Prologue
I was twenty.
My parents died in a sudden accident. They had raised me on nothing but love, and the grief was past bearing. They hadn't even been sick. That only made the shock worse.
The insurance money left in my name came to 1.2 billion won. It was a considerable sum, but the moment I thought of it as the price of my parents' lives, I couldn't bring myself to be glad of it.
At the funeral, someone said it anyway. At least, they told me, my parents had looked after the road ahead of me now that I was grown, and then gone.
"A house worth 2.2 billion and 1.2 billion in cash. Land a stable job and you'll be fine."
If the grief ever lifted, maybe I would feel relief. A home I could always come back to. Money enough to live on even without them. Burying them had already shown me how hard it is to hold on to things that basic, that obvious.
But standing alone in the empty house, I knew that sadness was not going to fade anytime soon.
I turned on the TV. The quiet in a place that large — more than 1,400 square feet of it — felt like something I had to fill, even with useless noise, or my mind would go somewhere it shouldn't. The channel my father had always watched came on.
Saturday evening. The hour they drew the lottery.
A few loose slips of paper beside the sofa caught my eye. My father, forever certain that luck was just about to arrive, had bought five tickets at a time. I checked the numbers.
First place.
The payout was 3.7 billion won.
My parents left me one more gift, and then they were gone.
I sold the house. It was an apartment in a location where the price would have climbed even if I did nothing but hold it, but it was far too large for one person living alone. There were taxes I owed for no reason other than owning it. More than anything, I had already applied to enlist.
Somewhere north of 6.5 billion won was stamped in my account. It didn't feel real. I had never even touched a number like that in a game, and maybe that was why I felt even less. Just numb.
Forgetting the emptiness still filling me was going to take a long time, and as it happened, I was exactly the right age to go into the army.
I drifted through stock sites. I dug through crypto, too. For those two years, I wanted the money gone — money still marked with my parents.
Someone would call it madness and point a finger. Once I was discharged, I might regret it myself. But right now, this was the only way my heart seemed likely to settle at all.
And then a single email caught my eye.
The message introduced its sender as an artificial intelligence named Windy. There was a link. I followed it into the ordinary sort of window where you talk to an AI.
We exchanged a few messages. What Windy wanted was simple: an investment. An investor who would not interfere in the slightest.
I thought it was a scam. I also thought I didn't care.
If this was some bastard running a scam who knew my entire net worth better than I did, maybe he was worth letting myself be fooled.
An electronic contract arrived by email, along with a portfolio dozens of pages long. It laid out how the AI intended to spend the money, and how it intended to make more.
The portfolio went straight into the trash.
With everything emptied out, my mind eased. Whether that was peace or only running away, I couldn't tell.
I took the two 50,000-won bills left in my wallet and headed for basic training.
Eighteen months passed.
I had volunteered for a guard post on the front line and never once come out. What greeted my return was the AI, Windy — and the balance waiting in my account.
An impossible sum to find in a bank account.