“Making money is this hard?”
A hollow laugh slipped from my mouth along with a deep sigh.
Elpanso, the head merchant who had once handled torrents of gold in Pellua, the greatest trade city on the continent.
The soul of that great capitalist was being shattered in the heart of Seoul, South Korea, in the twenty-first century, against the wall of a minimum wage of 9,860 won.
“Haa…… The math doesn’t add up. It absolutely doesn’t.”
Sitting beneath the outdoor parasol of a convenience store, I tapped away at the calculator on my smartphone.
Ten million won.
Even if I worked eight hours a day, five days a week without fail, the money I would actually have in hand each month would be barely over two million won.
After subtracting food and rent, the calculation said it would take more than a year to save a full ten million won.
‘A year? What kind of nonsense is that!’
I needed to get my hands on a large sum of money immediately, in a short period of time.
So I put my merchant’s instincts to work and plunged into the world of high-paying short-term part-time jobs, but the results were disastrous.
Because the temperament of a head merchant, engraved deep into my soul, clashed perfectly and discordantly with the modern system of bottom-rung labor.
My first failure was as a promotion and cashier worker at a large supermarket.
A merchant, by nature, must stand on the front line of selling goods. Full of confidence, I took my place at the supermarket register.
But when a customer came before me holding a pack of toilet paper and cans of tuna, my instincts overpowered my reason and burst out.
“Customer, you brought two because they’re part of a buy-one-get-one-free promotion. An excellent choice. However, from a merchant’s perspective, this is clearly a poor move.”
“Excuse me? What are you talking about?”
“Considering the expiration date of these tuna cans and the turnover rate of warehouse inventory, headquarters is using them as bait to clear out bad stock. Don’t buy them individually. Call the store manager with me and purchase three boxes wholesale. I’ll secure an additional thirty percent discount, and you and I can split the profit six to four. What do you say?”
“……What is this part-timer talking about? Manager!!”
A part-timer who should have been scanning barcodes instead attempted a wholesale deal with a customer, sharply criticized the supermarket’s distribution structure, and caused a scene.
As a result, my apron was taken from me and I was thrown out after half a day.
My second failure was as a delivery agency rider.
“Logistics! The flower of commerce is ultimately logistics!”
Climbing onto the motorcycle, I became as if possessed by the captain who had once crossed the eastern sea from Pellua.
Looking at the delivery calls appearing on my smartphone, the engineering calculations and route optimization algorithms in my head began spinning furiously.
‘Apartment, officetel, studio apartment. If I tie these three routes together and convert traffic light waiting times and elevator travel times into formulas, I can handle three calls at once!’
Like a Pelluan freight wagon, I packed the motorcycle’s cargo compartment full of food.
But I had failed to account for South Korea’s damn variables.
‘No, why are there so many apartment entrances with passcodes?! And delivery motorcycles are only allowed to enter through the underground parking lot? That ruins the entire route!’
In my attempt to maximize efficiency, I ended up trapped in elevators and lost in the maze-like structure of apartment complexes.
“Hey, you crazy part-timer! The jajangmyeon got so soggy it turned into rice cake! And all the broth leaked out!”
“You scooped up calls like an idiot and got us bombarded with complaints for delayed dispatches! You’re suspended!!”
After getting cursed out at length by the head of the delivery agency, my motorcycle was confiscated.
I might have known how to control the movements of a vast merchant fleet, but the petty delivery ecosystem of alleyways was not a place I could endure.
My third and final failure was as a barista at a franchise café.
Since I had obtained the coffee monopoly in Pellua and learned from a coffee expert on the island of Cyprus, I thought working at a café would be easy money.
But the moment I pulled a shot from the espresso machine and tasted the first coffee, I hurled the shot glass in my hand into the sink.
“You sell this filthy ditchwater for money?!”
“Hey, Gang Ujin! What’s gotten into you all of a sudden!”
The startled manager rushed over, but I was so agitated that I tore open a bag of coffee beans.
“Listen, Manager! This isn’t controlled acidity—this is garbage that’s been ignorantly over-roasted to hide the fact that the beans are rotting! On top of that, the tamping pressure is uneven, causing channeling and extracting nothing but bitterness! Serving customers this poison, which doesn’t even come close to the coffee the imperial princess drank, violates basic commercial ethics!”
“Are you insane?! I brewed it according to headquarters’ manual, so why the hell are you making a fuss! Get out right now!”
In the end, I was kicked out after being shoved through the café doors.
My palate, aimed at the high-end luxury market, and the fastidious standards of a merchant had collided head-on with the modern franchise system that ran on cheap prices and thin margins with high turnover.
“……Haa.”
Recalling those glorious failures of the past, I lay on a bench and looked up at the night sky.
Supermarket, delivery, café.
In just three days, I had been fired from three jobs.
The day wages in my hand amounted to barely over a hundred thousand won.
At this rate, let alone ten million won, it would be hard to earn enough for next month’s ramyeon.
‘It’s only natural.’
I closed my eyes and coldly faced reality.
In a capitalist society, “labor” is the most honest means of accumulating wealth, but conversely, it is also the slowest.
By selling off time and flesh for a pittance, I would never be able to break through this enormous wall in a short period of time.
*
A high-risk, high-return market where I could legally earn the hefty sum of ten million won in a short period of time—or even with a bit of bending the rules.
In truth, in this unfamiliar otherworld called the Republic of Korea, there was another vast “profit market” that I had been thoroughly ignoring ever since I possessed this body.
The moment I entered a single word into the search bar, millions of articles and job postings poured down like a waterfall.
Gates and Hunters.
According to Gang Ujin’s memories, it had only been a few years since mysterious dimensional portals called Gates began opening in this world and monsters started pouring out.
When the incident first occurred, modern civilization had defended itself against the monsters rather successfully with its overwhelming military power and organic systems.
After all, the destructive force of this world’s weapons—firearms and missiles—was violent enough to laugh off the fireballs cast by mages.
But the problem was that, as time passed, the quality of the monsters crawling out of the Gates changed.
‘The monsters’ physical durability and destructive power themselves were at a level where one shot from an anti-tank gun would turn them into chunks of meat…… The problem was the damn shell surrounding them.’
Energy shields.
Transparent barriers of mana wrapped around the monsters’ bodies.
These shields had the property of reflecting and absorbing physical blows to an extreme degree.
To kill a single monster, one had to pour in thousands of bullets and dozens of shells to forcibly grind down the shield’s durability.
Even for a wealthy country like South Korea, pouring tens of millions of won’s worth of firepower into killing one goblin every single time was a severe collapse in cost-effectiveness and a waste of budget.
It was precisely then that Awakened Ones, Hunters with special abilities, appeared like comets.
The supernatural abilities they emitted from within their bodies could pierce the monsters’ energy shields as easily as tearing through a sheet of paper.
A monster that would require a hundred shells to kill could be sliced apart by a Hunter with a single swing of a sword wrapped in sword aura.
Naturally, humanity’s anti-monster tactics were reorganized around small elite strike teams centered on Hunters, and the byproducts pouring out from within the Gates created a new market worth quadrillions of won, causing tremendous ripple effects across modern industry.
‘Then why haven’t I even glanced at this market until now?’
To be precise, it wasn’t that I hadn’t glanced at it at all.
Gang Ujin had entered the Department of Mechanical Engineering for that very purpose, and I, after possessing him, had studied hard as well.
However, once I found a way to return to Pellua, I became blindly obsessed with that alone.
I had thought of Earth as a library from which to steal engineering knowledge.
My head had been full of thoughts of bringing that knowledge back to my homeland, Pellua, causing an industrial revolution, and becoming the ruler of the continent.
‘...Maybe I threw away Gang Ujin’s life.’
But now that the possibility of traveling back and forth multiple times had clearly increased,
I realized that I had to properly take care of Gang Ujin’s life as well.
‘However, I haven’t Awakened, and I can’t fight in the slightest.’
“But now, the situation has changed.”
I touched the job posting displayed on my smartphone screen.
[Taeseong Hunter Guild - Urgently Hiring E-rank Gate Porters and Dismantlers.]
Requirements: Non-Awakened ordinary civilians aged 19 or older and in good physical health.
Pay: Base pay of 1.5 million won per expedition (approximately 12 hours) + 3% incentive on collected byproducts.
Caution: The guild bears no civil or criminal liability for death or serious injury inside Gates (signing a life-risk waiver is mandatory).
An extreme environment where one’s life was used as collateral.
That was why even a mere porter was assigned an unimaginably high wage.
If I was lucky and managed to profitably gather the byproducts of monsters hunted by the Hunters, I calculated that I could squeeze out the ten million won I needed in just three expeditions.
I twisted the corners of my mouth upward.
Killing monsters was the Hunters’ job.
But in the harsh environment called a dungeon, smelling the “real scent of money” that others failed to notice and scraping together resources—that was the domain of a merchant.
“Fine. If physical labor doesn’t suit me, I’ll jump into a gambling den where my life is the stake.”
*
A few days later, at dawn, in a restricted zone on the outskirts of Seoul.
In front of a massive dimensional portal ten meters tall, swirling blue in midair, barricades had been set up, and heavily armed soldiers and Hunters were busily coming and going.
Wearing the tough stab-proof suit I had been issued, I stood in the waiting line with a huge backpack-style special pack, as large as an adult man’s body, strapped to my back.
“Hey, rookie.”
A fierce-looking giant of a man approached, tapping my backpack.
He was the leader of the Taeseong Guild strike team I had been assigned to today, a B-rank close-combat Hunter named Choe Taeho.
“I heard this is your first Gate. Looking at your face, you seem like some delicate college boy raised in a greenhouse. Don’t piss yourself inside.”
Choe Taeho looked me up and down and smiled with a sneer.
The other Hunters standing beside him also chuckled, treating me like an easy target.
Porter.
A dirty, dangerous, and difficult job where non-Awakened ordinary people carried Hunters’ baggage and dug mana stones out of monster corpses.
Among Hunters, porters were nothing more and nothing less than “consumables” that could be used and discarded on the battlefield at any time.
But I thought of the countless nobles and merchants who had looked down on me in Pellua, and inwardly snorted.
‘Fine. Pose all you want. As long as I achieve my goal, that’s all that matters.’