The next day, I didn’t go to school.
Judging by the mood yesterday, Yang Jeongwon seemed to be in a bad temper.
On days like that, the chance of getting beaten up the moment I got to school was 980,000%.
There wasn’t anything for me to learn at school anyway,
so there was no reason to break through a 980,000 percent chance just to go.
Even if I went, I’d only get hit.
There was no one to nag me for not going to school.
No teacher would scold me for not showing up.
That was what my existence at school was like.
Like an NPC who didn’t matter whether he was there or not.
No, worse than an NPC.
At least NPCs in games have roles.
I don’t even have that.
Ah? Do I?
Yang Jeongwon’s errand boy.
Come to think of it, the only person who’d be disappointed if I didn’t go to school was Yang Jeongwon.
Isn’t that ironic?
If I don’t go to school, the person who misses me the most is the person I hate the most.
Funny.
Now that I think about it, Kwon Jua’s gaze from yesterday keeps bothering me.
It was like she wanted to say something to me.
Like she really knew something.
It doesn’t matter.
Anyway, after a day passes, it’ll all go by like it never happened.
And I’m not going to school for at least three days.
By the time I go back, an ordinary daily life will probably unfold as if nothing ever happened.
I’ll still be an errand boy, buying bread for them, and I’ll just have to take a few hits.
Why do I keep going to school even though I get beaten like that?
Because I want to have at least a high school diploma.
That’s all.
What do I have?
No parents to help me, no relatives.
Even less money.
On top of that, I’m scrawny, so I can’t fight or play sports.
I hoped I’d at least be good-looking, but that failed too.
Studying?
Of course I’m bad at it.
Maybe it’s because no one looked after me when I was young, but my basics are awful.
With no foundation, suddenly doing well in high school?
That’s impossible.
There wasn’t even anyone beside me to lie and say, “You’re smart, you just don’t study.”
If there had been someone like that, would I have studied?
My personality?
Wouldn’t my personality be even more fucked up?
Aren’t I a textbook case of someone who grew up without being loved?
Could a kid like that have a good personality?
A kid with sharp edges no matter what he does.
A kid who’s negative about everything, full of complaints and dissatisfaction—that’s me.
You try living in this kind of environment.
See if you don’t end up like me.
The fact that I didn’t go crazy or end my own life deserves an award.
To be honest, I got pretty close myself.
I only managed to eat and live now because I got this Inventory thing.
Anyway, in this terrible environment, I go to school to get one high school diploma.
Why?
I told you.
Because I have nothing.
If I want to even work part-time at a convenience store, I should at least have a high school diploma, right?
If I want to make a living, I need a high school diploma.
At the very least, I need something like a high school diploma.
That way, I can at least say, I am an ordinary, average person.
An ordinary person whose circumstances are just a little bad.
That’s my dream.
But the road to that dream is nothing but rough.
To get a high school diploma, you have to attend more than two-thirds of the 190 school days in a year.
That means I have to go to school at least 130 days.
What’s funny about our country is that even if you’re bad at studying, they let you advance, but if you’re absent, they make you repeat the year.
You go to school to study, but it’s okay if you can’t study, while being absent isn’t allowed?
It’s strange, but well, it’s a relief for me.
Right now, all I have to do is get beaten by Yang Jeongwon,
but if they made me study too, I’d have to study while getting beaten.
The GED?
Have you ever tried solving GED exam questions?
You have to study harder than you’d think.
And I told you earlier.
I’m bad at studying.
I have no foundation.
For someone like me, the GED is a pretty difficult and exhausting gateway.
That’s how hard and rough it is to get a high school diploma.
So don’t look down on people just because they only graduated high school.
Because for someone, it might be the result they earned while shitting blood.
.
.
.
I woke up early for no reason.
When I wake up early, I get hungry early too.
I checked my Inventory.
Thankfully, there was quite a bit to eat.
The good thing about this Inventory
is that things are preserved in the exact state they were in when I put them in.
If I put in hot gukbap, even if I take it out days later, it’s still hot,
and if I put in cold ice cream, it stays frozen solid even after days pass.
Which means.
The beef I procured from the food-supply mart is still being preserved fresh.
I started grilling beef first thing in the morning.
I cooked a pack of bibim-myeon and ate it together.
Since I’ve been eating beef almost every day lately, I’m getting a little sick of it.
At first, even eating only meat made tears stream down my face from the savory taste.
I didn’t even acknowledge heretical things like salt,
but after a few days, I found myself dunking beef deep into ssamjang and eating it.
Today too, while I was eating bibim-myeon, the beef was just a topping; the main dish was the bibim-myeon.
By the way, maybe it’s because I’ve been eating well lately,
but I feel like I’ve gotten a little taller, a little bigger.
Though I’m still a dwarf.
.
.
.
.
Today, I’m thinking of going to a warehouse-style mart.
I heard those membership marts have really good products.
Since I’m a minor, I don’t have a membership card, so I can’t enter.
Apparently, minors without guardians can’t be issued memberships.
It’s fine.
There are marts you can enter even without a membership.
From the three million won I received from the food-supply mart owner, I took out only ten thousand won and charged my bus card.
It’s too far to walk.
I searched the map and looked for a warehouse-style mart closest to a subway station.
There’s one in Magok.
Thankfully, there’s a passage directly connected from the subway to the inside.
I thought I’d have to walk forever, so I couldn’t be more grateful.
And the warehouse-style mart I entered was a whole new world.
Food-supply mart? Hypermarket? Tell them to get lost.
There’s no comparison at all.
The scale is different.
So this is heaven.
I wanted to put everything I could see into my Inventory, but first, I calmed myself down and decided to look around.
After one lap, instead of calming down, I ended up wanting even more things.
Starting with the fruit, and the meat section was good too.
But the prepared food section really won my heart.
Sashimi, sushi, smoked pork belly, eel, meal kits I could boil and eat anytime.
These are exactly what I need right now.
For things like beef, I can just go to the food-supply mart and take them.
Here, I should grab prepared foods.
Swoosh.
Swoosh.
I can feel my Inventory filling up.
Good thing I emptied it before coming out today.
They have clothes here too?
I don’t have clothes.
Nike?
Adidas?
I love it.
Swoosh.
Swoosh.
They even have shoes.
Levi’s jeans I’ve always wanted to wear.
Swoosh.
Swoosh.
Do people have to start taking nutritional supplements from a young age these days?
Swoosh.
Swoosh.
They have bread and cake too.
Swoo...
Swoo...
They have home appliances too.
Swoo...
Swoo...
It won’t go in.
Is it already full?
There’s still so much left to put in. How is it already full?
I’d never once thought my Inventory was small, but after coming to a warehouse-style mart, it became small.
Of course, it was partly because the items here were bulk-size and packaged big,
and partly because there were so many things I liked that I put in this and that,
but either way, there were still many things left to put in, so it felt too regrettable to stop.
First, I went to the restroom.
Sitting on the toilet, I tried to rearrange the Inventory space in my head.
I thought about how, when we pack for a trip, the volume can shrink or increase depending on how we pack.
If I packed it tightly like Tetris, wouldn’t I be able to fit more?
I struggled to move the Inventory images floating in my head.
What kind of feeling was it? Like closing your eyes, sticking your hand into a suitcase, and organizing the things inside?
Even when we try to take something out of a bag without looking, we have to rummage around for a while.
Since a suitcase is much bigger, it was far harder.
I couldn’t even touch the things inside the suitcase.
But since I could put things in and take them out, I felt like I should somehow be able to move them.
‘If I cross these bottles up and down, won’t there be more space?’
‘If I use the gaps on the side, won’t I be able to put in more things?’
I couldn’t see them,
and I couldn’t touch them.
I had to do everything purely by feeling.
That was the situation,
but with the heart of a pirate trying to take even a little more treasure from a treasure island,
I sat on the toilet in the restroom and did my absolute best to fit even one more thing in.
How long did I struggle?
Click!!
It didn’t actually make a clicking sound, but it felt exactly like something had clicked into place.
Like when a long bar appears in Tetris and clears away all the blocks that have been piled up until then?
Anyway, to my ears, it was practically the same as hearing it.
Along with that clicking sensation, the situation changed.
The Inventory that I had only been guessing, predicting, estimating—vaguely perceiving like Blind Sim—became recognizable like a game window.
Five slots across, two slots down.
A total of ten slots appeared before me.
In the first slot, Beef X10,
in the second slot, Beef X2,
in the third slot, Nutritional Supplements X2,
in the fourth slot, Shoes X1.
It was displayed like that.
Ah?
They stack?
Similar categories combine together?
Sitting on the toilet, I was so shocked that I flushed first.
It just felt like I should.
Smack~~
I slapped my own cheek.
Because I’d startled myself so much.
Looking at that game-window image, I could infer a few things.
I didn’t know how many packs of beef there were, but there had been quite a lot.
Seeing as they were split into 10 in slot one and 2 in slot two, I must have had 12 packs of beef in total.
The maximum number that could go into one slot was 10.
To confirm whether my thought was right, I just needed to put more into the Inventory.
Like a civilized person, I flushed once more and went back into the mart, then put a few more pairs of shoes into my Inventory.
Swoosh.
Swoosh.
Swoosh.
Shoes X2.
Shoes X3.
Shoes X4.
Huh?
For real?
It works like this?
Why?
Ah?! The why isn’t important.
What am I going to do after figuring out the reason?
If the reason isn’t reasonable, am I not going to use it?
No matter what the reason is, I’m going to use it, so I don’t need to think about things like reasons.
I only need to think about using it well.
Anyway.
To summarize,
before, it was like I was Blind Sim, eyes closed, putting things into and taking things out of a suitcase.
Through today’s upgrade? I became able to perceive something like a game status window.
As a result, I became able to store identical items by stacking them together.
The amount I could put into the Inventory also changed from the size of one suitcase
to ten items per category, ten slots.
In other words, I could put in one hundred items.
Both the quantity and the volume had definitely increased.
Thank you.
I didn’t know whom I should thank, but I offered my gratitude anyway.
Should I thank the mart owner?
Thank you, warehouse-style mart owner.
I’ll make sure to take plenty.
From that point on, the way I put things into the Inventory changed.
Before, I just put things in if I liked them, but now I had to put things in by item type to fit a lot.
For example.
There are 10 packs of beef in slot one. 2 packs in slot two.
That means I can put in 8 more packs.
Tenderloin, ribeye, saewoo-sal, and so on—I grabbed a good variety.
I roamed the mart more and put necessary items into my Inventory.
I had to calculate carefully.
When it was a suitcase, I could put in what I needed regardless of type,
but now I could only use ten slots.
And two of those slots were already filled with beef.
I had eight slots left.
Clothes were absolutely necessary.
The one fortunate thing was that it didn’t distinguish between tops and bottoms.
Clothes were simply one category.
It would’ve been nice if shoes were the same category too, but shoes were separate.
Today, I gained ten pairs of shoes.
Even if you added up all the shoes I’ve worn in my life, it probably wouldn’t reach ten pairs.
At least slippers going into the same slot as shoes was a relief.
I carefully grabbed nutritional supplements and vitamins. Red ginseng and probiotics too.
I have to think about my body.
I also grabbed meal kits I could boil and eat anytime instead of meat,
and since I shouldn’t eat only meat all the time, I grabbed sashimi too.
I also grabbed rice.
Then I moved to the camping section.
For guys like me who live at home as if they’re camping, nothing is as useful as the camping section.
First, I put in a tent.
As the weather got colder, it was too cold.
I felt like I’d have to pitch a tent inside the house and sleep in it.
I put in a sleeping bag too.
Whatever it was, I put in the most expensive one.
As I always say,
because I’ve lived as a beggar bastard, I have no standard at all for judging what’s good and what’s bad.
So by my standards, expensive means good.
Normally, the first thing to do would be to pay the bills and restore the cut-off electricity, water, and gas,
but after living without them, it was bearable enough.
I just have to live while thinking of it as camping.
I don’t need to use gas.
For water, I can go to a nearby public restroom.
I can just draw some water there and use it.
Drinking water?
Can’t I just drink restroom water?
I’ve been drinking that kind of thing since I was young, so I don’t feel any aversion.
Electricity isn’t that inconvenient either.
The only electronic device I have is my phone.
These days, there are lots of places here and there where you can charge your phone.
And if I don’t have it for a while, so what?
There’s no one who’ll contact me anyway.
Thinking that,
I began taking camping gear one by one.
Until the remaining slots were full.