The Wall of Genius
“Aigoo. Things were just a teensy bit... you know, off between us at our first meeting, weren't they? Haha.”
The team leader who had once radiated a frost-cold menace was nowhere to be found; in his place sat a man gazing at me with eyes as gentle as a docile lamb's.
“I think that was just me, sleep-deprived and running on frayed nerves that day. I apologize.”
“Not at all, Team Leader. And please, speak as comfortably as you like.”
“Goodness. How can anyone be so magnanimous? You're a different breed from a small-time hack like me. Different altogether.”
I'd half wondered if he was the sort of man who terrified people with his temper, but apparently he'd simply been exhausted and on edge that day. For all his forbidding looks, he seemed like a genuinely kind soul.
“......”
Watching the two of us, Team Leader Cheon Doa burst into a quiet pfft of laughter.
“Ahem. Wh-why are you laughing?”
“It's nothing. So—the contracts are coming in, I hear?”
“Yes. Five institutions have already signed, saying they'll entrust their entire investment funds to us. I've never seen deals close this smoothly. And we have someone to thank for that.”
Team Leader Lim shot me a sidelong glance.
“That's because of the semiconductor sector's slide, isn't it?”
“Exactly. When the report Intern Kang picked came out, the institutions turned their noses up at it at first. But who could have guessed a factory in the Netherlands would go up in flames? The blaze was so massive that all that good news got devoured whole by the bad.”
I had been stunned by that news myself. A market that had stirred, if only briefly, on the promise of a Semiconductor Super Cycle came crashing down from that single headline.
“I know it makes no sense, but did you somehow see this coming, Intern Kang? The factory fire in the Netherlands.”
“No, sir.”
How was I supposed to know about a fire at a factory on the far side of the world? And yet my hypersensitive nose seemed to have predicted it. There was no other explanation—otherwise I never would have pulled the one and only semiconductor-downturn report out of that entire mountain of paper.
At this point, is this actually a superpower?
Identifying the right report by smell alone. What in the world...!
“So they're handing everything over to us without even asking for a detailed investment strategy?”
“That's right. Hard to believe even hearing it, isn't it? Most clients torment us within an inch of our lives once they've entrusted their money.”
A Discretionary Wrap Account. Ordinarily, money is entrusted to an asset manager, but in this arrangement an institution takes a specific securities firm as its partner, opens an account, and delegates every last trade to it.
“There's no sweeter contract a securities firm could ask for. When institutions sign on, fifty billion won is the bare minimum.”
Fifty billion was small-time—the scale of a modest mutual aid association or a mid-tier fund manager at best. Pension funds, insurers, and banks opened their books at one hundred billion and negotiated upward from there.
“The institutions seemed rather stunned themselves. We were the first to predict the Super Cycle, and in the one-on-one meetings we were the only ones whose reports anticipated the semiconductor decline, no? I'd have handed my money over without a shred of doubt, too.”
I had never so much as touched money in nine figures, and now sums of fifty and a hundred billion were being tossed around so breezily that reality felt like it had slipped out of joint.
“We shorted exactly as Intern Kang's recommended report suggested, and it paid off big. The institutions clicked their tongues in awe. So now they're inquiring about additional contracts—not in semiconductors this time, but in entirely different sectors.”
That was precisely why Team Leader Lim had come looking for us today.
“I do head the semiconductor sector, but I'm also the one liaising with the institutions currently signing new contracts. When they suddenly ask me to scope out entirely different fields on top of everything else, it gives me a splitting headache.”
“So that's why you came? To lean on our Intern Kang here?”
“Cut me some slack, Team Leader Cheon.”
“You're not planning to ask with empty hands, are you? Intern or not.”
“Oh, come now. What do you take me for? Naturally Intern Kang gets a share of the incentive as well. The largest share, at that.”
With that, Team Leader Lim handed the report to me first, before Team Leader Cheon.
“We've drawn up a rough shortlist. Care to look it over?”
[Secondary Battery Market Outlook]
[The Revival of K-Bio]
[The Entertainment Stock Bubble]
The stack of documents was emblazoned with weighty titles.
“You've brought nothing but the hottest sectors to follow semiconductors, haven't you?”
Team Leader Cheon, who took the reports after me, already seemed to have grasped their gist.
“Yes. Pouring more money into semiconductors is tricky—too much capital has already piled in. Putting funds to work with a mid-to-long-term horizon doesn't look bad to me.”
“Given the situation, that does seem like the sensible play. Still... we ought to hear Intern Kang's opinion first, shouldn't we?”
“Right. Intern Kang's opinion matters most of all. I only heard this from you after the fact, Team Leader Cheon, but he's the one who prophesied the Super Cycle in the first place, no? Honestly, at this point isn't the man practically a shaman?”
Both team leaders were aiming burdensome looks my way.
“Ah—and if any of these strategy reports don't sit right with you, say so at any time. My own team members are standing by, and so is the strategy team. The moment you give the word, they can start writing fresh reports.”
No. There's really no need to go that far.
“Do you have any idea how long it's been since deals this size landed? The Center Director's grin is stretched from ear to ear. He's spent years stewing over how our Daeseong kept getting outpaced by our competitors' research teams. And these people know that if this goes well, the incentives will be fat, so every last one of them is grinding their teeth as we speak.”
By the time he finished, my shoulders felt heavy enough to sag under a thousand pounds. The Center Director, and now every employee connected to this deal—they all wanted to hear my opinion?
I'm just an intern!
“......”
Still, what had to be done had to be done. With my nerves wound tight, I began combing through the reports.
Secondary batteries, first...
An acrid, sooty stench hit me at once. I flinched and flipped past it immediately.
Then... bio?
The moment I turned to the bio picks, Team Leader Lim spoke up as though he'd been waiting for exactly this.
“Bio is what everyone's watching next after semiconductors. Clinical results from the big overseas bio companies are due out soon. If they succeed, the domestic biotechs tied to them are bound to climb right along with them.”
“Ah...”
But from the bio pages, a nauseating reek of sewage was pulsing.
“......”
I barely managed to hold down the surge of nausea. The trouble was, the next report offered nothing promising either—nor the one after that, nor the one after that.
Is this really how it ends—staff on standby writing reports all night while I sit here waiting for something worthwhile to show up? The thought had barely formed when—
“......!”
The moment I reached the back half of the stack, the signal came.
This one—
How should I put it—it was as if the fragrance of espresso brewed from top-shelf beans was drifting up off the page.
“I'll... go with this one.”
“Oh? You've made your pick? Which one?”
Both team leaders leaned in with curious faces to examine the section I was pointing to.
“Huh... that's an unexpected one.”
“Redhole? Isn't that a game company?”
Both team leaders tilted their heads.
“You know the old saying—never put money into game companies. You read the report yourself, so you've seen it: plenty of people claim the entertainment stocks are all bubbles these days. Game-related companies used to print money, but the market consensus now is that they're wildly overvalued.”
At those words, memories of a lifetime spent playing games flickered past like afterimages. We had come of age in the golden era of K-gaming—wasn't that exactly how so many companies had grown into corporate giants?
But now the age of transition had arrived.
“Plenty of games launched one after another, and every last one of them shut its doors in the end. These days, the moment a studio announces a new title, half the market cries scam.”
“......”
“And yet you still picked this one. Which means you're certain of something, aren't you, Intern Kang?”
Team Leader Lim seemed to deliberate for a moment—then rose from his seat.
“Good. We proceed as is.”
A decision without a shred of doubt. And here I'd expected at least a second review.
Was this really all right? I was truly nothing but an intern who knew nothing. Were they seriously prepared to invest all that money on nothing more than my say-so?
“By the way, what game does this company even make? Let's see... an FPS where a hundred users gather to fight. The title is...”
Team Leader Lim murmured, squinting at the page.
“Battle Island?”
“Well then, I'll go get the materials organized.”
The moment Kang Suho gave a polite bow and stepped out, Cheon Doa voiced what she'd been holding back.
“I expected you to object, yet you followed Intern Kang's opinion without a word of argument?”
“You were giving me the eye, Team Leader Cheon. Besides, Intern Kang is no ordinary intern.”
“That's true enough. His standing is different from ours.”
“That's not the reason I'm giving.”
“Pardon?”
“Aren't you curious, Team Leader Cheon? About how Intern Kang predicted this semiconductor downturn.”
Of course she was curious. But then, he wasn't exactly the sort to answer just because someone asked.
“However lucky a man is, how does luck alone land him good news and bad news in perfect succession? It's not as though a signal comes zinging up his arm the moment he touches something, like in a movie.”
“He must have an analytical method of his own.”
“Exactly. And I was dying to know what it was. So this time, I dug into the Netherlands fire in detail.”
Cheon Doa frowned.
“Don't tell me you suspect Intern Kang of arson?”
“Bah. What are you talking about? Nothing like that. It's that the factory that burned down had undergone a safety inspection two months ago, apparently.”
“And?”
“The inspection flagged several pieces of equipment as so outdated they'd need replacing within the near term.”
“But they weren't replaced?”
“No. As you well know, semiconductors were in a deep slump for a long stretch. Same story there. The costs were punishing, so they cooked up one excuse after another and kept putting it off, and then...”
“And that was when the orders came pouring in?”
“Exactly. A wave of unexpected bulk orders. They had no idea the Semiconductor Super Cycle would come roaring back, either.”
The picture was coming into focus.
“Even with orders surging, they should have paced production sensibly. But that factory—maybe it was desperate to quench its long drought—ran the machines past their limits. In the end the machinery broke down, and that breakdown became the seed of the fire.”
“Meaning if they'd replaced the machines sooner, this whole downturn would never have happened?”
“Exactly. A disaster that was entirely preventable.”
It was a fire that could have been stopped had the aging equipment only been properly replaced and serviced. It was always that complacent little voice—eh, this much is fine, surely?—that summoned catastrophe.
“Hold on. You're not bringing all this up out of nowhere because...”
“What if Intern Kang Suho already knew about that inspection report?”
And that was how he had foreseen this downturn?
“!?”
“Starting to get the picture?”
Cheon Doa's mouth had gone suddenly bone-dry.
“You know the saying. Every catastrophe begins with a small signal.”
There was such a thing as Heinrich's Law—a statistical principle holding that behind every accident, warning signs always exist.
“Intern Kang may simply be obsessively good at ferreting out those tiny signals. The kind even veterans like us let slip past.”
If that were true, it would mean he was single-handedly researching staggering volumes of data, storing it all in his head, and computing the web of cause and effect.
“Is... is that even possible?”
“Geniuses always come equipped with abilities the rest of us can't fathom.”
“A genius...”
Only then did Cheon Doa understand why Kang Suho had never once explained his analytical method—why he had never laid out a single piece of reasoning.
Because even if he explained, I wouldn't understand anyway.
However much a genius wired differently tried to spell it out, ordinary people simply could not follow. And knowing that, Kang Suho had chosen all along to show results rather than explanations.
“And isn't that precisely the way to convince someone and overwhelm them in the same stroke?”
Overwhelm, huh. That word seemed right.
She had been willing to admit he had real ability. But now, for the first time, she could feel a wall stretching up before her, impossibly high and impossibly far away.