“Assistant Manager Kim sweats even while he’s eating cold noodles?”
Manager Jeong Hanjun clicked his tongue at Assistant Manager Kim Taeseong, seated across from him.
Assistant Manager Kim Taeseong was enormous.
“......It’s summer.”
“It’s practically October the day after tomorrow. What summer?”
“The planet must be pretty sick.”
“The one who looks sick is you, Assistant Manager Kim.”
A backside so vast it looked ready to snap the chair legs in half. A gut that bulged until a 4XL black short-sleeved tee looked undersized. A dull, sallow complexion.
And hair soaked through with sweat.
He was sitting right under the blast of the air conditioner, eating a washbasin-sized bowl of cold noodles heaped with ice, and even so Assistant Manager Kim kept wiping away beads of sweat.
“If you want to take care of your health, exercise. Past thirty, exercise stops being optional and becomes mandatory.”
“Yes, I should.”
“You said you signed up at a gym last time. You are still going, right?”
The nagging disguised as concern had begun.
“I tweaked my knee, so I’m taking a short break.”
“Stop making excuses. A man like you needs exercise, I’m telling you. I say it because I’m worried you’ll die before your time.”
Kim Taeseong paid the lecture no mind and reached his chopsticks toward the last king dumpling on the plate.
Manager Jeong tutted at the sight, his gaze sour.
But he was not a man who would give up a dumpling over that.
“Excuse me, the check.”
“Separate checks, right?”
“Yes.”
Assistant Manager Kim paid 15,000 won for one extra-large bowl of washbasin cold noodles and a full plate of king dumplings.
Manager Jeong had picked up two or three of them, but the order had been placed to fill his own stomach in the first place.
‘This summer weather is really too much lately.’
Under the broiling sun of Yeouido, Assistant Manager Kim’s face had already flushed red.
Now it was not just his head. His back and armpits were soaked and clammy with sweat too.
“Look at that guy.”
Every passerby had no choice but to steal a glance at Kim Taeseong’s colossal frame.
Obviously not because he was handsome.
Kim Taeseong weighed 160kg. He stood 185cm tall.
This is roughly how Koreans look at the kind of morbid obesity you would only expect to see in mainland America.
‘Whoa, he’s finished. Is that a Grade-1 Iberico pig?’
‘Amazing that he can even walk.’
‘Ugh, the smell!’
The restaurant was less than a five-minute walk from the office, but Kim Taeseong’s body was already drenched in its own broth.
“I’ll smoke one out front and head up. You go on ahead, Assistant Manager Kim.”
“......Yes.”
Before going up to the office, Kim Taeseong stopped by the restroom in the first-floor lobby.
Whoosh— he ran the tap cold and washed the grease and sweat clinging to his face, trying to cool himself down.
Daily life was hard enough already, but every summer it was murder.
The endless sweat left angry red heat rash all over his skin.
Even washing twice a day, his body always carried a sour smell.
He stared at himself in the sink mirror and let out a sigh.
‘Even I have to admit I’m hopeless.’
Taeseong had not always been this morbidly obese.
He had been a big baby, so he had always been a little chubbier than the other kids.
But he had not been a Guinness-class hog like this.
Four years ago.
His parents died in a multi-vehicle pileup.
After losing them, a vicious loneliness settled in, as if he had been left alone in the world, and Taeseong’s life collapsed.
He shuttled between the office and his apartment, and after work he drank and ate delivery food every single day.
He gained weight easily to begin with, and eating without a shred of exercise had brought him here.
“Ha, it’s hot. So hot.”
This place, one of the Woojin Group’s affiliates, was Woojin Securities.
Taeseong was a fifth-year senior trader at Woojin Securities.
Back at the office, he turned on the air conditioner someone had shut off and sat down at his desk.
He opened his desk drawer to find it crammed with pill bottles of every kind.
There were prescriptions for hyperlipidemia, blood pressure, and diabetes.
But most of them were diet supplements, long past their expiration dates.
‘I’ve taken every pill that claims to burn fat. Why am I the only one it doesn’t work on?’
Taeseong knew perfectly well that you cannot lose weight by leaning on pills.
But.
People, as a rule, rarely change.
Six years of greasy delivery food and liquor every night — was a habit like that going to turn around in a single morning?
“Ugh, who set the air conditioner this low?”
Department Head Park Geonil, back from smoking outside with Manager Jeong, snapped in irritation and raised the temperature before anything else.
“I said don’t drop it below 25 degrees. Why don’t you listen? That was you, wasn’t it, Assistant Manager Kim?”
“......It’s just so hot today.”
“Hot, my foot! It’ll be autumn next week. Manager Jeong, are you that hot too?”
“Hot? Not at all. Honestly, I feel like I’m about to come down with air-conditioning sickness.”
Department Head Park felt the cold badly, which made him the natural enemy of Woojin’s thermostat.
“So lose some weight. Please, just lose some weight! You’re the only one who’s hot because you’re carrying all that.”
Between Manager Jeong and Department Head Park telling him to slim down, Taeseong felt his chest tighten.
‘Not one of these people ever gave me a single won to help me lose weight. The nerve.’
The afternoon ground on in that faintly clammy mood.
15:30. After the market closed.
Taeseong let out a heavy breath.
‘That was close.’
His estimated P&L for the day was -1,350,000 won.
Against the 1 billion won in assets allocated to him, that was a loss of –0.16%.
News that the Chinese property developer Evergrande Group had filed for bankruptcy protection had badly shaken investor sentiment across Asian markets.
Both the KOSPI and the KOSDAQ had closed lower because of it.
He had invested cautiously from the opening bell with a single thought — just don’t lose — and had escaped serious damage.
‘I should write up the trading journal and submit it.’
For traders, the real work began after the close.
Confirm the day’s final P&L, analyze the causes, review the market, and write the trading journal.
The journal recorded every trade of the day in detail, along with the reasoning, the market conditions, and even the trader’s own psychological state.
[Assistant Manager Kim, my office.]
At Department Head Park’s message, Taeseong got up at once and went into his office.
Department Head Park worked the mouse, running through Taeseong’s trade history for the day, and asked a question.
What he had flagged was Wooshin Bio, the one pharmaceutical stock Taeseong had traded that day.
“Wooshin’s interim clinical results came out after yesterday’s close and they were decent, but it opened down on market fear. Wasn’t this one you could have made a decent bite out of today?”
“I judged it to be short-term irrational selling, so I approached it with small split buys near the technical support line.”
Then, after watching it for about an hour, buying pressure came in on the recognition that the drop was overdone, and it rebounded — so he sold the entire position at the +1.8% profit range without getting greedy.
Listening to Taeseong’s calm explanation, Department Head Park nodded slowly, as if he was more or less satisfied.
“Tsk. Fine. Not bad, I suppose. But are you going to keep scraping by day to day like this forever?”
“It’s safer to manage the fund conservatively than to post a loss......”
“Fund management is fine. But you’re in your fifth year already, Assistant Manager Kim. Stop hitting singles every day. It’s about time you swung for a home run.”
But.
The stock market is a jungle where nobody knows whether today ends in a fortune or in ruin.
Consistently hitting singles the way Taeseong did was an achievement in itself.
There was no way Department Head Park did not know that.
Kim Taeseong’s trader grade was senior level.
But his treatment was still ‘junior’ grade.
The single biggest difference in treatment between junior and senior grade is the ‘incentive’.
Taeseong was called senior only because he had put in the years; his incentive was a mere 7% of P&L — the profit and loss on his managed funds.
Junior grade goes up to 5%.
Considering that senior grade normally starts at 10% or more, it was indeed abnormal treatment.
Only, that is simply what company life is like.
To last long and quietly, it is hard going while you have a thorn in someone’s side.
Why was there a thorn?
“And I wasn’t going to bring this up, but wash yourself properly, would you?”
“I wash twice a day, before work and after.”
“What good is twice if you don’t wash clean?”
Department Head Park loved lecturing Taeseong about self-management.
Ironically, the man himself was in his mid-forties with a gut of his own, and lived on coffee and cigarettes badly enough that his breath reeked.
He was the type who topped up his self-esteem by taking shots at the morbidly obese Taeseong.
“Anyway, good work. Head home early today.”
“Is that all right? I haven’t finished the trading journal.”
“Forget it, you’ve basically reported it to me verbally. So go on, get out of here.”
Kim Taeseong rose from his chair and began tidying his desk, but most of the office staff sat rooted in place.
Nobody spared him so much as a glance. Except one person.
Only Kang Hyeona, the new hire who had joined as a junior trader, gave Kim Taeseong a small bow.
“Heading home, Assistant Manager? Get home safely.”
“Yes, you too, Associate Kang. See you tomorrow.”
Associate Kang Hyeona.
Three months into the job, the youngest in the office and the only woman on Woojin Securities’ Investment Team 3.
Good-looking and easy to get along with, she was on good terms with everyone despite being new.
Clap, clap.
The sound of hands broke the office’s silence.
Not ten minutes after Taeseong walked out the door, Department Head Park Geonil stood up and addressed the staff.
“Anyone free tonight, how about a team dinner?”
“A team dinner?”
“That’s right, everyone should come if you can. It’s to celebrate Associate Kang joining us officially.”
The pretext was congratulating Associate Kang on finishing her three-month probation and becoming a full employee.
Whether a dinner was really necessary was another question, but Department Head Park Geonil loved team dinners and was forcing the issue.
“It’s hot out — how about chilled samgyeopsal? That place we went last time was good.”
“Good call. Phone ahead and hold us a table.”
The employees of Woojin Securities busily gathered their things and rose from their seats.
Associate Kang, who had unwillingly provided the excuse for the dinner, asked Manager Jeong a question.
“Should I tell Assistant Manager Kim to come back too?”
“No, no. He’ll want to go home and rest. Didn’t you see him sweating in this heat?”
“Still...... it’s a whole-team dinner. Won’t he be hurt if he finds out?”
Manager Jeong glanced around and lowered his voice to a whisper.
“Listen carefully, Associate Kang. If Assistant Manager Kim comes to the dinner, the Department Head doesn’t like it.”
“Why?”
“Why do you think? You’ve seen him.”
Manager Jeong sketched an exaggerated circle in the air, a shape that left nothing to the imagination.
“When Assistant Manager Kim shows up, the dinner budget takes a beating — it’s a disaster. So don’t worry about that, just call the place and book us. Six people, our team.”
“Ah...... Yes, understood, for now.”
***
While Woojin Securities was busy arranging its thrifty team dinner with no Assistant Manager Kim in it.
Taeseong had hauled his heavy body home.
“Huff, huff.”
Breathing hard, he stripped off his clothes and went straight into the bathroom to turn on the shower.
Whoosh— the cold water washed the crusted salt off his body.
He came out feeling refreshed, toweling the water from his hair, and flopped onto the bed.
“Ugh, now I feel human again.”
Cranking the air conditioner down to 16 degrees, lying naked on the bed, picking tonight’s dinner on a delivery app — this was the happiest moment of Taeseong’s day.
Tonight’s pick was his all-time favorite, braised pork and kimchi.
In the request box he even added his own little glutton’s tip: ‘Please use the fatty cuts, not the lean stringy parts.’
Thirty minutes later, the hot, greasy braised pork and kimchi arrived.
Taeseong cracked open a bottle of soju at once, swigging straight from the bottle, and enjoyed the private feast he had laid for himself.
As the buzz set in, his head swam and a wave of gloom rolled over him.
“They’ve all gone out for a team dinner without me again, haven’t they.”
Taeseong had more or less worked out that his coworkers had gone drinking tonight.
Unless the place was all-you-can-eat, Department Head Park never included Taeseong in a team dinner.
When he was told to go home early instead of working late, unlike every other day, it usually meant there was a dinner.
This was not paranoia. It was fact.
Because he had spotted Investment Team 3 from a distance at the bus stop, heading for the chilled-pork place.
“Freezing a guy out over food. Cheap bastards.”
After clearing away the empty takeout containers.
Taeseong lay on his bed and scrubbed the stray thoughts away with NewTube on his phone.
He was scrolling through one- and two-minute shorts, killing time, when it happened.
[How long are you going to live like that?]
A motivational video came up, a man shouting in a worked-up voice under an inflammatory title.
It was a NewTuber he had never seen before, but the man had a clean-cut face and a muscular build that made him look instantly trustworthy.
[I’ve seen plenty of people living hopeless lives. And they all have one thing in common.]
Taeseong was pulled into the man’s voice as if under a spell.
[People who can’t change their lives.]
[People who don’t make the choice to change have a lot on their minds.]
[Why do I have to be different?]
[If I change, does money appear? Does honor appear? What changes?]
[That vague dread that nothing will come of it. Why does it happen?]
“Because there’s no hope.”
[Exactly. Because there’s no hope.]
The man carried right on with the line as if he had heard him, and Taeseong’s eyes wavered.
[Because right now there’s no hope in my life, no reason my life has to get better.]
[So I made a decision. That reason. We’ll give it to you.]
On any other day he would have written it off as a scammy course-peddling video and scrolled past.
But today, something was different. Maybe it was all the liquor. It struck a nerve.
[Install Work For Your Life right now!]
[For details, please check the link below.]
He clicked the link and it took him to the app store.
An app icon with the plausible name ‘Work For your Life’, shortened to ‘Wopora’.
On top of that, it was free.
“Might as well get taken for a ride once.”
Maybe it was because he had sweated so much that day.
A full stomach. A pleasant buzz. Watching the download with bleary eyes, drowsiness crept over Taeseong bit by bit.
- 15%...... 40%...... 95%
- Download complete.
True to his morbid obesity, he fell asleep the instant he lay down after eating, and drifted off with only the vaguest press of the launch button.
- Launching Wopora!
- Welcome, member Kim Taeseong!
- A motivational mission has been generated for you!
Thunk.
On the screen of the phone that slipped from Taeseong’s hand, a golden message rose up, glittering.
[Tutorial Mission!]
- Lose 1kg of body weight!
- Reward: 1,000,000 won
[Target weight: 159.3kg]
[Current weight: 160.3kg]