An anomaly that started up this morning.

Everyone I meet appears in a colour of their own.

I shook my head a few times, wondering whether something had gone wrong with my eyes.

“Good morning.”

“Yes. Morning.”

Cheonghwa’s rules were strict. Most of the students kept to the dress code.

Coarse language and swearing are banned in everyday speech.

It has the useful effect that the swearing which usually sticks to boys that age never takes in the mouth.

Even wealthy children with solid backing behind them stayed modest inside a Cheonghwa foundation that owns a broadcaster.

They were model students in how they handled the discipline teacher standing out front directing the arrivals.

I went through the gate behind a group of them.

“Good morning.”

“And a good morning to you, Tae-ung.”

I greeted her briskly, which I never used to do. The teacher on discipline duty is a woman from the Korean department whose face I know.

Our eyes met as well.

Han Yura, the teacher who’d taken an interest in me for holding top marks without a cram school or a tutor behind me.

She’s in her early thirties at this point.

Round glasses, and something cute about the whole look.

A talented asset of Cheonghwa’s, who debuted as a poet while she was still at Seoguk University.

She’s also the supervising teacher of the reading club, the only club that ever took me as a member.

A bright sky-blue aura has spread out around her, and it’s restful just to look at.

I exchanged greetings with her as easily as if I’d seen her the day before, and went in. And then.

“Who’s that senior?”

“Who?”

“The tall good-looking one, there.”

“Drop it.”

“Why?”

First-year girls walking in together were whispering about it.

Then the one beside her put a finger to her lips and said it.

“He’s a charity case.”

“Ah. A charity case……”

Charity case.

At that one word from the girl, the attention I’d been feeling cuts off dead.

That’s right.

I am——

one of the handful of charity admissions at a luxury designer private high school.

(End of Chapter 6)