A Man's Intuition

The checkup ended without a hitch.

Thankfully, they found no cancer, nor any other illness worth the name. If anything, the doctors said she was healthier than most people her age, and that alone let me breathe again. Dad, who had gone through the same screening, came out just as clean.

"The older you get, the more carefully you need to keep up with your checkups. Once a year, without fail, please come here to Jinseong Severance Hospital."

"Th-that would still be free, then?"

"Haha, of course. Not only free—we'll do our best to book you on whatever day you want."

Ha. Honestly.

No matter how Ju Seongyong turned it over, he could not make sense of the situation he was standing in.

"And as for Ms. Kim Yangju, rather than discharging her right away, we'd like to watch her a little longer while she receives some nutritional IVs. The results are clean, but you never know. The hospital bill has already been paid in full, so there's nothing to worry about."

"Aigoo, if you'd do that for us, we're nothing but grateful."

Dad left Mom in the VIP room for a moment and called me out on my own.

"Even for a major corporation... I've never heard of anyone being thick as thieves with a hospital director."

So the moment I couldn't dodge had finally come. I'd scraped together an excuse.

"Dad, the truth is, what happened was—"

He set a hand on my shoulder while I was still talking.

"Tell me slowly, once you're ready. Looking at your face, this is putting you in a tight spot."

"Dad..."

"Whatever the reason, our son has gone this far for us. Who would scold you over that? We ought to be thanking you, if anything."

"Thank you for being so considerate. I'll tell you when I've got my head around it."

"Yes, yes. Anyway—I'm proud of you, my son."

I still wasn't sure enough to lay my assets out officially in front of my parents. Life had a way of flipping over on you just when it was going well, didn't it?

I thought the conversation was finished, but Dad tacked something on at the end.

"So, about that..."

"Yes?"

"Turns out bragging about my son costs a little money. Think you could spare me a bit of pocket money?"

Yesterday, lying in the hospital room, Mom and I had talked briefly about him. On his days off, she said, he went out to see his friends every single day, and every time he came home his face was brighter. He'd spend about an hour boasting about his son, then pick up the drinks for the whole table.

Had I ever, even once, been a son worth bragging about? How badly must he have wanted to, all those years? Before I knew it, I was swelling with pride myself.

"As much as you want."

A week later, Mom had regained her strength and was discharged without incident.

I couldn't camp in the ward every day, but word still reached me—that the hospital director had treated her kindly, and that Lee Jayeong had come by for another visit.

Talk like that from one person would have been plenty.

Two of them still wasn't enough.

Fine. Three of them, I could live with.

"Samcho-oooon!"

"Yeah, our Yeju."

"When's Unni coming to play again?"

"Hm?"

"The pretty unni! She said she'd buy me fruit again. So I told her I felt bad only getting treated, and next time we should hold hands with Uncle and go eat snow crab. Did Yeju do good?"

......

Was sorry for only getting treated something that belonged in a seven-year-old's mouth?

Either way, it looked like my head was going to keep aching for a while.

Wait. Don't tell me this was the debt Lee Jayeong had meant?

Figures. Debt was a terrifying thing.

'So this is why people tell you not to go into debt.'

The moment Mom was discharged, Dahun and I threw ourselves back into the grind.

First, through June, while Bitcoin drifted sideways, we skimmed short-term profits in the futures market.

Click. And another click.

Even the hours I spent planted in that chair easily cleared twelve a day. I'd set alerts by price level, and whenever one went off I ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠was up in the small hours, so my body was a wreck.

'What kind of life do traders even live?'

Ah. One look at the account, and I understood exactly why they lived it.

Twenty billion won.

From five billion, in the short span of a single month, I had multiplied the seed money exactly fourfold.

If I'd gotten greedy, I could have pushed it further. More than once or twice along the way, I had died and clawed my way back.

Without fail, whenever I took a bad futures position, it handed down a sentence.

Chop.

Once, I lived through the illusion of the offending finger being severed. Illusion was only the word for it—the pain felt like a real cut, and for a while I had no feeling in my index finger at all. Terrified my sister would hear a scream and come barging in again, I bit down on a gag and howled without a sound.

Pain threshold. Still, after taking it once or twice, I'd built up a certain tolerance.

'Am I supposed to be glad about this, or not?'

More precisely, it was spite. When it felt like my finger was coming off, I seriously considered abandoning Guide Navigation. But if I made the wrong call at some once-in-a-lifetime fork still ahead of me, I might live to regret letting it go—so I decided to keep it.

Instead, I ran a series of tests. And from the results, I reached the conclusion below.

The electrocution last time had come when I yanked thirty-times leverage. Ten to twenty times, set beside that shock, was practically civilized.

'So long as I don't push it too ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠far, I'm fine. That's all this means.'

I wanted to say one thing to Guide Navigation, loud and clear.

'Yeah. As long as I don't die, we're good—'

And while my investing rolled on, Dahun finished incorporating the company.

I'd named the company after my own initials. No matter how hard I wrung my brain, coming up with anything that had a scrap of sense to it was like plucking stars out of the sky. Turned around, the letters were Yeju's initials too, so I decided to leave it as it was.

Right now I was still growing the pile with abilities pulled from the Random Box, but the bigger the company got, the less I could shoulder every last thing myself.

'You have to trust your people.'

If my partner had been Kim Bongshik, I never could have offered it so easily.

Kang Dahun, safety-first ordinary citizen. I knew his investing temperament, and that was why I could hand it over.

I knew better than anyone why he was saying that.

He'd always loved a fancy title. The words I'm going to be branch manager had lived in his mouth for years.

COO—Chief Operating Officer. The title for a company's top operations executive, and as a rule the seat directly beneath the CEO.

Vice president of a corporation with exactly two people in it. I couldn't see his face, but I had no trouble picturing the grin.

Honestly, he was simpler than he let on.

Dahun was thinking of taking money he'd set aside on his own and making a light investment, following Jinyeong's advice.

'Just one hundred million won. That's all I'm putting in.'

'Now that I think about it, doesn't Ethereum at least have some substance to it?'

'Better than some useless altcoin. Ethereum ought to be fine.'

With Jinyeong's word that the call still held, Dahun quietly began preparing to buy.

The Random Box came back every single day. Even through June's sideways market I opened it without missing once, and the further I went, the more the prizes that sprouted up were nothing but junk.

Was this one actually decent?

......

Maybe this one was all right, in its own way?

Sure enough, the moment I set a hand on my forehead—

Was I ever going to use this in my life?

At any rate, nothing came along that actually whetted the appetite.

'If only the 1+1 Event had dropped now.'

Thinking back on it, I started to get genuinely sore. Back then I'd been thrilled to turn forty million won into eighty million.

If I'd drawn it now, wouldn't that have added another twenty billion to my assets?

And then, as if the cooldown had filled again, a status window rose in front of me.

What bizarre thing was coming out today? I pressed the button without expecting much of anything.

And in that instant—flash.

Light wavered across my eyes, and a new window rose.

......

That was it?

Not a single line of explanation. Just that one lonely sentence, and done. Usually a description came with it. I stayed where I was and studied the window for a long time.

I even stared into empty air and shouted, "A Man's Intuition!" Dead silence.

I puzzled over it a while longer, found no way to test the thing, and simply lay down on the bed.

'Another dud.'

I didn't know it then. That the Intuition I'd written off as a miss would turn out to be an enormous help.