<CHAPTER 6>

“Team Leader.”

“What?”

“What’s this?”

“Did a whale show up or something?”

Appbit.

It had started out as a shabby little cryptocurrency exchange in the early days of crypto, but it had quickly risen to the top ranks of the industry.

As a company with experience developing stock-trading programs, Appbit gained popularity from the moment it launched thanks to its clean, polished UI.

It further raised its profile by partnering with Bitnance, which was ranked No. 1 among North American exchanges at the time.

Unlike other exchanges, it offered trading in a wide variety of altcoins.

Rumors spread among information-sensitive crypto users, drawing them in by the masses.

Backed by solid financial resources, the company expanded its servers and comfortably widened its share of the market.

Rumors traveled like the wind.

These days, its daily trading volume was easily exceeding the trillion-won mark.

Thanks to aggressive financial backing, the convenience of the app was heavily promoted.

Appbit had designed its service to be as clean and user-friendly as the familiar stock-trading programs users were accustomed to.

One of the employees in charge of overnight trading called over the head of the response team.

“He just sent a huge amount of USDT over to Bitnance.”

“How much?”

“About one billion won.”

“What a traitor to his country. He should be trading on the domestic market where there’s a premium. Everyone and their dog is going overseas.”

“Korea doesn’t have a futures market.”

“That’s true. Still, it fucking sucks.”

Even the team leader found that part frustrating.

He clicked his tongue bitterly.

As the team leader, he was still relatively young, as was typical in the IT industry.

Recently, one crypto-made tycoon after another had been appearing.

Bitcoin, which had been relatively quiet, was showing signs of coming back to life.

Yet despite being an exchange team leader by profession, he had never been able to jump into the crypto market himself.

From what he had witnessed on the front lines, the crypto market was anything but normal.

He considered it highly susceptible to fraud—and that judgment came from someone watching it from the closest possible distance.

Among the company’s early founders were several dangerous individuals.

If he ever got caught up in some kind of insider trading scandal…

Nothing could be guaranteed.

“…Who is it?”

This was a cryptocurrency exchange where people who didn’t give a damn about personal transaction protection operated freely.

The moment you signed up, you tossed trust into the garbage dump and got started.

Any crypto transfer exceeding one billion won was subject to scrutiny by the internal monitoring staff.

Tap-tap-tap-tap.

The employee who had summoned the team leader rapidly typed across the keyboard.

“Name: Ha Tae-woong.”

“Never heard of him before… How old is he?”

“He’s nineteen, by Korean age—eighteen internationally.”

“What? Nineteen?!”

—

Tap, tap. Tap, tap.

He stayed up all night.

Sunlight streamed through the window.

“This is crazy…”

There really was something to having a young body.

He had stayed awake all night without feeling the slightest bit tired.

His mind was as clear as if he had downed several cans of Hot6.

He had been incredibly busy throughout the night.

He had been sorting through the information from the past that would become the foundation of his future.

Not just the Korean stock market, but the U.S. stock market, skyrocketing exchange rates and crude oil prices, surging gold prices, and massive rallies in various cryptocurrencies!

There was no way he could sleep.

No, he wasn’t even sleepy.

Even now, he still couldn’t believe that he had truly gone back in time.

“Grandma…”

I had definitely been born with the blood of a chaebol family.

And yet I had lived a life that was worse than that of someone born with nothing.

And then Grandma had given someone like me a second chance.

It had to be the result of all the good karma she had accumulated during her lifetime.

There was no way he intended to squander the opportunity he had been given and simply let things slide.

“Ha Ryoon.”

His teeth clenched even harder at the thought of him.

The beating he had suffered as a child in a blind spot of the neighborhood alley…

There was a good chance that the person who had carried it out had been bought off by Ha Ryoon.

What kind of lunatic would strike a child on his way to school in the head with a wooden club?

Only now could he see how all the pieces fit together.

His father’s accident.

His mother’s grief after being left alone.

The people who had created that entire situation had undoubtedly been Ha Ryoon’s people as well.

They were vile.

And there was no reason to believe they would be any different in the future that was about to unfold again.

It was war!

“Secretly and magnificently! I’m taking everything.”

He calmly laid out his plans for the future.

“For the time being, all my investments are going into crypto!”

Crypto futures trading was a feature available only on foreign exchanges.

On the screen, he could see graphs showing Bitcoin and various other coins swinging wildly at the same time.

Just because he had lived through that period once didn’t mean he knew everything.

Besides, he had never been particularly smart.

But one thing was certain.

LUNA was going to crash!

That much was absolutely certain about the future.

“That alone is enough.”

The meme coins that would skyrocket hundreds or even thousands of times were nothing more than pocket change compared to this.

Only a handful of coins could be traded with leverage.

“Phew.”

He was so excited imagining the future that he ended up staying awake until dawn.

He started trading with short positions.

Simple and clean.

“I’ll know soon enough if I just wait and see.”

Even now, at this moment when it still didn’t feel real, he forced his wildly beating heart to calm down.

Whoooooosh.

Wind slipped through the cracks around the window.

The rooftop room had been hastily put together with prefabricated panels.

Naturally, it was vulnerable to both heat and cold.

“I need to move first!”

Now that he was back, his days of paying rent for this rooftop room were over.

He had money now. There was no reason to sleep while hugging an old, worn-out blanket.

And he certainly wasn’t going to make cryptocurrency investments while looking like some pathetic loser.

“Go down~ Go down~ Please crash and burn!”

The result would come.

Even so, he prayed for it with all his heart.

In his previous life, he had done nothing but run away from this enormous wave.

Naturally, some people won while others lost.

A cold, ruthless zero-sum game.

As long as I’m never the one who loses.

“Crypto… futures!”

Just imagining the result made his blood boil.

“Leverage. That’s the real deal.”

It was time to increase the stakes without hesitation.

There had to be a reason he had been sent back like this.

And the timing was perfect.

At this point in time, there were still relatively few national restrictions.

There were few tax-related complications to worry about, either.

“I’ll put filial piety on hold for a little while.”

In his previous life, he had neglected his relationship with his mother.

For now, he needed to multiply the money Grandma had given him.

There would soon be plenty of opportunities to repay his mother.

There was no way he could foolishly burn through his capital under the pretext of being filial.

Beep-beep-beep, beep-beep-beep~ ♬

His smartphone alarm went off.

It was one of those familiar routines that had once been second nature.

Without thinking, his eyes naturally drifted toward the wall.

And then…

“…!!”

A school uniform was hanging prominently on the wall!

His mind snapped wide awake.

“M-Madness!! Does that mean I have to go back to high school?!”

He had been dreaming of becoming an orca swimming freely across the Pacific.

But reality had turned him into a tiny blue mackerel.

“Haa…”

A deep sigh rose from his abdomen and escaped through his throat.

—

Thud. Thud.

His footsteps were heavy.

It wasn’t because staying up all night had ruined his condition.

Whatever kind of bonus Grandma had given him, his body and mind remained fresh and clear even after pulling an all-nighter.

The school was a twenty-minute walk from his rooftop room.

After becoming accustomed to ready-made clothes as a working adult, he was suddenly wearing a school uniform again.

The feeling of the fabric hugging his body was unfamiliar…

And yet strangely thrilling.

Cheonghwa Arts High School.

It was a private school corporation established with funding from the Cheonghwa Group Foundation, a conglomerate ranked around fortieth in Korea.

It was one of the country’s prestigious private schools.

Officially, annual tuition for a single grade was around thirty million won.

That made it more expensive than most private universities.

Naturally, the school environment was nearly perfect.

Although the school had only been established forty years ago, its alumni were already deeply entrenched throughout Korea’s upper class.

They had been born with silver spoons in their mouths, after all.

It was only natural.

Business, law, politics, medicine, culture, sports…

There was hardly an influential field where the Cheonghwa alumni network didn’t reach.

The tight connections formed among students who attended the private system from kindergarten all the way through elementary, middle, and high school could not be ignored.

“Back then, I must’ve been out of my damn mind.”

His reckless behavior during middle school seemed even more absurd now.

One day, he had gone out to Gangnam.

That was where he had first seen students from Cheonghwa High School.

The moment he encountered them, the first thing he noticed was how different they looked.

Their uniforms weren’t mass-produced by some ordinary brand.

Every single one was wearing a custom-tailored uniform fitted specifically to their body.

And that wasn’t all.

How was it that every last one of them was so handsome or beautiful?

They had merely passed him by, yet an unmistakable air of refinement radiated from them.

That was when the idea struck him.

His grades were good enough to get in.

His middle school average had been 199.9 out of 200!

But after submitting his application, reality had hit him squarely in the face.

Tuition became the obstacle.

His family simply couldn’t afford it.

It was a luxury private high school where good grades alone didn’t mean just anyone could enroll.

For someone living a life even poorer than an ordinary commoner, it was an insurmountable wall.

But heaven had helped him!

It wasn’t completely impossible.

At the time, his family had been living in a rental apartment in northern Seoul.

His parents had tried to dissuade him from making that choice.

They were worried he would feel out of place.

But he had passionately insisted that he absolutely wanted to attend, and eventually they had given him permission.

“Fancy seeing you again, you arrogant lump of stone.”

By then, he had arrived at the school’s main gate.

The enormous entrance was built in the style of an Independence Gate, with massive granite slabs forming its imposing structure.

Cheonghwa (淸化).

Beneath the school’s name was its large motto, engraved in relief and coated in gold:

Seonjogosan (先照高山).

“Light shines on the highest mountains first!”

“What a fucking arrogant motto.”

Seeing it again, he realized that the motto wasn’t merely arrogant.

It was downright obnoxious.

It meant that those who were already great got the sunlight first.

And the Cheonghwa Group itself was much the same.

They had been exceptionally skilled at rubbing elbows with politicians and had won nearly every government contract available.

They had grown through an endless stream of business until they eventually expanded into golf courses, leisure industries, and even CBC, a nationwide broadcasting network.

The Cheonghwa Group could never be viewed separately from the political and business worlds.

Even its school system was part of that structure.

It served its role perfectly as a specialized educational institution designed for the children of the upper class who would become the leaders of the future.

Screeeech. Screech.

As always, the first lane of the road in front of the school entrance was congested with vehicles.

Students streamed out of luxury sedans lined up one after another.

Not a single small or midsized domestic car was anywhere to be seen.

Every vehicle was a top-of-the-line full-sized sedan.

The students stepped out of their cars and naturally passed through the school gates.

It was elegance taken to the extreme.

The problem was…

“What the hell? Why does everyone look so colorful?”

Something was strange.

He had no idea what he was seeing.

It was definitely not some fleeting phenomenon.

On his way to school, he had seen strange lights surrounding the people he passed on the street.

At first, he thought he was imagining things.

Red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, violet…

And colors beyond those.

It was a strange phenomenon that had begun this morning.

Every person he encountered appeared in a different color.

Wondering if something was wrong with his eyes, he shook his head several times.

“Good morning.”

“Yes. Good morning.”

Cheonghwa High School had strict school rules.

Most students followed the dress code without exception.

Profanity and vulgar language were prohibited in everyday speech.

It had the positive effect of making even the usual high school swearing feel unnatural on their tongues.

Even the wealthy heirs with powerful family backgrounds maintained humble attitudes within the Cheonghwa Group Foundation, which even owned a broadcasting company.

Their attitude toward the teachers standing outside the gate supervising students was exemplary as well.

He followed a group of students through the school gate.

“Good morning!”

“Good morning to you too, Tae-woong.”

Unlike in his previous life, he greeted the teacher with energy.

The teacher in charge of student guidance was a female Korean-language teacher he knew.

Their eyes met.

She was Han Yu-ra, the teacher who had always taken an interest in him because he had maintained top-tier grades without attending an academy or receiving private tutoring.

She was in her early thirties at the time.

She had a cute appearance, complete with round-framed glasses.

She was a talented member of Cheonghwa who had made her debut as a poet while attending Seoguk University.

She was also the supervising teacher of the reading club—the only club that had accepted him as a member.

A bright, comfortable sky-blue aura radiated around her.

He exchanged greetings with her as naturally as if they had seen each other just yesterday, then continued toward the school building.

That was when…

“Who’s that senior?”

“Who?”

“That tall, handsome senior over there.”

“Don’t pay attention to him.”

“Why?”