Risk Worth Bearing

Broadcast content.

Risk.

There was clearly value in bearing it.

It had gone as low as −29%.

And she had caught that falling knife.

Whoa…

In a little over three minutes, she was sitting on two million won in paper gains.

Even watching it happen live, it was hard to believe.

Not the profit itself.

"I get the reasoning, but normally you wouldn't even think about buying, right?"

"Hee, heehee."

"You can actually hit the buy button?"

"Heeheehee."

Da-yul's trading. If she wanted to do it, she could.

He understood the logic behind her entry points well enough.

Yeah, but still.

What if she slipped just once?

She'd cough up everything she'd made and then some. Rationally, you simply couldn't do it.

Or maybe that was exactly why the stock was going up.

It wasn't as if Sora had never day-traded herself. She knew the basic principles.

Think the opposite of retail.

It sounded plausible enough when you heard it. Like all you had to do was buy the other way.

"Why are you buying EnviPro?"

"Because it's expensive."

"Huh?"

"It's expensive, so nobody's buying. Heehee."

In reality, of course, that wasn't how it worked. There were always reasons people bought and sold stocks.

That was the ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠common-sense take. Retail investors weren't absolute idiots.

The odds of losing are huge.

Far too dangerous a trade. Nine times out of ten, it would play out exactly as expected.

Double kill!

Triple kill!

And among all of them, the surest thing of all: stocks that absolutely should not go up.

"Hee, heehee. Heeheehee."

That was when she bought. She hit the buy button when everyone else was saying no.

Yeah, she's not the gently unhinged type either.

Da-yul's trading. Even if you knew the method, it wasn't something you could copy. She was even crazier than her senior.

Her senior was a lunatic, sure — but he didn't buy stocks like these.

"What are you going to do if you get liquidated even once?"

"I-it's fun."

"…Right."

How she could do something like that. It felt like he'd just gotten the answer.

It really would be stimulating. Fun, even.

No wonder her stream had such a thick layer of hardcore fans. She definitely had an audience.

It just wasn't the direction Sora wanted. It looked like a machine for mass-producing people who blew up their accounts.

Stocks.

Unlike crypto, they were still an unfamiliar field to the general public.

It's kind of hard, you know?

Should've bought when they said that!

Should've sold when they said that!

Crypto boiled down to those two lines. Even the people who made the coins didn't know why anyone was buying them.

Momentum stocks worked the same way, in broad strokes.

"It is pretty stimulating, I'll give you that."

"And it looks easy, too."

"Ah, seriously!"

Whether money got printed or deleted, the verdict came fast. No need to understand any complicated structure.

On the surface, anyway.

There was a reason most stock and crypto streams leaned that way. From an ordinary person's perspective, they were easy to follow. High accessibility.

The problem was that it didn't always work out in a good way.

People ended up copying mindless investing. And nine times out of ten, that ending was not a good one.

"You can't learn stocks that way."

"You should be doing paper trading like you did."

"Hey!"

Even if you got lucky and won, it never lasted. The only one who made money was the house.

Unless you had talent like Da-yul's.

Most people didn't have that kind of talent. And it wasn't even a talent worth having. It was the perfect recipe for ending up with a sense of direction as bad as Roronoa Zoro's.

The kind of gift that only meant something if you cultivated it.

"I'm not a stock newbie anymore, you know."

"True — your chest is stupidly huge."

"I want my viewers to invest in the right direction."

She was growing well. As a trainer, her guts wouldn't lose to anything on Wall Street.

Have they gotten even bigger?

Sora had grown too — not just physically, but as an investor, filling in what she needed to fill in.

The direction, though. Completely opposite.

She wanted to run her stream the upright way, the way he did.

"Why don't you try giving lectures like a professor or something."

"If that were possible, I wouldn't be stuck like this!"

"Anyway, I'm busy as hell."

"You're not busy at all."

It was never going to be easy. There was a reason famous YouTubers and streamers kept getting caught in controversy after controversy.

Because that's the only way people watch.

The spicy flavor. Viewers wanted it. Broadcasters had to meet that demand. Striking the balance came down to your own ability.

That was something Sora would have to figure out on her own.

"At least give me some advice."

"I told you I'm busy."

"You're just playing a game."

"I just died, you fucking—"

"Are you done talking?"

She kept talking to him. She was poking the reverse scale of every Korean man in his twenties.

This is why college girls these days are really…

Empathy. They shouted about it all day long — except when it came to games, where they had none.

"Just hold on a second and do it later."

"How is a LoL guy supposed to just hold off on LoL?!"

"What kind of nonsense is that?!"

She didn't understand how important it was. This wasn't simply playing a game.

There are people in there!

League of Legends. A game no Korean man could claim not to know. A game you were practically obligated ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠to play.

"LoL?"

"You don't know LoL? Are you some filthy pinko gambler?"

"What the hell have you been saying this whole time?!"

"If you're an investor, you should know."

"Excuse me?"

The principles of how the world worked were packed inside it. You could say you could understand the world through LoL alone.

This is a form of training too.

The game in progress. His teammates were feeding hard. Top lane in particular looked grim.

Top was calling for jungle. Whining that he couldn't even farm CS.

The thing he'd been dreading happened. The enemy Kennen dodged the flag-and-dash with a flash right in their faces, and—

Fuck.

—one-shot James into the ground. Jarvan IV, skills already spent, went down with him.

They even gave up first turret. Worse still, the enemy jungler was free to roam.

"So what am I supposed to do about it?"

"You try to bail out one bad bank and the whole system goes into chain default."

"?"

Bot got dived too. Even with the enemy telegraphing the angle, there was no way out.

This is why you don't casually prop up bad banks.

Lehman Brothers, 2008. They threatened that if they went under, a recession would follow. The government bailed them out. Then they turned around and played cowboy with oil futures trying to recover their losses, and—

—they dragged not just themselves but the entire world into crisis.

That was why, if you were going to go under, you needed to go under cleanly. They didn't know that, and they whined.

James's gank call had steered the game straight into a Lehman Brothers bankruptcy scenario.

"What kind of game-addict nonsense is that?"

"Are you looking down on LoL guys right now?"

"What even is that, you fucking otaku."

"Most of your viewers are LoL guys too."

The principles of this world were contained inside this game. And of course, investing was among them.

Learning investing through LoL isn't a bad method at all.

Playing LoL was, without exaggeration, an inquiry into history and truth.

"There you go with the insane talk again."

"Have you really spent your whole life getting played?"

"Yes."

And he meant it literally.

Among the world-famous Korean investors, there was even one who was a Worlds champion.

Or has that not happened yet?

That was a story from a little further in the future.

An upset had happened. The strongest team on the planet had been brought to its knees.

It had seemed impossible for them to fall. LoL fans around the world burned with excitement.

Waaaaaaaaah~~!!

The team that made it happen. Five Star Space stepped up onto the finals stage. Applause and cheers poured down from the stands, celebrating the birth of a new champion.

Some of the players were famous. Some weren't. But in this moment, one thing was clear.

2018 would be recorded as their history.

Curiosity about the players' stories bloomed.

The kind of moment that connected through pure fandom. Of course the fans' reactions ran hot.

Five Star Space was the topic of the hour. And the biggest issue of all among them—

Five Star Space's mid laner. The host had every reason to throw such a bold question.

They had beaten the world's strongest team. They had handed a crushing defeat to the world's strongest mid laner.

Whether he could hold on to the strongest title he'd just seized. That was where the fans' attention was pouring — but.

He already had a new goal.