Chapter 1

Dopamine Addict

Dopamine.

An excitatory neurotransmitter.

In other words, the happiness hormone.

I am addicted to dopamine.

The first time I started getting dopamine was through fandom.

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

By the time I could no longer get dopamine from being a fan, I started exercising.

And by the time I could no longer get dopamine from extreme sports like martial arts and parkour…

I started playing online games, where there were no realistic limitations.

‘Honestly, games were the one thing I didn’t want to touch…’

Games might have been the easiest way to get dopamine.

But they reminded me of my mother, who I couldn’t even contact anymore, so I had deliberately stayed away from them.

But as they say, a late-learned vice is the most frightening.

As I searched for increasingly difficult, cruel, high-stimulation games, I ended up devouring all kinds of apocalypse stories.

Among them, the one that gave me high stimulation for the longest period of time was a game called Apocalypse: Safe Zone.

There was a reason I was able to enjoy Apocalypse: Safe Zone for so long.

First, to explain the game’s setting…

In the past, a meteorite fell to Earth, triggering an ice age, and most of humanity met its end.

Then, as time passed and an interglacial period arrived, the surviving humans built their own “safe zones” and lived within them.

There were a total of nine safe zones: Candy, Cola, Cigarette, Beer, Chicken, Cocaine, Knife, Love, and Unicorn.

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

Once the starting zone was decided, the player would awaken in the body of a ten-year-old child from that safe zone.

After awakening with a revelation about the Second Apocalypse, the player had to prepare for the coming destruction from that point on.

And this period was extremely important.

Because on the day the player turned twenty in that zone…

The “Second Apocalypse” would begin.

What you did before the Second Apocalypse arrived was entirely up to the player, but depending on what kind of nonsense you pulled, you could get a dead ending before the apocalypse even came.

You could call it the preparation period, the growth period, or Phase 1 of the game.

In any case, if you managed to survive until twenty and safely(?) greet the apocalypse, it became a survival game against the people from the other zones.

This was where the real charm of the game came in.

It was revealed here that starting in a safe zone with a low starting difficulty was not necessarily a good thing.

That was because characters who started in higher-difficulty safe zones had overwhelmingly higher stats.

On top of that, the people from the unopened “Knife” zone were complete lunatics. If they saw survivors from regions with a lower difficulty than theirs, their first instinct was to kill them.

The only zones with a higher difficulty than Knife were Love and Unicorn, so if you wanted to start in a low-difficulty zone, you first had to build up your combat power.

Anyway, Apocalypse: Safe Zone was fundamentally a game with an extremely high degree of player freedom.

And because the difficulty and content changed drastically depending on which safe zone you started in, I was able to enjoy the game for quite a long time.

But that ends today.

I have seen the endings of every safe zone.

Even the hidden zone, “Knife.”

[Dopamine Addict] Hidden Safe Zone “Knife” Starting Guide

As soon as I uploaded my final guide to the Apocalypse: Safe Zone community, comments started appearing.

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

As expected of an unemployed bum, HomeProtector was always the fastest to comment.

HomeProtector: But those zone bastards kill everyone, kids and women included. Is it even possible to start there?

└RoomCornerWife: Read the damn guide instead of asking this crap.

RoomCornerWife always left abusive comments, so I usually deleted them whenever I saw them, but this time, I decided to leave the comment alone.

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

How many comments was this guy going to leave by himself?

TotallyPossible: You have to kill everyone in the zone right from the start, but its difficulty is lower than Love and Unicorn???

-Safe8Zone: It’s the established academic theory that those two starting zones are harder because you have to roleplay the concept.

-HomeProtector: TotallyPossible clearly hasn’t tried the Love and Unicorn guides.

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

└DopamineAddict: It’s simple. You just have to see all the starting endings for the other eight zones.

└RoomCornerWife: Easy for you, damn it.

└DopamineAddict: I’m pretty sure I uploaded guides for all the other eight zone starts too, though?

└RoomCornerWife: Were those guides even made so people could follow them?? Are you insane, you crazy bastard;;

└DopamineAddict: I’ll block you.

I blocked RoomCornerWife, and the others started trying to soothe me.

HomeProtector: It’s true your guides are hard. Just look at this one. You start as a ten-year-old, and you’re telling us to massacre the zone residents?

Safe8Zone: Dopamine Addict’s guides are just something you read for fun lol.

…That was a bit shocking.

I had been diligently uploading guides because I wanted more people to enjoy Apocalypse: Safe Zone.

But they had only been coming to read them for fun.

‘Are my guides really that difficult?’

It’s not like becoming the successor of the warlord who rules the zone, or becoming the zone’s idol, is that hard, right?

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

TaejeongTaeseBeyoncé: Thank you as always for the great guides, hyung!!

Right. This person said they were thankful.

I guess there are people who find my guides helpful.

But judging by that person’s nickname alone, he seems like he’d be older than me, yet he calls me hyung every time.

Anyway.

Since there was no more content left to enjoy…

This was goodbye to Apocalypse: Safe Zone.

“What do I do now…”

I can already feel the dopamine levels in my blood dropping.

I need to find some new stimulation.

‘Before that, I should eat something.’

I had been so absorbed in the game that it felt like it had been ages since I last ate a proper meal.

I went outside to look for something simple to fill my stomach.

And in front of my house…

A convenience store I had never seen before had appeared.

I was pretty sure there hadn’t been a convenience store here until recently…

Had I really been playing games for that long?

‘Anyway, this counts as new content.’

A new hobby, a new game, anything new creates dopamine.

As if possessed, I stepped into the new convenience store.

But the newly opened convenience store did not look like any convenience store I was familiar with.

‘…What is this?’

The first thing I saw as soon as I entered was a candy display.

Unlike other convenience stores, where all kinds of candy would usually be displayed, this was a shelf piled high with rough-looking jawbreakers.

Next to it was a drink refrigerator, and it was filled with unlabeled glass bottles of cola.

‘This is the first time I’ve seen a refrigerator standing in the middle instead of against the wall.’

Past the cola refrigerator, there was a display stacked with cigarettes, a beer refrigerator, chicken boxes, flour portioned into transparent plastic bags, a kitchen knife section, condoms…

After blankly staring at the final display, which was piled high with unicorn dolls, I suddenly came to my senses.

‘This is… Safe Zone.’

Was this an Apocalypse: Safe Zone collaboration convenience store?

‘No. Let’s think calmly.’

Apocalypse: Safe Zone was not a game big enough to get a collaboration like this.

‘It’s more believable that the convenience store owner is a Safe Zone addict and placed the orders like this.’

Still, trying to run a business with only nine products was certainly an incredible idea.

Even so, as someone who liked the same game, I felt a little bad for them, so I took photos of the inside of the convenience store and uploaded them to the community.

It seemed newly opened, so if it spread by word of mouth among fans of the game, 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 building next door through a private message to HomeProtector, who immediately appeared and asked for its location, I took a cola from the refrigerator and walked toward the counter.

Maybe it was because I hadn’t seen bottled cola in a while, but from the moment I first saw the refrigerator, I had been craving the carbonation that tickled my throat.

As I approached the counter with the cola, the clerk smiled and asked me,

“Will you be going with Cola?”

“Huh? Ah, yes.”

“An excellent choice.”

…Was he perhaps taking a jab at me for taking so many photos of the store when I was only buying a single cola?

But the smile on the clerk’s lips did not look fake.

“Come closer.”

The clerk lifted a heavy-looking barcode scanner and said that, so I approached with the cola in hand. Then, feeling that something was off, I opened my mouth.

“Um, this cola doesn’t have a barcode…”

The next moment—

Thwack!

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

***

Thud. Thud. Thud.

At the sound that made the ground tremble, I suddenly came to my senses and sat up.

Thud. Thud. Thud.

It was the sound of dozens of soldiers stepping forward at the same time.

I watched, dazed, as dozens of soldiers marched past me in formation.

A scene far too familiar.

And yet, a sensation completely alien to it.

I hurriedly felt my own body, and soon realized that my hands and feet had shrunk.

Yes, as though I were a ten-year-old child.

“…No way.”

‘No way. No way, it can’t be.’

Denying reality, I examined the clothes I was wearing, and the pattern engraved on the chest.

It was a top that looked as though an adult military uniform had been roughly cut down to fit a child’s body. On its chest was a symbol of two cola bottles crossed in an X.

Cola.

One of the nine safe zones from the game Apocalypse: Safe Zone.

The crossed cola bottles were the symbol of the warlord faction that ruled that place.

“You’ve got to be kidding me.”

The biting cold that cut into my flesh.

The murky air.

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

This sensation was absolutely not a dream or a hallucination.

It seemed that I had somehow…

Possessed a character inside the game Apocalypse: Safe Zone—

“What the fuck is this!!”

Startled by the sudden curse that came from below, I flinched and looked down.

Beneath the wooden crate I had collapsed on, I saw another child who looked to be around ten years old, tearing at his own hair and screaming.

“No way, no way! Did I get possessed into that shitty-ass trash game Safe Zone?! Fuck, goddammit!”

…Apparently.

I was not the only one who had been possessed into this game.