The Path to Eight Hundred Million
Rattle-rattle! Clunk!
"Ugh! This is heavy! Hyung, help me out!"
Noh Beomjin, now twenty-seven, came struggling through the doorway under the weight of two enormous suitcases and a backpack nearly the size of his own torso. The load was so crushing he still hadn't cleared the threshold.
He really did pack a lot.
His younger brother wore his hair short, his features sharp and clean-cut, with a lean, agile look about him. Handsome enough, in a way.
Not that Hoojin would ever admit it.
"You sure you're still in your twenties?"
He hoisted a suitcase as if it weighed nothing and carried it inside, his tone dry with amusement.
"Whoa? What the—hyung, have you been working out?"
Watching him move the luggage so effortlessly, Beomjin looked faintly startled and scanned him from head to toe.
"No, hang on. We saw each other barely six months ago. How does a person change this much? Who even are you? Are you really Noh Hoojin?"
"Watch how you talk to your older brother."
Smack!
As Beomjin edged closer for a thorough inspection, their mother swatted him across the back. He turned to her with a look of pure injustice.
"Ow! No, Mom—it might not even be him! Haven't you seen the movies? An alien could've taken over a human body! Look at him—all that muscle. And that superhuman strength…"
This little bastard… I'm going to have to keep an eye on him.
They closed the shop early that day and went out for dinner, the three of them. Of course, "out" meant the restaurants practically within stumbling distance of the storefront.
For the first time in a long while they grilled samgyeopsal together, talking quietly as a family. After a long, full meal they stepped outside to find the sky already darkening.
The bus tickets had been booked in advance. If they wanted to make it on time, they had to leave now.
"You're really not going to see your father before you go?"
"What would be the point? I'd be lucky if he didn't just yell at me. I'll come back down for the holidays."
"All right. If that's what you want."
His blunt reply left their mother looking deflated, resigned.
A van taxi pulled up a moment later. With this much luggage, a regular cab hadn't even been an option.
"We'll be going, then. Don't overdo it—take care of yourself."
"You too. Call me the second you arrive."
He offered an awkward goodbye, loaded the bags, and climbed into the taxi. Beomjin finished stowing the rest of the luggage, pulled their mother into a tight hug, and followed him in.
She kept waving until they were out of sight.
Ah. Now I feel guilty. But it can't be helped. Right now, I have no desire to deal with Father.
On the express bus bound for Seoul, Beomjin asked,
"How long are you planning to go without seeing Dad?"
"…Want me to put you back on a bus heading south?"
"Sorry."
His brother didn't press the subject again.
By the time they reached Seoul, night had already fallen.
They unloaded the bags from the taxi and stood at the front gate. Beomjin's jaw dropped.
A few days earlier Hoojin had had the outer walls and the house exterior renovated and freshly painted, and the place looked as clean and new as a brand-new home.
"Holy—this is our house?"
"No. Not our house. My house."
With a blank expression he dragged one of the suitcases inside. Beomjin trailed after him, swiveling his head in every direction and letting out a steady stream of admiration.
"Whoa—a detached house in Seoul? Hyung, when did you even save up this much money?"
"Quit talking nonsense and go unpack. Your room's on the second floor. I just spent six hours on a bus—I'm exhausted."
"Okay! Rest up, then!"
Beomjin answered with pure excitement.
Hoojin understood the feeling. He had been just as thrilled the first time he walked through that door. Watching his brother light up like this brought a fresh wave of emotion.
A kind of quiet pride, maybe.
Bzzzt—
His phone vibrated. A message from his brother.
Yeah… cancel the pride.
He ignored the message, took a shower, and stretched out on the bed.
It wasn't so much that his body was tired as that his head felt heavy. His mother's situation kept circling through his mind, needling at him.
How much do buildings around there go for?
He opened the real-estate map app he had installed earlier and scrolled through the listings he had bookmarked. Every one of them sat near his mother's snack shop.
Most were two-story buildings, and because the area was a well-known food alley, the sale prices were nothing to sneeze at.
Every structure visible on Street View etched itself into his mind as clean numbers and data, the whole street resolving into something that felt like an entirely different world.
The foot traffic was excellent. The commercial district was alive and constantly moving.
Simple yield around five percent. Strong tenant stability. Weekday pedestrian volume about two thousand; weekends over four thousand. High ratio of detached houses in the area means a food alley has a built-in local customer base…
Among them, one property with solid location and decent condition was listed at roughly eight hundred million won.
Eight hundred million…
A large sum. But not an impossible one.
All right. Let's set a target: raise eight hundred million, buy a building, and set Mother up with a brand-new shop.
In the short term, the tools at hand were the one hundred thirty million already invested in A-Tech Solution—whose stock was climbing again—and a maximum loan leverage of three hundred million.
But he had already taken out one hundred sixty million in a mortgage when he bought the house.
No more debt.
Life always threw variables. Plans had to stay within what he could actually carry.
Which meant he needed another way to make money besides stocks.
His salary would cover living expenses and the loan payments. Everything else had to come from growing the capital he had already put to work.
He turned the problem over carefully as he drifted into a light, half-conscious sleep.
Lately he had developed the ability to keep thinking even while he slept.
The next day.
Sunday morning.
He pulled on a light set of training clothes and stepped outside. Even in the dead of winter, his body didn't shiver at all.
His brother was already gone. Apparently he had interviews lined up at two well-known restaurants today.
Interviews on a Sunday…?
Then again, restaurants didn't close on Sundays. A Sunday morning, when customer traffic ran higher than on weekdays, might actually be the better time to test new staff and gauge real floor reactions.
Noh Beomjin. Hitting the ground running the second he gets here. Go get 'em.
He headed straight up into the hills and took an easy loop around the trail. Plenty of other people were out enjoying a morning walk. Jogging through the clean air left his lungs feeling scoured clean all the way down.
Humidity, temperature, the stir of leaves, the condition of the soil under his feet—all of it registered with pure, intuitive clarity.
One full circuit later, he returned home. He showered, ate a simple salad for breakfast, and powered on the computer.
Then he began digging through every scrap of information on cryptocurrency he had been turning over in his mind all night. Contingency strategies for a USDT peg collapse. Shifts in whale movement patterns after the Luna crash. And on and on.
Fragments of things he had overheard over the years began to overlap, and his understanding of crypto deepened by degrees.
In his current situation, the fastest and most efficient way to pull together serious money in a short window was crypto.
High risk, high return—of course.
But he had already worked out a method that used crypto to generate solid returns at relatively low risk.
It existed only as calculations inside his head, so he didn't assume it would map cleanly onto reality. That was why he intended to go deeper—through the internet, through books—until he truly understood the space and could approach it properly.
If his thinking proved right and he could apply it with enough flexibility, raising eight hundred million wouldn't take all that long.
What he found online mostly covered how trading worked and how the systems ran. That much he could absorb in ten minutes.
And almost everything funneled toward signing up for exchanges or YouTube channels. He tried a few out of curiosity. None of it had any real substance—just flashy videos about making hundreds of millions in a single day.
Something was missing. The thirst for knowledge hadn't been quenched. He needed information that was concrete and grounded in reality.
Then, suddenly, he remembered a close friend who had been urging him for years to try crypto.
Ryu Junseok.
A college classmate, exceptionally good with computers, the kind of guy people around campus had freely called a genius. Both of them had been introverts, which made them close, and they had stayed in touch ever since.
Though it had been a while since they'd actually seen each other face to face.
When Hoojin graduated and entered the workforce, Junseok had chosen his own private world over the one outside. Timid and withdrawn by nature, living almost entirely through his computer, he had become a complete shut-in.
Hoojin had been too busy scraping by to visit, and more recently his health problems had made it impossible.
He still remembered the flood of messages about crypto Junseok had sent him right before the brain-tumor diagnosis.
He searched for the name on his phone and pressed call without hesitation.
"Junseok. What are you doing?"
"…Why are you calling all of a sudden?"
A gloomy voice answered after a long pause.
"You still living in the same place?"
"Yeah, I am, but—"
"If you've got time today, let's meet for a bit. I'll come to you."
"Today? Out of nowhere?"
The panic in his voice was obvious, but Hoojin didn't back off.
"Just wait. Text me if you need anything. It'll take about two hours."
He hung up and got ready to leave.
Two hours later.
He arrived at the university district near Samgyeong University in Suwon, Gyeonggi Province.
Amazingly, the place had barely changed in seven years. The young energy unique to a college town, the shabby snack shops and bars, the grimy walls, the utility poles plastered with tutoring flyers—all of it was still there.
He passed a chicken place with a yellow signboard and turned into an alley. Junseok had always lived alone in a studio near campus. Fortunately, the building from his memory was still standing.
He climbed the stairs to Junseok's unit and found empty delivery boxes stacked high outside the door. Every shipping date was recent.
Still not leaving the house, then.
Ding-dong.
He pressed the intercom. A slow stir of movement answered from inside—a presence he never would have sensed in the old days.
The door opened halfway, and a gaunt, scrawny man with a rough beard and messy hair poked his face out.
"You actually came?"
"What, was I supposed to send a fake?"
"Ah, well… come in."
He cracked the door wider. Even in the middle of winter, heat rolled out of the room. Junseok was wearing a short-sleeved shirt and shorts.
"Are you really Noh Hoojin? Something about your whole vibe is different…"
He looked Hoojin up and down, eyes narrowing.
"It's me. Don't worry about it. Anyway—it's good to see your face after so long."
Hoojin slung an arm around his shoulders as he said it. Both of them were shy by nature, but alone together they had always been free with each other. That was just how friendship worked.
The interior was exactly what he had expected. Four computer towers alone. Desks and monitors lining the walls, keyboards, electronic components of every kind, and cup-ramen containers and energy-drink cans staked out at every seat. Barely room to set a foot down.
"Ugh—this is suffocating. What are all these computers for? You still living and breathing crypto?"
He shrugged off his coat, frowning.
"These days it's actually pretty decent."
Junseok muttered it like a complaint.
Hoojin made one last sweep of the monitors.
And then the charts spread across those screens began pouring into his mind at high speed.
Will the method I've been thinking about actually work?