Securities Firm Rookie (1)
Thud!
“Hiss!”
I felt the jolt of impact and the sting of pain.
Was I dead?
Then why did my whole body hurt so much?
I dragged myself upright with effort.
A blanket was wrapped around me, and there was a bed beside me. Anyone looking at me would have assumed I’d rolled out of bed in my sleep.
I looked around.
For some reason, the cramped room felt familiar. It was exactly like the place I used to live in. Even the mold stains on the wallpaper above the bed were the same.
“The afterlife?”
So this was a reconstruction of the place I’d lived before?
That was strange.
I’d thought death was the end, but to think an afterlife really existed.
Still, I urgently needed the bathroom.
Even after dying, it seemed bodily functions still had to be dealt with.
I opened the door and headed for the bathroom.
After taking care of business and washing my hands, I caught sight of my face in the mirror and froze.
“Huh?”
The wrinkles around my forehead and eyes were gone, and my skin was smooth. Just by looking at my face, I seemed at least ten years younger.
When I looked at my hands, the burn scars I’d gotten from accidentally splattering hot oil while frying chicken were gone too.
“What the hell is this?”
Just as I was floundering in confusion, my thigh buzzed.
I pulled the smartphone out of my pocket.
A Cosmic L7 from Yuseong Electronics.
I’d used an L16, so this one must have been released about ten years ago. Did anyone still use antiques like this?
When I saw the name on the screen, I answered the call at once.
The instant I hit the accept button, a shout came through.
[Hey! Where the hell are you right now?]
“At home, sir.”
[What? At home? It’s past ten. Why aren’t you at work?]
“At work? Senior, where are you right now?”
[What nonsense are you talking about? I’m already at the office.]
“At which office?”
[Where do you think? DA Securities, of course.]
“......Huh?”
DA Securities hadn’t gone under?
As I stood there, stunned, my senior barked at me.
[Get your ass over here right now, you punk!]
◇◇◇◆◇◇◇
After getting my head straight, I threw on some clothes and scrambled into a taxi.
As the cab headed for Yeouido, I looked down at my smartphone.
“This thing is absurdly slow. Is it app-based?”
No hologram, and voice recognition barely worked.
I skimmed the latest news and dug through social media as well.
The house I used to live in, my younger face, my senior’s phone call, today’s date, the taxi model, the driver gripping an actual steering wheel instead of using self-driving, the streets outside, and so on.
When I put all of it together, one conclusion emerged.
“Could it be... I’ve gone back to the past? Ten years, no less?”
Then the taxi driver asked, “Pardon?”
“Ah, nothing.”
Right. That made no sense.
Things like this never happened in real life.
With that thought, I got out of the taxi, tapped my card, and went into the building. It felt like ages since I’d been here, but I made my way to my department without getting lost.
That made sense. I’d worked here for more than three years.
At DA Securities, my first job, I’d been assigned to the Research Department.
It was where analysts gathered to study the outlook for the economy, market conditions, and companies.
More specifically, they forecast specific industries, identified promising stocks, analyzed corporate management, and wrote public reports related to investment.
When I opened the door and stepped inside, everyone’s gaze turned to me. Familiar faces appeared one by one.
And among them was a face I was especially glad to see.
“Oh! Senior! Are you feeling okay?”
At my shout, Dong-ho senior looked startled.
“Hey, hey. If a rookie comes in this late, the first thing you say is sorry.”
“A rookie? Who? Me?”
Before he could hold back any longer, Assistant Manager Woo Baek-hyeon barked.
“Then who the hell would it be, the CEO? If you’re going to act like that, quit right now!”
◇◇◇◆◇◇◇
Lunch time.
While everyone else had gone out to eat, I was writing a written apology report.
Even as my hand moved across the page, my mind kept circling the same question.
What the hell was going on?
Was this not a dream, but reality? Was it really ten years ago right now?
I couldn’t believe it.
Wasn’t death supposed to be the end? Why had I come back?
Was it because I got hit by a car? Because I saw a meteor shower?
Whatever the reason, the important thing was that I’d returned to ten years in the past.
The future that hadn’t yet come was now the past, and the things that hadn’t happened were now experiences I already possessed.
“No, does that even make sense?”
It didn’t.
This was the sort of thing you only saw in novels.
“What doesn’t make sense?”
Someone dropped heavily into the seat beside me.
When I turned, I saw a young man in a suit. He wore glasses, and his hair was combed back carelessly.
“Dong-ho senior.”
“I told you to call me Assistant Manager at work, punk.”
His name was Lee Dong-ho.
He was three years older than me and had joined DA Securities three years earlier. As an assistant manager in the same Research Department, he was a securities analyst.
He’d graduated from Korea University’s Department of Economics, so he was my senior. That was why I called him Assistant Manager at the office and senior more casually outside.
“What the hell did you do all weekend to come in late and still look half-dead?”
“Uh, well...”
What, should I tell him I got hit by a car while delivering fried chicken and came back here?
“More importantly, is your body okay, senior?”
“Huh? Why do you keep asking about my body?”
“Does anything hurt?”
“Not really.”
Sure enough, the burn marks on his face and neck were gone, and his voice sounded perfectly normal. His breathing also seemed easy and steady.
I let out a sigh of relief.
“Good. I’m glad you’re fine.”
“I’m more worried that you’re not fine. How’s the written apology going? Office workers should be better at writing apologies than reports.”
“I just wrote it roughly.”
“That won’t do. You have to pour your soul into it.”
Dong-ho senior scanned the apology report I’d written, then looked shocked.
“What the hell? Why is this so good?”
Well, I’d made enough mistakes while working to fill a warehouse.
If it was a written apology, I’d written so many I was sick of them. Give me a subject and a reason for what went wrong, and I could churn out pages without blinking.
As if something had just occurred to him, Dong-ho senior asked, “Ah! That friend you live with, he still works at LD Studio, right?”
“That place got shut down...”
“Huh?”
“No, I mean, yeah, he still works there.”
Just like DA Securities, LD Studio was still standing for now.
“I’m writing a report on LD Studio this time. They’re supposed to release a new game next month, so ask your friend what he thinks will happen.”
Each analyst was assigned certain industries to cover. In Dong-ho senior’s case, it was IT and entertainment.
“That one also got shut down...”
“Huh?”
I muddled through it.
“No, I mean, I’m sure it’ll do well?”
If this really was ten years in the past, then Seon-woo was probably working hard on development over there right now.
Confident that the game he was making would be an absolute smash hit.
“Then I guess I should write, ‘Strong sales of existing titles plus the release of a new game are expected to drive earnings and valuation higher.’”
“What if it bombs?”
“Then it bombs.”
“......”
I wasn’t sure whether this was really fine, but securities reports were mostly like that. You started by writing a positive outlook and went from there.
Dong-ho senior returned to his desk.
Seeing him walk as normally as ever made me oddly relieved.
“A new game?”
Something suddenly came to mind.
At around this time, hadn’t that company also released a new game?
I searched the news right away. Just as I remembered, they were preparing for launch. More precisely, open beta service would begin in two days.
At that moment, I realized something important.
“So if this is ten years ago...”
I had returned from ten years in the future.
In other words, I knew what would happen in the future!
“This is insane...”
You didn’t even need to work in finance to understand how huge this was.
“I don’t have to fry chicken in a kitchen or run deliveries anymore.”
Right now I was a salaried employee at a securities firm.
But ten years from now, I would become a chicken shop owner with Seon-woo.
I’d worked hard at it, and I was proud of my taste. But now that I’d even regressed, there was no reason to keep aiming for a chicken shop.
All I had to do was move into trading, and earning annual returns of 100 to 200 percent would be child’s play.
If I bought only the stocks that were about to take off and let them sit there on a salary so tiny it could fit between my teeth, I could make hundreds of billions. Wouldn’t it be easy to buy a few buildings and just live comfortably off them?
No. After a regression like this, was there any reason to settle for something that small?
They say there’s no one above another person, but there’s always someone richer than the rich, and above conglomerates there are even bigger conglomerates. And money? The more of it you had, the better.
My original future had been to own a chicken shop, but now the situation had changed.
I had gone back ten years.
A grin spilled out of me before I could stop it.
“Ha... ha ha ha.”
◇◇◇◆◇◇◇
When I came back from lunch, the rookie was in the middle of writing a written apology and laughing his head off.
Seeing that, Assistant Manager Woo Baek-hyeon asked the employee beside him, “What do you think is wrong with him today?”
Assistant Manager Hong Chang-su tilted his head. “No idea. Maybe he got hit by a car on the way in?”
◇◇◇◆◇◇◇
I worked overtime and then went home.
The place I lived in was a two-room apartment in Gangnam.
It had originally belonged to a friend who lived alone, and when I got a job I quietly moved in. The commute from my parents’ house would have been far too long.
Living alone would have been a burden, but sharing with a friend meant we could split the rent and living expenses.
I had just loosened my tie and collapsed onto the sofa when someone entered the house after punching in the door code.
He was in jeans, a shirt, and a thin padded jacket. His hair was a mess, he wore glasses, and his nose and chin were covered in scruffy stubble.
This guy’s name was Kang Seon-woo.
He was a friend I’d met back in middle school, and we’d stuck together all the way through high school. After graduating from Heist University with a degree in electronic engineering, he was now working at a game company called LD Studio.
People say the job market is brutal, but IT companies are desperate for people.
The reason he’d turned down every company calling him over and chosen a game company was simple: he wanted to do something he liked.
And in ten years, he would open the chicken shop he liked.
“......”
Come to think of it, hadn’t he ended up doing nothing but the things he liked?
Seon-woo flopped down beside me.
His eyes were hollow, his hair was greasy, and his skin looked rough and dry. He looked like he hadn’t slept properly in days.
“You worked until this hour?”
“What, did you think I’d been out having fun?”
Games were a business of creating something from nothing.
Programming, scenario writing, design — everything was done by people, so when release drew near, overtime was a given and weekends were sacrificed too.
It was called crunch for a reason; people ground their teeth through it.
That was how countless developers’ blood, sweat, and sheer overwork went into making a single game.
Financial firms and game companies were both places where people were chewed up and used up.
“Have you eaten dinner?”
“Not yet. You?”
Seon-woo got up from the sofa.
“Let’s go out and have some chicken and beer.”
“Huh? Chicken?”
The place Seon-woo took me to was the chicken shop in front of our house.
It was none other than the very franchise that he and I had shared in our previous lives.
“Why chicken here, of all places?”
“What are you talking about? You love the chicken here. You won’t even touch chicken from other brands.”
“......”
Was I like that at the time?
In the end, we sat down and ordered.
Seon-woo grabbed a drumstick in both hands and tore into it, saying, “This place really is the best. If we ever don’t have anything else to do later, should we just open a chicken shop too?”
How many thousands of people in this country had started a chicken shop that way?
I let out a sigh.
“If we do, we’d be lucky not to get crushed by head office bullying and go under.”
“Huh?”
“Nothing. Keep eating.”
As Seon-woo kept stuffing his face, I casually asked, “What would you do if you suddenly came into a lot of money?”
“A lot? How much?”
“A ridiculous amount.”
“More than a lottery jackpot?”
“Yeah.”
It was a pointless question, but Seon-woo thought about it seriously.
“Then I’d probably start a game company and make the games I actually wanted to make.”
“Really?”
“Yeah. That’s my dream.”
I’d expected him to answer exactly that.
He’d always loved making games more than anything else in the world.
If someone told him to choose between “Take 10 billion won and live idly for the rest of your life” and “Keep working at a game company,” he’d pick the second one.
Suddenly, I remembered the conversation we’d had before I regressed.
We’d talked about our dreams.
“A dream, huh...”
When I first joined DA Securities, my dream had been to make a name for myself as a world-class investor.
Ten years later, I’d given it up as a foolish fantasy. But at this point in time, I would still be holding on to that dream.
And now the chance to achieve it had appeared!
Everyone hopes for an opportunity. But most people, when the opportunity actually comes, hesitate for one reason or another.
Because they don’t know enough, because they don’t know how, because they’ve never done it before, because they lack confidence, because it looks hard, because they think it’ll fail, and so on.
And every time, they miss the chance and end up repeating the same regrets all over again.
So what was the conclusion?
I put a hand on Seon-woo’s shoulder and said, “Good. If it’s for a dream, then you’ve got to throw yourself at it like your life depends on it.”
“Huh? My life?”
When people in Korea talked about the rich, they usually meant conglomerate families.
Even if I knew information from the future, if I started a business now and tried to build a conglomerate from scratch, it would take a long time.
There was only one way to do it quickly.
Start an investment firm.
It wasn’t widely known in Korea, but overseas there were plenty of famous private equity funds and hedge funds.
Kanaan Group, KRR, Redstone Group, Blue Pearl Consortium, Bridge River, Runestar, and so on. They moved tens or even hundreds of trillions of won and swallowed up companies all over the world that looked like money makers.
You think that was only possible abroad?
There were plenty of examples at home too.
Take MKK Partners, founded by Chairman Kang Myeong-guk after he left Kanaan Group. It was now ranked fifth in Korea’s business world and had grown into the largest private equity fund in all of Asia.
Why on earth couldn’t I do the same?
“This is a game you don’t get to die in!”
Seeing my resolve, Seon-woo nodded halfheartedly.
“Yeah, sure. You can’t die. Now eat your chicken already.”