The Realm of Prophecy
“Where is he right now?”
Park Gwa-jang's voice came out as a low growl.
“Why?”
“We need to sell before the damage gets any worse. I won't take his desk away—not yet, anyway. If he dumps the entire position now, it's true he'll walk away with a serious profit on Han-seong Steel. But he needs to be taught a firm lesson. Someone has to show him that trading isn't gambling—it's strict discipline and risk management.”
The Risk Management Team wielded enormous power inside the company.
Their salaries were pocket change compared to what the traders pulled down, but it was no exaggeration to say their authority sat even higher than the money.
They could shut down a position instantly—even one run by a Team Leader. That was the power of Risk.
And yet, exceptions existed.
“Hey, Park. Listen to me. I know that on this floor you could blow away a Team Leader whenever you felt like it—but that intern? Not him.”
“I'm sorry?”
Park Gwa-jang assumed Team Leader Oh was joking and burst out with a snort of laughter.
“It's not like he's some immortal mountain spirit. Haha. Anyone walking by would think he's family of the Daeseong Group chairman or something.”
“…….”
Team Leader Oh wasn't laughing.
“Team Leader?”
Instead, keeping his voice low in case anyone might overhear, he whispered something quietly into Park Gwa-jang's ear.
“……!?”
The color drained from Park Gwa-jang's face.
The moment his own joke stopped being a joke.
A cold trickle of sweat ran down his spine.
“Is—is that actually true?”
“Why would I lie about something like that? On this entire Trading floor, only the Division Head and I know.”
Team Leader Oh clapped him on the back.
“Your life, Park Gwa-jang—I just saved it. Understood?”
Park Gwa-jang swallowed dryly, unable to speak.
If Team Leader Oh hadn't stepped in, the desk being pulled today wouldn't have been the intern's—it would have been his own.
“Then…… what do I do now?”
“What do you do? You're not seriously thinking of stepping in and freezing the account yourself, are you?”
“No, sir.”
He knew exactly how he'd landed this job. He had no intention of picking a fight with the Royal Family and throwing away a position he couldn't afford to lose.
“Honestly, I'm not sure myself. At first I figured he was just some green kid blowing money out of rebellion.”
“And he isn't?”
“Until a minute ago I thought so, but after hearing him talk about shipbuilding stocks… honestly, it does feel like he's doing it out of defiance. And then Director Geum Gaho himself vouched for him, so I don't even know what to think anymore.”
“You're saying the Team Leader might have a source feeding him information?”
“Right. Though maybe not. You know as well as I do—who on earth is picking up shipbuilders these days?”
Shipbuilding stocks were, without question, trading at rock-bottom prices.
The problem was that every time investors thought, this has to be the bottom, right? This is the floor, right? and waded in, the market cheerfully revealed yet another basement level beneath them.
“And then the Daehwan Shipbuilding disaster had to happen on top of it. There's even controversy over public funds being injected, and with order books collapsing one after another, shipbuilding stocks have effectively been pronounced dead.”
It had only been days since Daehwan Shipbuilding & Marine Engineering—an industry frontrunner—was slapped with a trading halt over accounting fraud worth trillions of won.
Little wonder talk of delisting was quietly making the rounds.
“So for anyone to buy in now, they'd have to be out of their minds. Even if Director Geum did vouch for him. A normal informant would've said buy semiconductors, or biotech.”
“……So you're saying there really is no source, and it's just a spoiled rich kid digging his heels in?”
“The odds are high enough that it already makes me dizzy. Still, we have to sound him out at least once.”
If the young master really was throwing money around without a thought, then surely someone had to stop him before the situation snowballed.
It wasn't a mere 100 million won at stake anymore—a full 3 billion won was about to evaporate into thin air.
“You just stand there and pretend you don't see anything. I'll ask him myself.”
“Yes, sir.”
The dreaded Grim Reaper of the trading floor nodded along, docile as a lamb.
“Ahem.”
Team Leader Oh made sure to announce his presence as he walked over to Kang Suho's desk.
“Intern Kang. Pretty busy these days?”
“No, I'm fine.”
“Well… I only just heard about this myself, but apparently you bought up the entire shipbuilding position.”
“Ah, yes.”
“You must have had some kind of… conviction, to do that?”
There was a brief pause.
“……Yes.”
At that, Team Leader Oh and Park Gwa-jang both let out a small breath of relief.
“Could you tell me what basis you—”
Park Gwa-jang stepped forward to press the question, but Team Leader Oh cut him off.
“Right. If you've got conviction, then you need the guts to trust it and see it through. Well then, keep at it.”
Team Leader Oh dragged Park Gwa-jang away from the partitions.
“I told you to stand there and say nothing! Why were you trying to interrogate him?”
“I got too curious, that's all…. But doesn't it strike you as strange? What kind of source could drive a decision that bold?”
That, Team Leader Oh wanted to know too.
But a company was a place where, no matter how your curiosity boiled over, some things you simply had to pretend not to see.
“That's twice I've saved your life today.”
“Understood…. Thank you, Team Leader.”
“Back at Risk, you cover this as you see fit. If anyone upstairs asks, give them some vague explanation. As few people as possible should know who that intern really is. No sense stirring up another knife-storm.”
Park Gwa-jang bowed as if he understood perfectly and hurried back to the Risk Management Team.
“Whew. Walking on thin ice doesn't even begin to cover it.”
He almost missed the days when he'd been run off his feet during the global financial crisis.
Anything was better than tiptoeing around an owner family.
“……But is there really a source?”
He'd dug through everything he could find, and nowhere—nowhere—was there a single signal that shipbuilding stocks were about to rise.
China had squeezed them out globally; order books were cliffs; the industry wasn't even getting inquiries, let alone contracts.
What, exactly, was supposed to make shipbuilding stocks go up?
“……Thankfully, he left without a fuss.”
A question suddenly occurred to me.
Was our Team Leader an angel who trusted his team members to the very end?
Or simply neglectful to a pathological degree?
“Who was that man with him, again?”
He stared at me something fierce on his way out.
Risk Management, maybe?
I had a rough idea of how things operated around here.
Under normal circumstances, if you placed a trade nobody could stomach, Risk would scramble in and shut you down before you could blink.
And yet my account was still untouched.
Was the Team Leader covering for me?
“He really was a good man, after all.”
I had a fair amount of confidence in my own ability, sure—but how other people saw me was an entirely different matter.
My senior had told me the Trading floor was the most merciless place in the building, but apparently our team was the exception.
'……Though the risk is high, isn't it.'
I stared blankly at the screen.
1 billion won in Han-seong Steel. 2 billion won in Geum-young Shipbuilding.
Han-seong Steel was soaring happily along, granted.
The problem was Geum-young Shipbuilding—my latest buy.
What good was a killing in Han-seong Steel if Geum-young Shipbuilding plunged straight into the basement from here? It would all amount to nothing.
“Still… I caught a definite scent from this report.”
The moment the Team Leader dropped 2 billion won into my account,
this report's rich, heady fragrance had come calling to me.
Reading it through, the content was honestly nothing remarkable.
Order books were still in freefall, but since prices had hit rock bottom, wasn't it about time for at least one rebound? That was the extent of the forecast.
The problem was that even here, the report recommended against buying shipbuilders.
Yes, a bounce might come once—but the industry's outlook was so poor that investors should never, under any circumstances, enter the sector.
'And yet I bought anyway…… which means there really is something to it, right?'
The moment I'd finished the report, the fragrance that had been bursting like fireworks vanished without a trace, and that vile stench came back to torment me all over again.
Only after I'd bought up Geum-young Shipbuilding did the smell finally stop.
Like a treat handed to a kid who'd just finished his homework.
'My instincts have been dead-on so far, but…….'
Going by the data, my nose hadn't missed a single call since my days in the Research Center. Not once.
But anyone can trip on the tenth try.
And if this one turned out to be wrong……
Dizzying scenarios flickered through my mind one after another.
'Still, selling out now would be idiotic.'
If I steeled myself, gagged down the stench, and placed the order, I could do it.
But who on earth would absorb 2 billion won worth of shares?
There had been so many sell orders stacked up that buying had been no trouble at all—but unloading them again was a different beast entirely.
Because there was nothing but sellers, and not a single buyer to be found.
“Whew. Let's not borrow trouble.”
I tore my eyes away from the monitor entirely.
Staring at it did nothing but churn my stomach.
And so I was idly scrolling through one financial news article after another on my phone when—
“……Hm?”
One headline seized my attention.
For two straight days, Team Leader Oh had felt as if his insides were burning.
Was the kid just a beast with no self-preservation instinct—or was he actually planning to wait until the stock was worth less than scrap paper?
Kang Suho simply left both his Han-seong Steel and Geum-young Shipbuilding positions alone, selling nothing.
The good news: Han-seong Steel kept slamming into its daily upper limit, one day after another—a bonfire of profits. The bad news: Geum-young Shipbuilding had, in the meantime, drifted a little lower.
“Back then, I wanted to tell him to cut his losses before it was too late……”
Geum-young Shipbuilding couldn't even be sold—there was no one left to buy it.
And the part that tormented him most? Our young master was lounging around, perfectly at ease, idly playing with his phone.
Someone could have scolded him for browsing his phone during work hours, but the Trading floor was freer than most people imagined.
Once a trader judged there was nothing worth trading that day, leaving early, goofing off, doing whatever—nobody said a word about it.
Because this was not a place that judged your work ethic. It judged one thing and one thing only: your results.
“You must have been going out of your mind.”
He wasn't wrong.
Checking the prices of Han-seong Steel and Geum-young Shipbuilding, Team Leader Oh had washed his face dry more times than he could count.
“But it's fine now.”
……Because the sweet fruit of patience had finally ripened!
“Bwahahaha! Didn't I tell you? I said there had to be a source!”
Team Leader Oh, Park Gwa-jang beside him, and every last securities man on Yeouido—none of them, not even in their wildest dreams, had imagined shipbuilding stocks would come roaring back to life.
“The timing is just insane. I mean—how does an entire ship just die in the middle of the open sea and start drifting?”
At first, the odd vessel grinding to a halt here and there barely registered as news.
But over two days, a full seven ships went dead in the water.
“The moment that LNG carrier first stopped in the Barents Sea, every ship trailing behind it stalled out too. And it was that super cold snap, right?”
The so-called Polar Vortex.
The jet stream that had been corralled over the Arctic came loose, and a super cold wave descended on the fleet like a predator.
“A properly built ship would've shrugged it off. The Chinese-built ones simply couldn't take it.”
By regulation, an LNG carrier was supposed to be engineered to endure temperatures below minus fifty degrees Celsius—it was a baseline requirement, not an option. But in the wake of this disaster, it came out that in their manufacturing process the Chinese yards had swapped out the special-grade steel for defective material.
“The press is in an absolute frenzy right now. Calling it a disaster that was waiting to happen.”
Korea had over twenty years of accumulated know-how and boasted, by any honest measure, the finest technology in shipbuilding. But because Korean ships came at a premium, companies had kept choosing Chinese yards instead.
“The damages are sitting at trillions of won right now. Think how much cargo a single one of those ships carries—chemicals, pharmaceuticals, gas, the whole spread. That's why the losses keep climbing. And our Korean shipbuilders are milking it for all it's worth, running nonstop publicity: not one of our ships has ever had a failure like that. Not once in history.”
And so Korean shipbuilding stocks were skyrocketing.
No new orders had landed yet—but European companies were moving fast, moving to suspend the operation and purchase of Chinese-built vessels for the foreseeable future.
“I believed in him. Someone Director Geum Gaho personally vouched for? The quality of the information landing on his desk had to be a different class entirely. Incredible. Though you'd think he could've shared a little of it with us.”
“…….”
Well, what could I say.
Han-seong Steel was already riding a rocket, and Geum-young Shipbuilding was lifting off right behind it.
“Hey, why's your face been like that for a while now?”
If one thing was sticking in my craw, it was Park Gwa-jang standing beside us, silently working through cigarette after cigarette.
Somehow, his expression looked worse than before.
“Team Leader. Doesn't something feel off to you?”
“Now what?”
“Making money in advance off insider knowledge—earnings numbers, merger news, a contract win—it happens all the time. It's illegal, sure, but in this industry it's practically routine.”
“And?”
“This is different, Team Leader. This is an incident.”
Park Gwa-jang's face had hardened even further than before.
“Several ships just froze dead in the Barents Sea. Is that the kind of thing you learn in advance just because you have a good source?”
“Well……”
“A ship breaking down and stopping at sea is something not even the President knows in advance. Unless you're God, how could anyone know when a machine is going to fail? But that intern knew. He knew it precisely—that's why he pressed the buy button.”
“……!”
The smile drained slowly from Team Leader Oh's face.
“If you forced every piece into a puzzle, I suppose you could get lucky and predict that a record-breaking cold wave would hammer the LNG fleet and cause failures. But supercomputers can't even forecast the weather accurately. And this kid fired off a full-position buy on nothing but scraps like that?”
And the accidents hadn't been confined to the Barents Sea.
“Two more ships stopped dead in the North Sea too. Not from the cold—pure engine failure. The weather excuse didn't even hold up there, which is part of why it blew up even bigger.”
“Wh-what exactly are you trying to say?”
“This isn't the realm of analysis, Team Leader. It's the realm of prophecy. But there's another possibility too.”
“The other possibility?”
“That the accidents were caused deliberately……”
“!?”
Team Leader Oh jolted in shock and instinctively scanned the room, checking whether anyone might have overheard.
“Stop talking crazy!”
“I'm just running a private thought experiment. Because without it, none of this makes any sense at all.”
Park Gwa-jang's words did carry weight.
Because if it wasn't that kind of paranoid fantasy, then Kang Suho's judgment made even less sense.
'What on earth kind of information network does that young master have?'
By now, it was starting to genuinely frighten him.