An Era When Even Part-Time Jobs Are Hard to Find
When Song Yura had only briefly crossed paths with Lee Jongyeon and Kang Pung outside the Mechanical Engineering building, she had felt, if she was being honest, the faintest flicker of relief.
They were faces she saw often enough, and until they opened their mouths she had thought the atmosphere between them wasn't all that bad.
Maybe, unlike her own pathetic self, their relationship with Master had thawed a little. And if that were true, then maybe her own chances of reaching that same place someday weren't completely hopeless.
But the moment they spoke, Song Yura took a blow far worse than the one she had felt when she first woke up to her own sins.
"Hey, your mouth's getting pretty damn greasy, isn't it?"
"Doesn't change the fact that you're a worthless orphan brat with no backing and no parents."
Watching the three of them take that kind of abuse as if it were the most natural thing in the world felt like standing trial in the middle of hell itself.
Her breath caught in her throat.
"You know what, Yura? I read this in an article. A lot of people say they're more terrified of someone close to them dying than of dying themselves."
"What the hell? Isn't your own life the most important thing?"
"That's what I thought too, but I guess adults see it differently. Look at this — once you hit your late twenties, pretty much everyone thinks the same way. Is that even normal?"
"How should I know, you idiot."
Back then she had laughed it off like a fool. Now she thought she understood a little of what that feeling meant. She was standing far away, doing nothing, only watching — and still it felt as if her chest were being torn open.
I made him like that.
This situation right now.
Her share of the blame was anything but small. Lee Jongyeon and Kang Pung had only met Han Naengjung in high school — but Song Yura had been at it since middle school.
Worse: she was the one who had branded him as a bread shuttle from the very beginning.
"……"
She felt as if her mind might simply shut down.
Han Naengjung's eyes and voice — anything but normal, thick with scorn and killing intent — stabbed into her so hard she could barely breathe.
And even so… when she reached for him out of the desperate need to apologize, and he casually slipped his arm free, Song Yura felt something inside her collapse.
Thud!
Honestly, she had no idea how she even made it home.
By the time she came back to herself, she was face-down in her pillow like a madwoman, screaming herself hoarse.
"Hwaaaaah, hwaaaaah!"
How long had it even been since she made that vow.
She had sworn she would repay every wrong she had ever done him — that she would serve him with everything she had as his Master…
And then she had let her guard down at the first taste of his kindness and gone skipping along beside him like an idiot.
"Augh, hnnngh…!"
How disgusting must that have felt to him.
A girl who didn't understand even a tenth of what it meant to be tormented, walking next to him with a bright little smile as if she were doing just fine.
…How pathetic must she have looked.
"You ruin someone's entire life. You can't just talk your way out of that."
If she dug through her memories, she had said almost the exact same thing to Master.
Don't just talk — show some sincerity. And then she had shaken him down for money.
"Haha… hahaha……"
Song Yura drove her head into her knees again and muttered in a voice crumbling to dust.
"Just how much of a piece of trash was I…?"
More than that — why had she never once thought any of it was wrong.
She wiped at tears that would not stop and sat down in front of her laptop with hollow eyes. It was no longer mostly about surviving.
She simply wanted to make amends, even if only like this.
"I want to pay the money back. And more than that… I want to change how he feels about me. Even a little."
Clack-clack, clack!
Click!
Looking into how to withdraw from university, Song Yura's face twisted. There was more paperwork involved than she had expected.
But she had no intention of putting it off.
"I can forge my parents' signatures myself. Then I just need signatures from professors and a bunch of other people."
That kind of thing she could finish tomorrow.
Song Yura made up her mind. For at least one year, she would throw everything else away and build her life around one person: Han Naengjung.
A leave of absence would have been enough — but she didn't want to leave herself even that much of an escape route.
She would drive herself to the edge of a cliff until Han Naengjung was the only thing left in her sight.
"Next… a part-time job……"
Drip, drip.
She filled out her job-seeker profile on the part-time work site she had joined earlier and started checking nearby listings — and the tears came again.
In the end Song Yura couldn't hold it in. She buried her face against the laptop and broke down sobbing.
"Hwaaaaaaaaaah!"
She had never wanted so desperately to turn back time as she did today.
If she could go back, she would never have built a future like this. No — if she could just send a message to her past self, she would grab that girl by the collar and scream at her to stop those horrible things right now.
Song Yura regretted her past without end.
"Not a chance. Not even slightly."
I wiped the blood that had run down to the corner of my mouth in the bathroom and answered as if nothing were wrong.
"I told you the same thing with Song Yura. I don't particularly feel happiness through revenge."
Of course, there were people out there who could take genuine pleasure from getting even, or even from pure torment alone.
I just wasn't one of them.
I simply had a strong streak of selfish stubbornness that refused to tolerate anything that got on my nerves. That was a little different from enjoying hurting people.
"Happiness isn't something you can just pick up on your own."
On the other hand, if you had someone with you, happiness was the kind of thing that came easier than it ever did alone.
That was why you could burst out laughing at a joke you never would have cracked a smile at by yourself, or find yourself chuckling over something completely trivial.
Like that quiet little morning with Han Suhui earlier today.
……Put it in, Master.
I flinched.
"It's not that."
I shoved my hands in my pockets and headed for Strawberry Pocha, clicking my tongue for no good reason. Why did Song Yura's face have to surface even in a moment like that…
No. It'd be weirder if it didn't.
Only a few hours ago she had been pressed against me skin to skin in that motel room. If a man didn't revisit the pleasure and the memory of that, he'd be closer to sexually dysfunctional than anything else.
It was just…
A girl who swore she'd give it her all… and she just trails after me like that.
I had thought she might push back at least once, might crash into me head-on. I never expected her to wilt so completely, wearing an expression like she wanted to die on the spot.
It makes it look like I'm the one in the wrong. Puts me in a foul mood.
Swish, swish—
By the time I arrived at the shop, Kim Jeongyeol was already there as always — first one in, doing the cleaning the part-timers were supposed to handle, all by himself.
"Hello, boss."
"Tsk. I told you to call me hyung. You're leaving soon and you still won't even do that?"
I was about to let the familiar exchange slide past when Song Yura, hunting for part-time work, flickered through my mind. I stopped.
"Hey, boss."
"Yeah? What's up?"
"I was wondering if you've managed to find a proper part-timer yet. I'm on my way out, so I figured I'd ask out of concern."
"Ugh, don't even get me started."
Watching Kim Jeongyeol wave a hand, I entertained a possibility. If he was struggling to fill the spot, recommending Song Yura for it might not be such a bad idea.
She was my slave, so there was no chance she'd screw up the work — and she was decently pretty, which would help the shop's sales.
"Man, I don't even know how many dozens of applications came in. Looking at them, every single one says they can do six months to a year, no problem. Took a leave of absence, dropped out of school… reading those résumés, I mean, I dropped out myself, but it still kind of hurt to see."
"……"
"You know how it is. Ahem — feels weird saying it myself, but our place does pretty decent business. Even so, as the owner I can't exactly throw around big wages."
"……"
"I pay minimum wage and work them hard, and on top of that, lots of customers means… ahem, this also feels weird coming out of my mouth, but we get plenty of problem customers and young adults who still don't know how to handle their liquor."
"Yeah, I know."
I had been working here since before I even started university, and the number of nightmare customers I had personally dealt with easily cleared three digits.
But there was no helping it.
When you get enough people together, someone who sticks out always shows up. That was just the law of groups.
"Honestly, you'd probably be better off doing hard labor than working at our place. And still this many people want the job somehow, because of personal circumstances. Sure, some of them are just talking — but some of them have to be for real, right?"
"Yeah……"
"……What a world. Back when I was a freshman, it wasn't this bad."
Kim Jeongyeol wore a genuinely pained expression. It wasn't a lie. That was the kind of man he was.
Soft-hearted. The type who would look after other people even if it cost him something.
That was exactly why I had been able to work here so long, comfortably, and give it my best.
"I don't get it. Every year you hear about folding phones, VR breakthroughs, new drug developments… all these huge positive stories. And yet people keep having a harder time living, and the smiles just keep disappearing from their faces."
Honestly, it wasn't something I could fully relate to.
But the objective numbers backed Kim Jeongyeol up. As for me — I had been miserable nonstop since 2019, when I lost my parents and the bullying started…
"People really seem to be struggling just to get by. It's not like anyone's starving to death the way they did in the old black rubber shoe days — but this isn't that kind of era anymore."
"Yeah."
Maybe I had answered too flatly.
Kim Jeongyeol scratched the back of his head with a look that said he had just realized his mistake.
"Haha! Man, sorry. Damn, is this what turning into a geezer feels like? Maybe it's because I'm almost hitting thirty myself. Wow, that's crazy. Anyway — from an owner's perspective, this many people applying for part-time work is something to be grateful for, hahaha! Gonna have to think carefully about who to pick."
"……"
"And since the world's this rough, someone whose sales are holding up should work even harder, right? Come on, come on! Fighting!"
"……"
"Uh… Naengjung?"
"……No. It's nothing."
For roughly ten seconds, I nearly glared at Kim Jeongyeol while I weighed whether to recommend Song Yura. Then I shook my head.
I'm out of my mind.
Had the pleasure of sex and a scrap of lingering attachment already made me soft on Song Yura? If that were true, I was too pathetic to deserve to show her any consideration.
If finding part-time work has gotten that hard, then Song Yura should suffer a little too. Then she'll understand how I felt.
I muttered that to myself and watched a pack of high schoolers in uniform, chicken-and-cola cups in hand, cackling as they piled into a coin karaoke place.
They looked like regular academic-track kids. Mock exams today, maybe?
Suhui would want to goof off like that too……
The thought of Han Suhui pushed Song Yura clean out of my head. I picked up a pair of chopsticks in the kitchen, turning them over in my fingers, determined that today was the day I would clear the quest.
Then I snapped my wrist and flung them at the empty ingredient crate.
Thunk—!
I nodded at the chopsticks buried viciously deep in the wood.
"A little more practice and I'll have it."
And after spending the rest of the day as peacefully as any other—
Entering the Forgotten Tutorial Tower.
Floor 1 — The Tale of the Esteber Family
For the time being, nothing special was likely to come up. Aside from the part-time job, I intended to pour every spare hour into the Tutorial Tower.