Free plan: Korean visitors get routed to LAX instead of Seoul (ICN) — any fix?

My site's server is in Seoul, Korea. But when I turn on the Cloudflare proxy (orange cloud), Korean visitors get routed through the US:

Korean user → Cloudflare LAX → my server (Seoul) → LAX → Korean user

So every request crosses the Pacific twice.

What I measured:

– Proxy ON: 0.9–3.9s to first byte (TLS handshake alone 0.4–2.4s)

– Worst day (routed via SEA): 10–25s

– Proxy OFF (direct to server): 0.05s

So right now I'm running the root domain as DNS-only just to stay usable.

My zone got IPs in 104.21.x / 172.67.x, and those go to the US from Korean ISPs. Other Cloudflare ranges (104.17–19.x, 172.64.80.x) hit ICN in ~3ms from the same connection.

Questions:

1. Is there any way on the Free plan to get Korean traffic served from ICN?

2. Would deleting and re-adding the zone get me a different IP range?

3. Or is paying (Pro / Argo) the only real fix?

Anyone in Korea dealing with this? Thanks!