The Money Tree Bears Fruit
The criterion for choosing a money tree was practicality. Yet even with money waiting, Yoo Jae-won did not move immediately. A sudden flood of work made it impossible to advance the meeting date. That sudden work came in the form of Keyboard Warrior orders pouring in from keyboard warriors. Yesterday, three thousand units arrived from Mirae Information & Communications; today, five thousand more came from Daeho Electronics. Because Yoo Jae-won had already hired specialists, he stepped back from handling the orders directly. The former owner of the advertising shop—now Kang Chan-ho, ID Technology’s first partner—was left sweating through the workload in his place.
Whenever an order call came in and the deposit was confirmed, production volume increased. Of course, Kang Chan-ho also took full responsibility for the actual packaging work. The shop’s printer ran without rest, and he had to oversee the immediate assembly of the printed sheets. In an era without any concept of automation, every output from the printer had to be assembled by hand. It was labor-intensive work. Hiring full-time employees risked burdening the company if orders later dropped, and the labor law that would later create the concept of non-regular workers was still years away from being rammed through. Every hire had to be permanent. Yoo Jae-won himself disliked the non-regular system; he had suffered enough from it in his previous life. So when hiring, he carefully gauged how much steady work the company could maintain and how much one person could reasonably handle.
Kang Chan-ho solved the problem with a lighter touch: side jobs. He gathered housewives for paper-folding piecework. This was still an era when single-income households were the norm. Yoo Jae-won’s own mother working as a door-to-door saleswoman was unusual; most mothers stayed home. Once they sent the children off to school, they tended to housework or farming. With the farming season over, they had little to do. Looking back, even the bundle envelopes they had used before had all been folded and prepared in advance. At the time, he and his friends had mindlessly assembled manuals and diskettes and stuffed them into envelopes, but now he realized that too had been piecework.
Thanks to ID Technology, side jobs became a major trend in Yeoju. Bundle envelopes paid thirty won each, bulky full packages that took more time paid fifty won, and labor-heavy manuals paid one hundred won. The simplest task—sticking registration-number stickers—paid ten won. Folding just a hundred bundle envelopes earned three thousand won. Considering 1988 prices, that was an enormous income for side work. With orders in the tens of thousands, the mothers of Yeoju would see their pocket money swell through November and December. At the same time, the name ID Technology would spread far and wide. Of course, ID Technology was not simply giving money away. To meet delivery deadlines, they had also deliberately stoked the housewives’ eagerness. The company solved the logistics by hiring just two employees to deliver materials in the morning and collect finished work in the evening. Kang Chan-ho had clearly proven himself an expert in printing and packaging.
With production now off his hands, Yoo Jae-won focused on what only he could do: creating the full version of Keyboard Warrior that American distributors and hundreds of thousands—perhaps millions—of users were eagerly awaiting. Nothing was technically difficult. Implementing four-player co-op via TCP/IP networking was hardly a challenge for him. The only labor-intensive part was drawing the graphic resources for the stages. It would have been nice to have a graphics specialist, but in an ecosystem where computers were only just beginning to appear, no such talent existed yet. He had to do everything alone. Still, aside from the tedium of repetitive work, there were no real difficulties.
As the company’s workload grew, Yoo Jae-won found going to school increasingly bothersome. He never skipped classes, though. He went not to learn anything in particular, but to build friendships that would last a lifetime. He grew close with Jimin, Sugyeong, and the other children who had once helped with the home-based assembly work using their small hands. He could not predict what positions they would hold when they grew up, but compared to the bleak human relationships of his previous life, the present was undeniably better.
Besides game development and school, Yoo Jae-won had one more task: buying cars. He could not keep relying on the president of Hyeonmi Oil forever. Orders were flooding in, delivery destinations were multiplying, and Yoo Jae-won himself had more meetings to attend. Choi Kang-wook, the lawyer who had joined the legal team, also traveled frequently for business; it would not do to keep sending him by taxi. For these reasons, he purchased two vehicles. One was a one-ton box truck, the other a passenger car. Neither was new. An employee from Hyeonmi Oil who often helped Yoo Jae-won was a true car expert. Whenever the factory truck broke down, instead of taking it to a repair shop, he would buy parts and fix it himself. He took Yoo Jae-won to the Seoul used-car market and selected the best vehicles without falling for any dealer sweet talk.
The truck was a Porter, the eternal bestseller in the cargo world. The passenger car was a Grandeur 3.0 V6, the very symbol of success. The Grandeur in particular came at an unbelievably low price. It was an 1988 model, practically new with under a thousand kilometers on the odometer, yet it cost only three million won. It had no accident history either. The dealer, however, seemed desperate to hide something. When the older brother who had accompanied them asked if it might be a suicide car, the dealer sighed heavily and confessed. The president of a company that had gone bankrupt had turned on a charcoal briquette inside the car and killed himself. The vehicle had been seized by creditors and ended up at the used-car lot.
There was no lingering smell of charcoal or anything else inside. If the dealer had simply kept quiet and sold it at the usual inflated price, no one would have suspected anything. But the creditor who received the car must have had a conscience. Instead of selling it outright, he had only asked the dealer to broker the sale. Knowing the truth would come out anyway during the transaction, the dealer spoke honestly. Most people would have found buying such a car unsettling. Yoo Jae-won did not. He was a regressor who had made a deal with God to return through time. With the firm belief that no stray spirit could touch someone blessed by God, he felt no hesitation. The older brother, who knew cars well, agreed. Besides, he was an ex-Marine who could supposedly catch ghosts. He recommended the car without reservation, saying nothing better existed in that condition. His reasoning was memorable.
“Even from the car’s perspective, it’ll treat you well. Think about it. Fresh off the factory line, it probably dreamed of carrying VIPs and speeding around. Instead, its first owner turned out to be a walking disaster, and now it’s stuck on the used-car market labeled a suicide car. If it keeps sitting here unsold, it’ll eventually get scrapped for scrap metal. You’re rescuing it. Anyone in its position would serve you with everything they’ve got.”
The older brother’s way of thinking was certainly unique. He had clearly shown himself to be a true car enthusiast, personifying the vehicle to put everyone at ease. In reality, things would probably not unfold exactly as he described. If the car failed to sell, the dealer would likely have hidden the suicide story and sold it anyway, or shipped it overseas. Since the dealer was standing right there, Yoo Jae-won said nothing. Besides, the man had been honest enough to disclose the suicide incident. Yoo Jae-won paid the full amount in cash on the spot. The grateful dealer immediately began the brokerage process, brought the creditor over to help with the title transfer, and quickly handled the corporate registration and insurance. They were able to drive both cars back to Yeoju that same day. The dealer drove the Porter; the older brother drove the Grandeur. Yoo Jae-won naturally took the passenger seat of the Grandeur.
Neither car gave any trouble on the way home. The Grandeur in particular rode smoothly, and its ride quality was top-tier for an 1980s vehicle. In a single drive, Yoo Jae-won could feel exactly why the Grandeur had become the king of domestic luxury sedans. When he rolled into the village in the Grandeur, the news spread through the entire neighborhood in an instant. The villagers’ reaction was enthusiastic. Everyone already knew Jae-won had started a business and was doing well enough to appear on television commercials. But that was as far as their understanding went. Seeing him arrive in a Grandeur instantly made them realize his success was on an entirely different level. His parents felt the same. They had been curious about how the business was going but had refrained from asking, worried it might burden their son. After seeing the commercials and newspaper articles, they knew things were going well, yet it took the Grandeur for them to truly feel that he had succeeded.
Clearly, seeing once was better than hearing a hundred times, and experiencing once was better than seeing a hundred times. There was a small commotion over the cars. The eldest uncle from the main house insisted they hold a ritual to ensure safe driving without accidents. Yoo Jae-won gladly entrusted the car to him—especially the Grandeur, which carried its own story. Just to be safe, he also drove it to church for a blessing prayer. Of course, he did not leave it at that. He gave a proper offering to the main house for performing the ritual and made an appropriate donation to the church for the blessing. As a side benefit, Yoo Jae-won’s standing rose significantly in both the main house and his mother’s family. That much was only natural.