A Sister's Watchful Eye
After parting ways with Noh Hoojin, Kang Hanna loaded Kang Bitna into the car and headed home together.
She stole glances at her sister’s quieter-than-usual profile and kept her silence. Bitna looked lost in thought, but this was hardly the right moment to pry.
Once home, Hanna washed away the day’s fatigue under a stream of warm water. Her mind, however, only grew more tangled.
Noh Hoojin, huh…
It had begun with simple curiosity. Her little sister, who had never shown the slightest interest in men, suddenly had someone she liked. Of course Hanna’s attention was snared. Then came the real shock: the man wasn’t responding.
Bitna might be hiding her identity, but even without the family name she was more than attractive enough. And yet some guy had turned her down?
So Hanna had put her staff on him. Every report that came back only stacked surprise upon surprise, like peeling an onion that never ran out of layers.
He had caught a company molester, saved their uncle—President Choi Kangho—pulled people from danger on the subway and at the airport, and even landed an exclusive contract with Han Yojung. After that he racked up top performance reviews and stood at the forefront of every major ad campaign and project.
The fact that Han Yojung had insisted on Hoojin as a condition of the deal was astonishing enough. On top of everything else, he had casually overpowered Hanna’s own bodyguards. She had engineered the situation on purpose; he hadn’t flinched, handling it with perfect calm.
The guy’s a total superhuman. And before all this? Zero records. Did he just drop out of the sky or what?
Fresh from the shower, she sat at her vanity and began her skincare routine, replaying the conversation they had shared in the private room.
Asking what he wanted had been a test. No matter how pretty the answer, it would only have been a desperate scramble to escape the moment. Hoojin’s reply, though, had been different. He had seen straight through her.
She scooped a dab of eye cream onto her fingertip and gently patted it around her eyes, murmuring under her breath.
“Candy-coating, huh… He told me to watch.”
At the time she had half-dismissed it as bluster. Yet the look on Hoojin’s face, the quiet force of his presence, had been something else entirely. No arrogance. No groveling. Most of all—no fear.
He claimed he had liked Bitna long before he knew she belonged to the LK Group. Coming from anyone else, she would have written it off as a lie. With him, she almost wanted to believe it was true.
If he had anything to hide, he never would have admitted to Bitna that he had only recently learned her real identity. He would have simply worn a mask and pretended to be shocked.
Everything about Noh Hoojin felt direct, challenging, and ice-cold in the head. Beneath it all, though, ran a calm, unshakable conviction. He was not a man of empty talk.
Of course, people like him demanded caution. That personality type never simply fell into line. He would take the lead with Bitna himself. If the path he chose was wise and right, Bitna would be happy. If it was not, her life would turn rough.
Still, after meeting him face-to-face, Hanna found herself wanting to take the risk. That was why she had kept offering advice that wasn’t quite advice.
Was I just sticking my nose where it didn’t belong?
A faint smile tugged at the corner of her mouth as she smoothed lotion down her neck.
I think I finally understand a little of why she was drawn to him. Our Bitna found herself a pretty decent man.
She could guess which of his qualities had captured her sister’s heart. Yet that same spark might prove a dangerous game of fire. For now, simply looking at each other was enough. The wider their world became, the more obstacles they would slam into—that much was certain.
This big sister will have to help them as much as she can.
What worried her most was the family discovering the relationship. She had lived through that storm herself once upon a time, so the methods for shielding them rose naturally in her mind.
Riding home in the taxi, I went back over every point of my conversation with Kang Hanna.
What bothered me most was the exposure.
She wasn’t wrong. Kang Bitna—youngest daughter of a chaebol family—and me, an ordinary office worker from an ordinary household. This was Korea. Family trouble ranked as the highest-difficulty ordeal whether you were watching a movie, a drama, or living real life.
And I still wasn’t ready. To become a man who wouldn’t be overshadowed by Bitna’s background, I still had mountains of work ahead. So that her family would never have reason to look down on me…
Hold on. It’s not like I’m marrying Kang Bitna tomorrow. Do I really need to take this so seriously? Then again… making money was the plan from the start.
I decided to treat it as a side objective. Just a side objective. Something I had casually slipped into the original plan. Nothing more, nothing less.
While my thoughts wandered, the taxi arrived home. I went straight upstairs, threw open Junseok’s door, and called out,
“We’re working together tonight!”
“Huh?”
Junseok, who had half a dozen windows open and was staring at coin charts, frowned at me.
“Why the sudden fuss?”
“I’ve been slacking too much lately. Feels like my edge is dulling. Just want to sharpen it back up.”
I kept my tone casual. The room had been designed from the start for two people to work side by side, so space was never an issue—though until now Junseok had been handling every trade alone, hopping between both seats.
He narrowed his eyes.
“What, did Bitna say she’d only marry you if you had a hundred billion won?”
I flinched.
“It’s not like that. Bitna’s not some materialist.”
When I answered with a straight face, Junseok threw both hands up.
“Whoa, scary.”
And so, “just as originally planned,” I decided to trade coins with Junseok in the evenings whenever I could spare the time.
A little later, after a quick snack, some light stretching, and a trip to the bathroom, we settled in. Soft light filled the room; our eyes never left the monitors. Bright lighting only broke concentration.
Between the laptop and the tablets we had eight screens in total, all flickering with live data. To anyone who didn’t understand coins, it would have looked like pure chaos—nothing but numbers racing past.
“Feather’s second support line has over a seventy percent chance of breaking. If the next candle closes below it, we short immediately.”
“Got it.”
The moment the words left my mouth, Junseok’s hands flew across the keyboard. Almost on reflex he opened the position window and entered the limit order.
“Short entry complete. Support’s breaking… breaking… broke! Take-profit levels?”
“Half at 1967, full close at 1936. If it rebounds, flip straight to long.”
“Okay!”
“Hey—volume’s flooding in. Get out.”
Before I finished speaking the candle rocketed upward. Junseok’s face stayed blank as he clicked take-profit at the exact right second.
“Profit locked. Ooh, not bad!”
“We’re not done. Now the real game starts.”
I tapped the screen and pulled up volume indicators, RSI, and MACD all at once.
“Something’s off with this Feather coin. Volume’s spiking and the order book is full of spoof orders. Someone’s deliberately pushing it.”
“Spoof orders?”
Junseok raised an eyebrow and looked up, but his eyes still couldn’t spot the anomaly in the charts or the book.
“Yeah. Hundred-lot blocks keep appearing on both the bid and ask at the same time, then vanishing without filling. They’re pinning the price inside a specific range.”
I pointed at the daily chart with the mouse.
“Look here. These candle wicks. See the three consecutive upper wicks? Classic absorption-and-accumulation pattern. Smart money just walked in.”
Junseok’s eyes lit up.
“So… rebound?”
“No. They’ll bait the rebound and then dump. Right now everyone’s thinking ‘maybe the bottom’s in’ and jumping in. That’s when they’ll slam it again and shake them out.”
“Then what do we do?”
“Stay short for now. Once it drops to the 1900 line, get ready to go long. That’s the golden-ratio retracement of the previous wave.”
Junseok nodded and rapidly prepped the order window.
We kept grinding profits until midnight. In three hours we made roughly eight million won. Then we had no choice but to stop. Volume was drying up and my head was starting to heat.
I had burned through too much brainpower in too short a time. Fatigue hit hard and fast—five times worse than studying.
“Whew. That’s enough for today.”
The moment I lifted my hands from keyboard and mouse, Junseok finished closing the last position, tallied the profits, and let out a hollow laugh.
“Holy crap. Almost ten million in that short a window? Trading with you makes me feel like a god of this industry.”
I laced my fingers behind my head and snorted.
“God, my ass. Your hands were always faster and your instincts sharper than mine. I just sketch the outline—you color it in like a genius.”
“Sketch and color… not a bad combo.”
He nodded in agreement.
“I’m heading down. You should rest too before your brain overloads.”
“Yeah. Just a little longer. You go sleep first.”
“Alright.”
I gave him a casual wave and stepped outside into the cold night air. Going straight to bed felt wasteful; I wanted to study a bit more first.
This much should be fine, right?
Back in my room I opened science texts and stacks of papers, feeding my knowledge base. Lately I was realizing just how true the saying was—there’s nothing the internet doesn’t have.
Whenever the day came that I settled down and began real technical development, I needed to research as efficiently as possible. Time equaled money, pure and simple.
Computer science in particular had become a focus. Studying it for the Smart Glasses project was no longer mere curiosity—it was essential. Electronics and mechanical engineering alone had hard limits. Smart Glasses weren’t simple hardware; they were a complete system centered on human vision: real-time data processing, network communication, AI interfaces, predictive user-response modeling—everything.
The first wall I hit was software architecture. The glasses needed their own operating system, plus algorithms that analyzed visual data, natural-language processing for voice commands, and a server structure that stayed synchronized with the cloud in real time. All of it intertwined.
“Hmm… yeah, without a proper major this stuff is insanely complex…”
Recently I had been drilling machine-learning algorithms written in Python, especially the libraries specialized for image processing, working through example after example.
“Whew. No more.”
I let out a short sigh and decided to rest. But it wasn’t pure rest. Lying in bed, I reviewed everything I had studied that day, piece by piece, until sleep took me. Surprisingly, it cost almost no mental energy—like running in power-save mode.
I began designing a virtual interface inside my head. The moment I closed my eyes, a soft interface glowed in the darkness. Heart rate, temperature, ambient light levels flickered quietly along the edges of my vision.
A world where everything answered to thought alone, no finger required. Widgets that floated and shifted with my gaze, a virtual assistant that responded to voice, custom data streams that learned my habits and adapted.
To make all of that real, the road ahead was still long. No—I hadn’t even taken the first step.
But if, at the end of that road, something I built could change people’s lives… wouldn’t that be enough?
And above all…
It would make money.