TOIGC 41

Chapter 41 …

King of Odd Jobs (2)

This… someone deliberately messed with the concrete.

Though he had spent most of his life as an odd-job laborer on construction sites, working alongside other crew members for years had taught him a thing or two. Because of that background, Yoongi could state with absolute certainty that the concrete he was looking at right now was destined to cause a catastrophic failure down the road.

Grind.

He had poured so much ambition into this project, and seeing concrete that was so obviously sabotaged made his teeth grind in rage.

It doesn’t take a genius to figure out who ordered this.

Right now, no sane person in their right mind would commission an act like this on his construction site. A quick peek through the local grapevine would reveal the deep ties between Choi Cheol-kyu and JSD. That meant whoever ordered this must be someone completely out of the loop.

Uncle… no, Choi Cheol-min, you’ve officially crossed the line.

He could shrug off the tantrums thrown in front of his grandfather. He could easily ignore the shouting fits over having his goodwill rejected. But pulling a stunt this brazen to actively pull the rug out from under people’s lives? That was something he could never forgive.

Hoo.

Suppressing the rising fury inside him, Yoongi forced himself to resume walking. Meanwhile, Ryu Geun-tae casually wrapped up his round of encouraging words to the workers.

“Keep working as hard as you are right now, and I promise you’ll never have to worry about the food. Just keep your heads down and give it your all. Got it?”

Leaving behind the cheering chorus of the laborers in that section, Yoongi and Geun-tae continued their walk. And by the end of that day, Yoongi had flagged suspicious anomalies in several other spots.

“Director, here is the department store blueprint you requested.”

Inside Kim Jeong-sun’s construction office.

Yet the person Geun-tae was addressing as “Director” wasn’t Jeong-sun—it was Yoongi.

“Spread it out.”

A massive blueprint covered the entirety of the reception table. The layout for the first floor of their planned premium department store—featuring two underground basements and seven stories above ground—lay fully exposed before Yoongi, Kim Jeong-sun, Ryu Geun-tae, and Choi Cheol-kyu.

Screeech, screeech, screeech!

Beneath the harsh glare of the fluorescent lights at ten o’clock at night, Yoongi circled several spots across the blueprint with a black marker.

“Director Kim, you see these spots I just circled?”

“Yes, I do.”

Watching Kim Jeong-sun bow respectfully, Yoongi met his gaze and spoke in a low, heavy tone.

“Cross-reference these with the work logs and find out who worked on these specific sections. From the crew foremen down to every single laborer.”

“Understood. Are there issues with those areas?”

Kim Jeong-sun’s expression stiffened instantly. He knew full well that the “young director” standing before him wouldn’t issue an order like this without a damn good reason.

“Yes, massive problems. But don’t confront them or tip them off—just identify who they are. And make sure the guys linked to those work logs get reassigned to work in a specific location.”

“You want me to smoke them out without blowing our cover yet, correct?”

“Right. Just gather the evidence first.”

“I’ll handle it. And I am deeply sorry. I should have caught something like this myself…”

“Don’t worry about it. Our budget isn’t exactly overflowing, so everyone’s stretched thin keeping up with the pace. I’m more than happy to help cover these blind spots.”

While the department store under construction was indeed a premium project, its overall scale and construction techniques were vastly less complex than modern high-rises. Even so, the daily capital bleeding out was no joke.

Over 450 laborers deployed on-site daily. With daily odd-job wages sitting around 15,000 won, calculating all 450 workers at baseline wages meant burning roughly 7 million won a day. Add in material costs and equipment rentals—which usually edged slightly higher than labor expenses—and the actual daily burn rate hit nearly 15 million won. By modern standards, that equated to roughly 70 million won a day in construction costs.

It was a massive relief that Yoongi had acquired the land at dirt-cheap prices beforehand; if rumors had leaked that a department store was going up there, the land acquisition costs alone would have been astronomical.

“Thank you for understanding. Still, Director, if these issues aren’t addressed quickly…”

As Kim Jeong-sun trailed off, Ryu Geun-tae stepped in to pick up the thought.

“Director, if we factor in the cost of tearing this down and rebuilding it, our current capital liquidity is going to take a serious hit. Things are already running pretty tight as it is, so depending on how the numbers shake out, we might need to consider temporarily hitting pause on construction.”

Yoongi’s dividend payout from Microsoft this year totaled just over $400,000—roughly 260 million won in Korean currency. By all conventional logic, that amount shouldn’t even sustain twenty days of construction, given how outrageously expensive building a department store truly was.

Even so, because Yoongi had strategically scooped up prime real estate in Seoul at rock-bottom prices and was pulling in steady rental income from the existing buildings, coupled with smart cash flow management, he still had enough fuel in the tank to keep construction running through late September. Of course, this was only possible because defending his Microsoft equity wasn’t requiring an immediate capital dump at this exact second.

“Keep pushing forward for now. Even if we have to rebuild these sections, it only shrinks our runway from late September to mid-September, right? I can figure something out by then.”

“Understood.”

Trusting his young boss implicitly, Geun-tae nodded right away, bringing the four-way meeting at the construction office to a close.

“To be honest, I’m a bit surprised myself.”

In Yoongi’s darkened bedroom, only Deokbae’s glowing, bluish spectral form floated lazily in the air.

<Weren’t a be field? in pro supposed this to you>

“I’m closer to a seasoned field veteran, not an actual structural engineer. If I were coasting through this life relying purely on vague memories without actually studying the books, I’d have gone bankrupt ten times over.”

<Anyway, If Just September, a and are back backup budget? construction dividends grinds halt how in in, income, it late next of patch pick plan? planning pool rental rest roll the then? things to until up wait what’s with year’s you your>

Yoongi shook his head.

<Whoa… expression genuinely is now right terrifying… your>

An expression scary enough to unnerve even a ghost. With a quiet grinding of his teeth, Yoongi spoke in a voice sharp enough to slice glass.

“My uncle is going to provide it for me.”

“Burp—!”

One of Oh Jung-sun’s lackeys thumped his chest and belched into the open air. This wasn’t unique to Jung-sun’s crew—it was a sight mirrored by practically every single laborer working on Yoongi’s site.

“The daily rate here is a little tight, but I gotta hand it to them—the food is top-tier.”

Hearing that, Jung-sun clicked his tongue, though he didn’t bother arguing. The food at the on-site cafeteria genuinely was that good. Drawing from his past-life experiences, Yoongi had kept wages hovering right at the competitive baseline while pouring his energy into making other aspects of the job attractive. Sure, workers who cared exclusively about raw cash would work a day and move on, but laborers looking for hot, decent meals planted their roots right here at this site.

This turned out to be a win-win-win: great for the construction office, great for the workers, and great even for Oh Jung-sun’s crew.

“Besides, it’s nice that the faces around here don’t change much. Makes it easy for us to keep blending in.”

“My thoughts exactly. Anyway, same routine as always today. Got it?”

At Jung-sun’s prompt, the lackeys resumed the exact routine they had been executing on this site for weeks. They subtly sabotaged the concrete mixes and sprayed corrosive agents across areas where construction had already been completed. Sure, a rigorous future inspection would catch most of it, but Jung-sun planned to grease the palms of the inspectors with bribes anyway, fully believing his scheme was foolproof.

Compared to shaking down ten 500-seat luxury lounges, this is easy money.

Humming a tune as he actively wrecked the construction site, Oh Jung-sun and his crew never dreamed they would ever get caught. Work zones were strictly divided by crew, making internal security airtight.

What they failed to realize, however, was that ghosts genuinely existed in this world.

<Show’s over.>

The moment circumstantial suspicion hardened into absolute certainty, Deokbae sealed the fate of Oh Jung-sun’s crew in his mind.

In this era, getting a construction project off the ground without greasing palms was practically a pipe dream. While modern times weren’t drastically different, back then the common folk felt the squeeze much more directly.

Roaming cops would loiter nearby just to pick fights with the day laborers or, in worse cases, haul office staff down to the police station purely on a whim for sport. Municipal bureaucrats were no different: despite having granted official approvals, they would show up unannounced on a regular basis, inventing imaginary code violations to extract drinking money.

If public officials and police officers behaved like that, local street thugs were infinitely worse. Street gangs and neighborhood hoodlums constantly rolled up swinging wooden clubs, shaking down sites under the guise of “security fees.” These extortion losses were inevitably passed right down the line, squeezing the laborers’ daily wages and subcontractors’ margins.

Yet Yoongi’s construction site was different—at least when it came to meals, they spared no expense. Even in the dead of summer, watching the laborers sucking on ice pops while working made it obvious that the prevailing sentiment on site was, “At least life is manageable here.”

That sentiment applied to Oh Jung-sun’s crew as well. The sight of them sucking happily on ice pops while carrying out acts of unmitigated betrayal made Deokbae shake his head in disgust from his vantage point floating in midair.

Sure enough.

Ten grim-faced soldiers clad in full combat gear marched onto the construction site, heading straight toward the section where Oh Jung-sun’s crew was stationed.

Clack, clack!

Dressed in full field gear, the metallic clatter of the rifles slung across their backs echoed with every step—more than enough to send a wave of icy terror through everyone on the site.

“Round them up!”

The veins on the neck of the captain—whose uniform bore three gleaming diamond insignia—bulged as thick as a finger, his roar shaking the entire construction site.

Total gridlock.

Workers within direct line of sight whipped their heads around, while those further away rushed over to find the source of the commotion.

“Wh-What the hell is going on?”

Before Oh Jung-sun could finish, the captain stepped forward and slammed the back of his hand across Jung-sun’s cheek.

“You bastards! Where do you think you are, mixing foreign impurities into concrete?!”

For a split second, Oh Jung-sun’s vision went black.

Wait… how? How the hell did they find out?

Jung-sun frantically looked back at his lackeys, but they just stared back with blank, trembling expressions of utter bewilderment.

“Th-There’s some kind of mistake. We’d never pull a stunt like…”

Slap!

Accompanied by a sharp crack, Jung-sun shrieked as he spat a mouthful of blood and broken teeth onto the dirt. It had been nothing more than a backhand blow, but it knocked out a chunk of teeth and blood, reducing Jung-sun to a state where he could no longer speak coherently.

“The work logs point straight to you—every single spot where the concrete failed happened right where your crew was deployed! What’s that about a mistake? You and the bastards backing you up are red sympathizers trying to sabotage the ROK-U.S. alliance! Drag them away!”

Oh Jung-sun pissed his pants right then and there.

R-Reds?!

But with his jaw wrecked, no words came out.

I’m not a commie! I swear I’m not a commie!