I Became a Black Market Tycoon with an Inventory - Chapter 15

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This chapter was translated by Lunox Novels. To support us and help keep this series going, visit our website: LunoxScans.com

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015-Special Forces School
15.
“Check your shoe size here and take them.”
“Take your undergarments.”
“Confirm your combat boots.”
The first thing we did upon entering was to collect our supplies.
In a warehouse-like space, supplies sat in boxes,
and we lined up to gather the designated quantities for each item.
Of course, I stashed a few extras in my inventory.
Who knows what might happen.
When would I get another chance to shop like this?
It’s good to have spares of underwear and socks, isn’t it?
Same with combat boots and fatigues.
Looking in the mirror wearing the military uniform, some dopey kid stared back at me.
Wearing a military uniform doesn’t automatically make you look cool.
The Special Forces School where I am.
The training period is seventeen weeks.
Even excluding the one-week provisional enrollment.
Militarization training: five weeks.
Airborne training course: three weeks.
Specialization training: nine weeks.
I’ll spend eighteen weeks here.
After eighteen weeks of training and commissioning, I’ll have four years of mandatory service.
Just thinking about it is sweet.
That means I don’t have to worry about anything during that time.
The training was harder than I expected, but it’s fine.
It’s not like I’m the only one getting dragged off and beaten; we’re all suffering together.
Especially these instructors here—they’re clearly professionals, so they’re different.
They know exactly where it hurts and what’s on my mind.
Were they shamans in their past lives?
“Lift your legs higher.”
“Twist your body more firmly.”
“Jump with conviction.”
They pinpoint exactly what’s difficult and call it out.
It’s tough, you bastards.
“Is it difficult?”
“No, sir.”
“Do you want to leave?”
“No, sir.”
“Do you want to go home?”
“No.”
Of course it was grueling, and I wanted to go home.
Going home wouldn’t bring warm meals or family, but I still wanted to go.
I wanted to sit on a wooden bench and grill beef.
But I knew everything I thought was wrong, so I refused unconditionally.
The instructor smiled with satisfaction watching me.
Some couldn’t resist the temptation of going home and withdrew from the program.
They would now either apply to become non-commissioned officers or enlist as regular soldiers.
Today was the day for the Special Forces extreme training course.
A 50km forced march.
The extreme training course (map reading, casualty evacuation, individual combat tactics, ammunition carrying, tire rolling)
had to be completed within two hours and thirty minutes.
Doing a 50km forced march in full combat gear was
manageable enough, I suppose.
But if you’re going to do it, why do it at night and make people walk all night instead of during the day?
More than the difficulty, I was overwhelmingly drowsy.
My clothes, soaked with sweat, clung uncomfortably to my skin.
After eating one combat ration, we formed a team and proceeded through the extreme training course.
Using map reading, we checked the map and confirmed our position before evacuating the casualty.
The casualty weighed 100kg.
Shouldn’t they reduce their weight a bit?
Obesity is supposedly a major cause of adult diseases.
Our team transported the casualty on a stretcher.
Sharing the load among several people somehow made it feel harder.
Next was individual combat tactics.
Literally individual combat tactics.
You just roll around in the dirt.
Rolling this way, rolling that way, crawling under barbed wire—before you know it, you’ve arrived.
And then ammunition carrying.
This one’s a real pain.
With all my strength drained, I had to carry these damn heavy ammunition cans.
These cans have such an awkward shape and weight that you can only move them by gripping the handles.
I had to carry two of them.
If I didn’t hold one in each hand, there was no other way to carry them.
I was clearly gripping them in my hands, but the ammunition can suddenly drops to the ground with a thud.
Looking at my hands, I realized my hands were releasing the can.
My hands weren’t obeying me.
I couldn’t put any strength into my hands.
The others were passing me,
but I couldn’t move forward because I couldn’t put any strength into my hands.
But I couldn’t just abandon the ammunition box either.
Part of me wanted to throw it into my inventory and move on,
but while the others were struggling and groaning under the weight of their boxes, I couldn’t just stroll along like I was taking a leisurely walk.
I considered opening the ammunition box and storing its contents in my inventory, but the box wouldn’t open.
With no choice, I carried it and walked three steps, then rested,
walked two steps, then rested,
then just rested.
Drowsy,
my body drenched in sweat, sticky and uncomfortable,
my hands completely drained of strength, unable to grip anything,
and the ammunition box was damnably heavy.
It was the worst.
Yet somehow, I managed to reach the checkpoint.
One step at a time, and before I knew it, I’d arrived.
But there was no time to rest.
Tire flipping came next.
I had to flip a tire weighing over 300 kilograms all the way to the finish line.
Fortunately, this was a team effort, like the casualty evacuation drills.
With multiple people pouring their strength into it, that massive tire moved.
As if venting all the stress from training onto the silent tire,
I pushed it roughly.
After flipping the tire several times, the finish line appeared before us.
We were in first place.
“Yesssss!”
“Special Forces, fighting!”
“We’re first!”
“Yesssss!”
We climbed onto the tire we’d rolled and savored our victory.
I hesitated for a moment, wondering if I should join them,
but since no one seemed to mind, I quietly climbed up as well.
It was only thirty centimeters high,
but standing on that tire, the world looked different from where I’d been.
It felt slightly awkward, as if I’d stepped into an ordinary, normal life.
But that feeling—
someone wrapping their arm around my shoulder,
celebrating together with me—wasn’t something I disliked at all.
Soldier training was complete.
I could now call myself a true soldier.
The foolish kid in the mirror was gone.
Now it felt like I could do anything.
Confidence overflowed within me.
.
.
Confidence was bullshit.
Airborne training was the real deal.
The five weeks of training I’d received was merely foundational, nothing more.
Airborne training meant jumping from aircraft.
Through endless repetition, we prevented injuries and trained to land safely on the ground.
It was just infinite repetition.
We practiced landing safely all day long, without exception.
On the ground,
in the air,
on mock towers,
wearing VR headsets,
and even riding some bizarre white elephant-like contraption before
we could finally jump from a helicopter.
How should I describe it?
A feeling both terrifying and exhilarating?
A confidence-like sensation that I’d actually done it had emerged.
After that came nine weeks of identity transformation training,
and since the previous training had been so grueling, this wasn’t particularly difficult.
Instead, the sheer volume of material I had to memorize, absorb, and study was staggering.
Unlike my past, when I’d lacked private education and already fallen behind from elementary school enrollment,
here everyone started on equal footing, so I could keep pace.
But was it really right to enter elementary school already knowing Korean?
Shouldn’t the school be teaching that?
I struggled terribly in elementary school because I didn’t know Korean.
Military life was good.
Sleep well, eat well,
run if ordered to run, memorize if ordered to memorize.
If told to be quiet, I simply shut up.
No thinking required, no opinions needed.
I just had to walk the well-laid path as it was.
It was hard to find a more comfortable place than this.
Was it because I lived comfortably in such a comfortable place?
They said I ranked first in this cohort.
Me? Why?
I only did what I was told.
I’d seen a documentary like that once.
A documentary analyzing kids who got into Seoul National University.
How could I get into Seoul National University?
It was a program to research how to maintain good grades at Seoul National University.
The answer was to memorize the professor’s words exactly, without changing a single syllable.
Record the professor’s lectures, turn them into notes, memorize them word-for-word, and write down the answers as they were taught.
Those kids excelled at studying.
Perhaps I instinctively understood Seoul National University’s educational method.
If I’d received private tutoring since childhood, maybe I could have gotten into Seoul National University too.
The day of my commissioning ceremony.
The day I shed the label of candidate and became a sergeant.
My fellow trainees who trained with me all had someone come to congratulate them on their commissioning.
My peers embraced their families, girlfriends, and friends who came, and received congratulations with a salute.
The only person no one came to see was me.
And my fellow trainee Seo Dae-hun.
Seo Dae-hun is an orphan, which I envied.
When we weren’t yet close,
Seo Dae-hun himself told me he was an orphan,
and when I said I envied him, Seo Dae-hun threw a punch at me.
I’ve said it countless times,
if you throw a punch with your shoulder that wide open, it’s impossible to miss.
I dodged his fist and countered with a one-two.
I told Seo Dae-hun about who I was.
I lived alone, and though I had a father, I never saw his face properly.
I starved and lived in a wretched place.
Being a pathetic shuttle was my life.
I couldn’t help but envy kids who at least got to eat in orphanages.
That’s why I envied orphans.
Hearing those words, Seo Dae-hun looked at me with eyes that acknowledged me.
That day, we talked for a long time about what had happened to us.
Things you’d think could never happen unfolded in our lives like everyday occurrences.
It was as if we were competing in a “Who Lived Like a Beggar” contest,
our conversation was pathetic, sordid, and revolting.
Miserable, shabby, and pitiful.
Yet somehow, exchanging such stories made me feel a little lighter.
The resentment inside me?
Something that had hardened solidly seemed to crack a little.
It was a strange feeling.
Seo Dae-hun must have felt it too.
Seo Dae-hun cried for a long time while we talked.
A grown man crying like that.
Seo Dae-hun’s parents died in a traffic accident, he said.
He’d been in a collision with a 25-ton dump truck at a rural intersection, causing an accident.
When Seo Dae-hun’s parents passed away, he had no guardian and was sent to an orphanage.
He was fifteen at the time.
Unfortunately, for an orphan to receive military exemption, they need to stay in the orphanage for at least five years.
Seo Dae-hun unfortunately fell short of that requirement.
But Seo Dae-hun said he would have enlisted anyway.
“There are too many strange things about my parents’ death. It’s weird that the Police Officers forced it to be concluded as a simple traffic accident. I was too young to understand back then, but thinking about it now, everything about it is suspicious.”
“The reason I enlisted in the Special Forces is just one thing. Learning how to kill people. That’s why I came here. Once I learn that, I’m going to kill every single bastard who murdered our parents.”
Was it really okay for him to tell me such confidential information?
I’m someone who received Seoul-style education, so if asked, I’d confess everything without lying.
Seo Dae-hun’s father was apparently a Gangster.
A fairly well-known one in the region.
After Seo Dae-hun’s father died,
the second-in-command of that Criminal Organization and a rival organization merged through an M&A.
Their power and scale grew enormously.
It’s definitely suspicious.
If I had my way, I’d storm in and devour them all,
but with my current skills, I’d have trouble even knocking down a door.
I want to learn combat, but I don’t have money.
And even if I trained at a Gym like that, it would just be sports.
Not techniques for killing people.
That’s why I came to the Special Forces to learn techniques for killing people.
Wow.
I’m envious.
Did he write this in his application essay?
The narrative structure is perfect.
I had an incredibly hard time because I had nothing to write in my application essay.
So I basically wrote fiction.
I envied Seo Dae-hun for having such a narrative.
The Special Forces for accepting him is also magnanimous.
They accepted him even though he said he came to learn techniques for killing people.
The Special Forces really are different in every way.
We congratulated each other.
Seo Dae-hun was the first to speak.
“Congratulations on your commission.”
“You too. Congratulations.”
Even after our commission, we continued to receive training according to the schedule.
The longer we spent time together, the closer we felt to each other.
After the training ended,
personal maintenance time.
Before bed.
While standing watch.
We shared many stories with each other.
We became the kind of people who could open our hearts and speak honestly.
Had I finally gained a friend?
I wondered.
I wanted to confirm it.
But I never spoke the words aloud.
Because I could be wrong.
Most of the time, I was the one who was wrong.
I had no confidence, having never truly had a friend before.
I thought of them as a friend,
“Damn beggar bastard, you think I’m easy because I played with you? Friends? No. No, you piece of shit. Don’t you dare act like you know me anywhere else.”
Most of the people I’d considered friends had responded like this.
Along with kicks.
So I didn’t confirm it.
I didn’t want to speak the truth aloud myself.
I simply wanted to stay close.
All training at the Special Forces School had ended.
Now all of us from the same cohort would be assigned to different units and depart.
Both Seo Dae-hun and I had to leave this place now.
“Where are you going?”
“I’m going to the International Peace Support Unit. What about you?”
“I’m going to the 3rd Airborne Division. The International Peace Support Unit is the unit that deploys overseas, right?”
“It is, but it’s not like we’ll deploy so easily. They’re reducing deployment numbers these days anyway.”
“Still, you’ll probably go out at least once during your service.”
“So what? What’s the problem? We can stay in touch and meet up. We have phones. Let’s coordinate our leave and meet somewhere outside once.”
“Of course we should.”
I left the Special Forces School.
The cohort member—uncertain whether they were truly a friend—also departed.
Now I was heading to a new place.

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This chapter was translated by Lunox Novels. To support us and help keep this series going, visit our website: LunoxScans.com

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