Luciel's Snack Shop. First Hit Product: Chocolate Chip Cookies
"So soft...."
"It's so sweet... I've never tasted anything this sweet in my life."
"You chew it up into little crumbs and it's like it melts right on your tongue..."
"I want another one..."
Once again, a ring of children stared at the bag of remaining cookies in my hand. The mood was ripe for an all-out riot if I didn't hand over more.
"There's not much left, you know..."
"Just one more... please..."
"Well, this won't do... I suppose I have no choice~"
Feigning reluctance, I scattered another bag. And with that, every child gathered in the lot got the chance to taste two or three chocolate chip cookies apiece.
Before long, the entire crowd of kids had gone wild over the first proper sweets of their lives.
"...How can anything taste this good?"
"You know those little black bean things stuck inside the cookie? They're super sweet and so yummy!"
"Oh! Me too, me too! That's the best part!"
"That's called chocolate."
"Chocolate?"
"It's another kind of snack. And one of these days, I'll give you all a chance to try it!"
"Yaaay!"
Treated like a conquering hero, I made the rounds of three more open lots around Greenhill, scattering chocolate chip cookies the whole way.
From that day on, my title received a promotion: from Beggar Mister to Snack Mister.
At first I deliberately sought out only spots where children gathered with no adults in sight, so no grown-up ever stepped in to spoil my sweet little tasting event.
The only wrinkle was a single troubling remark from one of the kids I'd shared with.
"This tastes kind of like the snack peddler's cookies?"
"Snack peddler?"
One boy, dressed cleanly in a way that hinted he'd at least tasted sweets before, seemed to come from a somewhat better-off household. As it turned out, he was the son of one of the town's more prominent ranchers.
Wealthy... was too strong a word — more like the king of the ants among commoners, a family that pulled in a tidy sum selling meat, cheese, and milk.
"There's a snack peddler who comes once a month. Father buys a whole heap of sweets from him every time, and these taste just like those did!"
There was a snack peddler who regularly visited Greenhill?!
I'd seen the pack merchants coming and going through this town often enough. Greenhill sat at a midpoint squeezed between the big cities, so more traders passed through than you'd expect. There was the crockery peddler who trudged along with a donkey loaded to the brim with nothing but dishes, the cloth merchant, the fruit-wine peddler, and even the retailer types who rolled in with empty carts and rolled out with them piled high in the local specialties — beef and pork.
Their real destination was usually the nearby metropolis of Stonefield, so this place was little more than a rest stop on the road. They figured that since they were lodging a night anyway, they might as well unfold their bundles and scrape up a little pocket change.
But in a full year of living here, I had never once seen a snack peddler.
When I pressed the boy for details, it turned out that each time the man passed through Greenhill, he ran a quick strike-and-withdraw circuit of the ranchers' homes — the local upper crust. In other words, house calls. Door-to-door sales. It would be a waste of time, apparently, to even glance at the commoner neighborhoods. Those kids had no money anyway.
"So which is tastier — his, or mine?"
"Yours, obviously! It's sweeter and way yummier! But his are bigger!"
Naturally, my products would be incomparably superior in quality and variety. Add a lower price on top of that, and it was game over. Even with an incumbent already planted in the business I meant to enter, I wasn't particularly worried.
Still, I had a strong feeling that once the snack trade got serious, sooner or later I'd cross paths with this peddler.
And so, for about a week, I made my rounds at the same time every day, scattering snacks among the children. A different treat each day, at that.
Chocolate chip cookies on day one; tiny button chocolates on day two; assorted flavored jellies on day three; bubble gum you could chew for an hour on day four; sweet-and-sour fruit candies on day five; and rich, creamy milk caramels on day six.
And on the final day of free snacks, I pressed into each child's hand a chocolate bar a full ten centimeters long, studded with nuts.
How much had all this snack money cost me? Most of it was bulk-packaged stock bought by the box at a steep discount, and all told I'd spent just under 200,000 won. Of course, even after scattering that much, there was still plenty to spare — more than half the haul sat untouched back in my studio apartment.
From where I stood — unable to earn so much as a single donghwa of this world's money — it might have looked like waste, but I didn't regret a single won of the investment. Honestly, if another 500,000 won or even a million had been on hand, I'd have spent that too. What mattered right now was showing the children a taste of the snacks I intended to sell.
For Greenhill's children, that day was probably a festival second only to the unforgettable birthday of the King of Helion.
As if a carnival had come to town, every last child spent the whole day parading the streets with a black chocolate bar in hand, faces glowing. Even the adults who had tolerated it all until now couldn't quite play dumb about the mysterious black foodstuff their kids were chewing on, eyeing it with open suspicion.
But as I said before — this world, this damn other world, and this frozen little backwater of a village above all — was deeply conservative.
"Don't you dare eat that stuff! You'll catch a disease!"
"Who gave you that?! Throw it away this instant!"
"Things like that come straight out of the devil's asshole!"
As the sun began its lazy slide toward the horizon and the children carried their treasures home, I heard they caught an earful of every scolding imaginable from their mothers.
One mother, they said, was so poor that pig fat and a few potato chunks in soup was all her family ever ate — and even she snatched the chocolate bar from her gaunt, half-starved child's hand and hurled it into the fireplace flames.
Back then, a few of the townswomen genuinely believed I'd sold my soul to the devil in a contract. Even I had to admit it wasn't easy to swallow: a homeless vagrant who'd wandered about without a proper roof or clothes had suddenly appeared looking clean and presentable, handing out sweets no one had ever seen before.
Even now that the misunderstanding had cleared, quite a few mothers probably still looked unkindly on my selling snacks in Greenhill. Because of me, they'd even started giving their children allowances for sweets — money that had never existed before.
"My child wouldn't eat this junk even if you paid him, so stop luring the kids in! If you've got something good, just eat it all yourself, Mr. Luciel!"
That evening, the mother of one of the children sitting in the lot dragged her boy over to me by the hand and gave me a piece of her mind. The moment I heard those words, I could have sworn I'd been transported back to the modern world.
This business is doomed.
I hadn't even properly started yet... Maybe it would be better to fail now, at the very beginning?
Consumed by the thought that all the money and time I'd poured in had gone up in smoke, I remember opening and draining the single bottle of soju I'd been saving in the fridge.
Back then I didn't even know you could buy liquor online. I'd never been much of a drinker.
The rare alcohol hit me hard, and I spent the entire next day hungover, holed up in my studio apartment without stepping outside once.
And the day after that.
I couldn't stay cooped up in my room forever, so I stepped out for a breath of fresh air. Afraid of catching another scolding from the parents, I deliberately kept my walk to the deserted parts of town—
—when at some point, out of pure habit, my feet turned toward the lot where the children had gathered to play all week.
Why had I done that?
Perhaps I was hoping that at least a few of them had genuinely liked my snacks?
And then, from far off, I saw a crowd of people gathered in the lot.
My first thought was that an awful lot of kids had turned out today.
But as I drew a little closer, I realized the crowd included not just children but adults as well.
No — there were far more adults than kids.
They kept pacing back and forth across the lot, as if searching for something.
And then my eyes met one of theirs.
"There!! He's over there!"
"WAAAAAAAH!"
The moment one child pointed at me and shrieked, the whole crowd took it as their signal and came charging like a horde of zombies.
Right then, I thought I'd made a grave mistake ever leaving my room. And I made a vow: if I made it back to my studio apartment alive, I wouldn't set foot outside for at least a month, I'd never so much as think about selling snacks again, and I'd slip quietly out of this village.
"Got him!!"
"Luciel! Why didn't you come yesterday? We waited and waited!"
"Somebody help me...."
When the swarm finally swallowed me up, I counted myself lucky if all they did was brand me a devil worshipper and burn me at the stake. But what they demanded of me, in place of my life, was something else entirely.
"Huh? Why didn't you bring any today?"
"Wh-what?"
"Snacks! Snacks! Cookies, chocolate, or caramel!"
"You said you had candy that turns sweet when you suck on it, too."
As it turned out, these people were my potential customers.
The investment had paid off!
The children who'd tasted my snacks had gone home, and some of them had saved pieces to share with their parents.
Of course, a few adults still viewed me darkly for the religious and hygiene reasons mentioned earlier, but they were a vanishing minority. Most people thought well of it.
Unlike the modern world, this other world had almost nothing for children to snack on. So a figure like me wasn't some wicked presence poisoning children's health who needed to vanish — I was a godsend, filling in the missing calories of growing kids!
"Of course, we won't keep begging for freebies. You must have some margin in mind, after all."
"Sell us your snacks!"
"From what my boy says, you seem to stock quite a variety."
You bet! Was there even a question!
They'd even anticipated that I meant to go into selling.
Thrilled, I hurried to the nearest door fitted with a keyhole, slipped back into my room, and returned with the boxes of snacks I'd stockpiled. As I laid the varieties out one by one from the big cartons, the eyes of children and adults alike went round as saucers.
"Where on earth are these things made?"
"There's some kind of writing on the wrappers. Can't make head or tail of it."
"They can't have been made in our kingdom... which country do you import them from?"
Perhaps it was the strange shapes of the Hangul printed on the wrappers that fascinated them. Everyone was burning to know where my products came from.
Choose your words carefully.
"I brought them from a far eastern continent, across the sea."
"Lies. That's the edge of the world."
"Helion is the eastern end of the continent, and no ship that's ever sailed east has come back."
"Is that so? Is that really so? Well, I happen to be from there. These snacks came from there too."
!!
My breezy confidence seemed to startle them all considerably.
The simple truth was that the lands east of the Kingdom of Helion did not exist on any map. And so everyone believed the edge of the world was real — that the world was shaped like one vast bottle cap, and that anyone who reached its rim would plunge over a colossal waterfall with no visible bottom.
The damn flat-earth theory, here too!
But here, that was the accepted truth, and I simply had to let it be. I was no Galileo — what good would insisting the world was round do me? Besides, this otherworldly earth ignored universal gravitation, gravity, and all the rest of it; it really might be shaped like a bottle cap.
At first everyone shook their heads in disbelief, but as I kept speaking with unshakable confidence, they gradually seemed to come around. Even anyone here who'd attended school properly had learned little more than what a modern-world elementary education covers.
"Anyway, enough of that — everyone, have a taste!"
"Ooooooh!"
Deep down, they'd all been aching for it. Though by now every child in this town had tasted my snacks at least once.
I had everyone gathered there take one apiece of each of the snacks I'd been handing out to the kids all week. By then the lot had grown more crowded still, and a small circle had formed around me as though I were busking on a street corner.
"Hoh... so this is why...!"
"No wonder the children fell for it!"
"How can anything be this intensely sweet!"
"I'd love to know the recipe for this cookie!"
"Don't be absurd. Why would he ever share something that precious?"
"It's not from our kingdom, remember? Where would the ingredients even come from here?"
Young and old alike, the reactions were identical. The only difference was that the mothers and fathers, unlike the children, kept their composure, and their curiosity ran to how the things were made and what ingredients went into them. Honestly, what would I know? I was hardly a food scientist.
"Perhaps there's a country that exists off the maps — one the crown has never announced."
"True. The kingdom hides plenty from the likes of us."
"For all we know, these things have already made their way into the capital, Golden Circle, or cities like Stonefield and Strongfin."
"Right. Those places have proper shops that sell sweets."
"Damn it! Living in this town is shackles and nothing but shackles. What did we ever do to deserve never once tasting anything like this?!"
Suspicion of me and my snacks melted away like spring snow, giving way to the laments of Greenhill's residents.
This corner of Greenhill in particular sat a good distance from the capital, so the latest news arrived late — and late news meant late goods, late fashions. Most residents were broadly aware that they were behind the times.
Perhaps that was why those with money threw themselves so desperately at whatever the big-city merchants carried in.
"Come to think of it, Luciel, even your looks are subtly different from ours."
"Now that you mention it, that's true? Your hair was black until just the other day, wasn't it?"
"And weren't your eyes a different color, too?"
Accurate. So somebody remembered.
I was the only black-haired person around, so the moment I regained access to my room, I'd ordered hair dye online and colored it the light brown that was most common here. My colored contacts, likewise, were blue — the most popular eye color in this town.
I briefly considered telling them about the dye and the lenses, but everyone's attention had already drifted back to the snack boxes. I kept my mouth shut, and the conversation flowed naturally back to the business of selling.
"So then... Luciel, how do you mean to price these?"
"Some of them look quite expensive..."
"I've never tasted anything like them. I can't even imagine the cost."
I'd been waiting for that question!
"One donghwa apiece. For everything!"
"Just one donghwa?!"
"Young or old, every item, every variety — one donghwa each, and not a coin more!"
"That's madness!"
"Did you perhaps mean one silver coin? That's what you ought to be charging!"
"Would you even turn a profit selling like that?"
"It's quite all right."
Yes — because I'm a man of the common folk, friendly to the neighborhood, fond of children, and above all, I love Greenhill!
"Hahaha!"
I flashed my brightest smile at the crowd.