Assistant Manager Kim Hates Idols – Chapter 543 – Kim Wonjoo (4)

Author: LyraDhani

[SYSTEM] A work instruction from the ‘Superior’ has arrived.

▶ Assistant Manager Kim seems to have scrutinized the settlement statement, but honestly, the settlement statement itself doesn’t mean much. It’s like a menu in a restaurant. It’s stuck on the wall, but until the customer places an order, it has zero impact on how the restaurant actually runs.

Normally, I would have snapped back at the system, asking if that was the best analogy it could come up with. But now, such trivialities didn’t matter in the slightest.

[SYSTEM] A work instruction from the ‘Superior’ has arrived.

▶ Settlement is just the preparation stage. The important thing is the actual order. You have to make a request like, ‘Give me this, please~,’ for the waiter to move and the food to come out.

[SYSTEM] A work instruction from the ‘Superior’ has arrived.

▶ Creating the menu, posting the ordering instructions… No matter how I look at it, our company really does have excellent onboarding.

In other words, looking back over my life was merely a checkpoint. The important part was what came afterward—the part I had refused to access.

[SYSTEM] A work instruction from the ‘Superior’ has arrived.

▶ What’s the point of the company laying out a smooth road for you and spoon-feeding you everything when the time comes? Assistant Manager Kim does nothing but complain about everything. How are you any different from Karens who don’t place an order and then throw a fit because the food isn’t coming?

‘So that’s why you insisted that I look at the next document too.’

Because you shoved it in my face, I now knew that noona also had this a*shole pseudo-system attached to her.

The system immediately stepped in to clear up the suspicion that it was some kind of knockoff.

[SYSTEM] A work instruction from the ‘Superior’ has arrived.

▶ As they say, to do business, you have to know how to be flexible. Some people approach you with an open mind only when you speak kindly, while others only listen when you establish discipline right from the start.

Ah, so for me, who is a superior’s personal bootlicker, you spoke using Manager Nam’s skin, and for noona, you approached her in a ‘Friend’ version?

A rational decision. After all, I had obediently crawled as the system commanded, suffocated by the lingering influence of Manager Nam.

Since noona was naturally good at making friends, she might have accepted the anomaly of a system as more of a chatting friend.

Should I be relieved that noona’s system wasn’t as cruel as Manager Nam? Such a trivial fact made me let out a hollow laugh. I had struggled so much because of that small detail.

Even with a kind virtual friend attached, noona didn’t move at all, save for an occasional blink. Standing there like a stone statue, she simply stared down at her brother, who was exhausted and trapped in the cycle between the company and his studio apartment. Every time a message arrived and the room brightened and dimmed, a blue light flickered across noona’s face before vanishing.

The sun rose outside the window. The me of the past gathered my clothes and headed for the office.

I remembered watching this in a dream. Because there was no light in my eyes, I had thought the me of that time looked miserable.

Was it the same in noona’s eyes? No matter how intently I stared, I couldn’t tell what she was thinking.

The sound of a keyboard began to fill the room. The non-stop typing turned into noise, filling the space. Just as the rhythmic tapping grew loud enough to swallow a person whole—

“I’ve had enough.”

Noona muttered.

The system that had been hiding itself appeared once again.

Friend

You’ve decided on a wish, right?

Friend

Good choice. Before we finalize the wish, I’ll read you the ‘Chain Letter’ one last time!

With the brightly glowing system window, noona’s phantom vanished from my sight as if she had never been there. Once again, I was left alone.

‘What’s this about a wish?’

I demanded an explanation from the system about what I had just seen. Perhaps it judged that I had become more receptive, because the system obligingly opened a chat window.

[SYSTEM] A work instruction from the ‘Superior’ has arrived.

▶ The time has finally come for me to explain the history of our company to Assistant Manager Kim~. You can’t hear an authentic account of our founding process from a current employee just anywhere, you know. Assistant Manager Kim sure is lucky.

The System then unfolded a crude pamphlet. It was a brochure design for a corporate introduction, packed with body text. The fonts and layout were completely broken, as if the text had been randomly scraped from somewhere. The tiny characters, which looked smaller than 9pt, boasted atrocious readability against the deep blue background.

[Our company is a research entity that constructs and manages all organisms on this planet. We operate by securing the entire process pipeline—from the planning stage of life forms to generation, intermediate inspection, and supplementation.]

[Contributing to the Creation of a Harmonious Ecosystem]

Our business area is limitless, ranging from fungi and bacteria to flora and fauna. Our employees unite to create a world where diverse organisms live together.

[Managing with Responsibility]

Our pride as the number-one planetary administrator comes from our responsible after-sales service. From birth to death, we provide 1:1 direct care for organisms born through our verification process to ensure they join an error-free circulation cycle.

[Pondering Sustainability for the Future]

To prevent the early extinction of organisms, we equip all organisms developed by our company with a ‘Species Preservation Function.’ Our challenge to produce life forms that do not go extinct continues to this day.

It was full of sentences reminiscent of cult flyers or pseudo-science tabloids. I wondered if this cliched, archaic style was part of the system’s imitation of Manager Nam’s tone. I was curious, but I didn’t particularly want an answer.

Despite its awkward appearance, the brochure—which looked like it would likely get torn apart by science students—contained a lot of information.

‘Planetary administrator, business entity…’

It seemed my hypothesis was correct: the system was an absolute being, a higher-order existence compared to humans and other living things.

Reading web novels about absolute gods had finally paid off. If not for that, I probably wouldn’t have been able to grasp this situation so quickly.

[SYSTEM] A work instruction from the ‘Superior’ has arrived.

▶ Assistant Manager Kim has no idea how many changes and trials and errors we’ve gone through over the years. Balancing all of this is no small headache, you know? Things like water circulate on their own, but for animals, you have to create everything from the hunters to the hunted, the scavengers, and the decomposers.

[SYSTEM] A work instruction from the ‘Superior’ has arrived.

▶ You can’t even imagine how annoying it is to look after each of these individually. The rapid increase of a specific species is also part of a natural phenomenon, but who likes receiving a report that says, ‘It just happened to turn out this way~’? But if you leave them alone, they get sick at the drop of a hat; if they get sick, they die in droves; and if you want to restore them, the loss is astronomical… If it were going to be like this, I should have stopped at being a, what do you call it, a ‘Plant Butler’?

To prevent mishaps, this entity attached itself 1:1 to every living thing—like my ‘system’ or Noona’s ‘Friend’—and intervened directly.

However, there had never been a case where such a strange phenomenon was observed before. Even if it intervened in life, it seemed fundamental that the person involved would never directly experience or witness its influence during their lifetime.

Given that the system had referred to me as an ‘irregular’, I could at least speculate that something serious enough had happened to force a system that normally exercised its influence from an invisible realm to reveal its existence.

The System had mentioned the settlement statement and said the important thing wasn’t the process, but the ‘act of ordering’. Here, the ‘responsible A/S’ introduced in the brochure would belong to the process.

Then what exactly did the ‘order’ refer to? To find the answer, I continued reading the next page.

[Research & Design]

Utilizing our unique research data, we plan organisms to settle on this planet. To preserve diversity within clusters, we periodically form new TFs to promote nascent projects.

[Develop]

Organisms born from our company possess a certain level of self-evolution capability. In the event of a decrease in the number of species due to failure to adapt to the environment, we analyze the problems and improve existing organisms or create new life forms.

Most of it was similar to what was on the corporate introduction page. As I read down slowly, a paragraph caught my eye.

[New Business]

Beyond the realm of expanding survival possibilities through the reinforcement of physical conditions, we promote a ‘Support-Based Evolution’ business utilizing intellectual entities capable of fostering the next generation.

Our ‘Humanity’ is equipped with the highest level of ‘Species Preservation Function.’ By strengthening support capabilities, they display a different pattern of survivability compared to existing organisms.

Accordingly, we are supporting and recording the boundless development of humanity by establishing a new pattern of ecosystem, distinct from the food chain system, through continuous R&D.

‘This is it.’

I ran my finger over the words “Species Preservation Function.”

[SYSTEM] A work instruction from the ‘Superior’ has arrived.

▶ It feels a little awkward saying this myself, but I believe the fact that the company has survived this entire history without ever going under is all thanks to my efforts to preserve its lineage.

When I asked if it was a different concept from reproduction, the system flew into a rage. It berated me in Manager Nam’s manner of speech, saying things like I had a narrow perspective and lacked the ability to make connections.

[SYSTEM] A work instruction from the ‘Superior’ has arrived.

▶ Even that jellyfish mobile you hung in your room is a product of my research, did you know? For Assistant Manager Kim, deciding whether to eat cold noodles or spicy noodles for lunch might be the biggest dilemma of life, but over here, I’m engaged in fierce deliberations every single day over how to keep the ecosystem from collapsing.

‘Is it talking about the sun-catcher Cheonghyeon gave me?’

The name was… incredibly long. Turritopsis nutricula, was it?

Because Lee Cheonghyeon had even explained why he had chosen that particular gift, I knew quite a bit about its biological characteristics despite the jellyfish being unfamiliar to me.

‘A jellyfish that can live forever unless it’s eaten or suffers an accident.’

A creature capable of achieving immortality under the right conditions. A function granted to each living thing to preserve the species. An intellectual entity capable of fostering the next generation…

The words that had been drifting aimlessly around in my head gradually began to fall into place.

Organisms possess a ‘special characteristic’ bestowed by the system for the preservation of their species.
Humanity was given something different from all previous living things. Its purpose is to ‘support’ the next generation.
All living beings follow the rules established by the system, and exceptions are not permitted because they may cause problems.

‘Have I understood everything correctly up to this point?’

The system flashed.

[SYSTEM] A work instruction from the ‘Superior’ has arrived.

▶ Precisely.