The workers stood in a ragged line, shovels in hand, staring at me like I was about to order them to storm an enemy fortress. In a way, I was.
"Men!" I spread my arms like a prophet revealing divine truth. "Today, we begin the most ambitious project this territory has ever seen."
Silence. A few of them glanced at each other. One spat into the dirt.
"We're digging… a canal!" I announced.
Still no cheers. Only the sound of a distant crow laughing at me. These people had the enthusiasm of wet laundry.
I pulled out my "blueprint" — which was actually just a piece of parchment with a single line drawn across it. "This," I declared, "will bring water from the river straight into our fields. We'll turn dust into gold. Dead land into bread baskets. Poverty into—"
"Less poverty?" one of the workers offered.
I glared. "…Abundance."
The Inspection Phase (Also Known as Wandering Around Pointing at Things)
In my previous life as Kim Minjae, I had never dug anything deeper than a potted plant hole. But I had played enough city-building games to know that irrigation was step one. Sure, those games didn't account for "surprise swamp gas explosions" or "mysterious boulders the size of houses," but how different could it be?
"Move that dirt… somewhere else!" I barked, walking along the marked trench line. Two workers looked at me, then at the dirt, and then shrugged. Apparently, my instructions were too advanced.
I switched to the Lloyd Method™: pace around dramatically, point at random, and say things like, "Ah, yes, the soil composition here is… hmm, concerning." "Dig deeper. No, not that deeper." "Imagine the flow rate… yes… perfect."
They had no idea what I was talking about, which was the point.
"Lord Damien!" shouted Foreman Hugo, a broad-shouldered man with the permanent expression of someone who'd just tasted spoiled milk. "We've hit a rock."
"Then break it."
He scratched his beard. "It's bigger than the cottage."
I strolled over, expecting a large stone. What I found instead was a slab of granite so massive I half-suspected it was the lid to some ancient dragon's coffin. "Ah," I said sagely. "This is… a foundation stone."
"For what?"
"For… uh… stability. We'll… incorporate it into the canal." (Translation: I had no idea how to move it and hoped nobody would notice.)
Three days later, we hit water. The wrong kind.
A swamp — complete with frogs, reeds, and a smell like someone boiled cabbage in a sewer — began filling the trench. According to every map, there wasn't a swamp here. The workers panicked. "It's cursed water! Bad luck!"
I clapped my hands. "No, no! This is a… reservoir. Yes. A planned reservoir to… regulate the water supply."
One man squinted. "Did you… plan this?"
I smiled with the confidence of a man absolutely lying through his teeth. "Of course."
By week's end, the digging pace had slowed to the speed of continental drift. Half the workers claimed "injuries" from "lifting dirt wrong. "One guy was napping inside the trench.
I considered yelling, but then remembered the Lloyd Principle: never waste your voice when you can manipulate morale instead.
So I made speeches.
Glorious, nonsense-filled speeches about how their children's children would bless their names, how they were warriors against famine, how history itself would remember them.
Did it work? Well… they pretended to work harder whenever I was looking. Close enough.
After a month of chaos, shouting, and the occasional frog invasion, the canal was…Not finished. Not even halfway finished.
Instead, what we had was:
A trench zigzagging like a drunk snake.
A boulder "incorporated" as a scenic feature.
A swamp-turned-"reservoir" that smelled like regret.
And workers who now referred to me as "The Dreamer" behind my back.
But then the rains came.
The swamp overflowed, water spilled into the crooked trench, and — by pure accident — some of it reached the fields. For the first time in years, parts of the land turned green.
"See?" I told the skeptics. "All according to plan."
And maybe, just maybe… it actually was the start of something.