"Liam, you?" Diana Hemsworth found it hard to believe that this was real.
"Mom, listen to my explanation… I once bought a crypto coin. Back then, I only bought it with around 30 dollars. Later, I remembered it and checked again, and its price had already risen far above my entry, giving me a profit of over 200,000 dollars."
Liam said everything directly because he didn't want to give a long, complicated explanation.
Of course, there was a sense of awkwardness because he was lying.
This kind of thing was rare to begin with, so it was difficult to say even if it were true.
But the real truth was far more shocking.
He had turned 100 dollars into over 200,000 in just a few hours.
How could he possibly explain something like that?
It was too difficult.
It would only make things more awkward because it was too unbelievable.
"A crypto coin… 30 dollars into more than 200,000?" The woman spoke with a trembling voice.
It was unclear whether she didn't believe it, or simply found it impossible that such a thing could happen to her son.
"Mom, you know this can happen. The coin I bought only had a 100,000 dollar market cap when I bought it, and now its market cap is over 700 million dollars. Its ATH even exceeded 2 billion dollars, but I didn't check it at the time," Liam added, forced to elaborate.
"This is really real?" she asked.
"Yes. Mom, I still have a lot of money left. Tomorrow, let's go to the hospital so you can get better treatment." Liam nodded lightly.
"No, I'm fine now. I'm already better… You should keep that money. You still need it for your life."
At the mention of going to the hospital, the woman immediately shook her head firmly.
"No, Mom, you have to… At the very least, we should buy proper supplements so your immune system can fully recover," Liam insisted.
"Oh, right. I bought your favorite grilled meat. Let's eat," he added, shifting the topic for now.
He then led her to the table, urging her to sit down while he quickly prepared plates and utensils.
The meat was still hot, steam rising from it along with a rich aroma of spices.
Diana was naturally tempted by the food.
But as Liam sat down, she asked, "Which coin gave you that much profit?"
She clearly still wanted to talk about it.
"Dogwifhat…" Liam answered.
He wasn't making things up.
That coin really existed, and its price had indeed moved as he described.
"Dogwifhat…" Diana, curious, checked it on her phone.
She was genuinely curious, not suspicious that Liam was lying.
"What is this? It's just… this? How did the price rise that high?" she said, confused as she looked at the coin's image—a dog wearing a hat.
"I don't know…"
Liam shrugged.
"I bought it because I thought its community, even though small at the time, was very active… Now, its Telegram group has hundreds of thousands of members. Honestly, forgetting about it was my luck. Otherwise, I might have sold it after it rose just one or two hundred percent."
"This is still hard to believe," the woman said.
"Mom, it really happened…" Liam replied.
"Alright. It seems you got lucky. But luck like this doesn't mean you'll always be lucky. Don't go too deep into crypto. Many people lose money there because they become greedy after making easy money."
"Yeah…" Liam nodded lightly.
The truth couldn't be told now—and perhaps not even in the future.
After eating, Liam took a shower and went to his room.
Full and clean, he felt at ease, lying on his bed shirtless.
When he looked at his phone, a strange expression appeared on his face.
There were two notifications from Instagram.
(Luna Allen followed you back!)
(You received a message from Luna Allen!)
He had followed her a long time ago, but she had only followed him back now—and even sent a message.
Liam opened it.
(Hi Liam, are you the one who bought that car?)
So straightforward.
Liam couldn't help but show a faint look of disdain.
Young American women these days had reached an extreme level of pragmatism.
For money, they would do anything without considering dignity or shame.
No—they didn't even acknowledge those concepts when it came to money.
Liam was too lazy to reply.
He downloaded a crypto wallet—the largest one, supporting all networks—as well as a major DEX application.
He first created an account on the wallet, then connected it to the DEX.
After that, he bought around 10,000 dollars worth each of Solana and BNB, then transferred them to his wallet.
Soon, he looked at the coin listings on the DEX, which displayed a hundred coins with the highest transaction volume.
Some were old coins.
But of course, there were also several new coins that appeared on the front page, either due to ads or artificially boosted volume from bots.
Liam then adjusted the interface to show only newly listed coins from that day.
Most had market caps under 50,000 dollars. Some had hundreds of thousands, and many had dropped back to around 2,500 dollars after previously rising above 100,000.
The highest had a market cap of 1 million dollars, with a price of 0.001 per coin.
But that was exactly what caught Liam's attention.
It hadn't even been two hours, yet he could see its price would reach 0.017 per coin—or a 17 million dollar market cap.
A seventeenfold increase.
He didn't see that kind of movement in other coins.
He couldn't help but wonder if it had the potential to become the next viral meme coin.
Perhaps on the second day, its price would rise even further.
Of course, the opposite was also possible—it could crash, since meme coins with low liquidity could easily return to their starting price once volume dropped.
In the end, Liam chose that coin, buying it with his 10,000 dollars worth of Solana, acquiring 1% of the total supply.
It was a very large purchase, but due to the high volume, the price didn't move much.
'Right… I don't know exactly when it will reach 17 million market cap.'
Liam realized a problem.
Trading on a DEX was different from an exchange.
There were no limit orders—no automatic take profit or stop loss at specific prices.
He could only buy and sell manually.
That meant he had to constantly monitor the price.
Of course, there was a solution—using a bot.
He had no experience with it, so he searched for information first.
It turned out there were many bots available, but they required subscription fees.
He didn't care about the cost and immediately downloaded one of the most popular bot applications.
The bot could connect to his wallet, and one of its best features was creating thousands of different wallets to hold his coins, giving the illusion of many holders.
This was commonly used by coin developers for manipulation.
Those thousands of wallets could buy or sell simultaneously with a single command.
"Mm…" Liam frowned.
After setting up the bot, he suddenly saw massive selling on the coin—dropping 15% instantly despite the high volume, and still falling 1% every few seconds.
Panic selling had begun.
It seemed the developer was dumping their coins.
Within ten minutes, the drop reached 40%.
His 10,000 dollars had fallen to 6,000.
He was naturally annoyed.
If he couldn't see the future, he would've panicked too.
"Oh… shit…"
The drop didn't stop—it went even further, even faster.
Buying volume disappeared, and the selling drained the coin's liquidity.
'Why does this always happen when I buy meme coins?' Liam wondered.
This wasn't his first experience.
Of course, in the past, he had only used 5 to 10 dollars—and it always crashed afterward.
'As expected… can't rely on it.'
Liam shook his head.
After that, he opened the futures market on the exchange again.
But just as he was about to observe the prices—
The door to his room suddenly opened.
He was stunned.
Because the person he saw…
was not his mother.