Several hours later.
‘I wish someone would tell me this is a dream.’
Aiden could not believe his eyes.
Drinking cups rolling everywhere.
Dishes that looked as though a swarm of locusts had swept through them.
People, thoroughly tipsy, who had somehow linked arms and begun singing folk songs together as one mass.
“I have to clean up after this again?”
This had been one of the biggest reasons he had hated company dinners in his previous life.
The cleanup afterward.
Catching people who spouted nonsense like, “The fourth round is karaoke!” putting them into taxis, sending them to saunas, and even booking motel rooms for those who had become dead drunk.
‘I never thought I’d have to do work with not even a speck of productivity again.’
It was evening now, and the second market had ended as well.
For the first time since beginning his second life, Aiden had to keenly experience what exhaustion truly meant.
***
“You’re here, Administrator!”
“......”
“Why are you staring at me like that?”
“...Why are you fine?”
“Pardon?”
The next day.
When Aiden arrived at work, he found the situation utterly absurd.
“The other servants too. Why does everyone look fine? After making such a mess yesterday?”
Yesterday had turned into a company dinner for the entire lord’s castle.
It had been a night of madness, where they had not only destroyed every drop of liquor brought to be sold at the market, but also consumed quite a few jars of liquor brewed house by house in the village.
Naturally, when he opened his eyes that morning,
‘Work won’t go properly today, will it?’
He had thought that.
If people suffering from hangovers collapsed all over the place, holes would appear everywhere.
“Come on, how much did we even drink?”
“?”
“If a fellow has trouble working after drinking that much, he can’t go around calling himself a native northerner. Heh heh.”
Jamie puffed out his chest proudly.
Indeed, there was not even a trace of a hangover left on his face.
“...You came... to work....”
“Ah, you startled me!”
A familiar face appeared behind the hearty Jamie.
It was Kalisa, looking like a zombie, with the area under her eyes dark and sunken and her skin pale and bloodless.
“...You said northerners were fine. Is Kalisa an exception because she’s a woman?”
“Come on, Administrator. Kalisa isn’t from the north.”
“Ah, is that it?”
“She said several times that she’s from the capital. Did you not hear?”
Had she?
Now that he thought about it, he felt as though he had heard it.
However, he had apparently failed to remember because he considered a colleague’s hometown a private matter and had let it go in one ear and out the other every time.
He was certainly an excellent superior who respected his subordinates’ privacy.
“In any case, you must have suffered too, getting swept up by those northern bastards.”
“No, I am... Ugh...!”
“...Drink water. Water.”
“...Yes.”
“Ask the head cook to make you some honey water. You’ll feel better after drinking that.”
It seemed the only department whose work would not proceed properly today was the Commerce Development Department.
‘This kind of company dinner really won’t do.’
Just thinking about yesterday, when toasts, mixed liquor bombs, and all the things he had hated seeing in his previous life had appeared exactly as they were, still made Aiden shudder.
“Leisure, leisure....”
Someone might say it was still too early.
They might say these people barely had enough to scrape by, so when would they develop if they even cared about leisure?
‘But that isn’t how people live.’
Society was not a game.
That was what Aiden, an operations simulation enthusiast, had felt when he first became a civil servant and began working.
Sometimes, producing efficiency was not necessarily the right answer.
Because people were not machines.
‘Just because life is hard does not mean people can live working sixteen hours a day, seven days a week.’
Perhaps northerners resembled Koreans from his previous life quite a bit.
To be precise, not the MZ generation of the twenty-first century, but the generation slightly above them.
In other words, the generation that had spent its youth in South Korea when it was still a developing country and making a living was harsh.
‘The purpose of a company dinner is ultimately to strengthen team unity and improve closeness among members of an organization.’
Then why did they drink themselves senseless at barbecue restaurants day after day?
At least, Aiden thought this.
‘They didn’t know any other way.’
An era of rapid economic development.
Adults who had lived through an age where one would be weeded out unless one worked diligently with every part of one’s body.
Perhaps they had not been given the time to enjoy various forms of leisure and spend many hours exploring what they personally liked.
‘Drinking is efficient in that sense.’
It only took a few hours, could be done without going anywhere far, and for a few tens of thousands of won per person, people could even borrow the strength of alcohol to open up about what was inside.
In that sense, it certainly had good cost efficiency.
“Jamie!”
“Yes!”
“Prepare and submit a report immediately.”
“A report?”
“The Northern Daily-Life Leisure Improvement Plan.”
“......?”
“With yesterday’s company dinner culture and all, if we leave things like this, people will keep looking for alcohol whenever they have an excuse.”
“Come on, how many company dinners like that would we even have in a year?”
“That is true now, but what happens if people have more room in their lives going forward?”
“Well....”
“They’ll become more frequent.”
This was dangerous.
A society where alcoholism was widespread?
‘Especially in a place where even children who aren’t adults yet receive no restriction for drinking a few mugs of beer, it would be a problem if leisure concluded with alcohol.’
Aiden pushed forward.
“If we start only after problems are discovered later, it will be too late. We have to change the direction before then.”
“Yes, sir.”
At Aiden’s serious expression, Jamie realized this was not merely the administrator, who disliked alcohol, forcing an unreasonable opinion.
“Do not think too grandly just because it is about improving leisure activities. There are countless places where money has to go, so we cannot spend much.”
And then, one idea flashed through his mind.
“Since we are doing it anyway, it would be good if it could help the villages that recently joined the north blend naturally with the existing villages.”
In the north, each village had a strongly closed-off nature.
Moreover, the various villages that had not been registered in the family register ledger until now were sure to have almost no sense of shared identity.
‘That won’t do.’
They needed something that could bind the many villages scattered like dots together under the name of “the north.”
It was a kind of work to create a sense of peoplehood.
***
Meanwhile, in the central village of the north, where the lord’s castle was located.
“This is the cultivation calendar?”
Something closer to a picture diary than a calendar appeared in front of the village warehouse, with more pictures than writing because so many people were illiterate.
“It shows when to plant rye, when to harvest barley, and that sort of thing, right?”
“Well, it’s all stuff we know.”
“Really? You really know all of it?”
“No, do you think I wouldn’t know even that when I’ve spent all these years farming?”
“You really knew how to grow parsnips?”
“Well, that....”
“What about redcurrants? Watercress? Chard too? Really?”
“Ahem!”
“Heh heh heh.”
Some neighbors joked with one another, asking whether they knew or not, and snickered. But among them, a few people quietly stared at the calendar and sank into thought.
Babe was one of them.
‘Marjoram.... I think I saw the trading post buying that.’
Not long ago, the newly opened trading post had bought and sold various items, and because it publicly displayed the purchase prices for every item, he had gone in and out a few times for fun.
It was a kind of window-shopping.
He had nothing to sell right away, and even less money to buy anything, but looking at all sorts of goods and prices for no reason had been enjoyable.
Among them, what had caught his interest was herbs.
“...The lord’s castle said they would lease land cheaply. Should I try growing some there?”
“What?”
“Marjoram. My mother grew it a few times before, and we have some seeds saved.”
“Really?”
“Yes. I think they’ll still sprout. If my memory is right, it grew quite well. Well, it couldn’t withstand the cold and all died in winter, but if it blooms in summer, I think I can save the seeds and grow it again next year.”
“Then why not try it? Herbs are cash crops, so the price is decent.”
“That’s what I’m saying. But who are you...?”
Babe, the farmer, had been talking for some time before belatedly realizing that the voice agreeing with him was not someone he knew. He turned around.
Standing there was a black-haired man with a slender build unlike a northerner’s.
“A-A-Administrator!”
It was Aiden.
“I came to see if the calendar was being properly distributed, and I ended up meeting the first tenant of the lord’s castle farmland. It is a pleasure.”
“Ah, yes, yes!”
“So, how much land are you thinking of? If it is herbs, I do not think you will need that much land. Are you perhaps thinking of planting other crops as well?”
“Ah, well, that is....”
Babe’s eyes shook in every direction, unable to find a place to settle.
‘This is being decided like this?!’
It was true that the thought of growing the herb called marjoram had briefly crossed his mind.
However, it was not easy for a farmer to change crops.
“I originally farm rye, Administrator. I did show interest in marjoram farming, but it was only interest. Actually doing it is....”
“Goodness, if the rent is nearly nonexistent, what is the problem? From the looks of it, your forearms are no worse than our aide’s. I do not think you would have any trouble raising a tiny herb field while farming rye.”
“Ah, I am indeed quite strong, but....”
At the praise of his muscles, Babe’s face unconsciously spread into a broad grin.
Aiden had been making use of the fact that, with northern men, praise of their muscles got him halfway there.
“Even so, Administrator, no matter how low the rent is, what if I spend a whole year farming diligently and no one wants to buy it?”
“That is why the trading post exists, is it not?”
“Uh...?”
The farmer stood still for a while, as though a switch had been turned off, calculating this way and that.
‘Right, the trading post!’
Had he not become interested in marjoram in the first place because he had seen its purchase price at the trading post?
‘Th-Then.... If I lease farmland from the lord’s castle at a low price, plant marjoram, harvest it, and sell it to the trading post....’
The man trembled.
“I-I’ll do it! I want to lease the farmland, Administrator! P-Please lease it to me!”
Faced with their neighbor’s sudden plea, the villagers could only blink, wondering what on earth this was about.