My lips were cracked, and my face was filled with scratches. My left eye was so swollen that it looked like it was shut, and my reflection on the window of the mall looked like a victim of a gang. I had anticipated this to happen, so I used my imaginary friend’s name, Seong-Ho, to stay out of the house. Also, it was final exams season, so I was supposed to stay at Seong-Ho’s place to study until tomorrow, which was Constitution Day. 

I had the two ten thousand won bills in my pocket that my mother had given me to buy some treats while studying with Seong-Ho. 

Before I headed to the Internet cafe, I stopped by a public washroom at the park. Thanks to a hot midsummer tropical night, my clothes dried quickly even though I wore them wet right after washing. When I put on a wrinkled baseball cap, pedestrians no longer glanced at me. 

The smell of cigarettes in the Internet cafe made me feel nostalgic, and the old analogue vibe was still here in this period. Instead of a membership card, I sat down with a note that was given to me by the owner of the cafe. It had the start time of when I began renting hand-written on it. I accessed an American messenger platform and searched for the current market conditions while waiting for Jonathan. 

***

There were monsters called the Abaddon Ants. They were smaller than the human palm and could be stomped to death, but there were two reasons why the Awakened disliked them. They were voracious eaters and tended to swarm. I had never seen them move around alone. They moved for only one purpose: to eat. Unfortunately they went around in clusters, numbering from hundreds to tens of thousands, and they were always hungry and gnawed everything in their path. 

Everything went to ruins when the Abaddon Ants passed by, and they kept moving in search of new prey since their hunger never ended. The word ‘satisfaction’ wasn’t in their vocabulary. The hedge funds and the investors that were supporting this situation were just like them. They swarmed in groups and ate anything they could. Their tour of Southeast Asia was starting now.

Almost all of their money was now in my pockets, and so they would be desperately thirsty by now. Their actions were more aggressive than they had been in the original history since they were attacking the Philippines, Malaysia, and Indonesia at once. Originally, Southeast Asia was treated as a bundle in the financial world, but this case was a bit different. I could feel the impatience in their movements.

They must have noticed that an unknown group monopolized the position that the baht would plunge on July 1st and took all their profits.

- J: Sun.

- N: I was waiting for you. Don’t you think they noticed?

Jonathan would have known what I was talking about based on this vague hint. 

- J: They would be so curious as to who emptied their pockets.

- N: They are attacking the Philippines, Malaysia, and Indonesia at once as a group. Don’t you think they are rushing things from this?

- J: They are afraid of us? Isn’t that a good thing?

- N: It might cause some problems in my calculations because mistakes are made when things are rushed. It’s hard for me to calculate what mistakes they will make. 

- J: That’s enough. You can miss the details. Have you checked your email?

- N: Yes.

- J: I have gathered a task force of six people as you have told me. Should I invite them to Korea? They should know who the real owner of Jonathan Investments is. 

- N: Wait, you haven’t told them about me, right?

- J: Of course not.

- N: Do you remember what I said before? I’m in your shadow. Please keep that in mind, Jonathan. 

- J: Okay, I will. 

Jonathan began to report on the new situation in our company. He had commissioned the processes for dividing the company into a new start-up firm, then selected eight other companies to continue the process. If we changed firms after each step was completed, the one in charge of the final process would only work with the documents they received without knowing what they were actually dealing with. 

- N: How many paper companies do you think will be laid out? 

- J: If you include the ones in tax havens, there will be over a thousand. The commission fees are beyond imagination. How are you planning to distribute them? You must have thought about the plan, right? 

- N: I’ll send you an email in the morning.

- J: Morning? I forget that you are in Korea sometimes. 

- N: What about Jeffery K?

- J: He is positive about it.

- N: That’s good. There’s one more thing for him to do, along with taking over the investment firms. 

I couldn’t continue using other people’s servers when emailing, chatting, or even phoning. Even though I chose GOL messenger after checking its security system, it was terribly vulnerable to talented hackers no different from the speculative forces in front of Asian countries.

- N: Do you know Predict?

- J: Of course.

- N: It’s our top priority target to take over.

There was no point in choosing Predict if it was only for their database products. The fact that Predict achieved a record-breaking rise from late 1998 to when the dot-com bubble exploded, and that they reached a market capitalization of two hundred billion dollars before the Day of Advent were just minor reasons. 

The database language they created was the ubiquitous standard in the eighties. Data considered as top secret such as dungeons, monsters, skills, traits, items, seals, box rates, and others were handled in the database written in the language they created. Each country and guild established their own databases using Predict’s expensive development tools, but the best data program was the product their headquarters was directly involved in . 

The guild controlled by the Second Virtue was called Revulution[1]. In this era, people highly praised their database as much as their battle skills. If there had been a chance for me to look over Revulution’s database at least once, the battle against the Eight Evils and the Eight Virtues might have been a little different. Of course, I knew that my intervention would change history such as a change in the internal development team members. Therefore, it was important to minimize the fluctuations as much as possible. 

- J: You are driving me nuts, now IT?

- N: As I’ve told you before, I’ll put anything that I can earn profits on our portfolio. If I get an opportunity, I will make an aggressive investment in other IT firms.

- J: I don’t think it’s just a concept of investment in the case of Predict?

- N: That’s why I want to hold on to the current CEO, Donald Pinn, as much as I can.

- J: You will enjoy the company’s growth without interfering with their management? However, Donald won’t sell his company. Even if he succeeds in a hostile M&A (Merger & Acquisition), he’ll leave the company in anger. 

- N: Predict is our priority, and we can give Donald the largest stock options ratio with the highest possible annual income. But if he still insists on leaving, there won’t be anything we can do. 

We would keep him motivated with stock options and purchase Predict above their current value at the maximum price available. Would he be able to resist the temptation?

***

The owners of massive capital were not mentioned in Forbes. They either monopolized the basic resources of minerals, oil, and grain or hid in conspiracy theories embedded in history. 

However, there was a symbolic honor in being ranked as one of the richest people in the world by Forbes each year. Even if the counting only included stock options and other benefits, Donald Pinn’s assets was ranked seventh in 2017, with 50 billion dollars total. If we took out the commission fees and other expenditures, that was around how much we earned in Thailand. It felt like we still had a long way to go. 

- J: It would be better to make one of the paper companies into a normal one and treat it.

- N: That’s true. That’s the reason why we are dividing our investments.

- J: Huh? Aren’t we doing it because of tax reasons?

- N: No. As I said before, I don’t want our finances to be disclosed in public. We can’t transact everything like real estate and business under Jonathan Investments’ name. 

- J: Hmmm.

- N: Then, let’s begin with Predict so that there’s no mistake.

- J: Okay.

- N: Don’t let Jeffery handle the M&A.

- J: Why?

- N: You’ve already approached him in person, and he knows you. Jonathan Investments will expand only as an investment firm. You will be only known as the major shareholder and CEO of the company. However, you won’t be known in other fields.

- J: It’s hard to do that for now. It’s not that I will take my eyes off of him, so I will keep watching him. 

I crossed my arms as I leaned against the chair. Jonathan was misinterpreting the meaning of separating the company. It was not simply for taxes. 

A long time later, he restarted the conversation.

- J: I want to get into your brain to see the big picture you are planning, Sun. 

- N: I should have made things clear last time. It’s my fault. 

- J: Nah, you had made a clear statement that no one should know the actual owner. I misunderstood your meaning.

- N: Do you get it now?

- J: We will buy Predict, but the world shouldn’t know that we were the ones who purchased it. 

- N: Yes, that’s how all the transactions will proceed. 

- J: During that process, the selected paper companies will be made into real ones, and those CEOs won’t know anything about Jonathan Investments and us, right?

That was the point. They were our companies, but the CEO and employees wouldn’t know about our presence. 

- J: But there have to be connections, like the ones that would link our subsidiary companies and us. 

- N: That’s why you should make lots of imaginary friends under a detailed plan.

Like my friend, Seong-Ho. 

- N: You don’t have to worry now. It won’t be difficult when we complete dividing up our company. We will select holding/parent companies that would be in charge of controlling other companies, and selecting other companies that would control our controllers. We will build several steps for this method. 

- J: So, no one would know who is giving command…

- N: The parties would believe the commands came from right above. That’s why the larger the size of the company division, the better. It’s because there will be more layers of control we can build. 

- J: Forget about your master plan for a second. Where did you learn about all these things?

- N: Do you now get a sense of what you should do?

- J: Yes. But Sun, you do know what we’re doing…Right?

If we got caught by the U.S. authorities, we would be sentenced to life in prison.

- N: I know. I understand that you’ll take some time to prepare for the Predict M&A. Oh…I can't believe the time has already flown by so much. We should earn money. Our next investment is …