Chapter 3. Thanks for the Meal
Kim Seokhun walked over with a cigarette between his lips and immediately held out his hand.
“Where's my lottery ticket?”
Behind him, the leaders of the Store Development Team and Franchise Operations Team were looking at me with pity.
Apparently, news about my disciplinary committee had already spread.
Leaders from other departments.
Looking at them, my mind started working quickly.
Normally, this would have been an uncomfortable situation.
But right now, they were the perfect audience.
And perfect witnesses.
The man standing in front of me cared about his pride more than his life.
I held out my empty hand, exactly as he had done.
“Pay me first.”
Silence.
He blinked at me blankly before shouting.
“What, you bastard? Have you lost your mind?”
Exactly the reaction I expected.
For ten years, I had never once asked him for money.
He had always taken the lottery ticket as though it naturally belonged to him.
And I had never bothered fighting with him over a mere 5,000 won.
But things were different now.
If the diary entry really came true...
“You owe me 5,000 won.”
At least ten wrinkles appeared between Kim Seokhun's eyebrows.
He threw his cigarette onto the ground and laughed in disbelief.
“What? Five thousand won?”
“Yes. The lottery ticket cost 5,000 won. Isn't it obvious that you should pay me?”
“Wow, look at this bastard. Hey, are you screwing with me right now?”
His voice rose.
Naturally, everyone who had come with him began watching.
“You've never mentioned money even once before. Why now? Is this because of the disciplinary committee? You think you did nothing wrong? Huh?”
I needed to provoke him.
It was going to make my life tiring for a while.
But if I wanted to keep the lottery ticket, I had no choice.
“Isn't it a perfectly reasonable request? I'm not even asking for a delivery fee. At least reimburse the ticket price. Since the day I joined this company, I've probably spent over a million won buying lottery tickets for you.”
“You... You crazy bastard! Did that car accident damage your brain?”
Car accident, my ass.
There hadn't been any accident at all.
Kim Seokhun grabbed the back of his neck as if he couldn't believe what he was hearing.
For the first time, I raised my head proudly and stared straight at him.
Arguing over a few thousand won in front of other department heads was more than enough to scratch his pathetic pride.
Then came the quiet whispers behind him.
Perfect fuel for an already burning fire.
“What's wrong with Manager Kang? He's acting completely different.”
“Seriously. How hard did Deputy Manager Kim push him for even someone as nice as Manager Kang to act like this?”
Their whispers poured oil directly onto Kim Seokhun.
His ears turned bright red.
He stabbed a finger into my chest.
“Hey! Kang Jinhyeok! You're really treating your superior like this over a few coins? You sure you won't regret it?”
Regret?
He had no idea.
Right now, I was doing everything possible precisely so I wouldn't regret it.
I considered firing another line back at him.
But there was no need.
Instead, I turned my head away and frowned as though I couldn't even stand looking at him.
That became the final blow.
“Ha! This bastard really has gone insane. I don't need it! I don't want the damn thing!!!”
Music to my ears.
“Are you sure you don't need it?”
“Yeah! It's too filthy to buy from you! I'm not buying it! You think a ticket bought by an unlucky bastard like you is going to win anything? You keep it and get lost! You pathetic bastard. I'll buy another one with my own money before I ever ask you for anything! Acting important over five thousand won!”
Bang!
Kim Seokhun kicked an innocent trash can and stormed out of the smoking area.
The remaining department heads looked at me sympathetically.
But I genuinely didn't care.
Why had I waited this long to do something so satisfying?
Maybe I had turned myself into a pushover because I kept telling myself I needed to build power first.
What expression would Kim Seokhun make when he discovered that this lottery ticket was worth eight billion won?
I wouldn't even buy him cheap frozen pork belly.
The evening traffic was the same as always.
But inside my heart, I felt like I was speeding down an empty autobahn.
Every time I stopped at a red light, I opened the diary app.
My chest tightened with anticipation as I tapped next Monday's date.
[No entry recorded.]
I froze.
The contents hadn't changed.
They had completely disappeared.
I had expected some excited entry like:
[I won the lottery.]
Or:
[Eight billion won landed in my bank account.]
Had the future disappeared?
Just as uneasiness began creeping in, I remembered how I actually used this app.
An emotional trash can.
I had never once used it to record happy events.
I only dumped anger, injustice, curses toward other people, and the misery of corporate life into it.
Writing happiness down didn't make happiness twice as strong.
In other words...
If the March 9 entry had disappeared, it meant there would be nothing that day making me furious or miserable.
Specifically, the horrible event where Kim Seokhun won first prize with the lottery ticket I had bought.
Apparently, future me would be too happy to even think about recording a diary entry.
According to the old entry, Kim Seokhun would have received eight billion won after tax.
It also said there were only two first-prize winners.
And one of those tickets was currently in my possession.
If all of this was real...
A thought suddenly occurred to me.
There might be a way to increase my winnings.
What I was carrying wasn't merely an eight-billion-won lottery ticket.
It contained the winning numbers.
Sixteen billion won had originally been divided between two winners.
What if ten people shared it instead?
The unknown winner would receive less.
My own winnings would increase.
But was it okay to do that?
Technically, I would be taking money away from someone I had never even met.
My annoyingly active conscience began bothering me.
First, let's calculate.
If I bought ten more tickets with exactly the same numbers, I would have eleven tickets in total.
The total first-prize pool would probably be around twenty-four billion won.
Split between twelve tickets, the after-tax amount per ticket should be roughly 1.37 billion won.
With eleven winning tickets, I could collect around fifteen billion won.
The person who had originally been destined to receive eight billion would have to settle for roughly 1.3 billion.
But they would never know that.
And anyone winning more than a billion won would still be extremely happy.
The lottery was luck anyway.
Finding out the winning result in advance was simply my own form of luck.
After successfully giving myself a convenient moral excuse, I entered a lottery shop.
“Give me ten tickets with exactly the same numbers.”
“Ten 5,000-won tickets?”
Was this really that unusual?
The middle-aged woman behind the counter stared at me and blinked.
Good thing I had worn a mask.
There was no benefit in having people recognize the face of someone who would soon hold ten first-prize tickets.
“My friends and I agreed to split them. It'd be pretty painful if only one of us won.”
I didn't know which of the five number combinations on the original automatic ticket was the winner.
So I had to reproduce the entire ticket exactly.
The wasted combinations didn't bother me in the slightest.
I was spending 50,000 won to potentially make fifteen billion.
I laid the ten tickets on the counter and checked every number carefully.
I needed to be thorough.
I wasn't about to lose over ten billion won because of a clerk's mistake.
Even now, it didn't feel real.
Were these genuinely first-prize lottery tickets?
The disciplinary committee had been announced exactly as the diary predicted.
And still, I couldn't fully believe something this absurd.
If Friday's disciplinary committee actually confirmed the three-month salary reduction...
Then there would be nothing left to doubt.
But for some reason, even before I had complete confidence, I started thinking about what I would do once I won.
The first thing that came to mind was my father.
I couldn't do anything without taking care of him first.
He was one of the reasons I had clung so desperately to Seongun Group's Commercial District Analysis Team.
And the most painful wound in my life.
He had spent his entire life working for his family, yet had never been rewarded for it.
I turned the car toward Gangnam.
A forest of towering buildings threw brilliant lights into the night.
At the entrance to one of those enormous buildings stood a shabby security booth that looked completely out of place.
“Welcome. Basement Level Three is full, so please continue to Level Four.”
An old man with white hair bowed ninety degrees toward an expensive sedan entering the parking garage.
His uniform hung loosely from his body.
His bent back never seemed to straighten.
It was my father.
Once, he had been the proud owner of his own restaurant, grilling ribs under a sign bearing his own name.
His cooking was good, and he had plenty of regular customers.
But then aggressive franchise expansion and the massive wave of gentrification had swallowed his restaurant whole.
Nothing remained except debt he couldn't handle and the shattered pride of one man.
“Dad.”
“Huh? Jinhyeok? What are you doing here at this hour?”
I rolled down the window.
My father greeted me with surprised eyes.
I wasn't some amazing son.
Yet the instant he saw my face, he smiled brightly.
My throat tightened.
“You haven't eaten yet, right? It's almost shift change. Come eat with me. I'll wait out front.”
“No, I'm fine. I brought a lunch box...”
“Come on. There's something important I need to tell you.”
I had only asked him to eat with me.
Yet a shadow immediately appeared on his face.
He really never changed.
Even now, he was probably worried that I had come to ask him for money.
No matter how difficult things became, he had always been someone who would give even the smallest thing to his family.
And now that he had almost nothing left to give, he worried even more.
“I got a bonus, so I wanted to buy you dinner. Come on.”
After easing his concern, we went to a nearby restaurant.
As always, my father barely touched the meat himself and kept pushing it toward my side.
His love hadn't changed either.
“How's work? That Deputy Manager Kim you mentioned, is he still the same?”
“Yeah. Well... people don't change that easily. He's exactly the same. But Dad...”
I put down my chopsticks and looked directly into his eyes.
“Have you ever thought about running a restaurant again? I still think your ribs were much better than this place's.”
My father's hands stopped.
His gaze fell weakly to the table.
“You brat... Where did that come from all of a sudden?”
“I analyze commercial districts for a living. I found a decent location.”
“Forget it.”
He shook his head firmly.
“I don't have the capital anyway. And even if I did, I don't want to do it again.”
A bitter smile.
Apparently, the wounds left by failure still hadn't healed.
My chest hurt.
But I had expected this answer.
Which was why I had prepared another suggestion.
“Then instead of running a business, how about managing one?”
“Managing? You mean security work? I'm already doing that.”
“Not like now. You'd manage your own building instead of someone else's. I'm talking about managing tenants, not working as an employee. And if the opportunity looks good, maybe we'll run our own franchise business.”
My father stared at me blankly.
His expression said even a joke had limits.
“Are you sick or something? Since when do we own a building? And a franchise business isn't exactly simple...”
“We don't have one yet. But I think we will soon.”
Some anxiety still remained inside me.
But I decided to enjoy this moment.
I picked up my water glass and took a drink.
Even imagining it made my heart pound again.
“Look at this.”
I searched my pocket and handed him one lottery ticket.
“This is a lottery ticket.”
“Yeah. I had a really good dream. Such a good dream that I bought several tickets with the exact same numbers. If this wins, I'm thinking of building something in a good location.”
My father froze while turning the meat.
I understood.
His normally calm son was suddenly talking complete nonsense.
“...Just how good was this dream for you to be this excited?”
I had dreamed countless times.
Not while sleeping.
While wide awake in reality.
“I dreamed that the bastard who'd been biting me every day tucked his tail between his legs and ran away.”
“...Isn't that what people call a meaningless dog dream?”
“Maybe. But it felt like an incredible lucky dream to me. That bastard was the biggest obstacle in my life.”
This wasn't going well.
My metaphor only made my father look more worried.
He genuinely seemed to be wondering whether his son had lost his mind.
“Come on, I was joking about the dog dream. Just keep this safe. The important part is that if it wins first prize, I'm really buying a building. And when I do, you'll help me manage it. Okay?”
“Hahaha. You're being ridiculous. Fine. It's your lottery ticket, so do whatever you want with it. I'll help with the management too. Of course, this thing has to win first.”
My heart almost stopped.
That ticket would be worth more than 1.3 billion won.
Yet he was casually waving it around like scrap paper.
What if it fell into the charcoal fire?
“Give me your wallet.”
I took the lottery ticket from his hand, folded it neatly, and placed it inside his wallet.
This was a ticket to heaven that could completely change our family's life.
Though, as my father said, it first had to win.
“You really must've had a wonderful dream. Let's see what happens. Even if it wins only 50,000 won, your father will buy you a meal.”
Interesting.
Kim Seokhun wasn't the only person whose face I wanted to see after the first-prize result.
Even my father, who had spent my entire life teaching me not to depend on luck and to live honestly, wouldn't be able to stop smiling.
“Don't give that ticket to anyone else. If it doesn't win first prize, I'll blame you for ruining the luck. Got it?”
“What? You brat! What kind of father do you think I am?”
Watching my father laugh loudly for the first time in a long while, I left the restaurant feeling good.
Then I saw his back as he returned to the shabby container security booth.
It wasn't the kind of old age that suited someone who had spent his entire life sacrificing for his family.
I would build a building.
I would fill it with my own first stores.
And I wanted my father to stand there with me, looking down at the world while living comfortably.
Even better if he eventually decided to run a restaurant again.
I knew when my father had been happiest.
It was when he watched customers smile while eating the meat he had carefully prepared.
I stared at the old container that swallowed my father and opened the diary app.
The March 9 entry had disappeared.
It still felt strange.
But I couldn't stop hope from growing.
