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“I’ve checked it.”
“……That was fast.”
Chung Myung looked genuinely impressed as he glanced at Hong-ga. At that, Jwa Go-Hak let out a sigh and clicked his tongue.
“Hey, Taoist. What on earth are you planning to achieve being so naive? Do you really think a fellow like this did a proper investigation? It’s as plain as day he just poked around at useless—”
“Just as you said, after looking into the overall situation, I found something strange. The volume of cargo coming into the Gahwa Trading Company has increased by twenty percent, but the sales recorded in the ledger have actually decreased by about ten percent. Given the nature of a trading company, if the volume of goods increases, even if profits might vary, sales should naturally go up.”
As the information flowed smoothly like a running stream, Jwa Go-Hak blinked in surprise.
“Uh, go on.”
“Yes. Anyway, when I had my men check the ledger based on that, about twenty percent of the incoming cargo wasn’t being recorded at all. So I tried to check the condition of those items… but strangely enough, even though there were no records of them being shipped out, the goods had completely vanished.”
At this point, Jwa Go-Hak’s jaw dropped open on its own, and he was left speechless.
“Wh—… No, huh? How…? A laborer?”
Chung Myung looked at Jwa Go-Hak with a dull expression.
“So, what?”
“Ah, no. How could a laborer figure something like this out?”
“What are you talking about? He’s a laborer, of course he knows.”
“Bu— But he hasn’t studied.”
“Ugh.”
At Jwa Go-Hak’s clueless reaction, Chung Myung fiercely scowled.
“This is why I want to beat the living daylight out of you book-smart snobs. You guys think everyone lives like an illiterate bumpkin just because they haven’t learned what you define as scholarship.”
“……”
“Hey, you jerk! Obviously, people who have rolled around in the actual field know a lot better than someone who just reads books!”
Jwa Go-Hak looked at Hong-ga with an expression of supreme injustice.
Chung Myung’s words weren’t entirely wrong, but still, there’s a time and place to say such things…
“No, anyone can see he doesn’t look like that kind of person.”
“What? Are you saying just because that fellow’s face is rough, he can’t be smart?”
“Th— That’s not what I meant.”
Jwa Go-Hak hurriedly waved his hands in a panic.
“What I mean is… he doesn’t really look like the type who tries to solve things with his brain, so…”
“What? He doesn’t look like it? You’re a Confucian scholar, and you’re judging people by their faces? Are you saying someone who looks like this shouldn’t look at ledgers? What is it, even Confucius said—oh! Was it judgemental? Huh?”
“It’s To Judge a person by looks. It means if you judge people solely by their looks, you’ll make mistakes…”
“Oh, you know it well. If you know it so well, why did you do it?”
“……”
“Look at this. He got his feelings hurt.”
At Chung Myung’s hint, Hong-ga desperately twisted his fierce-looking face into a pitiful expression. For Jwa Go-Hak, it was an absolute nightmare.
Watching the suffering Jwa Go-Hak, the Mount Hua disciples shook their heads.
“Look, another victim is born.”
“It clearly doesn’t make sense, but somehow it sounds like it makes sense.”
“Amitabha. Once people start twisting words like that, it’s over.”
After having fun teasing Jwa Go-Hak for a long time, Chung Myung gulped down a cup of honey water and looked at Hong-ga.
“Anyway. To sum it up, unidentified cargo keeps coming into this house. And even the laborers working at the trading company don’t know much about it.”
“Yes, that’s correct.”
“Hmm. Is that so?”
It was definitely suspicious. It would be nice if they could search through that cargo.
“Can we find the missing cargo?”
“That might be a bit difficult. Once cargo leaves the trading company, it’s hard to track…”
“Ha-ha!”
At that moment, Jwa Go-Hak leaped to his feet.
“Look at this! Aren’t they unhelpful at a crucial moment? This is why you need systematic education!”
“……Does this jerk want the operation to fail?”
“How could I want that? What I mean is, going about it this way—”
Just as another tedious argument was about to start—
“Ah, thinking about it, that shouldn’t be much of a problem.”
“Huh?”
“Eh?”
Hong-ga, who had smoothly cut in, continued with a calm face.
“I checked with the laborers, and they say this kind of cargo has been coming in at intervals of less than half a month since this year. It’s been about ten days since the last batch arrived, so new cargo will come in within three days at the latest. We can just investigate that cargo, can’t we?”
Chung Myung turned back to Jwa Go-Hak.
“He says yes.”
“……”
Left with nothing to say, Jwa Go-Hak grabbed his head again and started muttering to himself. Watching this pathetic spectacle with a click of his tongue, Chung Myung turned to everyone and shrugged.
“You all heard it?”
“Yeah.”
“Then I guess you all know what we need to do from now on, right?”
“Huh? What do we need to do?”
“What do you think?”
Chung Myung curled the corners of his lips into a grin.
“We have to live as perfect laborers. For the next three days.”
“Hey over there! Are you not moving quickly?!”
“Yee-e-e-es! We’re goiiing!”
Jo Gul and Yoon Jong scampered over to the cart and began briskly lifting and moving large packages. The piles of cargo on the cart started emptying in an instant.
“Ho ho. My, the new guys this time around sure are strong.”
“You can say that again. They say they’re from Shaanxi, are people from up there all like that? They don’t even look like they’d be good at heavy lifting.”
“The guy who looks good at heavy lifting is over there.”
“Heave-ho!”
Baek Cheon, wearing a bushy fake beard, hoisted three large cargo loads at once and carried them.
“Oh my, you’re going to hurt your back like that!”
“I’m fine.”
“Then this way. Careful. Careful.”
As Baek Cheon strode forward with the cargo, the onlookers clicked their tongues in awe. To carry three heavy cargo boxes at once—each of which would make legs tremble if you carried just one!
“Now that’s a strongman.”
“He could make a lot of money even without being a porter.”
“Actually, I told him to apply for the local garrison, but he said he just likes living like this.”
“How can that be? From what I can see, a man like that isn’t someone meant for this kind of work. He must have been a mountain bandit chased away by the imperial army. He’ll probably show his true colors before long.”
“Tsk tsk. You’re saying that because you don’t know.”
“Huh?”
“He seems to have a son. Looks like there’s no mother.”
“Oh, really? So he’s raising the child alone? Heh-hem. He turned out to be a solid guy, unlike what he looks like.”
People looked at Baek Cheon with sympathetic eyes.
Feeling an itch at the back of his head from those gazes, Baek Cheon quietly clenched his teeth.
“Is there any more cargo?”
“Hey, why are you working so aggressively?”
“I feel like I need to work just to feel a bit more at ease.”
“What does that mean…?”
Seeing Baek Cheon nervously hoisting the cargo, the people once again let out exclamations.
“Anyway, the people who came this time are all good workers. If we’re going to hire laborers in the future, we should hire people from Shaanxi as much as possible. If I knew people from Shaanxi were all like this, I would have done so sooner.”
“Well, I don’t think it’s necessarily like that for everyone.”
“Yes?”
Right then, a loud voice was heard from over there.
“What is this, we’re short a man. Where did that little guy go again?”
One of the trading company members who came out to check on things shouted angrily.
“That hopeless bastard was walking around smelling of booze yesterday, and now he’s disappeared again?! I clearly said if I caught him again, I’d give him a beating!”
“Ah, he was definitely here until a little while ago.”
“Ugh! How did someone like that even get in?! I said we should kick him out right away!”
“We’re too short-handed right now… Please give us about three days.”
“Aish! This is why Shaanxi bastards—!”
Watching the huffing and puffing trading company member walk away, the workers shook their heads.
“There’s always a mudfish muddying the water everywhere.”
“People’s lives are all the same.”
“Tsk.”
Sizzzzzzle!
“Oh my! It’s burning! It’s all burning!”
Startled, an older kitchen woman rushed toward a pot emitting white smoke. She quickly snatched the lid off the pot sitting over the stove and made a crying face.
“No! I burned it again! Again!”
“……”
“I told you to watch it carefully and just flip it! You can’t even do that? Oh, it’s so frustrating! Oh-oh-oh!”
Yu Yiseol, who had been getting scolded by the woman, tilted her head.
“I was watching carefully.”
“What good does watching do?! Watching! You have to flip it so it doesn’t burn!”
“It wasn’t burning.”
“Oh my, my poor heart. Oh my!”
Seeing the scene from afar, Tang Soso quickly ran over.
“I’ll bake it again.”
“……Then what about the part that’s already burned?”
“Aish. It didn’t burn that much, anyway. Even if we can’t serve it to the guests, we can eat it ourselves. I’ll hurry up and make it again.”
“Would you do it again?”
“Yes, yes. Sago has never done this kind of work before. Please understand just a little bit.”
The woman looked back and forth between Yu Yiseol and Tang Soso, then let out a deep sigh.
“Alright. Do that. You’ve got your hands full.”
“It’s nothing.”
“Tsk tsk.”
Patting Tang Soso’s shoulder, the woman turned around to head out of the kitchen, when other kitchen helpers quietly approached her.
“How can you just let it slide like that? How many times has this happened already?”
“Forget it. Stop it.”
“Even so, how can we keep her in the kitchen? If we tell her to wash dishes, she breaks all the plates; if we tell her to prep ingredients, she ruins them all; and when we told her to just bake things, she burned them all.”
“Her knife skills were good, though.”
“That’s not what I’m talking about right now.”
“I said forget it.”
The woman waved her hand firmly.
“From the looks of it, she seems a bit slow, but look how hard she works just to take care of an older sister like that. Don’t you feel sorry for her?”
“……Well, that’s true.”
“We just have to understand a little bit. No matter how poorly we live, we aren’t so cold-hearted that we can’t look after one lacking person.”
“……You’re right about that.”
“Now, let’s get back to work. Quickly.”
“Yes.”
Tang Soso, glancing sideways at the kitchen workers who had gathered and then dispersed again, whispered softly to Yu Yiseol.
“It’s okay, Sago.”
“……I was watching carefully.”
“It’s fine, it’s fine. It’s no big deal.”
Tang Soso patted the dejected Yu Yiseol on the shoulder.
Honestly, this couldn’t entirely be called Yu Yiseol’s fault.
‘Saso did just as she was told.’
The problem was that the scope of “just as she was told” was a bit wider than for ordinary people.
When told to wash dishes without a single speck of dirt, she tried to scrape off even tiny specks normal people couldn’t see, ending up smashing the plate. When told to chop ingredients as finely as possible, she minced them like strands of hair. And when told to watch the pancakes to make sure they didn’t burn, she literally just stood there watching them burn.
Right, Yu Yiseol did nothing wrong. It’s just that she wasn’t used to the kitchen’s culture of “figuring it out and doing it in moderation.”
‘Those people are in the wrong, Sago isn’t lacking flexibility.’
If a person who follows instructions to the letter does a bad job, it means the person giving the instructions gave them poorly. Isn’t that just common sense?
So, for now…
“Hey over there. If you don’t have anything to do, help me with this.”
“Yes.”
Yu Yiseol walked over without hesitation to the person who called her.
“I’m trying to tenderize this meat by pounding it, you can do at least this much, right?”
“Yes.”
“You’ll probably have to pound it pretty hard. The meat today is tough.”
“How hard?”
“Huh? Don’t worry about that, just pound away hard.”
“Yes.”
“Alright, I’m counting on you.”
Yu Yiseol grasped the wooden mallet.
“Th—…”
Tang Soso, who was about to say something at that sight, saw Yu Yiseol’s dead-serious expression and simply turned her head away.
‘Where was that spare meat again?’
Unless she wanted to be eating meat porridge later, she better go grab some ahead of time.
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