[The characters, places, organizations, events, and so on appearing in this work have no connection whatsoever to reality and are fictional creations of the author’s imagination.]
“...Wow, if nothing else, the height is insane.”
A towering 190 centimeters, 84 kilograms. He wasn’t muscular in the sense of having been forged through exercise, but his natural frame itself was extraordinary. Broad shoulders and long legs—those couldn’t be hidden even by the tacky clothing of 1979.
‘From now on, I’m a winner, fuck! When I get to Korea, won’t my neck hurt from having to look down at everyone? Heh heh.’
It would be a long while before the word “loser” became a social buzzword, but it had been a deep grudge from my previous life, so that was the first thought that flashed through my mind. After giggling to myself for quite some time, I began examining my face in the mirror in detail.
Standing in the mirror was Supermen. A man who looked so much like the movie actor Henry Cavill that I almost tried putting strength into my eyes to see if I really was a Kryptonian was staring back at me. Thick eyebrows, a sculpted jawline, and even a full head of hair. If Henry Cavill in my previous life had worried over a slightly wide forehead, this body even had a perfect hairline. The problem was that a filthy mane of long hair falling to his shoulders was covering up that handsome face.
‘How hard did puberty hit you that you went all the way to Stanford Engineering and... no, that you lived there steeped in drugs, alcohol, and cigarettes? You’re a real nutcase, man.’
Digging through my memories, I found that the original owner, Henry, had been a rebel who, in his adolescence, had fallen belatedly and deeply into hippie culture, tormenting the elders of his family. He was timid and had hikikomori tendencies, so he hadn’t had a single friend, but apparently once he dug in his heels, not even the Founding Fathers rising from their graves could have stopped him.
The crystallization of that stubbornness was choosing Stanford out west to major in engineering instead of Yale or Harvard, the set course for someone from a prestigious New York family—and this goddamn long hair. On top of that, he had played around so freely in college that nothing he learned remained in his head. The fact that he had no ex-girlfriends and no friends, and had simply gone around satisfying his desires with money, was certainly an advantage in that I didn’t have to worry about complicated human relationships... but what a pitiful life it had been.
Another advantage was that, no matter how carefully I looked over every part of his body, there wasn’t a single tattoo, the symbol of hippies.
‘Ah, he just couldn’t do it because he was scared of needles? No, why did a guy who’s supposed to be the young master of an American prestigious family live like this? Seriously, what a pathetic loser.’
Vowing to cut this accursed hair first thing tomorrow, I left the bathroom. I sank deep into the chair I usually sat in and fell back into thought.
It had taken an absurd amount of time to set up a single clone, but the harvest had been definite. In the process, I had managed to dig up a pile of high-level information not only about the clone system, but about the status window as a whole.
A clone was, literally, a clone. It could be made similar in appearance or background to a person actually existing in this world right now, but it was not that person itself—more like a doppelgänger. The information I could create included name, birth, nationality, body, education, religion, and even family tree. In a word, it was on the level of creating an entire human life. However, there were limits to how much the appearance could be customized depending on race, and above all, “plausibility” was the most important thing.
I didn’t know what would happen if some Hunter genre suddenly got mixed into the future, but for now, settings with no coherence—like suddenly using supernatural powers or having learned an immortal secret manual from a martial arts novel—didn’t fly at all. Abilities that exceeded human limits were only allowed as far as they could be made to sound reasonable. Of course, it was possible to go beyond that, but the points demanded as the price became, quite literally, murderously expensive. In any case, while special abilities were impossible, it meant specs surpassing human limits could still be implemented.
Fortunately, since the system kindly warned me with things like, “This setting is impossible due to such-and-such plausibility issues,” the act of creating one itself wasn’t that difficult.
The really interesting part came afterward. Once the settings were finished, detailed values were determined according to my stats, and my Health stat of “4” was a feeble level only very slightly above average.
With the Knowledge stat, I could adjust personality. It was a kind of plus-minus system; if I inserted a negative personality trait, I could obtain one more positive personality trait or pour points into intelligence (IQ, EQ). In other words, I could synthesize a guy whose personality was wrecked but who was a genius, or someone like a savant syndrome case who was generally dumb but displayed ghostlike ability in one specific field.
The final star rating at the top was determined by all those assigned values and, above all, “connection to me (Henry).”
No matter how peerlessly beautiful, good-natured, and talented a person was, if I set them as someone living in a remote part of Africa, they had no point of contact with me, so the star rating was cut in half. But if I added just one line to the exact same character information—“moved to the United States and resides at the Westchester Devenzer mansion”? The rating shot vertically up to 1.5 stars, and the price soared to 5,000 points.
Stars existed from 0.5 to 5, and the price range was truly insane.
0.5 stars: 10–100 points
1.0 star: 101–1,000 points
1.5 stars: 1,001–10,000 points
It was a logarithmic scale where the price jumped tenfold every time the rating rose by 0.5 stars. After punching the calculator, I found that a 5-star clone started at a minimum of 10 billion points. The maximum couldn’t even be measured.
‘Ten billion? Even if they handed me 1 point per second like a vending machine, I couldn’t even look at one if I only gathered points my whole life.’
It was obvious I wouldn’t be able to make one anyway, but I was curious about the limits of the system, so I tried all sorts of experiments.
A direct descendant of the family of Washington, the first president of the United States, and the mastermind ruling the world from the shadows. Wealth greater than all the assets in the world combined. A peerless beauty with an even more unrealistic figure than an animation character, 178 centimeters tall with measurements of 110-60-110. On top of that, intelligence and physical ability surpassing human limits, supernatural powers capable of destroying the world alone, and even the setting that she was the loyal slave of me, Henry Devenzer.
When I dragged in every last thing that could make it expensive and hammered it in, an astronomical price of 890 billion points appeared.
‘At this rate, even God would have to open a savings account to make this... No, wait, is there no leverage?’
The experiment ended there. Now it was time to return to cold reality.
‘Should I draw a clone first, or raise my level or stats and get a feel for it?’
To reduce the cost as much as possible, I set the race to Asian and the gender to male, which was relatively cheaper. Since I didn’t know how my first clone would function, I removed complicated settings to avoid danger, and I didn’t insert any negative personality traits either.
And so, a “normal, loyal, diligent 0.5-star clone” was made. Staring blankly at the settings window, I sank into anguish.
‘Even if I make it as cheap as possible, the moment I shove in a connection to me, the minimum is 50 points. If I make even one clone, that means leveling up is off the table this time.’
Clone, or level up.
In the end, I chose a third option. Whether I drew a clone or raised my level, I could touch my stats anyway, so I decided to start with the foundation.
[To raise current Health “4” → “5,” 10 points are required. Would you like to proceed?]
[Yes] / [No]
‘Yes.’
The moment I pressed the confirmation button, I ran all around the room. I tried shadowboxing and even jumping in place. But there was no “dramatic change” like I had expected. The Health stat in the status window had definitely become 5, and my remaining points had decreased to 115, but my body was the same. Unable to hide my disappointment, I carefully examined every corner of my body again.
‘Or not? Maybe it did get a little better...’
If I had to find a change, it was a feeling that my body had become ever so slightly lighter. But it was so faint that I couldn’t even tell whether this was a real effect or just a “placebo effect” born from my mood. At this point in time, 10 points was by no means a small sum, yet the reaction was this pathetic. Doubt naturally rose in me over whether I really needed to raise my Knowledge stat, but I held it back.
‘I still have to raise it. How frustrated was I in my previous life reading novels because of protagonists who didn’t raise their intelligence! I can’t do that. In any case, my clone’s performance will only improve if my stats are high, right? Let’s go!’
[To raise current Knowledge “4” → “5,” 10 points are required. Would you like to proceed?]
[Yes] / [No]
‘Yes!’
The moment I pressed the confirmation button, a change completely different from when I raised Health came over me. A few seconds later, unfamiliar information rushed in like a tidal wave, and my head throbbed as if it would split apart.
“Ugh... Whew.”
‘Now I can breathe a little. Let’s see, silver? The Bunt brothers?’
What was etched into my mind as I raised Knowledge was a detailed report on “silver.” It was information that the price of silver, currently trading around 8 to 9 dollars per ounce, would skyrocket to the 50-dollar range on January 18 of next year—a full sixfold increase! Along with that, the silver futures chart until March 27, 1980, the detailed background story, and even the causes of the price fluctuations were all engraved in my head.
“Wow... the Knowledge stat is fucking broken.”
I had intended to think only inwardly in case there was a bug somewhere, but the information was so shocking that Korean slipped out of my mouth before I realized it.
In my previous life, I had been a maniac who had read every American chaebol novel from the 1890s to the 2020s. I knew the major historical events inside out, and in case I forgot, I had even recorded them in a Korean code only I could understand and shoved them into the family safe. (Though I nearly fainted when I saw the mountain of gold bars piled up in that safe.)
But this silver wave that had just entered my mind was information that hadn’t appeared in detail in the novels I read. I had only now learned that the Bunt brothers were working behind the scenes at this very moment to monopolize the silver market.
On January 18 of next year, precisely, the price of silver would hit its peak of 50 dollars. Then, on January 21, the Fed and the exchanges would pull out the unprecedented card of “banning silver purchases” and smash the market. On March 27, the historic “Silver Thursday” would erupt, the Bunt brothers would be unable to withstand the margin calls and go bankrupt, and the price of silver would plummet vertically back to 10 dollars.
‘Then I should buy silver instead of gold.’
My original initial investment plan had been gold and oil prices. After all, the price of gold, currently under 300 dollars, surpassing 800 dollars by next January and nearly tripling was practically a formula in chaebol novels. But silver was a full sixfold.
‘Damn, this is seriously sweet. As expected, a human being needs knowledge. Fuck, should I put in just one more point?’
Dopamine exploded. If the feedback from 1 point in Knowledge was this much, I absolutely had to raise it more. However.
[Current Knowledge “5” -> “6” cannot be raised. (Condition = LV 2)]
‘Of course.’
I smacked my lips. In the end, it was a structure where the stat cap was released only when I raised my level. If I could infinitely invest in stats without limits, there would be no need to level up, but the system was not that generous.
‘Should I just raise my level first and put more into Knowledge? ...Or should I still draw a clone first?’
Blinded by greed, I agonized for a moment, but soon shook my head. What I needed to level up was 100 points. If I spent that, only a mere 5 points would remain. There was no way I could raise another stat with 5 points, so the answer right now was ultimately to create a clone.
In truth, my surrounding environment as Henry was so perfect that others would be stunned. From the family’s dedicated security team to the group of experts managing assets, taxes, and charitable activities, and even my maternal family’s media empire, [New York Time].
But in my eyes, all of it looked like nothing but potential risk. I didn’t know whether it was trauma from betrayal in my previous life, or because I was naturally a safety-first person. But anyone who suddenly came to hold assets worth trillions of won overnight would naturally develop an instinctive wariness.
‘They say there isn’t a single person in the world you can trust, but the problem is that there are too many people around me that I have to trust.’
This was America in 1979. A chaotic crucible where prices went berserk every time you woke up, and a neighborhood where it felt like even a passing dog carried a gun in its back pocket. Protecting my precious forehead from stray bullets flying in from God knows where—wasn’t that the basic qualification of a chaebol?
The reason I didn’t even go down to the first-floor dining room and stayed holed up in my room was by no means because I was scared. It was acting faithful to the setting that not long had passed since I held my parents’ funeral, and a highly strategic seclusion to grasp the internal situation of the family.
Sometimes I even thought that I would have felt more at ease if I had been an orphan with no background. I would have suffered like hell gathering seed money, but at least the mafia or street punks wouldn’t have tried to stab me in the back aiming for my inheritance shares. Who knew whether people who didn’t share a single drop of blood with me might raise a rebellion under some pretext?
The saying that the more you have, the more you must protect was truly a wise one. A twenty-two-year-old fresh graduate and social novice being the sole heir to billions of dollars. This was no different from painting a target labeled “VIP” on my back and strolling through the middle of New York.
I tried not to be conscious of it as much as possible, but perhaps because of that pressure, I found myself restraining even my muttering to myself, and the number of nights when I couldn’t sleep kept increasing.
‘Right. If I want to stretch out my legs and sleep soundly, a clone isn’t optional—it’s essential.’
This was exactly why I was pouring all my sincerity into filling out the clone settings window. A definite ally guaranteed by the system. If I hammered this one line into the information section, every security risk would become zero.
[Devotes his life to loyalty toward Henry Devenzer]
At the very least, I had an extremely rational certainty that a clone created by the system wouldn’t bring me coffee laced with drugs while aiming for my fortune. On top of that, if I planted the clone in an important position within the family, it would be able to investigate all the people around me in my stead and sort the gems from the stones.