Fate’s Cruel Joke (3)
The takeover of Factory 4 moved quickly.
The loan shark, who usually wore sweatpants as if they were a uniform, had, for once, squeezed himself into a shiny silver suit.
“Here! And here, too—put your fingerprint. There you go, good boy. And the back page goes here. Right here, too.”
He sat the factory owner down and flipped through the paperwork one page at a time.
He might have looked friendly at a glance, but that was only on the surface.
The owner stamped the documents with a face that looked as though he were about to cry.
I had already gone through the contract in detail beforehand.
It said that instead of paying off every last bit of debt within the deadline, he would transfer his shares in Factory 4 to me and hand over all management rights.
In the early days, Factory 4 had been a tiny mid-sized business, just barely big enough to cover the employees’ wages.
The owner had kept the place alive by taking out bank loans and scraping by from one month to the next.
Then, by some miracle, the factory landed subcontracting work from the giant company Seosan.
The third-tier subcontract plant hit 1 billion won in annual sales, then 3 billion the next year.
The year after that, it reached 6 billion, and before long it had broken 10 billion.
That was how Factory 4 grew for years, expanding and expanding as though fortune had come rolling in on a cart.
The problem was that the management had been a total disaster.
The owner secretly siphoned company funds away and blew them on luxury, nightlife, women, and gambling.
He had slit the belly of the goose that laid golden eggs with his own hands.
“The last page is right here! Just this one and we’re done nice and clean!”
“Hic sob.”
The owner, now about to lose the factory, broke down and stamped the final seal.
Once everything was done, the loan shark clapped his hands.
“Okay! Here you go, President Choi.”
He handed the documents to me.
President Choi.
I had become the head of the place in a single day.
The title still didn’t feel right.
Karki, who was standing beside me, gathered up the contract and tucked it away carefully in his 007 briefcase.
I had always been obsessed with money, so I knew this much well enough.
Making money was easy.
If you had hands and feet, anybody could do it.
Even someone like me, who wasn’t especially skilled and had only graduated from high school, had managed to save up a huge sum—1 billion won—just by working steadily for thirty years.
But spending that money was easy too.
What was truly difficult was this.
Protecting it.
The loan shark held out his hand to me.
“Well, that’s that. You swallowed the factory whole, just like you wanted. Congratulations.”
I shook his hand.
He might have been a vile loan shark who charged outrageous interest, but I had to admit he was efficient and clean about getting things done.
“Please be sure to pay the remaining 1.2 billion won by the deadline.”
“I will.”
The loan shark threw an arm around the factory owner’s shoulders.
“Come on now, Mr. Kim. We’ve got something else to discuss, don’t we?”
“……Uh. Yes. Right.”
The owner was sweating buckets as he tried to read the room.
The money borrowed against the factory had been paid in full by me.
But the owner’s personal debts were still there.
No matter how much you paid, there was no climbing out of that ant lion pit.
That was how terrifying loan sharks were.
The loan shark practically dragged the owner outside.
“I parked my car out front, so let’s head to my office and talk things over slowly.”
“Um, that is…”
“What is it? Thinking of running again?”
When the loan shark bared his gold teeth and smiled, the owner bowed his head deeply.
“N-no, sir.”
After they left, Karki and I were the only ones left in the office.
I held out my palm toward him.
The guy grinned and slapped me a high five.
“Boss! Crazy cool! A factory ain’t some triangle kimbap, and you just gulped it down whole! That’s seriously badass!”
I tried to act calm, but I was still a little dazed myself.
To think I’d taken over the very company I used to work for in my previous life.
“Boss. No, Mr. Boss. What are you gonna do now? You gonna start playing golf and buying sports cars like that old bastard boss?”
Karki trailed after me like a puppy.
With the nonstop chatterbox at my side, I opened the office door and stepped outside.
Everyone in the factory turned to look at me.
They all stopped what they were doing and stared with stiff, frozen faces.
It seemed they all knew exactly how things had gone.
They knew I had revived the factory that had nearly gone under and been written off as a lost cause.
One by one, they began to speak.
“...Yongki.”
“Hey! Watch your mouth. He’s a boss now. Are we still the same as him?”
“Ah, right? Sorry. President Choi.”
Their faces made it obvious they were starting to treat me with a little fear and distance.
The former boss had constantly abused his power.
Not only did he hurl every kind of insult and emotionally trample people, he also forced them into unreasonable overtime and night shifts just to meet deadlines.
I walked forward at an unhurried pace, and every eye in the place followed me.
“That’s right. As of today, I’m the owner of this factory.”
Karki, standing beside me, pressed his lips together and listened intently as well.
“I…”
I slowly looked around.
Automated conveyor belts, press machines, robot arms.
All around me was a barren landscape full of steel.
“For a long time, I was trapped by a sense of defeat and thought this place was a hell of my own making.”
Some people tilted their heads, while others nodded as though they understood exactly what I meant.
“That was a pathetic way to think. Nobody had ever trapped me here in the first place.”
I hated poverty.
I had worked myself into the ground chasing money, clawing and scraping to hold on to every last bit of what I had earned.
But in the process, I had lost my grandmother and my little brother.
Under the sky of capitalism, everyone wants to become rich.
They compete to buy expensive houses, imported cars, luxury goods, and use wealth itself as a form of display.
But life may not be about what you gain.
It may be the process of losing one thing after another.
“This place isn’t hell. And you’re not puppets moving around without souls like the machines over there.”
Someone shouted, “Right on!”
The eyes fixed on me grew hotter and hotter.
“I’m not standing here as your boss because I want to dominate you. I’m here because I want to help you.”
Most of them were workers who spent every evening getting drunk after work and wasting their lives away in emptiness.
I wanted to lead them onto a better path.
Meeting each pair of eyes, I kept walking.
“Nepali. Thai. Bangladeshi! Don’t hate each other—grow together, and move forward together.”
Someone yelled, “Damn, our boss sure knows how to talk!”
Comic-book heroes save the world with strength and superpowers.
But what a real-world hero had to do was different.
It was to give people courage.
I stopped in the middle of the factory.
Eyes came at me from every direction.
“I’m not the main character here. You’re not slaves to this factory, and you’re not spare parts. You’re the main characters of your own lives.”
Everyone clenched their fists tight.
They looked like volcanoes just before an eruption.
“Factory 4 makes new equipment every single day. And starting today, you can all start new lives too!”
I wasn’t trying to bind them to me with sentimental appeals.
A workplace hierarchy doesn’t last long unless there’s mutual interest and mutual benefit.
So I would give them what they deserved.
The proper reward for honest labor.
A reward for trusting me and following me.
“We’re one team. We’re comrades running toward the same destination. We’re…!”
Beyond business.
I spread both arms wide and stopped beneath the falling light.
“Family.”
Karki, fired up and unable to contain himself, ripped off his work gloves and threw them into the air.
“Kyah! Boss! That was awesome!”
Shouting in every direction, the others followed his lead and tossed their gloves up as well.
Work gloves shot skyward one after another beneath the high factory ceiling.
The roaring cheers showed no sign of settling down.
The section leader watching all this checked the clock.
“All right, all right. Everyone settle down now. Let’s go eat first.”
Before I knew it, time had passed, and it was already lunchtime.
Karki checked the menu on his phone.
“Ugh. Tonkatsu again.”
I had bought the factory with money stolen from Cha Chi-do’s vault.
Cha Chi-do’s wealth had been stolen from the blood and sweat of industrial workers.
I used that money to buy the factory.
From the start, I had never intended to spend it only on myself.
The original owner deserved a little of it back too.
“Tonkatsu every damn day. Shibak!”
Karki let out a sigh, imagining those greasy frozen cutlets.
I reached over and put a hand on the shoulder of the guy who was pouting.
“You asked me earlier what I was going to do next.”
“Mm?”
“Let’s build a new cafeteria first. And make it huge.”
Karki’s eyes went wide.
“Yes! Boss is the best!”
I patted the shoulders of the excited Karki, who was practically bouncing in place, then shouted toward everyone else.
“Stay after work, all of you. Since it’s a celebration for me becoming boss….”
I pulled out my card and held it high.
“Drinks on me!”
Factory 4 began to change before anyone could miss it.
First, the number of employees increased.
This place had originally been severely understaffed for the amount of work it handled.
That had been because the former owner refused to hire people in order to cut labor costs.
As a result, one person often had to do the work of three or four.
Once the manpower shortage was eased, things improved noticeably.
Of course, I couldn’t just keep dumping money into the factory without limit.
So I came up with a realistic plan.
“Hey, idiot! Not there—grab it here! How many times do I have to tell you? Damn, you’re gonna make my head burst.”
Mr. Bae Yulim shouted at a group of boys who still looked like they were barely old enough to shave.
“Yes, sir!”
“Sorry!”
“We’ll try again!”
The students answered back with bright, sturdy voices.
They were high schoolers attending a vocational school for hunters.
One had lost his father at a young age and lived with his mother and older sister; another had a disability that made one leg difficult to use.
Anyway, each of them had their own circumstances.
The former owner had refused to hire anyone without experience.
He wanted people he could throw straight into the field on day one.
Every now and then, he would accept a hunter-school student, but only as an excuse for “training,” forcing them to work for free under the guise of practice.
After all, rookies were always less capable than seasoned hands.
“You’re getting paid to work here, so don’t slack off like that.”
“Yes, sir! I’ll do my best!”
Even after being scolded hard, the high schoolers didn’t lose heart.
Unlike the former owner, I gave those kids a proper wage.
“Ow, my head. Why’s this kid so cheerful? You happy or something?”
“Hehe! I’ll work hard!”
“Just teach me one more time, and I’ll really do better this time!”
They were like trees.
Even if it took time and money to teach them their jobs right now,
one day they would grow like baobab trees and become fully capable of carrying their own weight.
I turned my head.
Karki was there, barking at the workers lined up in a row.
“You foreign labor bastards—do you want your hands cut off?! Stop screwing around and memorize the safety rules, no questions, just drill them into your heads!”
“Yes, boss.”
“Listen to that half-hearted answer! Damn it, louder!”
“Yessir!!!”
It had been a long time since low birth rates had become a serious issue.
To revive rural areas and manufacturing, the government opened the door to foreign workers.
As the number of foreign workers increased, people with illegal stays or criminal records naturally got mixed in as well.
Plenty of companies hired undocumented workers to save money, but Factory 4 only accepted foreigners who had entered the country legally.
Karki was the one in charge of teaching them.
“You guys should know you’re lucky! Our boss is such a good person. If this had been the former boss, he’d have slapped you upside the head first thing! Got it?”
Karki had become known as the drill sergeant.
That brat. He’s doing a good job.
Leaving the drill sergeant behind, I moved to another spot and approached someone else.
“Team leader. Would it be all right if I step out for a bit?”
There was important work to do today.
Something I’d been putting off for a long time.
The section leader spoke to me.
“President Choi.”
“Just speak casually.”
“...All right. Yongki.”
He patted my shoulder.
“Thanks to you, this factory’s got some life in it again. The food even tastes better now, and I think I’ve grown pretty attached to this place myself. Thank you.”
Seeing the sincerity in his eyes made me feel at ease.
I nodded without saying much.
The section leader rubbed my back.
“Go on, then. I’ll take care of things here.”
“Understood.”
“But where are you headed?”
“I’m going to the Hunter Association to register as an awakened.”
“Ah, right.”
“And also…”
There was something even more important than that.
If I wanted to keep doing hero work from now on, it was something I absolutely had to do.
“I’m going to join a guild.”
The section leader rounded his mouth in surprise.
“Well then, I guess your world’s gonna be different from ours regular folks after all.”
“I won’t neglect the factory work either.”
This place was my livelihood and my sanctuary.
Hero, factory owner, and, finally, hunter.
I intended to catch all three rabbits at once.
“Which guild are you planning to apply to? Jinchon or Superior would be decent, I guess.”
He had just mentioned two of the three biggest guilds in South Korea.
“I’m not sure yet. I’ll be back.”
With a light smile, I opened the factory door and stepped out into a world filled with light.