Chapter 50: Hana Is Rich
Bora opened the door and stepped into Hana's room. Hana was lying on the bed with her phone.
"Hana!"
"What's the matter, Bora?"
Hana looked so perfectly unbothered that, for a moment, Bora almost believed nothing had happened at all. The debit card statement, however, had not changed.
"This... how did this happen?"
Bora held the statement out to her. Hana only tilted her head.
"What even is this, Bora?"
In that instant Bora saw her own mistake. Hana still had no real concept of money. This wasn't Hana's fault. It was hers. And the moment that sank in, she understood that talking to the girl about the bill would accomplish nothing.
"Never mind... hang on. Let me see your phone?"
Bora took it. Hana had been watching some gameplay video. The phone was clearly rubbing off on her. If Bora had her way, she would have confiscated it on the spot.
But every child that age had one. If Hana was the only one without a phone, the odds of her being left out were high.
What mattered here was raising her properly. Even so, two hundred million won—Bora couldn't begin to imagine how much was sitting in that account. The fact that anything remained on the debit card after a spend like that left her stunned.
She opened the banking app on Hana's phone, and the figure written there forced her eyes wide.
"One... one billion...?"
The account held a sum that would stagger not only ordinary people, but most of the wealthy as well.
When they had drawn up the contract, the royalty had been written as a percentage of operating profit, so she had never known the exact amount. Seeing it with her own eyes, she finally understood just how enormous it was. Every bit of it was money Hana had earned herself.
Among the self-made rich of Korea, Hana might well be the youngest of all. No one else was making a billion won at her age—not unless they had inherited it from their parents. And she was still a child who couldn't even write properly...
The money had come in less than a month, and from here it would only grow. It certainly wasn't going to shrink.
She had never imagined this much would pour in, and the question of what to do about it only dug itself deeper.
Bora looked at my phone, and her face went stiff. Then she walked out of the room.
I picked up the statement she had left on the bed and read it again. There were an awful lot of zeros in the amount due.
"Huh...?"
As if someone had upended a bucket of cold water over my head, my dazed mind snapped clear all at once.
Two hundred million won...?
Back when I worked part-time, a full year of grinding hadn't even earned me thirty million. I hadn't felt it while I was burning cash, but now that it had arrived in the real world, I understood I had done something seriously wrong.
I had thrown money at the game as if I were possessed. This small body slipped my control now and then. The baby hormones running through me had taken the wheel, and however strong my will, I couldn't overpower the hormones of a child's body.
I could already see exactly what came next. Bora would come back in with that angry face, and my poor backside would take a beating straight from her own hand.
I paced the middle of the room. I needed to run before she got back, but I couldn't leave. This was my fault.
How long did I stay there, feeling like a convict waiting to be sentenced? The closed door opened, and Bora came in.
I couldn't quite meet her eyes. I felt as if I had committed some terrible crime. Which, to be fair, I had.
Even so, sitting frozen wasn't going to save me. I went to her, stepped in close, and wrapped my arms around her leg.
"Bora..."
"Hana?"
Even with me clinging to her leg, Bora didn't do anything in particular. I had been sure she was about to drag me to the bed and spank me. Instead she stroked my head.
"Bora, I'm sorry. I think I spent way too much money."
I said it while looking up at her. Apologizing first was essential. I would rather die than get spanked. It hurt, yes, but every time my backside was hit, it felt as if something inside me were being shaved away.
"No... Hana..."
Bora started to say something. The moment I saw it, I buried my face even deeper against her. With the difference in our heights, all I could really press my face into was her stomach.
Feeling the soft give of Bora's belly, I clung on for dear life. I had to push harder. Eyes brimming, I lifted my head and looked up at her. I knew that showing her this face made her go weak.
The moment she saw me, Bora scooped me clean off the ground. Suddenly I was dangling in the air, short legs kicking at nothing, nowhere near the floor.
She held me against her and spoke, and the softness of her full chest came through just as it was.
"You didn't do anything wrong."
"Really...?"
"Of course not."
Saying so, she carried me to the bed, sat down, and settled me on her lap. I perched there lightly.
Then, from somewhere, she produced a book. Thinking it might be a picture book, I checked the title.
"What's this, Bora?"
"Mm... let's call it a book that helps you spend money the right way."
"Money...?"
"For how much you've got, your economics look a little thin. Starting today, you're learning it with me."
"Okay!"
I had been braced for a spanking, so a completely different conversation left me in a good mood. It didn't last. The moment we started in on a thicket of words I didn't know, my face fell.
"You must never cosign for anyone..."
Guarantees and on and on, voice phishing and on and on, and then a parade of economics terms—my mind went hazy. A spanking might have been kinder.
I typed it with a glum look on my face. Burning through two hundred million won in a week will do that. In truth Bora never told me to stop spending money on my hobbies, but I felt watched anyway.
When I said I wanted to be an internet streamer, she barely objected. She told me that what she wanted was for me to have a job I loved. So long as it wasn't a bad one, she would cheer me on to the end.
But how much was actually in my account? It was strange that money remained after I had spent two hundred million. Maybe I should have asked her straight.
When I asked how much was in the account, Bora only smiled and said I could keep spending however I liked.
Unless I went and bought a building or a supercar, she said, there was no way the money would dry up. I decided I would have to learn the bank password later.
I set Icarus aside for a while. I was thinking I might roll more Cubes once next month came around. Taking first across the entire server, not just on the character rankings, would look even better. A man, after all, has to claim first place.
I decided to look for another game. If it was something that didn't cost money, an AOS would suit me better than an RPG.
I booted up League of Relics. The so-called national game, known to everyone as LoR. It had held the number-one spot in the PC bangs for years, and the tournament scene around it was enormous.
Fortunately, the person I used to be had been reasonably good at games. I had stalled at Master, but among ordinary players that was more than respectable.
I had already made five accounts. My goal was to hit Master on every lane. Not exactly extraordinary, but hardly common either.
League of Relics tended to reward people who hammered a single lane over and over. In a way, that made sense. You climbed by playing the lane you were actually good at, didn't you?
But the moment I launched the game, most of the viewers who had been watching the stream dropped off. They had come in to watch me dump Cubes into Icarus, so of course they left.
A viewer count that had been over fifty shriveled to ten before I knew it. Even so, that was holding the line pretty well. For now, I set my goal as hitting Master in mid first.
On her break, Bora stopped by Hana's room. Hana was streaming.
Bora was a woman of the modern world; she knew what internet broadcasting was. She took a quiet look at Hana's stream.
The viewer count wasn't even ten. Streaming was not an easy job.
Even so, she hadn't known Hana kept the sort of hobby boys usually liked—online games. Every day, all the girl had ever asked for was Little Magician Rumi.
With a viewer count like that, it didn't seem like something she needed to worry over. How many people were going to sit and watch a little kid's broadcast?
Give it a week and Hana would lose interest and go looking for some other hobby. Bora had heard somewhere that it was good for a child to try all kinds of things while young, so she meant to support Hana as far as she could, whenever the girl wanted something.