How an Eight-Year-Old Spends Money - 4
More than seven hundred million won.
Add what I already had, and it came to nearly nine hundred million. Precisely eight hundred seventy million.
Eight hundred seventy million at just eight years old.
But that wasn’t the important part. What mattered far more than a few piles of cash was the fact that my memories lined up perfectly with the future.
Once I confirmed that the knowledge and information I carried were accurate, nothing could stop me.
Before December ended, I bought a new stock.
Juhan Fire.
Right now it was an ordinary insurance company trading at a mere 1,800 won a share. Around this time next year, though, the price would jump tenfold. One of the top five conglomerates in Korea would acquire it. Of course the stock would skyrocket, and my investment would come back ten times over.
Juhan Fire. 455,555 shares. A full eight hundred twenty million won’s worth. I poured in everything except the fifty million I left as a safety net.
So next year I’d have at least seven billion?
“Hehehe…!!”
“Something good happen?”
“You bet~”
“Stocks?”
“Yes.”
“What is it this time?”
“That’s a secret.”
“So stingy…! Come on, give me a little hint, Bodhisattva! I’ll pay any fortune-telling fee you want!”
“I’m not a Bodhisattva.”
Ever since the Teni Electronics windfall, Lawyer Choi Myeonghun had started calling me Bodhisattva. Fair enough—an eight-year-old turning two hundred million into more than seven hundred million would make anyone superstitious.
Still, I never gave him a single scrap of stock information. One word from me could completely rewrite Choi Myeonghun’s life. Just like people who win tens of billions in the lottery and then destroy themselves, I could wreck one man’s entire existence—and his family’s along with it.
More than that, he wasn’t being serious. As my legal guardian, Lawyer Choi could find out exactly which stocks I’d bought whenever he wanted. The fact that he didn’t meant the whole thing was just banter.
“Lawyer.”
“What? Going to give me even the first letter?”
“Let’s drop the stock talk.”
“Ahem…! Fine. What is it?”
“I need you to find someone.”
“Someone?? Ah… your parents…?”
“Ha… parents? I don’t have people like that.”
The humans who birthed me and threw me away. I didn’t want to know who they were, and I didn’t care how they were living. Even if they appeared right in front of me, I wouldn’t feel a thing. No rage, no resentment, no longing, no fondness—nothing left.
“Then who are you looking for?”
“Nakamoto Satoshi. Or Satoshi Nakamoto.”
“A Japanese person?? Who is he?”
“Someone who’s going to turn the whole world upside down.”
The developer of Bitcoin, the man who would kick off a global coin frenzy. I intended to find him. Even in 2035, though, no one ever learned who Satoshi Nakamoto really was. Could I actually track him down?
“You’re saying he might not even be Japanese?”
“Right. The name I gave you is just an alias. No one knows his nationality, age, gender, or what he looks like.”
“And you still want me to find him? I’d have better luck finding a needle in a sand dune. It’s impossible.”
“Still, please look into it. Highest chance he’s a hacker, computer scientist, or someone in IT. And he’s definitely not Korean.”
A Korean would never have used a Japanese name. Not a high-and-mighty Chinese person either—if a Chinese national had created it, he would have bragged about it to every neighborhood under the sun. So either he really was Japanese, or he lived on a continent far from Asia.
“And if you somehow find him?”
“Then I’ll be playing golf with Bill Gates and having chicken and beer with Warren Buffett.”
“What…?”
“Just call me if you find him~”
“Hey!! Are you seriously never going to teach me about stocks?!!”
Golf with Bill Gates, chicken and beer with Warren Buffett. If I ever found Satoshi Nakamoto, something like that might actually happen.
“But what is this? Why do I feel so uneasy…”
It felt like I’d taken a dump and forgotten to wipe. Filthy and sticky. Why on earth…
“Ah!! The Atonement Room!! Son of a…! Taxi!!!!”
I’d left all the future information I’d written on the walls of the Atonement Room exactly as it was. Last time I’d only taken pictures with my phone; I never thought to erase anything.
“Whew…”
Thank god. The lock I’d newly fastened was still hanging there. That meant no one but me had entered.
“All right, time to scrub.”
I soaked a stiff-bristled mop in foamy water and started scrubbing the walls. Erasing the notes in chronological order, I reviewed every piece of information I’d written one last time.
“Ah… the financial crisis is coming soon.”
The subprime mortgage crisis, the global financial meltdown, the collapse of Lehman Brothers—an economic disaster that would be remembered from countless angles and eventually turned into multiple movies. Plenty of people made fortunes inside that crisis.
Should I try it too? I thought about it, but jumping in wasn’t as simple as it sounded. You couldn’t just buy stocks; you had to short them. For someone who hadn’t studied finance professionally and had only memorized which stocks would rise when, the whole thing was a headache. I already had plenty of ways to make money without diving into that mess, so I stuck to my own method of investing.
Just like this.
Proceeds from selling Juhan Fire stock: 7,120,470,427 won.
“Woooow~~ It’s snowing~~ Naye! It’s snowing!! Hurry up and come out~!!”
“Kh…! Khkhkhkh…!!”
“Uuung?? Sunwoo, do you like snow that much??”
“Eunsol.”
“Ung??”
“You know what’s the easiest thing in the world?”
“Uuung… what’s the easiest??”
“Making money. Puhahahahaha!!!!!”
“Sunwoo’s being weird…”
A few days before I turned ten, I became a boy tycoon with more than seven billion won in assets.
I never found Satoshi Nakamoto.
Even after 2009 passed, Bitcoin never appeared.
The lottery ticket I bought the year I turned ten didn’t win first prize either.
The future had changed.
“Hmm… nice weather~”
Or maybe it hadn’t. Stocks, the World Cup, and every other incident I remembered were still unfolding exactly as I knew them. So the handful of futures that had shifted might be a kind of lock meant to keep me from running completely wild.
“Not the worst thing in the world, I guess.”
“What’s not the worst?”
Eunsol’s face filled my vision as she blocked the warm sunlight. The little-girl features were still there, but she had changed a lot too. Well… it was already 2015. Ten years had passed since I returned to the past. I was seventeen, and of course Eunsol was a seventeen-year-old girl as well.
“Isn’t class about to start?”
“Yeah, not about to—it’s already started. Teacher said to drag you back.”
“Ah…”
I sat up from the bench. When I lifted my head, the teacher standing by the classroom window looked down at me with a chilly expression and raised a fist.
“Tch… let’s go.”
“Okay~”
Having a lot of money wasn’t pure happiness. It made the ordinary daily life I’d wanted most of all feel boring. Why did I have to go to school? Why did I have to study? Even the natural duties of a student no longer felt natural. I’d gone through a full storm-and-stress phase in middle school, but I’d pulled myself together quickly and was attending high school with reasonable diligence. Honestly, counting my previous life, I was going through puberty past forty—kind of embarrassing.
“Class is over. Don’t all sprint straight to the PC bang. Exercise or study. Got it?”
“Yeees~~”
“And don’t skip cleaning. Especially you, Cha Sunwoo! I’ll come up in ten minutes to check.”
“Yes.”
“At least your answers are snappy…!”
The moment the homeroom teacher left the classroom, I grabbed my bag. I had zero intention of cleaning.
“Sunwoo~ PC bang?”
“You live at the PC bang or what? Sunwoo, forget that—let’s play a game of basketball today~”
“Hey, we already scheduled soccer with Class 3 today, remember?”
“Today’s the day? Then everyone to the field~!!”
“Does anyone want to hear my opinion?”
I didn’t want the PC bang, basketball, or soccer. Today I just wanted to sit in a café with good sunlight and drink coffee. But these coltish idiots were deciding the next schedule among themselves and dragging me along.
Bang!!!
I nearly jumped out of my skin. The classroom door slammed shut hard enough to break, and the guy who’d been about to leave first toppled backward in shock. Yet neither he nor anyone else got angry. They were too scared.
Because Lee Naye stood blocking the doorway like a final boss.
“Clean before you go.”
“Yes.”
“Let’s clean.”
“Yeah. Gotta loosen up the body while cleaning, hahaha…”
“……”
“You too.”
“Yeah, of course.”
I started cleaning without a word of complaint. Class president and first place in the midterms school-wide. Boys and girls alike feared her more than the teachers. The kind of person who looked like she wouldn’t bleed even if you stabbed her with a needle…
“What are you looking at? Clean.”
“I am cleaning. How do you keep getting more rotten—”
“……”
“Konjac… want some konjac?”
“Konjac my ass. Just clean.”
“Yeah.”
Me, who’d briefly gone delinquent during puberty. Eunsol, who’d always been so gentle you wondered if she’d even had a puberty. And Lee Naye, whose personality had turned ice-cold after puberty. Why had she changed like that? When we were little, at least teasing her made her cry. Tease her now and my skull would probably crack.
“Hey, you guys grew up together since you were kids, right? Was she always like that?”
“Nah, not that bad. She was pretty kind and innocent.”
“No way…”
“Lee Naye?? Holy crap…”
“The girl who slapped a guy in the cafeteria just for confessing was kind and innocent??”
“That was because the bastard kept spreading rumors that they were dating when they weren’t.”
“Ooooh~~ What’s this? Since when does Cha Sunwoo take Lee Naye’s side? Are you two dating?”
“Isn’t he dating Sol?”
“No way, two-timing?? Hey! You trying to monopolize both goddesses of our class?!”
Goddesses, huh… Naye and Eunsol were popular, true. Naye was tall enough, had a good figure, a pretty face, and top grades—she’d been far more popular when we first enrolled. Once her vicious personality became known, the heat died down a little. Eunsol was short but had a cute, pretty face and a gentle nature, plus the surprise charm of an enormous chest; her popularity kept climbing. Probably a lot of guys decided Naye was an unclimbable tree and switched routes to Eunsol.
Neither of them, though, showed any particular interest in boys. Naye especially hated people talking about her behind her back like this.
“I didn’t say anything.”
“Who said you did?”
“Then why again?”
“Someone’s looking for you.”
“Me??”
“Did you do something wrong? The person looking for you is a cop.”
“……”
A cop looking for me? Why??
I turned my head following Naye’s gaze. Outside the open classroom door, a police officer stood with one leg cocked, and our eyes met.
Thud— thud— thud—
The officer walked toward me and pulled out a pair of gleaming handcuffs. Then he snapped them around my wrist.
Click— clatter-clatter!!
I was cuffed. Something I’d never once imagined. Why on earth?
“Cha Sunwoo, you are under emergency arrest on suspicion of unauthorized phone-number change.”
“Unauthorized phone-number change…? Wh-what is that…?”
“Don’t take our Sunwoo away!!”
“You could just talk to him! Why are you putting handcuffs on him!!”
Eunsol and even Naye grabbed the officer’s arms, trying to protect me. Honestly, I was grateful. I never expected Naye to step in, even if Eunsol would.
But what the hell was “unauthorized phone-number change” supposed to be?!!
“Pfft…!!”
“Are you… laughing?”
“Hahahahaha~ You idiot. There’s no such crime.”
“….What exactly are you doing?”
“It’s me. Don’t you remember?”
What was he talking about? I didn’t know any cops… wait???
“Are you… Hyeonuk hyung??”
“That’s right. Long time no see, Sunwoo.”