Rated F for Farming, Now Every Guild Bids on My Vegetables novel · Chapter 3 of 32

Chapter 3: The Peppers Came Up

Ki-tae wins the strange pepper lot, and the sealed term read to the whole hall makes him pay off the debt he meant to foreclose and carry a message to the grandmother he was robbing.

"Ten coins," Ki-tae said.

A few people laughed.

Across the hall, a woman in a green Cheongju Guild jacket flicked open a folding fan and raised it.

"Twenty," said the crier, for her.

Ki-tae looked over at her, then up at Yook on the bench behind him.

Yook was smiling at nothing.

"Forty," Ki-tae said.

The fan went up again, and the crier said, "Sixty."

Gyu-ho stood at the back of the hall under his hood and did the sums in his head.

A Tower coin was worth a hundred thousand won at the Association exchange.

Sixty coins was six million won, for twelve peppers.

At the five-day market in Geumsan, twelve peppers went for three thousand.

Grandma would have called the crier a thief and then asked what else he was buying.

"A hundred," Ki-tae said.

"A hundred and fifty," said the crier, for the fan.

Now the hall had stopped laughing.

Nobody here paid with brass, he saw.

They held up flat Association coin cards, black for the big guilds, and the coins would come off them when the hammer fell.

The woman with the red-string ponytail leaned forward with her elbows on her knees.

Yook leaned down to her.

"Don't bid against my captain, Bom."

"I wasn't going to," she said.

He patted the pocket of her navy coat where the gray bottle was.

"Good. And drink your medicine. Hanbat looks after its own."

Gyu-ho had heard that tone from bank clerks, telling Grandma what was good for her.

The fan rose to two hundred and fifty.

Ki-tae's ears had gone red.

He had told the whole bench the Cheongju squad would freeze on floor 11 before he did.

"Three hundred," Ki-tae said.

The fan stayed down.

The woman behind it shrugged at him.

"Three hundred coins," said the crier. "Lot nine to the Hanbat captain."

A stone hammer Gyu-ho hadn't noticed rose from the lot stone by itself and came down once.

The sound went through the floor and up his boots.

A line hung in front of his eyes, inside the hood, where nobody else could see it.

[Lot sold. XP: 450 of 500.]

[Coins arrive when the term is met.]

So the Tower held the money until the buyer did what he was told.

"The seller's term," said the crier.

The hall went quiet, because this was the part everyone waited for.

"Pay Maeng Bok-sun's debt at the Geumsan co-op, by your own hand, before the thirty-first. And tell her the peppers came up."

For a moment nobody understood it.

Then one of the raiders on Ki-tae's bench turned and looked at him.

"Captain," he said. "Isn't Maeng Bok-sun your grandmother?"

Ki-tae's mouth opened.

"You were just telling us," the raider said. "The one who'll sign now because she's got nobody."

Someone on the Cheongju side laughed, and then half the hall did.

Ki-tae stood up so fast his phone fell on the floor.

"This is a setup," he said to the crier. "Somebody's playing games with my family."

"Seven days," said the crier, and nothing else.

"How much is the debt, Captain?" somebody called from the Seoul benches.

Ki-tae didn't answer.

Gyu-ho could have answered for him.

It was forty-two million won, the search fee Hanbat had taken for two men and one afternoon.

At the exchange that was four hundred and twenty coins, more than he had just bid for the peppers.

Ki-tae turned to Yook.

"Master Yook. The guild will cover it. It's a guild lot."

Yook took his glasses off his head, folded them, and put them in his coat.

"It's your term, Captain Ju," he said, kindly. "Hanbat doesn't pay family debts."

"And it isn't my field yet," he added. "Is it?"

That was the first time Gyu-ho had heard anyone say out loud whose field it was supposed to become.

Ki-tae stood in the middle of the bench with the whole Market looking at him.

His three hundred coins had already left his card when the hammer fell, and the Tower would hold them until the term was met.

Now he had to find forty-two million won on top of that, in seven days.

If he didn't, the Market was closed to him for life.

A raider who couldn't buy at the Market couldn't climb, and a captain who couldn't climb was nobody.

He picked up his phone.

The screen had cracked straight across.

"Who's the seller?" he said to the hall. "Who knows my grandmother?"

Nobody did, and the crier was already calling lot ten.

Gyu-ho turned and walked to the gray doorway at the back.

He kept his steps slow, though his legs wanted to shake.

He hadn't eaten anything but peppers in four days, and he had just made his cousin pay Grandma's debt.

He wanted to laugh, and he wanted to run all the way to Geumsan, and he could do neither.

But on Monday or Tuesday Ki-tae would walk into the co-op in his Hanbat jacket and put forty-two million won on the counter.

Then he would have to turn to Grandma and say four words she would understand better than he did.

The peppers came up.

Grandma would know whose seed it was before Ki-tae finished the sentence.

"Hey."

He stopped.

The woman with the red-string ponytail was standing between him and the doorway with her hands in her coat pockets.

Up close she was nearly as tall as he was, and she looked tired.

A gray line ran under the skin of her left wrist and disappeared into her sleeve.

He had seen a line like that once on the news, on a raider who never raided again.

"You're the seller," she said.

He didn't answer.

"Nobody else in here is wearing the Tower's hood," she said. "There have been two sellers in seven years. I saw both."

"You're the third," she said.

Two others had stood where he stood, and he had never heard of either one.

He stepped around her.

She stepped with him, easily.

"How does a seller know a farm in Geumsan?" she asked.

"I like peppers," he said.

His own voice came out of the hood flat and strange.

She tilted her head and studied the hood.

He kept his torn left arm behind him, where the blood had come through his sleeve.

Then she leaned in, close enough that he could see the coin she was holding against her lip.

"A man was taken in that field on Wednesday," she said quietly. "Ki-tae filmed it. He was an F-rank."

She breathed in.

"And you smell like his peppers."

← Chapter 2 · All chapters · Chapter 4 →

Want to keep talking to characters like these? Chat with AI romance characters: AI Boyfriend · AI Girlfriend · Dark Romance · Fantasy Romance · BL (Boys’ Love) · Billionaire Boyfriend · Mafia Boyfriend · Possessive Boyfriend · Hockey Boyfriend · Older Boyfriend · K-Drama Boyfriend · Anime Boyfriend · Vampire Boyfriend · Werewolf Boyfriend · Demon Boyfriend · Fae Romance · GL (Girls’ Love) · Anime Girlfriend · Goth & Alt Girlfriend · Gamer Girlfriend · Tsundere Girlfriend · Fantasy Girlfriend