The blue light from my phone screen painted my face in the darkness of my room.
It was 3:47 AM. And School started in four hours, but sleep was for people who weren't about to pull off the greatest heist in 'Eternal Abyss' history.
"Come on, you bastard... just a little more..."
My thumbs danced across the screen with practiced precision, navigating my maxed-out Merchant character through the Shadow Market district. Most players thought the Merchant class was trash—no combat skills, weak stats, and basically a glorified NPC.
Those idiots didn't understand that in any game, real or virtual, the person who controls the economy controls everything.
I'd spent three months researching this exploit.
Three months of browsing obscure Korean forums, bribing beta testers with gift cards, and cross-referencing patch notes. The developers had accidentally left a duplication glitch in the game's newest update, hidden in a specific sequence of trade commands that nobody would normally use.
Nobody except me.
[Trade Request Initiated...]
[Item: Philosopher's Stone Fragment x1]
[Cancel Trade]
[Rapid Input Detected]
[Trade Request Initiated]
[Item: Philosopher's Stone Fragment x2]
My heart raced as I executed the sequence.
[Cancel] at exactly 0.3 seconds.
[Reinitiate]
[Confirm]
The game's lag between server and client created a tiny window where the item existed in two places at once. Most players couldn't even perceive it. But I'd practiced this timing for weeks.
[Trade Completed]
[You have received: Philosopher's Stone Fragment x2]
"Yes!"
I had to physically stop myself from shouting. My mom was asleep in the next room, and the last thing I needed was her confiscating my phone again. She'd done it twice last month when my grades slipped. As if memorizing useless history dates was more important than securing my financial future.
Because that's what this was. 'Eternal Abyss' had a real-money trading scene that would make cryptocurrency bros weep with envy. The game's premium items sold for thousands of dollars on the black market. And Philosopher's Stone Fragments? Those went for ₩500,000 each. About $400 USD.
I currently had two of them.
And I was about to have a lot more.
This is either genius or I'm about to get banned, I thought, initiating another trade sequence. But honestly? Worth the risk. Our family convenience store was drowning in debt. My dad worked sixteen-hour days just to make rent. My mom's hands were cracked and bleeding from cheap cleaning products because we couldn't afford the good ones.
And me? I was supposed to be a good student, study hard, get into Itaewon university, and maybe—MAYBE—help them financially in ten years after climbing the corporate ladder.
Screw that.
I was tired of being poor. Tired of watching my dad's face when he counted the register at night and came up short. Tired of my mom pretending the knockoff brand was "just as good" when we both knew it wasn't. Tired of wearing the same three outfits to school while my classmates showed up in designer clothes their parents bought without thinking.
I wanted to be rich. Not "comfortable" or "financially stable." Rich. The kind of rich where money stopped being a constant background worry.
Where I could walk into a store and buy something without checking the price tag first.
And if exploiting a mobile game was the fastest path there, then that's what I'd do.
[Trade Completed]
[You have received: Philosopher's Stone Fragment x4]
The duplication was working perfectly. Two became four. Four would become eight. Eight would become sixteen.
Do the math. Sixteen fragments at ₩500,000 each.
₩8,000,000.
That was three months of store rent. That was fixing the refrigerator that sounded like a dying animal. That was buying my mom the expensive hand cream she always looked at but never bought because "it's wasteful, Min-jae."
My phone buzzed with a Discord notification.
[WarriorKing88: yo merchant69 u still buying mana crystals?]
I smirked. WarriorKing88 was one of those players who thought bigger swords meant bigger brain. He'd been grinding the Crystal Caverns for a week, stockpiling mana crystals because some streamer said they'd increase in value.
They wouldn't.
I'd checked the leaked patch notes—the ones the developers thought were secure on their private server. Mana crystals were getting a 400% drop rate buff in three days. The market would crash harder than my grades in calculus.
But WarriorKing88 didn't know that.
[Merchant69: depends on price. market's saturated rn]
This was a lie. The market wasn't saturated. But rule number one of negotiation: always make them think you're doing them a favor.
[WarriorKing88: dude i got 200 of them. took me all week]
[WarriorKing88: 50k gold for all of them. that's a good deal]
It absolutely was not a good deal. In three days, those crystals would be worth maybe 10k total. But I needed to play this carefully. If I seemed too eager, he'd get suspicious.
[Merchant69: hmm. i could do 30k]
[WarriorKing88: wtf no way!]
[WarriorKing88: 40k minimum]
[Merchant69: 35k and i take them all right now]
There was a pause. I could practically see him sweating over his keyboard, trying to decide. These types were always the same—impatient, desperate to cash out their grind time, convinced they were getting one over on the merchant.
[WarriorKing88: ... fine. but ur missing out when these spike]
[Merchant69: probably. meet at usual spot?]
Ten minutes later, the trade was complete. I'd dumped 35,000 gold—which I'd make back in an hour with my duped Philosopher's Stones—for 200 mana crystals that would be worthless by Wednesday.
I felt nothing. No guilt, no satisfaction. Just the cold calculation of profit margins and market inefficiencies.
This was the real game. The combat, the dungeons, the epic boss fights—that was all just flashy nonsense for people who couldn't see the bigger picture. The real endgame of any MMO was the economy. Control the flow of resources and you control everything else.
I spent the next two hours methodically duplicating Philosopher's Stone Fragments. One became two. Two became four. Four became eight. The exponential growth was beautiful. Mathematical. Perfect.
By 5:47 AM, I had sixteen perfect duplicates sitting in my inventory.
My buyer was already lined up—RedDragon_CN, some rich Chinese guild leader who wanted to craft a legendary item and had more money than sense. We'd negotiated the price last week.
[RedDragon_CN: fragments ready?]
[Merchant69: all 16. payment first then trade]
[RedDragon_CN: half now half after]
I rolled my eyes. Always with the negotiations.
[Merchant69: then no deal. plenty of other buyers]
This was a bluff. There weren't many other buyers at this price point. But RedDragon_CN didn't know that. Information asymmetry—the merchant's greatest weapon.
[RedDragon_CN: fine. full payment first.]
[RedDragon_CN: but if you scam me...]
[Merchant69: check my rep. 847 trades, zero disputes. i'm not stupid enough to ruin that for one score]
This was true. My reputation on the trading forums was immaculate because I'd carefully cultivated it for exactly this purpose. Trust was a currency you could spend infinitely, as long as you spent it on the right people at the right time.
The payment notification came through—₩8,000,000 deposited into my secondary bank account, the one my parents didn't know about. I'd opened it with a fake ID I'd bought from a senior at school. Technically illegal, but laws were just rules written by people who weren't smart enough to break them effectively.
I initiated the trade, watching the Philosopher's Stone Fragments transfer from my inventory to RedDragon_CN's. All sixteen of them, each one a perfect duplicate created through a glitch that shouldn't exist.
[RedDragon_CN: pleasure doing business]
[Merchant69: likewise. let me know if u need anything else]
I closed the app and stared at my banking app. ₩8,000,000. The number looked fake. Like it would disappear if I blinked.
But it didn't disappear.
It was real.
Eight million won. More money than I'd ever seen in my life. More than my dad made in six months of sixteen-hour days.
And I'd made it in one night by being smarter than everyone else.
I checked the time. 6:15 AM. School started at 8:30. I had time.
---
At 7:00 AM, I walked into our convenience store carrying bags of expensive food from the 24-hour grocery store. The kind of food we sold but never bought for ourselves.
My dad looked up from restocking the instant noodle shelf, eyes widening.
"Min-jae? What's all this?"
"Breakfast," I said, setting the bags on the counter. "The good kind."
I started unpacking. Imported bread. Real butter. Fresh fruit. The premium spam that cost ₩8,000 a can. Orange juice that actually tasted like oranges instead of sugar water.
My dad picked up the spam can, turning it over slowly. "Where did you get money for this?"
"Tutoring," I lied. "Rich kid in Gangnam. His parents pay well."
It wasn't technically true. But "I exploited a mobile game and committed mild fraud" seemed like a conversation that would end badly.
My dad's eyes got that watery look middle-aged Korean men get when they're trying not to cry. He set the spam down and pulled me into a hug.
"You're a good son," he said, voice thick.
Something twisted in my chest. Guilt, maybe. Or pride. Probably both.
"Someone has to make sure you eat something besides convenience store kimbap," I muttered into his shoulder.
My mom emerged from the back room, hair messy from sleep. She froze when she saw the food spread across the counter.
"Min-jae..."
"Tutoring job," my dad explained. "Our son is taking care of us."
My mom's face did something complicated. She walked over and hugged me too, and suddenly I was trapped between both my parents in the middle of our struggling convenience store at 7 AM, surrounded by expensive food I'd bought with money from selling duplicated digital items.
"My smart boy," my mom whispered. "Working so hard."
I wasn't working hard. Not in the way she thought. But I was helping them. That counted for something.
"It's just breakfast," I said, extracting myself before this got any more emotional. "Don't make it weird."
But it wasn't just breakfast. I could see it in their faces. They were proud. Relieved. Happy in a way I hadn't seen in months.
And I'd done that. With my schemes and exploits and morally questionable business practices, I'd made my parents happy.
We ate together—expensive bread and real butter and premium spam—and for the first time in years, nobody mentioned the bills or the debt or whether we'd make rent this month.
My dad laughed at something. My mom smiled. And I sat there thinking about the ₩8,000,000 in my secret bank account.
This was just the beginning. I was going to get rich enough that money would never be a problem again. Rich enough that my parents could retire. Rich enough that we'd never have to buy the cheap stuff ever again.
I was going to scheme my way to the top. Whatever it took.
My phone buzzed. Another message from a potential buyer.
I smiled into my orange juice.
"Min-jae?" my mom asked. "What are you thinking about?"
"Nothing," I said. "Just... planning ahead."
Planning to get so rich that this—this moment, this happiness—would be normal instead of rare.