An Omen Called Cov

"Let's just do one more round. Second round's on me! You already treated me to that expensive beef."

Bongshik swayed where he stood, the words tumbling out thick and slurred.

"Enough. You're drunk. Let's get you home. You're the one about to lose his job, and you're buying a second round? You need to be thinking about saving money."

"Haa— even if I end up unemployed, you guys won't look down on me, right? You'll still hang out? You're all I've got left."

"Obviously. You get fired, I'll be right there calling you a balding jobless piece of shit till you cry."

"...Get lost."

"You get lost. In a taxi."

"You get lost. I've got nobody but our Joo-nim!"

The childish spat ran its course, and Dahun loaded Bongshik into a taxi first. For a long moment he couldn't take his eyes off the cab as it pulled away. Then, at last:

"Haa. He's taking it hard, all right. The way he was chugging like that."

"Tell me about it."

"Jinyeong."

"Yeah?"

"We're going to have to grow the staff on our side sooner or later. What do you think about bringing Bongshik over while we're at it?"

Dahun always talked like that—needling, a little mean—and still looked after his friends more than anyone. Which was probably why he teased them all the harder. He glanced at me and went on.

"If it's a burden on you, I can even trim my salary a bit. I was getting paid plenty to begin with."

"No. I was ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠already thinking along those lines."

Bongshik. He hadn't been a poor student, not really—not by the standards of our school days. But he never chose a university. The day he finished high school, he jumped straight onto the front line of finding work.

First it was motorcycle delivery. Then rotating shifts at a small company. After that, loading and unloading parcels, overnight shifts at a convenience store—if it paid, he took it, no questions asked, whatever came his way.

There was only one reason he had thrown himself into work instead of college. His parents had abandoned him, and his maternal grandmother had raised him alone for decades.

Even back in elementary school, whenever it rained, she always came to the school gate with an umbrella.

Living with no one but his grandmother, Bongshik never lost his laugh. He was the friend who could always make the rest of us crack up. Then, the year he became a high school sophomore, that ordinary life collapsed.

A diabetes diagnosis. At first his grandmother brushed it off.

"They say I just need to take the medicine, that's all."

A few months later, the cost of the pills alone ate through a month's living expenses. Complications piled on, and she had to go to the hospital two or three times a week. Every single visit ran to hundreds of thousands of won in consults and tests.

That must have been when Bongshik decided he had to get a job right away. The terror of money. That, at least, he understood sooner than the rest of us. So he earned like a madman. And still, time refused to ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠wait for his grandmother.

Around the time the rest of us were graduating college, she passed. Bongshik stared at her smiling face and wailed without end. And he made up his mind. The world was a place where you could work like a dog and nothing would change.

He swore he would never bring someone into his life he might have to be responsible for—not unless he made real money—and marched proudly into investing. The result was dogshit. That was how the Bongshik of today was made: a man possessed by the market.

In dramas and movies, this is where you make it big in style... Reality really is nothing like the dream.

Anyway. Pulling a friend that close out of the fire was hardly a difficult thing for me.

But that status window from earlier—what had that been?

The window had surfaced, and not a single line of text had followed it. I picked the conversation back up.

"Dahun. Do you know what Cov is?"

"Think of it as a coronavirus. An RNA virus that causes a wide range of respiratory and digestive infections in animals, humans included. It isn't only found in people, either. Cats, pigs, cattle, bats—you see it in them too."

"How do you know all that?"

"I used to scalp biotech stocks now and then. They say hang around a school for three years and even a dog starts reciting poetry—I've put in my time in the market. But why Cov, all of a sudden?"

Cov. Coronavirus. And Intuition...

I just couldn't stand a bad feeling I couldn't shake. I decided to call on Teacher Gumong for the second time.

The last charge I'd spent asking for something worth investing in besides Bitcoin. That was how I'd learned Ethereum was going to rise.

Yes.

A moment later—

With a soft rustle, a long status window unfurled before my eyes.

Each line flashed in front of my eyes. A contagious disease was going to hit the entire world in 2019...?

If it was severe enough to declare an international public health emergency, the shock to stock prices would be enormous.

This one I need to remember, institute or not.

Once fear dyed the market, money would flee into safe havens no matter who you were. The exchanges would fall into panic. The whole board could be drenched in red.

A chance to make money... might be coming around again.

I read on. And the next window that rose—

I swallowed, throat dry.

Fifty-eight trillion. All the capital we had right now was twenty-two billion won...

I'd thought twenty-two billion was a lot. But this was trillions. Fifty-eight trillion won. Wasn't that the kind of money that could chew through the market cap of a major Korean conglomerate and swallow it whole?

To look at a lab destined for that kind of greatness and still pull the funding. The investors seemed almost willfully blind.

I had to save the institute, whatever it took. The problem... was that I still didn't have capital on that scale.

"Dahun."

"Yeah?"

"Earlier Bongshik said the lab's shutdown would take about two or three months, right?"

"Yeah. I think that's what he said."

"I think... I need to make money fast. And look into the institute where Bongshik works. In detail."

"The institute? Why all of a sudden?"

"Just in case. Look into it for me."

"All right. I will."

With my ability, two months would be enough.

June and July. The long, tedious sideways market finally came to an end.

While the price chopped up and down inside a box, the market wore itself out. Through all of it I sat with the charts every day, trading on a short breath, in and out, again and again. Scale. The more the seed money grew, the larger the leveraged sums became, and because of that even a small percentage came back as a huge amount of cash.

The result: JY Company's account now held roughly two hundred billion won. Only two months ago, that same account had been twenty billion.

There was a reason I'd been this desperate. From August on, a gradual bull market was going to begin.

And the moment that dull, drifting market ended, a sweltering summer arrived with it.

"Haa— it's cold."

I pulled a blanket over my head. Whenever I was home, I left the air conditioner running around the clock.

"If you're cold, turn it off."

"I was about to say it's so cold it feels incredible?"

"......"

Cold in the middle of a heat wave. How was that not a blessing? My sister had always been weak to the cold; even in high summer she went around in a cardigan. If Yeju had been cold too, I might have nudged the temperature up. ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠But—

"Mom... the storybook said heaven is up in the sky, but that was a lie."

"Hm?"

"This is heaven."

"......"

Sprawled on the cool floor, Yeju wore the brightest face in the world and grinned, soft and silly. She loved it that much. How was I supposed to turn the AC up?

When I'd lived with Lee Somin, every last coin went to that woman, so all I ever thought about—maintenance fees, living costs, any of it—was how to save a single penny. Because of that, I could never leave the air conditioner on with an easy mind.

Thinking about it now... what kind of life was I even living?

They had a word for men like that. The dish-soap husband—the one who scrubbed and scraped and yielded and never once put himself first. Look the word up, and wouldn't the definition just be Ju Jinyeong?

It felt good, not having to care about pocket change like that anymore.

I sat down and checked Bitcoin's price. The August close was up 65.85 percent from the prior month. Pull twenty-times leverage on that, and it came to a 1,300 percent gain.

But our almighty Teacher Gumong had said Ethereum would rise even more than Bitcoin. And not vaguely—by a precise +87.36 percent. Thanks to the teacher's detailed solution, my mind was at ease. This was why you had to meet the right teacher.

The problem was that the seed had grown too large for me to yank the leverage hard. A market can only absorb so much buying and selling. Run funds in the tens of billions of won on leverage, and your entry and exit shove the price around. One wrong move and you get slippage. In other words, the mere fact that I had traded could spike the price or dump it, and the fill would turn against me.

If I was going to use leverage anyway, there was no point forcing a reckless size. Lightly... just fifty million dollars.

Click. Teacher Gumong had kindly handed me not only the monthly close but the high itself, so I pressed the button without a moment's hesitation. Just as I'd expected—

I bought Ethereum. Then I passed the same word along to Bongshik.

Bongshik had been drained ever since that night out drinking. The research had been shut down entirely, and now every one of them had received a layoff notice. I'd thought that helping him like this—letting him taste a profit—would lift his mood. He was still under a cloud.

It was the first time Bongshik had stayed this low for so long.

Once, he'd been shot down by a bookkeeper he liked at a small company. He spent a good two weeks doing nothing but drink. Another time, he'd denied his hair loss until he finally had to admit it. Said the hair was going to fall out anyway, stopped treating it, and drank nonstop for a solid month.

This was the third. If the pattern held, he ought to have been drinking straight through for two months by now. He must have felt truly awful—he wasn't even eating properly, let alone drinking.

I still hadn't told him. I wanted it to land as a surprise.

No fun if he finds out early.

Brrr. Right on cue, the call I'd been waiting for came in from Dahun.

I straightened the back that had been curled up like a pupa for two months and rose from my seat. Then I opened the window and let the warm sunlight fall over me.

Been a while since I stood in the sun.

Box Bio Pharma. The first foothold of the business was beginning here.