Ellen's Tears (2)
Maybe I shouldn't have listened. For the man who owned Ellen's Tears, it was the kind of story that could turn on him the wrong way — and the thought that settled in me after I heard it was an ugly one.
This lunatic wrecked his life on a game item, still hasn't come to his senses, and now he's angling for a profit. Makes me want to teach him a lesson.
Live long enough and you start to see what people are really made of. They don't have to say a word. Tone, the way they move, the look on their face — sometimes you can tell exactly what they're thinking about you, and in what spirit they're dealing with you. This was one of those moments.
His business was in ruins. He was drowning in debt. And in the middle of all that hardship, the only hope he had left was Ellen's Tears. I could see it plain in his eyes: the hunger to sell the thing for every last won he could squeeze out of it, and claw back something bigger than the life that had already collapsed under him.
The situation was that desperate, so of course he couldn't hide it. There was no slack left in him to hide behind.
Usually, people like that just make me click my tongue. Why live that way? Sell it cheap, sell it fast, and at least buy yourself the room for a fresh start. When that hunger turns on me, though, I get angry. Do I look like a sucker? Even when I can afford the thing, a stubbornness sets in and I don't want to buy. I'm that kind of person. I have no interest in handing someone what they want when they've decided to treat me like a mark.
And yet, with something like 490 quadrillion won sitting in the account, that feeling strangely never came. Not even on the dinner date with Lee Yeonju. I'd heard from her own mouth that what she wanted was money, and I still wasn't particularly angry. If anything, I liked it. I could buy whatever I wanted with money rotting from sheer excess? For me, that was a profitable trade.
This time was no different. Ellen's Tears was an item that even a man drowning in money like me was never supposed to be able to get his hands on. I didn't know who owned it, and if they were putting it to good use, naming any price I liked still wouldn't make them sell. Call twenty billion, thirty billion, and maybe the answer changes — but that was beside the point. If they were willing to put a number on it themselves, that was easier on me.
The best outcome would have been paying what he wanted on the spot and walking out with the item. The moment he caught the look of a man ready to buy, though, he pivoted to an auction, and I had to admit the greed on him was something else. Even so, I laughed. Cute, almost. If he knew what was sitting in my account, what would that greedy face do? Wouldn't he regret skipping the absurd price entirely — double, triple — in favor of an auction?
All it had really cost me was a little inconvenience. Tomorrow at five in the afternoon, I'd join the auction at the Haven auction house and bring the thing home.
Greed didn't stir anything in me one way or the other. So I was grateful.
"Shows up to sell it right when I need it."
The five-star run could wait another day.
My own read on it didn't seem to matter. The viewers looked properly angry, and scrolling the chat, I felt a little of it myself. Still. If he'd named less than double, I couldn't quite bring myself to call it a wild markup. It was viewer hearsay to begin with.
"All right, all right, everybody, settle down. Five-star accessories are worth whatever anyone asks, aren't they? An auction means I buy it at a set price, so if anything, I come out ahead."
If I was going to buy it anyway, better to bring it home in a good mood. I shut down the urge to burn energy cursing some man whose face I didn't even know.
"I'll show you. Just how rich I am. The auction's unified worldwide, right?"
"I'll kill the stream and get some exchanging done, then. I was just going to step into a five-star once today and come back out. Looks like the schedule's changing."
"Secret."
I cut the broadcast and headed straight for Haven Bank.
It had been a little over a day since I'd exchanged something close to twenty-five billion.
"Somebody's moving an absurd amount through here."
I'd already yanked out the Haven money that had been sitting locked up, so by all rights the rate ought to have been trending down. Instead it was holding. That meant a huge volume of Haven currency was still being sold off and swapped for cash.
"Well. I spent some of it myself."
I was curious how far it would fall if I exchanged today. Before that, there was something I needed to check.
"Windy."
"Is it all right for me to be spending money like this?"
At the start, Windy had been clear. She couldn't pay out 490 quadrillion in cash, so it would come as Windy Pay — and along with that she'd handed me something close to three or four trillion in actual cash. Spend too much, she'd said, and the economy breaks; when she ran the numbers, the odds of me ever using the whole sum were zero percent. Back then I'd thought the same. I couldn't even picture what you'd have to buy to burn through 490 quadrillion.
Lately, though, the units I was throwing around had climbed from tens of billions into the hundreds, and a small worry had started to itch. Was it really fine to spend like this?
"...Really?"
And then she bragged.
"Huh. Makes sense."
Haven Bank's exchange fee was ten percent. Hardly a small cut. Even so, the sums moving through it were enormous, and every bit of that fee dropped straight into Windy's pocket.
"So I can exchange with a clear conscience?"
I'd been meaning to ask ever since the exchanges hit the ten-billion range. A straight answer from Windy settled me. In the end I was still just one person, and with Windy's nanobots running through my bloodstream, there was no point living in defiance of what she told me not to do.
"I'll exchange one hundred billion."
I called it clean.
The community lost its mind, and the reason was the sudden drop in Haven Bank's exchange rate. A falling rate isn't usually worth a fuss. The number climbs and slips every single day.
Haven had become another reality, so it moved with the same kinds of winds as the real world. The fees kept anyone from hoarding it the way people hoard dollars or gold, but there were plenty of ways to invest Haven money and grow it. For every user pouring cash in, there was another exchanging what they'd earned in Haven back into cash.
Two years on, a crowd of fairly high-level users had appeared, dungeon profits had surged, and the number of people making real money kept climbing. For one reason or another, the rate had held near 2.8 to 3.3 against 1 for almost a year. More precisely, Haven currency had been slowly losing value. It was still a game, after all, and the more users there were — the more ways there were to earn — the more Haven money entered circulation. Haven Bank printed the stuff, so it could never run short. Call it the limit baked into anything that was still a game.
Which was why the rate almost never ripped upward like that. The closest thing to a real jump had been a few days ago, when Kim Siwoo exchanged.
Whoever had done it didn't matter. To the community, and to the people who made their living in Haven, this was an enormous event.
When the rate thrashes, somebody makes money. Through Haven Bank itself, of course, that trade was impossible.
Off-market deals that skipped the fee were a different story. Prices there tracked the rate, and people were already moving to skim the sudden gap.
There was risk. But if it worked, it was a chance to make serious money sitting still.
The whole mess only fed the anticipation for the auction.