Two days later, The rain outside drummed politely against the window panes of Mr. Nam's study, soft and constant, like a gentle heartbeat. Warm lamplight spilled across shelves of old books and leather-bound reports, painting the room in amber.
The logs crackled in the fireplace. Wood snapped sharply, sending tiny sparks up the chimney.
And yet — despite all the warmth — the atmosphere was thick with doubt.
"You know I trust your judgement," Nam said, exhaling slowly as he set a teacup down. "You're brilliant, Jae-Hyun. Too brilliant sometimes. But…" He gestured vaguely, fingers trapped between uncertainty and worry. "This merger? Investing into both corporations? In this climate? It's reckless. Antitrust regulators are famous for dragging processes. Deals fall apart all the time."
Opposite him, reclined comfortably on a leather sofa, sat Jae-Hyun — relaxed, composed, almost serene.
"I understand," he said calmly, voice low. "Any experienced investor would say the same."
"Exactly!" Nam leaned forward, relieved the boy finally saw reason. "The safer—"
Jae-Hyun raised a hand gently. Not silencing… guiding.
"But investing isn't about safety," he murmured. "It's about clarity."
Before Nam could respond, Jae-Hyun glanced at the sleek watch on his wrist. He rose, walked to the remote resting on the table, and turned the TV on. The screen came to life with muted commercials.
Nam blinked. "What are you doing?"
"Just watch."
Jae-Hyun's gaze was fixed on the second hand sweeping silently around the watch face.
Nam frowned deeper. "Is something—"
"Three…"
He pointed at the TV with two fingers.
"…two…"
Nam followed his gaze, puzzled.
"…one."
The channel abruptly cut mid-advertisement. The screen warped into a flash of red headlines.
BREAKING NEWSATLAS MICRO & KEUM-TECH MERGER RECEIVES ANTITRUST APPROVAL
Nam's jaw dropped.
The anchor spoke quickly, voice pitched high with excitement.
"Regulators have cleared the twenty-eight billion dollar merger between Atlas Micro and Keum-Tech just minutes ago. Market consensus predicted at least another month of review—"
A flurry of images exploded across the screen: stock tickers, surging graphs, smartphone alerts lighting up hands across the city, investors shouting across trading floors.
The anchor continued breathlessly:
"Investor confidence has skyrocketed as both corporations leap across expected valuation thresholds—"
Nam's hands trembled around his teacup. "…No. No. No way. They wouldn't approve something this controversial this fast. They—"
He turned sharply to Jae-Hyun.
"When did you— How did you—?"
"Internal regulator chatter," Jae-Hyun answered like he was discussing the weather. "Their preliminary clearance was quietly finalized three days ago. Public confirmation simply lagged."
Nam stared, speechless.
On the TV, numbers glowed:
ATLAS MICRO: +19%
KEUM-TECH: +24%
INDUSTRY INDEX RESPONSE: +11%
The flames in the fireplace flickered wildly as if reacting to the market.
"And that," Jae-Hyun added softly, "is only the beginning."
Nam rose slowly from his chair, stepping toward the screen like a man walking toward a miracle.
In Equinox trading room — displayed live through a picture-in-picture broadcast — the graph wasn't climbing.
It was sprinting.
Portfolio values exploded into neon acceleration arcs,
arrows punching upward like rockets breaking sound barriers,
numbers flipping faster than eyes could track.
Investors gasped first.
Then they surged.
The room in the feed erupted — gasps, curses, disbelieving laughs. Phones rang. Trading bots activated with machine precision.
Nano-trades.
Micro-profits.
Hundreds every second.
Volatility harvesting.
"Good Lord…" Nam whispered.
He turned toward the boy — no, the phenomenon — sitting quietly on the sofa.
"…You predicted this?"
"With margin to spare," Jae-Hyun replied.
"And the crypto volatility?" Nam gestured vaguely. "It's behaving like a heartbeat monitor."
"Yes." A slight nod. "And we are extracting profit with every pulse."
Nam swallowed. Hard.
"How much have we made already?"
Jae-Hyun tapped his tablet. A single number glowed.
FIVE TIMES INITIAL CAPITAL.
In forty-eight hours.
Nam staggered back into his chair. "…Forty-eight hours… Jae-Hyun, that profit usually takes—"
"Months," the younger said. "I know."
Another spike flared across the screen. Market commentary buzzed below it.
Jae-Hyun finally stood, and handed Nam a sleek black drive.
"What's this?"
"My edge," he said simply.
Nam inserted it into the tabletop projector. Light bloomed upward, forming a rotating model of prediction graphs, time-sequence differentials, risk isolations, macro-trigger flags.
It was beautiful.
"This," Jae-Hyun said softly, "is one of my AI tools."
Mr. Nam blinked. "AI… tool?"
"It reviews thousands of simple, everyday things people miss," Jae-Hyun explained. "Government schedules, spending habits, trade patterns, rumors, old news articles… It connects dots no human has time to connect."
"But what does it actually do?" Mr. Nam asked.
"In plain English?" Jae-Hyun smiled.
"It helps us buy when something is cheap and sell right before the crowd realizes it's expensive."
Mr. Nam's breath hitched.
"And if most people buy after the price has risen too much…" Jae-Hyun continued, "the price eventually crashes."
"So…" Mr. Nam whispered, "we ride the wave… before everyone else piles in and drowns?"
"Exactly."
His eyes flicked to the TV where the numbers kept climbing.
+27%
+31%
+36%
"This is insane…" Mr. Nam exhaled, genuinely speechless.
"And EquinoxFund," Jae-Hyun continued, "will use this to outperform every firm… not because of luck… economy… or workforce."
He leaned in, voice settling like a crown.
"But because of me."
Something old and iron-strong settled in his tone.
Nam sat motionless.
"You planned this," he whispered, "like chess."
"No," Jae-Hyun corrected gently. "Chess is two dimensions. Markets are four."
Nam covered his mouth with his hand. Eyes shone with respect — and devotion.
"…I don't need thirty days," he said slowly. His voice trembled with the weight of decision. "I don't need to track performance for a month to determine of you're worth working with. You've proven yourself more in two days… than most leaders do in ten years. I want to learn from you."
Silence.
"I will resign from Daesung tomorrow morning." His chest rose, full of conviction. "I will join you."
Jae-Hyun didn't smile brightly. He nodded — deeply. Respectfully.
"I'm honored."
Nam bowed his head.
"No. I am honored."
The graphs spiked again — violent, beautiful fireworks of wealth.
"But," Jae-Hyun continued gently, "you'll pull out on day three."
Nam blinked. "Three? But if it's rising, why not hold?"
"Because retail will surge irrationally on day four. Herd psychology floods late. They buy the top. When enough investors pile in, overvaluation snaps. Panic selling cascades. And stocks crash."
"You see a crash?"
"I see gravity," he replied. "And gravity always wins."
Nam exhaled in disbelief. "You're predicting four days ahead…"
"Actually," Jae-Hyun murmured, tapping the hologram, "…four days, six hours, twenty-two minutes."
A beat.
Nam stared.
"You're terrifying," he whispered.
"Thank you."
THREE DAYS LATER
The stock ticker glowed like a fever:
+412%
+568%
+619%
News anchors were shrieking by noon.
"Record-setting surge!"
"Unprecedented growth!"
"Everyone wants in!"
Nam pulled out exactly when told. His portfolio crystallized at profits that should've taken years.
And on day four…
Red.
Crimson.
BLOOD-RED.
Investors screamed on live TV. Brokerages froze accounts. Tickers crashed like falling starships.
Portfolio graphs plummeted. People who bought on day three lost half their money in forty minutes.
Nam watched from his home office, hands trembling around his phone, while his own profits sat untouched — safe — because he pulled out early.
On screen, commentators yelled:
"HOW DID THIS HAPPEN?"
"The trajectory was upward—"
"This is chaos—"
And then, quietly, one analyst:
"…Someone must have seen this coming."
Nam closed his eyes.
"I know who did."
- - -
Meanwhile, across town, black wall's boardroom hummed quietly with low conversation and the delicate clink of ceramic cups. Department heads filtered in, their badges glinting against sharp suits. Chairs slid. Tablets unlocked. A few executives wore that familiar predatory grin—the kind tech giants get before dissecting a rival.
Cha Eun-Seo sat near the center, arms crossed, eyes sharp. Across from her, Director Park Seol-Gi shuffled a tablet, yawning once — loudly — before covering it with a cough.
The door sealed with a magnetic click.
"Let's begin," said the presenter — Jung Woo-Shik, lead systems architect.
Screens blinked to life. The Black Wall logo dissolved into a folder directory.
And immediately—people leaned forward.
Because it was chaos.
Floating files. Random alphanumeric strings. Inexplicable folder names like _maybe and misc2 and real_final_FINAL. A man in the back whispered, horrified:
"…Is this a tech company or a teenager's laptop?"
Soft laughter rolled, edged and sharp.
A strategist sighed, pinching the bridge of his nose. "They're children. Sloppy, reckless children. I expected something a little less… emotionally unstable."
"Wait," Woo-Shik said, voice tight, "keep looking."
His laser pointer hovered over a folder buried three layers deep behind useless clutter. When he clicked, the room exhaled collectively—like air leaving a balloon.
PROJECT: ASTRA BLADE PROTOCOL
Voices stilled. Even the air seemed to listen.
Woo-Shik's tone was crisp. "This is an autonomous optimization layer for corporate networks. Simply put — it runs your entire digital infrastructure for you. No engineers tuning firewalls. No analysts watching traffic. It predicts where issues will appear before they exist."
A low whistle slipped from someone in the back. Another leaned forward, squinting.
Woo-Shik zoomed in on a simulation: red hotspots shifting to green before they could flare.
"Right now," he continued, "security teams manually adjust all this. Imagine traffic cops directing a thousand intersections. Astra automates that. Server loads drop. Crashes disappear."
Director Han muttered, "And salaries shrink."
A few executives chuckled under their breath.
Cha Eun-Seo's eyebrow twitched. "And this is all NovaSec?"
Woo-Shik nodded. "Blueprint found in their internal archives."
One executive scoffed. "Archives? Their archive structure looks like someone salted their drive and shook it."
More laughter. Dry, tired — then curious.
"Performance metrics," Woo-Shik went on, tapping again. "Thirty percent faster response times. Forty percent fewer false alarms. Twenty percent lower server bills. Early models suggest companies can replace entire cybersecurity departments with this one system."
Murmurs spread like ripples.
"That's impossible."
"Automation can't predict novel threats."
"Unless it models behavior patterns…"
Woo-Shik slid to a simplified diagram — network nodes shifting like flocking birds, moving away from pressure points.
"Think of it like internal weather forecasting," he said. "You don't need to see the storm — the model predicts the pressure change and moves traffic away first."
A senior engineer exhaled, impressed in spite of himself.
"And how soon can we deliver this?" an executive demanded, greed blooming in his voice.
Woo-Shik smirked. "With these blueprints? A week."
Several heads snapped up.
"A week?" someone echoed, stunned.
A thin thread of nervous laughter tangled through the room.
"That's faster than our quarterly updates."
"It's faster than HR answering emails."
More restrained laughter — but behind it, awe.
"And this is just the first," Woo-Shik said, sliding forward.
Everyone groaned at the folder names again. _trash, _maybe2, _old??, _delete_later.
Someone muttered, "Who organizes like this? A caffeinated raccoon?"
Laughter rippled—dry, nervous, strained.
Woo-Shik zoomed deeper. "…There."
A thin, unassuming document expanded into neural routing models, adaptive load shifts, and on-the-fly defense pivots. The title glowed:
PROJECT ORACLE RESONANCE
The room hushed. Again.
"This," he continued, "is an identity-trust network. Right now, users authenticate with passwords, tokens, biometrics. Oracle watches behavior instead. Location, timing, rhythm, access habits. If anything changes suddenly, Oracle assumes someone stole credentials — and locks the account instantly."
A board member nodded slowly. "So if someone logs in from Los Angeles every day, and suddenly from Berlin at two in the morning—"
"—the system shuts them out," Woo-Shik finished. "It prevents financial fraud. Stops stolen accounts. Hospitals avoid identity mix-ups. Government portals stay clean."
Another quiet whistle.
"And because it learns across all client networks," he added, "if one organization detects suspicious behavior, every connected partner pre-emptively tightens security."
A director leaned back. "So trust becomes a… shared fabric."
"Exactly."
Someone raised a hand. "So this will eliminate fraud penalties. Insurance liabilities. Risk premiums."
Greedy calculation flickered behind eyes around the table.
"And the launch schedule?" someone asked sharply.
"Next week," Woo-Shik replied.
Silence.
Then a burst of shocked voices.
"Next week—?!"
"We can't draft PR that fast!"
"Do we even have the hardware?!"
Woo-Shik let the panic simmer, then switched slides.
Blueprints. Layered architectures. Clean. Elegant. Frighteningly complete.
"We found everything here," he said. "NovaSec must have been preparing these for months. They simply… never launched."
That sentence hung.
Cha Eun-Seo tapped her pen, voice low. "Isn't it suspicious? A flawless system lying around, unused? If they had this, why not deploy? Why leave it sitting?"
Some shifted, uncomfortable.
"That's paranoia," Han said, dry as bone. "If it was a trap, the trap wouldn't make us rich."
Another snorted. "And what, NovaSec dotted all the i's and forgot to launch? Maybe they're not as organized as they look."
A wave of deadpan sarcasm followed:
"Considering their file system looks like someone dumped a puzzle on a carpet—"
"—and then lit it on fire—"
"—I'm impressed they remembered to name the files at all."
Snickers rippled. Tension loosened.
Eun-Seo didn't laugh.
"They scared me once," she said quietly. "With that actor. And that theater stunt. This feels… wrong."
Han waved her off. "Nothing about this says trap. It's clean. It's profitable. It's executable."
Another slide flashed: projected earnings. Explosive growth. Contract expansion. Market capture timelines.
Executives inhaled sharply.
"Hospitals."
"Banks."
"Defense contractors."
"We'll own the backbone of trust."
Woo-Shik continued, pace smooth. "And Astra reduces costs while boosting reliability. Together, clients will tear up contracts to reach us."
Suddenly no one breathed.
Then a low voice: "If this works, we overtake NovaSec in three months."
Greed crystallized.
A hand slammed the table lightly. "We move. Now."
Hands shot in support. Pages rustled. Signatures flew across digital pads.
"We launch both immediately."
Eun-Seo swallowed once, her unease swallowed by the room's heat.
"We're pushing engineers," Woo-Shik concluded. "Seven-day sprint. QA on rotation. We deploy, we dominate, we bury NovaSec."
Applause broke — ragged, eager.
Someone muttered under breath, "And all from files they sloppily hid."
"Beautiful incompetence," another replied.
The room's laughter was sharp. Hungry.
A countdown timer appeared on the screen.
LAUNCH T-7 DAYS
Sweaty palms. Greedy smiles. Contracts drafted. Coffee orders multiplied. The machine roared alive.
Somewhere, quietly, fear turned into ambition.
And ambition turned into ignition.
- - -
Far across the city, NovaSec's Chairman's office rested in warm, amber light. Late-night quiet pressed against the glass walls like velvet.
Jae-Hyun watched his screen, eyes calm.
A soft notification chimed.
Unauthorized blueprint extraction detected. External replication underway.
A tiny, almost polite sound.
He read it once.
Then leaned back, tapping the message away with the corner of his finger.
A slow, satisfied smile ghosted across his face.
"They took the bait."