Dopamine Addict's First Playthrough Highlights
65. Dopamine Addict's First Playthrough Highlight Video
Before I could even figure out what a “first playthrough highlight video” was supposed to be, the recording started.
The first thing that appeared on screen was a convenience store. Judging by the angle, it looked like footage pulled from the store’s CCTV, and of course the store in frame was the same place we had all been transmigrated into—the one we had mistaken for a Safe Zone collaboration convenience store.
Don’t tell me…
My guess seemed right. A moment later, a man in a familiar tracksuit walked in through the door. No question about it. It was me. Dopamine Addict.
“What the hell is this…”
I couldn’t tear my eyes away. Once inside, Dopamine Addict scanned the shelves, took a photo, and then poked at his phone for a long time. I’d done the same thing myself, so I knew exactly what he was up to—posting about the convenience store on the Safe Zone community board.
Watching it like this, he really does look like a community addict.
Eventually he looked up from the phone and started wandering between the shelves, picking things out. He walked right past the fridge with the bottled cola without a second glance and plucked a unicorn plush from the back of the store.
I had never even gone near that unicorn plush when I was in there, so the meaning of “first playthrough highlight video” hit me immediately.
The Dopamine Addict in this video isn’t me.
If my guess was right, this was footage of the “me” who had chosen the unicorn plush at that store—Ttopamine Addict—before he was transmigrated.
Plush in hand, he trudged toward the clerk. But the clerk’s face wasn’t the one I remembered. The employee who had cracked me over the head with a barcode scanner had definitely been a man; the person standing behind the counter on the CCTV was a woman with short black hair. And she never swung a barcode scanner at Dopamine Addict’s skull. Once he’d paid, instead of blacking out from a blow to the head, he just shuffled toward the door.
Why am I the only one who got hit with a barcode scanner…
At the entrance he grabbed the handle, hesitated for a beat, glanced back—and vanished from the frame.
So that’s how everyone else got transmigrated?
I still had no idea why I alone had been griefed by the store clerk. Then the screen cut, and a white-haired little boy lay sleeping peacefully in frame. That face, too, I knew all too well.
My main custom avatar…
There was no room left for doubt. This was Ttopamine Addict. His playthrough footage.
They’d helpfully labeled it a first playthrough, which meant that bastard wasn’t a fake regressor like me—he’d actually looped for real.
A moment later, Ttopamine Addict woke up on screen. The pure, exhilarated joy of realizing he’d been transmigrated into a game filled the entire frame.
Feels a bit like being force-fed mirror therapy.
From there, true to the “highlight video” title, it cut straight to a string of Ttopamine Addict’s greatest hits. The child version of him became an adult in the blink of an eye, and the adult version rolled through other zones like he was rolling a piece of candy around on his tongue—effortless, total domination.
The strange part was that while he was conquering zone after zone, I never once saw any of the other players I knew. Had completely different people been transmigrated in the first playthrough? Or had they been dropped into different custom avatars?
I was turning those questions over when the screen crackled with static, then locked onto Ttopamine Addict’s face. Letters began to rise over the image, assembling themselves into sentences.
Congratulations! You have survived this world. Player Dopamine Addict—as a reward for entertaining me, I shall grant you one wish.
Ttopamine Addict stared blankly at the letters hanging in midair, then tipped his head slightly.
“A wish?”
His voice was dry and cracked. The text above him rearranged itself.
Yes! A wish! Whatever you desire!
“Whatever I desire…”
Shall I bring the dead back to life? Or send you home to reality? Or wipe all of this away as if it never happened? Come now—tell me what you want!
“I…”
Ttopamine Addict opened his mouth with a face emptied of feeling.
“Want a bigger thrill.”
……Excuse me?
“I won too easily. I should have taken my time and enjoyed it more.”
What on earth…
“I want to play this game one more time.”
Play this game… one more time?
“And this time, transmigrate other players too—not just me. That’ll be more fun.”
The letters hanging in the air flickered as if they were panicking, and only after a pause did a new sentence take shape.
Are you truly going to spend your wish on that? A chance to save someone—a chance to undo everything—a chance to erase the beginning of every tragedy—and you would use it for this?
“Yeah.”
Ttopamine Addict went on in a sunken voice.
“I just want to keep playing this game until I’m satisfied.”
The letters in the air trembled in fine, rapid little shivers, almost like laughter.
It seems I ought to bestow a new title upon you: Dopamine Addict.
“I don’t need a title. Nowhere to use it.”
Don’t worry. From the next run onward, I’ll make sure it’s useful. Then… my precious player, cursed with boredom. May the next game, at last, be enough to satisfy you.
And with a soft pop, the screen went black.
“…What the hell did I just watch.”
This was… a little much. I calmly hit replay, then scrubbed back to the final stretch alone.
I want a bigger thrill.
I won too easily. I should have taken my time and enjoyed it more.
I want to play this game one more time.
And this time, transmigrate other players too—not just me. That’ll be more fun.
I just want to keep playing this game until I’m satisfied.
No matter how many times I checked, nothing changed. I drove my face into the mattress.
It was me.
The one who dragged the other players into this game. Not Mother. Not Father. Me. It really was me!
I don’t buy for a second that this video is fake.
Every line that Dopamine Addict spat on screen was something I could have said myself. Thoughts I would have had. Wishes I would have made.
“No.”
I jerked my head up off the bed and sat upright. The one who made that wish was Ttopamine Addict—first-playthrough Dopamine Addict. Not me. I had chosen the cola. I existed as an entirely separate entity from Ttopamine Addict.
So after making a wish like that in his previous loop, he tracked me down just to spout all that garbage?
I couldn’t trust a single word Ttopamine Addict had ever said to me anymore. A guy who wished for something like that, telling me Father was the one who transmigrated us?
No—fine. There had to have been someone else who transmigrated the original Dopamine Addict. Whether that someone really was Father… I could no longer take that on faith.
If it were Mother, why set the transmigration point ten years later? If she wanted to come back to this other world, why pull so many people in? And why drag me along—the kid she’d abandoned?
Right… thinking about it, he hadn’t lied about Mother. The reason so many people had to be transmigrated was him, not her, so of course he’d been sure it wasn’t Mother.
But there was one thing that still didn’t add up.
Ttopamine Addict’s wish was to transmigrate other players. That wish doesn’t explain my existence.
First-playthrough Dopamine Addict’s wish hadn’t included himself. And yet Ttopamine Addict had gone out of his way to come all the way to the Cola Area just to check whether I was growing up properly. Coming to find me meant he already knew I existed.
Which left one working theory.
It wasn’t just a first playthrough. There could have been a second—maybe even more.
In a second playthrough, Dopamine Addict would have crushed the other players again, survived, and made a new wish. This time: I want to fight myself.
I was him, and he was me, so I knew. If the second playthrough still hadn’t been fun enough, that was exactly the wish I would have made.
And if that theory held, a lot of things fell into place—why he and I existed at the same time, why he ranked higher than me even though I’d inherited the all-zone conqueror title as a privilege, and so on. Including the fact that the game developer bastard had not sent me this video out of the kindness of his heart.
He deliberately sent the first-playthrough footage.
If he’d only wanted to warn me about Ttopamine Addict, he could have sent every loop so far. Instead the developer had sent me only the first. And he’d deliberately staged the wish that transmigrated the other players at the most dramatic beat in the reel.
The original timing of this video’s arrival was right after the additional unlocks. Just when I thought I was closing in on the secret of the apocalypse—was he trying to show me that the transmigration had been a disaster I’d brought on myself?
I’ve felt this before…
Whoever was watching us was, without a doubt, a spectator dripping with malice. This garbage highlight reel, and every other little provocation dangled in front of me—someone was watching my reactions on purpose. The ridiculous title itself—“Dopamine Addict’s First Playthrough Highlight Video”—was the proof. Someone fanatical enough to record, cut, and edit only the juiciest scenes.
The “game developer” was watching me—watching us—as content.
I’ve had dry spells where I didn’t have enough content. Being someone else’s content is a first, though.
He probably wanted to watch me rattle once I realized the mass transmigration’s culprit wasn’t the convenience store—it was me. But there was something the developer had overlooked.
Even if I was the one who had transmigrated the other players into this world… so what? I wasn’t soft enough to be shocked by that, or to drown in guilt over it. Showing me this wouldn’t get him the reaction he wanted. At most, it would leave me mildly troubled about what wish to make if the last surviving player really did get one granted.
Then, one after another, new messages arrived.
It was almost like asking whether I could still feel nothing after seeing all of this.
Newbies!
Without a second’s hesitation, I hit play on the Dentist’s Candy Zone clear highlights.