The Genius Construction Worker Who Moved to America - Chapter 11

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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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Episode 11

The Alchemist of the Mudflat

“What the hell is this? It’s nothing but a swamp….”

Leo shouted, heedless of the mud spattering across his handcrafted leather shoes.

The collapse site along the stream that cut through the outskirts of Pasadena.

The site where last night’s raging waters had swept through was far more devastating than he’d anticipated.

The stream’s water had risen well above its level and lapped at the edge of the road, while the retaining wall that had crumbled under the swollen current lay exposed, its entrails laid bare.

The ground condition at the collapse point where Kang Jun and Leo stood was appalling. As the river water and sediment mixed together, the bottom had transformed into a clay-like bog.

One misstep and you’d sink knee-deep—a perfect mudflat, in every sense.

And they had to build a wall of heavy stone and concrete in such a place.

With a foundation this unstable and yielding, even the sturdiest wall would prove worthless.

A single rainfall would bring it down like dominoes.

Worse still, the site access itself had been eroded away. The waterlogged ground left barely enough space for a single pickup truck to enter.

“Oh, Jesus… Mister Kang, this competition is already lost! You can’t even get a proper foothold on this swamp!”

Leo tore at his hair, groaning in despair.

But contrary to his histrionics, Kang Jun’s expression remained perfectly serene. More than that—a faint smile played at his lips.

“Fortunately, I came well prepared.”

Already, a blueprint was forming in Kang Jun’s mind—exactly how to stabilize the ground, exactly how to structure the retaining wall.

If a large excavator couldn’t get in, then it wouldn’t. If the ground was mudflat, then it was mudflat. He had a scheme for that too.

“Stop your whining and take this, Leo.”

Kang Jun pulled a black card from his inner jacket pocket—the anonymous Black Card the system had issued along with his early completion bonus, carrying a limit of one hundred thousand dollars.

Kang Jun tapped the card against Leo’s chest and pressed it into his hands.

“What is this?”

“The equipment and materials I mentioned yesterday. Get everything on the list I wrote out. There’s more than enough money on this card, so set aside about ten thousand dollars for yourself as an advance.”

“T-ten thousand dollars?! But surely you can’t just hand over that kind of money to me like this….”

Leo’s eyes, which had been wearing a look of despair at the mudflat mere moments before, suddenly sparkled. He clutched the card and spoke with absolute conviction.

“Leo Spencer will get it right now!”

He scrambled into the pickup truck and raced away from the site. Kang Jun crossed his arms and began calculating the stream’s current velocity with his eyes.

Two hours later, the entire site began to vibrate as if an earthquake had struck.

Boom-boom-boom! Crash!

Three massive excavators and dump trucks roared into the site entrance, followed by a Crawler Crane, their thunderous arrival announcing their presence.

The equipment bore the Blackwood Construction logo emblazoned across its hull.

“Wow….”

Even David Scott and the Pasadena city officials observing from a distance stood slack-jawed at the sheer overwhelming spectacle.

The equipment came to a halt, and a man descended from the lead Jeep.

Rough-hewn in appearance, yet his sharp gaze and calloused hands testified to decades spent in the field—the mark of a true veteran.

It was Max, Blackwood Construction’s site foreman.

Max chewed his gum methodically as he surveyed the surroundings, then ambled toward the section where Kang Jun stood.

“Howdy there. So you’re the local construction outfit taking the upper section?”

Max greeted Kang Jun with a gruff once-over, his eyes traveling from head to toe.

“I look forward to working with you during construction. Your equipment seems a bit sparse, though—hasn’t it arrived yet?”

At Max’s remark, Kang Jun chuckled and gestured with his chin toward the entrance road.

“No, actually. The equipment’s already here.”

“Huh? Where?”

Max furrowed his brow and turned to look where Kang Jun had pointed.

What caught his eye was only Leo’s weathered Titan Truck, which had just arrived.

And loaded on the truck’s bed was a single Mini Excavator that looked like a child’s toy and dozens of burlap sacks of mysterious contents piled haphazardly.

“…You’re joking, right? You’re going to build a fifty-meter Retaining Wall in this mudflat with that toy excavator?”

Max let out an incredulous snort. In all his decades on job sites, he’d never encountered anything that defied his understanding so completely.

“Equipment size doesn’t matter, foreman. Don’t relax your guard—you might sink into the swamp.”

Kang Jun’s cutting remark made Max’s eyebrows knit tight.

“Cocky bastard. Fine, let’s see what kind of tricks you pull with that toy. You’ll need to work all night just to keep up with us.”

Max snorted derisively and headed back to the downstream site. Immediately after, Blackwood’s brute-force construction began.

Vroooom! Crash!

Blackwood’s approach was sheer money thrown at the problem—raw force pushed through.

They didn’t even bother compacting the soggy ground. Instead, they mobilized the Crawler Crane to hoist dozens of H-Beams high above the mudflat, then began driving them down with a vibratory hammer.

Their strategy was pure capitalist ingenuity—drive steel stakes deep into the Bedrock Layer and forcibly construct a skeleton by whatever means necessary.

But from the very start, the fortunes of the two companies diverged sharply.

Rat-a-tat-tat-tat!!!

Each time the vibration hammer struck the H-Beam, tremendous vibrations shook the surrounding mudflat.

“Damn it! Stop!!”

Max’s urgent shout pierced the air across the site.

A thirty-ton excavator was entering the mudflat to reinforce the H-Beam when catastrophe struck.

The excavator’s enormous weight combined with the equipment’s vibrations triggered a Soil Liquefaction phenomenon, transforming the mudflat into something resembling liquid.

Crunch—!

The excavator’s tracks spun uselessly before sinking into the muck, tilting at a sickening angle. Even the waiting Concrete Mixer Truck found its wheels trapped, immobilized entirely.

The poured cement mixed with mud before it could set, turning into sludge.

A textbook case of poor construction in its initial stages.

“Pull the crane! Get the Mini Excavator out! Dig out more mud and lay down gravel first! For God’s sake!”

Max hurled his hard hat to the ground, cursing fluently. Even a veteran like him hadn’t anticipated the ground subsiding to this degree.

Leaving the chaos behind, Kang Jun and Leo walked casually upriver to the construction site fifty meters away. Two companies that had diverged from the starting line completely.

Behind Kang Jun’s receding figure, Max’s mud-caked murmur carried on the wind.

“They’d better hurry…. Not like that toy equipment can do anything anyway. Look at the state of the ground….”

Meanwhile, Leo’s impatience burned just as fiercely.

He felt a flash of schadenfreude watching Blackwood Construction floundering in the mud, but the moment he turned his attention to their own situation, only a sigh escaped him.

No additional workers.
Just one pickup truck and a three-ton Mini Excavator loaded in its bed. And white powder stuffed in burlap sacks—that was everything.

In this hellish swamp, was it even possible to construct a fifty-meter Retaining Wall with toy equipment?

‘No. Mister Kang built an incredible roof without skipping a beat. There has to be something this time too.’

Leo called to mind the miraculous feats Kang Jun had accomplished thus far, forcing himself to breathe steadily.

And so Kang Jun’s construction began.

Upon arriving at the site, Kang Jun knelt on one knee at the muddy edge before mounting the Mini Excavator. Then he peeled off his work gloves and plunged his bare hand into the muddy ground.

That was the moment.

[Skill Activated] [Pulse of the Earth (Lv.1) is now active!]

Whoosh—!
Kang Jun’s vision warped strangely, and the world before his eyes began transforming into a translucent golden schematic.

From the surface to five meters, ten meters down… and the contours of the granite Bedrock Layer hidden twenty meters below. Underground Water Veins trickling and draining through the clay between strata.

All of it unfolded across Kang Jun’s retina as a single blueprint.

‘The critical Bedrock Layer bearing the load is fifteen meters down. The Underground Water Vein flows from right to left at a fifteen-degree angle. Current moisture content at the bottom is eighty-five percent….’

The assessment was complete. The ground condition was every bit as dire as Kang Jun had feared.

Anything built here would crumble in a single downpour—that much was certain.

He wouldn’t do it Blackwood’s way, driving metal stakes into the ground like a fool. The soil itself had to change fundamentally, completely—and fast.

Kang Jun set his jaw and rose to his feet.

“Leo! Open the truck bed and pull out all the sacks! We’re about to spread quicklime on this bog!”

“Q-quicklime?! Really?!”

Leo gasped and began dragging the burlap sacks from the truck bed.

Quicklime—a chemical compound of calcium oxide, white powder used mainly to adjust soil acidity or as a disinfectant.

Leo had no idea what Kang Jun intended to do with it. The logic escaped him entirely.

Meanwhile, Kang Jun climbed into the operator’s cabin of the mini excavator.

On construction sites he’d run heavy machinery ten thousand times without a license. The toy-like three-ton excavator moved with his hands like limbs—fluid, precise, alive.

Whirrr—snap!

The bucket arced toward the torn quicklime sacks Leo had opened.

It filled with white powder and dumped the load into the churning black bog.

“To lay stone, you have to fire the earth first.”

He murmured the words low and began working the levers with dazzling precision.

Whump! Crunch! Crunch!

The bucket tore through the mud relentlessly, mixing it over and over—like a giant spatula working through dough. Moisture and white powder became one.

Moments later, something no one expected happened—pure magic.

Hisssssss—!!!!

“Ahhh! H-hot! What is this?!”

Leo, who’d been hauling sacks nearby, shrieked and stumbled backward. Pure white steam was pouring off the mud-and-quicklime mixture Kang Jun had just blended together.

The hydration reaction of quicklime.

When moisture-laden bog met the chemical, an exothermic reaction erupted—heat near a hundred degrees Celsius released in seconds.

Whoooosh!
As Kang Jun drove the excavator forward, dumping more quicklime and churning the bog over again and again, the site transformed into a winter hot spring, shrouded in billowing vapor.

When the steam cleared, everyone’s eyes went wide.

“O…my…God…”

David Scott, his aide Tom, and Leo—who’d come to watch the upstream progress—found themselves gasping without a word.

The swamp that had been soupy moments before was now crisscrossed with cracks, the moisture completely baked out by the quicklime’s heat.

The quicklime had evaporated the water while binding the soil particles together like cement.

True alchemy of the bog—quick, dirty, and undeniably brilliant.

“This is! A miracle! A miracle! Did you see it, Mayor Scott?!”

Leo bounded across the solidified ground, his shouts of jubilation echoing across the site. Scott, too, made no effort to hide his excitement, his trembling hands coming together in applause.

“We’re not out of the woods yet, Leo.”

Kang Jun gestured playfully at the old logs and debris scattered around the stream, mixing the word with a light touch.

“Rake up every last branch and scrap down there. The real work starts now.”

Genius Laborer Goes West — Episode 11

Author
Kalman
Publisher
Titan
Planning / Editing / Production
Lee Sung-guk
Cover Design
Studio Inus

UCI
G720:N+A036-20260819030.0011

© 2026, Kalman

※ This e-book is protected under the Copyright Law of the Republic of Korea.
No part of this work may be reproduced or adapted in any form without the written permission of the author and publisher.

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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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