Grandma Bok-ja's Secret and Lee Jin-ho's Confession
At Lee Dae-kyung's reaction, Choi Seo-dan leaned in, craning her neck.
“Why? Don't tell me you got a zero?”
After checking my report card, she'd scrunched up her face in an instant and was now glaring daggers at me.
So Lee Dae-kyung hadn't been letting out a sigh of sympathy after all.
“Heh, heheh……”
Yes. This is the look.
This is exactly that gaze of looking up at someone, a blend of admiration and burning envy!
1st / 94
First place, just as I'd expected.
The other kids envied me too, but they were all strong students in their own right.
There was one variable, though.
“Waaah……, I should've saved my share of the potatoes!”
Before we headed to the potato field, Park Chi-woo, one of our club members, had wailed in the science room where we'd all gathered.
While everyone else had eaten their potatoes, the guy had sold his entire share without saving a single one for himself.
“Come on, don't cry over something like that……. I'll share one of mine with you.”
Park Chae-ah tried to console him.
“You guys ALL made the top ten!!”
Writhing in utter betrayal, Park Chi-woo sprang to his feet and shouted.
“Let's go to the field right now!! This time I'm eating those potatoes no matter what!”
Park Chi-woo moved at a staggering pace and harvested the potatoes.
A speed none of us had ever seen from him before.
Wait, is this guy secretly an agricultural prodigy?
A few days later, as it turned out.
The word going around was that Park Chi-woo, having demolished ten of his freshly harvested potatoes in one sitting, had promptly given himself a monster stomachache—but that's neither here nor there.
“I'm home.”
I'd returned from the field.
It had taken everything I had to calm down the overexcited club members before sending them off.
Exhausting!
Trudging through the front door in a drained state, I found my father waiting to greet me, his face brighter than I'd seen it in ages.
“Ji-on! Great news!”
Good news worthy of a face like that…….
“Don't tell me—the approval came through?”
“That's right! How did you know? We can officially start selling in two days.”
The sales permit for the Lettuce Pills had been granted.
Now all that was left was to begin full-scale distribution.
We would start selling under the company's name.
The company name had been decided after discussing it with my father.
Or rather, since my father's opinion was that I should pick the name, it was really my call.
And the name that was born in the end was……
Mana Farm.
It's a field that literally can't function without mana, so there couldn't be a more fitting name!
I even placed an order for a Mana Farm sign to be planted at the entrance of Jakgol-ri.
I ordered it in gold, in hopes of a golden age of harvest.
When she heard the name, employee Song Yu-jin turned oddly pale for some reason, but she designed the logo for us anyway.
She said she'd be able to wrap everything up in Seoul and come down sometime next week, so as soon as she arrives, I'll have to start on the packaging design for retail right away.
The problem is distribution.
When it comes to distribution, the people I know are my father and… my father and……
Ugh. We really do need more people.
There'd been no word from Team Leader Lee Jin-ho yet.
Today was the last day I'd given myself to deliberate—would he actually call?
Just as I was lost in that thought,
the phone rang, perfectly timed.
📞 Incoming Call — Lee Jin-ho, HR Team Leader
Could anything be more welcome?
I hastily cleared my throat and picked up.
“Hello, this is Seo Ji-on.”
“Hello. This is Lee Jin-ho—you extended me a job offer a while back.”
“Ah, Team Leader. Have you had enough time to think it over?”
At my question, there was a brief pause.
Don't tell me—no way. Come on, no.
“Yes. I'd like to accept the position.”
Yes!
Just as I was working hard to force down the corners of my mouth to hide my overflowing joy—
“In return, could I ask one favor of you?”
“…What kind of favor?”
His voice was dead serious.
What kind of favor required that kind of tone?
“Those… those Lettuce Pills you gave me before.”
“Ah, yes.”
“I'd like to get some more of them.”
Oh. You startled me there.
All that dramatic build-up over something so trivial.
I answered readily.
“Of course.”
“Thank you. And, um…….”
He sounded hesitant.
Was there something else he wanted to ask?
“Hm? Hello? Team Leader Lee Jin-ho?”
“It… it may be a long story. Would you be willing to listen?”
Crash—
The sound of a glass bottle shattering rang through the house.
Mother had taken every last won of her severance pay and left the house alone.
All that remained in this hellhole of a home—where nothing arrived but collection notices—was him, his younger sibling, and that man who did nothing but drink from morning to night.
Lee Jin-ho, home on leave from the army, stared down at the man sprawled on the floor.
White foam was bubbling from the man's mouth.
“……Father?”
Lee Jin-ho prodded the man a few times.
The sight of him lying there limp and motionless sent a jolt of fear through him.
“Hyung! Hyung! I called 119!”
His underage younger brother came sprinting back into the house, shouting.
The home phone had been cut off, so he'd had to knock on the neighbor's door just to make the call.
The paramedics came in, loaded the man onto a stretcher, helped Lee Jin-ho into the ambulance, and headed for the hospital.
From the moment they arrived until the doctor escorted his father up to the intensive care unit, Lee Jin-ho couldn't gather his wits at all.
One day, Lee Jin-ho's father had been laid off in a round of company restructuring, and he'd drowned himself in alcohol.
Then, at last, he'd collapsed from acute alcohol poisoning.
He'd made it out of the ICU after that day, but he was still in a nursing facility.
Ten long years had passed with him lying in bed, mind clouded, barely able to do more than breathe.
“So I tried feeding my father the Lettuce Pills. It was a shot in the dark, really.”
The Lettuce Pills Seo Ji-on had given him totaled ten.
He'd fed half of them to his father.
Both were symptoms brought on by alcohol, so he'd thought—maybe, just maybe, his father could recover too.
It had been a foolish thought.
A hangover and acute alcohol poisoning were two different things.
And yet, he'd tried anyway, clutching at straws.
I understood every word of the story Lee Jin-ho poured out, halting and fragmentary, over the phone.
“So it worked, then.”
“It did. A faint light came back into my father's eyes.”
Though still sluggish, he could speak again too.
After a single dose, the father who had seemed like a hollowed-out shell of a man was beginning to come back to himself.
“He was lucid and moving around normally for about thirty minutes.”
After that, he'd relapsed—limp and listless again, back to his suffering old self.
But in that moment, Lee Jin-ho had seen hope.
Until the day the world cast him aside, his father had been a good provider.
The happy memories were still there, unmistakably.
He'd fought tooth and nail, wedged among the corporate sharks waging their wars at a conglomerate.
And all of it had been for his father's sake.
To prove that the road of despair his father had chosen was the wrong one.
“…I know I must look foolish. But I simply can't give up on my father. Please, help me.”
It was unexpected.
A capable man who had climbed all the way to head of HR at remarkable speed.
I'd assumed he was nothing but cold and calculating—but here he was, a man with warmth in him, someone who knew how to live for another person.
Huh. I hadn't realized I could have this kind of positive impact on people, in this kind of way.
I'd learned something new.
I answered without a moment's hesitation.
“I was planning to hand out Lettuce Pills every month as part of our employee benefits anyway.”
“Then that means……!”
“Yes. Nothing will go wrong if we front-load your share. Go right ahead.”
“…Thank you. Truly.”
And so Team Leader Lee Jin-ho was joining us.
He said he'd scout out the talent we needed before officially transferring, so I had one less thing to worry about.
For the first time, it felt like a proper structure was finally taking shape.
Now all that was left was the farm itself.
“Hmmm…….”
From here on, Father will handle all the company work, so I should focus on the farm.
Which means I'll probably need to go inspect the plots I entrusted to the grandmas and grandpas of Jakgol-ri myself.
I grabbed Bong-gu and set off making the rounds of the fields.
Not that “making the rounds” amounted to anything more than circling Jakgol-ri once.
“Ji-on, where are we going?”
“To Grandma Bok-ja's field first.”
The field we arrived at was unusually… dazzling.
The handsome sweet potato vines were bouncing the sunlight right back off their leaves.
…They seem even greener than they should be.
Grandma Bok-ja, working away in the field, spotted me and called out.
“Well I declare! Who's this if it ain't our President Ji-on himself?”
“Just came by to see how you're getting on.”
“Oh, gettin' on fine and dandy. 'Course, I reckon I'm doin' the best of anybody.”
The pride radiating off her was immense.
I nodded and stroked one of the sweet potato vines.
“These are from the sweet potato seedlings I gave you, right?”
“That they are!”
“It's been, what, five days since you planted them……?”
“Five days exactly!!”
Grandma Bok-ja puffed out her chest.
🌾 Crops under cultivation:
└ Muscle Strengthening Sweet Potato (100%) — READY FOR HARVEST
Something was off—I hadn't applied any higher grade of mana inscription to her plot.
Five days in, and the crop was already ready for harvest?
Watching my puzzled expression, Grandma Bok-ja started explaining with obvious impatience.
“See, last time that Kim Gwang-nam fella came by, the instruction sheet he left behind didn't say a word about spreadin' fertilizer!”
A crop-harvesting instruction sheet, printed in size-30 font.
Since these crops grew so unusually fast, the harvest windows differed from ordinary produce.
So I'd put together an instruction sheet for the grandmas and grandpas doing the actual farming.
The content couldn't have been simpler.
Plant. Water. Weed. Pull.
The end.
Crops grown on Mana Land required no fertilizer or supplementary nutrients of any kind.
They grew big, grew well, and grew delicious all on their own.
The growing period was so short that there wasn't even time to worry about pests and disease.
But to Grandma Bok-ja, who knew none of this, it must have looked strange.
“I figured fertilizer's mighty important and he'd just up and forgot to write it, so I went right ahead and spread some. And Lord have mercy, them things shot up faster'n spit.”
Faster than spit.
Truly, that was the literal truth.
Sweet potatoes took one week to grow on Mana Land.
But she hadn't raised the mana inscription grade—she'd merely spread fertilizer.
And yet the crop had grown so much that it was harvestable in just five days.
“……”
What's more, the sweet potato leaves looked lusher and sturdier than ever.
Bong-gu, perched on my shoulder, gave a mighty sniff.
“Keewit! (It smells delicious!)”
His eyes were sparkling far more brightly than usual.
It really did smell more appetizing, apparently.
As I fiddled with the sweet potato vines, Grandma Bok-ja chimed in beside me.
“Now you take them there sweet potato stems and make kimchi outta 'em—ooh-wee, sour-sweet and crunchy—that there's a taste straight from heaven, I tell you.”
…I had no idea.
Until now, I'd either replanted the vines to grow them into more sweet potatoes or disposed of them some other way.
And you're telling me you can make kimchi with them?
At the words sour-sweet, Bong-gu's fur trembled all over.
Oh no. This guy is completely worked up.
Information I'd never known came pouring out in a flood.
Not only was there a way to grow crops even faster, there were entirely new ways to eat them too.
Fine. I admit it.
I was ignorant.
From today on, I'm spreading fertilizer on every single field.
And I'm making kimchi too……!
“Grandma, could you teach me how to make that kimchi?”
“Well now, course I can. I'll teach you all the way down to Seo Bok-ja's secret special seasoning blend, I will!”
But then her eyes flashed sharp and gleaming.
“Only it ain't for free.”
“…I shall offer you one root of sweet potato. Deal?”
“Deal!”
And so, after finishing the sweet potato harvest first,
an entirely unscheduled one-day kimchi-making class broke out at Grandma Bok-ja's house.