Chapter 38. Scale
“Why do you look so miserable?”
At Geonshin’s words, the TA gave a bitter smile.
Then again, the person who had the most reason to feel disappointed right now was Geonshin himself. What difference would it make for the TA to sit there sighing?
“I was waiting, but I just couldn’t stand it anymore, so I checked the results first…. Cheer up, man. There won’t be a next time for you, but it really is a shame your work didn’t make it. It was seriously good.”
Geonshin was already approaching graduation from a two-year junior college, so there obviously would be no “next” Korea Architecture Competition for him to place in.
Perhaps that was why the TA could not shake his disappointment.
With the skill Geonshin had shown him, even one more opportunity would probably have been enough for him to win something….
“There really isn’t going to be a next time. Anyway, buy me meat like you promised, hyung.”
“Huh? What meat?”
“You said you’d buy me meat if I won an award.”
“Won an award? I just checked everything. Those Hankuk University bastards swept everything all the way through the Grand Prize.”
That was true.
As the TA had scrolled upward through the list of winners, he had already confirmed that someone else had won even the very top category, the Grand Prize.
There was no way he could have somehow missed Geonshin’s name along the way.
But Geonshin looked at the monitor and smiled.
“Hyung, scroll up a little more.”
“What? Up?”
Without giving it much thought, the TA scrolled upward at Geonshin’s suggestion.
Then he froze solid.
There was another work listed under the Grand Prize category.
And not just any work.
[Grand Prize: Entry No. 314 <Seocho-dong 1685-3> — Gyehwa Junior College, Second Year, Na Geonshin]
Along with the name Na Geonshin, belonging to the man standing right in front of him.
Was this what people meant when they said someone’s jaw dropped?
The TA rubbed his eyes several times and stared at the monitor again.
Then he kept looking back and forth between the screen and Geonshin to make sure.
“Hey! Why is there another Grand Prize…?”
“Oh, there are two Grand Prize winners in this year’s competition. It was a special instruction from the judging chair.”
“What? You already knew? You knew you won the Grand Prize?”
“They called me this morning. They told me the schedule for the awards ceremony and the exhibition.”
“Seriously?! Is this real? Na Geonshin actually won the Grand Prize? The Grand Prize at the Korea Architecture Competition…?”
Geonshin simply smiled.
Looking at him, the TA felt a tremendous surge of excitement.
Someone from their department had actually won an award at the Korea Architecture Competition.
And not just some ordinary award.
The Grand Prize….
At that moment, screams erupted from the studio upstairs.
Apparently the students up there had also found Geonshin’s name on the list of winners.
Just then, Professor Han Yeonggi, Geonshin’s faculty advisor and a former member of Yeongjo Architecture, came running in.
His face flushed with excitement, he slapped Geonshin on the back.
“You did it! Damn, Na Geonshin! You go work at Yeongjo Architecture for a little while, and now you’ve gone and won the Grand Prize at the architecture competition! Hahaha! Wait, this isn’t the time to stand around. We need to put this on the school community right away. Right, Uk! I need to brag about this to Yoo-uk too. Geonshin, text me the exhibition date. I have people I need to tell.”
Back when Professor Han Yeonggi had been a team leader at Yeongjo Architecture, he had been the one who recruited Director Yoo-uk, who at the time had been an assistant team leader at another company.
While collaborating with that company, Professor Han had been impressed by Yoo-uk’s sales ability and practical knowledge, so he brought him onto his own team.
The reason Director Yoo-uk had agreed to take Geonshin on as a part-timer was because he still remembered what Professor Han had done for him back then.
But neither Director Yoo-uk nor Professor Han Yeonggi could possibly have predicted that Professor Han’s simple request to “give my student a chance” would produce a result like this.
In any case, the entire school erupted into chaos.
Gyehwa Junior College, located in Anyang.
Its architecture department occupied an awkward place within a school that aspired to be an arts college.
Most departments admitted students through practical examinations in their majors, but the architecture department used CSAT scores instead.
After all, it was difficult to classify architecture as a branch of fine art.
Architecture.
It was a field that could not easily be defined as belonging to a single genre, which was why it occupied such an ambiguous position.
But looked at another way, architecture was engineering to some, the humanities to others, and art as well.
It might belong completely to none of them, but if one thought of it as a vessel capable of containing all of them, it was an extraordinarily comprehensive field.
In any case, ever since Gyehwa Junior College had established its architecture department, not a single student had ever won the Grand Prize at the Korea Architecture Competition.
Na Geonshin had achieved the greatest accomplishment in the department’s history.
But this chapter had merely been preparation for what came next.
The real beginning was only now.
At that moment, a status window appeared before Geonshin.
Perhaps because this mission had been an achievement accomplished entirely on his own, it seemed to shine even more brightly.
====================================
[Pritzker Prize-Winning Project.]
Goal: 100 Lv (12/100 Lv)
Grand Prize: 4 Lv — Mission Complete
Mission 3. Win the Grand Prize at the Korea Architecture Competition.
Reward: Creativity 0 SP (25/100 SP), Skill 0 SP (25/100 SP) — Awarded
Attachment: 10 coupons for use of a 3-terabyte folder.
====================================
‘I’m only Level 12, so I still have a long way to go. Still, if I keep accomplishing things one by one… someday I should be able to achieve the goal of winning the prize. And now that my Creativity Points are increasing, I can feel my basic ideas improving beyond simply using the folder. If I ever reach 100 points, maybe I’ll develop a unique design identity that belongs solely to me, Na Geonshin.’
Strictly speaking, all the architecture he had worked on up to this point had been little more than arrangements he had created in his own way while referencing basic examples of future architecture from the folder.
There might be nothing truly new under the sun, but if someone asked whether those works contained Geonshin’s own originality, he would honestly have no choice but to say no.
But if his Creativity Points continued rising like this, perhaps the day would eventually come when he could show something that was truly his own.
Yet just when Geonshin thought the system had finished dispensing his rewards, the status window did not simply end there this time.
Ding.
[10 Lv completed. The Scale (Scale Bar) ability has been granted.]
‘Scale Bar? Do I get an item every ten levels?’
Geonshin sat with meat right in front of him, thinking about the ability he had just received.
The TA looked at him and scolded him.
“Geonshin, what are you spacing out for? The meat’s burning. Hurry up and eat.”
“Yes, sir.”
As promised, Geonshin had gone with the TA to eat at a barbecue restaurant in front of the school.
The owner had changed recently and the restaurant had reopened with a new interior, so the inside was extremely clean.
“It just melts in your mouth. Melts.”
As though he had been the one to win the Grand Prize, the TA happily ordered pork ribs.
Normally, he was such a miser that he would use thin-sliced pork belly as drinking food and have one drink for every slice of meat.
But today was special.
Even though the pork ribs in front of him were grilling beautifully, Geonshin’s mind was entirely occupied by the newly granted Scale item.
Just what kind of ability was it?
Why had this power suddenly appeared without any warning?
Geonshin put a piece of meat into his mouth and looked around without even noticing how it tasted.
The restaurant contained roughly twenty barbecue tables.
Perhaps because it was an awkward time of day, there were not many people inside.
The few occupied tables were mostly students who had already started drinking in the middle of the day.
Geonshin opened his status window again, but he could not find any instructions for using the item or any button he could touch.
‘Then there must be another way to activate it. What is it?’
Meanwhile, a commotion broke out in the kitchen.
The owner was complaining to someone.
Geonshin’s attention naturally turned toward the kitchen.
“Sure, it’s fine right now because there aren’t any customers. But when the dinner rush comes, the meat smoke just won’t vent outside properly. You said there wouldn’t be a problem.”
“Yes, the ductwork was installed appropriately for the floor area. Or would you like us to install another ceiling exhaust fan? If you want additional work done, we can give you a discount this time.”
“Ha… really? Good grief, maybe I should have another one installed. But why does the interior work keep getting more expensive?”
“We really are doing this cheaply for you. You won’t find another company that can do this much for this price. Go ahead and ask around.”
Apparently, something was wrong with the equipment installed by the interior contractor, and the company seemed to be using that as an excuse to charge additional fees.
Interior work did not normally have fixed base prices neatly displayed like price tags at a supermarket, so disputes over construction costs like this were common.
“Ha… what am I supposed to do? I don’t even have anyone I can ask….”
As Geonshin watched the troubled expression on the owner’s face, he could not stop thinking that she looked familiar.
A familiar face.
‘Where have I seen her before?’
After a moment, he finally remembered.
‘That woman… No way! The owner of the barbecue restaurant on the first floor of my old office building?!’
The owner of this restaurant was the same woman who had owned the first-floor barbecue restaurant where Geonshin had taken his employees for one final company dinner on the last day before his regression.
Of course, this was twenty years earlier, so her hair color was different, leaving him unsure at first.
But that distinctive scowl on her face belonged unmistakably to the same woman.
It seemed she had opened her first restaurant here.
After regressing, he had wondered whether, just as he had met the TA hyung again at school, he might gradually encounter people from his previous life one by one.
But still….
To run into her again here of all places.
‘She asked me so many times to take a look at her ductwork back then, and even here the ducts are causing trouble.’
If he had to trace the starting point of Geonshin’s regression, the first cause would probably be the damage to his drawing files caused by the power outage.
But if he went a little farther back, there had also been the duct problem at the restaurant on the first floor.
Water leaking from the duct had caused the power outage.
It had certainly not been intentional, but considering that he had regressed as a result, perhaps he could even call her his benefactor.
‘Then I should take a look at that duct for her today. Let’s see… about how large is this restaurant?’
Ding.
[Would you like to use the Scale item?]
The moment Geonshin thought that he needed to determine the scale of the restaurant, the item window naturally appeared before his eyes.
‘It automatically pops up when I need it. That’s convenient.’
Scale item activated!
From that moment on, dimension lines like those on architectural drawings sprang out wherever Geonshin looked.
The walls.
The floor.
Even a small container holding spoons.
They appeared like tissues being pulled from a box.
The human eye had many limitations when distinguishing between long and short objects.
Optical illusions did not exist for nothing.
If the same stick was alternately compared against a longer object and a shorter one, it could appear to change size.
The human brain was not nearly as trustworthy as people liked to think.
The eye was easily deceived by surrounding shapes, lines, forms, and angles, making an object appear different from its actual dimensions.
But Geonshin now possessed an ability that allowed him to escape those deceptions of sight.
All because of the [Scale] skill.
Chewing another piece of meat, he checked the width and length of the restaurant.
After examining various things, he took a sheet of paper from his bag and began drawing.
As a CAD monkey with twenty years of experience, he had drawn countless plans for small stores like this one.
If the problem was smoke, then there was the efficiency relationship between the number of tables, the restaurant’s floor area, the ceiling hoods, and the ducts carrying the smoke outdoors.
On top of that, everything from the table arrangement to the kitchen construction contained little problems that kept catching his eye.
Perhaps this was another effect of his increasing Creativity Points.
‘The short side is 9,686 mm. The long wall, including the kitchen, is 19,925 mm. The total area is 57.8 pyeong, and the kitchen alone is 8.5 pyeong. One pyeong is 3.3058 m². Then….’
Before Geonshin’s regression, the basic unit of area had been square meters, but in 2002 it was still common to use pyeong (py).
One pyeong was approximately 3.3 square meters.
You could picture it as a square roughly 1.818 meters by 1.818 meters.
“Huh? Hey, what are you doing instead of eating?”
“Hyung. You can still eat more meat, right? If this goes well, we might even get some extra meat on the house.”
“What?”
There was no need to explain any further.
Geonshin slapped the table and stood up before heading toward the kitchen.
Unlike the flustered owner, the employee from the interior company wore a strangely capitalistic smile.
One glance at him was enough for Geonshin to get a rough idea of what he was planning.
He had probably done the original work just poorly enough to create a problem, then intended to charge extra for additional construction.
Then again, this was an era when hardly anyone even knew how to use the internet properly.
Whatever a contractor quoted was basically the price.
Unless someone went around personally comparing multiple contractors, even if they were blatantly overcharged, the prevailing attitude was that the fool who got ripped off had only himself to blame.
‘But that’s not going to happen.’
Standing at the entrance to the kitchen, Geonshin addressed the interior company employee.
“Hello. I’m a student in the Interior Design Department at Gyehwa University.”
“Gyehwa? Oh, that junior college. But interior design? Did they have an interior design department there?”
‘Of course they don’t have one yet. Well, they’ll get one soon enough anyway.’
“The reason I’m asking is that, for an assignment, I had to choose a store near the school and do a hypothetical interior design project for it. I chose this restaurant. As far as I know, this place is about 57.8 pyeong. Is that right?”
“Huh? The floor area? Yeah, around that. You students sure have a lot of questions. Now that you’ve actually come out to a real job site, you can see it’s pretty different from sitting at a desk pushing a pencil around, right? If you have any questions, ask me whatever you want. I’m a professional.”
His swaggering tone practically dripped with arrogance.
This sort of superiority complex among field workers was usually found in rookies who had only recently joined a company and had just begun learning how the work was actually done.
They had no one at work whose abilities they could really compete with, so instead they showed off to university students, proudly displaying practical knowledge that could not be found in textbooks and boasting about the greatness of real-world experience.
For some reason, the man’s eyes also suggested that he wanted to put Geonshin, a mere junior-college student, in his place.
But whatever this guy thought, Geonshin was already a seasoned veteran with more than twenty years of experience in the industry.
And after regressing, he had been running projects at Yeongjo Architecture and spending his entire day buried in drawings.
‘Bastard. Where did you learn nothing but dirty tricks, trying to scam people? Guys like this are why decent contractors get cursed at too.’
Unscrupulous contractors who inflated estimates or deliberately made mistakes so they could demand additional payments had continued to appear well into the twenty-first century.
Even in an era where smartphones allowed people to check everything from land prices to online reviews, fraud and deception remained widespread.
So how could people like this possibly not appear in a poorly informed market like this one?
Geonshin made a decision.
‘I’m going to teach this bastard some manners.’
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