Chapter 3. Kim Suyeon (2)
“You’ll fall into a deep sleep just like this.”
“Yes……”
Soon, Director Oh began snoring loudly.
The sound made my ears feel dirty, so I quickly grabbed my bag and left.
My steps were incredibly light, as though my entire body had turned into a feather.
That trashy boss probably won’t show up at the company for a while!
But that alone wasn’t enough to satisfy me.
I really should quit after all!
I’d wanted to do that for a long time, but I’d never even been able to try because of the same problem everyone had.
Money.
And in my case, the situation was even worse.
Just like in my previous life, I’m an orphan with no one in this world to rely on.
Apparently, I’d been found near a Gate when I was around five years old.
Whether my guardian had died or simply abandoned me, no one ever came looking for me.
On top of that, perhaps because of the shock of being caught up in a Gate incident, I had lost all my memories from before then.
After that, I lived in an orphanage.
But there was a fire there, and all the records from when I was first found were destroyed.
I was transferred to a second orphanage, where I was given a new name.
Because of that, whatever chance I might have had of finding my guardian disappeared forever.
Well, there was nothing I could do about it.
The teachers at the orphanage did their best to take care of the children, but I was timid and quiet, so I never really managed to fit in.
When I turned nineteen and my protection period ended, I combined the government support money I received with every penny I had desperately saved from part-time jobs and started living on my own.
Then I joined One Star Guild as a temporary employee.
Director Oh and the other higher-ups always told me the same thing.
“We hired you because we felt sorry for you, Kim Suyeon. You should consider yourself lucky. So work even harder, okay?”
I genuinely believed I had been lucky to get the job.
Afraid of being fired, I worked with everything I had.
And I lived like a slave for a full three years.
Then, not long ago, I learned a shocking fact.
Guilds receive government subsidies if they employ Gate victims who grew up in orphanages, don’t they?
And they had kept that from me!
That wasn’t all.
This damned guild had kept me as a temporary employee the entire time.
Even though they sometimes make me work on Saturdays!
Worse, I worked around seventy hours every week, yet my monthly salary wasn’t even two million won.
Reporting them to the labor authorities hundreds of times still wouldn’t have been enough.
Just thinking about it again makes me furious. Yeah. I’m getting out of this damned company, and then I’m reporting them to the labor office!
If my pockets were completely empty, I might have hesitated.
Of course, my financial situation still isn’t exactly great.
But I did have things worth money.
The mana stones, monster materials, and Random Draw Box inside my inventory.
They were Grade 5 items, so altogether they should easily be worth more than two hundred million won.
But I can’t sell the mana stones or monster materials.
Mana stones dropped when monsters died and provided clean, pollution-free energy.
Monster materials were revolutionary resources that could be used to create entirely new things.
Naturally, every government considered the mana stones and monster materials obtained from Gates within its territory extremely important.
Transactions involving them were monitored thoroughly so they could be properly taxed.
That was why every guild employed ordinary office workers to manage them.
That’s exactly what my job is.
I managed the mana stones and monster materials collected by One Star Guild’s Hunters.
Naturally, I knew their types, effects, uses, and prices extremely well.
With the government watching them like a hawk, I’ll definitely get caught if I try selling them secretly. Then they’ll find out I’m a Hunter.
And thanks to my job, I knew something else too.
So if I don’t want to get caught, I can only sell the Random Draw Box.
It was a rectangular box about the size of a watermelon.
The number representing its Gate grade was written on top.
It glowed in all kinds of colors, had absolutely no weight, and was an incredibly mysterious item.
It released so much mana in every direction that even ordinary people could feel it.
Though it’s actually pretty infamous.
As the name suggested, the contents of a Random Draw Box were random.
However, the results were heavily influenced by the Luck stat.
In other words, no matter how high the box’s grade was, or how high the Hunter’s rank and level were—
Apparently, if your Luck stat is low, you’ll get something terrible.
Because of that, Hunters with low Luck would either ask Hunters with higher Luck to open the boxes for them or simply sell them to another Hunter.
I should sell my box too.
Because no one could know what would come out of one, the government didn’t tax the buying or selling of the boxes themselves.
Instead, it strongly encouraged people to sell them to Hunters with higher Luck stats.
