Chapter 97

Chapter 97
HIGHLIGHT VIDEO
Dentist – Candy Zone Clear Highlights (NEW!)
I had been wondering how my precious newbie was managing his clear anyway.
When I pressed play, that same collaboration convenience store CCTV recording from my initial-cycle footage appeared on the screen. So the moment you select a symbol inside the shop counted as highlight material too.
After a brief wait, a man wearing a white doctor’s coat walked inside. In his mid-thirties, carrying the appearance of a writer from the Enlightenment era, he adjusted his thin round spectacles and addressed the clerk at the counter.
“Excuse me-are you the owner here?”
Oh.
He had not arrived to shop. The Dentist did not even glance at the shelves as he walked straight toward the clerk.
“I’m not the owner, but… what do you need?”
The clerk on the monitor was a face I recognized-the scoundrel who had cracked me over the head with a barcode scanner.
Late twenties, perhaps. Far too muscular for a convenience store job, and beneath the rolled-up sleeves of his shirt I caught a glimpse of a tattoo resembling octopus suckers.
With those muscle-corded arms wielding a barcode scanner, of course I had passed out cold.
“Ah-well, that is-”
Whether he had spotted the tattoo or simply felt how wrong that physique was as he stepped closer, the Dentist looked slightly tense. He pushed his glasses up once more.
“This might sound strange, but I came to ask whether this store has a back door.”
“A back door?”
“It’s nothing dramatic. The flower shop owner across the street said many people go in here and none of them ever come back out. She’s worried. It seems unusual to her.”
“Hmm.”
The clerk tilted his head with a flicker of interest, and the Dentist flapped both hands in a flustered denial.
“I’m not accusing anyone, of course! Older folks her age just worry about everything, you know? I thought if I could tell her people were leaving through a back door, she’d calm down.”
“A back door… well, of course there is one.”
“Ah, I figured as much. I’ll let her know there was a back door. Haha.”
Still wearing that good-natured smile, he turned to leave-until the clerk stopped him.
“Hold on.”
“Yes?”
“Doctor?”
“Ah, yes. I’m a dentist, actually…”
“Hmm.”
The clerk looked him up and down with dead, black eyes, then smiled thinly.
“Since you’re already here, go ahead and pick one. We’re neighbors now. On the house.”
“Ah, that’s all right-”
“Pick one. Now.”
“Uh… okay.”
Under the clerk’s rather forceful insistence, the Dentist looked faintly awkward. Then, with the expression of a man deciding that refusing a free favor from a new neighbor would only create trouble, he walked calmly over to the display.
So that was how a civilian who did not even know about the Safe Zones ended up purchasing candy in that store…
The way they had steered him into choosing something made me wonder if the iron rule was simply to possess every single individual who walked in. Then again-checking that he was a doctor first… perhaps there was some other motive.
“Th-this convenience store is really something, though. Only nine items on the shelves.”
“It’s a convenience store with the future riding on it.”
“The future, even?”
After careful deliberation, the Dentist picked up a piece of candy. The clerk looked surprised.
“You’re a dentist and you chose candy?”
“If you think dentists hate candy, you’re profoundly mistaken.”
“So you like it?”
“Do you have any idea how much money dentists have made since tanghulu became popular? You need patients for there to be doctors.”
Even I had found it strange that a dentist would select candy. More of a capitalist newbie than I had anticipated.
But the clerk went silent, as if something had plunged him deep into thought. The Dentist glanced at him, then said sheepishly,
“That was half a joke. You said it was free, so candy seemed like a sensible choice…”
“Ah. I see.”
The clerk seemed to emerge from whatever he had been pondering and looked at him again.
“If I sounded like I had abandoned medical ethics and that offended you, I apologize-”
“No. I just thought of the absolute worst human being alive for a second.”
“Excuse me?”
“Anyway… you’re lucky.”
“I am?”
“Some idiot picked the knife even after I warned him.”
I was just registering how dry the clerk’s tone had suddenly become when he continued, flat and blunt.
“You can go now.”
“Ah-yes. Thank you for the candy. Um… there doesn’t seem to be an ingredients label on this, though…”
The Dentist turned back as he was departing and said something more, but the clerk only offered a mechanical smile.
“Good luck.”
With those words, the Dentist’s body vanished from inside the store, and the video cut to the next highlight.
The Candy Zone.
A place where, even with nine-tenths of the world buried under glacial ice, you could still spot green shade. Under the influence of a meteorite, the so-called Christmas trees had grown to an unnatural scale, and they thrived here in dense groves. Near those clusters the temperature rose, so cold-hardy monsters kept their distance-which was why the Candy Zone existed inside a vast Christmas forest.
Most of the residents lived in log cabins constructed from Christmas wood and hunted the monsters circling the forest using bows and arrows. A hunter village, one could call it.
At the center of the zone stood a massive candy-shaped meteorite driven into the ground-the zone’s meteorite item. The Christmas forest spread out around that stone, and the accepted theory among players was that the trees had grown so massive under its influence.
On the screen lay a ten-year-old child asleep beneath a Christmas tree-the Dentist’s face, only younger. Not long afterward, Candy Zone residents out on a hunt discovered him and carefully carried him into the heart of the village.
When he woke and panicked in total confusion, the residents calmed him down.
“Ah… a dream. It has to be a dream…”
Unable to accept the reality of it, he spent the day telling himself it was merely a dream. The residents had boiled him a stew of monster meat; he mistook it for beef stew and was about to dig in happily-until he ran into the “player-style meal” that had even thrown me for a loop. He hurled the bowl away and broke down crying in pure terror. I watched with genuine interest.
A player who gets horror-stricken mid-stew. That’s new.
Worried, the Candy Zone residents took him to the chief NPC.
“I-I can’t eat! When I put food in my mouth it turns into blue particles and vanishes at my lips! I don’t remember why I’m in a child’s body! I don’t even know where this is…!”
I watched, freshly entertained, as he poured every strange thing that had happened to him out to the chief NPC.
The chief decided something about the Dentist was different from the rest of them, and around the evening of the second day of possession, led him to the village meteorite.
Told to place his hand on it, the Dentist did so with a blank, stunned face. Instantly the meteorite flared bright enough to blind, enveloping the entire Christmas forest in light before the glow faded away.
The villagers erupted, calling him the Child of Prophecy, their savior. I watched without much feeling.
That meteorite always lights up if a player touches it.
Any ordinary player would have pivoted straight into the Miracle Child route from here.
“I-I’m not the Child of Prophecy! I’m an ordinary person, just like you! What am I supposed to save anyone with -the ability to make a rock light up? What? It’s not just a rock, it’s a meteorite? No, no-even if it really is a meteorite, what good does making it glow do?!”
In the scene where any normal player would have casually played the prophesied child and zone savior, the Dentist was desperately trying to talk the residents down.
“I’m not a savior-I’m a dentist! What? You don’t know what a dentist is? D-do you people… not have dentists? Can the rest of you eat without chewing, like me? You can’t? Then-when was the last time any of you got a scaling? Do you know what brushing is? Floss?”
I was thoroughly enjoying his lecture on the importance of oral hygiene to the Candy Zone residents when the video jumped to the next highlight.
The following scene seemed to take place some time after possession. Our chat exchange was not in it, so they truly had only compiled what they considered true highlights.
He actually made floss and handed it out…
Once he realized it was a bow-hunting zone, the Dentist had used bowstring to make dental floss. Why he stayed this committed to oral care even after learning he had been possessed into a game. I had no idea.
From the rest of the highlights, though, one thing was clear: the Dentist was an extraordinarily decent person.
After our chat, once he learned players could heal by consuming food, he threw himself into every hazardous job the zone offered.
Perhaps because he was not a Safe Zone player-he never once treated the villagers like NPCs.
After long persuasion, the residents finally accepted that he was neither a miracle child nor a savior. Even so, they clearly still cherished and respected him. I had never considered a clear like this, not in a zone that worships the player if you simply stand still.
Play it this way and you won’t hit the total-wipe route at the end.
The most popular clear in the Candy Zone was the Miracle Child route, but its flaw was how dependent the residents became on the player. Convinced their special child would handle everything, they made zero preparations for the Second Apocalypse-and got completely steamrolled by other zones.
In this highlight footage, though, the Candy Zone NPCs were doing everything they could to keep the Dentist from sacrificing even a little more. Even so, the residents’ growth rate was still abysmally slow-the kind of clear a pure efficiency addict like me would never attempt. But for a newbie with zero understanding of the Safe Zones to clear this stably was quite encouraging.
The highlight video concluded on the scene where the Dentist earned the title Saint of the Christmas Forest.
I made up my mind.
This newbie is mine.
Content I did not want stolen by veteran players from other zones. And from the way he operated, he looked like the type who would cooperate without complaint when it came time to open Logout-which only elevated my expectations further.
The catch was that I had been ignoring the Dentist’s friend requests this entire time. Other veterans had almost certainly already gotten involved with him. Still-even if he had already grown friendly with someone else, I could simply pull him into my zone.
There are other people’s highlight videos too, but…
I was not particularly curious. The veterans were almost certainly following my clears. Even Shin Eun-jo was running my pseudo-cult route.
So out of mild curiosity-just to see what kind of hell T-balnom had gone through early on to want me dead so intensely-I casually hit play on T-balnom’s highlight video.
And in T-balnom’s convenience store footage, I ran into someone I never expected..
“…You look familiar. Are you by any chance a national team player?”
“Ahaha, I retired ages ago. You’re here for the Safe Zone too, right? My in-game name is Taejongtaesebeyonce. What’s yours?”
…The guy introducing himself as Taejongtaesebeyonce.
The former national soccer player forced into retirement over a doping scandal.
Kim Tae-jung.