RunningWildHorse
Minjae was thirty now, and he didn't go live until late in the evening.
"Hey, everyone. Running a little late today, huh?"
His room was dead quiet. The world inside the monitor was already a circus. Greetings, dead jokes, the usual noise — people who'd been sitting there waiting for him to show up flooded the chat the second he appeared.
Minjae flicked an eye across it and got down to business.
"All right. January fourth — well, almost the fifth. Let's start the stream."
Minjae's broadcast was a crypto stream. Unlike the stock market, the coin market never closed, which was how he ended up going live at hours like this.
Before launching into any real talk, he skimmed the chat for whatever had been hot that day.
Being a coin stream, it started with Bitcoin, wandered through listing news on shitcoins whose names he could barely remember, and somehow arrived at a scandal article about a famous actress. His viewers never ran out of things they wanted to talk about.
And buried in that mess was a topic that actually caught his attention. A post from a well-known crypto gallery online.
One message, then another. The chat latched on and the topic started swelling fast.
Minjae remembered the post he'd seen that afternoon.
"Yeah. I saw it."
Most of the viewers envied RunningWildHorse, but they split into two camps. One side just drooled over the insane profits. The other couldn't wrap their heads around walking away from crypto because of a college exam.
Minjae looked over both reactions and let out a short laugh.
"Hey. WildHorse isn't twenty. What the hell college exam?"
The chat threw out a few hooks, but Minjae didn't budge.
"You guys know when I first saw WildHorse on that gallery?"
Six months had passed, and he still remembered that day like it had just happened.
"Early July, I think. Right in the middle of that huge coin boom, when every random person on earth was flooding in. I was browsing the board because it was actually entertaining, and then this one post went up. I remember the title exactly. 'I'm a high schooler, what should I buy to make it go up.' I shit you not."
The viewers locked in at once.
A legendary figure's humiliating origin story hit the chat like a brick. The whole window descended into chaos.
"No, you idiot. WildHorse wrote it and deleted it. I remember it crystal clear. And you know what's even funnier? Somebody left a comment. Recommended some complete garbage shitcoin and said it was going to pump. Anyone with eyes could tell they were just messing with him."
The chat reacted exactly the way Minjae had at the time.
"Right? I thought it was nasty too. But then WildHorse replied. I remember this word for word too. 'Thank you. Going all in! Gazua!'"
The story had them now. The stream was locked in.
"That's what I thought. All right, I'm never looking at this guy again. Pretty much anyone would've thought the same thing. But then — and this is the part that became legend — that shitcoin started climbing two days later, and about a month after that it went absolutely vertical."
The chat had it right. The coin someone had trolled RunningWildHorse into buying started as a nobody shitcoin nobody had ever heard of. These days it sat among the top five coins in Korea. Mystic.
"That's the one. Mystic. A month later the guy posted his profits and I just sat there laughing because I couldn't believe it."
Minjae had thought more or less the same thing back then. He'd filed it away as just another circus act from the coin pits.
"I figured it was beginner's luck."
It wasn't the end of it. RunningWildHorse kept showing up on the board after that, and every time he did, he sucked the entire gallery's attention toward him.
Hard not to, when the returns he posted blew past anything that made sense. Ten times at minimum. Early on he was regularly pulling twenty times or more. And because he kept casually mentioning school in passing, he blew up as the high-school investor.
That was when people really started watching him.
"At first he looked completely clumsy. About three months in, though, he was basically a pro. That's probably when he deleted that first post, too."
Results had a way of converting people. Before long, the gallery was hanging on every word RunningWildHorse typed. Minjae himself started quietly bookmarking any coin the guy mentioned, just in case.
"His hit rate was unreal. He did something stupid now and then, sure, but even so — it was just astonishing. And more than anything, the way he invested. No hesitation. None."
Then came the problem. October tenth. A day nobody in crypto would ever forget. The great crash.
Up to that point Bitcoin had been running at $18,300 — about twenty-four million won. In two days it had already crumbled to twenty-one million. Then, at eleven in the morning on October tenth, the chart started drawing something apocalyptic.
"It just kept falling. Not a single bounce. Forty-five percent gone in one day. Even thinking about it now, it was just insane."
The chart plunged in a solid red line, like someone had drawn a cliff and shoved the market off it.
It felt like a force no human being could stand against. Resistance was meaningless. Eighteen hundred. Fifteen hundred. Thirteen hundred. Eleven hundred. Every time the floor refreshed in real time, hope curdled into terror.
When it first dropped around twenty percent, plenty of people were actually happy. This is the dip. Get in now and you're looking at ten percent easy. Free money. You have to buy.
But it kept coming — thirty percent, forty percent, not a single flicker of a fight — and the fear finally took them.
The gallery lost its mind.
Bitcoin is finished. It's going to be worthless paper. Blockchain was a Ponzi scheme all along. The questions about crypto's future poured out in a flood, and it hit harder because this was still the early days, when virtual currency had only just started getting real attention.
"That's when WildHorse showed up. You all know this post. It's famous."
Still telling the old story, Minjae shared a thread from the gallery.
Going in at $9,028. Volume's about to explode.
"I don't know how it looked to anyone else. To me it looked like a suicide note."
Viewers who remembered the atmosphere that day piled on.
There's an old saying in stocks. Don't try to catch a falling knife. It's what you say on a day when the chart is in free fall. Reach for it too early and you lose both hands. Every time.
Minjae knew that as well as anyone, which is why RunningWildHorse had looked reckless to him. On a day like that, you waited for a bounce no matter how much profit it cost you. Calling the bottom of a falling knife and grabbing it was, by any sane measure, insane.
"Even now it was a crazy thing to do. But the part that still doesn't make any goddamn sense — just like WildHorse called it, volume suddenly exploded at $9,015."
Bitcoin's volume detonated at $9,015, and in a matter of seconds the graph shot the opposite direction. It was the kind of thing that belonged in a story about Moses parting the sea. Except it happened on a live chart.
The moment Minjae saw that volume, goosebumps ran down his whole body. His hands started trading on instinct. His head was full of nothing but WildHorse.
"A beast's heart. A beast's heart. We all throw that phrase around. That guy was just on another level."
The chat wasn't any calmer than he was.
"The next day a proof post went up. You know how much WildHorse put in? Five billion won. Five billion. Anyone who was watching that day probably thought the same thing I did. There is no way this person is a high schooler."
After that, RunningWildHorse became the gallery's undisputed legend, and every post he made turned into a holy site.
"Watching him keep the bit going all the way to the end is kind of a lot, though."
The problem was that Minjae's story didn't have enough hard proof to actually convince anyone.
The chat was starting to piss him off. A bunch of people poking around with a few hundred thousand won, running their mouths about things they didn't understand.
That was how sure he was.
"I'm telling you, you idiots, there is no way he's a high schooler. And I can't even prove it on stream. This is so goddamn frustrating."
That was when someone in chat brought up a collab.
Years of streaming instinct told Minjae this was a usable hook. Played right, it could turn into decent content.
"You really want me to go for it? Should I send him a DM?"
If he said yes, jackpot. If he didn't, it was still decent bait. Not that there was much chance he'd say yes. The viewers seemed to know that too, which only made them push harder.
A few people weren't thrilled about trying to pull RunningWildHorse onto the stream, but they were a tiny minority. And if the guy actually showed up, that would be his choice. Nobody else got a vote.
Once the mood had settled into something natural, Minjae put a period on it.
The chat detonated. Minjae sat there enjoying every second of it, and sent RunningWildHorse a DM.