The World I Never Knew
I headed for Jamsil.
The towering Lotte Tower came into view.
The home I’d bought occupied one of that tower’s crowning floors.
I parked in the underground lot and got out.
To be honest, I’d been curious enough to look up Signiel on my own. The only downside, apparently, was that for security reasons you had to switch elevators somewhere in the middle of Lotte Tower.
I can live with that.
I wasn’t the same nobody I’d been before. Of course my life had to change to match. Tightening security was part of that.
But then—
“Isn’t the elevator over there?”
“There’s a separate private elevator for the chairman’s residence.”
“..”
I guess I’d underestimated the power of money. Real rich people erased even that kind of inconvenience.
The head of the secretary’s office handed me a separate card.
From now on, I was supposed to use that to take the private elevator.
The more time passed, the more I felt it.
How precious money was. How good it felt to spend it.
People always said that once you had a lot of money, it stopped feeling like anything special. Yeah, sure—easy to say if you’d been born rich. If you’d had silver spoons in your mouth since the day you were born.
For someone like me, who’d been born dirt poor—plain old bronze, maybe even plastic—it felt new every single day.
I rode the elevator up.
“You’ll have access to a variety of services. A dedicated staff member will be assigned to you, you can use the hotel’s facilities, and you can even call in the hotel chef for an in-house visit.”
There it was. The power of money.
The hotel restaurant I used to have to stare at from a distance.
Now I could have them come straight to my house.
Sure, I’d have to pay for it, but it didn’t feel burdensome at all.
I was rich.
When I arrived and stepped inside, my mouth fell open before I could stop it.
I’d expected a lot. I knew this wasn’t a normal house. But this went far beyond anything I’d imagined.
The interior was impossible to take in at a glance, all soft curves and sweeping space.
About three hundred pyeong. You couldn’t even estimate it with simple arithmetic.
Even if you added twenty of my aunt’s houses together, this place would still probably be bigger.
And because it used two floors, the ceiling height was enormous. Even though it was a duplex.
From one end to the other, you probably couldn’t even get a shout across if you tried.
It would be a bizarre place where you’d have to call someone on the phone just to talk to them in the next room.
“Wow…”
The inside of the house was astonishing, but what really stunned me was the view beyond the windows.
From the seventy-first floor, looking out through a wall of glass, Seoul spread beneath me.
..
It gave me an odd feeling. Beautiful was obvious. The sky felt closer than the ground.
And the apartment towers that had once looked enormous from below now seemed no bigger than Lego bricks.
It felt as if I were standing on top of them, having climbed up by stepping across them one by one.
With Seoul beneath my feet, I felt like I was ruling it.
In a very real sense, I was looking down on it.
“This is nice.”
“I’m glad you like it, sir.”
It really was nice. That was the only way to describe it.
There were eight rooms and seven bathrooms. Parking space for twelve cars.
I wasn’t even sure I’d be able to use all of it.
If I had to force myself to find a flaw, though—
“It does feel pretty empty.”
“I’ll have everything filled in exactly the way you want, Chairman.”
There wasn’t any furniture or appliances yet, which made the place feel stark and barren.
It was emptier than standing in the middle of a sports field.
“Could you definitely make at least a room for watching movies, a room for games, a room for music, a study, and so on?”
“Of course. I’ll make sure the rest of the rooms are put to good use as well.”
What was the best way to describe this?
If I really had to force out a phrase—
Yeah.
A different world.
That was the only thing that fit.
***
Baek Jihyun got back to her studio apartment and collapsed straight onto the bed.
From the moment she’d gotten out of the car to the moment she reached the bed, it had been a very short distance, but her legs had been shaking so badly she’d almost died. And her lower abdomen burned something fierce, too.
Probably because she’d overdone it yesterday, against her better judgment.
“What do I do now..”
To be honest, what had happened yesterday had been half impulsive.
Her older brother—who had seemed so much less confident lately—had suddenly started seeming different, and before she knew it, she was the one leaning on him.
Then alcohol got involved on top of that.
“Ah!”
And that mix was what led to yesterday’s impulsive decision.
Crazy girl.
She couldn’t even date properly, and here she was.
Anyone could tell this was basically being partners, wasn’t it?
And the power in the relationship was all on his side.
“Haa…”
She should accept it.
She didn’t want to cut ties with him.
If she could be greedy and have him, she would. But if she got greedy, it felt like he might disappear from her sight entirely.
So whatever happened, happened.
According to her friends, there were plenty of other women who went out to bars or got sponsored by older men.
As for casual sex partners, that went without saying.
And with so many people cheating anyway, if she looked at it that way, then Oppa was...
..
Her face burned red.
Just from remembering what happened yesterday.
She’d never once imagined she’d end up like this.
***
Half my soul had gone missing by the time I got out of Signiel and made it home in silence.
That was how shocking Signiel had been.
.. Was it this small?
The house I’d seen at my aunt’s place, after all I’d been through in that half-basement rabbit hole, had once looked huge.
But not anymore.
At this rate, I seriously wondered whether my room alone might be about the same size.
When I got to my room, I felt it even more strongly.
My room... isn’t this smaller than the bathroom?
The sense of scale was no joke.
But it wasn’t as if I suddenly started thinking my room was bad.
Rather, Signiel felt like it wasn’t even my house.
I turned my head left and right.
The wallpaper was right there, practically in my face.
Yeah. This was my home.
I finally got my bearings back.
I’d get used to Signiel eventually, but not right away.
I’d only been there for a few months.
My house in Gwangju, where I’d lived for roughly twenty years, was similar in a way.
“A room should be packed tight once you put a bed in it.”
How could they call something the same room when it was big enough to fit a small movie theater?
“I need to adjust.”
I needed to get away from what was familiar.
How long was I supposed to keep living like the old me when I had more than a hundred billion won now?
I didn’t have to worry about going back to how things used to be anymore.
And that was because—
“Not bad.”
January passed, and February came. In that time, Bitcoin had done nothing but keep falling, without so much as a real rebound.
The first time I took partial profits was when it had dropped from around $17,500 to about $14,300.
And now—
“Wow.”
It was around $10 million. I couldn’t help saying wow out loud.
About a 30 percent drop.
An investment of roughly 30 billion won through leverage.
The profit came to about 9 billion won. Add in the original seed money, and that made 11.8 billion won.
..
What had started as a gambling-like investment—something I’d treated as neither here nor there—had somehow turned into a result that surpassed my original money.
I’d checked it now and then, but looking at the whole thing in one place made it even more shocking.
I honestly never would have guessed.
That I’d make another 1 billion won from scratch like this.
And this result included my own choices too, didn’t it?
“Is this even possible...?”
I wondered if it was really possible to make about 1 billion won in profit at once.
But come to think of it, there was no reason it couldn’t be.
Lately, the communities online were saying tens of trillions of won had been liquidated over the course of a month because of the constant drop.
Compared to that, my 1 billion won profit was nothing.
“Hmm... what should I do?”
I was genuinely torn. Should I leave the money in there and ride it, or take profits now while I could?
I studied the chart for a long time. I thought it through. I didn’t overestimate myself either. I was just an ordinary guy who happened to have a lot of money.
And my conclusion was this:
Bitcoin didn’t seem likely to completely collapse.
With this much shock, I expected it to move sideways or keep falling for about a year.
Of course, that wasn’t certainty. It was just a guess.
But wasn’t investment supposed to begin with a hypothesis in the first place?
You had to think about what to do when you were wrong, too.
So I made my decision.
“I’ll pull out 1 billion won into safe assets.”
This time, I’d realize 1 billion won in profits again.
It felt too burdensome to keep it all in there now. Even a 1 percent move from here would erase tens of millions of won in profit.
Now that I’d already seen the result, I knew I’d keep thinking about the money I could lose if I left it alone.
If I pulled out 1 billion won, I’d still have about 200 million left.
I could use that for more leveraged investments.
As for the 1 billion won I’d pulled out, I planned to buy a decent building with it.
Then I’d cover the monthly fixed expenses with the rent it brought in.
Countries around the world kept printing money, so the money supply kept growing. And as it did, scarce assets kept going up in price.
More precisely, the value of the currency kept falling.
Land was a limited resource. And the best land of all was land in Seoul.
People said it was expensive, but expensive things always rose further.
So that was the 1 billion won handled.
And with the remaining 180 million won—
“It’s money I don’t even need.”
I should do some short-term trading. Make aggressive use of leverage.
If I got liquidated, then so be it.
Even then, I’d still have about 200 billion won left.
And I had confidence, too.
The chart being formed now was moving exactly the way I’d expected.
If not, then whatever.
Once I’d made up my mind, I realized the rest of the profits too and moved about 1 billion won into my account.
For now, that was settled. The urgent thing right now was—
Tomorrow I had to go shopping with Jihyun.
Life was good.
Soon enough, I’d have to make a triumphant return to Gwangju.
I was busy, and yet somehow I was this happy?
So this was the world I’d never known.
---