Chapter 1: Back to Seventeen
The bankruptcy papers covered Daniel Cho’s desk like a funeral shroud.
Forty-seven pages of legal jargon, but they all said the same thing: Cho Industries was dead. Twenty years of his life, reduced to signatures and settlement clauses. Dead because of Minho.
Daniel leaned back in his chair and stared at the ceiling. His corner office on the forty-second floor of the Cho Industries tower still offered a panoramic view of Yeouido’s financial district, but he’d stopped looking at it months ago. That view belonged to a man who owned things. Daniel owned nothing now. Less than nothing—twelve million dollars in debt, to be precise.
Park Minho. His college roommate. His best friend. His CFO for fifteen years.
The man who had systematically siphoned fifty million dollars through shell companies, forged invoices, and offshore accounts while smiling at Daniel across the conference table every Monday morning. By the time the auditors found it, Minho was gone. Somewhere in Southeast Asia with a new name and Daniel’s money. The company, starved of cash and drowning in debts Minho had secretly accumulated, collapsed in six months.
Daniel was forty-two years old. No company. No money. No family—he’d been too busy building his empire to build a life. Just an empty office in a tower that would belong to creditors by Friday.
He pulled open his desk drawer and took out the bottle of whiskey. The expensive kind—Minho had given it to him for his fortieth birthday. The irony tasted worse than the alcohol.
He poured a glass. Drank it. Poured another.
His phone sat on the desk, dark. No one was calling. His parents were both gone—his father from a heart attack three years ago, his mother from grief two years after that. He hadn’t visited either of them enough. He’d always meant to. Next month. After this quarter. When things settled down.
Things never settled down. And now they never would.
“Minho,” Daniel said to the empty office, his voice rough. “I hope you’re enjoying Bali or wherever the hell you are.”
He finished the second glass. The city lights blurred. He closed his eyes.
He didn’t open them expecting to see anything at all.
The first thing he noticed was the smell.
Chalk dust and floor wax. A scent so specific, so deeply buried in his memory, that his body recognized it before his brain did. His shoulders tensed the way they used to when Mrs. Park was about to call on him for an answer he didn’t have.
The second thing he noticed was the chair. Hard plastic, the kind that made your back ache after ten minutes. Not the Herman Miller executive chair he’d spent three thousand dollars on.
The third thing was the sound. Not the hum of air conditioning and the distant murmur of a trading floor, but the scratching of chalk on a blackboard, the rustle of paper, and the barely-suppressed giggling of teenagers.
Daniel opened his eyes.
A blackboard covered one wall, filled with dates and names he’d memorized twenty-five years ago and forgotten almost as quickly. Fluorescent lights buzzed overhead. Through smudged windows, he could see a schoolyard with basketball hoops, the nets frayed and drooping.
A classroom. A high school classroom.
I’m dreaming.
“Cho Daniel! Are you sleeping again?”
A woman’s voice, sharp and familiar in a way that made his stomach drop. Daniel’s head snapped toward the front of the room.
Mrs. Park stood at the lectern, chalk in one hand, glasses perched on the end of her nose. She looked exactly the way he remembered—stern mouth, kind eyes, the same navy cardigan she wore every Tuesday.
Mrs. Park had died of pancreatic cancer in 2014. Daniel had sent flowers to the funeral but hadn’t attended. Too busy.
“I asked you a question,” she said, tapping the chalk against the board. “What year did the Joseon Dynasty begin?”
Daniel opened his mouth. Nothing came out. He looked down at his hands.
Small. Smooth. No calluses from two decades of stress. No age spots. No scar on his right palm from the time he’d punched his office wall when the first audit report came in. He was wearing a white dress shirt and dark slacks—a school uniform.
His heart was slamming against his ribs so hard he was sure the kid next to him could hear it.
“1392,” he said automatically. His voice cracked on the second syllable—not from emotion, but from the physical reality of a seventeen-year-old’s vocal cords. “Founded by Yi Seong-gye after overthrowing the Goryeo Dynasty.”
Mrs. Park blinked, visibly surprised. Daniel had never been a good student the first time around. He’d scraped by on charm and athletics until he discovered business in college.
“Correct. Try to stay awake, Daniel.”
She turned back to the blackboard. Daniel sat frozen, staring at the back of her navy cardigan, his mind running calculations it couldn’t possibly solve.
This isn’t a dream. Dreams don’t have this much detail. Dreams don’t have the specific scratch of chalk that Mrs. Park makes when she writes the number 4. Dreams don’t have the smell of Jeonghyun’s tuna kimbap three desks over.
He looked around the classroom with the controlled panic of a man who has just realized the building is on fire but knows running will only make things worse.
There. Second row from the back, by the window.
Park Minho.
Seventeen years old. Messy hair that somehow looked intentional. The lazy, confident grin of a boy who had never worried about anything because the world had always been kind to him. He was doodling in the margins of his notebook—little cartoon faces that Daniel had once found endearing.
Minho caught Daniel staring and gave him a thumbs up. His lips moved silently: What’s up, bro?
Daniel turned away. Under the desk, his hands were trembling. These small, seventeen-year-old hands that had never signed a contract or shaken on a deal or held a glass of whiskey meant as a parting gift from a life that no longer existed.
I’m seventeen years old. It’s… what year is it?
He glanced at the date written in the corner of the blackboard: September 3, 2008.
2008. The global financial crisis is twelve days away. I know everything that’s going to happen for the next twenty-five years. And the person who ruined my life is sitting ten feet away from me, thinking I’m his best friend.
The bell rang at 3:30.
Students erupted from their desks like water from a broken dam, streaming toward the door in a chaos of backpacks and shouting. Daniel stood slowly. His legs felt strange—too light, too full of energy, like a car engine that had been swapped from a tired sedan into a sports car.
“Daniel-ah!” Minho appeared beside him, slinging an arm around his shoulders. The weight of it was so familiar it hurt. “PC bang? I found this new StarCraft build that’s completely broken. We can—”
“Can’t today.” Daniel shrugged off Minho’s arm as gently as he could manage. The physical contact made his skin crawl, which was irrational—this Minho hadn’t done anything yet. This Minho was seventeen and innocent and had no idea what he would become. “I’ve got something to take care of.”
“Something to take care of?” Minho laughed, a bright, genuine laugh that Daniel had to remind himself not to trust. “Since when do you have things to take care of? You literally told me yesterday that your life plan is ‘wing it until something works.'”
Yesterday. The old Daniel said that yesterday.
“Things change,” Daniel said quietly.
Something in his tone made Minho tilt his head. For a moment, behind the easy grin, Daniel caught a flicker of something sharper—the same calculating look he’d seen across conference tables years from now.
Or maybe he was imagining it. Maybe he was projecting twenty-five years of betrayal onto a seventeen-year-old boy who just wanted to play StarCraft.
“Okay, weirdo.” Minho punched his shoulder lightly. “Tomorrow, then. And you’re buying the snacks.”
“Sure.”
Daniel watched Minho walk away down the hallway, hands in his pockets, whistling something tuneless. A boy. Just a boy.
But I know what you become.
Outside, the September afternoon was warm and golden. Daniel walked slowly, taking in every detail with the hyper-awareness of a man seeing a demolished building standing whole again.
The convenience store on the corner where he used to buy ramyeon after school—the one that had been torn down in 2015 to build a coffee shop. The PC bang where he’d wasted hundreds of hours on StarCraft—still advertising its grand opening special, three years running. The bus stop for the number 37, which would take him home to his parents’ apartment in Bupyeong.
His parents’ apartment.
Daniel stopped walking.
His father was alive. Right now, at this moment, his father was probably at the Hyundai factory, finishing his shift, looking forward to dinner and the evening news. His mother was in the kitchen, making kimchi or bean paste stew, humming along to a trot song on the radio.
Both alive. Both healthy. Both completely unaware that their son had just arrived from a future where he’d let them die alone.
Daniel’s eyes burned. He pressed the heels of his hands against them, hard, standing on the sidewalk in his school uniform while students flowed around him like a river around a stone.
Get it together. You’re standing in the middle of the sidewalk crying like—well, like a seventeen-year-old. Which is what you are. Sort of.
He took a breath. Then another. The air tasted different here—2008 air, before the construction boom, before the new highway, before half these buildings existed. Cleaner, somehow. Or maybe that was just nostalgia filtering through panic.
His phone buzzed in his pocket. He pulled it out—a chunky Samsung flip phone, the kind with a tiny external screen and buttons that clicked with satisfying precision. A text from Minho:
“Changed your mind? PC bang is calling bro”
Daniel typed back with thumbs that remembered this keyboard better than he expected: “Tomorrow. Promise.”
He flipped the phone shut and started walking toward the bus stop.
Twenty-five years of knowledge. Twenty-five years of mistakes he could unmake, opportunities he could seize, people he could save. The financial crisis was coming in twelve days. After that, the smartphone revolution. Social media. Cloud computing. Everything.
He knew every major market movement, every technology shift, every turning point for the next quarter century.
But standing at the bus stop, waiting for the number 37 with his too-light backpack and his too-young body, Daniel made himself a promise that had nothing to do with money or markets or revenge.
This time, I go home for dinner.
The bus arrived with a hydraulic wheeze. He climbed on, tapped his student transit card, and took a seat by the window. Incheon scrolled past—apartment blocks, construction sites, the glint of the sea in the distance.
Somewhere ahead, his mother was humming in the kitchen. His father was clocking out of his shift. Neither of them knew that their son was, in some impossible way, older than both of them combined.
Daniel leaned his forehead against the cool glass of the bus window and, for the first time in twenty-five years, allowed himself to feel something that wasn’t anger or regret or exhaustion.
It took him a moment to recognize it. It had been that long.
Hope.