Chapter 1

Chapter 1
Dopamine. An excitatory chemical messenger in the brain, frequently called the hormone of happiness. I am completely dependent on dopamine.

My hunt for dopamine began ages ago within fan communities centered around idols, rock bands, the Premier League, and the Three Kingdoms. When those avenues stopped providing a thrill, I shifted toward physical movement, exploring martial arts, parkour, and various extreme sports until those sensations also flattened out. Eventually, I turned to digital games, a medium where boundaries existed only in the imagination.

The truth is, I had always tried to avoid playing games because they offered the easiest and most accessible dopamine rush imaginable. Whenever the thought crossed my mind, I would think of my mother, who no longer picked up her phone, and I would forcibly pull my hands back. Even so, late-blooming thieves are always the most reckless. I kept pushing forward, seeking out increasingly difficult, harsh, and high-stimulus titles until I had completed every single survival and apocalypse game available on the market.

Among them, the title that sustained my interest with high-voltage excitement longer than any other was a project titled Apocalypse: Safe Zone.

The reasons for my long-lasting fascination were straightforward. First, the premise: a massive meteor collision forced Earth into an ice age, destroying the majority of the human population. Once an interglacial period finally arrived, the remaining survivors constructed independent “Safe Zones” to dwell within.

There were nine distinct Safe Zones altogether, designated as Candy, Cola, Tobacco, Beer, Chicken, Cocaine, Knife, Love, and Unicorn. Players could select their starting location from any of the choices except for Knife. Once that choice became locked in, the participant awoke inside the physical form of a ten-year-old child native to that specific zone.

Armed with foreknowledge regarding the Second Apocalypse, players had to begin preparing for global collapse immediately. That initial window of time meant everything. The moment a character reached twenty years of age within their territory, the Second Apocalypse officially commenced.

Whatever actions were taken prior to turning twenty rested entirely in the hands of the player, though incorrect decisions could trigger a game-over screen long before the actual catastrophe unfolded. You could look at this period as a preparation phase, a training interval, or Phase 1 of the journey. Manage to stay alive until twenty and face the end times in relatively one piece, and the actual game would finally begin: a brutal struggle for survival against competitors originating from every other zone.

That dynamic constituted the true allure of the experience. Choosing a low-difficulty Safe Zone did not grant the effortless path it initially appeared to offer, because characters hailing from tougher regions emerged with dramatically superior base statistics. Furthermore, the inhabitants hailing from the locked territory known as Knife acted as absolute sociopaths who hunted down any survivor from easier areas on sight. Only Love and Unicorn held higher difficulty rankings than Knife, meaning anyone choosing a beginner-friendly starting point still had to relentlessly grind their combat power right from day one.

Ultimately, Apocalypse: Safe Zone granted participants an extraordinary degree of freedom, with both the challenge level and contents shifting drastically based on the chosen territory. That flexibility explained why I remained hooked for so long.

However, even that journey reached its conclusion today.

I had unlocked and witnessed the endings for every single Safe Zone, including the hidden territory of Knife.

COMMUNITY POST
[Dopamine Addict] Hidden Safe Zone ‘Knife’ Starting Guide

The moment I published the final strategy guide onto the Apocalypse: Safe Zone message board, replies started streaming in.

HOME PROTECTOR
That sociopath den was an actual starting zone? No wonder it carried a difficulty rating even while locked.

Home Protector, true to his unemployed lifestyle, was invariably the first person to drop a comment.

HOME PROTECTOR
Those guys slaughter children and women without a second thought. You can actually begin a playthrough there?

SHUTINHONEY
Read the damn guide instead of asking idiotic questions.

ShutInHoney consistently posted hostile remarks, and I normally deleted them immediately, but this time I decided to let it stay.

HOME PROTECTOR
Holy crap, I am reading through it right now and what on earth is this? What sort of walkthrough starts by slaughtering the entire population of the zone?

It turned out this user was posting multiple replies back-to-back.

SSAPASUBLE
You have to wipe out everyone in the zone right at the start, and the difficulty rating is still supposed to be lower than Love and Unicorn?

LANJEONSYEOK
The general community consensus is that those two starting zones are brutally difficult because of the mandatory roleplay elements.

HOME PROTECTOR
Ssapasuble clearly has never attempted the Love or Unicorn routes.

T-BALNOM
So how exactly did you manage to unlock the hidden zone anyway?

[OP] DOPAMINE ADDICT
Simple. Clear the introductory endings for all eight other zones.

SHUTINHONEY
Easy for YOU, maybe, lmao.

[OP] DOPAMINE ADDICT
I already uploaded comprehensive starting guides for the other eight regions, you know.

SHUTINHONEY
Were those even meant to be humanly possible to follow? This guy is completely unhinged;;

[OP] DOPAMINE ADDICT
Blocking you right now.

I blocked ShutInHoney, and the rest of the forum users immediately began attempting to calm me down.

HOME PROTECTOR
Not gonna lie, your guides are hardcore. Just look at this one. You start out at ten years old and your opening strategy is to massacre the entire district?

Dopamine Addict’s guides are just meant for entertaining reading, lol.

…That particular remark genuinely stung.

I had uploaded those walkthroughs diligently because I wanted a broader audience to experience and enjoy Apocalypse: Safe Zone. Were people really just treating them as casual entertainment?

Are my guides truly considered that extreme?

Becoming the successor to a regional warlord, or rising to fame as an idol within a zone—neither of those objectives seemed particularly challenging to me.

I stood on the verge of sinking into a profound spiral of self-doubt when a final comment popped up.

TOP COMMENT
TAEJEONGTAESEBEYONCE
Always deeply grateful for your incredible guides, hyung!!

Right. At least this individual expressed appreciation. Clearly, someone out there derived genuine value from my efforts. Although, judging purely by the chosen screen name, this person was likely older than me yet persistently addressed me as hyung.

Regardless.

There was nothing left for me to play. This marked my final farewell to Apocalypse: Safe Zone.

“Now what am I supposed to do…”

I could already sense my internal dopamine levels plummeting. I desperately needed a new source of stimulation. But first, food.

I had been so absorbed in the digital world that I could not recall my last proper meal. Stepping outside to grab a quick bite, I noticed a convenience store situated directly in front of my building that I had never seen before.

That storefront definitely had not existed there until recently… Had I really been gaming for that long straight?

Well, I suppose new content was waiting for me.

A fresh hobby, an alternative game, anything novel to manufacture synthetic dopamine. I walked into the unfamiliar establishment as though pulled by an invisible magnet. The instant I crossed the threshold, however, I understood this place bore no resemblance to any normal convenience store.

…What on earth is this?

The initial item that caught my eye was a candy display. Unlike standard shops stocked with hundreds of commercial brands, this fixture was piled high exclusively with crude, roughly chiseled hard candies. Positioned right beside it stood a beverage refrigerator—not pushed back against the perimeter wall, but planted firmly in the dead center of the aisle—crammed with unlabelled glass bottles of cola.

Just past the cola cooler sat a shelf loaded with crude tobacco packages, a beer cooler, crates filled with fried chicken, open bags of flour portioned into transparent plastic pouches, a section dedicated to knives, and piles of unicorn plushies stacked all the way to the ceiling. I stared blankly at the arrangement before forcibly snapping back to reality.

This setup is… the Safe Zones.

Could this be some sort of themed collaboration store for Apocalypse: Safe Zone?

No. Let me think rationally.

Apocalypse: Safe Zone was never a mainstream enough franchise to warrant an official promotional partnership. It was far more plausible that the proprietor happened to be an obsessive fan who intentionally stocked the interior this way.

Still, attempting to run a retail business utilizing precisely nine product categories showed remarkable audacity. As a fellow devotee of the game, I felt a mild surge of sympathy, so I pulled out my phone, photographed the interior, and uploaded the pictures to the community board. If word caught on among the active player base, perhaps it would generate a bit of helpful traffic.

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

HOME PROTECTOR
What is this place? Where is it located? Direct message me the address right now.

I forwarded the building’s address located right next door to Home Protector the second his request appeared online.

Following that, I retrieved a glass bottle of cola from the refrigerator and walked toward the cash register. It had been so long since I had encountered bottled soda that the carbonation had seemingly called out to my throat from the moment I spotted the cooling unit.

As I drew near the checkout counter carrying the bottle, the store clerk flashed a smile and inquired,

“Will this be all for the cola?”

“Pardon? Ah—yes, exactly.”

“An exceptional choice.”

…Was he mocking me for photographing the entire store interior merely to purchase a single bottle of soda? Yet the expression on his face appeared entirely sincere.

“Step closer.”

“Wait, this cola bottle doesn’t even feature a barcode—”

The next fraction of a second.

CRACK!

The barcode scanner gripped in the clerk’s hand slammed directly down onto my skull, and my vision instantly faded to total blackness.

Thud. Thud. Thud.

A heavy impact shaking the earth jolted my consciousness awake. I jerked upward into a seated position.

Thud. Thud. Thud.

The noise belonged to dozens of soldiers marching in precise synchronization. I watched in a dazed stupor as wave after wave of troops paraded past me in flawless formation. The scenery felt hauntingly familiar, while the physical body I inhabited felt entirely foreign.

I frantically patted down my limbs and immediately realized my hands and feet had dramatically shrunk. Indeed, they resembled those of a ten-year-old child.

“…This cannot be happening.”

No. No, this has to be a mistake.

Rejecting reality with every fiber of my being, I inspected the garments I was wearing, paying particular attention to the insignia stitched over the chest region. The attire resembled a standard adult military coat that had been crudely cropped down to fit a youth. Emblazoned squarely across the fabric were two cola bottles crossed in an X shape.

Apocalypse: Safe Zone. One of the nine fictional territories within the software known as Cola. Those crossed beverage bottles served as the official crest of the warlord governing the sector.

“Oh, you have got to be kidding me.”

A bone-deep chill filled the air alongside thick, polluted wind. The steady, heavy stomp of marching infantry still echoed in the distance. This was neither a dream nor a hallucination.

Somehow… I had been transmigrated directly inside the universe of Apocalypse: Safe Zone.

A sudden string of curses originating from below caused me to flinch and look downward. Hiding beneath the wooden crate I had been resting upon, another small child who appeared roughly ten years of age was wailing loudly.

“Don’t tell me, please don’t tell me I got isekai’d into that piece-of-trash Safe Zone game?! Damn it all, what the hell is going on!”

…Apparently, I was not the sole individual who had been dumped into this digital reality.