Chapter 1 – Dopamine Addict

===================

Translated by Seoulbound

Read it only at Novelbyu.com & Utoon.net

===================

Dopamine.

An excitatory neurotransmitter.

Otherwise known as the happiness hormone.

I was a dopamine addict.

The first time I started getting dopamine was through geeky pursuits.

Idols, rock bands, the Premier League, Romance of the Three Kingdoms…

Around the time I could no longer get dopamine from geeky pursuits, I started exercising.

Around the time I could no longer get dopamine even from extreme sports like martial arts and parkour.

I started playing online games, which had no realistic constraints.

‘Actually, playing games was the one thing I didn’t want to do, but…’

Although games might have been the easiest way to get dopamine.

I had deliberately avoided touching them because playing games reminded me of my mother, who couldn’t even be reached.

But as the saying goes, a habit picked up late is the scariest.

As I searched for increasingly difficult, cruel, and highly stimulating games, I ended up mastering all kinds of apocalypse-themed ones.

Among them, the game that provided me with high stimulation for the longest period was a game called .

The reason I could enjoy for so long was nothing else.

First, to explain the game’s setting.

An ice age began due to a meteorite that fell to Earth in the past, bringing an end to most of humanity.

The setting is that after some time passed and an interglacial period arrived, the surviving humans built and lived in their own ‘safe zones.’

A total of nine safe zones called Candy, Cola, Cigarette, Beer, Chicken, Cocaine, Knife, Love, and Unicorn.

The player could choose a starting zone from the eight safe zones, excluding Knife.

Once the starting zone was determined, they woke up in the body of a ten-year-old child in that safe zone.

The player, who woke up after receiving a revelation of the ‘Second Apocalypse,’ had to prepare for destruction from then on.

This period was truly important.

Because, on the day the player turned twenty in this zone.

The ‘Second Apocalypse’ would begin.

What to do before the Second Apocalypse came was entirely up to the player’s freedom, but depending on what they did, a dead ending could appear even before the destruction arrived.

Should I call it a preparation period, a nurturing period, and something like Phase 1 of this game?

Anyway, if one survived until age twenty and safely (?) met the destruction, from then on, it was survival against the bastards from other zones.

This part was the charm of this game.

And here, it was revealed that a low starting difficulty for a safe zone was not necessarily a good thing.

Because the stats of characters who started in safe zones with high difficulty were significantly higher.

Furthermore, the bastards from the unopened ‘Knife’ zone were complete madmen who tried to kill any survivors from areas with lower difficulty than theirs on sight.

Since the only zones with higher difficulty than Knife were Love and Unicorn, starting in a lower-difficulty zone meant one had to build up combat power first.

Anyway, was basically a game with extremely high player freedom.

In addition, because the difficulty and content varied drastically depending on which safe zone one started in, I was able to enjoy this game for quite a long time.

But even that ended as of today.

I had seen the endings of all the safe zones.

Even the hidden zone, ‘Knife.’

[Dopamine Addict] Guide to Starting in the Hidden Safe Zone ‘Knife’

As soon as I uploaded the final guide to the community, comments were posted.

HomeProtector: That psychopath den was a starting zone? No wonder it had a difficulty rating even though it was an unselectable area.

HomeProtector was a guy who posted comments the fastest, like the jobless person he was.

HomeProtector: But the bastards in that zone kill everyone regardless of whether they are children or women, is a starting run even possible there?

└ CornerHoney: Read the guide instead of asking this shit, fuck.

This guy CornerHoney always left abusive comments, so I usually deleted them whenever I saw them, but I decided to leave this one alone.

HomeProtector: Crazy; I’m reading it now, and what is this? What kind of guide starts by massacring the residents of the zone?

How many comments is this guy posting by himself?

SsapPossible: You have to kill all the residents of the zone from the start, but the difficulty is lower than Love and Unicorn???

└ SafetyZone8: It’s an academic consensus that starting in those two zones is highly difficult because you have to play along with the concept.

└ HomeProtector: SsapPossible probably hasn’t tried the guides for Love and Unicorn.

T-Bastard: But how did you unlock the hidden zone?

└ Dopamine Addict: It is easy. You just need to see the starting endings of all the other eight zones.

└ CornerHoney: It’s only easy for you, fuck.

└ Dopamine Addict: I should have uploaded all the starting guides for the other eight zones though?

└ CornerHoney: Were those guides actually meant to be followed?? Isn’t this guy crazy;;

└ Dopamine Addict: I’m going to block you.

I blocked CornerHoney, and the others began to soothe me.

HomeProtector: It’s true that your guides are difficult. Just look at this guide. You start as a ten-year-old, and you’re telling us to massacre the residents? Does that make sense?

SafetyZone8: Dopamine Addict’s guides are just read for fun, lol.

…This was a bit of a shock.

I had been steadily uploading guides in the hope that more people would enjoy .

Yet they only came to read them for fun.

‘Are my guides really that difficult?’

Becoming the successor of the warlord ruling the zone or becoming the idol of the zone shouldn’t be that difficult, right?

Just as I was about to fall into deep thought, one more comment was posted.

Taejeongtaesebeyonce: Thank you as always for the great guides, big brother!!

Right, this person said thank you.

There must be people for whom my guides were helpful.

But judging by his nickname, this guy seems like he would be older than me, yet he calls me big brother every time.

Anyway.

Since there was no more content to enjoy.

This was goodbye to .

“What should I do now…”

Already, the dopamine in my blood was dropping.

I had to find some new stimulation.

‘Before that, I should eat something.’

It felt like it had been a long time since I had eaten a proper meal because I was so absorbed in the game.

I went out of the house to find something simple to eat.

A convenience store I had never seen before had appeared in front of my house.

I didn’t think there was a convenience store here until recently…

Had I been playing games for that long?

‘Anyway, it’s new content.’

A new hobby, a new game—anything new produced dopamine.

I walked into the new convenience store as if possessed.

The newly opened convenience store did not look like the ones I was familiar with.

‘…What is this?’

The first thing I saw upon entering was a candy display stand.

Unlike other convenience stores that usually displayed various kinds of candies, this display stand was piled high with crude-looking jawbreakers.

Next to it was a beverage refrigerator, which was filled with bottles of cola without labels.

‘It’s my first time seeing a refrigerator in the middle instead of against the wall.’

Moving past the cola refrigerator, there was a display stand piled with cigarettes, a beer refrigerator, chicken boxes, flour divided into transparent bags, a kitchen knife section, condoms…

Staring blankly at the last display stand piled high with unicorn dolls, I suddenly snapped out of it.

‘This… is the safe zones.’

Is this an Apocalypse Safe Zone collaboration convenience store?

‘No. Let’s think calmly.’

Apocalypse: Safe Zone is not a game grand enough to do a collaboration.

‘It’s more credible that the convenience store owner is a Safe Zone addict who placed orders in this ridiculous manner.’

Even so, trying to do business with only nine items, what an idea.

Still, feeling sorry for them as a fellow lover of the game, I took photos of the convenience store interior and uploaded them to the community.

It seems new, so if it gets some word-of-mouth among game fans, it might help a little.

[Dopamine Addict] A convenience store that looks like it was opened by a Safe Zone addict owner

HomeProtector: What is this place? Where is it? DM me.

After sending the address of the neighboring building via PM to HomeProtector, who showed up immediately to ask for the location, I took a cola from the refrigerator and walked to the counter.

Perhaps because it had been a long time since I saw bottled cola, I had been craving the carbonation to tickle my throat ever since I first spotted the refrigerator.

As I approached the counter with the cola, the clerk asked me with a smile on his lips.

“Will you go with Cola?”

“Huh? Ah, yes.”

“Excellent choice.”

…Was he perhaps mocking me for taking so many pictures of the store when I was only buying a single bottle of cola?

However, the smile on the clerk’s face did not seem fake.

“This way, closer.”

As the clerk lifted a heavy-looking barcode scanner and said that, I approached him with the cola, but feeling a sense of incongruity, I opened my mouth.

“Excuse me, this cola doesn’t have a barcode—”

The next moment.

Thwack!

The barcode scanner in the clerk’s hand struck my head hard, and I lost consciousness.

* * *

Thud, thud, thud.

At the sound that shook the earth, I snapped to my senses and sat up.

Thud, thud, thud.

It was the sound of dozens of soldiers stepping in unison.

I stared blankly without realizing it as dozens of soldiers marched past me in alignment.

A scene so familiar, yet a contrasting, unfamiliar sensation.

Hurriedly groping my body, I could quickly tell that my hands and feet had shrunk.

Yes, just like a ten-year-old child.

“…No way.”

‘No way, there’s no way.’

Denying reality, I checked the clothes I was wearing, examining what pattern was engraved on the chest.

A top that looked like an adult military uniform roughly cut to fit a child’s body, and engraved on its chest was a symbol of two cola bottles crossed in an X shape.

‘Cola,’ one of the nine safe zones in that game, .

The symbol of the warlord ruling that place was the crossed cola bottles.

“This is crazy.”

The biting cold and murky air.

The rhythmic footsteps of the soldiers continuing their march in the distance.

This sensation was absolutely not a dream or a hallucination.

I, somehow.

Seemed to have been possessed into the game —

“What the fuck is this!!”

Surprised by the sudden curse from below, I looked down.

Underneath the wooden box I was sitting on, another child who looked about ten years old was screaming while clawing at his own hair.

“No way, did I get possessed into that fucking trash game, Safe Zone?! Oh, shit, goddammit!”

…It seemed.

That I was not the only one possessed into this game.