It had been a day so ordinary it was almost boring.
As usual, after getting off work, I had put off even washing up and flopped onto my bed, picking up my smartphone. That was how it began. My only pleasure these days was reading American tycoon novels. Even after binge-reading hundreds of chapters, my thirst hadn’t gone away. No—every time I saw the scale of the assets being thrown around by the protagonist, I felt a certain vicarious satisfaction.
“Is it because of Alon Musk? These days, every new one has a trillion dollars in assets as the baseline...”
Thirty-two years old. What I had in my hands was nowhere near 100 million won—only a mountain of debt well over 100 million when you combined my jeonse loan and student loans. The salary deposited into my account every month merely brushed past it before vanishing into the black hole known as loan payments and credit card bills.
Compared to my suffocating reality, the dazzling money-burning antics of the characters in those novels were, if anything, an unrealistic comfort. You had to be on the same level to even feel jealous. Now, I could only let out a hollow laugh while watching protagonists in modern settings go so far as to found their own countries.
“Founding a country in the 21st century is a bit much, isn’t it?”
My mouth grumbled, but my fingers diligently kept scrolling. At some point, it had become part of my bedtime routine—imagining things like, “If only I were the protagonist of the novel I just read...” or “Wouldn’t he have gotten richer if he did it this way?”—until I drifted off to sleep.
Yes, it truly had been a day so ordinary it was almost boring, with not a single strange sign to speak of.
.
.
.
Standing by the window and looking out at the chaotic streets of Times Square in 1979, Henry Selzberg Devenger let out a deep sigh.
“Fuck...”