Chapter 51: User Count Surpasses 500,000
Translator: ShutDoor
For the past few days, overseas social media services—especially platforms based in the United States—had been going down one after another, until at some point they stopped working altogether.
[This page is currently unavailable!]
Could war really have broken out between the United States and China, just as <SurvivalNet> had said?
“…”
The servers seemed to come back online occasionally, because repeatedly refreshing the page would sometimes make new posts sluggishly appear, but at this point, it was practically a warning not to use the sites at all.
It was only natural that people would flock to domestic communities such as <SurvivalNet>.
Anonymous65123: I’m hungry T_T T_T T_T T_T
Anonymous9999: (Crafting recipe memo) 4 wooden planks + 3 ropes = zipline
Anonymous9999: (Crafting recipe memo) 10 pieces of plastic trash + 3 parts + 2 circuit boards + any desk = old calculator. Share any other recipes you know
Anonymous751: 9999 <- This asshole’s casually playing games while radioactive yellow dust is raging outside lol
He was chuckling as he read other people’s posts when it happened.
Knock, knock.
“Son, I’ll leave the portable gas stove outside your door.”
“!”
Startled by the quiet knock, the man cautiously pressed an ear to his bedroom door.
He looked to be in his early to mid-twenties at most. He waited until his mother’s footsteps faded away, and only after hearing the master bedroom door close did he carefully open his own.
“…”
A portable gas stove and an unopened one-liter bottle of water sat outside his door.
After quickly checking his surroundings, the man dragged the stove and water bottle into his room, then took out the half packet of ramen and half packet of seasoning left over from breakfast and put some water on to boil.
Eating an entire packet of ramen in a single meal had become a luxury long ago.
Even this would have to last him through dinner, when he would fish the solids out of the leftover broth and eat them. Not that there would be much to fish out beyond a few pieces of mushroom and several strands of soggy noodles… Still, it was better than enduring an empty stomach.
Perhaps the fact that plenty of others were in the same situation offered some consolation.
Anonymous922: Been eating nothing but seaweed soaked in water at my goshiwon for a week. How am I doing?
Anonymous7522: Even I probably wouldn’t hand out relief supplies with the country in this state.
Anonymous12413: I can’t live like this anymore lol. Gonna get infected and come back with a review
It was not just him, either. Every member of the family was holed up in a separate room, handling meals this way.
They only had one portable gas stove, so they could not all cook at once. More importantly, if the whole family gathered like they used to and even one of them was an infected person in the incubation period, it was all over.
What about the piped gas supply? That had been cut off ages ago. Electricity still came on intermittently, but unfortunately, his home did not have an induction cooktop.
Someone who knew nothing about the situation might click their tongue and ask how a grown man in his twenties could survive on one packet of ramen a day.
Even so, a household that could still cook ramen at all was relatively well-off.
At least they could still eat things that qualified as ‘food’, and they had not yet reached the point of risking their lives to leave the apartment in search of something to eat.
Anonymous88878: Hiding at home every day was fucking miserable, but now that I’m infected, I feel so much better
Anonymous88878: I’ll track down your homes and kill every last one of you, you fuckers ^^
Anonymous151: Blocked the monster mole, yep
Anonymous41623: That bastard 88878 had me worried since yesterday, and now he’s finally become a monster mole. Rest in peace.
Anonymous50012: Someone keeps knocking on my front door. What do I do? Help me
A quick look through the community turned up countless posts about infected people breaking into homes, so his household was genuinely fortunate by comparison.
It was not because the apartment his parents owned was in an exceptionally expensive neighborhood.
Expensive apartment complexes might have enjoyed better security in the past, but after the police and firefighters were all wiped out, everywhere was much the same.
Wealthy neighborhoods were not free of infected people.
The only relatively safe places were areas where the Republic of Korea Armed Forces were permanently stationed and continued firing indiscriminately at the infected.
Fortunately, his apartment complex was within one of those few areas with a permanent military presence.
That was because Seoul’s only thermal power plant was located nearby.
Armored vehicles and heavily armed troops had established a perimeter around the power plant and shot every infected person they saw, sparing nearby apartment complexes from the disasters occurring elsewhere, where groups of infected people stormed buildings en masse.
Bang!
At first, every gunshot had made his heart lurch. By now, though, he supposed he had grown somewhat accustomed to them.
The ramen was ready.
But instead of immediately eating the bubbling ramen, he quietly examined the water bottle his mother had just left outside.
“…”
He scrutinized it for anything like a pinhole.
It was a terrible thing for a son to suspect his mother, who still made an effort to smile amid all this chaos, but after witnessing exactly how the world had collapsed over the past two months, he had no choice.
What if she had secretly smeared saliva on the aluminum pot?
If his mother had gone that far, then he might as well die. What would be the point of living any longer?
‘…Fuck.’
What a goddamn nightmare of a virus.
His high school classmates who had enlisted later than him had stopped responding long ago, while his university friends who lived outside the Seoul Capital Area…
Lee Min-su: Hyeon-u, are you doing okay? It’s been hard to reach you lately.
Park Chang-min: Wanna meet up sometime? I could even come to your neighborhood.
Kim Su-hyeok: Hey! Lee Hyeon-u! You alive? lol You still live in Mapo District?
Lee Tae-jin: Let’s meet up and catch up sometime lol
…were no longer his ‘friends’.
The number 1 remained on the screen, indicating that he had not yet opened the messages.
These days, keeping quiet was proof that someone was uninfected. Anyone making a fuss about meeting up was highly likely to be infected. Granted, that was also information he had learned from <SurvivalNet>.
Slurp.
He scraped up every last morsel of ramen with his chopsticks, then gulped down a few mouthfuls of the bland broth. Afterward, he covered the aluminum pot, still sloshing with broth, and set it aside in a corner of the room.
That would be his dinner later today.
Grrrrowl.
He carefully returned the gas stove to the middle of the living room after using it, then clutched his hungry stomach and threw himself onto the bed.
The roar of harsh wind battering the windows. Leaves thrashing with terrifying violence. Sand and dirt lashing against the insect screen. Somewhere, a window shattered, and screams rang out. The stench of excrement creeping up from the bathroom’s clogged pipes…
To escape the reality closing in on him, he focused even more intently on <SurvivalNet>.
NNNN: How to Prepare for This Colossal Yellow Dust Storm (12512)
Anonymous77777: From now on, call me Lucky Seven Man… (7)
ADMIN1000: Current Situation in Pyeongtaek (21534)
Whoooooosh!
The wind grew fiercer, and the window, crisscrossed with tape as a precaution against the storm, began rattling violently.
Bzzzt, crackle!
The fluorescent light flickering precariously on the ceiling went out with a click.
The power had gone out.
In the pitch-black darkness, where he could not see an inch ahead, the phone in his hand was the only light left.
“…”
Hadn’t someone said that when sight was taken away, the other senses grew sharper?
Through the roar of the wind, the man finally heard the harsh coughing coming from inside the master bedroom.
“…”
Terrified, the man relied on the faint light from his screen as he curled his trembling body even tighter beneath the blanket.
Thud. Thud.
For a moment, heavy footsteps and something resembling the dull report of a machine gun sounded from somewhere, but he stubbornly ignored them.
…Son? Are you asleep? Could you open the door?
He had already fled from reality.
*****
The supplies we planned to recover under cover of the yellow dust storm could be divided into roughly five categories.
First, fertilizer ingredients such as potassium nitrate and calcium nitrate for the hydroponic growing facility.
Potassium nitrate in particular could be used to manufacture explosives as well as fertilizer, so considering our plans to keep expanding the hydroponic growing facility, we decided to scrape together as much as we could store.
Second, native seeds that would disappear forever if the Korean Peninsula were reduced to ashes, along with seeds from various crops and fruits to diversify our hydroponic produce.
Third, raw materials used in large quantities by the advanced materials and chemical engineering laboratory, including copper, aluminum, and stainless steel.
Fourth, various precision consumables needed to operate the particle accelerator in the aerospace engineering and physics research building.
Finally, ultra-high-strength low-carbon steel for the shelter expansion, civil engineering materials for reinforcement, and assorted construction consumables.
Tunnel construction used far more materials than I had expected.
These four days, while radioactive yellow dust blanketed the Korean Peninsula, were the optimal window for recovering resources from the surface.
However, we decided to give up on oil, ammunition, and other weapons because the military was maintaining surveillance over those key facilities somehow, even amid the radioactive yellow dust.
We left the food alone as well. Our shelter already had more food than it could use, but to the survivors outside, it would be the single most vital resource of all.
We deployed a staggering 150 units to the surface. Naturally, that figure was Juggernauts and Enigmas combined, with no humans included.
At an average price of 1.5 trillion won per unit, that meant a force worth an astonishing 225 trillion won had left the shelter.
I had staked a quarter of our total assets, making this a tremendous investment even for me.
As I had stressed time and again, this was absolutely not theft.
We were merely ‘repositioning’ supplies that the South Korean government had left behind when it abandoned the Korean Peninsula to a place where they could be used more efficiently.
If left where they were, they would most likely be contaminated by radioactive dust, deteriorate over time, or be destroyed by the infected.
Wouldn’t bringing them here and putting them toward the reconstruction of humanity be the strategically correct choice?
I was currently watching the situation outside in real time through a camera mounted in a Juggernaut’s visor.
Outside, the yellow dust storm was so dense that it completely blocked the view, making it almost embarrassing to call what lay beyond a ‘landscape’.
As the wind grew fiercer, the sound of sand grains and other debris tapping against the visor echoed in my ears. Visibility was barely three meters. An ordinary person would have been unable to open their eyes, let alone tell which way was which.
Whooooooosh!
But by borrowing the Juggernaut’s ocular sensor, I could see the dying city with perfect clarity.
“…”
The city, entirely steeped in red and yellow, had taken on the grotesque colors of a place already ravaged by a nuclear strike despite never being hit by one.
Dented signs creaked and shrieked in the gale, while sand of an ominous color accumulated in layered mounds in the cracks in the asphalt.
Vehicles abandoned along the roadside were coated in radioactive dirt, every window shattered, while ownerless belongings and corpses on the paving stones were being buried beneath the sand in real time.
Naturally, quite a few people had collapsed because they could not withstand the radiation. They were probably infected people who had rushed into the streets when they could no longer endure their fever.
They turned their heads toward the sound, but their sand-caked eyes had already lost focus.
Crunch!
The Juggernauts showed them mercy by crushing their skulls underfoot in a single step.
That aside, ordinary people could never go outdoors in yellow dust this severe.
The wind was so loud that even the Juggernauts’ heavy footsteps were swallowed by its roar.
“Far more radioactive ash is mixed into the storm than we originally predicted. I believe I need to recalculate for a moment…”
Ann’s eyes emitted a faint blue glow, if only briefly.
“At these levels… it will be impossible to grow crops fit for human consumption on the surface for at least thirty years.”
“…”
It did not even surprise me anymore.
At this point, I was almost wondering just how much worse the world could get.
Once the Juggernauts reached their destination and began briskly hauling heavy H-beams and construction materials, I switched monitor feeds and turned my attention to the reconnaissance satellite’s camera.
Even at this very moment, the United States and China continued launching indiscriminate retaliatory attacks against each other.
Both were superpowers with vast territories and some of the world’s strongest militaries, so the spectacle of missiles being intercepted in midair and painting the night sky like grotesque fireworks repeated itself over and over.
Naturally, I had not sent more than 200 trillion won worth of androids outside recklessly on nothing more than faith in a yellow dust storm.
Even now, General Kang and the rest of the military staff advisers had every radar network at their disposal fully mobilized, ready to issue an immediate evacuation signal if they detected even a single nuclear missile heading toward the Korean Peninsula.
We had not sent a resource recovery team anywhere near Pyeongtaek in the first place, since it faced a high risk of nuclear attack.
During the four days the yellow dust storm held the Korean Peninsula in its grip, we successfully recovered thousands of tons of our targeted metal raw materials, native seeds, and construction materials.
The country’s death toll was impossible even to estimate, but at least the number of users believed to have joined SurvivalNet did not fall. In fact, it rose.
To a staggering 500,000.
That fact offered me a small measure of comfort.
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