One Hundred Arrows
"Alright! Let's ease into this."
I stretched once, settled into my computer chair, powered on the tower, and opened the Upbit site.
Then I logged into the account Junseok had set up for me at his place and transferred the money from my bank account into it.
Most of my capital was still locked up in A-Tech Solution stock, so all I had for crypto was twenty million won. A reasonable sum for a first experiment.
I immediately put the method I'd planned in advance into motion.
First, from roughly two hundred listed coins, I began selecting one hundred. Of course, I had criteria.
The first was a history of short-term surges. A surge meant eyes and attention — and that meant ants and whales alike were more likely to swarm in looking for a meal.
The second was thematic diversity. Artificial intelligence, gaming, DeFi, stablecoins, green tech, NFTs, memes, the metaverse — a broad spread of positions where something, someday, was bound to hit.
The third was market cap, liquidity, and trading volume, ranked from highest to most active. Without volume, a coin could turn into scrap paper overnight. Safer coins were better.
Whether the adjective "safe" and the noun "coin" could even coexist was another question entirely.
Over the course of an hour, I put two hundred thousand won into each of one hundred coins.
This was the method I'd devised — what I called the Simultaneous Multi-Watch Reaction Trading Method.
The moment any one of those coins spiked, sell, then redistribute into coins sitting at their lows. It wasn't a strategy built for massive returns. But the risk was almost nonexistent.
A one-in-a-hundred risk. Fire a hundred arrows — if even one hits, you win.
Of course it wasn't risk-free. If the entire market rolled over into a downtrend, the damage would come regardless.
An ordinary person couldn't track the price movements of this many coins at once. But I was no longer ordinary.
The instant I bought, I began collecting every coin's real-time movement, trading volume, order-book shifts, social media mention counts, and reactions across every channel — processing them all simultaneously.
Trading could be halted at any moment. Every decision had to be careful.
The one small mercy was that the coins I'd bought sorted themselves by real-time gains. Tracking the ones rocketing upward was remarkably convenient.
I'd finished buying everything and was scanning the list when one coin suddenly began climbing at a ferocious pace on an abnormal surge in volume.
It jumped.
I snapped the chart open. The graph was shooting upward at a truly absurd speed. The critical part was the sell timing — too early or too late, and it was a problem either way.
I moved between the second and minute candles, waiting for the right moment. The instant it crossed the threshold I'd projected, I sold.
As if on cue, the blue minute candle plunged straight down.
Nice.
Cold judgment and a vast flood of information had locked the sell timing perfectly. The old me never could have managed it. My heart would have been hammering too hard to even click properly.
The cashed-out balance read 325,800 won. I'd sold at a sixty-one percent gain.
"Sixty-one percent… the volatility is insane. Stocks were child's play."
I picked another coin I hadn't bought yet and put two hundred thousand into it. That left 125,800 won in cash, which I held back rather than reinvesting.
The altcoin market moved in absolute lockstep with Bitcoin. If Bitcoin dropped, every altcoin shook with it. So when profits came in, parking them as cash instead of immediately reinvesting was the smarter move.
If I'd put in two million per coin instead of two hundred thousand, that profit would have been 1.2 million.
Not bad for short-term high returns. The whole market could still collapse, or a coin I'd bought could suddenly hit the floor — but that level of risk felt manageable.
There was just one problem.
When am I supposed to sleep?
Sleep was the issue. Unlike stocks, which had trading hours, crypto rose and fell without rest, twenty-four hours a day. Watching it was exhausting work. That had probably played a part in Junseok turning into a shut-in in the corner of his room.
But I wasn't particularly worried. Prices could go up or down — that was the nature of the thing. Wake up, sell what rose, wait on what fell. Because I'd diversified instead of going all-in on a single coin, the pressure was light.
I stood up without a second thought and lay down on the bed. I could have kept watching the coins in a half-sleep state, but that was far too inefficient. Better to rest properly and keep my condition sharp.
My phone buzzed.
A text from my younger sister.
I snorted at the message. Thoughtful kid.
I turned off the phone screen and slowly closed my eyes.
The next morning.
From early on, I could hear movement in the living room. My sibling had come downstairs and was doing something in the kitchen — the thick smell of spices told me it was curry.
I was the type to eat lightly in the morning or skip it entirely, so catching the scent of real cooking this early was something I hadn't experienced in a long time.
I got out of bed and checked the coin trading window still open on the monitor first.
"Huh."
A breath of pure disbelief slipped out on its own.
The coin at the very top of my holdings list was surging at +179%. At the very bottom, another was freefalling past –45%.
Was that even possible? Absolute extremes.
Looking closer, of the hundred coins, roughly half were rising and half were falling. The total estimated value of my holdings hadn't changed much from before I'd gone to sleep. Gains and losses were roughly canceling each other out.
I opened the chart for the coin climbing at +179% — Jet.
I rapidly assembled the graph and every related piece of data. While I'd been asleep, it had shot up like a skyscraper and was now slowly drifting lower to the right — down about halfway from its peak.
Just how high did the peak go? Insane.
Selling now would still net me 358,000 won in profit. But I didn't sell.
This isn't over yet.
The reason was clear. On the surface, Jet's chart looked like it had turned bearish. To my eyes, it looked completely different.
The current movement was a simple correction — the natural pullback pattern that followed an abnormal surge. It wasn't a head and shoulders. It wasn't a double top. It was closer to a dip zone building for another climb.
While the supply shook, volume hadn't collapsed, and the drop from the high had stopped precisely on the support line. And more than anything — real-time social media mention volume, the buy-side psychology forming in the communities, inflow from overseas exchanges, on-chain wallet movement patterns, the co-rising patterns of related coins — all of it was screaming inside my head that this was not the sell timing. I could see a path the chart itself didn't show.
I decided to watch a little longer. I hadn't put much capital in, and this was practice — no real pressure. I was certain it would rise again, and observing it as an experiment didn't seem like a bad idea either.
I headed out to the living room, stretched lightly, and made my way toward the kitchen.
"You're up early. What's with the curry?"
"I picked up some groceries on the way home yesterday. Eat before you go to work."
"Ah, well, it feels a little much — but it's hard to refuse something my sibling made. Just one spoonful, then."
I grinned and sat down at the table. As if waiting for exactly that, my sibling filled a large bowl with rice and poured curry over the top.
"You said one spoonful. Why is the bowl the size of a serving dish?"
I squinted as the bowl was pushed toward me.
"You need to eat a lot of rice. Carbs are essential if you want your brain firing in the morning."
Unexpectedly scientific. Come to think of it, if you learned to cook, you'd pick up some nutrition science along the way, wouldn't you? The thought crossed my mind that I should read a few cooking-related books sometime. Maybe I could help out a little.
I lifted the spoon and, without thinking, scooped up a bite of curry. Hot steam rose, and a spicy aroma tickled the tip of my nose.
"Hoo—"
I blew on it lightly to cool it, then put it in my mouth. A rich curry fragrance filled my mouth as the savory depth wrapped around my tongue. The heat hit first, ahead of the sweetness, and the subtle sweetness of potato and onion rose underneath to balance it. Far better than anything store-bought.
My sibling was watching me with a faintly tense expression.
"Oh? Surprisingly decent."
"What do you mean, 'surprisingly'?"
My slightly startled comment made my sibling's brow furrow.
"No — I mean it. It's genuinely good."
"Yeah? That's a relief, then."
My sibling scratched the bridge of their nose, looking sheepish. One of those habits that always showed up when things got awkward.
I would have let it pass without a second thought before. Now I could see the thought and intention behind every single gesture.
Maybe I should enter a world poker tournament while I'm at it. Top rankings would be locked in at minimum.
I'd meant to stop at two or three spoonfuls, but between one thought and the next I'd already cleared well past half the bowl. It really was good.
"Where'd you get this recipe?"
"Does curry even need a recipe? I just went by feel."
A casual brush-off.
"Anyway, that was great. I'm heading to work — text me if anything comes up."
"Yeah. Be careful."
I exchanged a brief goodbye and left the house right away. Eating a solid breakfast really did seem to spin the gears in my head a little faster.
The company was a thirty-minute walk. At a brisk pace, twenty. A distance that might feel slightly taxing to most people — for me, it was nothing.
I leisurely opened the coin trading window on my phone.
Jet Coin: +218%.
It had rebounded again from 179%. Valuation: 646,000 won. Subtract the principal, and the pure profit was 446,000.
Looking at the chart — after dropping halfway from the high, it had bounced exactly off the support line and just broken through the short-term resistance. At the same time, positive reactions to Jet Coin were exploding across communities and social media.
The so-called FOMO — Fear of Missing Out. The stretch where individual investors piled in, terrified of being left behind.
I was moving at the exact center of that current. The rising candles began to stall in place — big drops, climbs back up, the gaps left by the big players being filled by the ants.
This was the real sell timing.
I tapped the sell button immediately.
Sell Complete — Jet Coin
Realized Profit: 445,600 won
And a moment later, the chart began to collapse again.
Every single timing had been perfect.
"This is fun. So this is why people do crypto."
Before I reached the company building, I cleaned up every coin that had hit a reasonable target and every coin that looked hopeless. I wouldn't have time to watch crypto at work, so holding cash for stability made sense. Stocks I could glance at now and then — crypto needed more focus.
Maybe I should just quit the company and do crypto full-time.
I still didn't have enough experience or information for that.
I arrived at the company and headed up to the office. The teammates who were already in suddenly greeted me — but the title they used was strange.
"You've arrived, Manager Noh Hoojin!"
Kim Seungho, the junior associate, called out first in an excited voice.
Huh? Manager?