Chapter 4: A Total of 38.985 Trillion Won
Translator: ShutDoor
First, a few things I had figured out.
One, the Construction function only worked within a certain distance of this ‘terminal’. Its limit seemed to be a radius of roughly three kilometers.
Two, the construction method was identical to the snap and voxel systems found in typical sandbox games. All I had to do was place a structure on the grid displayed on the game screen and click. A physical object would instantly materialize, completely disregarding the laws of physics.
For example, like this.
「[Basic structures] Creating a concrete foundation.」
「Cost: 199,600 won」
Like the concrete block that had just appeared beneath my feet, measuring one meter long and wide and ten centimeters high.
“…Wow.”
I knew absolutely nothing about architectural engineering, but even I understood how absurd this was.
Wondering if it might be a hologram, I rapped my fist against the cold concrete surface, but all I got was an ache in my knuckles. It was unmistakably real concrete.
And three, any structure I built could be demolished and recovered at any time with a single click.
「Recovering concrete foundation.」
Fwish. With that sound, the concrete supporting my feet vanished in an instant, scattering like pixels.
I blankly ran my hand over the ground, now bare dirt again, and let out a deep sigh instead of marveling at it.
—Make sure you survive! You can do it!
…Was Earth really about to end?
The possibility that Earth would soon be destroyed was starting to feel more credible than the possibility that I was developing schizophrenia.
“…”
If so, I had no time to sit around staring into space.
If I couldn’t be certain, preparing for the worst was the rational choice.
I muttered to myself, just to steady my nerves.
“Let’s see. If the game is this detailed, there should be a separate custom-design function.”
Sure enough, the tabs on the left side of the screen included separate Detailed Design and Sandbox Mode options. Naturally, the system also offered a vast selection of preset blueprints.
They ranged from cost-effective tin cans that were little more than shipping containers crudely buried underground and barely deserved to be called shelters, all the way to luxurious thirteen-story underground bunkers complete with self-sustaining ecosystems and guard posts.
Their prices varied just as widely, from a bargain ten million won or so to hundreds of billions.
But I couldn’t find any shelters costing trillions. Apparently, anything beyond that scale had to be built from scratch.
‘I don’t know anything about civil engineering, but…’
When it came to construction games, I was as confident as anyone.
*****
“…”
Two hours.
That was how long it took me to realize I was an idiot.
「Warning: Critical design flaw」
⦁ Load calculation error: Insufficient support for the upper granite bedrock.
⦁ 97.4% probability of the upper bedrock layer collapsing within 48 hours of the start of excavation.
Rrrrumble!
Accompanied by the dispassionate warning sound, the culmination of all my efforts, the Home_Sweet_Home_v.7 blueprint, crumpled into rubble in the on-screen simulation.
Thankfully, the bedrock hadn’t collapsed in reality and it was only happening inside the 3D simulation, but I couldn’t shake the feeling that my pride had collapsed along with it.
I knew the laws of physics would apply to some extent, but I hadn’t expected the game to be this demanding.
How was a computer science major supposed to calculate things like stress and load distribution?
‘Fuck.’
Just as I began seriously considering whether I should use one of the provided blueprints, a notification appeared in the corner of the screen.
「We recommend the [Automated Construction Service].」
A slight chill ran down my spine. The timing of the notification was far too uncanny.
Had it read my mind or something?
Then again, this insane program could drop real chunks of concrete into existence with a few mouse clicks. Reading a user’s mind didn’t seem beyond it.
“…”
As if it couldn’t care less that my heart was in my mouth, the laptop blinked indifferently and displayed the same message again.
「We recommend the [Automated Construction Service].」
After staring blankly at the screen for a moment, I moved the cursor and meekly clicked the button as though resigning myself to my fate.
Knowing when to admit defeat was one of my few virtues.
I couldn’t even begin building the shelter without its help anyway.
[ Automated construction service ]
⦁ Cutting-edge AI will handle the entire construction process based on the selected facility tier.
⦁ Select the facility tier to be constructed (Tier 1–Tier 9).
⦁ [Warning] Construction speed and unit price increase exponentially according to tier.
Facility tiers ranged from Tier 1 to Tier 9.
If Tier 9 was an exposed tin-can shelter shaped like a Dragon Ball capsule, with barely enough room for one person to crouch inside, Tier 1 was supposedly a vast underground city capable of housing thousands of people, complete with a self-sustaining ecosystem and nuclear protection system.
In other words, if I wanted a bigger shelter, I had to pay that much more.
After careful consideration, I selected Tier 1. Once the population grew, having too much room would be infinitely better than being packed into a space too small to breathe.
Was it Yemi Lab in Jeongseon, Gangwon Province? Anyway, hadn’t they made the laboratory a thousand meters underground extra spacious because they didn’t know when it might need to be expanded?
[ Automated construction service (Tier 1) ]
⦁ Only cutting-edge construction materials are used.
⦁ Automated construction begins as soon as the design is entered.
⦁ All construction processes are handled, including excavation, foundations, floors, walls, and ceilings.
⦁ No separate personnel or equipment is required.
⦁ Unit price: Approximately 50,000,000 won per m³
…Fifty million won?
Two clicks cost a hundred million?
No matter how I looked at it, that seemed like a rip-off, so I did the math. If I spent half the budget, around 500 trillion won, on excavation and construction, I could apparently carve out a colossal cube roughly 215 meters on each side.
The numbers alone didn’t make the scale easy to grasp, but in terms of volume, it was apparently large enough to cram several of the gigantic Lotte World Towers inside with room to spare.
Once I realized that, the vicious price tag of fifty million won per click suddenly began to seem reasonable.
After all, it did say they used only the finest and most expensive construction materials.
‘Hmm.’
After digging a little deeper into the system, I discovered the real reason Tier 1 construction was so absurdly expensive.
Like paying real money in a cookie-cutter mobile game to shorten a base upgrade timer, this system apparently let me pay a premium to skip civil engineering work with a single click.
Even for excavation alone, the cheapest Tier 9 took an entire day to dig out a single cubic meter, while Tier 1 finished construction the instant I clicked.
In short, the higher the tier, the more money I paid to buy time.
‘Okay.’
I understood perfectly.
I gazed steadily at the majestic granite mountain towering before me, 1,400 meters above sea level.
Wasn’t the Cheyenne Mountain nuclear bunker, the largest nuclear bunker in the United States, buried six hundred meters deep in a granite mountain?
Whatever else happened, my shelter would be far larger and sturdier than that.
*****
There was one ironclad rule for playing city-building games: always start with a master plan.
That was how to avoid making everything look beautiful, only for a sewer pipe to burst later and flood the city with sewage. I spoke from experience, so there was no doubt about it.
Before beginning construction in earnest, I decided to establish a solid master plan of my own.
For the basic layout, I decided to copy our American big brothers. They were bound to know far more about this sort of thing than an ordinary person like me.
There wasn’t much public information available, but after spending hours scraping together every relevant paper and military reference I could find, I managed to extract a fair amount of useful information.
First, like the Cheyenne Mountain nuclear bunker, I would excavate an enormous arched tunnel large enough for heavy machinery to pass through.
The road inside the tunnel would curve several times to block direct fire and shock waves.
That way, if an enemy fired a missile or direct-fire weapon into the tunnel from outside, the attack would strike the tunnel’s rock walls instead of reaching the vital facilities within.
Excavating one arched tunnel 260 meters long with a cross-sectional area of 46 square meters cost 594 billion won.
…Was this right?
Nearly six hundred billion won had evaporated in a few clicks.
The figure was so unrealistically huge that it felt like play money. Otherwise, my reaction wouldn’t have stopped at a trembling hand on the mouse.
At the end of the tunnel, I ‘only’ cleared out a broad space where the first checkpoint would eventually be built. I didn’t think this was the time to worry about such fine details.
Next came the shelter entrance. I decided to install two layers of superheavy blast doors made from a low-carbon steel alloy.
【 ■ Defense equipment list 】
⦁Mk.IV Superheavy Blast Door (Low-carbon steel alloy / Thickness: 2,000 mm)
⦁ Unit price: 68 billion won
⦁ Status: [Available for purchase]
When I bought the most expensive blast door available, a monster weighing hundreds of tons, nine meters wide, seven meters high, and two meters thick appeared on the blueprint.
I wondered whether a mass of metal like that could really move using hydraulic motors, or whether it could even budge at all, but the system guaranteed it was possible, so I decided to take its word for it.
Something else caught my attention more.
‘Why go out of its way to display the [Available for purchase] status…?’
Perhaps it meant that once the twenty-nine-day demo period ended, I would no longer be able to buy things with a simple click of the mouse like I could now.
There was no way to find out immediately, so I focused on designing the shelter’s interior again.
According to the papers I had read, digging a shelter deeper underground offered far better protection than spreading it out horizontally. A wide horizontal shelter had more surface area in contact with the surrounding ground, and if one level was destroyed, all its equipment went with it. With a deep vertical shelter, however, the loss of one or two levels could be endured.
Then I would have to dig deeper underground as well.
Next, I considered which facilities the shelter would need to survive.
‘The essentials would be residential quarters, dining halls, a communal kitchen, a hydroponics room, a laboratory, a food warehouse, a raw materials warehouse, an armory, an ammunition depot, a munitions factory, a recreation zone, power generation facilities, a maintenance workshop, an archive, a control room, and an infirmary. Oh, and I can’t forget the battery room…’
That alone was a rough list of everything that immediately came to mind. Now I had to prioritize them for survival.
‘The control room and power generation facilities.’
Shouldn’t those two be classified as the most critical facilities?
Losing the other facilities wouldn’t be immediately fatal, but if the control room that monitored internal conditions such as the shelter’s air and pressure, or the power generation facilities responsible for its electricity, were destroyed, then it wouldn’t matter whether this was a quadrillion-won shelter or humanity’s final ark. It would simply become a coffin.
So I decided to build the power generation facilities first.
【 ■ Power equipment list 】
⦁Small modular reactor (SMR / 300 MW class)
⦁ Unit price: 1.5 trillion won
⦁ Status: [Available for purchase]
⦁Emergency hydrogen fuel-cell generator set (10 MW class)
⦁ Unit price: 80 billion won
⦁ Status: [Available for purchase]
⦁Large emergency diesel generator
⦁ Unit price: 25 billion won
⦁ Status: [Available for purchase]
.
.
.
I never even considered anything but nuclear power for the primary power source. Nothing else could supply enough electricity to keep a shelter this enormous running around the clock.
That was why I chose MS-SMRs, molten-salt small modular reactors.
Unlike traditional large light-water reactors, they didn’t use solid fuel rods, which made them better suited to long-term operation. Since the coolant circulated through a closed loop, they also didn’t require a continuous supply of vast quantities of cooling water. Most importantly, the equipment could be distributed across multiple locations, making it far more suitable for installation in an underground facility.
The drawbacks were the correspondingly lower power output, the complexity of equipment that used specialized coolants such as molten salt, the need to replace internal components every few years, and the sheer difficulty of disposing of the resulting waste.
The most critical drawback was that the technology had yet to be properly commercialized, not because it was incomplete, but simply because it wasn’t profitable.
For a developed country looking to install new nuclear facilities, there was little reason to choose far lower-output SMRs over proven large light-water reactors while also paying higher development and construction costs.
But my situation was different.
My shelter, to be built hundreds of meters underground, couldn’t secure the vast amount of cooling water needed for a light-water reactor. Nuclear power plants weren’t built next to the sea for nothing.
But an SMR? I only needed to secure enough coolant to charge the system initially.
‘Hmm.’
In any case, the power generation facilities were the shelter’s heart and its most critical systems, so I decided to install them at the deepest level.
China’s Jinping Underground Laboratory, CJPL, had supposedly been built 2,400 meters underground, so I planned to go even deeper.
‘Just in case, let’s build three.’
I splurged on three reactors, each designed to last thirty years. A combined output of 900 megawatts was an insane amount of power, roughly enough to run an entire major city of one million people, so it should leave plenty to spare no matter what facilities I added to the shelter.
「Purchased three MS-SMRs (300 MW class).」
「Purchased three sets of spare SMR parts.」
「Purchased a hydrogen fuel-cell generator and a large diesel generator.」
Just in case, I also bought three extra sets of critical SMR components. Then, since they might come in handy, I purchased a hydrogen fuel-cell generator and a large diesel generator as well.
Of course, if I left them like that, they were nothing but empty shells. I would have to connect concealed wiring later and take care of the other complicated setup work before they could actually operate.
But establishing the master plan came first, so I put that off for now.
Let’s see. According to the papers, nuclear power facilities required a containment structure, transfer cranes, a specially shielded storage area, and so on.
Using more than a dozen papers as references, I excavated a total of 613,000 cubic meters. That included the reactor facility for three twenty-five-meter-class SMRs, a warehouse for related components, an area for the transfer cranes, a specially shielded storage area, and finally generous space for access routes and safety clearances.
That meant I had spent 30.65 trillion won on construction costs alone.
Then I had burned another roughly seven trillion won on the power equipment itself and a generous supply of spare parts…
Thirty-eight trillion?!
I had spent more than half of South Korea’s annual defense budget on a single power generation facility. And I still had a tremendous amount of money left.
‘A quadrillion won really is a lot of money.’
So America, the ‘Land of a Thousand Trillion Won,’ burns through that much every year on defense?
The sun was already sinking toward the horizon. I looked back and forth between the pop-up tent in my backpack and my laptop, whose battery was steadily running out, then decided to return to the motel.
Camping here without proper cold-weather gear would have been a perfect way to freeze to death.
‘Next time I come, I’ll have to bring both a battery and Starlink.’
*****
Choosing not to camp was one of the wisest decisions I had ever made in my life. If I had descended the mountain even a little later, I genuinely might have frozen to death on the trail.
“Hngh, ughhh…”
I fled into my motel room in town, where the heat was blasting, plugged chargers into my laptop and power bank with frozen hands, then ran straight to the bathroom and turned on the hot water.
Even as I thawed my frozen body beneath the steaming water, my mind remained completely consumed by 「Shelter Builder」.
‘Should I build guard posts outside the tunnel too? But then there’d be no point in hiding it in the mountains. Maybe it would be better to make do with small surveillance cameras and sensors…’
After showering and returning to bed, I immediately visited online communities in Korea and abroad.
Before leaving for the mountain, I had set up alerts for every keyword I could think of, including ‘apocalypse’, ‘Shelter Builder’ in both Korean and English, ‘bunker construction’, and more.
I needed to find out whether anyone else among all the people scattered across the world was experiencing the same impossible phenomenon as me.
But my feed contained nothing except the usual doomsday delusions and survival-gear recommendations. I found nothing of value.
‘Maybe I should just sleep.’
After all, I had to crawl back up that goddamn hiking trail early tomorrow morning.
I set the alarm on my smartphone and was just about to pull the covers over myself when…
Ding!
【 Alert: One new post matching the keyword ‘Shelter Builder’ has been published. 】
A familiar logo appeared along with the notification sound.
It was from an overseas community.
The post’s title read as follows.
[headpats: Review of 「Shelter Builder」, a shitty demo game that isn’t even officially released yet and was forced on me by some roadside hawker.]
*****
Author’s Note
Entrance: 2 blast doors (68 billion × 2)
Tunnel construction costs (594 billion)
Power equipment: 3 SMRs (2.5 trillion × 3), 1 hydrogen generator (80 billion), large diesel generator (25 billion)
Power plant construction costs (30.65 trillion)
A total of 38.985 trillion won
That’s all!
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