The Cheapest Item
Without taking his eyes off the snack bag, Lee Do took a slow step forward.
"Hold on."
Instead of reaching out with his hand, Lee Do pinched the screen of his phone to zoom in with the camera. Though the resolution fractured into slight pixelation, the face remained unmistakably clear.
It was the man from earlier.
He was dressed in the same business suit. His hairstyle was identical. The only thing that had changed was his expression: just like the part-timer at the counter, the man was smiling, the corners of his lips sliced wide open all the way beneath his ears.
"Believe me, I'd love to," Lee Do muttered under his breath.
Rustle.
The snack bag gave a tiny, imperceptible twitch. Lee Do jerked the camera back. Had he imagined it?
Rustle.
This time, there was no mistaking it. Without anyone brushing against it, the foil packaging swelled from the inside once, then gently collapsed back down. It was as if it were breathing.
Lee Do stepped back on instinct.
"I'm sure as hell not buying that."
Lee Do shifted his gaze past the display shelves. The woman with her oversized hoodie pulled tight over her head stood frozen in the distance. She was the other customer who had been trapped here from the moment he first walked into the store, and she had witnessed the entire scene unfold.
When their eyes met, her lips parted and trembled several times before she managed to force out a sound.
"That person..." Her voice quivered violently. "Where did he go?"
Lee Do couldn't answer. Instead, his gaze settled back onto the snack bag. The woman's eyes followed his. A few seconds stretched into agonizing silence.
"That can't be... right?" When Lee Do said nothing, her voice climbed higher with rising panic. "That's not him, is it?!"
"...I don't know either."
"You saw it!"
"I only saw him vanish into thin air."
"Then we have to call the police—"
The woman abruptly cut herself off, seeming to realize the futility of her own words. Calls wouldn't go through. They couldn't leave, either. With trembling hands, she yanked her phone from her pocket and repeatedly jabbed at the dark screen.
"The phone..." she stammered, tapping frantically. "Why won't it connect?"
Lee Do glanced down at his broadcast interface. It was bizarre. Phone calls were completely blocked, yet his livestream remained active without a single dropped frame. What was more, his viewer count had quietly spiked to 83.
Under normal circumstances, seeing his audience nearly double would have thrilled him. Right now, it didn't register at all.
"My stream is working, though," Lee Do said.
The woman whipped her head toward him. "A stream?"
"Yes."
"You're broadcasting this right now?"
"...Would you rather I shut it off?"
The woman hesitated for a brief second, then shook her head vigorously.
"No," she blurted out, her answer desperate and immediate. "Keep it on. There needs to be someone on the outside watching us."
Lee Do had no intention of turning it off either. More than anything, it was the chat who had confirmed the entrance door's anomaly, and it was the chat who had urged him to inspect the price tags. Had he been left entirely alone, he likely wouldn't have even grasped the rules of this nightmare yet.
"I'll leave it running for now."
Lee Do checked the upper right corner of his screen. "Seventy-two percent."
Lee Do shook his head. "Let's worry about battery life later."
The only thing that mattered right now was escape, and the method had already been etched in stone:
Customers who have not completed a purchase cannot leave the premises.
Which meant, by logical inversion, once a purchase was completed, they could walk right out the front door.
The problem was the Price of Goods.
Lee Do looked over toward the refrigerated drinks. One fingernail. One day of lifespan. The face of your first love. One joint of the right index finger. Things that money could never buy, and, without exception, things nobody would ever willingly sacrifice.
"Let's find something we can buy without destroying ourselves," he said to the stream.
"If it's your fingernail, sure," Lee Do retorted.
Lee Do almost cracked a smile, but the tension snapped right back the instant his gaze grazed the checkout counter. The part-timer was watching him. She had an ordinary face, an ordinary mouth, but her dark eyes tracked his movements with unnerving, mechanical precision.
Lee Do quickly averted his eyes and turned back to the aisle. "Only look at the price tags," he instructed the woman softly. "Don't touch anything."
The woman nodded vigorously. Keeping a safe distance between them, the two began systematically checking the display shelves.
On the snack shelf, a bag of chips was priced at one childhood birthday. A chocolate bar demanded one front tooth. A pack of fruit gummies asked for one favorite song. And a bowl of instant cup ramen required a left pinky finger.
"A whole finger for a cup of ramen?" Lee Do muttered under his breath.
Lee Do paused to re-read the label marked 'one birthday.' Did it mean surrendering the memory of a single celebration? Did it extract an entire year of his lifespan? Or would it erase the very day he was born from physical reality? In an anomaly like this, interpreting any word through ordinary common sense felt like courting death.
"Let's look only for things that are completely unambiguous."
They kept scanning. A toothbrush cost two teeth. A disposable razor was priced at the era before facial hair grew. A roll of toilet paper asked for three embarrassing memories.
Lee Do halted. "Wait... isn't this one actually pretty good?"
"Then try showing it during regular streams too," Lee Do muttered.
Lee Do drifted over to the adjacent aisle where the woman was inspecting items on the opposite rack.
"Everything over here is insane too," she whispered.
"What's there?"
"The socks..." She read off the tag, squinting. "'A walked distance of 10 kilometers.'"
"Wouldn't that be fine?"
"What does that even mean, though?"
"...Good point."
It could very well rob the owner's legs of the physical capability to walk ten kilometers ever again. Lee Do firmly resolved never to make shallow assumptions about these prices. Amidst the flurry of chat messages debating prices, a lone observation suddenly caught the stream's attention.
Lee Do froze mid-step.
The notice board by the entrance had only contained two lines:
The Price of Goods cannot be paid in cash.
Customers who have not completed a purchase cannot leave the premises.
Nowhere had it said that asking about the price was forbidden. Yet the man had asked the clerk, and within seconds, he was gone.
"...Are there more rules?" Lee Do whispered.
Lee Do read the last comment aloud. "They appear after someone takes an action?"
Thinking back, that had been the pattern all along. When he attempted to pay with cash, the rule appeared: The Price of Goods cannot be paid in cash. When he tried to push through the glass doors and leave, the rule updated: Customers who have not completed a purchase cannot leave the premises. And when the middle-aged man asked about the price—
Lee Do swung his camera toward the front counter. "The notice board."
He zoomed all the way in. A third sentence had freshly manifested at the bottom.
Do not ask the employee about the price of goods.
"What is?"
Lee Do's gaze lingered on the newly printed warning. If that was the case, there could be countless other hidden rules lurking unrevealed, and the only way to uncover them was for someone to trigger them firsthand.
"This is a nightmare."
For the first time, the grotesque mechanics of this convenience store became clear. You had to complete a purchase to walk out alive, which required paying a price, but every price demanded parts of your body or soul. And piled on top of that, an unseen minefield of unspoken rules waited for a single false step to consume their lives.
"Excuse me."
The woman's call shattered his racing thoughts.
"What is it?"
"Look at this." She pointed toward the bottom rack near the checkout counter. "This one's strange."
Lee Do hurried over. It was a compact metal display wire rack holding packs of chewing gum and mint candies. Predictably, most of the tags were sinister abstractions: peppermint candies cost the taste of your favorite food, while lollipops cost one happy day. But at the very bottom shelf sat a perfectly ordinary pack of stick gum.
Unlike every other tag in the entire building, this one displayed an actual number.
10 won.
Lee Do blinked. He leaned in and looked again.
10 won.
"I'm wondering the exact same thing," Lee Do admitted.
It was impossibly cheap, which made it infinitely more suspicious. But the label unmistakably read 10 won. The board had warned that prices could not be paid in cash, yet here sat a literal cash amount printed on a shelf. The contradiction itself felt eerie.
"What should we do?" the woman asked, her eyes darting between Lee Do and the gum.
Lee Do weighed his options. Buying any other product guaranteed losing a limb or a chunk of his mind. This one remained an unknown. It could be lethal, or it could be a genuine escape hatch. What was certain was that they couldn't linger here forever. His battery was down to 69 percent; when his phone died, his external lifeline died with it.
"I'll try it," Lee Do said.
"Will you be all right?"
"Probably not," he muttered, staring at the small pack. "It's just that every other option looks ten times worse."
Taking NyanNyanPunch's advice, Lee Do cut his eyes toward the register. The part-timer was still locked on him, unblinking.
"...Understood."
Slowly, deliberately, Lee Do reached out and picked up the pack of gum. There was no cold shock against his fingers, no sudden movement on the notice board, and no strange sensation racking his body.
"Nothing's happening so far."
Holding the pack, Lee Do made his way toward the counter. The woman trailed a few paces behind, holding her breath. He placed the gum down directly in front of the part-timer, then slid his wallet out of his back pocket.
He opened it. He didn't have a single coin.
"Shut up," Lee Do snapped at the screen. He clawed frantically through every pocket and fold of his wallet. Not a single coin was tucked inside.
Just then, the woman spoke up.
"I have one."
"A ten-won coin?" Lee Do looked at her in shock as she opened a small zippered pouch and extracted a single bronze disc.
"You still carry these around?"
"Yes... it was just rolling around in the bottom of my coin pouch..."
"You just saved our lives."
Never in his thirty-two years had a ten-won coin looked so magnificent. Taking the tiny coin from her trembling hand, Lee Do set it firmly down on the glass counter.
Clink.
"I'd like to buy this."
The part-timer looked down at the pack of gum. She looked at the ten-won coin. Then, she raised her head to stare straight into Lee Do's eyes, not saying a word for several agonizing seconds.
Cold sweat soaked through Lee Do's palms.
After what felt like an eternity, the corners of the part-timer's lips gently turned upward. This time, her cheeks didn't tear open; it was an ordinary, perfectly human smile. A thin breath of relief slipped past Lee Do's lips.
"Customer."
"Yes?"
"I apologize."
The part-timer slid the pack of gum back across the counter toward him.
"That particular item..."
A chime echoed softly through the overhead ceiling speakers.
An out-of-stock item has occurred.
In a serene, polite voice, the part-timer finished her sentence.
"Is sold out."
Lee Do stared dumbfounded at the pack of gum resting right in front of his fingers. It was physically here. He could grab it, squeeze it, feel the waxy paper between his fingertips. Yet the employee was looking right at it and declaring it out of stock.
Lee Do slowly lowered his eyes back toward the rack where he had taken the gum. The 10 won price label was still there. But looking at it again, he spotted something he had missed in his rush earlier: the label's position. It wasn't directly underneath the gum shelf. It was slightly, just a couple of inches, offset to the side.
Lee Do followed the alignment upward. Next to the candy rack hung a thick bundle of small translucent plastic bags—the exact standard shopping bags used for bagging items at convenience store registers.
"...No way."
The stream realized it at the exact same second.
Lee Do turned his eyes from the gum to the stack of plastic bags. The 10-won label nestled between the two wasn't meant for the candy at all; it was marking the price of a plastic bag.
Slowly, Lee Do parted his dry lips.
"I think I found it."