When Chris' class ended, he quickly went home and checked the stock price of Nexon.
"Alright it went according to my plan," Chris said happily. He quickly sold all his shares and his bank account surged to $3 million.
'It would be easy for me to invest all this 3 million and get another million or two within a week, but since I did all the prep work for Nexon, let's end it with Nexon,' Chris thought. He took out his phone that he recently got and called a number that he never used in his past life.
It rang for a couple of seconds, but soon a male picked up the phone.
"Hello?"
"Can I have some pig's feet with scallions?" Chris asked.
"Let me transfer you to the proper department," The man said in a calm tone. The phone rang once again and this time a female's voice answered.
"Job description?" The lady asked.
"Nexon's game Maplestory. Down for 2 days starting tomorrow noon, but no data losses," Chris said.
"200k," The woman said. She immediately hung up and Chris smiled.
"Oh I'm going to be richer than those regular 1%," Chris said.
The next morning, Chris immediately went to his brokerage site and put in all of his money except for $200,000 in order to short Nexon.
'Luckily in my past life, a friend of mine told me about them. Their password changes a lot, but he did mention about this password which he thought was the best password out of all of them,' Chris thought happily.
"$50 per share! We're going to get such a big bonus!" An employee shouted.
"Yeah! Let's go out to a pub today! I'm buying! Who's in?!" Another employee asked excitedly.
The manager smiled and also decided to take part in the little celebration.
'I'm going to get promoted soon right?' The manager thought as he was already starting to celebrate his promotion in his mind. However, their celebration was short-lived.
"Manager, we have a huge problem!" An employee that looked at his computer said with panic.
"What's the matter? The stock went down by a dollar?" The manager asked jokingly.
"No... Maplestory has been hacked! For now, we're trying our best, but there's no sign of us recovering," The employee said.
"What?!" The manager asked with a shocked tone. "Try your best to recover the servers. If we don't get this fixed by today, it won't be only me that gets sacked, all of you will be as well!"
All the employees were frantically trying to do whatever they could, but nothing was happening.
"We're screwed.. No one can do anything about this right now and news is going to go out fast. Forget the bonus, we're going to lose our jobs," The employee who asked everyone out to the pub said sadly as he shuddered at the thought of him losing his job.
"It's alright," The manager said. "You guys have till the end of tomorrow to try to fix this or else we're all going down,"
However, Nexon was not able to fix the servers the next day. Even Madeline switched to World of Warcraft as she could not play Maplestory anymore.
All the employees at Nexon were depressed. While they felt that they were getting closer to fixing the problem, it was already too late. The stock price for Nexon plummeted to $10 per share and while it did not drop any lower than that, there was no sign of it ever going up even if they fixed the hacking problem. This was because many were now insecure about the security of Nexon. While it was still considered a huge win overall considering that the share price went from $0.50 a couple days ago to $10, going down from $50 to $10 was a huge sting to the company.
'It's over. I'm going to be fired,' The manager thought gloomily. He knew that even though he increased the price by a huge amount, it was still nothing compared to the error of getting the share price lowered from $50 to $10.
On the other side of the world, Chris was extremely happy. He once again took out his money. The amount that he had was enormous with it being in the tens of millions. Chris knew that he was in the 0.1% now that he had a 8 digit figure in his bank account.
Chris suddenly heard a familiar voice that he hadn't heard from in a while in his head.
'Chris you finished the task at hand. Are you ready to return?" Prometheus asked.
"Wait," Chris said. "I want to do a couple more things. Let's see if I can increase my wealth a little bit more,"
"Alright. Contact me when you are ready, but don't take too long. If you do, I'll forcefully remove you," Prometheus said.
"Alright let's see what I can do," Chris said. When he went to school, he met up with Madeline who looked visibly upset.
"What's up Madeline?" Chris asked.
"I still can't play Maplestory!" Madeline exclaimed. While her World of Warcrafts video was doing just as well as her Maplestory videos, she still liked Maplestory more.
"They should fix it by today," Chris said. "You know the people at Nexon are very hard-working people. Perhaps the problem with their server is a little worse than they thought,"
"I know, but with 2 days, I could've leveled up my Archer 2 levels!" Madeline said angrily. "And even if it does come back, there won't be a lot of people playing it anymore. I like it and will still play it, but a lot of people who don't trust the security of the game anymore won't play it so a lot of the friends I made in the game won't play anymore,"
"Why don't you ask your dad to do something about it?" Chris asked. "Doesn't he have a company related to cyber security and things like that? If he helps, people can trust the company again"
"Oh yeah he does!" Madeline said. "Alright I'll talk to my dad. He'll be able to do something,"
When Chris went home, Nexon stated that they fixed the servers. However, the share price still did not go up. On the contrary, it went down a little bit more to $9.50.
"Alright, here goes nothing," Chris said. He put a limit order at $9 to buy as much Nexon stocks as he possibly could. While this did bring a bit of talk within the investing community, only some people decided to buy the shares and many others shorted it.
"Whoever put that limit order must be stupid," An investor said as he put in a couple thousand dollars shorting Nexon.
"I wish I could see the face of that rich guy when he loses hundreds of thousands of dollars at once from this stupid decision. It's not about it being oversold anymore. This hacking incident will lower the amount of players by at least half," Another investor said to himself as he spent $40,000 shorting Nexon.
However, the news the next day shocked everyone even more than when the game was hacked.
After the One of the top cybersecurity company, CyberTech is negotiating to work with Nexon to massively improve the security of the game.
"Isn't CyberTech that company owned by Henry Porter that billionaire? Why are they talking with Nexon?" The investor who spent $40,000 asked. "That's probably some fluff news. They're probably going to bail last minute. Alright shorting more,"
Many others had the same mindset as they shorted more. The prices dropped further as many people got cold feet and sold while the amount of buyers were not increasing.
Chris also lost a lot of money, but he still kept his shares as he knew that big news was coming.
'Oh Madeline, you're going to make me extremely rich,' Chris thought as his order was filled.