Priming the Pump That Draws Up Money
It had been a long time since the whole family had sat down together like this.
On the table Mother had set out, doenjang stew, bulgogi, japchae, and rolled omelet steamed gently in the air.
A Korean meal, unchanged even on American soil—these were the dishes I liked best these days.
Just as dinner was about to begin, Mother shot Father a sidelong look and said, “Honey, isn’t this getting a little extreme?”
“Hm? What is?”
“What do you mean, what? Who washes a car six times a day? Twice in the morning, twice at lunch, twice in the evening. Last night you even slept in the car! Is the car your son bought you that amazing?”
The car she was talking about was the brand-new Buick sedan I’d recently given Father as a present.
“Ahem.”
Father cleared his throat and changed the subject.
“How have you been lately? With the painting lessons.”
“Me?”
Mother’s face lit up.
“Oh, I’ve been having such a wonderful time lately that I lose track of time the moment I pick up a brush.”
She had once dreamed of becoming a painter when she was young.
Then I came along and the family’s already difficult finances became even tighter, so she had given that dream up completely. But now she was taking it back out and dreaming it again.
Mother looked at me and said, “Oh, and my teacher says I’ve got talent.”
“Really?”
“Yes! She said I have a good eye for color and a natural sense for composition. Next month they’re even hanging one of my paintings in the amateur exhibition at the local art museum!”
At that moment, Uncle, who had been slurping soup beside us, cut in. “Ah, sis, isn’t that just flattery? Our family’s kind of a big deal in this town now. Who’d dare look at the Emperor’s mother’s painting and say it’s bad, that she has no talent? They’d have their neck snapped off right there, wouldn’t they?”
“What was that!?”
Mother’s palm came down hard on Uncle’s back.
I laughed out loud for the first time in ages, free of any stress at all.
“How have you been, Uncle?”
“Me? Well, I’ve been having a rough time lately since I broke up with my girlfriend.”
“Oh? You broke up?”
“Yep. So now I only have seven girlfriends. Still, heroes are supposed to have three wives and four concubines, so seven is enough, I suppose. For the record, I’m seeing all of them by mutual consent.”
“······.”
I decided to respect Uncle’s private life.
Then Father and Mother turned to me with serious expressions.
“Son,” Father said.
“Yes?”
“Your mother and I are living so comfortably now, but I don’t know how you’re actually living your own life.”
Their concern was reasonable.
“It looks like you’ve already made all the money you’ll ever need in your lifetime. Maybe it’s time you started living for what you want, and spent a little too. I know that’s not something you say to a young man just starting to make money, but still...”
“What I want?”
“Yes. What you want.”
I thought about it for a moment.
Then I answered honestly.
“I’m still not sure what it is I want to do. But one thing I do know for certain is that I’d like to help the family do the things they want to do.”
“······.”
“Seeing the people around me gain economic freedom because of me, and live happily while doing what they want—that’s what I enjoy most. At least, that’s how it is right now.”
“······.”
“Dad, you’ve always said you wanted to own a baseball team. Once this is all over, I’ll buy one for you. Build it around Korean players. Who knows? Maybe one day there’ll be a Korean Major Leaguer.”
“······.”
“And Mom. I’ll make sure you debut properly as a painter. I’ll even hold an exhibition for you. And you said you wanted to establish a foundation to help Korean immigrants, didn’t you? I’ll help with that too.”
Uncle shot his hand into the air. “Nephew! What about me!?”
“As for Uncle... well, it feels like even when you didn’t have money, you already did everything you wanted to do...”
“That’s true!”
Uncle’s quick acceptance was one of his best qualities.
Mother asked carefully, “So... what about you? Isn’t there anything just for yourself?”
“Hmm. Honestly, I enjoy making money itself. And seeing how far I can go. Someday, I’d like to become like Rockefeller.”
Father nodded slowly.
“······I see. You’ve always been that way. Once you start something, you see it through to the end. When you were young, you couldn’t study all that well, but once you really picked up a pen, you taught yourself and made it all the way from this rural backwater to Harvard.”
“Right now I don’t really have anything I want to do just for myself, but I’d hate to someday discover something I want and not be able to do it because I’m short on money. So I’m trying to earn as much as I can while I still can.”
Uncle cut in. “Why? Is there something you plan to want later? Some plan to resettle all of humanity on Mars or something?”
“Haha—if I were going to do something like that, I’d need to make a whole lot more money first.”
I clapped my hands once.
“Anyway, my first dream is to help every member of this family achieve their dreams. And beyond that, to make every business I’m planning succeed one by one.”
Silence fell for a moment.
Then Father smiled quietly and said, “I’m proud of you, son.”
“It’s nothing. But really, think about the baseball team, Dad. Make Garden Queens the home base.”
“······Honestly, that does sound tempting.”
Father, a baseball fanatic, nodded with a serious expression.
***
Several weeks had passed since the vacation started.
The world as heard through the television news was still in chaos.
In a world where the devil called recession was running rampant, all you could hear were the groans of people crushed beneath depression, grief, and the weight of their own survival.
······But Wishville was different.
The dying mining town had turned into a vast construction site, alive with energy and motion.
Rrrrrrkkk!
Three Caterpillar bulldozers, their yellow paint bright and unmistakable, were shoving aside the ruined wooden buildings.
An old inn, a general store with a rusted metal roof caved in, bars with shattered windows—all of them crumbled before the steel blades of the bulldozers in quick succession.
Kwa-r-r-r-r-r-r······
Behind them, dump trucks rolled in one after another and unloaded gravel and building materials.
Tower cranes sliced through the sky, hauling H-beams through the air, while sparks flew from welders working atop the rooftops.
It’s all moving along nicely.
I stood by the window of the second-floor container I had converted into a site office and looked down over the work below.
The massive steel-framed structures bustling with activity now weren’t mining facilities.
I was building a supermarket, an inn, bars, dormitories, laundries, bathhouses, barber shops, a post office, and gas stations all across Wishville.
Large-scale, all-purpose support facilities meant to house thousands of miners and the other waves of migrants who would come to service them.
On the dormitory site, concrete foundations were already being poured in earnest, and in the supermarket district rows of large refrigerated containers were being installed.
Eighteen-wheelers kept entering and emptying out their loads of daily necessities and food supplies.
Canned goods and frozen meat for the miners, rice and flour, bottled water and beer to quench their thirst, cigarettes to take the edge off the exhaustion.
Along with work clothes and safety boots, gloves, flashlights, batteries, shovels, pickaxes, helmets, beds, mattresses, and so on and so on······.
Just selling these things is an important source of income too.
Supplies had begun to circulate through the dead ghost town.
Which meant money had started to circulate too.
And most of that moving money came straight out of my own pocket.
In other words, I was pouring in plenty of starter water so I could draw up even more.
I’ll develop this place starting with Wishville’s First Town.
While focusing development on this area packed with my real estate holdings, I also planned to steadily work outward and develop the surrounding scraps of land.
After all, I had bought up the entire Wishville region in enormous quantities at prices of only a few cents per acre, so I didn’t need to care what anyone thought.
“Going up nice and smooth.”
I looked down at the asphalt road being laid beyond the red wasteland.
For the record, the asphalt being paved onto that road had come from the oil field in Garden Queens.
The laborers doing the roadwork were all from companies I had bought at auction, and the people hauling in the materials were all independent truckers I had hired myself, so every part of this project was being carried out at a tightly controlled cost.
Materials, labor, transport—all of it was running through the circular flow of the domestic economy I had designed.
A collaboration between an oil field and a gold mine, maybe. They complement each other beautifully.
I nodded as I looked at the streetlights being installed along the road.
Just a month ago this land had been nothing but weeds and rusted barbed wire, but now it was transforming into a mining town teeming with hundreds of workers.
Every time I walked through it, everyone who worked in Wishville bowed their heads and greeted me.
“Oh! You must be the boss of Salmon Pink. I’m sorry I didn’t recognize you. How are you?”
“Oh, of course. Have a good day today too.”
“Hahaha! Every day is a good day now! Thanks to you, we’ve got jobs! If there’s anything you need us to do, just say the word!”
At this point, I was treated like the local notable—or rather, the king of this region.
I’m still young, so it’s a bit much, honestly.
I hurried my steps along, accepting the greetings of the older workers who lifted their hats and bowed.
Then—
“Boss, here are the revised blueprints.”
Armstrong’s voice came from behind me.
He, the man overseeing the construction site managers, came up beside me with the town map in hand.
Since our brush with death in the mine, the man with bandages wrapped around his forehead and arms had grown noticeably more friendly toward me.
“I’ve divided the lots according to the district-by-district development plan, but... are you really going to proceed this way?”
“Yes. We’re moving forward as planned.”
On the blueprint Armstrong handed over, the sections marked in red and the sections marked in blue were clearly separated.
I pointed one after another at the circles marked in red on the map.
“These red circles are the mining zones where we confirmed high-grade gold veins this time.”
The red zone made up only about 15 percent of the total site, but that was where the ultra-high-grade veins I had identified were concentrated.
“These areas are off-limits to the public. Lee Energy will develop them directly, so set security to the highest level and strictly control outside access.”
“Then what about these blue zones? Aren’t they geologically promising too?”
Armstrong pointed at the blue areas on the blueprint.
The remaining 85 percent of the site, excluding the area around the second shaft.
I shook my head.
“We’re not developing those ourselves. We’re subcontracting them out.”
“What? But why leave those kind of bonanzas to someone else—”
“Because there doesn’t seem to be much gold there. The core mining zones with the most gold are already under control. The rest are scraps.”
“Forgive the question, but... how can you be so certain of that?”
“Just... intuition.”
“······?”
Armstrong didn’t understand, but as a regressor, I knew.
Ninety-eight percent of Wishville’s gold was concentrated in the few mining zones I had singled out, and the rest were merely the kind of places that could maybe deliver a 5 to 6 percent return on extraction cost—decent enough, in other words.
And rather than develop those places myself, I was planning to lease them to other mining companies.
If the marginal zones only return up to 6 percent, then leasing them to another company would bring in more than 10 percent in rent. And on top of that, the more outside companies swarm in, the higher the profits from all the support facilities in Wishville will climb...
I was using the core mining zones as bait to lease out the scattered smaller ones too.
In other words, I was promoting the place as a top-class suite and then quickly renting out all the standard rooms at a good price.
Of course, that top-class suite would remain entirely mine.
“If we lease them out, we get guaranteed income. Whether the tenants dig up gold or not, rent comes in every month. And I make money selling them bathhouses, barber shops, inns, supermarkets, gas stations, taverns, laundries, and every other service under the sun.”
“Then the dreamers who heard the rumors and came chasing sudden riches will swarm here like bees. Just like the California Gold Rush in ’49.”
“Exactly. Wishville will build its own ecosystem. Everything will pass through me.”
“Boss, you really are... the god of money.”
But Armstrong still looked worried.
“Still, Boss. What if your intuition is wrong? What if the leased mining zones end up producing a lot of gold for the outside companies? Wouldn’t that be a terrible waste?”
“Actually, I’ve already prepared for that too. I put a special clause in the mining lease contract.”
The memory of burying my head in discussion with Vito for days on end came back to me.
“If you look at Article 12 of the lease contract, it says this: if the total value of the minerals extracted by the tenant exceeds $100,000 per month, the landlord may exercise a right of first refusal on that mining zone or the minerals themselves. In addition, the tenant must pay the landlord a 15 percent royalty on the extracted yield.”
“From the tenant’s perspective, that’s awfully restrictive. And the royalty is two or three times the industry standard too.”
“It’s a hot mining zone. They’ll swallow that much. And whoever comes in should still be able to make a decent profit after paying the royalty.”
After all, I couldn’t develop every single mining zone myself.
I didn’t have enough labor, enough equipment, or enough time.
So rather than let the scraps sit idle, this kind of automated hunting was the more efficient path.
Just then—
Skreeeek—
Brakes squealed at the entrance to town.
I turned to look and saw three midsize sedans parked there.
Six or seven men in suits got out.
I could guess their identities immediately.
“Team Leader Armstrong. Could you go to the site office right now and fetch Vito and Soren for me?”
“Yes, Boss!”
Armstrong ran off.
I alone went to meet the suits.
One of them, a man with a slick, oily face, asked me, “We’re looking for the person in charge of this project. Where can we find him?”
“That’s me. Speak plainly.”
“······?”
They looked at one another’s faces.
It was understandable that they couldn’t believe the boss of this massive construction site was someone as young as I was.
Their doubts only cleared when they saw Vito and Soren arrive with Armstrong.
At last, the slick-faced man spoke.
“We’re from the Environmental Protection Agency, and... are you carrying out construction with an environmental impact assessment on file?”