That Korean guy messaged me again today, saying that the worst summer of his life since he became an adult still isn’t over—on the day the KOSPI broke below 7000, he didn’t just wipe out his own five years of savings; he also drained the retirement money his parents had scraped together by selling pears in a pear orchard show. Because he was so sleepy staring at the charts, he hit the stop-loss key and turned it into a shutdown program. When the system restarted, his account was already in the red.

The Korean won’s 20% depreciation made his landlord raise the rent that same day, and he was kicked out of the exam dorm. A coworker called off the wedding because the honeymoon deposit had gone down the drain. When the football team got knocked out, he was curled up inside a sauna room, trying to get an extra overnight stay; while the players cried, he smiled—at least other people still had an annual salary.

He sold his shoes to buy two seaweed kimbap rolls. Sitting by the Han River, he threw his phone into the water. It was due to his liquidation that, only two hours later, the system finally pushed low-risk bonds to him—so even the algorithm thought his reaction was too slow.

At dawn, in a convenience store, he bought eggs with his last coin. After the microwave cooked them, he cracked and peeled them into pieces with his own hand. He thought of how his mom used to peel eggs without ever breaking them, but now he can’t even hold a whole egg. Tomorrow he has to go to Noryangjin to carry boxes for daily wages of 80,000 Korean won—enough to pay for three days in the sauna room, and enough to send his parents a message: “The money is still there.” But his phone had already sunk into the Han River. He crouched at the entrance of the convenience store and realized he’d even thrown away his chance to fool his own family.