The Sovereign Tower - 18th Floor. Early Summer.

  The transition from spring to summer in Yeouido was usually marked by the shedding of trench coats and the sudden appearance of iced coffees on the streets below. But inside the 18th floor of the Sovereign Tower, the climate was strictly controlled to a crisp 21 degrees Celsius.

  Kang Min-jun stood at the head of the holographic smart-table. Around him stood the five members of Unit 2026. They had successfully navigated the Silicon Valley Bank collapse, but that was a crisis of gravity—things falling apart. Min-jun needed to know if they could predict a launch.

  He tapped the table. A blank, three-dimensional axis appeared.

  "I am giving you your first blind mandate," Min-jun said, his voice echoing slightly in the quiet room. "No parameters. No specific sector. I want you to find the next global choke point. Not a crash—a bottleneck of capital and demand. Where is the liquidity going to get stuck over the next eighteen months?"

  Dr. Song Ji-hoon adjusted his glasses, crossing his arms. "That's a ridiculously broad query. We could look at sovereign debt, or agricultural yields, or energy grids..."

  "Narrow it down," Min-jun challenged. "You have the pulse of the Daegwang Data Lake. You have infinite computing power. You have all the resources. Find the bottleneck."

  He didn't wait for a response. He turned and walked to the private elevator, leaving them to the silence of the 18th floor.

  For the next three weeks, Min-jun stayed away. He monitored their server usage from his penthouse, watching the terabytes of data flowing into their models, but he didn't look at their conclusions. He wanted the Engine to run on its own fuel.

  Down in the Unit 2026 operations center, the friction was palpable.

  "It's Copper," Dr. Song declared during their daily stand-up meeting on the second week. He had covered his section of the glass wall with macro-economic charts. "The global transition to Electric Vehicles (EVs) requires three times more copper per vehicle than a combustion engine. And the grid infrastructure requires millions of miles of new cabling."

  Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.

  "Copper is too obvious," Lee Chang-ho, the Gambler, said from his desk, spinning a Go stone. "Everyone knows EVs need copper. The market has already priced in the demand curve. The upside variance isn't high enough."

  "The demand is priced in," Han Su-jin, The Storm, interjected, walking over with a tablet. "But the supply disruption isn't. Look at this climate modeling."

  She cast her screen to the central table. It showed the Andean mountains in South America. "Chile and Peru produce 40% of the world's copper. My models predict a severe, prolonged El Ni?o event disrupting the water supply to the high-altitude mines. Desalination plants will fail. Production will drop by 15% right when the EV demand hits the hockey stick curve."

  Park Min-seok, The Hawk, nodded slowly, leaning against the wall. "Geopolitically, it makes sense. China is hoarding base metals to secure their EV supply chain. If South America chokes, China buys everything else, leaving the West starved. Copper goes to $12,000 a ton."

  "It's a solid thesis," Dr. Song said, looking at Park Dong-hoon. "Dong-hoon, run the sentiment and supply chain scrape. Let's draft the preliminary report for the Chairman."

  Dong-hoon, who was buried behind a wall of monitors, gave a noncommittal grunt. He was typing furiously, but not about copper.

  Three Weeks Later. Floor 20, The Penthouse.

  Min-jun sat on his balcony, reading the preliminary report titled: [Projected Copper Deficit: The EV Infrastructure Choke Point].

  He closed the leather binder and sighed. He felt a cold weight settle in his stomach.

  It was a good report. It was logical, well-researched, and supported by excellent climate and macroeconomic data. If he were running a standard hedge fund, he would be thrilled.

  But it was wrong. Or rather, it was just... average.

  Min-jun reached into his jacket pocket and touched the worn spiral notebook. His cheat sheet. He knew the next massive supercycle wasn't EV metals. EVs were already becoming yesterday's news. The real choke point—the one that would mint trillion-dollar companies in the next year—was Generative AI hardware. NVIDIA. High Bandwidth Memory.

  They missed it, Min-jun thought, looking out at the Han River. They got distracted by the physical economy. The Engine is just a normal think tank.

  The existential dread crept back in. If they couldn't see the AI boom coming, what would happen when his notebook ran out of pages in 2025? He would be flying blind, relying on a team that only saw what every other smart analyst in Yeouido saw.

  He tossed the report onto the table. He wouldn't intervene. He would give them the final week. But the disappointment tasted like ash.