You Don't Play the Domestic Market
The teller who checked the balance felt the corners of her eyes begin to tremble. In all her years at this bank, she had never seen a cash depositor like this.
Hundreds of billions of won in cash alone — and how much more must there be in real estate, stocks, and the rest? Even the people counted among this country's wealthy kept their fortunes mainly in shares and property. Almost no one walked around carrying money in crisp bills like these.
And this child, Hana, was a girl turning ten this year. A child like that, holding hundreds of billions in cash? No matter how she turned it over, earning hundreds of billions at the age of ten was impossible, so it had to be an inheritance from her parents — and she could not begin to guess how much money those parents must have.
Wasn't this the sort of wealth that belonged on the nation's rich list? The teller stopped her thoughts from spinning in circles and set her hands to the work the customer had requested. The shock had been so great that even the motions she usually performed by habit would not come. Why had her fingers gone so stiff?
"H-how high were you thinking for the daily transfer limit?"
"Hmm... ten billion won ought to be enough, don't you think?"
"Y-yes!"
Ordinarily, an individual was capped at five hundred million won a day. But the customer had already come with the paperwork prepared, and one look at the account balance made it plain there was nothing to worry about where a limit like that was concerned. Raising it meant a heavier blow if they fell prey to voice phishing or some other financial crime — yet in this customer's case, it seemed the balance would still be sitting there even after a hundred such scams.
Or they might simply earn that much all over again.
"All right, Hana. This is your bankbook. Now, there are all kinds of ways to make money..."
I was stuck in a dull economics lesson, the sort where the boss taught and I learned. Over the past half year, money had piled up in my account until it could pile no higher, and the boss had decided I was not to leave it sitting in a bankbook. I was to invest it somewhere else.
Of course, when she told me to buy stocks, she picked only blue chips. She had also told me that the domestic market was not something you played. So most of the shares in my account were American companies. There were a few domestic stocks as well, but I had mainly bought the kind that paid fat dividends.
"You don't play the domestic market, Hana."
The boss said it flatly. Having once dabbled in crypto and blown the money, I was curious despite myself. I was fairly sure I'd heard that if you did stocks well, you could make a great deal of money. I'd even heard there was a profession called individual investor.
"Why? If you're good at stocks, don't you make money?"
I said it while fiddling with my pen. The boss answered anyway.
"You're young, so you might not see it, but the domestic market isn't a place where a company that does well gives anything back to its investors. Spin-offs, rights offerings, capital reductions without compensation, dumping treasury shares, and on and on... they're desperate to siphon the investors' money out, one way or another."
"Don't you run a stock company too, Boss?"
"I hold every share myself, so it doesn't concern me. Hana."
"Is that so?"
Honestly, even if one person held every last share, an heir to a great conglomerate had probably sucked the retail investors dry all the same. I did not say so out loud. There was no need to pick at a scab.
"But if there's a chance of losing money in stocks, then shouldn't we just not buy them, like you said? Couldn't we just lock it all in a savings account?"
That part genuinely puzzled me. Investing was not only a matter of making money. Losing it was just as common. People didn't joke about fooling around with stocks and ending up in the Han River for nothing.
"Savings alone can't keep up with inflation. Twenty years ago a bowl of jajangmyeon — those black-bean noodles — was 2,500 won, and now it's 7,000, isn't it? If you'd put money in a deposit twenty years ago and taken it out today, you wouldn't even have doubled it. In short, the interest rate sits below inflation, so you end up eating into your principal."
Oh. I was a complete beginner who didn't know the first thing about economics. Mid-twenties was when you'd only just graduated and stepped out into the world, wasn't it? And in this country, people didn't study economics much to begin with. Even back when I was in school, I was pretty sure I'd heard that savings accounts were king.
The boss knew how much money I made, so she put it bluntly: even if I blew every last one of these hundreds of billions, I only had to wait a little and the principal would come back.
For now, then, we were putting it mainly somewhere safe, but her hope was that once I grew used to economics, I would invest the money all over the place. I was too lazy for any of that, so I only nodded along for show.
Even with all this money, there was still nowhere to spend it. The research institute provided the house and fed me besides — it was practically the army. I had nothing to spend money on. They fed me, they put me to bed, and I didn't even have to stand night watch. You could call it the dream job.
"And a share transfer is coming your way, Hana. You're going to hold forty percent of our Starlight Foods. From now on, you and Starlight Foods are one and the same!"
The boss said she was giving me Starlight Foods stock. In exchange for the transfer, a portion of the profits would change hands the other way, but this was Starlight Foods stock, and from here on it was only going to rise. It was not going to fall.
From the boss's side, too, it was the surest way to keep me tied down. I had no reason to go anywhere else, but giving me the shares and making us one body still seemed to put her at ease. In a single moment, I became the richest ten-year-old in Korea.
I was certain that among children my age, not one of them made more money than I did. According to the boss, the day I came of age would be the day the Korean economy turned upside down. Even she could not predict how much the money I'd held on for dear life would be worth by then.
Something else might appear in the future, after all. I pictured that bright future and grinned. With the greatest worry of a life — how to eat and get by — settled at last, my heart had never felt so light.
Rinea, the shrine maiden who guarded the World Tree, rose early this morning as well and set about tending it.
"I miss you, World Tree..."
Once the cleaning was done, she stroked the World Tree whose soul had vanished somewhere, and spoke to it. They said it would return in only a few hundred years, but that span was so long it felt like an eternity. Unbearably so, in a way.
Perhaps her longing was simply that fierce. Even her friend Luna, looking at her, could only click her tongue.
"The World Tree will come if you just wait a hundred years. Aren't you worrying too much?"
By elven reckoning, it was the blink of an eye. But Rinea was the sort who found even that blink hard to endure. At lunch, eating meat with her friend, she hung her head. Her friend was right, and a shrine maiden ought not to be swayed like this.
"But what am I supposed to do, when I miss the World Tree so..."
"There isn't a shrine maiden alive as impatient as you."
She had not been a shrine maiden for long, and her friend's words — advice that amounted to a scolding — came down on her all at once. Rinea recognized her own haste and could only nod and admit it. Just as her friend said, there had probably never been a shrine maiden as impatient as she was.
"Anyway, hang in there! Next time I come, I'll bring the rabbit meat you love!"
"Okay. Bye!"
The promise of rabbit meat next time made Rinea's ears perk and twitch. They were long and slender, as an elf's are.
Having eaten her fill, Rinea returned to the hours she spent attending the World Tree. Performing the rites at the appointed times was important work. Was that not why the elf tribes had entrusted her with it? Of course, it was not as if some great calamity would break out if she disappeared.
Even if she died without warning, the tribes would simply choose another shrine maiden and send someone to tend the World Tree. What mattered was that at least one person remained to attend it.
And so it was deep into the evening before Rinea could return home. She had to sleep soon if she wanted to see the World Tree again tomorrow, so she lay down early on her bed of leaves and drifted off.
She dreamed of wandering about with the World Tree. It was so sweet and happy a dream that a smile formed at the corners of her mouth.
All while she slept on, unaware of the gate taking shape around her...