A Boring Day That Was Anything But Ordinary
The day had been so utterly ordinary it bordered on tedious. Just like always, I got home from work, didn't even bother showering, and flopped onto my bed before grabbing my smartphone. That was how it started.
These days, my only real pleasure was reading American conglomerate novels. I'd already binged hundreds of chapters, yet the thirst never went away. If anything, every time I saw the insane scale of assets the protagonists commanded, I felt a strange kind of vicarious satisfaction.
"Is it because of Elon Musk? Everything coming out these days starts at a trillion dollars like it's the bare minimum..."
I was thirty-two years old. What I held in my hands wasn't a hundred million won in cash—it was a mountain of debt well over that amount, combining my jeonse loan and student loans. Every month, my paycheck would brush past my account like a ghost before vanishing into the black hole of loan repayments and credit card bills.
Compared to that suffocating reality, the protagonists' extravagant money-flinging in those novels felt like an almost unreal form of comfort. You had to be in the same league to even feel jealous. These days I was even seeing main characters who straight-up founded their own countries in modern settings, and all I could do was let out a hollow laugh.
"Founding a country in the 21st century? Isn't that a bit brain-rotted?"
I grumbled out loud, but my fingers kept scrolling diligently. At some point, it had become my nightly routine before sleep—imagining things like, 'What if I were the protagonist I just read about...' or 'Wouldn't I have gotten even richer if I did it this way?'—before drifting off.
Yeah. It really was an utterly ordinary, boring day with absolutely no warning signs whatsoever.
Standing by the window and gazing out at the chaotic streets of Times Square in 1979, Henry Salisbury Debenzer let out a deep sigh.