Killing Three Birds with One Stone
Standing before his fields, Oh Hyeon-seong gazed out over the cleared land.
He'd sketched out a rough plan back when he was still sourcing the seeds, but now he ran the numbers through his head one more time and divided the plots accordingly.
I've never farmed for real before, so no point getting greedy. Better to start with just a few essential crops and see how they do.
What he really wanted, of course, was to scrape together every seed his money could buy and grow them all — to taste again the countless flavors humanity had long since forgotten.
But that would make cleanup a nightmare.
If he planted crops that grew at a frightening pace without any restraint, he'd end up buried under a mountain of things that all needed harvesting at once. The spirits would help, sure, but he had no idea how much they could actually handle, so for now he settled on a safe, conservative scale.
And so, the handful of crops he'd chosen.
"First up... rice, I suppose."
The foundation of every Korean meal — a full bowl of rice is the bedrock of happiness.
Oh Hyeon-seong scooped a handful of rice seeds from a sack.
According to popular wisdom, the disgustingly tasteless rice of the modern era had knocked at least another fifty percent off the national happiness index.
Hyeon-seong himself had missed a hot bowl of rice more than anything else. Not some strange rice-shaped clay they made you play with in your mouth — an honest, proper bowl of real rice.
Besides, whatever he cooked going forward, most of it would be eaten alongside rice.
In a way, this was the most important crop of everything he'd plant today.
At first I thought I'd have to divert water and build actual paddies for rice farming... but thankfully, there turned out to be another option.
Yoo Seung-su had told him that rice didn't necessarily have to be grown in a flooded paddy — there were varieties that grew in ordinary fields. Dry-field rice, it was called. Apparently there'd been a noticeable difference in taste from what modern Koreans were used to eating, but thanks to modern cultivation, varieties existed today with no difference at all.
Even so, Seung-su had warned him off it — it took far more hands-on care, and the yields were lower. There was a reason it never went mainstream, he'd said.
In any normal situation, Hyeon-seong might have listened.
But he had spirits. The extra labor simply wasn't a problem for him.
And it would have felt absurd to undertake a massive construction project to build paddies at this point anyway.
"Hoo. Alright, let's get started."
Oh Hyeon-seong scattered the seeds as he went, sowing as he walked.
Rice had gotten the largest share of the field, so it ate up a fair amount of time. When the rice was done, he moved on to the next crop.
Potatoes, which had run out, plus new additions to the family — sweet potatoes and corn.
He included chili peppers, onions, garlic, and green onions in the first list too, since they were absolute cooking essentials. If he was going to cook seriously, these mattered even more than the other staple grains.
And last of all, he finished with the beans he'd nearly forgotten.
"And now... finally, the fruit."
Oh Hyeon-seong turned and looked behind him.
There, stacked up in a pile, was something in a whole different size class from the tiny seeds he'd just been planting.
Apple tree saplings.
With the spirits' boost, even apple seeds wouldn't take that long to grow... but I wanted to plant well-maintained, quality stock if I could.
Seung-su had recommended a good orchard site and urged these particular saplings on him. A layman couldn't pinpoint the exact differences, but the thick, healthy roots felt good all around.
Up you go!
Still, I was a hunter — lifting this much is nothing.
He hoisted an apple sapling with ease and set it into the earth. Digging, planting — the work demanded more strength than he'd expected, but given where he came from, none of it was a problem. He only had to be careful about how he planted his left leg.
Strawberries are done too. That's everything.
With the strawberry sowing finished just beyond the apple rows, Oh Hyeon-seong stretched his back and rolled his shoulders. Those last two fruits marked the end of everything he'd planned to plant.
He turned around, soaked in a deep sense of accomplishment.
Clap clap clap!
The spirits, who had been watching him work, burst into applause.
Oh Hyeon-seong chuckled and addressed them. "No need to clap — you're the ones with all the hard work ahead."
The spirits tilted their heads, puzzled.
"Don't you want to eat something as delicious as those potatoes you had the other day?"
Now the spirits nodded their heads furiously.
They had only just awakened to the taste of food, and ever since the potatoes ran out, they'd mourned the loss terribly.
"Once these crops grow in, they'll give us wonderful things to eat. The healthier they grow, the more incredible the food becomes — and the happier our meals get. That's the deal."
Weee! Weee!
The spirits' eyes lit up as they erupted in an ecstatic reception. Some hugged each other, some bounced up and down, some broke into gleeful little dances. It looked like the site of some grand festival.
Of course, Hyeon-seong was looking forward to it just as much.
The saplings aside, not every crop would take the same time to mature — but as with the potatoes and lettuce, most of them would already be ready to harvest by tomorrow. How could he not be excited for the next day?
"Hyeon-seong! Oh Hyeon-seong!"
"Hm...? That'd be Gwon Gyeong-min."
At the familiar voice carrying from far off, his head whipped around. There was Gyeong-min, climbing up the hill in the distance.
He was well within view, but Gyeong-min couldn't see him at all. Thanks to the barrier Han Su-yeon had set up, anyone standing inside the fields was simply invisible — and the crops he'd planted were hidden just the same. Every field above the house looked warped and completely empty to outside eyes.
"Ah, come on. Not home, not anywhere — where'd the guy go?"
Gyeong-min scanned around, apparently searching for him. But unexpectedly, Yoo Eun-ha was walking up right behind him.
And she was wearing an extremely grave expression.
"Oppa! If you can hear me, come out right now! It's a real emergency!"
Something, it seemed, had happened.
"Careful. It's right there."
"Hm..."
Oh Hyeon-seong approached the planter Gyeong-min was pointing at and tilted his head.
Psst-psst-psst!
Before long, the thing revealed itself.
A pit stained pitch black, dug deep into the ground. A dark, instinct-repelling energy was smoldering up from within it.
"So erosion really did happen."
Oh Hyeon-seong frowned slightly. That inky black energy was takgi — miasma. The very force that had plagued humanity since the gate incidents began, and the one he himself had faced countless times.
"Th-then what do we do?"
"To be more precise, it's a sudden 'partial erosion' event caused by miasma. When miasma lingering underground accumulates past a certain threshold, it clumps together in one spot and surges back up. That hole over there is what's left after it melted through the soil and pushed its way up."
Hyeon-seong ran his finger along the edge of the pit. The onlookers shuddered at the sight alone — but he, utterly expressionless, simply shook the black-tinged energy off his finger.
"Has a gate ever appeared in this village?"
"No, not once recently. Nothing like this has happened since I settled here."
"What if you widen the search a bit beyond the village?"
"Oh! Now that you mention it, I heard a few gates opened in the mountains a few kilometers out. But they said all of them were subjugated without any trouble..."
"Then that was probably the cause."
Oh Hyeon-seong nodded at Gyeong-min's answer. That was when Yoo Eun-ha, who'd been chewing her nails, cut in.
"So it's not that a gate opened in the village, or that a monster showed up?"
"Partial erosion is what happens when damage accumulated in the surrounding environment — through sustained miasma exposure — finally surfaces. A monster appearing just now wouldn't cause something like this immediately. That's what I'm saying."
"Phew. So there's no chance of a monster attacking us, then?"
"Not one hundred percent in theory, but for now, you can assume so."
Hyeon-seong nodded at Gyeong-min's question.
Korea's detection network was far denser now than it had ever been, blanketing every corner of the country. If a gate had appeared near a village where ordinary people lived, its signs would have been picked up long before the gate even finished forming.
And in the first place, if a monster had been lurking around a village long enough to cause this kind of erosion, it would have spotted humans and attacked ages ago. To a monster, an undefended stretch of countryside like this was nothing more than an easy hunting ground.
"Once the Bureau is contacted and this is dealt with, there shouldn't be a recurrence for at least a few years."
"I'll take ten years of that, honestly. I was actually debating whether we'd have to evacuate and empty out the whole village. Thank god we've got an expert like you around."
Gyeong-min sighed in relief. Hyeon-seong might not have been a hunter who could subdue monsters, but his years in the relevant department made him someone Gyeong-min could lean on completely. No such expert would ever be found in a small village like this, so just having someone so knowledgeable about gates nearby was enormously reassuring.
"I'll head down then and let the elders know. Everyone must be rattled — it's the first time any of us has seen something like this. Ah, and I'll tell them about your heroics too."
Gyeong-min gave his shoulder a couple of approving pats and left the greenhouse. Was this supposed to count as a contribution to the village?
Oh Hyeon-seong scratched his head.
"Haah..."
But beside him came a long, despondent sigh. It was Yoo Seung-su, who'd been sitting alone on the ground this whole time.
"Damn it, I kept wondering why I was getting these impossible malfunctions. Why didn't I think of this? I should've figured it out right away..."
"Hey, how were we supposed to know this would happen?"
"No — I should have. I had to. There was no excuse for missing it."
Despite his sister's words, Seung-su buried his face in his hands.
Around the gaping mouth of miasma, the crops within its radius had blackened and rotted away.
"What's wrong? Is it because of the crop damage?"
"Yeah."
Eun-ha clicked her tongue and shook her head. At the sight of Seung-su more devastated than the damage seemed to warrant, Hyeon-seong asked with his eyes: what's got him like this?
"It's... the entire strawberry shipment for Hankyung Department Store just got wiped out."
Thanks to catching it relatively early, the number of dead crops wasn't that large. But the erosion's reach extended far wider than what was visible.
Crops that had been affected even indirectly had developed deformities or suffered major flavor defects, forcing them one by one down the path of disposal. The other crops had gotten off relatively easy, but the strawberries growing in this section had taken a critical hit. Most were dead, and the survivors were deformed badly enough that the entire lot had to be scrapped.
It was damage that simply couldn't be made up.
And strawberries were one of the siblings' flagship products. The fruit had drawn attention from the start as an ideal candidate for smart farming, and development on natural varieties had advanced accordingly. These days, with the right cultivar and top-tier facilities, you could cycle through harvests year-round at high speed and push the flavor to a remarkable level.
Thanks to that, the natural strawberries from the siblings' farm held their own against even premium synthetic ones.
The problem was that Hankyung Department Store had taken just as much care with them in return.
"We had a small event planned where our strawberries were going to be featured soon, and we were scheduled to negotiate better terms next month — a higher unit price and a bigger supply contract. But if something like this blows up in our faces, it's over. No question."
Seung-su clutched his head in anguish.
They had clawed their way into the notoriously exacting food hall of Hankyung Department Store, and delivered faithfully ever since without a single failure. And just as that effort was about to bear fruit, this had to happen. A facility this size meant a hefty upfront investment, so there was no way they could afford to ignore their revenue stream.
I've never seen him like this... must have been a real shock. But I can't just hand over my strawberries either.
He had, after all, just come back from sowing his own strawberry patch. But he couldn't offer those strawberries as a substitute shipment. The crops the spirits raised would no doubt boast incredible flavor again — and that was precisely the problem. The flavor was too incredible.
If something like that suddenly hit the shelves of a famous department store, the whole world would kick up a fuss. With heavyweights across the globe already turning their eyes this way, they'd never let the source alone. That's a problem.
Oh Hyeon-seong let out a long sigh and turned the problem over in his mind, hunting for a workable solution. Then his eyes went wide.
It came to him — a way to make money without getting tangled up in any troublesome business.
"As it happens, I might be able to help you out... so give me the contact info for your point of contact there."