Chapter 6: The Prophet of Bupyeong
Daniel told his father about AIG over breakfast.
He’d rehearsed it three times in the bathroom mirror, trying to find the right balance between “informed teenager” and “not suspiciously omniscient.” The mirror had offered no feedback. Mirrors never do.
“Dad,” he said, pouring soy sauce over his egg. “You know the American bank that collapsed yesterday? Lehman Brothers?”
His father grunted. He was reading the sports section of the Incheon Ilbo, which was his way of saying I acknowledge your existence but I’m busy.
“There’s going to be another one. A company called AIG. It’s an insurance company, the biggest in the world. The American government is going to bail them out. Probably within the next two days.”
His father lowered the newspaper. Not all the way—just enough to look at Daniel over the top of it, the way a judge looks at a defendant who’s said something unexpectedly interesting.
“And how would you know that?”
“I’ve been reading the financial news. AIG has massive exposure to something called credit default swaps. It’s basically insurance on bad debt. When Lehman went down, all those insurance contracts became liabilities. AIG doesn’t have enough money to cover them.”
His mother paused mid-pour over the rice. Minji looked up from her math homework with the expression of someone who’d accidentally wandered into the wrong movie.
“Credit default swaps,” his father repeated, each word pronounced with the careful skepticism of a man who worked with metal for a living and preferred his problems tangible.
“Think of it this way,” Daniel said, leaning forward. “Imagine if every car in Korea was insured by the same company. And then suddenly, half the cars in Korea crashed on the same day. That company couldn’t pay all the claims, right? AIG is that company, except instead of cars, it’s banks. And instead of Korea, it’s the entire world.”
His father stared at him. His mother stared at him. Even Minji stared at him, though she quickly pretended she hadn’t been listening.
“Where did you learn to talk like this?” his mother asked.
“The internet.”
“The internet teaches seventeen-year-olds about insurance companies?”
“It teaches everything, Mom. That’s kind of the point.”
His father folded the newspaper slowly and placed it on the table. “Okay. So you think this AIG company is going to get a bailout. What does that have to do with us?”
“Nothing. Yet.” Daniel picked up his chopsticks and ate a piece of kimchi, trying to look casual. His heart was hammering. “I just wanted to tell you. So that when it happens, you’ll know I called it.”
“And why would I need to know that?”
“Because later, I’m going to ask you to trust me about something bigger. And when I do, I want you to remember this conversation.”
The kitchen was quiet. The refrigerator hummed. Outside, a dog was barking at something only dogs could see.
“You’re a strange kid,” his father said finally. “You know that?”
“I’ve been told.”
“Eat your breakfast. You’ll be late for school.”
Daniel ate his breakfast. His father went back to the sports section. But something had shifted in the air between them—a hairline crack in the wall of paternal certainty that Cho Byungsoo had built around himself. Not trust. Not yet. But the beginning of curiosity.
Step one complete. Now I wait.
The AIG bailout was announced forty-one hours later.
Daniel was in the library when it happened, helping Jieun with past participles, when his phone buzzed with a news alert. He glanced at the screen under the table:
BREAKING: U.S. Federal Reserve announces $85 billion rescue package for AIG
He closed his eyes for a moment and let the confirmation wash over him. Not surprise—he’d known this was coming. But relief. The first prediction had landed. The foundation was set.
“Daniel? You okay?” Jieun was looking at him with concern. “You just smiled at your phone and then closed your eyes. That’s serial killer behavior.”
“I’m fine. Where were we?”
“Past participles. ‘The cake was eaten.’ I still don’t understand why the cake is doing anything. The cake is just sitting there.”
“The cake isn’t doing anything. That’s the point. Passive voice means the subject receives the action instead of performing it. The cake didn’t eat itself. Someone ate the cake.”
“Then why don’t they just say ‘someone ate the cake’?”
“Because sometimes you don’t know who did it. Or you don’t care. Or—” Daniel paused, thinking of a better example. “Imagine you broke your mom’s favorite vase. You could say ‘I broke the vase.’ Or you could say ‘The vase was broken.’ See the difference?”
Jieun’s face lit up with the glee of a student who has just discovered a practical application for grammar. “Passive voice is for avoiding blame!”
“Now you’re getting it.”
“So if I fail my English test, I can say ‘The test was failed’?”
“I mean, technically yes, but I’d recommend just passing the test.”
She laughed. Daniel felt a small glow of satisfaction that had nothing to do with AIG or investments or the grand plan. Teaching was—unexpectedly—enjoyable. Not in the way that making money was enjoyable, which was sharp and addictive and left you wanting more. This was warmer. Quieter. The satisfaction of watching someone understand something for the first time.
In my first life, I never taught anyone anything. I hired people, managed people, fired people. But I never sat with someone and helped them learn. Maybe that’s one of the things I missed.
He brought it up at dinner that night.
His timing was deliberate. His father had just finished his second beer—enough to be relaxed, not enough to be dismissive. His mother was washing dishes, which meant she was listening but not directly involved, which was her preferred mode for potentially contentious conversations. Minji was in her room, headphones on, lost in whatever world twelve-year-olds inhabit when they think no one is watching.
“Dad.”
“Hmm.”
“AIG got bailed out today. Eighty-five billion dollars.”
His father’s chopstick stopped midway between the plate and his mouth. Slowly, he set it down.
“I saw.”
“I told you two days ago it would happen.”
“You did.”
“Does that count for something?”
His father leaned back in his chair. It creaked—the same creak it had made for fifteen years, a sound so familiar it was practically a family member. He studied Daniel with an expression that Daniel had never seen on his father’s face before: not skepticism, not amusement, but something approaching genuine assessment.
“It counts for something,” his father said carefully. “It means you read the news and made a good guess.”
“It wasn’t a guess.”
“Everything is a guess when it comes to money, Daniel. The difference between a rich man and a poor man is just who guessed right more often.”
“What if it’s not about guessing? What if you actually understand how the system works, and you can see the patterns?”
“Then you’d be the smartest person in the world, and you wouldn’t be living in Bupyeong.”
Daniel bit back the response that rose in his throat: I’m not the smartest person in the world. I’m just the only person who’s seen this movie before.
“Okay,” he said instead. “Then let me make another prediction. I think the stock market—the KOSPI—is going to drop at least thirty percent in the next two months. Maybe more. And I think it’ll hit its lowest point sometime around March 2009.”
His father’s face hardened. “The stock market.”
“Yes.”
“The thing that your grandfather lost everything on.”
“Grandfather lost money because he trusted the wrong person, not because the market itself was bad. The market is a tool. It’s like—” Daniel searched for an analogy his father would understand. “It’s like a lathe. A lathe can make beautiful things or it can take your fingers off. The machine isn’t good or bad. What matters is whether the operator knows what he’s doing.”
His father was quiet for a long time. From the kitchen, Daniel could hear his mother’s hands pause over the dishes. She was listening. She was always listening.
“And you think you know what you’re doing,” his father said. It wasn’t a question.
“I think I know more than most people. And in six months, when the market hits bottom, I want to invest. Everything I’ve saved. If you’ll let me open a custodial account.”
“How much have you saved?”
“Right now? About 300,000 won. By March, it should be over four million.”
“Four million won.” His father said it the way you’d say “four million lightyears”—as a number too large to be connected to reality. “From tutoring.”
“Tutoring and electronics resale.”
“Since when do you—” His father stopped. Rubbed his face with both hands. Took a breath. “Daniel. Three weeks ago, you were a normal student. Average grades. No job. No interest in anything except that computer game. Now you’re making a million won a month and predicting global financial events. What happened to you?”
There it was. The question. The same question Minho had asked, the same question his mother’s eyes asked every time she looked at him too long. What happened to you?
I died, Dad. I lived a life where I had everything and nothing, and then I died alone in an office that smelled like whiskey and betrayal, and I woke up in a classroom that smelled like chalk dust. And now I’m trying to do it right.
“I grew up,” Daniel said quietly. “I know that sounds weird. But something clicked. I realized I was wasting time, and I didn’t want to waste any more.”
His father looked at him—really looked, in that rare way that Cho Byungsoo reserved for moments that mattered. The assessment in his eyes was no longer casual. It was the look of a man recalibrating his understanding of his son.
“Your grandfather,” his father said slowly, “trusted a man who smiled a lot and made big promises. He lost everything because he believed that someone else could make him rich.”
“I’m not asking anyone to make me rich. I’m asking you to let me try.”
“With your own money?”
“With my own money. Every won I’ve earned myself. I’m not asking you to invest anything. Just to let me open the account in your name.”
More silence. The clock on the wall ticked. The refrigerator hummed. From Minji’s room, the faint tinny sound of music leaking from headphones.
“I’ll think about it,” his father said.
In the language of Cho Byungsoo, that wasn’t a no. That was as close to a yes as Daniel was going to get tonight.
“Thank you, Dad.”
“Don’t thank me. I said I’d think about it.” His father picked up his chopsticks and resumed eating. “And if you lose everything, I’m not going to feel sorry for you. You’ll get a job at the factory and work until you’ve learned the value of a won.”
“Fair enough.”
“Good. Now eat. Your mother’s kimchi jjigae is getting cold and she’ll blame me.”
From the kitchen, his mother’s voice: “I can hear you, Byungsoo.”
“I know you can. That’s why I said it loud.”
Daniel ate. The jjigae was perfect—hot and salty and exactly the right kind of spicy. His father went back to his newspaper. His mother resumed washing dishes, humming a trot song that Daniel hadn’t heard in twenty-five years but recognized in the first three notes.
I’ll think about it.
It was enough. For now, it was enough.
At school the next day, the mood had shifted.
It was subtle—not the kind of thing that teenagers would normally notice, because teenagers exist in a world where the economy is something that happens to other people. But the teachers were different. Quieter. Mr. Yoon’s jokes weren’t as frequent. Mrs. Park’s smile was tighter. The principal’s morning announcement, usually a perfunctory thirty seconds about upcoming events, included a new phrase: “In these uncertain times, let us focus on our studies and support one another.”
“What uncertain times?” Sangmin asked, genuinely confused. “Is something happening?”
“The economy, dumbass,” Jeonghyun said. He was scrolling through his phone under his desk. “My dad’s been on the phone all morning. Something about his suppliers not getting paid.”
“That’s his problem, not ours.”
“His problem pays for your lunch, Sangmin.”
The table went quiet. Even Sangmin, who was constitutionally incapable of reading a room, sensed that something was off.
Minho caught Daniel’s eye across the table. A slight nod. This is what you were talking about.
Daniel nodded back. This is just the beginning.
After lunch, Minho fell into step beside him in the hallway. “So. Lehman. AIG. What’s next?”
“The market keeps dropping. For months. There’ll be a few dead cat bounces—days where it looks like it’s recovering—but it’s going down.”
“Dead cat bounce?”
“Finance term. Even a dead cat bounces if you drop it from high enough.”
“That’s the most disturbing metaphor I’ve ever heard.”
“Welcome to economics.”
They walked in silence for a moment, carried by the flow of students between classes. The hallway smelled like floor cleaner and the sweet chemical tang of the vending machine that had been broken since May but that nobody had bothered to repair.
“I talked to my dad,” Minho said. “About what you said. The stock market crashing.”
“What did he say?”
“He said I should focus on school and stop listening to ‘armchair economists.'” Minho made air quotes. “Then he went into his study and closed the door. I could hear him on the phone for two hours.”
“Your dad’s in finance, right?”
“Accounting firm. Mid-size. He handles tax returns for small businesses.” Minho shrugged. “He probably knows more about this stuff than he lets on. He just doesn’t want me worrying.”
Minho’s father. Kim Juntae. An accountant who taught his son the language of numbers and the architecture of money. In my first life, I always wondered where Minho learned to navigate financial systems with such precision. Now I know.
“Your dad’s smart,” Daniel said carefully. “He’s probably already adjusting his clients’ portfolios.”
“Probably. He doesn’t talk to me about work.” Minho’s voice carried a trace of something that Daniel recognized—the quiet frustration of a son who wanted his father’s respect and wasn’t sure he had it. “He thinks I’m going to end up in business school and join his firm. Minho & Kim Accounting. My name first, obviously.”
“Obviously.”
“What I actually want to do is—” Minho stopped. Shook his head. “Never mind.”
“What?”
“It’s dumb.”
“Tell me.”
Minho glanced around the hallway, as if checking for eavesdroppers. “I want to start a business. Not accounting—something real. Something that makes things. I don’t know what yet. But I want to build something from scratch.”
Daniel felt the floor tilt beneath him. Not physically—the hallway was perfectly stable. But something in his understanding of Minho had just shifted, like a puzzle piece rotating into a position he hadn’t considered.
In my first life, Minho was a thief. He stole fifty million dollars through fraud and embezzlement. But what if that was the corrupted version of something else? What if the instinct was always there—the desire to build—and it just got twisted along the way?
What if, given a different path, Minho could have been a creator instead of a destroyer?
“That’s not dumb,” Daniel said. His voice came out rougher than he intended.
“You sound weird.”
“I mean it. Starting a business isn’t dumb. It’s—it’s exactly the kind of thing you should be doing.”
Minho looked at him sideways. “You really have changed, you know that? The old Daniel would have said ‘sure, bro’ and gone back to thinking about StarCraft.”
“Maybe the old Daniel wasn’t paying attention.”
“Maybe.” Minho was quiet for a moment. Then he punched Daniel’s shoulder lightly—the same gesture he’d made a hundred times, in this life and the last. But this time, it felt different. Less casual. More deliberate.
“Thanks for taking me seriously,” Minho said.
“Always.”
I just wish I knew whether I should.
The bell rang. They split toward their respective classrooms, carried by the current of students, and Daniel allowed himself one backward glance. Minho was already gone, swallowed by the crowd, and the hallway was just a hallway again—fluorescent lights, scuffed floors, the faint smell of chalk dust and adolescence.
Eight days until the next drop.
But for the first time, Daniel was thinking about something other than the market.
He was thinking about second chances. Not his own—he’d already taken that for granted. But Minho’s.
What if I could give him one too?