Huff, huff.
His breath burned in his throat.
He couldn’t even remember when he had run like this.
He wanted to stop from exhaustion, but he couldn’t.
His destination was right there before him.
Li Yuantao, a city hall official, was running toward the restaurant where he had eaten lunch yesterday.
Hoping that some candy was still left.
*****
Li Yuantao had experienced something completely new yesterday.
After eating a meal at the restaurant and having a piece of candy, his mind had cleared and his emotions had flared.
The stress he had accumulated preparing for the event vanished in an instant.
The parts he had been worrying about were resolved in a flash.
The panoramic view of the event venue rose clearly in his mind, and he thought of how to pull off the event perfectly.
He figured out how to persuade the florists’ association and the restaurateurs.
He wrote the report feverishly.
He lost all track of time.
When he looked at the clock, two hours had already passed.
He thought it was the first time in his life he had ever been so immersed.
It was a level of concentration that surprised even him.
It was perfect immersion.
When his concentration broke, a sudden wave of hunger flooded in.
Was it because he had had a light lunch?
It was unbearable.
He ran to a convenience store and frantically stuffed himself with bread, jelly, and candy.
Li Yuantao usually never ate such things, but now it felt like nothing else would do.
He craved intensely sweet, carbohydrate-heavy foods.
After hurriedly filling his stomach, Li Yuantao returned to the office.
When he sat down, the file he had just been working on was on the monitor.
But….
But….
What was this even saying?
He couldn’t understand it.
It was definitely something he himself had written.
He had definitely written it, yet he couldn’t understand why he had written it that way.
He couldn’t recall at all what he had been thinking when he arranged this part like this.
He had no idea why he had left this part blank.
It felt like solving a math problem where a symbol had been left empty.
Like doing a jigsaw puzzle while looking at the back of the pieces.
No matter how hard he tried to remember, the answer wouldn’t come.
‘Candy!’
He suddenly thought of the candy.
He was sure that after eating the candy, his mood had brightened and the ideas had come.
If he ate the candy again, would the idea come back?
It was only a possibility, but confirming it wasn’t difficult.
He had grabbed a handful of candy when leaving the restaurant.
He would know once he tried eating it.
Whether the candy gave inspiration or not.
Li Yuantao searched for the candy he had put in his pocket.
Huh?
Gone?
Ah, right.
Hadn’t he put it on the desk because having candy in his pocket was uncomfortable?
He looked on the desk, but there was nothing there.
The candy he had brought back was gone.
Where could it be?
Only then did he look around and realize things were different from usual.
His coworkers were completely immersed in perfect concentration.
Without turning their heads or even blinking, they were fervently moving only their keyboards and mice.
Even the guys who usually only looked at stocks or browsed social media were now strangely staring fixedly at their monitors and tapping away at their keyboards.
Their appearance was so strange it was even eerie, but the emotions that came before that were disappointment and anger.
*Sigh*, did those bastards eat it?
My candy? Without even asking?
These damn Chinese.
You’ve gotta admit they have no manners.
He was angry, but he couldn’t just sit here fuming.
He had to go back to the restaurant.
He had to go get more candy.
If they wouldn’t give it, he had to buy it even if it cost money.
Given the current situation, that was the only way.
The missing parts of the report—
candy seemed to be the only way to decode the report written like a cipher.
He was about to head out toward the restaurant.
“Li Yuantao, come in. Let’s have a meeting.”
“I… right now… I urgently need to go…”
“What are you doing? Aren’t you coming in?”
“Yes…”
Dragged away by the department head, Li Yuantao talked about the festival event for quite a while.
Around when the meeting ended.
“Then shall we go take a look at the site?”
“Pardon?”
“Hearing about it only goes so far. I think we need to go see it for myself.”
“Do we really have to…”
“We’ll leave in five minutes. Get the car ready.”
“Yes.”
Li Yuantao felt like his stomach would burst.
He needed to go quickly and get the candy, but what if someone had taken it all and none were left?
He was filled with worry.
He didn’t even know what state of mind he had inspected the site in.
His head was completely filled with candy.
By the time the inspection ended, it was already seven o’clock.
But it was still before the restaurant’s closing time.
If he went now… perhaps… the candy…
“Li Yuantao, it’s late. Let’s grab dinner together before heading back.”
The words “I can’t” had reached his throat at the department head’s suggestion, but he barely swallowed them down.
Instead, he thought about it differently.
The candy was uncertain.
It was merely one of the things with a high likelihood of generating ideas.
But the department head was different.
The relationship with the department head was not a matter of probability.
If he turned the department head down here, there was a very high probability he would receive a low score in his performance review.
And the relationship would sour too.
“A skewer place recently opened nearby. How about there?”
“Skewers? Sounds good. Shall we have a beer too?”
“Of course we should.”
“This is why I like you, Li Yuantao. Hahaha.”
How the lamb skewers went into his mouth like that—
he couldn’t remember what the department head had said.
No, to be precise, he hadn’t even listened.
Inside, he only wanted to hurry to that restaurant.
He barely placated the department head, who suggested going for a second round, then hurriedly took a taxi to the restaurant, but the door was already closed.
Li Yuantao simply slumped down in front of the restaurant.
Tears came for no reason.
.
.
.
Chen Guolin, who ran a hotpot restaurant in Guangzhou, sat in a chair with sunken eyes.
Normally it would be time to prepare ingredients bought from the market or boil broth, but today he just sat staring at the ceiling.
He was completely ruined.
Yesterday, when he ate the candy, it had been great.
Strength had surged through his body.
He could even feel his blood coursing.
It felt like he had returned to the youth of his nineteen-year-old self.
His body overflowed with strength and elasticity.
He had forgotten what the word “tired” meant.
So he had enjoyed that night.
He couldn’t remember how long it had been.
He called and got his friends to come out.
He usually didn’t drink much.
Because he got too tired when he drank, and it seemed to affect him until the next day.
But today was fine.
Because he was overflowing with energy.
He felt like he could stay up all night drinking and be fine.
His friends who had been drinking with him left one by one, but Chen Guolin didn’t.
He wanted to feel this night through from beginning to end.
As a result.
He stayed up almost the entire night.
By dawn, his fatigue felt twice as heavy.
His body was so heavy.
Having felt his body so light, the heaviness now felt even greater.
It felt like he had gone from a nineteen-year-old youth to a sixty-year-old elder in an instant.
He had become lethargic.
He didn’t want to move a single finger.
So he gave up on buying ingredients from the market and preparing them, and just sat there blankly.
That was all he could do.
But inside his head, a completely different thought was wriggling.
If only he had that candy.
If only he had that candy, he could return to being nineteen again.
His lethargic body began to move.
Chen Guolin started rummaging through the counter where the candy had been placed.
Could there perhaps be some candy left?
Had someone perhaps accidentally dropped some?
He searched every nook and cranny without missing a spot, but the candy was nowhere to be seen.
When the candy wasn’t visible, a deep lethargy flooded over him again.
He sat blankly in a chair when someone burst wildly into the store.
“C… c… candy? Do you have any?”
********
“No more handing out samples. We’re switching to sales.”
I changed my plans in a hurry.
I contacted the person in charge of Yeonggyeseon and told them there was no need to distribute samples anymore, that we would start selling from now on.
Now Yeonggyeseon would prepare for sales as planned beforehand.
They would stop handing out Ascend samples at restaurants, cafes, and bars, and instead hide packages of ten Ascend in various places and take photos of the locations.
When orders came in, they would send the photos together with the order.
It was introducing the dead-drop method commonly used by drug dealers into China.
In fact, the first batch placed had been intended to be distributed entirely as samples, but that no longer seemed necessary.
I had started this work thinking it was a very long task that would take a great deal of time, but the response came much faster than expected.
If orders were coming in like this, why would we hand out samples?
We should just sell them.
Are we running a charity?
Actually, there was another reason for the hasty change.
A problem more important than money.
To place those, I’d have to take a plane again.
Fighting nausea, switching passports, traveling through multiple countries by plane to place the Ascend.
Thinking that I had to do that again made every single piece precious.
Still, there was something that slightly set my mind at ease.
Fortunately, a good route had emerged.
.
.
.
Not long ago.
I had met with the leader of the New People’s Army (NPA).
The broker Simon had caught turned out to be the commander of the NPA.
He wasn’t the official commander; the current commander was too old and had become a figurehead, while the actual planning and orders were all handled by that broker.
His name was Jason Chua.
There was plenty of time, so we conversed slowly and at length.
I had wondered if he would attack again once untied, but he didn’t.
As expected, there are those for whom the whip is the only cure.
He couldn’t forget the taste of my left hook.
I too gave him water and food once he became docile.
As we talked while he ate slowly, we unexpectedly got along quite well.
There was truly much we didn’t know about the NPA.
“Really? The NPA didn’t receive support from the Communist Party? That’s what I had understood.”
“They did at first, but it dwindled at some point.”
“Really? I had no idea. Then how do they make ends meet? Isn’t life hard?”
“Extremely hard.”
“How do they cover living expenses? Do they even work part-time jobs?”
“Well, it’s pretty much like that. They work here and there, and take contracts from the source.”
“The source?”
“The Communist Party side. For example, there are cases the Communist Party can’t officially handle, so they hand them out as missions. Like this Sin Junggi case.”
“Aha. So it’s like offering a bounty?”
“Similar. Bring in this or that document and get paid a certain amount, bring in a certain person and get paid. It works like that.”
“Oho. Quite creative.”
“We also worked on Sin Junggi for a long time because the Project Full Moon tech bounty was high.”
“And?”
“But at some point, it disappeared from the mission list.”
“Huh? Can that happen?”
“Happens quite often. Depending on the situation, new ones get added and others get deleted.”
“Then what do you do?”
“Well, in cases like this, Sin Junggi is no longer needed, so we tried to eliminate him and secure the data, since the mission might come back later. If we could sell it somewhere else, we’d do that too.”
“Oh~ Interesting. So you take missions.”
“But these days, even those rarely come up, and even if we complete a mission, they nitpick and cut the pay.”
“That must really suck.”
“It sucks. But even if it sucks, we have to do that stuff to feed our families. It’s dirty, but what can you do? I think they know it too.”
“Will you keep doing it in the future?”
“What other skills do we have? We just have to keep living like we always have.”
“Hmm… really? I hope we can get along and cooperate well.”
“I’m grateful just for your goodwill. The only thing we know how to do is bring things in from China. But these days that doesn’t make money. Do you need anything from China? I’ll bring it cheap.”
“Huh? You can bring stuff from China?”
“We might not know much else, but our routes are pretty solid.”
“Really? You can also get things into China?”
“That’s even easier. Do you know how much cargo enters China every day? Throwing in a few containers here and there is no big deal.”
“Hahaha. We’ve got one.”
“What?”
“Something we can cooperate on.”
*******
Li Xin, who had solved the error code after eating the candy yesterday, realized belatedly.
That the ability bordering on superpowers which had suddenly appeared came not from the coffee, but from the candy.
Thinking superpowers came from the coffee, Li Xin had sipped it sparingly, rationing it out—but it hadn’t been the coffee.
It had been the candy.
He ran back to the shop where he had bought the coffee.
But the plastic container that had held the candy was empty.
Li Xin urgently asked the female employee, and she answered with a smile, in an exceedingly kind voice.
“Are there any of those candies that were here?”
“No. Other customers took them all.”
“Do you happen to have any extras?”
“No. I’m afraid we don’t.”
“Anything left over, spilled, dropped, even crumbs?”
“No. I’m afraid not.”
“How do I buy that candy?”
“It is not an item for sale.”
“Then how can I get it? What company is it from?”
“I’m sorry, but we don’t have that information.”
“No, you must have received some information when you got the candy. A company name, a phone number, something like that.”
“Unfortunately, they simply said they would leave it here, so we let them. That was all, so we do not have their contact information.”
Unlike the frantic Li Xin, the female employee answered with a bright, kind smile.
That only made Li Xin even angrier.
But there was a hint in her words.
“They just left it here?”
“Yes. That’s correct.”
The moment he heard that, Li Xin ran straight out of the café without even saying thank you and headed to another shop.
He was hoping there might be candy in a different shop, not here.
Once Li Xin left the café, the smile vanished from the kind female employee’s face.
When she opened the drawer beneath the counter, it was full of candy.
It was Ascend.
The day before, while working, she had tried one Ascend and been amazed, so she had hidden away all the remaining candy.
The reason she had acted like an idiot in front of the man who came looking for Ascend was because she thought that was the best way to make him understand.
She intended to give the Ascend in the drawer to no one and eat it all herself.
Sparingly, slowly.
Meanwhile, there were more than a few people wandering around in search of Ascend like Li Xin.
They all opened restaurant doors and checked whether there was a plastic container on the counter.
More and more people began barging into bars and cafés at random, then coming back out.
A spoonful of disorder had been added to Chinese society, which already lacked order to begin with.
Someone was watching that chaos with an amused look in his eyes.
He looked at the people searching for Ascend with pity.
Then he spoke in a low voice.
“Just buy it with money. There’s a QR code on the wrapper…”
The man quietly left the Ascend wrapper on the bench where he had been sitting and walked away, and the people searching for Ascend with hawk-like eyes discovered the Ascend wrapper lying on the bench.
Though there was no candy inside, there was a QR code there that could be used to purchase Ascend.
“Finally… I found it.”