Fourteen Million Won
"Excuse me. You're a new hire, aren't you?"
"Huh? Oh, yes."
"You'll need to pick up your employee ID at that booth over there first. Your name is…?"
"Bae Gi-chul, ma'am."
"Bae Gi-chul… Bae… Ah, here it is."
"Thank you."
An ID card on a lanyard, printed with his own photo and name. As Gi-chul stared down at the card bearing the words Limitless Construction Division, a strange feeling washed over him.
I… I actually got a job?
This was a dangerous world, one where employment scams ran rampant—con men dangling absurd conditions to lure in gullible young people and exploit them for all manner of illegal work. That was exactly why, the first time he'd seen that insane job posting, he had assumed the whole thing was a fraud.
But then came the CEO's now-legendary, headline-making live interview, followed shortly by the acceptance notice that landed on his phone. And only after actually traveling out here to this rural village called Bug-i-myeon—a name he'd never even heard of—did Gi-chul finally accept that this situation was real.
The auditorium building was packed with countless other young people just like him. Every one of them wore a suit, an identical employee ID around their necks, glancing around with expressions split evenly between curiosity and anxiety. Just then, someone stepped up to the podium with a microphone.
"The new employee orientation for the Limitless Construction Division will now begin. All new employees, please take your seats."
At the announcement, Gi-chul quickly spotted an empty chair and sat down, then looked up at the stage with the same slightly nervous expression as everyone else.
"Welcome. I am Kim Cheol-min, General Manager in charge of overseeing all of Limitless's business divisions. First of all, a warm welcome to every one of you joining our company."
The General Manager who ran the entire company was astonishingly young. At a glance, his face seemed barely older than Gi-chul's own—but he looked utterly exhausted, with dark circles so deep they trailed all the way down to his cheeks.
"As most of you already know, you'll all be assigned to our newly established Construction Division, where you'll be taking on a wide variety of work."
The CEO himself had given a live interview that turned the whole country's attention their way, so nobody so much as blinked at Cheol-min's words.
"Some of you may be thinking something like this right now. What do I know about construction? I've never even set foot on a job site. Or maybe, I've never held down a real job in my life—can I actually do this?"
"…!"
Gi-chul flinched at those words. He'd come this far riding the joy of simply having landed a job, but deep down, an anxiety had been gnawing at him all along.
A vague, formless worry: could he really adapt and do the work? He wasn't the only one feeling it, either—several people around him wore the same frozen expression. And then Cheol-min's calm voice rang out again.
"It's all right."
He continued quietly.
"We know perfectly well that none of you have specialized skills or experience."
"And frankly? That's actually a good thing. If you picked up sloppy habits at some other job site and brought them here half-baked, the odds of causing a serious problem would be far, far higher."
Shoddy work and corner-cutting tricks ran rampant on ordinary labor sites. But Limitless had boldly declared its intention to tear down every one of those entrenched bad practices and rebuild from scratch—so the excuse of "but that's how it's always been done" would never, ever be tolerated here.
"Those of you who watched the CEO's interview already know this, but the core value of Limitless's Construction Division is building structures of the highest quality—strictly adhering to regulations and protocols, handling every single process meticulously, and doing it all in a safe environment."
"That's why… for the next two months, you will undergo intensive training, learning and mastering the various skills required for the job from the experts seated in front of you."
"Squeeze everything you can out of these people. They're all extremely well-known figures in the industry, so you have a great deal to learn from them."
After Limitless announced its entry into the construction industry, Chairman Koo Hoe-jin had all but decided to pull KG Group out of the business entirely. Because of that, he had personally introduced Limitless to dozens of capable employees with decades of experience at KG Construction, along with skilled tradespeople essential to any construction operation—welders, carpenters, electricians, landscapers, tilers, paperhangers, heavy equipment operators, and more.
Thanks to that, Cheol-min had been able to absorb KG Construction's know-how and build out the division's systems with remarkable speed. Now he addressed the five thousand new hires who were staring up at him like a flock of newly hatched chicks.
"When your two months of training are over, all of you will be deployed to the development project here in Bug-i-myeon. A project worth a cool two trillion won. The construction site of Limitless Village."
"Limitless Village is divided into five zones radiating out from the headquarters. An R&D innovation park for next-generation technologies. Residential complexes. Commercial and living infrastructure. A cargo and logistics hub. Industrial zones, an eco-park, and natural green space. Add to that the roads, water and sewage systems, electrical infrastructure, and telecommunications networks… In other words, from start to finish, we are building all of it ourselves."
"Wow…"
"We're… we're building that?"
"That doesn't seem like something five thousand people can pull off…"
It was a scale far too colossal for a single company. Doubts bubbled up from every corner of the hall—could a mere five thousand people really handle a construction project the size of an entire village… no, a small city? But at the rising murmur, Cheol-min gave a small nod, as if he'd expected exactly this.
"There's no need to make faces like that. The Limitless Construction Division will be running large-scale hiring every year, and we're not asking you to build all of it yourselves."
Cheol-min went on to explain in detail what the new hires—including Gi-chul—would actually be doing. With his repeated reassurances that it was fine not to know anything yet, that they shouldn't worry, the taut expressions across the hall gradually began to loosen.
"…Maybe it'll be okay?"
"Honestly, even if it isn't, so what? I'm just grateful they gave us jobs at all."
"Work hard, and it'll work out somehow."
The haze of uncertainty seemed to lift a little as each of them quietly steeled themselves to work hard for the company. Gi-chul was doing much the same, re-resolving himself, when Cheol-min wrapped up his explanation with one final remark.
"Ah, and one last thing, just in case—if a suspicious stranger you've never seen before approaches you after you've joined the company, be very careful."
"…?"
"If you let your guard down and leak internal company information, you could find yourself facing serious civil and criminal liability. Please keep firmly in mind that Limitless strictly prohibits the external disclosure of any information, no matter how trivial."
Kim Cheol-min delivered the warning with a graver expression than at any other point in his speech. He said it because he knew the National Intelligence Service had gone so far as to establish a new branch office near the company grounds, watching over Limitless as much as protecting it—but the new hires, who knew nothing of this, only wore puzzled looks.
◇◇◇◆◇◇◇
One month after joining Limitless.
With no lodging available anywhere near the company, Gi-chul had rented a room in downtown Cheongju and was commuting back and forth every day, devoting himself entirely to his training.
"Hey! What're you doing holding that welding rod like that, boy! Look at it! It's all stuck together wrong!"
"I'm sorry!"
"Aigoo… give it here! What did I tell you? When you weld, the wrist snap is everything. Grip it like this! Keep the angle locked and move it smooth and easy—see, you rotate it as you go, like this."
"Yes, sir! Got it!"
Gi-chul had been assigned to the Welding Team. He'd never held a welding rod in his life, but by practicing relentlessly—from the moment he clocked in to the moment he put the rod down at the end of the day—what had started as a hopeless mess improved before his very eyes, day by day. He found it deeply rewarding.
"Tch… still clumsy, but it's not unusable, I'll give you that."
"Not bad, but something's missing, I tell you! Get it cleaner next time."
"There you go! That's proper welding! Lay it down like that and it'll hold for thirty years, easy!"
At first, the master welder had watched him with pure disdain, hurling one cutting remark after another in his thick Gyeongsang dialect. The first time the old man actually praised him, Gi-chul felt his throat tighten so hard he nearly burst into tears on the spot.
This is… fun.
Worthless scrap metal passed through his hands and came out the other side transformed into something of value.
Something he'd never even thought to try before… no, something he might have hesitated over, half-convinced it would be looked down upon.
But as he learned to weld, Gi-chul never once felt that his work was shameful or lowly. If anything, he felt a pride so strong he wanted to brag about it to everyone he knew.
And so another day slipped by unnoticed, spent practicing his welding over and over until it was time to wrap up. As he changed out of his work clothes, someone came up to him.
"Gi-chul hyung! You didn't forget, right? Drinks with the guys after work tonight?"
"Of course not."
Four years of studying for the civil service exam had left him with almost no one to call a connection—even the people he'd once been close to had drifted out of touch. But at Limitless, he'd met so many others in the same boat that they'd grown close almost instantly.
In less than a month, Gi-chul had gone back to being his old cheerful, sunny self.
When he thought about how he'd spent those months in a cramped, windowless gosiwon room in Noryangjin, gloomy and silent, going entire days without exchanging a single word with another human being—this life, where he did something meaningful every day, laughed and joked without a care in the world alongside people he could call colleagues, felt like a dream.
A dream he never wanted to wake from.
And just then, a text message arrived on Gi-chul's phone.
"…?"
Gi-chul stared down at the message in a daze. Then, with trembling fingers, he counted the digits one by one—and shouted in disbelief.
"Th… fourteen million won?"
It was no spam text, no prank. A genuine sum of over fourteen million won had just landed in Gi-chul's bank account. And it seemed he wasn't the only one.
"Holy—! What the hell is this?"
"No way! Is this for real?"
Everyone was clutching their phones, faces flushed with excitement, causing a commotion. Only after they trooped over to the HR office and asked what on earth was going on did they finally grasp the reality of it.
"It's your first month, isn't it? Your salary and your joining bonus were paid out together, that's why it came to so much. From next month on, it'll be roughly… half that."
"H… half?"
This month was a special one-time payment; from next month onward, they'd be receiving seven million won a month. At those words, the eyes of Gi-chul and his coworkers began to tremble violently.
"Seven million… a month."
"W… wait a second. Are you telling me our annual salary is really a hundred million won?"
"Of course it is…? Do I look like someone who jokes about salaries?"
When they asked again, unable to believe it, the HR employee answered with an exasperated look, as if the question were absurd.
Gi-chul and his colleagues drifted out of the building like people in a trance. And there, for the first time in their lives, they came face to face with a feeling so intense that words could not contain it.
A loyalty and devotion so complete that they would give their bodies, their minds—yes, even their souls—for the company.
They finally understood what that meant.