3. 1962
I half-believed those words.
More accurately, it wasn't that I believed them, but the spike lodged in my heart wouldn't come loose, so I had no choice but to believe.
Honestly, Mother probably hadn't known if it was real or fake either.
It makes no sense, doesn't it?
It must have been my mother's heart, simply wanting to try anything for her child who struggled day after day.
If it wasn't true, I simply had to live without recklessly harming the body my parents had given me, but to dismiss it as false like this, my heart was far too steeped in lingering regret.
I memorized my mother's childhood home address. I memorized Korean history from start to finish.
I didn't think my head was all that good, but I memorized them diligently.
Just in case—if it was real, this knowledge would become my asset...
In front of my father and mother's graves.
I wrote one person's name on a talisman with my blood.
And I swallowed the talisman.
"Kkhuk...!"
A hot energy coursed through my body, and the whole world turned white.
*
"Dongho, Dongho, you bastard."
Someone shook me awake.
But...
Dongho?
The talisman was real?!
Dongho.
Full name: Lee Dongho.
My eldest maternal uncle, whom I'd never once seen. My mother's wild older brother, eight years her senior!
That was his name.
But my body wouldn't move as I willed it.
Why wouldn't strength enter my body?
"Dongho... *sob* I'm sorry. I gotta live too... *sob*..."
In that instant, lightning flashed through my head.
"Since you cannot enter a living person's body, once the original owner dies, you will enter and live again..."
I recalled the words of the Taoist priest whose age had been difficult to guess.
Then this meant it was now after the moment the original Lee Dongho had died.
But he's apologizing?
Holding my breath, I felt the sensations in every corner of my body; there didn't seem to be any place that hurt or was injured.
It was merely irritating that, strangely enough, strength wouldn't enter my body.
Either this man crying his eyes out before me had killed my eldest maternal uncle, or he had left him to die.
'They said my eldest maternal uncle had committed suicide. The friend who had gone to the Seoul Stock Exchange with him said so, so the family thought he was dead. So it was this man.'
I had spent a full month preparing after Mother's death before regressing—no, being reincarnated—so I could quickly assess the current situation.
I cracked my eyes open slightly and surveyed my surroundings.
Yellowed wallpaper.
A worn interior.
A murky light faintly illuminated my figure.
It was an inn room.
I had returned to the time I had anticipated.
When I heard the stories about my eldest maternal uncle, I had thought he died.
Having lost all his family wealth in the stock market crash, I figured he committed suicide sometime around when the 1962 stock market crash ended.
But upon returning, it seemed the timing was about what I'd anticipated, even if it wasn't suicide.
It was probably one of the inn rooms in Myeongdong, where the stock exchange was located.
At this time, identity verification such as the resident registration system and fingerprint registration was not yet properly established.
So my deceased and abandoned eldest maternal uncle here would have naturally faded from people's attention as just one of many swept away by stock speculation.
As the innkeeper, too, he would have had to quickly hide the fact that someone had died.
If word got out that someone died in an inn that took guests, who would like that?
I quietly tried to put strength into my body.
Perhaps because it was a young body of twenty, vitality returned quickly, unlike my forty-year-old body.
"Dongho... I'm gonna make it big, and I'll definitely repay the debt to yer ma and yer siblings."
When the bastard rummaged through my chest, I opened my eyes and swung at his jaw with all my might.
Thwack!
"Guhwaack...!"
"You bastard...! Some friend you are, blinded by money, trying to kill my uncle... no, me!"
"D-Dongho!"
"Because of you! Because of you! My mom!! She was even ashamed to write her name on a wedding gift envelope!!!"
"W-what. What. What the hell are you saying?!"
"Die!"
My mother, who had only graduated elementary school and hadn't properly held a pen a single day since she was thirteen. When writing her name on wedding gift envelopes, she had been ashamed, saying her handwriting was ugly.
Bam!
I climbed on top of the guy, who was crouching down clutching one side of his jaw, and started beating him mercilessly.
"I'm sorry... I'm sorry, Dongho... I was blinded by money... hit me more, I'm sorry..."
The bastard was bawling his eyes out, his face covered in blood.
"What's yer name?"
Because the bastard kept using dialect, the dialect I had lived forgetting came out of me before I knew it.
"Let's get to a hospital, Dongho... Ya must've inhaled too much briquette gas...."
"Worry about yer own damn face. I asked what yer name is!"
"It's Minsu... Kim Minsu."
"Did I inhale briquette gas? Or did you do this to me?"
"No matter how blinded by money I am, I wouldn't do that... I'm sorry... I thought you were dead...."
Hearing the truth of the incident from the bastard's mouth, I felt somehow empty.
That all of these things that had stolen my mother's youth...
were neither murder,
nor suicide,
but a briquette gas accident.
Huh...?
Briquettes??
It should be well past June, so why briquettes...??
*
"I'm gonna go buy some cigarettes."
"Curfew's almost on; you gonna be okay?"
"I'll be quick there and back. Don't go to sleep, just wait here, ya hear?"
There was something called a curfew in this era.
To be exact, a nighttime travel ban.
It began in September 1945, immediately after the country's liberation and the US military settling in, starting with Seoul and Incheon.
The beginning was the travel ban from 8 PM to 5 AM in those two regions.
Ironically, it was the US military that started it.
After that, curfew hours were generally from 10 PM to 4 AM, and from 1954, it was codified in the [Minor Offenses Act], becoming an established system where violators were subject to detention or fines.
It wasn't something that could simply be condemned as a bad custom.
Viewed through the circumstances of the time, streetlights weren't installed everywhere like in the era I was from, so it wasn't an age where nights were bright; darkness inevitably bred crime.
Since there was no light and nothing to enjoy anyway, it was a time when people naturally retired early when darkness fell.
Since the first priority was to normalize life, even if it meant forcibly regulating the residents' routines, the curfew had in fact been one of the public order stabilization policies that existed even in the Joseon Dynasty before modern times.
The regrettable aspect was that even after this period as the quality of life improved, the system was maintained for quite a while and used as one of the blades of the military regime's iron-fisted rule.
Kim Minsu buttoned up his coat and stepped out of the inn room.
Sparse streetlights illuminated spots here and there in the alley, but it was pitch black.
He walked through the darkness-filled alley with quick, hurried steps.
"Missus. Gimme a Pagoda cigarette."
The proprietress, who looked about forty, stared at Minsu intently.
She seemed curious as to who he was, seeing him ask for such a luxury item.
"You must've come to buy stocks too, young man."
"Mmhmm. I already bought 'em. That's why I'm smoking Pagoda like this, ain't I?"
"Hoho. Anyway, I hope you do well. People like us are too scared."
"What's there to be scared of? Just do it quick and clean. My money's already swelling; I'm gonna be a rich man now."
As the tobacco shop proprietress engaged him, Kim Minsu puffed up with a few more boastful words.
"Don't need no change, so take it, missus."
Pee-eek---!
"Hey! It's curfew right now, what are you doing!"
As Minsu, a cigarette in his mouth, was strolling down the alley, police blew their whistles from afar.
"Whoa. What! Is it curfew already?"
"Hey! Don't run, get over here!!"
Minsu gritted his teeth and ran.
Since this was a time when the police wielded formidable public authority unlike in the 21st century, he was afraid of being caught and bolted.
"So?"
"So yeah, there was like an empty warehouse, so I went in and hid, and when the curfew lifted, I rushed back."
I looked at Minsu.
In a way, I thought that was the difference in fortune between him and me—or rather, between him and Lee Dongho, who had been my eldest maternal uncle.
He had gained his life in that less-than-ten-minute span where his mood was lifted by a few words from the shop owner and he exchanged chatter, while Lee Dongho had simply been unlucky.
"Sit up straight."
"Aw, I'm comfortable like this."
"Sit up straight!"
"Thank ya...."
Minsu, who had been kneeling before me, wiped his nose and stretched his numb legs.
Tap. Tap.
Minsu folded his legs to the side like a new bride and tapped his own leg with one hand.
"What're ya doing?"
"My legs fell asleep...."
"......"
I looked at Minsu.
His face was a mess. At first, rage had surged, but now I felt a bit sorry too.
Minsu was not the culprit who killed me. Minsu had gone out to buy cigarettes, gotten caught by the curfew, crouched in a nearby warehouse, and slept lightly.
How comfortable could a light nap possibly be?
He saw me dead, and this was not an era with cell phones or even a 119 emergency line.
Covetousness arose at the sight of goods; since I was dead, he rummaged to pocket at least the securities in my clothes, and got beaten to a pulp for it.
Trying to grab money first at a friend's death was an enormous sin, but looking at him, I felt pity.
He had lived a harder life than me.
A widowed mother and eight younger siblings.
He was the eldest son like me, lost his father during the war, and had to feed nearly ten mouths; how heavy must that responsibility have been?
This memory was likely the original memory of my eldest maternal uncle.
Anyway, it was simply a hard time to survive, so in one respect, it was understandable.
And through him, I learned one crucial fact.
Briquettes!
The stock market crash ended with the stock exchange's bankruptcy on May 31.
I had naturally assumed that Lee Dongho, like the countless victims of the stock market crash, would meet his death sometime after that.
So it was true that I had been somewhat at a loss about how to build wealth even from within the cracks of poverty to help my mother.
It wasn't that I lacked confidence in making money, but whether then or in the time I was from, the unchanging truth was that you needed something to start with to roll a snowball.
Anyway, it was not after May 31, when the stock market crash ended and the stock exchange went bankrupt.
February.
Today was February 10.
It was the very middle of that period when the stock market crash had just set sail and was vigorously advancing toward El Dorado.
Of course, there was no El Dorado, and the ship would run aground and produce countless victims.
However it turned out, it was now February 1962.
Unexpectedly, I had been lucky from the very start.
It seemed Lee Dongho had an eye for money.
At the tail end of nineteen, in early December, hearing news in that remote backcountry village of Gunwi that the Seoul Stock Exchange was moving, as soon as the New Year hit January 1st, he had emptied all his family's assets and come straight to Seoul.
The money he had scraped together amounted to 5 million hwan.
In terms of the currency value of 2019, when I was from, it was roughly about 50 million won, so considering the poverty of the era, it was undoubtedly a considerable sum.
Anyway, on the way up, Lee Dongho dumped his entire fortune into Korea Stock Exchange stock—that is, KSE stock—at 95 jeon, not even 1 hwan.
It was an investment worthy of praise, displaying an ability to sniff out money and bold decision-making.
Market manipulation forces backed by the state were only touching KEPCO stock, and KSE stock had shown only faint signs of moving, yet he chose KSE stock instead of KEPCO.
He seemed to have poured all the luck in the world into January and met with bad luck in February.
And now, after over a month had passed.
The current price of KSE stock I heard from Kim Minsu was 3 hwan 65 jeon.
365 minus 95 equals 270.
The profit per share was about 2 hwan 70 jeon, and having purchased roughly 5.26 million shares, he had achieved a return of just under 300 percent.
Roughly calculated, my eldest maternal uncle's current stocks were worth just under 20 million hwan including principal.
"Let's sell... Sell and go back home and live the good life. Dongho..."
That Minsu guy hadn't come by liquidating all his assets like me; he had just followed along with pocket money to see Seoul, so his profits themselves were meager.
"You sell and go on back home. I don't resent you, but I don't think we can sleep in the same room."
"Dongho... What're you gonna do? Are you really gonna stay longer?"
"I said go on back home. I'm letting you go because of our past ties. If we meet again, we're strangers. Strangers."
"*Sob*... Dongho. I'm sorry...."
Had I been a hot-blooded youth in my twenties, I would have parted as if I'd never see him again.
But having lived a bit longer, I realized there was no need to make an enemy unnecessarily, nor any reason to resent him for a lifetime.
────────────────────────────────────