TOIGC 50

Chapter 50 …

I Am a Businessman (2)

“Huh?”

At that single word, Fernandez let out an utterly foolish sound before he could even stop himself.

“Why look so shocked? You turned me down right away, so I’d already started looking for a replacement. It’s not set in stone yet, but I’ve already lined up a few interviews.”

“W-Wait a second. You’re not going to hire me?”

“Nope. I have zero interest in forcing someone to work for me when they clearly don’t want to.”

“You’re not going to find anyone with my level of talent easily, you know.”

“It’s not like we’re building a world-historical monument here. It’s just commercial interior design for a department store, not the exterior shell. Qualified replacements are a dime a dozen.”

“No, wait a minute…”

Fernandez wanted to say something, but his mind was spinning so fast he couldn’t even figure out what his argument should be.

“If you don’t have anything else to add, I’ll be heading out.”

“Wait, wait a second!”

Yet Yoongi made no move to stop getting up.

“If you just walk out like that, what am I supposed to do?! Am I supposed to spend the rest of my life being tortured by ghosts?”

“That’s hardly my problem. By that logic, do you dedicate your entire life to starving kids in Africa? I’ve got enough on my plate just looking after the people in my immediate circle; I’m hardly some saint going around worrying about total strangers.”

“You gave scholarships to all those other kids, didn’t you!”

“That’s only because they’re going to be working under me later on.”

“Why didn’t you give me the full story from the start? Why!”

Convinced that the moment the kid in front of him walked out, he’d be condemned to a lifetime of sheer agony, Fernandez broke down and started sobbing openly.

“Did you give me a chance to speak? Anyway, I don’t have a single reason left to hire you.”

As Yoongi turned his back, Fernandez dropped straight to his knees and lunged forward to grab the hem of Yoongi’s trousers.

“I’ll work! Let me work! Please, I’m begging you, let me work!”

Naturally, a scene like that in the middle of a cafe instantly drew the stares of every other patron in the room.

“Hoo… Fine, take a seat for a minute.”

Yoongi sat back down with an expression of deep reluctance. Sniffling hard, Fernandez scrambled back into his chair, and the conversation finally got down to brass tacks.

“So, what reason do I have to hire you?”

Fernandez found his tongue tied in knots all over again. He looked like he was on the verge of tears. Having a grown man sporting a Santa-clause-level thick, dark-brown beard sit there blubbering was an genuinely awkward sight even for Yoongi.

Is it time to dangle a carrot?

In truth, hiring Fernandez was a net positive for Yoongi anyway, so just keeping up the psychological beatdown indefinitely wasn’t a great strategy.

“Don’t stress over it too much. Just think carefully about why I should hire you and tell me.”

After pondering for a moment, Fernandez tentatively ventured a guess.

“Because I’ve got the talent…?”

“I already answered that just a second ago. I said I don’t need that kind of high-end talent for this gig.”

Fernandez fell back into deep thought. Then, wearing an expression that seemed to say surely not, he spoke up again.

“If I work cheap…?”

“Now that is something worth considering.”

Yoongi had been dropping hints from the very beginning—specifically, the message that ‘I have no intention of paying through the nose for your services.’

Still, for Fernandez, swallowing his pride to accept that wasn’t going to be easy. After all, he had been one of Gensler’s most promising rising stars.

“W-Well, exactly how much are you offering…?”

Back in 1979, America’s per capita income sat around $12,000, while South Korea’s GNP hovered around $5,500—roughly a two-fold difference. That kind of per capita benchmark typically aligned closely with an entry-level salary at a top-tier firm, meaning Fernandez should realistically have been commanding at least $20,000 annually based on his pedigree at Gensler.

However, Yoongi had zero intention of offering anything remotely close to that.

“Around $5,500 is what I’m thinking.”

“As a monthly salary…?”

When Yoongi flashed a bright, cheerful grin at the counter-question, the color drained straight out of Fernandez’s face.

“Are you out of your mind?!”

“Hey, even by any reasonable standard, $5,500 is… Look, my salary back when I was still at Gensler was already over $10,000—”

The fact that his salary had cleared $10,000 before 1973 proved just how heavily invested Gensler had been in him. Yet Yoongi felt no obligation to pamper Fernandez right out of the gate.

“Fernandez.”

“Yeah…?”

“That’s why people need to make good choices from the very start. If you’d just accepted when I first came looking for you, I wouldn’t have bothered hunting down other candidates. But you turned me down. That’s why we’re in this mess. I had to drag myself all the way out to Nevada just to find you, and now I had to come all the way here because you called. Do you have any idea how much time and money was wasted on all that?”

“That’s…”

Left completely speechless, Fernandez snapped his mouth shut.

“So make your choice. Are you going to take the job or not? That’s the only option you’ve got left.”

“Ugh…”

While Fernandez wrestled with his dilemma, Yoongi dropped the second carrot.

“We’ll be covering all housing expenses for your stay in Korea. So you can consider your effective compensation package to be quite a bit higher.”

“Oh, seriously?”

Color rushed right back into Fernandez’s cheeks. Workers in places like Silicon Valley pulled in hefty nominal salaries, but brutal local rent prices often left their actual disposable income surprisingly low. Having lived through that exact kind of financial squeeze, Fernandez couldn’t help but react strongly to the promise of free housing.

“Just one last thing… Do I have to work for peanuts like this forever?”

“If you actually demonstrate real competence, we can sit down and renegotiate a proper package once I reach adulthood.”

“When is that?”

“Seven years from now.”

“Seven years…”

“If even that doesn’t work for you, I can’t help you.”

In the end, Fernandez nodded.

“I suppose I don’t have a choice… But the second I start experiencing those nightmares again near you, I’m booking a flight right back to America. The only reason I’m working under you is to escape this godforsaken hell.”

“Don’t worry about it.”

Though Fernandez looked half-skeptical at Yoongi’s bright smile, a full night of uninterrupted, dreamless sleep later that night was all it took to cement his absolute trust in the kid.

Having checked into the same business hotel, Yoongi met up with Fernandez at the hotel cafe the next morning.

“Sleep well?”

Wanderin’ down without even bothering to wash his hair, Fernandez let out an enormous, body-shaking stretch of satisfaction.

“Haven’t slept this deeply in ages. I even had a wonderful dream.”

“A dream about beating the living daylights out of a ghost?”

“How’d you know?”

At Fernandez’s stunned expression, Yoongi simply smiled.

“Now do you see why you belong working under me?”

“Damn it… I really should’ve listened properly back at that log cabin… Letting my ignorance about Korea cloud my judgment cost me…”

“Well, it’s not like the opportunity is gone forever, right? Let’s look forward to seven years from now.”

“Yeah… I suppose. At least the friends I recommended will be interviewing with you around that time too…”

Part of the reason Fernandez had ultimately agreed to the meager pay was the fact that his acquaintances would soon be interviewing under Yoongi, allowing him to benchmark their salaries down the road.

When that time comes, I’ll make sure they don’t get paid any less than anyone else, at least.

Since it was unthinkable that an American employer wouldn’t scale pay somewhat to match Western standards when hiring expats, Fernandez decided to mentally categorize his low base salary as a ‘ghost-exorcism surcharge.’ He took a sip of the coffee the server had left on the table.

“Damn it, nobody ever believed me when I said I was seeing ghosts, and yet a kid from a country like Korea pulls it off…”

“If I went around telling people I see them, nobody would believe me either, so I keep my mouth shut. You’d be wise to do the same, Fernandez. The world tends to look at anyone different as a freak.”

“Well, I can’t argue with that. Why the hell did a ghost have to latch onto me of all people…”

“Who knows? Maybe you’ll end up getting the best treatment in the world right here from me.”

Yoongi was only half-joking, but Fernandez laughed it off as pure banter.

“Yeah, maybe I will. Anyway, as long as I can sleep this peacefully every night, I can hang in there for seven years. So, what’s my first assignment? I heard it was interior design for a department store.”

“There’s actually one thing I’d like you to do before that.”

“What is it?”

“Interviews.”

At Yoongi’s words, Fernandez couldn’t help feeling like he’d been thoroughly played.

What a mischievous little punk.

A few days prior to meeting Fernandez, Yoongi had received six additional candidate recommendations from Lianna—contacts who lacked a bit in raw skill, but belonged to her personal circle.

Of course, he had no intention of hiring all of them, but having scheduled interviews lined up anyway, Fernandez’s decision to come on board meant they could now conduct those evaluations with genuine professional expertise.

“Oh, right, Yoongi. What are we doing about the kids’ salaries?”

Thirty minutes before the interviews kicked off, Fernandez tossed the question over, and Yoongi offered a subtle, knowing smile.

“What do you want to do about them?”

“Er… Can I speak honestly?”

“By all means.”

After mulling it over for a second, Fernandez spoke up.

“It kinda rubs me the wrong way if they end up making more than me…”

<This Can’t amusing. anyone are bear doing else humans is see so to well. why>

Chuckling inwardly at Deokbae’s comment, Yoongi nodded and replied to Fernandez.

“Then use your judgment to figure out which of the six are actually worth hiring at that rate. Today’s session is purely to gauge whether they’re qualified and willing to work; we can hash out the actual compensation details in follow-up negotiations after the interviews.”

“Well, that works for me.”

“Oh, and while it doesn’t matter right now, once the interviews start, I’d appreciate it if you addressed me as ‘President’ or ‘Boss’. After all, this is a formal employer-employee relationship.”

“Ah, right. Optics and all that… Got it. I’ll make sure to watch my tongue the second we start.”

Scratching the back of his neck for a moment, Fernandez stroked his beard, prompting Yoongi to speak up.

“Do you really not need to shave that off? I heard you didn’t even use to have facial hair.”

“I just couldn’t be bothered back when I was falling apart, and now it feels like a waste to trim it off. Might as well just keep growing it.”

“Hmm, considering you stumbled down to the cafe unwashed the other day, I figured you were just completely letting yourself go.”

“That was only because I rushed down the second I got your call. I’m actually a remarkably neat and diligent guy.”

“Right… I’ll take your word for it.”

“I’m serious!”

Since there genuinely wasn’t any foul odor coming off him, Yoongi let it slide and waited for the interview schedule to roll around.

Prompted by the start time, Fernandez slipped right into a remarkably sharp, perceptive interviewing mode, engaging the candidates with incisive questions while Yoongi listened to the live feed from the adjacent room via Deokbae.

“Did any of them stand out as actually worth bringing on?”

“Honestly, two of them are completely hopeless.”

Clearly drawing on his years navigating real corporate environments, Fernandez had shifted straight into formal language toward Yoongi as promised—though since they were speaking in English, the distinction didn’t map precisely to Korean honorifics.

“So that leaves four.”

“Do you plan to hire all four?”

Yoongi shook his head.

“No. I’ll need to review the four candidates individually based on today’s interview logs. Which of them do you think you’d work best with?”

“Ah, these folks.”

Fernandez slid four application portfolios across the table, and Yoongi picked them up, carrying them back to his hotel suite.

<What? What Why’re are at chores like looking me now? saddle that? to trying with you>

While being treated to an impromptu shoulder massage courtesy of the white spirit, Deokbae looked at Yoongi with a distinctly anxious expression.

“Naturally. Can I put that ghost to work, too?”