I Became a Black Market Tycoon with an Inventory - Chapter 4

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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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004-Warehouse-type Mart
4. Warehouse-type Discount Mart
The next day, I didn’t go to school.
Based on yesterday’s atmosphere, Yang Jung-won seemed to be in a foul mood.
On days like this, the probability of getting beaten up the moment I arrive is 980,000%.
There’s nothing to learn at school anyway.
There’s no reason to brave a 980,000% chance of getting pummeled just to go to school.
All that waits for me there is a beating.
No one nags me about skipping school.
No teacher scolds me for my absence.
That’s what my existence is at school.
Like an NPC that doesn’t matter whether it’s there or not.
Actually, I’m worse than an NPC.
NPCs in games at least have a role.
I don’t even have that.
Wait, do I?
Being Yang Jung-won’s errand boy.
Come to think of it, if I don’t go to school, the only person who’d miss me is Yang Jung-won.
Isn’t that ironic?
The person who misses me most when I’m absent is the person I hate the most.
That’s amusing.
Now that I think about it, Kwon Ju-ah’s gaze from yesterday keeps bothering me.
It was the kind of look like she wanted to tell me something.
It was genuinely the look of someone who knew something.
It doesn’t matter.
After a day passes, it’ll fade away like it never happened.
Besides, I’m not going to school for at least three days.
Just like when I did attend, everything will unfold as ordinary and unremarkable.
I’ll still be the errand boy buying bread, taking a few hits here and there.
Why do I keep going to school even though I get beaten like that?
Because I want to have at least a high school diploma.
That’s all.
What do I even have?
No parents or relatives to help me.
And money? Forget about it.
On top of that, my frame is so frail that I can’t fight or do sports.
I at least hoped to have a decent face, but that failed too.
Academics?
Obviously I can’t do that.
Maybe because no one looked after me when I was young, my foundation is pathetic.
No foundation, and suddenly I’m doing well in high school?
It’s impossible.
There was no one beside me whispering the comforting lie that I’m smart but just don’t study.
If someone had said that, would I have studied?
My personality?
Wouldn’t that be even more messed up?
Aren’t I the textbook case of someone who grew up unloved?
How could someone like that have a good personality?
Whatever I do, something’s always wrong with me.
I’m the type who’s negative about everything, full of complaints and grievances.
You try living in an environment like this.
See if you don’t end up like me.
I deserve a medal just for not going insane or ending my own life.
Honestly, I came close to that edge myself.
I only managed to scrape by and eat because I got this Inventory.
Anyway, I go to school to earn just one thing in this miserable environment—a high school diploma.
Why?
I already told you.
I have nothing.
If I want to work at a Convenience Store, I need at least a high school diploma, don’t I?
To survive, I need a high school diploma.
I have to have one.
Only then can I say I’m a normal, ordinary person.
A normal person, just one whose circumstances aren’t great.
That’s my dream—to become that kind of person.
But the path to that dream is nothing but treacherous.
To get a high school diploma, I need to attend at least two-thirds of the 190 school days in a year.
That means I have to go to school at least 130 days.
What’s funny about this country is that they’ll let you advance even if you can’t study, but they’ll hold you back for absences.
You go to school to study, but studying doesn’t matter—only attendance?
It’s strange, but it works in my favor.
Right now, I just need to stay on Yang Jung-won’s good side.
If he made me study too, I’d have to study while taking his hits.
The GED?
Have you ever tried solving GED practice problems?
You have to study harder than you’d think.
And like I said before.
I’m not good at studying.
I have no foundation.
For someone like me, the GED is an incredibly difficult and grueling hurdle.
A high school diploma is this grueling and treacherous to obtain.
So don’t dismiss someone just because they graduated high school.
It’s likely the hard-won result of someone bleeding themselves dry.
.
.
.
I woke up earlier than usual for no particular reason.
Waking early meant my stomach growled early too.
I decided to check my inventory.
Fortunately, I had quite a bit to eat.
The best thing about this inventory is
that items are preserved in their exact state when stored inside it.
If I put in piping hot beef soup, it remains steaming hot even days later when I retrieve it.
If I put in cold ice cream, it stays frozen solid no matter how many days pass.
Which means.
The beef I procured from the Food Ingredient Mart remains perfectly fresh and preserved.
I started grilling beef from early morning.
I boiled some spicy mixed noodles and ate them together.
Eating beef almost every day lately has made me a bit tired of it.
At first, just eating meat alone made tears stream down my face from the savory richness.
I didn’t even bother with salt and such condiments.
But after a few days, I found myself dipping the beef generously in sauce before eating it.
Today too, I ate spicy mixed noodles with beef as a side—the noodles were the main dish.
Anyway, eating well lately seems to have had an effect.
I feel like my height and build have grown a bit.
Though I’m still a runt regardless.
.
.
.
.
Today I planned to visit a warehouse-type mart.
I’d heard membership-only marts had such excellent merchandise.
As a minor, I didn’t have a membership card, so I couldn’t enter those marts.
Apparently, minors without a guardian couldn’t get membership cards issued.
That’s fine.
There are warehouse-type marts you can enter without a membership card.
I withdrew ten thousand won from the three million I’d received from the Food Ingredient Mart owner to charge my transit card.
Walking there would be too far.
I searched the map for the nearest warehouse-type mart to the subway station.
It was in Magok.
Fortunately, there’s an internal passage connecting directly from the subway station.
I thought I’d have to walk for quite a while, but this is incredibly convenient.
And stepping into the warehouse-type mart felt like entering an entirely new world.
Food Ingredient Mart? Regular supermarket? Forget about them.
There’s no comparison whatsoever.
The scale is completely different.
This is paradise.
I wanted to grab everything in sight, but I forced myself to stay calm and decided to browse first.
After one lap around, instead of calming down, I only wanted more things.
Starting with fruits, the Meat Section was excellent too.
But the prepared food section absolutely captivated me.
Raw fish, sushi, smoked pork belly, eel, meal kits ready to heat and eat anytime.
These are exactly what I need right now.
I can always grab beef and such from the Food Mart later.
Here, I’ll focus on prepared foods.
Whoosh.
Whoosh.
I can feel my inventory filling up.
I’m glad I cleared it out before coming today.
They have clothes here too?
I don’t have any clothes.
Nike?
Adidas?
This is amazing.
Whoosh.
Whoosh.
They have shoes as well.
Levi’s jeans—exactly what I’ve been wanting.
Whoosh.
Whoosh.
Do people need to start taking supplements from a young age these days?
Whoosh.
Whoosh.
They have bread and cakes too.
Wh…
Wh…
There are even home appliances.
Wh…
Wh…
It won’t fit.
Is it already full?
There’s still so much more to pack—how is it already full?
I’d never thought my inventory was small before, but stepping into this warehouse-type mart made it feel cramped.
Of course, the items here came in bulk sizes with large packaging,
and I’d grabbed various things I liked, which contributed to filling it up,
but still, there was so much left to collect, and stopping felt wasteful.
I headed to the public restroom.
Sitting on the toilet, I tried to mentally reorganize my inventory space.
I thought about how, when packing for a trip, the volume can shrink or expand depending on how you arrange things.
If I packed it as tightly as Tetris, couldn’t I fit more?
I struggled to manipulate the inventory images forming in my mind.
It felt like closing my eyes and reaching into a suitcase to rearrange the items inside without seeing them.
When we want to pull something from a bag without looking, we have to fumble around for a while.
A suitcase, being much larger, was far more difficult.
I couldn’t even touch the items inside the suitcase.
But since I could put things in and take them out, it felt like I could move things around somehow.
‘If I cross these bottles vertically, wouldn’t more space open up?’
‘If I use the gaps on the sides, couldn’t I fit more items?’
Invisible,
untouchable.
Just something I had to do by pure intuition.
Despite such circumstances,
with the heart of a pirate trying to claim even one more treasure from Treasure Island,
I sat on the toilet in the public restroom, doing my absolute best to fit in just one more item.
How much did I struggle?
Click!!
Actually, there was no sound, but it felt like something had clicked perfectly into place.
Like in Tetris when a long straight piece appears and clears all the blocks you’ve stacked?
Either way, it was as good as hearing it with my own ears.
With that click, everything changed.
Like a blind man’s conjecture, my vague, estimated inventory suddenly became visible like a game window.
Five columns, two rows.
A total of ten slots appeared before me.
The first slot contained Beef X10,
the second slot contained Beef X2,
the third slot contained Supplements X2,
the fourth slot contained Shoes X1
and so on, displayed in this manner.
Huh?
They stack?
Are items being grouped by similar categories?
Sitting on the public restroom toilet, I was so startled that I flushed immediately.
It just felt like the right thing to do.
Smack~~
I slapped my own cheek.
I was so shocked by my own discovery.
From that game window image, I could deduce several things.
I didn’t know how many packages of beef I had, but there were quite a lot.
Seeing that slot 1 contained 10 and slot 2 contained 2, it appeared I had a total of 12 packages of beef.
The maximum number that could fit in one slot was 10.
To confirm whether my theory was correct, I just needed to test it with the inventory.
Acting like a rational person, I flushed once more and returned to the Warehouse-type Mart, then added several more pairs of shoes to my inventory.
Whoosh
Whoosh
Whoosh
Shoes X2
Shoes X3
Shoes X4
Huh?
Really?
It works like this?
Why?
Wait—why doesn’t matter.
What good would knowing the reason do me?
Would I refuse to use it if the reason wasn’t satisfactory?
Regardless of the reason, I’m going to use it anyway, so I shouldn’t waste time thinking about reasons.
I should just focus on using it well.
Anyway.
To summarize:
Before, I was like a blind man putting things in and taking them out of a suitcase.
But today, through this upgrade, I became aware of something like a game status window.
As a result, I could now store identical items stacked together.
The capacity I could put in the inventory expanded from the size of one suitcase to
10 of each type, across 10 slots.
In other words, I could now store 100 items.
Both the quantity and volume had increased significantly.
Thank you.
I offered my gratitude, even though I wasn’t sure who to thank.
Should I thank the Mart owner?
Thank you, Warehouse-type Mart owner.
I’ll make sure to gather everything carefully.
From that point on, my method of storing items in the inventory changed.
Previously, I’d just put things in if I liked them, but now I had to organize by category to fit more.
For example.
Beef occupies slot 1 with 10 packages and slot 2 with 2 packages.
That means I can fit 8 more packs.
I gathered a balanced selection—tenderloin, ribeye, shrimp meat, and so on.
I continued wandering through the Mart, filling my inventory with necessities.
I had to calculate carefully.
When I was a porter, I could store anything regardless of type,
but now I could only use 10 slots.
And 2 of those were already filled with beef.
8 slots remained.
Clothing was absolutely necessary.
The fortunate part was that tops and bottoms weren’t categorized separately.
Clothing was just one type.
I wished shoes were the same, but they weren’t.
Today I’d acquired 10 pairs of shoes.
In all my years, I’d never owned 10 pairs of shoes combined.
At least slippers counted in the same slot as shoes.
I carefully gathered supplements, vitamins, red ginseng, and probiotics.
I had to think about my health.
Besides meat, I grabbed meal kits I could boil anytime,
and since I couldn’t eat only meat, I picked up sashimi too.
I also grabbed rice.
Then I moved to the camping section.
For someone like me, living at home as if camping, nothing was more useful than the camping corner.
I put in a tent first.
The weather was getting cold—it was freezing.
I’d need to pitch a tent at home to sleep.
I grabbed a sleeping bag too.
I always picked the most expensive items.
As I’ve always said.
Having lived as a beggar, I had no criteria for judging what was good or bad.
So by my standards, expensive meant good.
Normally, I should have prioritized restoring the electricity, water, and gas that had been cut off,
but living without them was surprisingly bearable.
If I thought of it as camping, it worked.
I didn’t need gas anyway.
I could use the Public Restroom nearby for water.
I can just get water from there and use it.
Drinking water?
Can’t I just drink tap water from the restroom?
I’ve been drinking it since childhood, so I have no aversion to it.
Electricity isn’t a major inconvenience either.
The only electronic device I own is my phone.
These days there are plenty of places to charge a phone anyway.
And what does it matter if I don’t have it for a while?
No one calls me anyway.
With that mindset,
I began gathering camping gear one piece at a time.
Until the remaining slots were completely full.

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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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