Chapter 75: The Tree
On a Sunday morning in June 2016, Cho Byungsoo measured the jade tree.
He did this with a tape measure from his factory toolbox—the same toolbox he’d used for thirty-one years, carried from the Bupyeong apartment to the Songdo house, its contents unchanged because good tools don’t need replacing, they just need maintaining. The tape measure was metal, retractable, the kind with a hook on the end that caught on surfaces with a satisfying click.
He stood the tape against the trunk. Stretched it upward. Read the number.
“Two point three meters,” he announced to nobody in particular, though Daniel, who was drinking coffee on the porch, heard him.
“Two point three. Up from two even last year.”
“Thirty centimeters in twelve months. That’s good growth.” His father retracted the tape with a snap. “The soil here is right. The drainage, the sun exposure. Everything about this spot is right.”
“You chose the spot.”
“I chose the spot because the tree told me where it wanted to be. A good gardener doesn’t impose. He observes.” His father knelt—carefully, because fifty-three-year-old knees complained about kneeling in ways that nineteen-year-old knees never did—and examined the base of the trunk. “The root structure is expanding. See here? New growth spreading west, toward the fence. In another two years, it’ll need more room.”
“We can extend the garden.”
“Or we can let it find its way. Trees are good at finding their way.” He stood, brushed the soil from his knees, and sat in the garden chair that Jihye had bought for him—a proper outdoor chair, with cushions and armrests, the kind of chair that a retired man who spent his mornings in the garden deserved. “Two point three meters. The pot on the balcony held it at sixty centimeters for fifteen years. Same tree. Different conditions.”
“Is that a metaphor?”
“It’s horticulture. But maybe it’s also a metaphor.” The almost-smile. “Everything is a metaphor if you look at it long enough.”
Daniel sat with his father in the garden. The Sunday morning was warm—June warm, the kind that promised summer and delivered humidity. Soomin was inside, watching a cartoon that she’d already watched seventeen times and showed no signs of tiring of. Junwoo was in his playpen, conducting a systematic investigation of which objects could be stacked, which could be thrown, and which could be both. Jihye was at the kitchen table, reading—she spent Sunday mornings reading, a habit from her librarian mother that she’d carried into marriage and that Daniel had learned not to interrupt.
“Dad,” Daniel said.
“Hmm.”
“Are you happy?”
Cho Byungsoo looked at his son. The look was long, measured, the same assessing look he’d given Daniel across kitchen tables and brokerage counters and hospital rooms and fishing piers for the last ten years.
“I’m in a garden,” he said. “With a tree I planted. In a house my son bought. My wife is healthy. My daughter is at Seoul National University. My son runs a company that I don’t understand but that apparently is worth a great deal of money. My grandchildren are inside making noise, which is what grandchildren are supposed to do.” He paused. “The fishing rod still works.”
“But are you happy?”
“I’m a man who spent thirty-one years in a factory and who now spends his mornings measuring trees and his afternoons catching fish. If that’s not happy, the word needs a better definition.”
“You could have had this earlier. If I’d—”
“If you’d what? Come back from the future sooner?” His father’s voice was dry but not cold. The voice of a man who had been told his son was a time traveler and had responded with the pragmatic acceptance of a factory worker who had seen stranger things on the production line. “You came when you came. You did what you did. The results are in the garden.”
“The results are in the tree.”
“The results are in everything.” His father looked at the house—the windows, the walls, the roof that kept his family dry. “When you were seventeen, you sat at our kitchen table in Bupyeong and told me the stock market was going to crash. I thought you were insane. When you asked me to open a brokerage account, I thought you were reckless. When you made a million won in two months, I thought you were lucky.”
“And now?”
“Now I think you were brave. Not because you knew the future—because you acted on it. Knowing is easy. Acting is hard. Acting when everyone thinks you’re insane is the hardest thing a person can do.”
“You helped me act. You opened the account. You signed the papers. You trusted me.”
“I trusted my son. That’s not bravery. That’s biology.”
They sat in the garden and watched the jade tree do what jade trees do: grow. Slowly, imperceptibly, with the quiet determination of a living thing that had been given the conditions it needed and was making the most of them.
“Three meters,” Daniel said. “You said a jade tree in the ground can grow three meters.”
“Three meters. Give it time.”
“We have time.”
“We do now.” His father picked up the tape measure. Looked at it. Put it back in the toolbox. “We do now.”
That afternoon, Daniel sat in his home office and opened his notebook. The same notebook he’d been writing in since he was seventeen—or rather, the seventh in a series of identical plastic-covered notebooks that he’d been filling since the night he woke up in a classroom in Bupyeong and wrote his first plans on lined paper.
The last entry was from months ago. The notebook had been neglected—not because the thoughts had stopped, but because the thoughts had become actions, and actions didn’t need to be written down when they were being lived.
But today felt like a day for writing. A day for marking a moment.
June 2016. Ten years since the regression.
Company: Nexus Technologies. Market cap: 450 billion won. 250 employees. 20,000 customers. AI platform launched. Korean AI Alliance founded. Zhonghua partnership established.
Family: Jihye. Soomin (3). Junwoo (2 months). Parents healthy. Minji at SNU Law. Jade tree: 2.3 meters.
Team: Sarah (CTO, still coding at 2 AM). Marcus (CMO, still closing at 10 PM). Minho (VP, still charming at all hours). Soyeon (GC, still terrifying at every hour).
Allies: Yuna (rival, friend, the person who sees the architecture). Wang Lei (regressor, dinner guest, the man learning to catch fireflies). Professor Kim (mentor, charter signatory, still drinking terrible coffee).
Portfolio: 80 million won personal holdings (Nexus equity excluded). Dad’s retirement funded. Mom’s kitchen has a window over the sink. Minji has new sneakers (she goes through them at a rate that defies physics).
Status: Volume 3 complete.
What I came back with: 25 years of future knowledge, fading as the timeline diverges.
What I’ve built: A company, a family, a team, a garden, a tree.
What I’ve learned: The future I remember is not the future that’s happening. The divergence grows with each year. By now, my advance knowledge is less useful than the relationships I’ve built. The investments, the timing, the strategic advantages—those were the tools of the early years. The tools of the next decade are different: trust, patience, the willingness to let people grow at their own pace instead of optimizing them into the shapes I think they should be.
The jade tree grew thirty centimeters this year. Nobody told it to. Nobody optimized its growth schedule. It just grew, because the conditions were right and because growing is what living things do when you stop holding them in pots.
That’s the lesson. The only lesson that matters.
Stop holding. Start planting. Trust the soil.
The tree knows how to grow.
He closed the notebook. Set it on the shelf next to the others—seven notebooks, ten years of a second life, written in handwriting that had evolved from the round letters of a seventeen-year-old to the sharp strokes of a twenty-seven-year-old CEO.
Through the window, the jade tree was visible in the garden—green, growing, patient. His father was still in his chair, reading a fishing magazine. His mother was in the kitchen, preparing dinner. Soomin was playing in the yard, chasing something invisible with the focused joy of a child who didn’t need a reason to run. Junwoo was asleep.
Ten years. Two lives. One tree.
And the best part was: there were still twenty years of story left to write.
But that was for tomorrow. Today was Sunday. And Sundays were for gardens.
Minji called that evening from her SNU dormitory, because Cho Minji called every Sunday evening with the reliability of a clock and the enthusiasm of a sports commentator.
“Oppa, I got the highest grade in my corporate law class,” she announced. “Professor Yoon—the boring one—said my analysis of hostile takeover defense mechanisms was ‘the most thorough he’d seen from a second-year student.’ His words. I recorded them.”
“You recorded your professor giving you a compliment?”
“Evidence preservation. Soyeon unni taught me that.” The sound of papers rustling. “Also, I need your advice on something.”
“Legal advice or brother advice?”
“Both. There’s a summer internship at Soyeon unni’s old firm. The one that handles tech company IP. I want to apply, but the application asks for a ‘personal statement describing my motivation for pursuing technology law.’ And my real motivation is ‘my brother is a time-traveling CEO and I want to make sure his company doesn’t get sued,’ which I can’t write.”
“Definitely don’t write that.”
“So what do I write?”
“Write about why technology matters to you personally. Not about me—about you. About the girl who failed a math exam at twelve and decided to understand systems instead of being defeated by them. About the student who sees law not as a set of rules but as a framework for making innovation possible.”
“That sounds like a Soyeon unni speech.”
“Soyeon gives good speeches. Borrow the structure, fill it with your own content.”
“Like coding?”
“Exactly like coding. Sarah would be proud of that analogy.”
“Sarah unni would tell me to stop talking and start writing.”
“Then stop talking and start writing.”
“I love you, oppa.”
“I love you too. Good night, Minji.”
“Good night. Tell the jade tree I said hello.”
“The jade tree doesn’t have ears.”
“It has roots. Same thing.”
She hung up. Daniel looked at the jade tree through the window. Two point three meters. Growing. Patient. Alive.
He didn’t tell the tree that Minji said hello. But he thought it anyway, because some communications were better conducted in silence, between living things that understood the language of growth.