WeTried Translations
Translator/Editor: LilGuyBlastoise
Discord: https://dsc.gg/wetried
◈ The Economics of an Alchemist ◈
Chapter 8
──────
Han-il Accounting Firm, 12th-floor office.
“Accountant Kim Seo-yun, I made a few adjustments to this audit report. The numbers were right, but it didn’t quite show the picture the partner wants to see. Maybe it’s because you’re still junior.”
Manager Kang Minsu spoke as they casually placed a hand on Seo-yun’s shoulder. Their heavy palm came with an oily smile.
Seo-yun struggled to keep her expression under control.
She had been the one to uncover decisive signs of accounting fraud in this audit. She had given up sleep to dig beneath the figures everyone else had overlooked.
But Manager Kang had presented it to the partner as the result of their own review. They had simply switched the nameplate on the tower Seo-yun had painstakingly built.
“Thank you.”
“So, are you free after work today? I’d like to give you some feedback. We could also talk about this season’s performance evaluations.”
Seo-yun barely stopped herself from frowning. To hell with the evaluation. She just wanted them to get away from her as soon as possible.
“I’m sorry, but I already have plans.”
“Plans? A boyfriend, maybe? Ah, what a shame. I was making special time for you. Accountant Kim Seo-yun, you know that at a firm, knowing how to fall in line is just as important as ability. If you insist on going it alone, you’ll be the only one who loses out.”
With that veiled threat, Manager Kang returned to their desk. Seo-yun brushed off the shoulder they had touched.
On the way home, Seo-yun rubbed her dry eyes and looked at her reflection in the subway window. Her Han-il Accounting Firm ID badge, the kind others envied, seemed especially heavy today.
‘Get it together, Kim Seo-yun.’
She reassured herself that the humiliation she had suffered at work today was nothing.
The professional title she enjoyed was a prize her older brother Jaeha had won by giving up his youth. She could not let Manager Kang’s petty schemes shake her.
When Seo-yun arrived home, she stood before the front door and tried to brighten her expression with a smile.
Beep beep beep. As she unlocked the door and opened it, the savory scent of soybean-paste stew hit her nose. Jaeha was in the kitchen, stirring a stew with a ladle.
“Oppa? You got home early today.”
“Yeah. Go wash your hands.”
“Where’s Jaeseong?”
“He’ll be home soon. He said he’d be back before dinner.”
After changing into comfortable clothes and washing up, Seo-yun sat at the table and watched Jaeha set out dinner.
“Is there anything I can help with?”
“No.”
Jaeha’s voice was as dry as usual.
But Seo-yun’s sharp instincts caught something different. Tap tap tap. The sound of the knife striking the cutting board was unusually lively.
“Did something good happen today?”
Jaeha shrugged. Something had happened, but he could not tell her yet.
“What good thing?”
“Hmmm...”
Just as Seo-yun narrowed her eyes and prepared to press further, she heard Beep beep beep as someone entered the door lock code.
“I’m home! Ah, this wonderful smell. Whoa! Braised short ribs too? Hyung, what’s the occasion? Don’t tell me I forgot some important day?”
A noisy dinner soon began.
Jaeseong went on about trivial things that had happened at school, while Seo-yun occasionally responded and studied Jaeha’s face.
Others might have thought he was expressionless, but she could tell. Her older brother was in an extremely good mood.
‘Hmmm... why?’
After dinner, Jaeha told the other two to do the dishes and went into his room. Seo-yun pulled on rubber gloves at the sink and asked her younger brother,
“Jaeseong, you noticed it too, right?”
Jaeseong, who was wiping the table with a dishcloth, answered with shining eyes.
“You bet. One hundred percent.”
“What is?”
“He got a girlfriend. Definitely.”
Seo-yun’s eyes widened.
“No way. Dating? Oppa?”
“I think he met her while he was traveling last time.”
“Come to think of it, he has been acting strange since then.”
“Think about it. Is Hyung the type to wear perfume? His girlfriend must’ve bought it for him.”
Seo-yun nodded as she recalled the faint woody scent Jaeha had carried for some time.
“And honestly, Hyung stays out overnight way too often. What do you think he does during all that time? Heh heh heh.”
Jaeseong gave a lecherous grin. Seo-yun’s hand rose automatically.
Smack! Smack!
“Argh! Why are you hitting me? That hurts! Stop!”
“You really don’t know what you can’t say in front of your sister.”
“Ah! Stop hitting me! Save me!”
After the roughhousing ended and they finished cleaning up, the two sat on the sofa and continued talking.
“...Who could it be? The person Oppa is seeing.”
There was both disappointment and relief in Seo-yun’s voice.
It felt as though her brother had finally put them down from his arms. As though he had finally begun living for himself.
“Who knows... But I think Hyung’s really fallen for her. When you went to get water earlier, he glanced at his phone and smiled so wide it reached here.”
Jaeseong pulled the corners of his mouth all the way up to his cheekbones with his fingers.
“You’re exaggerating...”
There was some exaggeration, but Jaeseong was not wrong. Jaeha had definitely looked at his phone during dinner and smiled faintly.
[Your ordered item has been delivered.]
Contrary to what the two thought, it was not a message from a girlfriend, but from a delivery company. The delivered item was an expensive high-purity silver nitrate solution that he had ordered for an experiment.
* * *
H University Hospital.
“Very good.”
Professor Park shook their head in amazement as they pointed at the MRI images. The grotesque tumor mass had now become nothing more than a faint trace.
“At this rate... we may be able to declare a complete recovery within three months. I can only call it a miracle of modern medicine.”
Three months. Jaeha repeated the number to himself. But Professor Park’s next words shook him.
“And now, I think we need to gradually reduce the dosage.”
“Reduce it?”
“The drug is certainly effective, but the side effects are the problem. Metabolic activity in the brain, centered around the pineal gland, is abnormally high. If things go wrong, it could damage your nervous system.”
Professor Park was firm.
“In accordance with clinical guidelines, we will begin tapering the dose step by step for the patient’s safety. Seventy percent this month, fifty percent next month... We need to reduce it like that so your body can adapt.”
Jaeha’s steps were heavy as he left the examination room and headed for the bus stop.
‘I have to succeed as quickly as possible.’
He could not rule out the possibility that if he stopped taking the medication, Edwin’s dreams and the All-Seeing Eye would disappear in an instant.
It had now been proven that alchemy could be made real. He needed a product that could turn that miracle into cash within three months.
The goal was low risk, high return.
The cheaper the raw materials, the better, and the result had to be unmatched.
B2C rather than B2B.
It needed to be something he could sell directly to consumers, rather than a product for corporate transactions mired in complicated procedures and fierce battles over interests.
And most importantly.
‘I can never let anyone find out alchemy was used.’
What if the world learned that he possessed a power capable of overturning common sense? Governments, intelligence agencies, and mega-corporations across the world would never leave him alone.
He might be kidnapped without a trace and spend the rest of his life trapped in an underground laboratory, living like a slave.
‘It has to look completely like an ordinary manufactured product.’
Something people would merely admire, thinking that a genius had developed an incredible new manufacturing process.
‘...’
Jaeha considered one product after another, shaking his head each time. Then he realized another condition had to be added.
The Transmutation Array had to be simple enough for Jaeha to create with only the scraps of knowledge he received from his occasional dreams.
As he thought through those things, the bus arrived. Jaeha tapped his transit card and sat in an empty seat. He set aside the headache-inducing thoughts of alchemy for a moment and watched the people around him.
There were many students who looked like college students today, and they had one thing in common. They all had their heads bowed, absorbed in their smartphones.
Every model was an A-phone 3GS.
‘If I stop taking the medication and return to normal... maybe I should buy A-ple stock?’
After confirming that alchemy could be reproduced on Earth, Jaeha had raised the stakes.
From 30 million won to 100 million won.
His goal was to use that budget and alchemy to make a marketable prototype. Greed told him to go all in, but cold reason stopped him.
He needed a Plan B in case he failed.
He had not thought it through in detail. He only figured he could invest his seed money of 200 million won in blue-chip stocks or real estate, then find work that would be less physically demanding than construction labor.
Looking at the smartphones that had changed the scenery inside the bus so quickly, he thought buying A-ple stock might be better than real estate.
‘It won’t be long before everyone in the country carries a smartphone...’
Screeeech!
The bus’s sudden stop broke Jaeha’s train of thought.
Crash! Thud, smack!
“Eek!”
“Sir!”
“Drive more carefully!”
Some people had fallen. The bus was in chaos.
“You fucking bastard! Are you trying to get yourself killed?”
A car had suddenly cut in without even using its turn signal. The bus driver opened the window and unleashed a torrent of curses.
“Argh!”
A college student’s scream caught Jaeha’s attention. The student held up an A-phone 3GS with trembling hands.
“What? What? Oh no... It’s cracked?”
“What are you going to do?”
“The screen repair costs are fucking expensive.”
“Did you get insurance?”
“Do you think I did?”
“At that point, just put tape over it and use it like me.”
The situation felt strangely familiar.
Come to think of it, his younger brother Jaeseong had broken his A-phone screen as soon as he bought it.
‘The repair bill was almost 200,000 won, wasn’t it?’
The A-phone’s weakest point was its screen. People would accidentally drop it in their daily lives, and if the fall looked even a little bad, the screen was almost certain to crack.
Then Jaeha remembered the dream where Edwin had attempted a structural phase transition on a tank’s armor plating.
Edwin’s theory had been to keep the force of a shell’s impact from remaining concentrated at one point, instead directing it through densely woven molecular pathways like a net.
Though the experiment had failed, Jaeha focused not on the result, but on the concept. What if he took only the core theory of dispersing impacts and applied it to a smartphone screen? Could he dramatically improve its durability?
But he soon shook his head.
‘Applying it to the screen is absolutely impossible.’
The original Transmutation Array Edwin had designed was as difficult to understand as a first-year college student trying to read a quantum mechanics paper.
Furthermore, its formula had been designed for metal alloys, not glass. It was impossible for Jaeha to perfectly redesign that complex formula for a smartphone screen.
Then what would be a manageable material to apply that theory to?
[This stop is Cheongsol Apartments, Cheongsol Apartments.]
The bus stopped at the station in front of his home. Jaeha changed his plan to rest at home, went straight to the parking lot, and took the wheel of his SUV.
His destination was the workshop.
He stopped at a red light. His gaze fell on the smartphone he had tossed onto the passenger seat. More precisely, on the case protecting it.
A flimsy thing, perhaps, but still the only way to protect a smartphone.
Honk! Honk!
At the horns from behind him, he looked up to see that the light had turned green. Jaeha hurriedly pressed the accelerator.
Jaeha arrived at the workshop.
When he opened the container door and entered, the familiar woody scent put his mind and body at ease. He flipped the switch and turned on the lights.
At the center of the workbench lay the result of the painstaking effort he had poured in after raising the stakes from 30 million won to 100 million won.
Finely ground graphite powder.
It was the result of perfectly breaking down the molecular bonds of a mass of carbon with alchemy alone, without any physical force.
Jaeha turned on his computer, connected to the internet, and researched smartphone cases.
The two main materials for cases were PC, or polycarbonate, and TPU, or polyurethane. Commonly called hard cases and jelly cases, both were carbon-based polymer compounds.
The breaking was over. Now it was time to build.
‘Aegis? Aegis Case?’
The name that suddenly came to him for a new product, an absolute shield that would protect phones from destruction, felt quite fitting.
Thump, thump.
Jaeha’s heart beat pleasantly.
Join our discord at https://dsc.gg/wetried