Rated F for Farming, Now Every Guild Bids on My Vegetables novel · Chapter 1 of 32
Chapter 1: Rating Day
His cousin films his seventh F rating in front of the neighbors and offers to take the farm off their grandmother's hands, Gyu-ho tears up the paper, and the breach in the pepper field opens again and takes him instead of her.
The rating board on Ki-tae's phone said the same thing it had said for seven years.
"Ju Gyu-ho. Sow. F. No combat value," his cousin Ki-tae read out, loud enough for the whole pepper field.
He turned the phone around so the co-op manager could see it.
The manager ran the farm co-op in town, the one that held Grandma's loan.
Ki-tae had brought him out to witness a signature, and he wore two pairs of glasses at once.
Grandma's neighbor, a widow who lived alone next door, had come up the lane in her blue truck with side dishes.
She had stayed to watch.
Gyu-ho kept picking peppers.
He was twenty-seven, lean, with forearms burned dark from the rows and a front tooth he had chipped on a tractor hitch at twelve.
His grandmother cut his hair with kitchen scissors, and it showed.
His own phone had chimed with the same news at nine that morning, and he hadn't opened it.
Every October the Hunter Association re-rated every skill in Korea and posted the results at nine sharp.
Before 2019 there had been no skills to rate.
On March 14, 2019, the Tower had come up out of Expo Park in Daejeon, an hour north of this field.
It was a gray needle with no visible top, and on clear days he could see it from the north ridge, a pale line on the sky.
At the moment it rose, every person in Korea over fifteen had heard one word in their head.
The word was their skill.
Gyu-ho had heard his in a soil-science lecture at the agricultural college, and the whole class had laughed before the professor did.
Since then, the Association had rated every word from F to S by one measure, what it could kill.
Six adults in ten were F.
The law called anyone licensed into the Tower a climber, the guilds called their fighters raiders, and TV called them all hunters.
F-ranks were none of those, because F-ranks weren't allowed through the Tower's doors.
That law came from the first spring, when a Seoul guild took eleven F-rank porters up the stairs and none of them came down.
"Seventh year in a row," Ki-tae said. "Grandma, do you know what the Association calls a skill like this?"
Three rows down, under a flowered sun hat, his grandmother kept filling her basket.
Maeng Bok-sun was seventy-six, small and bent and quick, and she had a stiff black handbag hooked over one elbow even in the field.
"I don't care what they call it," she said.
"Welfare. Director Namgung says it on TV every October."
Namgung was the Association's rating director and Korea's only S-rank, and he read out the top ranks on the rating show every year.
The first year, he had called the F-rank allowance welfare, and the whole country had laughed.
Gyu-ho had never cashed a won of that allowance, out of pure stubbornness.
The two raiders Ki-tae had brought laughed on cue.
They wore the same black Hanbat Guild jackets as Ki-tae, with a gold wheat-ear crest on the chest.
Ki-tae was Grandma's other grandson, four years older than Gyu-ho, a B-rank with a skill called Iron Hide.
Hanbat had sent him home to Geumsan on breach watch.
At the edge of the field stood the Association's yellow meter post, and its needle had sat in the red since Monday.
A breach was a hole the Tower tore open outside itself, in a field or a parking lot or a school yard.
The meter needle climbed days before one opened.
Then a gray seam split the air, monsters came out of it, and when it closed, it pulled in whatever stood too near.
Nobody pulled into a breach had ever come back.
Four years ago one had opened in this field and taken Gyu-ho's grandfather.
He still caught himself looking for Grandpa's cap at the end of the rows.
Ki-tae took a folded paper out of his jacket.
"Here's the thing, Grandma. The co-op loan is due on the thirty-first."
"Forty-two million won," Ki-tae said. "You don't have it, and Gyu-ho doesn't have it."
"His skill makes seeds come up a day early."
That was true, and not one day more.
Gyu-ho had sat in the Association's test room while a bean came up early in a paper cup, and watched the examiner write F.
"So sign the field over to Hanbat," Ki-tae said. "The guild pays the loan."
"You move into a nice place in Daejeon with heated floors, and everybody wins."
"A nice place," Grandma said. "You mean a home."
Gyu-ho set down his basket.
The loan was the money Grandma had borrowed the week the breach took Grandpa.
Banks in Korea asked your rank before your name, and no bank lent to two F-ranks, so the co-op had lent against the land.
Ki-tae had told her Hanbat would search the breach site for him, for a fee.
Hanbat had sent two men for one afternoon, and they had taken photos of the dirt.
The fee had been forty-two million won.
Gyu-ho had done the sum most nights since.
A basket of twelve peppers brought three thousand won at the five-day market, so the debt was fourteen thousand baskets.
"You want the field because it's a breach field," Gyu-ho said.
Ki-tae smiled into his phone.
"Monsters come out of breaches, and monsters drop coins."
"Hanbat can farm a field like this for years. That's real farming, cousin."
Gyu-ho walked over and took the paper out of Ki-tae's hand.
It was a land transfer form with a yellow sticker where Grandma was supposed to sign.
He tore it in half, and then in half again, and put the pieces in his pocket.
"We'll pay the co-op by the thirty-first," Gyu-ho said.
"With what?" Ki-tae asked.
"Peppers."
He had no idea how, and he said it anyway, because Grandma was listening.
"You'd need a field of gold peppers," Ki-tae said.
"Then I'll grow some."
Ki-tae grinned into the phone.
"You heard him. My cousin the F-rank is going to grow gold."
Grandma came up the row and stopped in front of Ki-tae, who was twice her size.
"Your grandfather taught you to ride a bike in this field," she said.
Ki-tae lowered the phone and looked at the ground, ashamed.
Before he could answer, the air over the far end of the field split open.
The seam was gray, taller than the house, and the wind turned around and blew toward it.
A hairless gray hound the size of a calf climbed out, with a mouth that opened sideways.
It went straight past a raider's bolt of red light and bit down on Ki-tae's arm.
Ki-tae's skin went dark as iron, and the hound's teeth snapped off against it.
A brass coin with a square hole rolled out of its mouth into the dirt.
"It's closing!" the other raider yelled. "Get back!"
The seam was shrinking, and the pull grew stronger.
The toothless hound went first, tumbling backward into the gray.
Pepper plants tore out of the ground and flew in after it.
The widow wrapped both arms around her truck's side mirror, and the co-op manager held on to her waist.
Grandma was the smallest person in the field, and the wind took her feet out from under her.
She slid down the row on her back, still holding her handbag, toward the seam.
"Ki-tae!" Gyu-ho shouted.
His cousin was closest, and that iron arm could have held a truck.
Ki-tae looked at Grandma, then at the seam.
Then he grabbed his raider by the collar and backed away toward the lane.
"Leave her!" he said. "Nobody comes back out of those!"
Gyu-ho ran down the row with the wind at his back.
He didn't think about it.
Four years ago nobody had been close enough to grab Grandpa, and he had spent four years wishing he had been.
He caught Grandma by the arm a body's length from the seam.
He planted both feet, swung her around by the arm and the handbag strap, and threw her up the row.
She landed in the peppers and rolled.
The wind let her go, and it took him instead.
The last thing he saw was Grandma on her knees in the dirt, and Ki-tae at the end of the lane, filming.
Then everything went gray and quiet.
He came down on his back in tall grass.
There was no wind and no sound, only a white light overhead with no sun in it.
He was alive.
Nobody had come back out of a breach, so nobody had known that a person could live on the other side.
He thought of Grandpa first, and made himself stop.
The co-op loan was due in ten days, and Grandma was alone in that field with Ki-tae.
His phone said No service, and its camera showed only a flat gray.
He sat up.
Grass ran in every direction to a gray wall so far off it looked like weather.
It was a plain the size of the county seat, flat and silent, with no bird and no insect anywhere in it.
Gray stone blocks lay scattered in the grass, square-cut, each about the size of a rice sack.
A few steps away stood a persimmon tree, bare and crooked, exactly like the one in their yard.
It even had the low fork where he used to sit as a boy and shell beans for Grandma.
In his jacket pocket he found the torn form, his pocketknife and Grandma's old seed tin.
He had been saving seed into it all morning, from the best peppers of the year.
He had ten days, one tin of seed and a skill the whole country called welfare.
He knelt and pushed his fingers into the soil.
It was black, cool and damp, better than the best field Grandpa ever had.
He dropped one pepper seed into the hole and thought the word Sow, without hoping.
The dirt cracked before he took his hand away.
A stem climbed out, then leaves, then white flowers that dropped as he watched.
By the time he breathed out, the plant stood at his waist, hung with red peppers.
In seven years, Sow had never once done more than a day's worth of anything.
Beside the tree, one of the gray blocks began to glow.
It was bigger than the others, waist-high and about the size of a rice chest, with a flat top the size of a serving tray and a front face smooth as slate.
He had taken it for one more block.
Pale letters rose on that front face, one line, glowing.
[Seller found: Ju Gyu-ho. The Market opens on Saturday.]
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