Prologue
Bitcoin’s meteoric rise had left me with nearly a trillion won.
Of course, I could never have made that kind of money without the inheritance my father left behind. Thanks to it, after graduating high school I bought buildings of my own and settled into a life that looked perfect from the outside.
I had grown up alone with my father.
When I first entered middle school, no one came to the entrance ceremony. My father was buried in work, and for reasons of her own, my mother never showed either.
She had money, but she never much cared for my ordinary-looking father, a man who did nothing but work. My mother was pretty, beautiful, the lively sort who loved meeting people. Bit by bit the hours she spent out of the house outstripped the ones she spent with Dad, and by the time I became a middle schooler she simply stopped coming home.
“I’m sorry, Junwoo… You’re in middle school now. You’ll manage just fine without Mom.”
That was all she said when I asked why she hadn’t come to the ceremony. Then she left.
According to my father, she had run off with a man who looked broke but had a sharp, thuggish kind of handsomeness about him. Father held me while I cried and threw a tantrum, begging him to bring her back.
And then even he left me, around the time I started university. Overwork. Watching him go like that—love already gone, nothing left but a single child, grinding himself down until the end—felt pitiful.
The truth was I hadn’t spent that much time with him either. I didn’t have many memories of us together, so the grief never cut as deep as it should have.
Still, of the tens of billions he left me, I put several tens of billions into crypto on a friend’s advice. The result was a fortune that fell just short of a trillion won.
Turning the coins into real assets took a long time. The moment the last of it was converted, I stepped away completely. There was nothing money could no longer buy.
I enrolled in university, coasted through about a year, then took a leave of absence. What was the point of studying? Better to learn real estate and pick up a few more buildings.
I put up two studio buildings near campus and bought a solid commercial property in the neighborhood. The monthly income kept coming in faster than I could spend it. But having grown up essentially without parents, I never had many friends—only the ones I’d eaten lunch with at school.
I was rich, and I was always lonely. I called women over. I drove sports cars through Gangnam and Gangbuk, drinking with strangers I’d never met before. None of it filled the emptiness.
Today was no different. I was sprawled at home with the air conditioner running, with nothing to do and nowhere to be.
Beep-beep. Ring-ring~
My phone—which almost never rang—lit up with a call from an unknown number.