False Coexistence
Late evening.
Just because the day’s business was done didn’t mean my work was finished.
Sizzle. Hiss.
I tended the ingredients with the same care you’d give an orchid.
Green onions and bean sprouts.
Both were easy enough as crops went, but they still needed attention.
“Grow well. Ingredient Strengthening.”
Ingredient Strengthening
The flavor of the ingredients Green Onion and Bean Sprout is enhanced.
Care plus the skill. Combine the two and you end up with perfect ingredients. Once they were fully grown I’d harvest what I needed, then prep them. Any time left after that went to simmering more garlic or trimming more onions—whatever was running low.
Busy work.
Before long, late night settled in. Even working this late, my mood never sank. If anything, I felt good.
“Those two came in holding hands again today.”
The elderly couple—easily the most memorable of my regulars. Whatever good thing had happened to them, they arrived with their fingers laced tight. The smiles carved into the deep lines around their eyes looked happier than ever. Just looking at them warmed you. The kind of customers who gave you strength.
“Hmm. I think the seasoning was still a little strong for them today.”
That made me want it even more—to cook something that would satisfy them better. They seemed content enough as it was, but the base saltiness that came with ramen felt too heavy for them.
“I need to make the salt a bit gentler. Without letting the flavor go thin, though…”
Lighter seasoning, same depth of taste. I turned the problem over carefully.
“Ah! I should bring in more umami. What about adding dried shrimp? Yeah. That works.”
A new ingredient occurred to me. Dried shrimp. A solid natural substitute for commercial seasonings. Technically, a broth drawn from dried shrimp was basically a seasoning itself—but the “natural” part still scored higher in my book.
Either way, good. Nothing made me happier right now than satisfying the people who came to eat.
If I’m adding dried shrimp, I’ll have to hit the market at dawn…
More work, then. I still took it positively.
While I’m at the market I should look for something that cat-like kid would actually enjoy. Sausage’s getting boring. Hmm… what would be good?
For me, going to the market was another chance to find better ingredients. It was a happy thing, too. In my past life I’d only ever seen markets emptied out. The markets of this world were packed full of food. Just looking at them left me feeling full. Other people might call that pathetic, but—
Crawl through an apocalypse and you don’t say things like that.
Memories of my previous life made every one of these moments almost too happy. A kind of comparison, sure—but it was my experience I was comparing. Who was going to tell me otherwise?
As long as I’m happy, that’s enough.
And to keep that happiness going, there was still one more job: reserving the spot. Unlike the truck space I’d locked in for a full month, the table spots had to be reserved as we went. Annoying every time, but unavoidable. The available units were either a full month or a single day, so to keep the tables lined up with the truck’s schedule I had to book the rest day by day. A nuisance, yes—but only one more week of this and I could sync the table reservation dates with the truck’s location.
Click. Click.
I opened the reservation page for exactly that purpose. And then I stared, eyes wide.
“Huh…?”
Every available spot around me was already booked solid.
Something feels off.
I left the dawn market with yesterday’s events still looping in my head. It wasn’t the first time something like this had happened.
Other food trucks have parked next to me before.
Word must have gotten out that my truck was doing well. A few trucks had reserved spots right beside mine, hoping to siphon off customers. It hadn’t worked.
Everyone still came to my place.
They sat empty. Once the gap in business became obvious, those people mostly stopped trying. They’d learned that cheap tricks only cost them money. After that, nothing of the sort had happened again.
Maybe new trucks just came to set up shop. I’d rather it be that.
New food trucks were fine. I welcomed anyone trying the business for the first time. New neighbors weren’t a bad thing either. The problem was if it turned out to be something else.
“Thank you.”
“Not browsing any new ingredients today? You’re in a hurry.”
“I’ve got somewhere to be.”
“That so? Well, get home safe. See you again!”
“Yes. See you tomorrow.”
I left the market quickly so I could check for myself. The market and the Food Truck Zone sat close together.
Today feels especially wrong. Off.
The closer I got, the harder my heart beat—because of what I was half-expecting. If it was fellow vendors I could understand. If it wasn’t, we had a problem.
I don’t think I’ll be able to stay calm about this.
It had been a long time since I’d felt this close to boiling over. Thump—thump— I picked up my pace. When I finally reached the Food Truck Zone, all I could do was let out a long, heavy sigh.
“Ha… Of course it couldn’t just be a wrong guess.”
My worst-case scenario was exactly right.
“Hey there! You’re late… sir?”
That big frame waved at me with easy confidence. Boss Bang—the man I’d later learn ran the local ramen shop near here. Word was he ran a neighborhood favorite and looked down his nose at the surrounding businesses more than a little.
He greeted me warmly, one arm full of something. The way he started in casual speech and then scrambled into polite language late was almost funny—except what he’d laid out around him killed any urge to laugh.
“What are those?”
“Ah. These?”
“These?”
“No—these, I mean. You can tell just by looking, can’t you?”
Everything he’d arranged around the area was a sandwich board.
[Budu Ramen] [Gaya Sashimi House] [Chamshiru] [Wang Flower’s] …
I’d wondered where the signs had come from—and then I recognized the names.
Those are the places from that food alley, aren’t they?
First among them was Budu Ramen, Boss Bang’s own shop. The sashimi house was the one the merchants’ association president supposedly ran. Wang Flower’s was a home-style rice place; Chamshiru was the rice-cake shop everyone called a local fixture. The few other shops nearby were in the same vein. Roughly ten sandwich boards in total, planted across every reserved spot around my truck, with food-alley maps and shop info crammed into the gaps between them.
Well. Someone put some thought into this.
I understood the situation well enough by now. Still, better to confirm it properly. I held down the heat rising in my gut and asked.
“What is all this supposed to be?”
“What else? It’s all for coexistence. Ahem.”
“Coexistence?”
“That’s right. Coexistence! Funny thing is, because of these food trucks, the proper restaurants around here that are actually paying rent and keeping real shops open can’t get any business going… you know?”
“From what I heard, it’s only the ramen place that’s struggling. Whoever the owner is.”
“And whose fault is that—!! Ahem. Anyway, I figured this was a chance to revive the alley a little and get some information out there, so I took the idea to the merchants’ association!”
“And that idea was these sandwich boards.”
“Exactly… sir!”
Coexistence. That was not a word I’d expected to hear. So he’d stirred up the association. Thinking he had the upper hand, Boss Bang looked thoroughly pleased with himself.
“Huh… And you call that coexistence? What happens to the Food Truck Zone, then?”
“Wasn’t the Food Truck Zone the problem to begin with?”
“Everything here is fully permitted.”
“Permits, nothing. You ought to open a real shop and do business properly. This isn’t right. I don’t even think of these as shops. No—I can’t.”
“If you want to argue that, take it to city hall. And if you look at the monthly rent, it isn’t that different from your food alley.”
“Is the deposit the same? Either way, I don’t care about any of that! Our food alley has to survive too. Am I wrong!?”
Boss Bang wasn’t going to listen no matter what I said. Then again, someone who would listen wouldn’t pull a stunt like this in the first place. He made a show of shifting the sandwich boards this way and that, arranging them just so.
“Anyway, I’m done setting everything up, so I’ll be going. You get on with your work. Fighting for another day!”
“……Ha.”
He came deliberately close while I was still prepping, tossed me a farewell, and walked off like a general returning from victory.
Not long after Boss Bang left, the coffee-truck owner who’d been prepping in the distance came over. She had a cup of warm coffee in one hand.
“Aigoo. Look at them over there. Ugh… they’re at it again.”
“They’ve done this before?”
“They have. Back when food trucks were trendy and business was good, there was interference like this then too.”
“So not a first-timer—a repeat offender.”
“That’s right. It wasn’t this bad before, but… looks like they mean business this time.”
“And that business is these sandwich boards.”
“Well, something like that. That whole mess was why they put the operating-hour restrictions in place back then.”
“Ha… So there’s history.”
“Exactly. They never touched us when business was slow, and now that it’s picking up they pull this. Aigoo. What are we supposed to do about it?”
Worry sat plain on the coffee-truck owner’s face as she looked at me. Clearly she’d gone out of her way to bring coffee because she was concerned—warm coffee as a way to settle the nerves.
I’m fine, actually…
I was more worried about her. Even if I lost a few table spots, my truck would still fill every seat. The real problem was the coffee truck. The sandwich boards had been planted to block her truck with careful spite. Her business was going to take a hit, no question.
“Are you going to be okay, ma’am?”
“Me? Probably not… With things set up like this, my sales will crater too. Aigoo.”
“Thought so.”
“Well, don’t you worry about it. What choice do we have? You’ve got to put up with this kind of territorial crap. When we get our own shops someday, let’s not act like this.”
…Our own shops. Usually a nice thought. Today the words stung.
“We definitely won’t.”
“Aigoo. Still—what do we do about this?”
“Hmm…”
I had to find a solution. While I turned over possible approaches, the coffee-truck owner kept talking, working the bitterness out of her system with words.
Of course her stomach’s burning.
I listened quietly and kept thinking.
“Is there even a way? Once they grab all the spots like this, you’re pretty much stuck, right? You can’t put out more tables. And you can’t take ramen out like coffee, either, can you?”
“!!!!”
The answer was closer than I’d expected.
“Ma’am, could I borrow some of your beans?”
“Huh?”
First, the answer was coffee beans.