How to distinguish edible mushrooms from poisonous mushrooms.
How to preserve handmade dairy products for a long time.
How to weave a sturdy netted bag that would not break even when used roughly, and so on.
Every resident of the north had their own know-how for surviving on this barren land.
‘Maybe that’s only natural.’
The land was barren and the climate was cruel, so they must have had to try anything and everything in order to survive.
‘Or is it the opposite?’
Perhaps only those who could survive in such a harsh natural environment had been able to continue living in the north.
He did not know which came first, but one thing was certainly regrettable.
This damned closed-off nature.
‘Their individual skills and know-how weren’t being shared at all.’
Why had Aiden opened this flea market?
Those who existed, yet did not exist.
The unregistered.
The market was the device he had chosen to draw out those who had lived in hiding while minimizing contact with outsiders.
He had believed that if the lord’s castle held the north’s largest trading place, where surplus goods could be exchanged, then those holding their breath outside the system would have no choice but to be incorporated into the system.
“Hmm.”
“What are you thinking about so deeply?”
It was Jamie.
“I thought it was about time for you to have finished a lap, but you weren’t coming back, so I came out.”
“Maybe, Jamie.”
“Yes.”
“This market might be able to change its form a little.”
“Change its form?”
“Not just a place where goods are traded, but a place where skills and people can exchange....”
Aiden’s mind began spinning rapidly.
‘If I can somehow combine the role of a market with the role of an administrative welfare center....’
If the market took responsibility for the movement of goods, while the administrative welfare center took responsibility for administration,
‘It feels like something could come of it.’
Jamie quietly guided his superior along.
Whenever his superior sank deeply into thought like this, he always found an answer. As his aide, Jamie’s job was to make sure no one disturbed him.
“Bwahahaha! Then if we go over there and have another drink.... Hic!”
A man who happened to pass near them while speaking loudly hiccuped at Jamie’s demon-like face, his eyes glaring fiercely, then quietly shut his mouth.
“Administrator, here are paper and a pen.”
“Ah, thank you.”
The two returned to the operations room.
Aiden began writing something down on the paper in a frenzy.
It was not organized yet. It was a kind of brainstorming.
Words that seemed completely unrelated filled the paper densely. When he wrote them down according to the flow of his thoughts like this and looked them over again after some time, he sometimes found a direction.
It was a method Aiden often used.
Boom, ba-boom, boom, boom!
“Waaaaaaaah!”
How long had he been doing that?
The sky was gradually growing dark, and it was time for everyone to clear off their assigned stalls.
As if they had been waiting, the cheerful sound of drums rang out, followed by cheers loud enough to shake the ground.
“What the? That startled me. What is it?”
Aiden, who had been lost in thought, was startled as well. He set down his pen and jerked his chin at Jamie, telling him to explain.
“Heh heh. Well, you told me to catch some kind of traveling troupe, didn’t you?”
“...I did?”
When?
Aiden was dumbfounded.
He was not some bandit chief, so there was no way he would have given such an order....
“Hiss. I wonder if there’s a traveling troupe somewhere.”
“Should I catch one?”
“It feels empty if there’s no guest singer at a neighborhood event.”
...Had he?
He had absolutely not meant it that way, but with an aide who was needlessly overzealous, it would not be strange if he created a singer out of nothing and brought one along.
Boom, ba-boom, boom, boom!
Somehow, the drumbeat that had sounded exciting just a moment ago now felt ominous.
“You didn’t really catch innocent people, did you?”
“What do you take me for? I merely put up a suitable prize and opened a singing contest.”
“A prize? Did we have something worth putting up as a prize?”
“I put up a few barrels of liquor.”
“Ah.”
Come to think of it, there was quite a bit of liquor in the lord’s castle’s underground storage.
More than half of the previous administrators were said to have lived while relying on alcohol, so it could be considered their legacy.
“But would people go onstage just because you put up some liquor?”
“And when it comes to liquor, we northerners’ eyes turn, don’t they? Heh heh.”
Thinking about it, the servants of the lord’s castle also took every chance they could to drink, sing, and play instruments.
‘When we have a company dinner, it really goes all the way.’
Seeing this, they seemed less like cold and cynical Vikings and more like spirited people from North Hamgyong Province.
“How about it? Will you go watch?”
“No. I’ll go inside, organize what I was thinking, and sleep. Take responsibility for wrapping things up after the singing contest ends. Can you do it?”
“Of course!”
Somehow, he did not feel particularly trustworthy, but Aiden had to trust him and leave it to him.
He could not handle every single task alone.
“If anything happens, contact me. I’m always in the lord’s castle anyway.”
“Please sleep early today. You worked hard from dawn.”
“Well, I should.”
His eyelids were already as heavy as lead.
‘There’s still a mountain of work to do....’
Should he try training his body by following Jamie around?
‘Would my stamina get a little better if I did that?’
Then he would be able to work more.
Aiden felt so aggrieved he could go mad, wondering why his stamina was not as good as a northerner’s, leaving him unable to work more even when he wanted to.
Chirp, chirp, chirp!
Trill—!
At the sound of mountain birds, Aiden sprang up.
“How long did I sleep?”
He could not remember the last time he had slept this refreshingly, but he also felt a little uneasy.
It felt as though he had overslept and was on a sure path to being late.
“Phew.”
However, Aiden soon let out a sigh of relief.
He had remembered that even if he was late, there was no superior to berate him.
“This is nice. Is this why everyone was so obsessed with promotion?”
That he considered public service his calling had not changed from his previous life to now.
However, what he was interested in was, strictly speaking, “public duty” itself. Because of that, he had not cared in the slightest about the other things needed for promotion—in short, things like “networking.”
Thanks to that, even though he did more than enough work, he had not received much recognition and had not been promoted quickly.
‘But here, I’m even acting as the head of an institution.’
If he had known how enjoyable it would be to approve and evaluate the work he himself had initiated, he thought he might have been a little more ambitious about promotion in his previous life too.
Click.
“I’m finally getting a little used to this cold air. ...Hm? What is that?”
Aiden had opened the window and was stretching in the wind when he spotted servants carrying armfuls of things somewhere.
‘What is that?’
Were they stealing goods?
‘There’s no way.’
If they intended to steal something, they would have come in while everyone was asleep at night and left through a side gate. Why would they confidently head toward the main gate through the garden, where workers were crawling everywhere?
‘Then where are they going with those?’
In the end, Aiden could not overcome his curiosity. After washing his face roughly, he went outside the lord’s castle.
He quickly caught up with the servants carrying all kinds of goods on their heads and backs.
No, to be exact, the moment he left the lord’s castle, he discovered servants who had come out carrying bundles upon bundles of things.
There was coarse bread and water, dishes, cleaning tools, and the like.
The cleaning tools were one thing, but he wondered why bread and water were necessary.
“......”
The moment Aiden saw the scene outside the lord’s castle, he was rendered speechless.
“Snore, phew!”
“Wake them over there too! The sun is already high in the sky!”
“Get up. You have to sell again today!”
“Goodness, my stomach. I can’t even remember how much I drank.”
“Ugh. My stomach is turning....”
He had thought things would not be neatly cleaned up.
After all, he seemed to have heard the singing contest continue endlessly through his sleep the previous night.
He had assumed that northerners with liquor, songs, and food would not easily break up the gathering, but...
‘Still, this is a bit much.’
Aiden’s brow furrowed.
The empty lot in front of the lord’s castle remained exactly as it had been, with none of the tables or sections used for yesterday’s event cleared away. All around, people had merely spread out rough cloths and curled up on top of them to sleep.
There was not even the slightest sign that anyone had tried to clean up the flea market at all.
Veins bulged one after another on Aiden’s forehead.
“Wake up, hurry!”
“Mmm, who is it this early in the morning....”
“If lying in the street suits your constitution so well, should I just take your desk out of the office entirely?”
“Who are you to take my desk.... Huh! Administrator!”
In the atmosphere, which resembled a refugee camp, finding Jamie was not particularly difficult.
“What the hell is this? Explain.”
“Pardon? What do you mean?”
“I mean why people are sprawled out like this, and why the empty lot hasn’t been cleared at all.”
At Aiden’s question, Jamie stammered out an answer as though wondering why he was asking something so obvious.
“...Uh, well, the singing contest went on until late last night.... And, uh, if we had cleared the empty lot last night, people wouldn’t be able to do business today.”
“?”
“Ah! But as you can see, the singing contest stage has been neatly cleared away! Heh heh!”
Jamie pointed to the pile of planks, saying that even after drinking, he had taken up an axe, dismantled the stage, and turned it all back into lumber.
“It’d be a waste to throw out those boards, so I’m going to put them in storage and use them later when making something.”
Jamie added something like, “The more we save supplies, the better, is it not?” and snorted as though asking Aiden to praise him quickly.
“What does that mean?”
“Pardon? So I mean, I think there will be somewhere to reuse those boards....”
“Not that. What do you mean they wouldn’t be able to do business today?”
“Pardon?”
“Hm?”
They seemed unable to understand one another.
Neiiiigh!
“Ah, I told you horses can’t come in here!”
Somehow, a familiar line came from far away.
‘I feel like I heard that yesterday too.’
Aiden’s head turned so sharply it nearly snapped.
“......!”
An absurd sight entered his eyes.
“Now, now. Come this way. This reads as number thirteen, and it marks your place. You must not open your stall at another table!”
“Goodness, of course, sir! Thank you!”
“Now, next!”
Without realizing it, Aiden slapped his own cheek.
‘Was this genre regression, not possession?’
Why were the events of yesterday morning repeating again?
“Goodness. Looks like we’ll have to make a few more tables. It seems there are more new people who came to do business than people who left after finishing business yesterday. Heave-ho!”
“No, wait. Just wait.”
“Yes, Administrator.”
“Are we doing this again today? No, I mean, how many days are we doing this?”
“Uh.... Shouldn’t we still do it for another two or three days?”
“What? Why? Didn’t we announce that the flea market was yesterday?”
“Come on. People don’t follow dates that precisely, do they? A difference of a few days gets lumped together. Heh heh.”
“...Still, people didn’t come early, did they?”
“There were quite a few who came early. Where do you think the logs for making these tables came from?”
“...Those people cut them down and brought them?”
“They are being fed, so they should do at least that much work. Where in the world is there anything free?”
“......”
At that moment, the words that surfaced in Aiden’s mind were Korean time.
During the United States Army Military Government period, the term referred to Koreans failing to keep appointment times because they had not adapted to the modernized new way of life.
Some said that it was not simply a matter of whether systematic time management existed, but that some people deliberately came late because they believed arriving on time diminished their authority.
‘Whatever the reason, this place is a mess too.’
What did it even mean to not only fail to keep the exact hour, but also fail to keep the exact day?
Neiiiigh!
“I told you not to bring horses this way!”
Even in the midst of this, the footsteps of those who had proudly violated the market day continued.
“Shit....”
Aiden was troubled again today.