Another year has passed, and Kim Jung Hee is now a senior in high school. And he is busier than ever.

The main one that eats up his time is the clinic.

For several months, Jung dealt with patients with diabetes and explosive diarrhea with professionalism and without complaining. After he's proven himself to the doctor, he is allowed to give patients proper dosage consumption and other helpful tips, like don’t down your freaking pills with a shot of vodka. And then he is allowed to inject medicine directly into the patients when the doctor is busy.

Two months after Jung started work at the clinic, he received a skill called “Medicine.” It is a semi-active skill that gives a view of all possible medical problems to a targeted individual. The diagnosis is both based on his senses and observation, as well as taking into account data given by another individual or outside tools such as medical equipment. At the time, Jung did not have any level 0 skills left except, of course, this new one, so he has no problem allocating 1 of his skill points to activate it, even if he only has 2 skill points left. It was simply a pleasant surprise to Jung that the skill is a general one, so he can simply improve it from now on by continuously using it with the patients while he is in the clinic.

In two months, he leveled up the skill to level 2, and then five months after that, Jung received the notification that the skill had leveled up to level 3.

It is all well and good, and yet Jung has sort of gotten immune to it already since all his energy and resolve are to earn more money and help out with the family finances. His impulsive decision to loan Eun Mei money for the bike was ill-timed, and now he is scrambling to get more money. He continued to fix and auction off items in the junkyard, and then furniture orders kept coming in from town as word of the quality of his work became common.

Despite his successes, money is not easy to come by.

The harvest season happened three months ago, and the entire north Korean agricultural field was a resounding failure to all. Actually, it was a complete disaster. Famine is expected in most provinces and even in the capital, Pyongyang. Because of these failures, the great leader executed high-profile party officials in charge of farming. It was the country's third crop failure in a row. And it's the seventh time in the last ten years that the harvest has fallen short of expectations.

The government has no choice but to use its limited foreign currency to buy more rice, wheat, and corn from China. Since they are the only available market for the North due to the ongoing embargo by the West, the prices of goods are extremely one-sided in favor of the Chinese, which then severely depletes the Korean national treasury. This further strained the entire economy, and as usual, it was the peasants who needed to tighten their belts more.

That is why Jung's garden was a lifesaver, and his green success is almost unheard of. It helps that the family did not advertise the garden as well. Hyusil did so because he knew the impact it would have on his neighbors if they knew. It will not bring anything but envy and bad thoughts since they cannot possibly supply the entire town with leafy vegetables. Jung didn't brag about it simply because he didn't see anything extraordinary in his actions.

Before winter, Jung had an idea for a heated greenhouse. One of the first things he missed last winter was the loss of green produce due to a nationwide lack of vegetable supply during the colder months. Jung resolved that this wouldn't happen to his family this year.

Using wires, plastic covers, wooden planks, and a computer fan he recycled from the junkyard, Jung Hee created a simple nichrome wire heater. Basically, he placed intricate wiring using metal coils in confined bedding that uses an old refrigerator battery that Jung also extracted from the junkyard. It produced a sustained but cheap source of heat that warmed a small area. It then slowly heats several stones carefully placed inside that, when heated, keep the heat within themselves for several hours. With only minor maintenance of heat, the stones kept the temperature inside the enclosure way up compared to the temperature outside. Two built-in plastic fans were taken from a machine in the junkyard that Jung had never seen before. Hyunk-ki called it the "computer." Anyway, Jung connected the two spaces using the tiny fans to spread the heat in a much bigger but enclosed area.

By covering the raised bedding in a stitched plastic tarp, Jung is able to create this warm artificial environment to plant easy-to-grow vegetables like cabbage and tomatoes. The warmth itself kept the moisture level sufficient enough that watering the plant was nothing more than an extra procedure.

Jung combined this with his customized compost mixture, and by the middle of winter, Jung and his family were the only ones in the province with access to beautiful, lush greeneries that supplemented their diets.

Stolen from its original source, this story is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

With Jung's silent effort and simple satisfaction from old-fashioned hard work, his new contraption expanded to include the next series of eggs the chickens laid out so that they could heat them and fertilize them this winter season. His father thought it was a great idea that he start helping Jung with the expansion. Jung did not have the heart to explain to the older man that he was only doing it to increase his woodworking and electronics skills.

The truth is, Jung has been having a hard time getting to level 15 for more than a year now. He is still able to upgrade some of his general skills by grinding them, and he is still getting a few skill points simply by completing minor daily quests. But the experience points are simply coming by in trickles, and he still has a long way to go to the next stop point.

This is happening because, in the senior year of high school, there is simply nothing else for him to study. He had already scoured and read the entire library in school, and he has since studied his senior year curriculum. Even the library in Kwang's family is already well used by Jung. Also, skills that he normally relies on with his side jobs like repair, jury rigging, mechanics, electronics, woodworking, metalworking, etc., are all at high-level specialist skills now, level 5 and above, which makes it really hard to improve upon since he never has more than 5 skill points at any given time these days. As such, his progress was at a snail's pace.

What he needed were new machines to dissect and analyze or new subjects to study and learn. Unfortunately, the internet was not something available in his neck of the woods, and Jung has no idea about it. So he just continued on with his slow, level-up pace since there was nothing else he could do about it.

*****

One other interesting development was when Jung decided to build his own hut slightly inside the forest so he would have a place to do his hobbies without annoying his parents. He had never built an entire structure before, but he'd been doing a lot of carpentry work due to his furniture building and repair business, so Jung is confident he can do it. It took Jung an entire week once he was able to spring the needed materials from his own savings, and it worked out great. The place was simple and had only a single window and door, but that was enough for Jung, especially when he installed an old stove that heated the inside without any trouble.

After finishing the structure, Jung was surprised to receive a new skill prompt.

Congratulations!

You have unlocked the general skill "Engineering."

-You now have enough skill to build massive projects that will last for a long time. The higher the skill, the stronger, more stable, and safer the structure you build.

Requirements: MIND 1, BODY 1, STR 2

Current level: 0

That was 5 weeks ago. Even though most of his main projects are in the new house now, Jung still brings a lot of the furniture he repairs back to the barn, mostly because, well, it is in the middle of the forest and his mother will beat his ass raw if he goes there after dinner. Also, there are no light sources in the new place yet, so working at night is near impossible. The barn at least has its dependable lamps.

Jung blew on the slight dust remaining on the surface of his new chair. Unfortunately, Jung didn’t have any money to buy sandpaper, so he used a mixture of herbal leaves and grinded rock salt to create this mixture that somehow made it a fine finishing touch for the wooden furniture. It took him years of trials and errors to perfect his mixture enough that he is satisfied with it.

Before that, the wood was soaked in a bath mixture of herbs he could easily pick up in the forest, plus calcium carbonate he derived from the powdered remains of an eggshell, butane from lighter fluid, and weak acetic acid, which is basically vinegar. Also, he used animal blood and choice internal parts to create a coagulant mixture that combined all the materials into a sort of coating that keeps the wood pristine.

To this day, he wasn’t sure if he got the idea either from his herbology skill or his alchemy skill. He supposed it wasn’t important in the big schemes of things to know what skill actually helped him, but Jung wanted to know how these things work, and it bugged him until now.

Most of his wooden crafting projects are built using the Japanese technique of "Sashimono,” wherein you assemble the furniture wooden parts without nails and only using simple and highly complex wood joints. It is not the only way he can build things, but it is Jung’s preferred technique both because of the aesthetic and the practicality of things since nails cost a lot of money in their town. Instead, Jung used another form of herbal mixture that serves as light glue and gets stronger as time goes by.

Jung perfected all these relevant skills, and now he is confident in building things from scratch. At first, he only built some stools to help his mother sit down while in the garden, but then he started taking repair orders from town, and he was able to build them to the customer’s satisfaction. Soon, he had the confidence to build his own furniture. The first one he built was a table. He was supposed to only repair the old table. Unfortunately, due to exposure to the weather, the table the old woman wanted to fix is simply damaged beyond repair, so Jung was honest with the old woman and instead offered to build her a new table for a fixed price. She agreed, and the finished product ended up well. Both Jung and the woman were satisfied with the transaction.

Unfortunately, the old woman died two years later. Jung Hee even attended the funeral and gave his heartfelt condolences to her son before leaving.

But that was years ago. Now Jung is now a confident master craftsman of most wooden items. He inspected the last chair in the set of four, nodded to himself for a job well done, and placed the finished product next to its cousins. He smiled as he took a step back and admired his own work.

And then the giant owl promptly pooped in it from the ceiling.

“Gaaaah! You evil bird!” screamed Jung. He started comically jumping up and down, trying to catch the owl sitting on top of the wood reinforcement of the barn’s roof. “Come here! Tomorrow, my family will feast on owl meat soup with tofu and tomatoes!”

The owl turned its head sideways to him, like a confused dog. Jung also stopped jumping up and down the barn like a lunatic and scratched his chin instead. “Yeaaah… I know. That sounds awful. But I don’t know any owl meals, so you’re lucky... But I’ll still kick your ass!”

“Would you knock it off! It’s the middle of the night!” shouted his father in the next house. “You still have classes tomorrow! Go to sleep!”

In his panic, Jung covered his face with a flower pot with one of his mystery plants in it and stood rigid to one side of the barn. When his parents did not march out of the house to whoop his ass, Jung gave a sighed of relief. Then he gave the bird a death glare. He also shook a fist at her, promising dire retribution, but Jung did so silently. Then he used an old rag to clean the poop from his client’s chair and then set it aside to one corner of the barn, away from any pooping owls.

Then he walked back to the house to clean up and finally go to sleep.