The campus was quiet, vibrating with the low-frequency hum of intellectual elitism and sleep deprivation. It was a Friday afternoon, but for the graduate students of the Industrial Engineering Department, weekends were just theoretical concepts—much like the social lives they didn't have.
Kang Min-jun walked down the hallway of the Engineering Building N1. He had ditched his school uniform for a crisp white shirt and slacks he had bought at the express bus terminal. He carried a leather briefcase that belonged to his father (unused for a decade).
He looked like a young insurance salesman, or perhaps a prodigy intern.
He checked the room number on a piece of paper. Lab 304: Operations Research & Optimization.
This was the den of Oh Jae-il.
In Min-jun's previous life, Oh Jae-il was a footnote in a business case study. A tragedy. The man who invented the "Dynamic Routing Algorithm" that Amazon eventually adopted, but only after Daegwang Group had humiliated him, stolen a simplified version of his code, and blacklisted him from the domestic industry. Jae-il had died of a heart attack in Silicon Valley in 2021, rich but bitter, never having seen his work implemented in his homeland.
Not this time, Min-jun thought, stopping in front of the door. This time, you work for me.
He knocked. No answer. He knocked again. A groan echoed from inside. Min-jun opened the door.
The room smelled of instant ramen, stale coffee, and overheating servers. It was a mess of whiteboards covered in Greek symbols, tangled ethernet cables, and stacks of pizza boxes that might have constituted a geological record of the semester.
In the center of the chaos, a man lay slumped over a desk, his face buried in a keyboard. He wore a stained hoodie and thick glasses that were currently askew.
"Oh Jae-il?" Min-jun called out.
The man jerked awake. "I didn't order delivery," he mumbled, wiping drool from his chin. "Go away."
"I'm not delivery," Min-jun said, stepping over a coil of CAT5 cable. "I'm an investor."
Jae-il squinted, adjusting his glasses. He looked at Min-jun—the baby face, the ill-fitting shirt.
"An investor?" Jae-il scoffed, a dry, cracking sound. "You look like you wandered out of a high school debate club. Get out, kid. I'm trying to debug a heuristic."
Min-jun didn't leave. He walked to the massive whiteboard covering the far wall. It was covered in a complex web of nodes and edges—a classic graph theory problem.
"The Traveling Salesman Problem," Min-jun noted. "NP-hard. You're trying to optimize last-mile delivery routes for high-density urban clusters. Seoul, specifically."
Jae-il froze. He spun his chair around. "How do you know that?"
"I read your draft paper," Min-jun lied. "The one you submitted to the Daegwang Logistics Innovation Contest. 'Stochastic Optimization for Same-Day Delivery Networks.'"
"That paper isn't published yet," Jae-il narrowed his eyes. "And Daegwang rejected the abstract yesterday. They said it was 'computationally too expensive' to run in real-time."
"They're idiots," Min-jun said, picking up a marker. "They think logistics is about trucks. They don't realize it's about data."
Min-jun drew a circle around a cluster of nodes on the board.
"Daegwang uses a static hub-and-spoke model. Packages go to a central center, get sorted, and go out. Rigid. Slow. 3 days."
Min-jun drew lines connecting the nodes directly, bypassing the center.
"You're proposing a mesh network. Where every delivery truck is a moving node. Dynamic rerouting based on traffic, inventory, and new orders coming in real-time. Uber for boxes, before Uber even exists."
The narrative has been taken without permission. Report any sightings.
Jae-il stood up. The exhaustion vanished from his face, replaced by the intensity of a scientist whose ego had just been stroked.
"Exactly!" Jae-il shouted, waving his hands. "The compute power is the bottleneck. But with CUDA cores and parallel processing, we can solve the route optimization in under 5 minutes! But those dinosaurs at Daegwang... they said, 'Why fix it? The customers are used to waiting 3 days.'"
"They are comfortable," Min-jun said softly. "Comfort is the prelude to death."
Min-jun put the cap back on the marker. He turned to Jae-il.
"My name is Kang Min-jun. I represent Umbra Investment. We are a boutique firm focused on... disruptive technologies."
"Umbra?" Jae-il frowned. "Never heard of you. And you look sixteen."
"I am sixteen," Min-jun admitted. "But I have 20 million won in liquid capital, 5,000 Bitcoins in cold storage, and a position in H-Semicon that will triple in two years."
Jae-il blinked. "Bitcoin? The magic internet money?"
"Forget the money for a second. Let's talk about vision. You want to build this engine, Jae-il. But you need a playground. You need a fleet. You need data."
"I need a supercomputer," Jae-il corrected. "And about 50 million won for cloud server costs."
"I can't give you 50 million today," Min-jun said. "But I can give you 2 million won today. For ramen. And server rental."
Jae-il laughed. "2 million? That's cute. Why should I take pocket money from a high schooler?"
"Because Daegwang rejected you," Min-jun said. The air in the room grew cold. "And because you know, deep down, that if you join a normal company, they will put you in the IT support basement fixing printers. You are a genius, Oh Jae-il. But to the corporate world, you are just a weirdo with bad hygiene."
Jae-il flinched. The truth hit home.
"I will build a company," Min-jun continued, his voice steady. "A logistics company. And the core of that company won't be the trucks or the warehouses. It will be your code. You will be the CTO. You will have equity. And when we crush Daegwang Mart, you can stand on the ashes of their headquarters and tell them they were 'computationally inefficient'."
Jae-il stared at Min-jun. He looked at the 2 million won in cash that Min-jun placed on the desk (withdrawals from the H Semicon remaining cash + his own allowance savings + a small 'loan' from his mother's secret stash he promised to repay).
It wasn't a lot of money. But the look in the kid's eyes... it was the same look Jae-il had when he solved a proof. Absolute certainty.
"Equity?" Jae-il asked.
"10%. Non-dilutable until Series A."
"Make it 15%."
"10%. But I buy you a new computer. Dual GPU."
Jae-il looked at his dying laptop. He looked at the cash. He looked at the whiteboard.
"You're a crazy bastard," Jae-il muttered, reaching for the money. "But Daegwang really did piss me off."
"Is that a yes?"
"It's a retainer," Jae-il counted the bills. "I'll build the prototype. But if you don't secure Series A funding by the time I graduate next year, I'm taking the code to Google."
"Deal," Min-jun extended his hand.
Jae-il shook it. His hand was clammy and stained with ink.
[System: Talent Acquired] Name: Oh Jae-il (Future CTO of Hermes Logistics) Class: S-Rank Developer / Mathematician Current Cost: 2,000,000 KRW + 10% Equity. Future Value: 3 Trillion KRW.
October 2010. The Wait.
Min-jun returned to Seoul. He had the Seed (Bitcoin), the Engine (H Semicon), and the Architect (Jae-il).
Now came the hardest part of the plan. The wait. H Semicon was slow. It fluctuated. 23,000... 22,000... 24,000. Jae-il was coding in the dark. Bitcoin was dormant.
Min-jun had to go back to being a high school student. He had to take exams. He had to listen to his parents worry about heating bills.
It was a test of patience. In the financial world, alpha is generated by waiting when others are frantic.
November 11, 2010. G20 Summit in Seoul. The city was locked down. Police everywhere. The government pumped national pride. Daegwang Group was a major sponsor. Chairman Jin was on TV, shaking hands with Obama.
Min-jun watched the broadcast from his small living room. He saw Jin Hyuk-jae (the heir) standing behind his father, looking bored, checking his phone.
Laugh while you can, Min-jun thought, spinning a pen. The algorithms are running. The miners are hashing. And I am watching.
December 2010. End of Year.
Min-jun walked into the bookstore where he had seen Hyuk-jae months ago. He bought a notebook. A fresh one for 2011.
He wrote down his targets for the next year.
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H Semicon: Hold until SK Acquisition rumors start (Summer 2011).
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Bitcoin: Accumulate if price dips below $0.20.
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Hermes: Register the corporate entity. Secure a warehouse lease in Gyeonggi-do (Distressed asset auction).
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School: Maintain Top 3 rank (Camouflage).
He closed the book. The prologue was over. The regression honeymoon was finished. 2011 was coming. The year the world changed.
Min-jun walked out into the snow. The cold air of December bit his face, reminding him of the terrace in Yeouido where he had died. But this time, the cold didn't feel like death. It felt like the cool air of a server room.
It felt like calculation.
[TRANSACTION LOG]
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Date: September 10, 2010
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Entity: Umbra Investment (Operating Expense)
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Debit: 2,000,000 KRW (Cash)
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Credit: R&D (Talent Acquisition - Oh Jae-il)
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Asset: Intellectual Property (Dynamic Routing Algorithm v0.1)