Chapter 492. Financial Difficulties (3)

The Hunter of the Other World Who Is Being Misunderstood

Chapter 492. Financial Difficulties (3)

Press.

I rubbed the bridge of my nose with my finger. I'd hidden my appearance with a magic tool, but the core of me was still the same, so old habits slipped out.

"All right, we've placed our orders, so let's rest here for a bit."

"It's so dry inside the dungeon I thought I was going to die--"

"Want me to share some lip balm?"

Still, I couldn't keep sighing to myself in front of perfectly fine people.

"Anyway, about ninety percent of the workers probably feel the same way I do."

My thoughts continued. It was only short-term day labor, but regardless, the people in front of me were colleagues who would be working with the Archmage for a while.

"And if I keep repeating the obvious--how I don't want to work--it'll obviously stress everyone around me too..."

So I waited quietly as so not to bother the Earthlings.

***

A few minutes later. They said there was a shop nearby, and sure enough, the gukbap the Earthlings ordered arrived in the blink of an eye.

"Look at all that steam rising!"

So Kim Giryeo began eating while still in disguise.

Tub.

For the record, the reason this side of him was treated as something unfamiliar was because anyone who had seen his real face was either dead, or threatened, or forced into silence as a modern-day slave through an unfair contract.

But the people around him didn't know such grim truths and warmly welcomed the new harvester.

"At the end, try mixing in the paste. It tastes different then."

"The rice is hot, so be careful."

"Is the cubed radish spicy? Tell us if it is. We've got dongchimi here too."

An environment that praises chopstick skills for picking up a single bean.

"They really take good care of foreigners (aliens), so honestly, it feels nice."

For now, Kim Giryeo didn't react much more than that. Just the fact that he'd have to work all day weighed heavily on him. Kim Giryeo barely swallowed the curses trying to burst out as he crunched on the kkakdugi.

"This guy eats kimchi well too!"

"Must have lived in Korea a long time--"

But just as the noisy atmosphere began to subside,

"No."

Suddenly, a negative thought popped up from a corner of the place.

"It's not just someone from another region--what's with a foreigner who speaks Korean so well suddenly showing up at a tiny gate like this?"

Black hair. And aside from that, a harvester with nothing but ordinary features shot a covertly hostile glance at the alien.

"He looks like he's in his 20s no matter how you look at it..."

For the record, the sharp look that man was starting to show wasn't a simple reaction. Even if the newcomer hadn't been a foreigner, he was in a position where he would have been wary all the same.

"Seeing someone that young sprawled out working here... did that b*stard also ruin himself by rushing into some investment or something?"

The man muttering inwardly was originally the youngest employee on the harvesting part-time team. And for good reason. In modern society, people generally looked down on gate-related work. In an era where truckloads of people suffered from dungeon trauma, most citizens would flat-out try to stop non-awakened people from working in other worlds. As a result, industries near monster emergence sites inevitably gathered a certain kind of crowd.

Those who had failed spectacularly at speculation. Or unskilled laborers whose physical strength had been eclipsed by low-grade awakened individuals, and so on.

"There was even a lady who quit her stable job saying she wanted to work at a relaxed pace, but most of them are people without much of a resume."

For various reasons, the average age of civilian harvesters hovered around their forties. So the Korean man sitting in the corner had, until a few days ago, stood out as the team's only "early thirties" member.

"Oh my, why would a student come all the way here to work?"

"Ah, I'm not a student. I graduated college a while ago......"

"Then that's even more admirable! My kid's about your age, but they won't even clean their own room at home, let alone work a part-time job."

It was a really good environment. For starters, his team had no hazing. On top of that, everyone treated him with special care as a rare young man, and the workload itself was absurdly light, which made him happy. It was truly worthy of being called a "sweet gig," and to be clear, this Korean man in his thirties had been quite satisfied with the job up until now.

"Ah, damn it."

But today, some stranger had shown up and swept away all that attention. From his perspective, there was no way he wouldn't dislike the change.

"Just because one kid in his twenties joined, all the attention shifts over there."

Of course, he himself had received all kinds of perks simply because he was close in age to his teammates' children. Still, the Korean man in the gray hoodie stiffened his expression.

"They're giving away their hearts and souls just because he's a foreigner."

He, on the other hand, had been careful of possible hazing when he was new. He'd been polite. He'd made his own efforts, in his own way. Now that people's gazes vanished in an instant, a sense of hurt welled up inside him. And the thoughts that followed were, to be honest, a twisted expression of his rising resentment.

"Honestly, the people here are a problem too."

And then, right as he was lost in those thoughts--

"All right! Those of you who've finished eating, start getting up and prepare to enter the dungeon!"

The work leader's voice rang out. While someone had been grumbling to himself, mealtime had passed by more than expected.

"I finished my gukbap while thinking anyway, so whatever."

With his body warmed by a hot meal, it was time to actually earn his pay. The man in the hoodie popped into his mouth some chewable toothpaste that had come into fashion thanks to the development of the dungeon industry. After finishing this minimal hygiene care, he returned to his designated spot.

.

.

.

A few minutes later. The hired harvesters finished replenishing their energy and re-entered the dungeon all at once. For reference, this F-rank gate was owned by a domestic pharmaceutical company. He'd never heard the details, but people expected that the plants harvested here would be used to manufacture natural-molecule medicines.

"As if it weren't obvious this is a shoddy gate, the entrance keeps forming tiny, so you can't even bring in farming equipment......"

Moreover, the plants they had to harvest from now on indeed had colors that looked healthy for the body. The worker in the hoodie looked up.

"We worked all morning, but there's still plenty left."

What came into view was a mass of turquoise plants very similar in color to the surrounding grass. These were today's targets, which had to be harvested by hand and bagged. But even though the dungeon--colloquially called a field--was full, one worker's expression was strangely dark.

A moment later. The work leader's voice rang out.

"All right, everyone! Make sure you only pick the correct plants. If you mix in the wrong ones, you'll end up going home late sorting them later."

It might have sounded obvious, but this gate's field was actually tangled with multiple plant species, like an ordinary forest on Earth. Unfortunately, the above-ground root portions of the weed-like type A and the needed type B looked similar.

"I'm in my thirties--not old enough for presbyopia--but just looking at them like this, I can't tell the difference at all."

So the method civilians had used so far was simple: pull the plant up, carefully check the medicinal root part, and then put it in the bag--

Pop!

Pop!

Pop!

Why was that foreigner--and how was he--working that well?

"Crazy..."

The sounds just now came from the new foreign harvester digging up plants. And yet, the people around him couldn't take their eyes off his actions for quite a while. Everyone here was a harvester who'd spent at least several months living while staring at the same plant, after all.

"Was that guy actually an experienced worker from another region......? How is he picking only the right ones when even machines can't tell without mana...?"

"Mr. Jang, what did you just say? I couldn't hear you."

"Oh, no. It's nothing, Team Leader."

One outsider alone had abnormally excellent classification skills. And there was actually a fairly simple reason for that.

Compared to the specimen collection assignments I got back in the day, this is child's play.

Having honed his learning to an obsessive degree, Kim Giryeo was well-versed in classifying newly encountered specimens.

"Wow, seriously. How does our newbie pick out medicinal herbs so well?"

"The smell is different."

"The smell?"

"If you come close and smell them like this, the two plants are a bit different. So it's easy if you distinguish them that way."

"Oh my, hahaha. I just can't tell at all."

Crunch.

With his enhanced sense of smell, Kim Giryeo picked out only the medicinal herbs, almost like a bear. And a certain early-thirties man watched the scene with a hollow look.

"I smell them, they all just smell like the same grass..."

To him, distinguishing these plants felt about as hard as telling male and female chicks apart.

But over there, just strolling up close was enough for valuable material to cling to the guy. At this point, he felt a little unfair.

"That crazy foreign b*stard. If his nose is that good, he should go work for some perfume company or something. Why the hell did he come here?"

When he'd casually asked the temp recruiter that morning, he'd been told the foreigner had no experience at all. Far from lacking ability as a harvester, the newbie was conspicuously superior.

With no grounds to criticize him, the man could only grumble inwardly.

"Anyway, if he just suddenly shows up pretending to be a newbie, that harvester definitely screwed up big in another region and came back here. Otherwise it makes no sense."

Should he go all out and run a criminal background check or not? Other complaints came to mind as well, but in the end, he was here to earn money too, so he couldn't afford to do anything else while digging up plants.

"Ain't it hot."

"The gate we worked at last time was cool and nice......"

"But sometimes they make us pick fruit in a snowfield. Compared to places with extreme weather, this is a hundred times better."

Two hours. Three hours. The afternoon after the meal passed with people silently immersed in work.

"Is that foreign laborer not desperate for money? If he wanted to earn more, he could grab another bag and come back, but after filling one, he's blatantly slacking off?"

But as more time passed, the opportunity he wanted began to appear from a truly absurd place

.

.

.

It was twelve hours later.

"Hen?"

More precisely, it was around the time the field-harvesting shift at a certain gate entered its second day. The Archmage, who had come out to work again today, was immediately given new information.

"This time, you're entering the gate without a safety manager?"

"Yes!"

"So, that E-rank Hunter we saw yesterday hasn't even shown up for work?"

Honestly, he should have realized it from the moment he saw that hunter unfolding a camping chair inside the dungeon and reading a book.

"It's fine. Like you saw yesterday, every morning a Hunter comes in and clears out all the animals."

"Th-that is! The animals that live here are slow as hell to begin with. Even if an eighty-year-old came in, it wouldn't be dangerous."

The pay was at a level looked down upon in proper hunting circles. But when paired with civilians, it seemed E-rank were still a fairly expensive superpower. The pharmaceutical company that owned the gate chose not to dispatch a Hunter to cut costs.

"Come to think of it, keeping a hunter tied to one place all day would cost as much as the combined minimum wages of all the harvesters here."

No safety manager. If you ran the numbers in your head, it was an understandable decision.

But the alien mixed in among the harvesters was surprisingly interested in Earth's laws.

"But this would be illegal, wouldn't it?"

A pure question soon popped out.

"Dungeon-related transport work has no restrictions because gate-clear teams cooperate directly, but for civilian-based operations like miners or harvesters, the law says you must always be accompanied by separate protective personnel......"

The reactions around him weren't good. The easygoing faces that had been so kind to the outsider cooled rapidly.

"So what, you want everyone who showed up today to go home empty-handed?"

"Hahaha. This kid really doesn't know how society works yet."

Money was always necessary. And since they'd already been harvesting this way for months without a single injury, people wondered if anything would really happen now. The harvesters on site had violated related regulations multiple times already, so they felt no resistance to entering the dungeon. Only one person felt uneasy.

"What is this uncomfortable feeling now?"

The massively bloated guild situation, too. Why did nothing seem to go according to plan these days?

Just as the disguised Kim Giryeo was reflecting on life by himself--

"Ah- sir. If you're not going to cover everyone's wages, then let's use some tact and let this slide."

The familiar thirty-something harvester jumped into the conversation.

"Judging by how well you know the law, did you maybe prepare for the civil service exam before?"

"The civil service exam...?"

"But honestly, I'm sorry, this kind of thing is a bit inconvenient for us. Laws are one thing, but out here on site, we have to be flexible if we want to get paid."

Kim Giryeo kept insisting that headquarters should be held responsible for violating safety regulations, but no one around him listened. Instead, they nodded along to the words of the thirty-something man who'd taken the lead, warning that if headquarters took note of them, they'd never be able to work as harvesters again.

"If you keep this up, you'll end up on the blacklist soon."

They even whispered a certain piece of jargon to properly scare him.

"Blacklist?"

The head of a super-large guild. An enchanter. A civil servant embedded in the Hunter Association headquarters. And the undisputed number-one Hunter in South Korea, among others.

The rookie harvester, who had all kinds of influential contacts saved on his phone, finally sank into thought.