High School, Again??
"Team Leader."
"What is it?"
"What's this guy doing?"
"Did a whale show up or something?"
AppBit.
It had launched as a shabby little cryptocurrency exchange in the early days, but it rocketed straight to the top of the industry. As a company that had previously built stock-trading software, it won users over from day one with a clean, polished UI. Then it partnered with Bitnance—the number-one exchange in North America—and its name recognition exploded.
Unlike other exchanges, it listed a wide range of altcoins. Word spread among information-hungry coin traders, and they poured in by the droves. Backed by solid capital, AppBit expanded its servers and grew the market at a leisurely pace. Rumors flew on the wind. These days its daily trading volume soared well past the trillion-won mark. Aggressive funding let them aggressively promote the app's convenience—AppBit, built to feel as clean and user-friendly as the stock programs traders already knew.
One of the night-shift trading desk staff called over the response team leader.
"Just now—someone dumped a huge load of USDT over to Bitnance."
"How much?"
"Around a billion won."
"Traitor. With the premium sitting on the domestic market, why wouldn't you trade here? Every last idiot is running to the overseas books."
"Korea doesn't have a futures market, sir."
"Yeah, I know. Damn it."
Even the team leader felt the sting of that one. He clicked his tongue. Still young by the standards of most industries—IT being what it was—he held the title of team leader. Lately, overnight crypto billionaires had been popping up one after another. Bitcoin, which had been dead quiet, had started showing signs of a revival.
For all that he ran a desk at an exchange, he himself had never dared jump into the coin market. From everything he'd watched up close, the crypto scene was anything but normal. It reeked of fraud—and that was the judgment of a man sitting right next to it. A few of the company's early founders were dangerous people. If he ever got caught in insider trading… nothing was guaranteed.
"…Who is it?"
These people didn't give a damn about personal-transaction privacy. From the moment you signed up, trust got tossed into the landfill—that was how coin exchanges worked. For the internal monitoring staff, any coin transfer of a billion won or more was a flag.
Clack-clack-clack.
The staffer who'd called him hammered the keys.
"Name: Ha Taewoong."
"Never heard of him… What's his birth year?"
"He's nineteen, sir. Turning twenty."
"What? Nineteen??"
Tap-tap. Tap-tap.
I'd pulled an all-nighter. Sunlight spilled through the window.
"Unbelievable…"
A young body really was something. Even after staying up straight through the night, I didn't feel tired at all. My mind was razor-sharp, as if I'd downed half a dozen cans of energy drink.
I'd been ridiculously busy all night. I'd sorted through the flood of past information that now filled my head—information that would become my future. Not just the Korean stock market, but the U.S. markets, the currency and crude oil surges, the gold spike, and the massive pumps across all kinds of coins. Sleep had been impossible. No—sleep simply wouldn't come.
Even now, I still couldn't believe I had actually regressed.
"Grandma…"
I had been born into a chaebol bloodline. And yet I'd lived a life worse than the poorest dirt-poor kid. And she had given me this chance. It had to be the fruit of all the good karma she'd accumulated in her lifetime. I had zero intention of taking that chance and squandering it half-assed.
"Haryun."
My teeth ground together for no reason. The assault in that blind alley as a kid—odds were high that some thug Haryun had bought had done it. What kind of lunatic clubs a schoolkid over the head with a wooden bat on his way to class? The puzzle pieces were finally falling into place. Dad's accident. Mom's grief, left alone. The ones who engineered every last bit of it—Haryun, without a doubt. Vicious bastards. In the future that was about to unfold again, they wouldn't change one bit.
This was war.
"Secretly, yet magnificently. I'm taking everything."
I laid out my plans with ice-cold precision.
"For the time being, every investment goes into coins."
Crypto futures—only available on foreign exchanges. Graphs flickered, Bitcoin and a handful of other coins surging and dipping in tandem. Just because I'd lived through this time didn't mean I knew everything. And I hadn't exactly been a genius. But one thing was certain: Luna was going to crash. Of all the futures ahead of me, that one was locked in.
"That's more than enough."
Meme coins that pumped hundreds or thousands of times were pocket change by comparison. Only a limited set of coins even allowed leveraged trading.
"Hoo."
Hyped out of my mind, I'd spent the whole night imagining the future that was about to unfold—and stayed up until dawn. The trade had started with a short. Simple. Clean.
"Watch and see."
Even now, none of it felt real. I forced my racing heart to settle.
Whoosh…
Wind slipped through the cracks around the window. A rooftop room slapped together out of prefab panels—hopeless against heat and cold alike.
"First things first—I need to move."
The rooftop monthly-rent life ended the second I came back. I had money now. I was done sleeping wrapped in a ratty blanket. And I sure as hell wasn't going to trade coins looking like some half-rate loser.
"Luna~ Luna~ please just collapse already!"
The result I wanted was coming. Still, I prayed for it with everything I had. In my past life, I'd done nothing but dodge this enormous wave. Of course someone wins and someone loses. A cold zero-sum game. As long as the loser wasn't me.
"Coins… futures!"
Just imagining the outcome made my blood boil.
"Leverage—that's the real deal."
Right now, the only priority was growing the stake. There had to be a reason I'd come back like this. And the timing was perfect. At this point, national restrictions were still weak. Tax issues barely existed.
"Filial piety can wait a little."
In my last life, my relationship with Mom had grown distant. First I had to grow the money Grandma had given me. The chance to be a good son would come soon enough. Dumping the capital on "filial piety" like an idiot would be the worst possible move.
Beep-beep-beep, beep-beep-beep~♪
My smartphone alarm went off—one of those old, familiar routines from the past that had always just worked. Without thinking, my eyes drifted toward the wall.
And in that instant—
"……!!"
There it was, hanging plain as day on the wall: a school uniform!!
My mind snapped wide awake.
"A-are you kidding me!! So I have to go to high school all over again??"
I'd been dreaming of a killer whale thrashing across the Pacific. Reality was a bright-blue mackerel.
"Haa…"
A sigh rose from my gut and slipped out through my throat.
Thud. Thud.
My footsteps felt heavy. Not because an all-nighter had wrecked my condition—whatever bonus Grandma had handed me, my body and mind were still clear and fresh even after staying up. The school was a twenty-minute walk from the rooftop room.
From a working adult used to ready-made clothes, I was suddenly back in a school uniform. The way it clung to my body felt strange—and somehow exciting.
Cheonghwa Arts General High School. A school corporation founded with endowment funds from the Cheonghwa Group, ranked roughly fortieth among the conglomerates. A prestigious private institution. Official annual tuition ran around thirty million won—more expensive than most private universities. The campus facilities were nearly perfect to match. The school was only forty years old, yet its alumni packed the upper ranks of South Korean high society. Born gold spoons, so of course they did. Business, law, politics, medicine, culture and sports—there wasn't a line they couldn't reach. You couldn't ignore the tight networks forged by private-school kids who moved together from kindergarten through elementary, middle, and high school.
"Back then I must have swallowed rat poison."
The bravado I'd shown in middle school felt fresh all over again. One day I'd gone out to play in Gangnam. That was the first time I saw Cheonghwa High students on those streets. The moment I ran into them, I felt it—they were a different breed. Their uniforms weren't off-the-rack brand products. Every single one of them wore a custom-tailored uniform fitted to their body. And that wasn't all. Somehow, every last one of them was good-looking. They only brushed past me, and refinement poured off them in waves. That was when the itch hit me.
My grades were good enough for admission. Middle-school average: 199.9 out of 200. Then I hit reality when I filed the application. Tuition stopped me cold. My family simply couldn't afford it. A luxury private high school you couldn't enter on grades alone. For someone living worse than ordinary working-class people, it was a towering wall.
But heaven threw me a rope. There was one way in. At the time, my family lived in a public-rental apartment in northern Seoul. My parents tried to talk me out of it—the culture shock would be too much, they said. I pushed hard, insisted I had to go, and finally got their permission.
"There it is again. That arrogant hunk of stone."
I'd arrived at the main gate. An Independence Gate–style entrance built from massive slabs of granite marble. Cheonghwa. Beneath the school name, carved in huge gold-leaf relief, sat the school motto: Seonjogosan—Light First Strikes the Highest Peaks.
"What a load of entitled crap."
Looking at it again, the motto wasn't just arrogant—it was dripping with attitude. The well-born get the sunlight first. That was Cheonghwa Group itself. They'd greased the right political palms and scooped up nearly every government construction contract. Steady work had grown them into golf courses, the leisure industry, and even CBC, a full-scale broadcasting network. You couldn't separate Cheonghwa Group from the political and business elite. The school system was the same. It served perfectly as a special training ground for the children of the upper class—the future's leading players.
Screeeech. Screech.
The first lane of the road in front of the school gate was still jammed with cars. One after another, luxury sedans pulled up and students climbed out. Not a single domestic compact or midsize car in sight—nothing but top-tier full-size sedans. The students stepped out and glided naturally through the gate. Peak elegance.
The problem was…
"What the hell? Why is everyone so colorful?"
Something was wrong. I couldn't make sense of what I was seeing. This clearly wasn't a momentary glitch. On the way to school, people I'd passed on the street had given off strange light. I'd thought it was a trick of the eye. Red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, violet—and colors beyond those. The anomaly had started this morning. Everyone I met appeared in their own distinct color. I shook my head a few times, wondering if something was wrong with my eyes.
"Good morning."
"Right. Morning."
Cheonghwa High enforced strict discipline. Nearly every student followed the dress code. Slang and swearing were banned from everyday speech—a surprisingly positive effect that kept even the usual high-school curses from sticking to anyone's mouth. Even the kids from rock-solid wealthy backgrounds stayed humble inside a foundation that also owned a broadcasting network. Their attitude toward the teacher on gate duty was model-student perfect.
I passed through the gate behind one of the groups.
"Good morning, ma'am!"
"Good morning to you too, Taewoong."
I greeted her more brightly than I ever had in the past. The teacher on duty was a familiar face—a woman from the Korean language department. Our eyes met. Ms. Han Yura. She'd always taken a special interest in me, the kid who held top ranks without academies or tutors. Early thirties at this point. Cute style, round-framed glasses. A genuine talent of Cheonghwa who'd debuted as a poet while still at Seoguk University. She was also the faculty advisor of the Reading Club—the only club that had ever accepted me as a member.
Around her, a soft sky-blue aura spread—comfortable just to look at. Just like yesterday, I exchanged a natural greeting with her and headed in.
Then—
"Who's that upperclassman?"
"Who?"
"The tall, handsome one next to us."
"Forget about him."
"Why?"
A pair of first-year girls walking in beside me whispered among themselves. The girl next to her put a finger to her lips.
"He's a sabaeja."
"Ah! A sabaeja…"
Sabaeja.
At that single word from the girl, every gaze that had been on me cut off cold.
Right. That was me.
One of the handful of social-care recipients enrolled at this luxury brand-name private high school.