Park Junho had, by anyone's reasonable measure, the worst good luck in South Korea.
He was twenty-three years old, enrolled at Hansung National University's College of Agriculture and Life Sciences, and he was — without a shadow of a doubt — the most brilliant agricultural student his department had produced in the last thirty years. His professors said so constantly, effusively, and with the kind of warm admiration that would have been touching if it hadn't always come immediately before the phrase: "So naturally, you'll handle this for us."
It was a Tuesday morning in late October when the semester's particular flavour of suffering reached a new low.
Junho was crouching in the university's experimental rice paddy at six-thirty in the morning, ankle-deep in mud that smelled like something had died in it twice, carefully measuring the pH levels of the soil with a calibrated probe while simultaneously dictating observations into his phone. His waterproof boots — the expensive ones his mother had bought him as a birthday present — had already given up on being waterproof around the third week of September. Cold, grey water sloshed around his socks. A frog sat on his clipboard and watched him with an expression of pure, unbothered contempt.
"Soil pH at station four, 6.2," Junho said into the phone. "Slightly more acidic than ideal. Recommending amendment with agricultural lime at approximately two tons per hectare. Also recommending that whoever designed this monitoring schedule be sent directly to—"
"Junho-ya!"
He straightened up so fast he nearly dropped the probe into the paddy. Professor Kim Dae-woong was striding along the narrow embankment between the paddies, wearing pristine white sneakers that had never once touched actual mud, holding a tablet and looking extremely pleased with himself — which was, in Junho's experience, always a bad sign.
Professor Kim was sixty-one years old, had four academic degrees, seventeen published papers, and the absolute unshakeable belief that having access to an exceptionally talented student meant never having to do tedious work himself.
"Ah, good, you're already here," the professor said, as if Junho had materialized in the cold paddy at dawn for any reason other than because Professor Kim had texted him at 5:45 AM saying 'urgent monitoring data needed early pls come thx.'
"Yes, Professor. I've completed stations one through four."
"Excellent, excellent. Listen, I need you to also do the growth measurement survey for my graduate seminar students. They were supposed to do it yesterday but there was some kind of—" he waved his hand vaguely, "—scheduling conflict."
"The growth survey," Junho repeated. "For forty plots."
"Yes. And if you could compile it into a report by Thursday, that would be wonderful. My seminar meets Friday and I'd like the data ready."
"Professor, Thursday is also when I have to submit my own thesis proposal draft, help Professor Yoon with her field trial analysis, and present to Professor Choi's undergraduate class because he has a conference—"
"Junho-ya, I have complete confidence in you." Professor Kim clapped him on the shoulder — from the embankment, so he didn't have to step into the mud — with the easy authority of a man who had never once doubted that confidence was a sufficient substitute for compensation. "You're the best student this department has had in decades. A real treasure. I tell everyone."
"I would prefer cash."
Professor Kim laughed as if this were an excellent joke and walked away, already typing something on his tablet.
Junho looked at the frog. The frog looked back.
"Don't," the frog seemed to say.
"I know," Junho said, and went back to measuring pH levels.
The architecture of Junho's suffering had been constructed slowly, over the three years he'd been at Hansung, with the patient craftsmanship of people who recognized opportunity when they saw it.
It had begun innocently enough. In his first year, Professor Yoon Soo-jin — Crop Physiology, a small woman with sharp eyes and the ability to grade papers with terrifying speed — had noticed that Junho's practical reports were not only correct but genuinely insightful. She'd asked him to help her demonstrate soil moisture measurement techniques to a struggling study group.
He'd said yes, because he was twenty and wanted his professors to like him.
By the end of first year he was running three study sessions a week and had somehow ended up co-authoring a section of Professor Yoon's conference paper, credited only in the acknowledgments.
Second year: Professor Choi Byung-soo — Plant Pathology, a nervous man who communicated primarily through anxious laughter — had discovered that Junho could diagnose plant diseases from photographs with accuracy that rivaled his own ten years of experience. This had led, in a chain of logical steps that felt reasonable at each individual moment and catastrophic in retrospect, to Junho essentially running the practical half of the undergraduate Plant Pathology course while Professor Choi attended conferences, wrote grants, and stress-ate ramyeon in his office.
And then there was Professor Kim, who had realized that Junho could not only conduct field research but write it up in clear, publication-ready prose, and had begun feeding him data sets like a man feeding a particularly productive golden goose, patting him on the shoulder, calling him a treasure, and carefully never putting any of the actual work in writing.
There were also two visiting lecturers who had each separately discovered Junho's existence and begun routing questions through him. There was the department head's secretary, who had figured out that Junho knew more about the university's agricultural equipment than the maintenance staff and occasionally texted him when a soil analyzer stopped working. There was a masters student named Dawit from Ethiopia who was genuinely lovely and asked for help with statistical analysis because his Korean wasn't strong enough to parse the textbooks, and Junho helped him purely out of goodwill but it still took four hours a week.
All told, Junho was doing approximately the workload of two graduate students, one postdoc, and a part-time lab technician, while officially being an undergraduate completing his third year.
He was also, somehow, maintaining a 4.3 GPA.
His mother called it a blessing. His one friend, a philosophy student named Seungmin who occasionally ate meals with him and regarded agricultural science with fond incomprehension, called it "a masterclass in allowing yourself to be gaslit by an entire institution."
Junho called it Tuesday.
By the time he finished the pH monitoring, the growth survey for forty plots, his own site inspection notes, and a supplementary soil structure analysis he'd noticed was needed while doing everything else, it was 7:30 PM.
He ate dinner standing over his kitchen sink — instant ramyeon with an egg, because he hadn't had time to buy groceries — and opened his laptop to start on the report due Thursday.
At 11:00 PM, he received an email from Professor Kim asking if he could also review and revise the methodology section of the professor's upcoming journal submission "when he had a spare moment."
At 11:02 PM, he received an email from Professor Choi asking if he could create a diagnostic reference guide for the undergraduate students "since you're so good at explaining these things."
At 11:05 PM, he received an email from Professor Yoon with twelve attached data files and the subject line: "Quick question about these results—"
Junho closed his laptop.
He sat in his small apartment in the dark for a long time.
Then he opened his laptop again, but not for any of the work emails. Instead, he opened a gaming forum he'd bookmarked three months ago and never had time to read. He'd seen it mentioned somewhere — a new immersive RPG called Verdant Conquest, a fantasy world-building game where you commanded armies, managed territory, built civilizations. Reviews called it "the most richly detailed fantasy world ever constructed in a game." One review said the player could, if they chose, spend the entire game just developing their territory's agricultural systems and it would still be deeply satisfying.
Junho read this review twice.
He thought about the cold paddy and the frog and Professor Kim's pristine white sneakers.
He opened a new tab and bought the game.