Regression
Morning.
For me, it was always a miserable hour.
A body worn down to the last thread refused even to open its eyes. Today would be worse than usual. Last night I had drunk until my blood might as well have turned to pure alcohol.
"Haa~."
Old liquor. Aged, vicious stuff leaves a long aftertaste—one that brushing your teeth can't erase. I yawned, expecting the flavor of the expensive booze I had guzzled to still be hanging around. I had meant to savor at least that much.
Building foreclosure should be rolling in any day now… huh?
All I tasted was sweetness. That familiar sticky-mouth feeling of morning. And my body felt strangely clean. No—light. How long had it been since I last felt like I could take flight?
What the—?!
I sat bolt upright in bed. Not because I needed to leave the room. I looked around.
One Piece, Volume 35.
There it was. A comic book. Even if paper-book production had been banned in 2035, that alone wouldn't have been strange.
Volume 35? That should be one of the arcs Oda-sensei wrote himself.
Up through the Water Seven arc, the original author had handled everything personally. One Piece fans only recognized the series up to that point, which is why those volumes carried a premium. Among hardcore collectors they traded for serious money; you didn't just find them lying around.
I've got the whole run from volume one? I bought them back in the day too.
Market value north of ten million won. Pristine sealed copies supposedly went for hundreds of millions. After the series finished, the reappraisal only got fiercer. So why was something that rare sitting here?
This is… an old phone?!
That wasn't the only thing. The object that casually snagged my right hand was familiar. No—impossible not to recognize. A cellphone. Except it didn't fold. It didn't bend. A previous-generation smartphone that only circulated on the used market these days.
Holy hell. Feel the weight on this thing.
I might as well have been holding a dumbbell. Fair enough. Osung Electronics' Space Note had been built larger than ordinary phones. Before foldable tech existed, the crude solution had simply been to make the base size enormous. Market loved it, as I recalled.
Something's off. Something is very off.
Relics of a previous generation littered the area around the bed. The whole scene was absurd. Rarity aside, there was a coherence to it—every single object looked like it had ridden a time machine straight out of the past.
This isn't a movie set.
An actual Truman Show? That crazy bitch might have gone full psycho again, hauled me off while I slept, or gotten herself worked up wanting another round.
…No. Not that.
I would be honest. In my current state I held zero appeal as a man. Who would want a fat middle-aged guy with diabetes?
Except that was no longer true. The lightness in my body hadn't been imagination.
"Mm… oh?"
Investor. Surviving a world that flipped by the second demanded accurate, instantaneous shifts in judgment. Even if a call had been right one second ago, the moment it became wrong you had to change your mind.
From that angle—
I think I've regressed.
One conclusion. Everything else could be faked; body condition could not. This was too close to perfect. The belly fat that had ballooned me toward 120 kilos had vanished. Sixty kilos gone in an instant. No wonder I felt light. Even if I had diversified that weight across my entire body, the felt load had been enormous—like setting down a full sack of rice.
Situation assessed.
Where I was: the room I had rented while attending university. I had moved once, so this was after discharge. And the reason? Luck this pure never arrived without cause. God had been watching.
He must have been disappointed I never got to devour America.
So he had handed me a situation that could only be called opportunity. An ordinary person might panic. A dream-like setup. In the stock market you ran into the same thing often enough—the best stock dumped at a fire-sale price.
Most ordinary people never even notice.
"Wasn't that the normal price?" Then later they yammer, "Should've bought when it was cheap~." Opportunities are always lying around. What matters is the ability to snatch them. A wise investor recognizes the chance and places the bet.
Chirp! Chirp!
I opened the window. Outside—
"Ugh…"
Sunlight poured in and stabbed my eyes. For a second a dizzy thought hit me. A hundred-story building. Even without acrophobia, looking down from that height forced fear into you. Lose your balance and fall and it wouldn't end as a minor incident. You would get a full ten seconds of blank free-fall.
A sparrow saying hello.
Not a hundred stories—ground. A thick pine standing on a green field. A sparrow perched on a branch. Startled by me, it fled, wings beating freely. Grill one of those and you had a delicacy with no equal.
Sparrows are tiny, but the amount of exercise they get is insane. Meat comes out chewy as hell.
One problem: extinction. They disappear. Climate change hammers the sparrow population in this country into free-fall. Truly a pity that couldn't be helped—a bird that helps humans and tastes good vanishing from the earth.
Being able to eat sparrows again… I'm genuinely moved. Tsk.
The fact of returning to the past. The upsides weren't one or two. I could fly free like that sparrow. Fully possible. But I had to keep in mind it would never be easy.
It wasn't lack of money. It wasn't lack of ability either.
A one-trillion-dollar fund. Scale that didn't flinch even on Wall Street, the center of global finance. Built entirely by my own hand. Something I had already done once—if told to do it twice, there was nothing I couldn't manage.
The problem is I can collapse twice.
I merely didn't lag. Funds dozens of times larger than mine stood in ranks. To fight them I had used every dirty trick available. Results had been decent enough, yet—
I can't do it alone.
It wore me down. As assets under management grew, difficulty rose exponentially. Same story in the previous life. Early on I bulked the fund at blistering speed.
Tap. Tap!
Then it inevitably slowed—exactly like this old phone I was tapping now, the Space Note.
A smartphone that pushed performance through raw hardware.
Early on the method worked. Osung Electronics equaled performance; Apple Phone equaled feel. After the Space S10 even that flipped. Dig into the numbers and the iPhone had pulled ahead on pure performance too.
The GOS scandal was the GOS scandal, but—
Root cause: software optimization. Hardware never got pulled to 100 percent. When performance sat in the mediocre range it somehow limped along. Push into high performance and the limits appeared—heat, throttling, everything. Funds suffered the identical phenomenon. The more capital you managed, the more brand-new problems sprouted.
Bang!
Like I don't already know that.
Not hundreds of billions. Tens and hundreds of trillions. How do you find people you can actually trust? One small slip and the beautiful plan I built collapses in a heap. That had been the hardest part of all.
Even if I use future information to make money—
The fact of returning to the past. I knew perfectly well how many angles there were to exploit. As a stock investor I couldn't not know. Even so, I would only repeat the same ending. No matter how much cash I piled up, without the ability to manage it the whole thing was a pearl necklace on a pig. A pig fattened to the limit is destined for the slaughterhouse.
I have to fix that somehow.
Not easy. But it wasn't all bad news either. Regression itself was an enormous edge. Plenty of angles to work. No need to look far—right here around me.
Thud!
I picked up the Space Phone I had thrown. Durability, if nothing else, was ridiculously solid. It lit up without a hitch. Not a crack on the screen, not even a single scratch.
I already know the magical changes waiting for this Space Phone too.
Current time period. Exact date unknown, but definitely my twenties. At least twenty years further into the past. I could freely loot every scrap of history and every event that would unfold.
With my ability, more than enough.
I would force change on the world—in a direction no one expected. I could prepare countermeasures in advance. Along the way, opportunities I hadn't even imagined might appear.
Tap. Tap!
For that I needed the date first. It would help lock in concrete plans.
Huh?
I powered on the smartphone. Checking the date was simple. The problem was the news that came along for free. A new president had just been inaugurated. Early in the year—possible enough. The problem was that the inauguration speech looked familiar.
"I will create a country never experienced before."
Regression. Maybe I had taken returning to the past a little too lightly.
I'm fucked…
Life difficulty: Hell. Already booked.