The Right Answer, the Short Seed

After I finished drinks with Bongshik, I went straight home and pulled up the monthly Bitcoin chart I had written down.

The closing prices, month by month. Even if I ran the numbers on nothing but next month's close, it came to plus 97.36 percent.

Leave it sitting there and my assets would double. That was the math.

People love to say it. You pick your own life, so you get to choke on it. And if you picked this one apart, it was a life I had chosen... Still. For a life like that, wasn't the Random Box in front of me nothing short of a treasure chest?

I swallowed, throat dry, staring at the monthly Bitcoin prices saved on my phone.

How much did I actually have again.

Cash I could move right now: forty million won. Money sitting in stocks, profits included: about fifty million.

I could dump the cash straight into Bitcoin, but the stocks would take two business days to settle into cash, so buying Bitcoin with them today was out of the question.

Scrape together every won I had and I might, if I was lucky, see a hundred million.

Something about it still feels thin...

I knew the right answer. The flaw was that the seed money was too small.

And in that instant, a TV-commercial jingle I only half remembered from childhood flickered through my head.

I never thought a loan ad I had seen on TV as a kid would turn out to be this useful.

No teeth? Then you chew with your gums.

Next, I sent Dahun a message on KakaoTalk.

After Bongshik, the next friend I could talk balls with: Dahun. He worked as a private banker at a top-tier commercial bank.

Going through a friend would be easier than digging into a loan myself.

For a while, nothing came back from Dahun. Then, at last:

Tell him I was borrowing to invest, and he would obviously try to talk me out of it.

I had reached out because I figured that going through someone I knew inside a prime bank might get me at least a little more than looking it up on my own.

Right answer or not, I had no intention of touching private moneylenders. There was no telling how a life could turn, and put a hand in the wrong place and the interest alone would balloon into something monstrous.

A carrot. Sure. Now, if he had meant wave a stack of bills, then maybe.

Monday.

Same as ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠ever, I came down the slope out of Dal-dongne, caught the bus, and went in to work.

Ever since Team Leader Park's sexual harassment incident, a few people in the lobby had taken to greeting me as if they were genuinely glad to see me.

"Assistant Manager. Good morning."

"Did you have a good weekend, Assistant Manager?"

"Were you always on the tall side? I don't remember you being quite this tall before."

Slurp, slurp. In the elevator, Section Chief Lee Eunsik from my own team, chocolate milk rising through a straw, set a hand on my shoulder.

"I'm so jealous I could die."

"...Of what."

"You're popular, obviously. If I'd known it would turn out like this, I would've been the one to crack Team Leader Park's skull."

"......"

Lee Eunsik. Even while word spread through the company that I had gotten divorced and the suspicion of an affair kept swelling around me, he was the only one who had believed me.

"A gutless coward like you, having an affair? Please."

"If you managed an affair, then I'm Casanova. Casanova."

...... Now that I thought about it, was believed me even the right way to put it.

In any case, Chief Lee had never been especially fond of Team Leader Park either, and setting Chief Lee aside, there weren't many people in the company who were.

Maybe that was why they were happier to see me. People have a way of admiring someone who actually does the thing they have only ever pictured in their heads.

Better than before, maybe?

"Assistant Manager Ju. You're in?"

The moment I stepped into the office, Lee Jayeong greeted me with a bright, blooming smile.

Hm. Maybe not better than before.

I answered her greeting with a small dip of the head and sat down.

"Assistant Manager, ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠you do have to actually greet a person."

"...I bowed, didn't I."

You know the scene. The dramas where bodyguards watch from the shadows to protect a chaebol family's only granddaughter.

Wondering whether someone like that might be planted in this very office, I was all the more careful about every word I traded with Lee Jayeong.

"Hmm. Feels like you're colder with me than usual."

"How much did we even talk, normally..."

"That's a hurtful thing to say. We even had dinner together over the weekend!"

!

Clack-clack-clack. ...Clack. Tap.

The typing from every desk faded out the way a gradient does.

I could feel it. Every ear in the room had pricked up toward us.

A man fresh off a divorce and a junior woman from the company, sharing dinner on a weekend evening rather than some weekday. Was there a better bar snack for office gossip?

"Ahem. I heard you, so please keep your voice down."

"I got completely soaked because of you that time, and this is how cold you're going to be?"

!

A murmur ran through the room. This time the keyboards came back faster.

Clack-clack-clack. Clack-clack-clack-clack. Clack-clack-clack-clack-clack.

I could feel this, too. They couldn't very well say it out loud, so a flood of messages was flying back and forth on the company chat.

...... Leave out every scrap of context and put it the way she just had, and the staff's suspicions had nowhere to go but up.

If Punch King Rolf were still mine, I might have used it for no other reason than to shut Lee Jayeong's mouth.

"Let's step outside and talk."

"Hehe— sure. You're buying the coffee, right, Assistant Manager?"

I took the oblivious Jayeong and got us out of the office.

"Haa—"

Once Ju Jinyeong and Lee Jayeong were gone, the employees let out the breaths they had been holding.

"Did we just hear that right?"

"What does Jayeong even see in having dinner with Assistant Manager Ju on the weekend?"

"But if you think about it, Assistant Manager Ju is pretty decent, isn't he? I never looked at him twice before, but during Team Leader Park's hidden-camera mess he took the hit in Jayeong's place."

"Hmm... and I never noticed before, but he looks like he's over six feet, doesn't he?"

"But that isn't the important part, is it? You haven't forgotten what kind of person Assistant Manager Ju is, have you? The shameless man who dated inside the company, got all the way to marriage, cheated, and ended up divorced."

"...... But now that I think about it, where did we even hear that rumor?"

"Which rumor?"

"The one about Assistant Manager Ju cheating."

"Well, Employee Lee Somin cried after the divorce, so..."

"The reason for a divorce is something only the two of them know. If the affair turned into a rumor, then one of them must have said it somewhere. Has anyone actually heard it come out of either of their mouths?"

"And look at how Assistant Manager Ju usually carries himself. Unlike Team Leader Park. Upright. Honest. Mild. Does it even make sense that a man like that cheated?"

"Now that you say it, yeah."

"We might have been misunderstanding this the whole time. That's probably why Jayeong treats him so naturally."

Ju Jinyeong had never said a word inside the company about the divorce, but the mood on the floor was shifting, little by little, toward taking his side.

"But what did she mean earlier, about getting soaked?"

Smack. Section Chief Im from another department, the long-unmarried one, gave Employee Lee a light slap across the back.

‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠

"You're asking because you don't know? Honestly. No sense at all."

And right alongside the rest, a misunderstanding about his relationship with Lee Jayeong was piling up too.

I headed for the rooftop terrace with Lee Jayeong.

"If you talk like that, people get the wrong idea."

"The wrong idea? About what?"

"That whole thing about getting soaked..."

I stopped. Jayeong's eyes looked as clear as Yeju's.

She wasn't teasing. She meant it in complete innocence.

"Hm? What's wrong with saying I got soaked? You sprayed wine and my clothes got soaked through. That's exactly what happened."

"...Never mind. Anyway, you don't have to greet me so warmly at the office."

"Why not?"

"There are already rumors flying about affairs and all the rest. What good does it do you, getting close to a divorced man?"

"But that isn't true."

"What?"

"You didn't have an affair. Right?"

"No, I didn't, but..."

"Then that's settled. You only get one life. Why live it watching everyone else's face when you can just do what you want?"

It felt like someone had brought a hammer down on my skull.

You only live once. And here I was, dodging people and shrinking into myself over a single divorce. In that moment I was ashamed of myself.

Jayeong looked at me and smiled, soft and bright. And then:

"So from now on, you greet me warmly too, Assistant Manager. Anyway, I've got a meeting, so I'll head down first."

I stared straight at her back as she pattered away down the stairs.

If only her personality had been a goddamn mess. That, at least, would have made this easier.

A beautiful face. Young, on top of it. And the family wasn't merely rich. She was the granddaughter of the fourth-ranked house in the business world.

And then the personality...

Why would a woman like that like me?

Because of Jayeong, I had been ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠spaced out since morning.

Nine-thirty. Right. I hadn't even checked the share price.

One more thing I needed to confirm.

Bitcoin first. Fortunately, today it was chopping sideways.

I only knew the monthly closes, not the daily ones, so it nagged at me a little, but this much was enough.

Right now was a kind of test period. A test of how closely the chart-reading ability I had picked up under Speed Reading Master lined up with Bitcoin's actual chart.

It was unfolding more or less the way I had called it.

I closed the Korea Bit app, opened my MTS, the mobile trading system, and checked the share price at once.

The moment I did.

...!

A l-limit-up?! In a mere thirty minutes, the stock had already hit the ceiling.

For a jump like this, there has to be some piece of good news...

A moment later, the headlines began to spill out one after another.

...... Keep this up, and I couldn't unload the shares and rotate into crypto.

I decided I would sit with it. Which play was the better one.