WeTried Translations
Translator/Editor: LilGuyBlastoise
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◈ The Economics of an Alchemist ◈
Chapter 3
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Jaeha held up two fingers.
“Two hundred million.”
“...Two hundred million won?”
Team Leader Choi repeated it uneasily, wondering if he had heard wrong. The unexpectedly small demand left him more bewildered than anything.
Jaeha had the new drug project by the throat, so he had expected him to demand at least several billion won, or perhaps royalties from the drug.
“The average cost of screening one patient for a Phase 1 cancer-drug trial and keeping them in the trial through this stage is 150,000 dollars. That comes to just over 200 million won, right?”
“How did you...?”
“I read it in a medical journal lying around the break room.”
A hollow laugh escaped Team Leader Choi. At the same time, irritation surged inside him.
‘Why would a construction day laborer read that crap?’
He should have been praying to God for the drug to work, not memorizing clinical trial cost charts.
“If this trial fails, Genovanta will have to resolve the drug’s side effects, completely reset Cohort 1, find new patients, and bring them back to this stage. Ah, assuming the new drug project isn’t scrapped entirely, of course. I can’t even imagine how much opportunity cost would go up in smoke.”
“...”
“Just one person. The cost of setting up one patient from the beginning. That is exactly what I’m demanding, as settlement for the severe adverse reaction I suffered and in exchange for a confidentiality agreement.”
Team Leader Choi’s mind raced.
Two hundred million won. It was not an amount he could approve on his own authority as team leader. He would have to report it to the division head and obtain approval.
But compared to the worst-case scenario, where the project might collapse, it was practically pocket change. More importantly, it was the ideal upper limit for keeping noise from the higher-ups to a minimum and settling the matter at the working level.
‘Could he really have calculated the highest amount I could report upward and smooth over?’
Team Leader Choi’s face went pale as he tapped at his calculator. He was beginning to understand the meticulous reasoning behind Jaeha’s demand for 200 million won.
‘What if this man had demanded several billion won, or royalties from the new drug, in exchange for handing over human-derived material?’
Under bioethics law, trading human-derived material was illegal. Genovanta’s legal team would pretend to agree and make him sign, then later file suit to invalidate the contract and force him to return the money.
That was why he had completely changed the pretext. It was a thoroughly legal settlement for severe adverse reactions and the prevention of legal disputes, leaving the pharmaceutical company with no room to sue later.
“...Very well. I will visit again as soon as a draft settlement is prepared. However, this requires the division head’s approval, so actual payment may take some time. I’ll do my best to move it through the approval process quickly. Please keep everything discussed here strictly confidential.”
Jaeha had no interest in how Team Leader Choi would report this to his superiors. The result was what mattered.
* * *
Genovanta handled matters swiftly.
Exactly three business days after Jaeha had stamped the thick settlement agreement and confidentiality undertaking:
[200,000,000 deposited / Genovanta Co., Ltd.]
The deposit record in his account marked the perfect conclusion of the transaction. It was a full 200 million won, without a single won withheld in taxes, since it was legally categorized as a non-taxable compensation settlement.
Jaeha willingly continued the clinical trial under a tightly controlled schedule. Medication and blood tests at fixed times. Frequent brain MRIs and CT scans as well.
The medical staff worked busily to gather every scrap of data they could from Jaeha, a super-responder.
Then, at last, the final day of the trial arrived.
Professor Park looked up from the chart and swallowed hard. The miracle that shattered decades of medical common sense stood before him in the form of the young man, Kim Jaeha.
“The tumor is steadily entering remission. Shrinking to less than half its size in only four weeks is an astonishing development, one that is difficult to explain medically.”
It was a miraculous remission. Yet Professor Park did not look entirely pleased. He pointed a pen at a deep central area of the brain in one of the MRI images on the monitor.
“However, there is something I repeatedly emphasized throughout the trial. The pineal gland is in an abnormally hyperactive state. Fortunately, it is barely staying below the threshold where the brain would be damaged, but its metabolic activity remains abnormally high.”
Jaeha nodded calmly.
The medical staff suspected the pineal gland was the source of every side effect he had experienced. Chronic hypoglycemia, his dramatically improved memory, and the strange dreams that came every few days.
“To prevent hypoglycemic shock, keep sweets such as candy on you at all times. And regular outpatient visits and EEG tests are not optional. They are essential. If anything unusual happens, come to the hospital immediately.”
“Understood. Thank you.”
Jaeha gave a light nod, stood up, and left the examination room.
After completing the discharge procedures and passing through the hospital’s revolving doors, a fresh breeze brushed against his cheeks.
Rustle. Jaeha took a mint from his pocket, unwrapped it, and looked up. The clear sky was free of clouds, and the sunlight was dazzling.
He tossed the candy into his mouth, slipped his hand back into his pocket, and headed for the bus stop in front of the hospital.
A bus arrived after a brief wait. As he leaned into a corner seat in the very back, the vibrations of the old engine traveled directly through the seatback.
Watching people go about their ordinary lives through the rattling bus window, Jaeha thought about his strange dreams.
‘At first, I thought they were just nonsense dreams.’
The dreams had begun when he lost consciousness from an adverse reaction during the clinical trial. So far, Jaeha had dreamed three times.
In every dream, he became a strange man named Edwin. There seemed to be no pattern to the times or events that played out.
There were memories of boyhood, attending class in a lecture hall. Memories from childhood, when he was harshly scolded for breaking a ceramic piece his parents treasured. There was even a middle-aged memory of sitting in the carriage of a steam train and staring out the window.
Like a video that randomly played scenes from someone’s life, the memories in the dreams were utterly fragmented.
“The pineal gland controls melatonin secretion and sleep cycles. There is a high probability that your dreams are also caused by excessive activation of the pineal gland.”
That was what the hospital had said. But...
‘They’re too vivid.’
The sharp cracking sound of the ceramic shattering on the floor. The heavy vibration running through his whole body as the train sped along the tracks, and the piercing whistle that struck his ears.
The sensations he had felt in the dream lingered so thickly that they seemed ready to ring in his ears and brush against his nose at any moment.
Above all, what kept Jaeha from dismissing the dreams as simple side effects of the new drug was the language.
The unfamiliar language he heard as the boy Edwin in that lecture hall, and the bizarre letters written on the blackboard. It was clearly a system he had never encountered in his life, yet in the dream, Jaeha could hear and read it.
It was not as if he had mastered the entire structure of that world’s language. All he could bring back to reality were fragments of what Edwin had seen, heard, and said.
Still, those fragmentary sentences and phrases burned into his mind like photographs were enough to make him certain. That language had clearly accumulated over a very long time, shaped and used by countless people. It was steeped almost oppressively in traces of a vast collective intelligence.
‘And that was a hallucination my unconscious mind created?’
Jaeha frowned and crunched the mint between his teeth.
The warm spring sunlight, the cool breeze through the window, and the regular vibrations of the rattling bus made his eyelids grow heavy.
I’ll just close my eyes for a moment.
That was what he thought, but he soon drifted off to sleep.
#
A small shadow slipped through the slightly open kitchen door.
“Young Master Edwin! Where are you!”
The nanny’s voice came from beyond the hallway. When her presence faded away, Edwin, who had been holding his breath, cautiously moved.
He stood on tiptoe and headed for the cupboard. He took the sour wine left over by the cook and scooped the white powder used to make bread rise into a small pouch.
“Young Master Edwin! Oh, honestly. Where has he gone now?”
The nanny’s voice rang out again.
Edwin’s heart pounded as if it might burst. He clutched the things he had gathered tightly to his chest and slipped out through the back door used by the servants.
He kept looking around as he moved, until he reached a dusty attic at the very top of the manor, a place no one ever visited.
Creak. Only after opening the attic door and going inside did Edwin release the breath he had been holding.
It was a dark room where faint sunlight streamed through the window.
He moved an old chest toward the window and placed the ingredients he had secretly brought from the kitchen, along with crude experimental tools, on top of it. His little hands trembled slightly with excitement and tension.
“Mix the acidic sour wine... with this white powder used to make bread rise...”
Muttering the proportions etched into his mind, Edwin poured the ingredients into a small bowl and carefully mixed them.
Sizzle!
A sharp, sour smell rose as bubbles churned violently.
“Ah!”
Edwin jumped in surprise. Then, worried that the sound might carry, he quickly clamped both hands over his mouth.
After a while, when the bubbles died down, he placed the bowl over a small candle with trembling hands.
“Until all the moisture... evaporates...”
His heart felt ready to burst at the thought of being caught at any moment, but his curiosity for unknown knowledge overwhelmed his fear.
He boiled the liquid in the bowl until beads of sweat formed on the bridge of his nose, then opened the attic window slightly and cooled it in the cold air.
At last, the liquid became transparent and still.
With his heart pounding, Edwin took a tiny bead from his pouch and dropped it onto the surface.
Tap! Crack!
Before even a ripple could form, the transparent liquid transformed into white ice crystals and froze explosively.
Edwin cautiously brought a finger to the white, solidified ice.
“It really is hot!”
Amazingly, it was not cold at all. Rather, it gave off enough heat to burn his hand. It was the true hot ice he had read about in a book in the library.
Just as he watched the result of his first alchemy experiment with flushed cheeks:
“Young Master Edwin! You’re in there, aren’t you!”
Bang! The attic door opened.
#
“Next stop, Cheongsol Apartments. Cheongsol Apartments.”
Jaeha’s eyes flew open.
The familiar, aging open-corridor apartment building stood outside the window. He hurriedly got up and got off the bus.
The house was quiet when he entered after unlocking the door. His younger sister, Seo-yun, would be at work, and Jaeseong, the youngest, would be at school.
As he looked around the house, Jaeha’s gaze stopped on a photograph of his parents sitting on the dining table.
“...I’m home.”
After greeting them, Jaeha entered his room and set down his bag.
Though his body was tired, he did not lie down on the bed. Instead, he leaned deeply into his desk chair and began reviewing the dream he had had on the bus.
The transparent liquid. The white crystals that froze explosively the moment a small bead was dropped in. And the heat that poured from them.
‘...Could that have been it?’
A winter toy he had bought from a stationery shop in front of his elementary school when he was young. A so-called click hand warmer, which turned white when you snapped the metal chip inside its clear liquid.
The hot ice Edwin had made looked exactly like the white crystals that formed when a click hand warmer hardened.
Jaeha sank into thought.
He knew how to use a click hand warmer. But no matter how hard he searched his memory, he had never learned how to make the liquid inside one.
Jaeha rose from his chair and left his room.
He knew it might be a foolish thing to do, but he wanted to see whether he could use the knowledge gained through his dream in reality.
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