I Only Baked Bread, but I Was Mistaken for the Best - Chapter 105
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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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Chapter 105. The Potato Bread of Truth (4)
Kwon Min-ji was a twenty-three-year-old university student this year.
Her major was Creative Writing.
She had always enjoyed reading, and when interest sparked in writing as well, it became the path she chose.
But reality was unforgiving.
While the act of writing itself was enjoyable, she possessed no talent for it.
Only after countless hours of desperate effort did I realize I could never move people’s hearts through text.
When my only father, a drunkard, failed in business and disappeared after squandering everything, I was left alone.
‘At least I had talent elsewhere, which was fortunate.’
As they say, even when the sky falls, there’s always a hole to escape through.
Though I lacked the power to move people’s hearts, I possessed other talents.
The blog I had written casually, like a diary, had thrived precisely because of that.
‘And I even got hired through that work….’
Everything began from there.
While searching for employment, one particular posting caught my eye.
It was a position writing and managing blog posts about bread.
Since I had always loved bread, such an offer seemed quite attractive.
I thought I had gotten hired, but it wasn’t employment at all.
It was merely the entrance to hell.
‘How much longer will this continue….’
Their strategy, exploiting my desperate circumstances, was ruthless beyond measure.
They advanced my salary, claiming I had no living expenses.
They even told me to stay at their house if I had nowhere to go.
But it was all lies.
My wages hadn’t been paid properly in months.
The initial advance was disguised as personal debt rather than salary, accumulating interest each month.
The offer to stay if I had nowhere else was no act of kindness.
It was purely the foundation for imprisoning me.
Thus a life was created where I remained trapped in a room, writing only what they demanded.
Violence was commonplace whenever they were the slightest bit displeased.
And what of recent events?
‘They even had me conduct comment terrorism after receiving requests from somewhere….’
Using roughly thirty accounts created from scraped IDs, posting malicious comments consistently had become part of my duties.
Now they were forcing me to commit acts beneath human dignity.
Yet there was nothing Min-ji could do.
I had no one to ask for help, couldn’t leave the room, and the internet-connected computer was always under their surveillance.
‘I just want to die….’
The bread left behind by the demonic woman I once thought was a kind owner caught my eye.
Human instinct was this powerful and cruel a force.
Growl.
Even in this dire situation, she still complained of hunger—that said it all.
Why had I given her that bread?
If I died right now, the projects I was working on would fall into disarray.
She was meant to eat it and weave more convincing lies to frame others—that was my intention.
Min-ji’s remaining conscience screamed at her.
It told her to die rather than eat this.
But she couldn’t do that.
“Hgh… hgh…”
She wanted to live.
Her life was pitch-black with no answers in sight, yet she couldn’t abandon the hope that some way forward might still emerge.
And so she picked up the bread that had fallen to the floor.
‘It’s been crushed…’
The bread, flattened by the violent impact.
Yet despite this, all the effort poured into baking this bread was transmitted to Min-ji intact.
‘They coated it with soybean powder and black sesame powder before baking. They must have put so much care into this…’
Others might have thought, ‘What’s all that stuff caked on it, trying to look earthy?’ But she, a true bread enthusiast who genuinely loved bread, could tell.
If they’d intended to make it easily, they would never have done it this way.
Moreover, despite being crushed, the filling inside hadn’t burst out—this suggested extensive research had gone into preserving that chewy texture.
All for this single, small bread.
“But I’m supposed to eat this and then write more garbage like that? Hah…”
A self-deprecating laugh escaped her.
She opened her cracked and burst lips and bit into the bread.
Though she tried not to lose hope, her gradually eroding spirit had pushed her to this point.
When the bread filled her mouth completely.
‘It’s delicious…’
Unlike the chewy exterior, the inside was filled with soft mousse.
And within it, she felt a crumbly sensation and a savory richness.
This was potato.
A potato bread reinterpreted in my own way.
But…
‘Can this even be called a reinterpretation?’
A reinterpretation meant adding the baker’s skill and choices while preserving the essence.
Normally, the differences that arose were minimal precisely because of this.
But what about this bread?
Whatever potato had been used, even made into mousse, its flavor shone brilliantly across her palate.
Honey? And a hint of richness?
Had I devised this strategy to fill and sustain the mouth with aroma and taste?
And what about the refreshing tartness of the berries that cut through when it might have been excessive?
‘This isn’t… just a new bread…’
It was bread so delicious it was almost embarrassing to call it potato bread.
I had always felt it whenever I left malicious comments.
Just how delicious must the bread be for people to cherish it so deeply?
Normally, even if I left a few negative comments, they’d disappear swept away by the tide of opinion, but this place had counter-arguments popping up as if there were some idol fan club protecting it.
‘But with a taste like this, I suppose it makes sense….’
Why was this welling emotion rising up inside me?
Yes, this was guilt.
And pangs of conscience.
Though I had chosen this path for survival, wasn’t this still something fundamentally wrong?
“Mmm! This is delicious! Oppa! This bread is really good. Try it!”
Watching those people outside behave that way, was hurting others truly the right thing to do?
‘This can’t continue.’
All the effort, passion, and time that went into baking this bread.
For the sake of those who would eat it, surely this couldn’t keep happening.
With that thought, Min-ji opened her blog with trembling hands.
The clicking sound of the mouse accompanied the appearance of a new post composition window.
‘The first line should be about my current situation….’
My fingers had never felt so alive.
All the times my words hadn’t come out properly must have been because I was lying.
I never knew pouring out the words I’d been holding inside could be this joyful.
‘Let’s do this.’
But Min-ji’s quiet rebellion was suppressed before it could go far….
“What? I thought you were working hard, but you’re doing this nonsense? Huh?”
“Hiccup….”
The Bakery Owner’s Brother had walked in.
In the illusion that the face that had been struck by him before was throbbing, Min-ji trembled.
Yes, of course.
There was nothing that could be changed.
“Good thing the CCTV monitor told me. Aren’t you managing properly? Huh?”
“No… Oppa. How am I supposed to keep tabs on every strange thing this woman does?”
“You have a job assigned to you, so you need to do it right. Ugh. I’m letting it slide because the bread is delicious.”
The man mumbled while eating the exact same potato bread Min-ji had eaten earlier, then spoke carelessly.
“But this place really is tasty. Why does that crazy old geezer want to ruin this place?”
“What else? Once the commercial district looks promising, he wants to take it for himself.”
“Anyway, the rich always do more. Either way, we just take the money and that’s it. Anyway, we sent the rest to the kids. Still, they should know the taste of the bread from the bakery they’re trying to set up.”
The gaze of beasts wearing human skin, speaking words they shouldn’t, turned toward Min-ji.
Eyes that despised the weak.
“Hey. Aren’t you working?”
“Y-yes, I will….”
“Can’t even do this simple thing right. Should I write it for you? Huh? [Trèfle de bonheur’s bread tastes fucking awful]. What’s so hard about writing that?”
“While we’re at it, let’s say [a cockroach came out]. How about that?”
“Hey. Why don’t you write something? Get rid of this pathetic woman. Hehehehe. See? If I just write like this…. Ugh….”
The man suddenly covered his own mouth mid-sentence.
The woman, about to ask why he was doing that, instantly covered her own mouth as well.
What on earth was happening?
Before Min-ji could even form a proper thought, both of them erupted in violent reactions.
“Aaaaagh! What is this! Aaaaagh!”
“It hurts! It burns! It stings! Kyaaaah!”
They clutched their mouths and rolled across the floor.
They gulped down water desperately, even shoving their fingers into their mouths and scratching at their skin in a frenzy.
“What is this! What! What!”
“Kyaaaaaaagh!”
“Uh… uh….”
Now they were screaming and thrashing across the floor.
In the chaos, the woman’s phone screen on the ground lit up brightly.
And simultaneously, a message appeared.
[Sloppy Bakery: Lies always bring pain. If you reveal the truth now, there will be no pain.]
“Surely not….”
The two of them writhing on the floor.
And the message arriving at just the right moment.
Chills ran down Min-ji’s spine.
What she did next was simple.
She seized the moment when surveillance was lax and hurried out of the place.
She rushed out frantically, entered an internet café, and immediately opened her blog to start writing a new post.
[Hello. I’m exposing Uni’s true identity.]
What started as an intention to commit the act now poured out as sentences driven by pure terror.
Soon after she finished writing a lengthy post of about 5,700 characters and pressed enter.
The world once again erupted in chatter about Trèfle de bonheur.
* * *
“It works perfectly.”
That was my first comment after reading the post from the power blogger called Uni that went up immediately.
The method was simple.
I packed plenty of Lumiere bread of truth and waited for them to eat it.
As expected, they ate the Lumiere bread I gave them without the slightest hesitation.
“Meow. Taking what I gave them without any suspicion. Foolish humans.”
“Unlike the old days, poisoning isn’t common in this era. Noir.”
“If you’re going to stab others, you should consider that you might get stabbed too. If they didn’t even think about that, they deserve to be called fools, don’t they?”
Noir stretched while nonchalantly twitching his whiskers.
After patting that creature’s rear, I checked the Quest window again.
39 out of 40 people had eaten the bread.
I didn’t know who the last one was, but they would eat it soon enough.
“I didn’t expect the effect to be this potent.”
The bread had caused no issues when eaten, but the moment a lie was spoken, Lumiere’s bread activated immediately.
What must it feel like—that sharp, stinging pain in the mouth combined with a sour sensation and 200 micro-vibrations per second coursing through?
I couldn’t even imagine it no matter how hard I tried, but through Jinjeonyang’s eyes, it looked quite agonizing.
“Still, I sent them a message explaining what they need to do, so they should be fine soon.”
“To even tell them that revealing the truth will solve it—you’re remarkably kind, Owner.”
“I can’t just leave them in that state forever, can I?”
One of them had already seen that text message and rushed off to post a lengthy apology on their blog.
Reading it, the situation was quite the spectacle.
“So it really was an organized operation.”
Along with their own circumstances—being detained and forced to write—came the confession that the posts about Trèfle de bonheur were malicious lies written at someone’s instigation.
The moment the true face of Uni, an influential power blogger, was exposed, the world erupted into chaos.
In various online communities where the firepower had only been intensifying, screenshots of the post were circulating everywhere.
“But Owner, you’re quite cruel too.”
“Me?”
“Aren’t you? You’re still sharing your vision right now, aren’t you?”
“That’s true.”
Through Jinjeonyang’s eyes back at the bakery, the woman who had first eaten the bread and her partner came rushing in, tears and snot streaming down their faces.
They must have been certain that everything happening to them was because of me.
But they would never be able to meet me.
“To think you’d time it perfectly for the broadcast filming. Did you calculate this, Owner?”
“To some extent.”
I turned off Jinjeonyang’s vision, which had been showing the two people wailing outside the locked door.
Then I picked up my luggage and left the airport.
“It’s been a while. Here too.”
France—the space of my study abroad days unfolded before me.
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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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