Dopamine Addict
1. Dopamine Addict
Dopamine.
An excitatory neurotransmitter.
Also known as the happiness hormone.
I am a dopamine addict.
The first time I started chasing dopamine was through fan culture. Idols, rock bands, the Premier League, the Three Kingdoms… When even that stopped delivering, I turned to exercise. Martial arts, parkour, extreme sports of every kind — until those, too, went flat. Then I started playing online games, where the only limits were imaginary.
Truth is, I never wanted to touch games…
Games might have been the easiest dopamine hit of all. But every time I thought about them, I remembered my mother, who no longer answered her phone, and I deliberately kept my hands off. Still — a late-blooming thief is the most dangerous kind. I kept hunting harder, crueler, higher-stimulus titles until I had worked my way through every apocalypse game on the market.
Among them, the one that fed me high-voltage thrills the longest was a game called Apocalypse: Safe Zone.
There was a simple reason I could keep enjoying it for so long. First, the setting: a meteor strike plunged Earth into an ice age and wiped out most of humanity. When an interglacial period finally arrived, the survivors built their own “Safe Zones” and lived inside them.
Nine Safe Zones in total, named Candy, Cola, Tobacco, Beer, Chicken, Cocaine, Knife, Love, and Unicorn. A player could choose a starting zone from any of the eight except Knife. Once the choice was locked, you woke up in the body of a ten-year-old child belonging to that Safe Zone.
Having received the revelation of the Second Apocalypse, a player had to start preparing for the end of the world from that moment on. That window of time was everything. Because the day a player turned twenty in their zone… the Second Apocalypse began.
What you did before turning twenty was entirely up to you — but the wrong choices could slap a dead ending on your screen long before the world actually ended. Call it a preparation phase, a training phase, Phase 1 of the game. Survive to twenty and meet the apocalypse in one piece (more or less), and the real game began: survival against the people from every other zone.
That was where the real charm of the game revealed itself. Starting in a low-difficulty Safe Zone was not the free ride it looked like. Characters who began in high-difficulty zones came out with vastly superior stats. And the people from the unopened zone — Knife — were complete psychopaths who would try to kill any survivor from a lower-difficulty area on sight. Only Love and Unicorn ranked harder than Knife, so if you started in an easy zone, you had to grind combat power from day one.
In short, Apocalypse: Safe Zone gave players an absurd amount of freedom, and the difficulty and content shifted wildly depending on which Safe Zone you started in. That was why I managed to stay hooked for so long.
But even that ends today.
I had seen the ending for every Safe Zone. Even the hidden one — Knife.
The moment I uploaded the final guide to the Apocalypse: Safe Zone community, the comments started rolling in.
Home Protector, true to his unemployed lifestyle, was always the first one to drop a comment.
ShutInHoney always left toxic comments, and I deleted them on sight — but I decided to leave this one up.
This guy was leaving multiple comments by himself.
I blocked ShutInHoney, and the rest of the community started trying to calm me down.
…That one actually stung.
I had uploaded guides religiously because I wanted more people to enjoy Apocalypse: Safe Zone. And they were just coming by for entertainment?
Are my guides really that hard?
Becoming the heir to a warlord who ruled a zone, or rising as a zone idol — neither of those seemed that difficult to me.
I was about to sink into a deep spiral of self-doubt when one more comment appeared.
Right. At least this person said thank you. So someone out there was getting something out of my work. Though judging by the username alone, this guy was probably older than me — and he still called me hyung every time.
Anyway.
There was nothing left to play. This was goodbye to Apocalypse: Safe Zone.
"Now what…"
I could already feel my blood dopamine levels dropping. I needed a new hit of something. But first, food.
I had been so deep in the game that I couldn't remember the last proper meal. I stepped outside looking for a quick bite — and found a convenience store in front of my building that I had never seen before.
There definitely hadn't been a convenience store here until recently… Had I really been gaming that long?
Well. New content, I guess.
A new hobby, a new game — anything new manufactured dopamine. I walked into the unfamiliar store as if drawn by a magnet. And the moment I was inside, I realized this was nothing like any convenience store I knew.
…What the hell?
The first thing I saw was a candy display. Unlike a normal store stocked with every brand under the sun, this one was piled high with nothing but crude, rough-cut hard candies. Next to it sat a drink fridge — not against the wall, but planted dead center in the aisle — packed with unlabeled glass bottles of cola.
Never seen a fridge sitting in the middle of the floor like that.
Past the cola fridge: a shelf stacked with cigarettes, a beer cooler, boxes of fried chicken, flour portioned into clear plastic bags, a knife section, condoms… And at the very last display, unicorn plushies piled to the ceiling. I stared at them in a daze before snapping back to myself.
This is… the Safe Zones.
Some kind of Apocalypse: Safe Zone collab store?
No. Think clearly.
Apocalypse: Safe Zone was not a big enough game for an official collaboration. Far more likely the owner is a Safe Zone junkie who stocked the place like this on purpose.
Still — trying to run a business on exactly nine product lines. Bold concept. As a fellow fan of the game, I felt a twinge of pity, so I took photos of the interior and posted them to the community. If word spread among the player base, maybe it would help a little.
I messaged Home Protector the address of the building next door the second he appeared asking for the location. Then I pulled a bottle of cola from the fridge and walked toward the counter. It had been so long since I'd seen bottled cola that the carbonation had been calling to my throat from the moment I spotted the fridge.
As I approached the counter with the bottle, the clerk smiled and asked,
"Will that be the cola?"
"Huh? Ah — yes."
"An excellent choice."
…Was he digs at me for photographing the entire store just to buy one bottle of cola? But the smile on his face didn't look fake.
"Come. Closer."
He lifted a heavy-looking barcode scanner as he said it, so I stepped in with the bottle — and a sudden wrongness hit me hard enough to make me speak.
"Uh, this cola doesn't have a barc—"
The next instant.
CRACK!
The barcode scanner in the clerk's hand smashed down onto my skull, and the world went black.
Thud. Thud. Thud.
A sound that shook the ground jolted me awake. I sat up hard.
Thud. Thud. Thud.
It was the sound of dozens of soldiers marching in unison. I watched, dazed, as rank after rank of soldiers filed past me in perfect formation. A landscape so familiar it hurt — and a body that felt completely alien.
I groped at myself in a hurry and immediately registered that my hands and feet had shrunk. Yes. Like a ten-year-old child's.
"…No way."
No. No, it can't be.
Denying reality with everything I had, I checked the clothes I was wearing — specifically the emblem stitched over the chest. The uniform looked like an adult military coat crudely cut down to fit a child. Emblazoned on the breast: two cola bottles crossed in an X.
Apocalypse: Safe Zone. One of the nine Safe Zones in the game — Cola. The crossed cola bottles were the emblem of the warlord who ruled it.
"Oh, you have got to be kidding me."
Bone-deep cold. Thick, filthy air. The steady tramp of soldiers still marching in the distance. This was no dream and no hallucination.
Somehow… I had been transmigrated into the game Apocalypse: Safe Zone—
"What the fuck is this!!"
A sudden string of curses from below made me flinch and look down. Under the wooden crate I was sitting on, another kid who looked about ten was clawing at his own hair and howling.
"Don't tell me — don't tell me I got isekai'd into that piece-of-shit Safe Zone game?! Goddamn it, what the fuck!"
…Apparently.
I wasn't the only one who had been dropped into this game.