A New Dimension of Hoarding
The next day, I didn't go to school. Judging by the atmosphere yesterday, Yang Jeongwon's mood was bound to be incredibly foul. On days like this, the probability of getting beaten half to death the moment I stepped through the gates was 980,000%.
There was nothing to learn at school anyway, so there was absolutely no reason to brave a 980,000% chance of a beating. If I went, I'd just get thrashed. Besides, there was no one at home to nag me for skipping, and no teacher at school who cared enough to scold me for my absence. That was my existence at school. I was like an NPC who made no difference whether they were there or not. No, actually, I was worse than an NPC. At least game NPCs had a designated role. I didn't even have that.
Wait, did I? Ah, right. Being Yang Jeongwon's bread shuttle.
Come to think of it, if I didn't show up, the only person who would actually miss me was Yang Jeongwon. Isn't that ironic? The person who would yearn for my presence the most when I skipped school was the very person I hated most in the world. Funny, really.
Now that I think about it, the look in Kwon Jua's eyes yesterday kept bothering me. It was a look that seemed to say she wanted to tell me something. A look that suggested she actually knew something. But it didn't matter. After a day or two, it would blow over as if nothing had happened. Besides, I wasn't planning on going to school for at least three days. By the time I finally returned, a perfectly normal, mundane routine would unfold, as if nothing had ever occurred. I'd go back to being the shuttle, buying bread, and taking a few hits.
Why do I keep going to school despite getting beaten like that, you ask? Because I want a high school diploma. That's it. What else do I have? No parents or relatives to help me. Certainly no money. On top of that, I have a frail build, so I'm terrible at fighting and sports. I hoped I'd at least be handsome, but that was a failure too. Academics? Of course I'm terrible. Maybe because there was no one to look after me when I was little, my foundation is utterly pathetic. How could someone with zero foundation suddenly excel in high school? It's impossible.
There was never anyone by my side to feed me comforting lies like, "You're smart, you just don't study." If there had been, would I have studied? And what about my personality? It's probably even more twisted. Aren't I the textbook definition of a kid raised without love? How could a kid like that have a good personality? I'm rough around the edges, no matter what I do. I'm negative about everything, constantly complaining and dissatisfied. Try living in my shoes. See if you don't turn out like me. Honestly, you should give me a medal just for not going crazy or ending my own life. Actually, I came pretty close to the edge. But then I got this Inventory thing, and now I'm barely scraping by.
Anyway, I endure this wretched environment and go to school just to get that single piece of paper: a high school diploma. Why? I told you. I have absolutely nothing. If I want to get a part-time job at a convenience store, I need at least a high school diploma. To survive, you need one. You have to have at least that much. Only then can you at least say, "I'm just a normal, ordinary person." A normal person who just happens to have a slightly bad background. Becoming that kind of person is my dream.
But the path to that dream is nothing but treacherous. To get a high school diploma, you have to attend at least two-thirds of the 190 school days in a year. That means I have to show up for at least 130 days. The funny thing about our country is that they'll let you advance to the next grade even if your grades are terrible, but they'll hold you back if you miss too many days. You go to school to study, but failing your classes is fine while skipping is a sin? It's bizarre, but hey, it works in my favor. Right now, all I have to do is get beaten up by Yang Jeongwon. If they forced me to study on top of that, I'd have to hit the books while getting thrashed.
What about the GED? Have you ever tried solving GED exam questions? You actually have to study pretty hard for those. And like I said, I'm bad at studying. I have no foundation. For someone like me, the GED is an incredibly high and grueling wall to climb. Getting a high school diploma is just that difficult and exhausting. So don't look down on anyone just because they only graduated high school. For someone out there, that piece of paper was a result they bled and cried to achieve.
· · ·
I woke up early for no good reason. And because I woke up early, I got hungry early. I decided to check my Inventory.
Fortunately, there was plenty of food. The great thing about the Inventory is that items are preserved in the exact state they were in when they were put inside. If I put in a piping hot bowl of gukbap, it would still be steaming hot when I pulled it out days later. If I put in cold ice cream, it would remain frozen solid even after days had passed. Which meant the beef I had procured from the large grocery store was still perfectly fresh.
I started grilling beef first thing in the morning. I boiled a pack of spicy cold bibimmyeon to eat with it. Eating beef almost every day lately was starting to make me a bit sick of it, though. At first, just eating the meat alone brought tears of joy to my eyes from its rich, savory flavor. Back then, I wouldn't even look at unorthodox condiments like salt, but after a few days, I found myself dunking the beef deep into ssamjang. Even today, while eating my bibimmyeon, the beef was merely a side topping; the bibimmyeon was the main event.
On another note, perhaps because I'd been eating so well lately, I felt like my height and frame had grown a bit. Though I was still a dwarf compared to others.
· · ·
Today, I planned to visit a warehouse discount mart. I'd heard that membership-only warehouse stores had incredibly high-quality goods. As a minor, I didn't have a membership card, so I couldn't enter. Apparently, minors without a legal guardian aren't allowed to get memberships. But that was fine. There were warehouse stores you could enter even without a membership.
I took out a single ten-thousand-won bill from the three million won settlement I got from the grocery store owner, Min Baeho, and topped up my transit card. It was too far to walk. I searched the map for the warehouse discount mart closest to a subway station. There was one in Magok. Thankfully, there was a direct indoor connection passage from the subway station. I had braced myself for a long walk, so this was a pleasant surprise.
And the warehouse discount mart I stepped into was an absolute whole new world. Local grocery stores? Standard supermarkets? They could beat it. There was no comparison. The scale was entirely different. This was heaven.
I wanted to sweep everything in sight into my inventory, but I forced myself to calm down and look around first. Yet, as I walked around, instead of calming down, my desire only grew. Starting from the fruits, the meat section was great, but the prepared food section stole my heart. Sashimi, sushi, smoked pork belly, grilled eel, and meal kits that I could just boil and eat whenever I wanted. These were exactly what I needed right now. I could always get raw beef from the local grocery store, so here, I should focus on prepared foods.
Swoosh. Swoosh. I could feel my Inventory filling up. I was glad I had emptied it out before leaving today.
They even have clothes here? I barely have any clothes. Nike? Adidas? This is amazing. Swoosh. Swoosh. Shoes, too. And Levi's jeans, which I've always wanted to wear. Swoosh. Swoosh. Should I start taking nutritional supplements from a young age? Swoosh. Swoosh. There's bread and cake, too. Swoo... swoo... Oh, they have home appliances as well. Swoo... swoo...
Wait, it won't go in. Is it already full? There's still so much left to take, how is it full already?
I had never once thought my Inventory was small, but coming to a warehouse discount mart made it feel tiny. Of course, the items here were bulk-sized and heavily packaged, and I had stuffed in a bunch of things I liked, but still, it was frustrating to stop when there was so much left to grab.
First, I headed to the restroom. Sitting on the toilet, I tried to mentally reorganize the space inside my Inventory. I thought about how, when packing a suitcase for a trip, the volume can shrink or expand depending on how you arrange things. If I packed it tightly like Tetris blocks, wouldn't I be able to fit more?
I strained to move the mental images of the items in my Inventory. It felt like closing my eyes, reaching into a massive suitcase, and trying to organize the contents. Even trying to pull something out of a regular bag without looking requires a lot of rummaging. Rummaging through a space much larger than a suitcase was far harder. I couldn't even physically touch the items inside. But since I could put things in and pull them out, I felt like I should be able to move them somehow.
If I stack these bottles top-to-bottom, alternating them, won't that create more space?
If I utilize the gaps on the sides, can't I fit more?
It was invisible and intangible. I had to rely entirely on raw intuition. But with the desperate mindset of a pirate trying to squeeze every last coin from a treasure island, I sat on that toilet seat and gave it my absolute all to cram in just one more item.
How long did I struggle like that?
Click!
Of course, there wasn't an actual physical sound, but it felt as if something had perfectly clicked into place. It was like getting that long straight bar in Tetris and clearing a massive stack of blocks all at once. To my ears, it might as well have been a real sound.
With that click, everything changed. The Inventory, which I had previously only been able to guess, estimate, and feel out like a blind man, suddenly registered in my mind like a game interface. A grid of five columns and two rows. A total of ten slots appeared before my eyes.
Wait. Do they stack? Do similar categories merge together?
Sitting on the toilet, I was so startled that I instinctively flushed. It just felt like the right thing to do.
Slap!
I slapped my own cheek. I was just that shocked.
Looking at the game-like interface, I could deduce a few things. I hadn't known exactly how many packs of beef I had, but it was quite a lot. Seeing them split into ten in the first slot and two in the second, I must have had twelve packs of beef in total. This meant the maximum stack size per slot was ten.
To verify if my theory was correct, all I had to do was put more things in. Behaving like a civilized intellectual, I flushed the toilet one more time, walked back out into the mart, and slipped a few more pairs of shoes into my Inventory.
Swoosh. Swoosh. Swoosh.
Shoes x2. Shoes x3. Shoes x4.
Whoa, seriously? It actually works like this? But why? Ah, whatever. The 'why' doesn't matter. What's the point of knowing the reason? If the reason wasn't good enough, would I stop using it? I'm going to use it regardless, so instead of wasting brainpower on the 'why,' I should just focus on how to make the best use of it.
To sum it up: before, I was like a blind man blindly stuffing things into a suitcase. But through today's upgrade, a game-like status window had manifested, allowing identical items to stack.
The capacity had expanded from a single suitcase's worth to ten slots, with up to ten items of the same category per slot. In other words, I could now store up to a hundred items. Both the quantity and volume had drastically increased.
Thank you. I didn't know who to thank, but I offered my gratitude anyway. Should I thank the owner of this place? Thank you, owner of the warehouse discount mart. I shall make excellent use of your wares.
From that moment on, my method of hoarding changed. Before, I just threw in whatever caught my eye, but now, I had to group them by category to maximize efficiency. For example, I had ten packs of beef in Slot 1 and two in Slot 2. That meant I could fit eight more packs in Slot 2. I grabbed a diverse selection: tenderloin, ribeye, ribeye cap, and more.
I roamed the aisles, sweeping necessary items into my Inventory. I had to calculate carefully. When it was just a suitcase-like space, I could throw in whatever I needed regardless of type, but now I only had ten slots to work with. And two of those slots were already occupied by beef, leaving me with only eight.
Clothes were an absolute necessity. Fortunately, the system didn't differentiate between tops and bottoms; clothes were just classified as a single category. It would have been nice if shoes were grouped under the same category, but they were separate. Today, I acquired ten pairs of shoes. I probably hadn't worn ten pairs of shoes in my entire life combined. At least slippers were categorized under shoes, which was a relief.
Nutritional supplements and vitamins. I meticulously packed red ginseng and probiotics. I had to look after my health. I also grabbed meal kits that I could boil and eat anytime, since I couldn't just survive on meat. I took some fresh sashimi too, and a bag of rice.
Then, I moved over to the camping section. For someone like me who basically lived like they were camping at home, nothing was more useful than the camping section. First, I put in a tent. The weather was getting colder, and it was freezing. I figured I'd have to pitch a tent inside my house to sleep. I added a sleeping bag too. I chose the most expensive ones for everything.
As I've said before, having lived my entire life as a dirt-poor beggar, I had absolutely no standard for judging what was good or bad. In my book, expensive meant good.
Normally, paying off the bills to restore the cut-off electricity, water, and gas would be the priority, but having lived without them, it was surprisingly bearable. I could just pretend I was camping. I didn't need gas. For water, I could just go to a nearby public restroom and fetch some. What about drinking water? Couldn't I just drink tap water from the restroom? I'd been drinking that kind of water since I was a kid, so I had no aversion to it.
Electricity wasn't a major inconvenience either. The only electronic device I owned was my phone, and these days, there were plenty of places where you could charge your phone for free. Besides, so what if it died? It wasn't like I had anyone calling me anyway.
With those thoughts, I began packing camping gear one by one, until the remaining slots were completely full.