Adaptation (2)
“..Wow, his height is seriously off the charts.”
Standing at 190 cm and weighing 84 kg, the body wasn’t packed with gym muscle, but the raw bone structure was exceptional. Those broad shoulders and long legs refused to be hidden even by the tacky fashions of 1979.
From now on I’m a winner, fuck! When I go back to Korea I’ll be looking down at everyone. No more neck cramps. Heh heh.
The word “loser” wouldn’t become a cultural catchphrase for years, but my baggage from the previous life made it the first thought that popped into my head.
After grinning like an idiot for a while, I started dissecting the face in the mirror in detail. Superman himself was standing there. The man staring back at me looked so much like actor Henry Cavill that I actually flexed my eyes to see if I’d somehow become Kryptonian. Thick eyebrows, a jawline carved from marble, and a luxuriously full head of hair. If the Henry Cavill of my past life had worried about a slightly broad forehead, this version had a perfect hairline. The only problem was the messy shoulder-length hair that completely hid that handsome face.
How hard did this guy’s puberty hit him? He got into Stanford’s engineering department and then… what, spent the whole time drowning in drugs, booze, and cigarettes? What a fucking moron.
Digging through the memories, the original Henry had been a rebel who fell hard for the late-stage hippie movement during adolescence, giving his family constant headaches. Timid and reclusive by nature, he had zero friends, but once he dug his heels in, not even the Founding Fathers crawling out of their graves could have stopped him. The ultimate expression of that stubbornness was choosing Stanford on the West Coast to study engineering instead of the predetermined elite path of Yale or Harvard, along with this godawful long hair. On top of that, he had partied so hard at college that almost nothing academic remained in his head.
He had no ex-girlfriends and no friends; he simply paid for his desires. That was definitely an advantage—no need to deal with messy human relationships—but it was still a pathetic life.
Another upside: after checking every inch of the body, there wasn’t a single tattoo, the classic hippie trademark.
Ah, so he was just scared of needles? Or rather, why the hell did a son of an elite American family live like this? He really was a pathetic little shit.
I promised myself I would cut this annoying hair tomorrow and left the bathroom. Sinking deep into my usual chair, I fell back into thought.
Creating a single clone had taken an absurd amount of time, but the rewards were solid. In the process I had extracted a mountain of high-level information—not just about the clone system but the entire status window.
A clone was literally a clone. It could mimic the appearance and background of a real person in this world, but it was essentially a doppelganger, not the actual individual. The fields I could fill in included name, birth, nationality, physical specs, education, religion, and even family tree. In short, it was the power to create an entire human life.
However, there were limits to appearance customization based on race, and above all else “rationality” was the most important factor. If a hunter story suddenly crashed into this world later, maybe things would change, but for now any setting that broke probability—sudden superpowers or learning an immortal martial arts manual—was flatly rejected.
Abilities that surpassed human limits were only permitted within believable bounds. Of course it was possible to go further, but the point cost became literally insane.
Still, even if supernatural powers were off the table, specs that transcended normal human limits could be implemented. Thankfully the system gave polite warnings—“This setting is unavailable due to probability issues”—so the actual writing process wasn’t too difficult.
The real fun began after the settings were finished. Once everything was locked in, detailed numerical values were generated according to my own stats. My health stat of “4” was only slightly above average—a mediocre level at best.
The knowledge stat let me adjust personality. It worked like a plus-minus system: adding negative traits gave me extra positive ones or let me dump points into intelligence (both IQ and EQ). In other words, I could create a genius with a shattered personality, or a savant who was average in most areas but possessed supernatural talent in one specific field.
All those values, combined with the most important factor—connection to me (Henry)—determined the final star rating at the top.
No matter how perfect the beauty, how good the personality, or how outstanding the abilities, if I set the person in the middle of the African wilderness the connection would be zero and the stars would be cut in half. But if I added one simple line to the exact same profile—“Immigrated to the United States and resides in the DeVenger mansion in Westchester”—the rating shot up to 1.5 stars and the price skyrocketed to 5,000 points.
Stars ranged from 0.5 to 5.0, and the pricing was completely insane.
0.5 stars: 10 ~ 100 points 1.0 stars: 101 ~ 1,000 points 1.5 stars: 1,001 ~ 10,000 points
It was a logarithmic scale—every half-star increase multiplied the price by ten. A 5-star clone started at a minimum of ten billion points. The upper limit was literally unmeasurable.
Ten billion? Even if I earned one point per second like a vending machine, I’d never see it in my lifetime.
It was obviously impossible, but curiosity about the system’s limits made me run every experiment I could think of. A direct descendant of the Washington family, secret ruler of the world, wealth greater than the combined assets of every nation on Earth. A peerless beauty with 178 cm height and 110-60-110 measurements—more unrealistic than any anime character. Transcendent intelligence and physical ability, superpowers capable of destroying the planet alone, and on top of all that, the setting that she was Henry DeVenger’s utterly loyal slave. When I poured in every possible soul-binding detail, the price hit a staggering 890 billion points.
Even God would need a savings account for this… Wait, can’t I use leverage?
That was enough experimentation. Time to return to cold reality.
Should I summon a clone first, or raise my level and stats to get a feel for the changes?
To keep costs as low as possible, I set the race to Asian and the gender to male, which was comparatively cheap. Since I had no idea how the first clone would behave, I avoided complicated settings and skipped any negative personality traits. The result was an “ordinary, loyal, and diligent 0.5-star clone.”
Staring blankly at the setting window, I fell into deep thought.
Even when I cheap out as much as possible, forcing any connection to me pushes the minimum to 50 points. If I make even one clone, leveling up is off the table for now.
Clone or level-up? In the end I chose a third path. Since I could adjust stats either way, I decided to start with basic groundwork.
Raising current Health from '4' to '5' requires 10 points. Do you wish to proceed?
Yes.
The moment I pressed confirm I started running around the room—shadow boxing, jumping in place, the works. But the dramatic transformation I’d hoped for never came. The status window now showed Health at 5 and my remaining points at 115, yet my body felt exactly the same.
Hiding my disappointment, I examined myself again from head to toe.
Maybe it’s not completely unchanged… I do feel a tiny bit lighter?
If there was any difference at all, it was an almost imperceptible sense that my body had become slightly more agile. But it was so minor I couldn’t tell whether it was real or just a placebo effect. Ten points was no small amount of money at this stage, yet the reaction was pathetic. I felt a wave of doubt about whether I should bother raising the knowledge stat, but I pushed it down.
Still have to do it. In my past life I got so annoyed reading novels where the protagonists never raised intelligence! I can’t make the same mistake. Besides, the higher my own stats, the better the clones will perform. Let’s go!
Raising current Knowledge from '4' to '5' requires 10 points. Do you wish to proceed?
Yes!
This time the change was completely different from the health upgrade. A few seconds later, unfamiliar information crashed over me like a tidal wave and my head throbbed as if it would split open.
“Ugh… haa.”
Okay, I can breathe again. Let’s see… Silver? The Hunt brothers?
What had been burned into my brain was a detailed report on silver. The current price hovering between eight and nine dollars per ounce would explode to fifty dollars by January 18th next year—a sixfold surge. The full futures chart through March 27th 1980, every behind-the-scenes detail, and the exact causes of the price swings were all seared into my mind.
“Holy shit… the knowledge stat is completely broken?”
I had meant to keep it inside in case the room was bugged, but the information was so shocking that Korean slipped out before I could stop myself.
In my previous life I had been a maniac who devoured every American chaebol novel from the 1890s to the 2020s. I knew all the major historical events, and fearing I might forget them I had even recorded them in a personal Korean code only I could read, then locked the notes inside the family vault. (I had nearly fainted at the mountain of gold bars piled in there.)
Yet this silver shockwave was information that hadn’t been covered in detail in any of those novels. Only now did I learn that the Hunt brothers were already working behind the scenes to corner the silver market.
Exactly on January 18th next year, silver would peak at fifty dollars. Then on January 21st the Fed and the exchanges would drop the unprecedented “silver purchase ban” and shatter the market. By March 27th the historic “Silver Thursday” would explode; the Hunt brothers would be unable to meet the margin call and go bankrupt, sending silver crashing back to ten dollars.
In that case, I should buy silver instead of gold.
My original early investment plan had been gold and oil. The gold price, currently under three hundred dollars, would triple past eight hundred by January next year—a classic trope in chaebol stories. But silver was going to rise six times.
Whoa, this is absolute honey. As expected, knowledge really is power. Fuck, should I drop one more point?
Dopamine flooded my system. If the feedback from raising knowledge by one was this good, I had to keep going. But—
Cannot raise Knowledge from '5' to '6'. (Requirement = LV 2)
Yeah, figured…
I clicked my tongue. So the system was designed so that I had to raise my level before the stat cap would increase. If I could dump stats infinitely without restriction there would be no reason to level, but the system wasn’t that generous.
Should I just rush the level first and then pump knowledge? …Or should I still make the clone first?
Greed clouded my thinking for a moment, but I soon shook my head. Leveling up required 100 points. After spending that I would have only 5 points left. There was no way 5 points could raise another stat, so the immediate answer was to create the clone.
As Henry, my surrounding environment looked perfect to outsiders. A dedicated family security team, a full staff of professionals handling asset management, taxes, and philanthropy, plus the media empire of my maternal side—the New York Times. But to my eyes every single one of them looked like a potential risk.
Whether it was trauma from betrayal in my past life or an innate obsession with safety, I couldn’t say. All I knew was that anyone who suddenly inherited trillions of won in assets would develop instinctive wariness.
They say there’s no one in the world you can trust, but the problem here is that there are too many people around me that I’m forced to trust.
This was America in 1979. A chaotic cauldron where prices went insane overnight, the kind of place where even stray dogs probably carried a pistol in their back pocket. Protecting my precious forehead from stray bullets that could come from anywhere was basic knowledge for any chaebol heir.
The reason I never went down to the first-floor dining room and stayed shut up in my room wasn’t fear. It was an act faithful to the setting that I had only recently lost my parents, and a high-level strategic seclusion to grasp the internal power structure of the family.
Sometimes I thought it would have been easier to be an orphan with no background. Sure, scraping together seed money would have been brutal, but at least the mafia and street thugs wouldn’t be aiming knives at my back to steal my inheritance.
Who knew whether distant relatives with not a drop of shared blood might raise a banner of legitimacy and start a revolt? The saying that the more you possess, the more you have to protect is a timeless truth.
A twenty-two-year-old fresh graduate suddenly becoming the sole heir to billions of dollars was the same as walking around the middle of New York with a giant “VIP” target painted on my back.
I tried not to dwell on it, but the pressure still made me speak less out loud and caused more and more sleepless nights.
Yeah. If I want to stretch my legs and sleep soundly, a clone isn’t a choice—it’s a necessity.
This was exactly why I poured every ounce of focus into filling out the clone settings. A guaranteed ally created by the system. If I simply put one line in the information column, every security risk would drop to zero.
Will devote his life to absolute loyalty to Henry DeVenger.
At the very least, I had the perfectly rational conviction that a clone born from the system would never spike my coffee with drugs in order to steal my fortune. Moreover, if I planted clones in key positions throughout the family, they could investigate everyone around me in my stead and separate the wheat from the chaff.