The Genius Construction Worker Who Moved to America - Chapter 6
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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 6
Cut away the rotting bone and let fresh flesh grow
Slide—
Kang Jun’s palm came to rest against the main support column that ran through the center of the living room. He’d been running his hands over the pillars and walls of the house for hours now.
Arthur’s Residence lay silent in the gathering darkness. Yet Kang Jun could hear this old wooden house crying out in pain.
[Voice of Materials (Lv.1)]
The sensation transmitted through the skill was eerie.
Each time his fingertips touched wood, information flooded in unfiltered—the moisture content, the subtle direction of the grain’s twist, even the oxidation marks spreading around the nails.
And the moment his hand pressed against the thickest column supporting the center of the living room.
Red text cascaded down like a waterfall.
[Voice of Materials (Lv.1) Activated!]
▶ Target: North American Douglas Fir Column
▶ Moisture Content: 32% (Over-saturated / Decay in Progress)
▶ Structural Integrity: 12% (Critical Collapse Threshold Reached)
▶ Critical Flaw: Subterranean Termite Colony Infestation.
▶ Warning: 88% of internal mass lost in the lower 1-meter section of column. Without immediate intervention, it cannot support the load and will collapse.
……
Kang Jun’s brow furrowed.
To the eye, it looked like a solid log column with oil stain applied. But what his fingertips sensed told a different story.
Hollow. The feeling of touching a watermelon rind hollowed out from the inside.
Press with just a little force and even the outer shell seemed ready to crumble.
“Sir.”
Kang Jun withdrew his hand from the column and spoke.
“There’s something more urgent than the roof. The real Time Bomb is in the middle of this living room.”
Arthur, who had been sitting in a rocking chair leaning on his cane, turned his head. A flash of displeasure crossed his weathered face.
“What are you talking about? The skeleton of my house is perfect. The main columns are premium timber I personally sourced from Canada!”
“I won’t dispute the quality of the wood. But it seems you didn’t account for the uninvited guests coming up from below.”
Kang Jun rapped the lower section of the column lightly. Tap.
Instead of the dull thud of solid timber, a hollow ring like striking a cardboard box.
Crackle.
Wood grain crumbled away like biscuits, cascading to the floor.
……!
The color drained from Arthur’s face in an instant.
His ear, honed by a lifetime of carpentry, could not mistake what that sound meant. His grip tightened on the walking stick.
“Termites… white ants. Merciful God. That can’t be. How meticulously I treated the foundation for pest control…!”
“You said the roof blew off three years ago, didn’t you? Rainwater seeping through that gap ran down the pillars and saturated everything with moisture. Perfect breeding grounds for the damn things.”
Arthur reached out with trembling hands and ran them along the lower portion of the beam.
He felt crumbling wood chips and damp sawdust residue beneath his fingers.
His expression contorted. The house he’d poured his life into was rotting from the inside, crumbling to pulp.
“Oh, merciful heaven… If that pillar gives way, the whole structure comes down. They said the repairs won’t be simple either. First we’d have to jack up the ceiling with a hydraulic jack and install steel beams!”
But Kang Jun remained composed.
“Sir, you won’t need any of that metal.”
“Have you lost your mind? How else do you expect to replace the pillar without steel beams to support it?”
“Didn’t we have a contract? Not a single steel nail.”
Instead of answering, Kang Jun moved toward the tools lining the wall.
“Sir, you of all people know that the foundation of good work isn’t strength—it’s angle and balance.”
Kang Jun dragged over a sturdy-looking length of oak timber from the corner of the workshop.
He positioned it vertically beside the rotted main pillar, barely a hand’s breadth away. A temporary support.
But simply standing a timber next to the pillar wouldn’t transfer several tons of weight by itself.
Kang Jun took a blunt oak log and roughed it with an adze. In moments, two wedges with sharp beveled edges emerged.
He wedged both pieces diagonally into the gap between the base of the temporary pillar and the floorboards.
A soft hissing sound.
As Kang Jun’s eyes narrowed, his vision flooded with gold.
The path of 4.5 tons of vertical load descended as a brilliant crimson line.
The mechanics of distributing the concentrated load from the rotted pillar to the temporary one.
His mind raced through the calculations.
‘Strike point three degrees right. Wedge depth four and a half centimeters. Vertical height exactly two millimeters.’
One second was all he needed.
Kang Jun raised the wooden mallet.
“Transferring the load to the temporary support.”
Crack!
The mallet struck the wedge at precisely the right angle.
The wedge bit into the gap and eased the temporary post up with infinitesimal precision. The moment when horizontal striking force transformed into vertical lifting power.
Crack! Crunch!
The entire old wooden house groaned. The sound of ceiling joists twisting.
Arthur stumbled backward in alarm.
“Stop! The ceiling’s warping! The roof will collapse!”
“Not yet.”
Kang Jun kept his focus fixed on the load lines visible in his mind’s eye.
Crash!
The second blow. The crossed wedges drove fully home.
In that instant, the groaning timber throughout the house fell silent as death.
In Kang Jun’s vision, the red load lines that had pressed down on the rotted post shifted completely toward the temporary support. The lines shimmered and rippled, transmuting to brilliant gold.
“Breathe.”
Kang Jun wiped the sweat from his brow.
“Load transfer complete. The main column now bears not a single gram. It’s essentially floating in the air.”
Kang Jun set down the mallet and picked up the Two-Handed Saw.
“Impossible… You lifted the entire house’s weight with two wooden wedges? No Hydraulic Jack?”
“If you’re skeptical, listen to the saw.”
Kang Jun positioned the saw blade at the base of the rotted post, one meter above the termite-damaged section.
Whoosh. Whoosh.
The saw cut began, brisk and clean.
Any carpenter knows this: if the post bore even ten kilograms of weight, the blade would bind and jam the instant it bit through.
But Kang Jun’s saw glided through like cutting marsh reeds suspended in mid-air—smooth and unobstructed.
Thunk!
Three minutes. Kang Jun stopped and casually kicked at the severed column section with his boot.
Crash!
The bottom meter—now weightless—crumbled and raised dust. Above it, the remaining upper section of the column hung suspended in perfect vertical alignment, held by the temporary post and wedges.
“Hah… Oh, my God….”
Arthur crouched in the rubble, running his fingers over the clean cross-section of the upper post, and a sound of pure wonder escaped him.
The young Asian man hadn’t demolished this house. Not with all its twenty years of memories. He’d cut it like a surgeon, excising the cancer with precision and leaving the rest pristine.
Kang Jun brushed dust from the saw blade and spoke.
“Now, then. Time to join the new wood.”
In Kang Jun’s mind, the blueprint for the Donbari Joint—a joinery technique used by master carpenters of Joseon centuries ago—clicked into place, rendered in golden lines.
That’s when the sound of a truck engine roared from beyond the entrance.
“Mister Choi! I’m here! I’ve swept every lumber yard in the area and brought back the finest Red Grandis Timber!”
Leo kicked open the door and rushed in.
Kang Jun’s gaze shifted from the rotting debris to the rich crimson Red Grandis logs loaded on the truck.
Moments later, what came next was strange.
“Hey, Mister Choi! Stop right now! You’re not about to set fire to someone else’s house, are you?!”
Leo, who’d been unloading the timber, cried out in horror, tearing at his own hair.
In the middle of the yard, Kang Jun had laid out a plank of the premium Red Grandis timber and was aiming a gas torch at it.
Whoosh—!
Flames licked across the timber’s surface without mercy. The ruddy grain darkened to black char in seconds.
Even Arthur, catching the scent of smoke, came out to the yard.
“You! Burning wood!”
“This fire will send the termites to hell.”
Kang Jun controlled the flame, charring the entire lower section of the post evenly.
The standard American pest control method was to pour chemicals into the soil or use chemically treated lumber.
But Kang Jun had chosen the Charring Technique—surface carbonization.
“Leo. Do you know what termites eat? Cellulose. When you char the surface with fire and turn it to charcoal, those insects don’t recognize it as food anymore. As a bonus, it also resists moisture.”
Kang Jun extinguished the torch and picked up a straw brush.
He scrubbed the blackened surface relentlessly, charcoal dust flying away, revealing the heartwood beneath that had endured the flames.
Kang Jun moved toward a metal bucket on a burner at the edge of the yard. It held linseed oil that Arthur had given him.
He soaked a thick cloth in the hot oil and rubbed it across the charred surface.
Hissss—!
The boiling oil seeped into the wood’s pores. The nutty aroma of linseed oil mingled with the smokiness of the Red Grandis, spreading across the yard.
“Phew… Oh, my God. What in the world is that smell?”
Leo, who’d been holding his nose, drifted closer, sniffing as if enchanted.
Arthur was the one most startled. His trembling hand reached out to touch the oil-soaked Red Grandis surface.
“This… how is this possible….”
It was solid yet smooth, the wood’s natural grain alive beneath his fingertips.
“Natural pest resistance, it seems. Just what country’s sorcerer are you, anyway?”
Tears gathered at the corners of Arthur’s eyes.
Unbelievable analog craftsmanship. The old master was drawing comfort from Kang Jun.
“Let’s just say a laborer from Korea. That’s as far as the admiration goes. Now we get to the real technique.”
Kang Jun carried the coated column into the living room.
What remained was connecting the suspended upper column to the new lower column.
The chisel and mallet began to move.
A Donbari Joint—the traditional method where the cross-sections of upper and lower columns are carved into a Z-shape, interlocking them together.
Scrape, crack! Tap-tap-tap!
Sawing and chiseling without hesitation. The golden blueprint in Kang Jun’s mind allowed no margin for error.
Ten minutes later, the joint was complete.
“Now we connect it.”
He pushed the new lower column upward, fitting it into the groove of the upper column.
Click!
The two pieces of wood locked together with the precision of machined gears. Not even paper could slip through the seam.
Kang Jun finished by driving an Oak Pin through the joining hole, striking it twice with the mallet—thwack, thwack. The pin expanded, pressing the wood outward on both sides. A perfect unified column was born.
He removed the wedges and cleared away the temporary support posts.
The 4.5-ton load poured back onto the main column. Not a single creak. If anything, it held the house’s center with far greater weight and solidity than before.
That was the moment.
Ding!
[Hidden Quest: ‘The True Path of the Artisan’ Stage 1 completed perfectly!]
[A flawless joint without a single nail, and a pest-resistance technique drawn from nature itself—the god of architecture marvels at your work.]
[Rewards granted.]
▶ Experience gained! Your Agent’s level rises! (Lv.1 → Lv.2)
▶ Stat Bonus: Strength permanently +3.
▶ Special Reward: Passive Skill [Artisan’s Grip Strength (Lv.1)] acquired!
*Effect: Grip strength when holding tools increases to mechanical levels, and fatigue during work reduces by 50%.
His entire body’s muscles swelled with power. Especially the grip strength in both hands became iron-solid.
Kang Jun clenched and unclenched his fists, a quiet laugh escaping him.
“Jesus… this column is a complete work of art. Mr. Choe, are you actually human?”
Leo embraced the column. Arthur too was pressing his cheek against it, overcome with emotion.
Main column repair complete. The structural hazard inside the house had been removed.
But Kang Jun’s gaze was directed upward. Beyond the torn ceiling, the California sky lay exposed.
“It’s premature to celebrate, Leo.”
This was the true beginning of the Tutorial Quest.
A Genius Day Laborer in America — Chapter 6
Author
Kalman
Publisher
Titan
Planning / Editing / Production
Lee Sung-guk
Cover Design
Studio Inus
UCI
G720:N+A036-20260819030.0006
ⓒ2026, Kalman
※ This e-book is protected under the copyright law of the Republic of Korea.
No part of this work may be reproduced, adapted, or redistributed in any form without the 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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