Chapter 9

The Youngest Is Better Than Dad (1)

I couldn’t help but open my mouth wide at the sight in front of me.

“What are all these things?”

There were countless monitors covering almost an entire wall of the room.

Cables were tangled all over the floor.

All the curtains were closed, so even though it was the middle of the day, no sunlight came in.

And with the lights turned off, the room was quite dark.

In the middle of the room sat the familiar figure of a woman.

A slim woman wearing thick-rimmed glasses turned her head toward me.

“……Dad?”

I had a feeling it might be her, and I was right.

It was my youngest daughter, Mihye.

Mihye seemed just as surprised as I was and blinked her large eyes several times.

“Why are you here, Dad?”

“Didn’t you hear from Jinhye? I told you I was coming here today.”

“Ah…… So that’s what my sister was talking about. I had just woken up at the time, so I wasn’t fully awake. My sister said something to me, but honestly, I don’t remember any of it.”

As she said that, she gave another long yawn.

Unlike my hardworking eldest daughter, my youngest was completely different.

She always went to bed late and didn’t wake up until the sun was already high in the sky.

It had always been a struggle to wake Mihye up and send her to school.

“But what are all these things?”

I pointed at the monitors attached here and there and asked.

It was the first time in my life that I had seen so many monitors installed in someone’s room.

“Oh, these? Dad probably knows what they are, too. Just a moment.”

My youngest reached for the mouse.

Click, click.

After a few clicks, several familiar program windows appeared on the monitors.

Watchlist.

Real-time Balance Check.

Automatic Trading Journal Chart.

Overall Market News, and so on.

“Isn’t this a stock trading program?”

Those windows looked extremely familiar to me.

“Yes, it is. I was getting bored because I stayed at home all the time, so I’ve been studying stocks lately. But once I started, it turned out to be pretty fun.”

So that’s what it was.

That explained the hints my eldest and second daughters had dropped before.

Well, if you wanted to make a large amount of money from home, stocks were probably one of the few ways to do it.

Or maybe cryptocurrency.

However, when the cryptocurrency boom happened, Mihye had only been a high school student.

Where would a high school student get money?

It was a time when she couldn’t invest in cryptocurrency even if she wanted to.

No, when I thought about it carefully, the same was true of Mihye two years ago.

Back then and now—

Mihye was still a student.

“Where did you get the money? Don’t tell me…… you didn’t use your tuition money, did you?”

“Dad. I’m not that terrible of a daughter. I’m using money that I earned myself.”

Since she said she had earned the money herself, I decided to just accept her answer.

Maybe she had earned it through a part-time job.

Or—

‘Maybe Jinhye helped her out a little in the beginning.’

My eldest daughter made good money.

Maybe she had helped Mihye get started.

Judging by the fact that Mihye had bought this house, she clearly seemed to have a talent for stocks.

‘I only ever lost money.’

I still remembered it clearly.

I had gathered up my courage and invested five million won in a company called Daesoon Pharmaceutical, only to lose 58% of it.

After that day, I decided never to touch stocks again.

But unlike me, my youngest daughter was doing extremely well with stocks.

‘The youngest is better at this than Dad.’

Even when I looked at the balance screen, there were so many numbers that I couldn’t immediately understand how much money she had.

‘I never imagined that the super individual investor mentioned in the news would be my daughter.’

You really did see everything if you lived long enough.

Making a lot of money from stocks was certainly a good thing.

Even so—

“You should at least clean your room once in a while. What is all this?”

I couldn’t help nagging her.

But my youngest just hugged a huge whale stuffed toy and rolled around on the bed, repeatedly saying that everything was fine.

“I’ve actually organized it pretty well.”

No, anyone could see that the room was simply a mess.

“I’ll clean it up a little after we eat, so go sit in the living room.”

“Okaaay~”

Even though she was twenty-three, to her parents, she still looked like a child.

Especially since there was quite a large age gap between Mihye and Jinhye and Seonhye.

Jinhye was twenty-eight, Seonhye was twenty-six, while Mihye was twenty-three.

Even compared with her eldest sister, there was a five-year age gap, so it was only natural that she had become a spoiled youngest child.

Even when I tried to lecture my daughters, I was too soft-hearted with my youngest to scold her easily.

Still, she was a grown woman now.

‘I should say something when she deserves to hear it.’

After doing a quick cleanup of Mihye’s room, I headed straight to the kitchen.

“Aren’t you hungry? I’ll make your favorite kimchi pancakes and fried sweet potatoes, so sit quietly in the living room.”

At my words, my youngest daughter’s eyes began to sparkle.

“Dad really is the best.”

Hearing that, I couldn’t help but straighten my shoulders with pride.

I guess whenever daughters act cute toward their fathers, fathers somehow find strength they didn’t even know they had.

My youngest slowly ate the food I had made with her chopsticks.

Seeing her like that, I couldn’t help but smile happily.

Whenever she moved, her hair seemed to bother her, so she kept using her hand to push it behind her shoulders.

“Aren’t you going to cut your hair?”

It was incredibly long.

It reached almost all the way down to her butt.

It looked very uncomfortable.

But Mihye shook her head at my question and answered as if it was perfectly fine.

“I like having long hair.”

“Hmm, really?”

It was her personal preference.

If she liked it, there was nothing I could do about it.

“What about school? I heard you took a leave of absence.”

“Yes. Whenever I’m outside, people keep coming to find me. So I decided to take a break from school for a while.”

“People? Who?”

Before answering, Mihye briefly went into her room and came back out.

She showed me something she was holding in her hand.

It was a huge stack of business cards, probably dozens of them.

Names, positions, companies, and so on.

They were all different.

But there was one thing they had in common.

“Are all these business cards from people who work at securities companies?”

“Yes. They keep contacting me and asking if I’d work for their companies. It’s annoying, so these days I barely even check my phone.”

When I had briefly looked at her balance screen earlier, almost all I could see were red numbers.

Her rate of return was also incredible.

She had the ability, and she was only twenty-three years old.

‘There’s no way securities companies wouldn’t want someone like her.’

Knowing that my daughter was being recognized for her abilities in the financial industry made me feel proud for no reason.

“Don’t you want to get a job at a securities company?”

“No. I don’t. Home is the best. I could never work at a company.”

She knew herself very well, too.

Actually, I hadn’t said it directly because I felt bad telling my youngest daughter that.

But I thought the same thing.

My youngest was absolutely not suited for office life.

It would be much better for her to work alone like she was doing now, or work as a freelancer.

‘Besides, she makes good money.’

I didn’t see any reason to force her into a regular salary job.

Just as we were finishing our meal, my youngest made a suggestion.

“Would you like me to show you around the house?”

I had actually been planning to ask my youngest to show me around anyway.

“That would be nice.”

I wanted to see how well my daughters were living.

‘Surely they don’t all live with their rooms this messy like Mihye, right?’

I wanted to check that, too.

It took almost an hour just to walk around the house.

Jinhye and Seonhye’s rooms, the dressing room, the first bathroom, the second bathroom, the storage room, the movie room, the study, the cafeteria, the balcony, and so on.

Everywhere I went, I couldn’t help saying, “Wow.”

‘I thought houses like this only existed in movies.’

I never imagined that my daughters would end up living in such a magnificent house.

While I was thinking about that for a long time—

“Dad! Come over here.”

Mihye waved her hand and called me over.

An empty room appeared before us. It wasn’t clear what the room was supposed to be used for yet.

“Jinhye said that maybe we should make this Dad’s room. What do you think?”

It was the largest room I had seen so far.

It seemed almost too good for me to use.

“Instead of me, why don’t Jinhye, Seonhye, or you use it?”

“My sisters like their current rooms. I do, too. I don’t want to remove all my computers and monitors, then install everything again. I don’t want to go through all that trouble again.”

That made perfect sense.

Since my daughters had left this space empty specifically for me, I couldn’t help but feel strangely attached to it.

“Okay, I understand. I’ll do that. I’ll tell your sisters myself. Now, let’s see……”

I wondered when Jinhye and Seonhye would come home.

Just as I was about to check the time—

Suddenly, the doorbell rang.

Mihye reacted first.

“I think my sister is here.”

“Already?”

“She said she’d come home early today because Dad was coming. Just a moment, Sis. I’ll open it.”

Mihye quickly walked toward the intercom.

She pressed the button, and the front door automatically opened.

The moment Jinhye entered the house and saw me, she gave me a bright smile.

“Dad, you’re here?”

“Yeah. You must be tired from working.”

“No, Dad worked harder. You came all the way here from Cheongju. But more importantly……”

Jinhye’s eyes turned toward Mihye.

“Did you get nagged a lot by Dad?”

It seemed Jinhye already knew.

She knew that Mihye would probably get scolded by me.

Mihye puffed out her cheeks.

“I didn’t.”

“You showed Dad your room, didn’t you?”

“……Yeah.”

“Then there’s no way you didn’t get nagged.”

“……”

As expected, that was the kind of insight only an older sister could have.

“If you don’t want to get nagged by Dad again, you should keep your room clean. And open the windows sometimes, too.”

With Jinhye there, the nagging doubled.

Mihye pretended to cover her ears and quickly ran into her room.

Seeing that, Jinhye let out a deep sigh.

“She may have grown physically, but she’s still a child.”

“But Mihye is good at stocks. She’s smart, too. I only ever lost money.”

Unlike me, it seemed that my youngest was naturally suited for stocks.

“Jinhye, did you give Mihye money to invest in stocks?”

No matter how much I thought about it, Jinhye was the only person who came to mind.

Unless it was Seonhye.

But Jinhye shook her head.

“It was actually the opposite. Mihye made money and provided the starting capital for my company. She also supported Seonhye’s activities.”

My youngest?

One unbelievable thing after another came out of her mouth.

“Through stocks?”

“No. She wasn’t doing stocks back then.”

“Then how?”

Jinhye told me to wait a moment, then opened a few photos on her smartphone and sent them to me.

The moment I saw them—

I couldn’t believe my eyes.

[732nd Lottery — Second Prize Winner]

[745th Lottery — Second Prize Winner]

[751st Lottery — Second Prize Winner]

And that wasn’t even the end.

This was only the beginning of revealing my youngest daughter’s true abilities.

The problem was the next photo.

[781st Lottery — First Prize Winner]

[Prize Money: 17,800,000,000 Won]

“I told you, didn’t I? Mihye is incredibly lucky.”

Three second-prize wins and even a first-prize win.

It was a record that truly showed she had reached the absolute peak of good luck.