Shut Up, You Clueless Whiner
October 21, 2053.
The population of the Roseberry Quarantine Zone has exceeded 300,000.
"Time really fucking flies."
Hwi-hyun looked out over his quarantine zone, which had swelled past a population of 300,000 in less than a year.
Of that number, only about 5,500 were survivors from the outer zones. The rest had all been dumped on him by the World Union, which meant he could only guess how many refugees those polished lunatics had offloaded here.
And yet, for all that, the place looked strangely empty. That was because he’d sent most of them outside the walls to work.
"How far along is the moat?"
[Based on current progress, around 37 percent complete.]
"It’s 11:36 now... a little early, but issue a rest order. Have them eat and rest, then start work again at 1:00."
[I’ll relay the order to the site.]
"And the wall upgrade? How much time’s left?"
[12 days and 17 hours remaining.]
That was right. Hwi-hyun was currently digging a moat, and separately from that, he was also upgrading the height of the wall.
In Quarantine City, there wasn’t just the building construction and upgrade system tied to construction drones and the control system. There was also the civilian mobilization function, which let him wring labor out of the population and keep them fed, one way or another.
Of course, in the early stages it was mostly minor stuff: building barricades or moats, tagging along as a volunteer on outer-zone expeditions to increase resource gains, that sort of thing.
But the more the civilian population grew, the more productive the people themselves became, helping maintain the quarantine zone and, bit by bit, shifting from temporary abilities to permanent passive ones. That was when the phase arrived where population itself became power.
There were events like volunteering for research to provide a speed boost, forming militias to temporarily swell the ranks, or working extra overtime of their own accord to repair vehicles and equipment. And then there were cooldown-based abilities that sent them by rocket to the World Union’s coastal cities as temporary laborers, letting them handle infrastructure work in exchange for Tokens.
Outside the game, it had been a system designed to discourage minimal-growth play, where you kept only the barest population alive while developing the zone, and instead reward players who kept expanding their territory and growing their population.
Of course, all of those functions came with one crucial condition: the player had to be running the quarantine zone well, with low dissatisfaction and high satisfaction among the people.
If you ran the place into the ground, the events would still trigger, sure—but instead of helping, they’d spark riots over distrust in research, militia formations that turned into rebellions or underground organizations, theft of vehicle and equipment parts, laborers who refused to come back from deployment, or constant friction with locals that got your Token rewards canceled. It was just one miserable disaster after another.
In other words, it was a system meant to let good players do even better. It wasn’t some comeback mechanism for players who’d already turned their zones into trash fires.
＊
There’s a riot in the armory right now, and I have to put it down...
Of all places, it had to be the armory, so I can’t even use brute force. Fuck... and the one-year anniversary wave is coming up soon, too. They’re saying they’ll blow themselves up if I don’t meet their demands.
I’m seriously losing my mind... why is this happening?
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"Well, damn."
It was lunchtime.
Hwi-hyun, stuffing himself with cereal just to meet his daily calorie intake, spotted one post that had gone viral in the gallery.
It said the residents had staged a riot and were proving impossible to deal with. There were plenty of possible scenarios.
Maybe they didn’t know they could buy drones, or maybe resource distribution had been botched. Maybe he’d pushed through the early phase too quickly and had no reserves left to act as a buffer.
He looked like he’d kept the civilian mobilization running on top of eighty-hour workweeks, but that was basically the same as working 120 hours a week.
He probably thought he’d found the optimal solution through simulation, but in the end he just didn’t realize he was forcing extra labor out of people.
"Why the hell does nobody read the tutorials and the guides? Why do they try to solve everything with their tiny little brains?"
Hwi-hyun had bought Quarantine City one year and three months after release. That had always been his habit with new games: let them sit for a year, wait for extra content and optimization fixes, and then jump in.
And after buying a game, he’d spend a full week reading the setting compendium, the art book, and the YouTube guides sorted by newest.
You know the type. Videos with titles like Perfect Early-Game Clear! or Quarantine City: Things You Must Absolutely Never Do Early On. Top 10 Must-Do Actions!
Then, once he actually started playing, he’d read the tutorial like a madman.
If something didn’t make sense, he’d read it forty times or more. And in case there was a mistranslation, he’d switch it back to the original English, type it out one line at a time into ChatGPT, and try re-translating it.
Even after all that, he still hadn’t made it past the first anniversary before dying seven times, hadn’t made it past the second before dying sixteen times, hadn’t made it past the third before dying three times, hadn’t made it past the fourth before dying eight times, and hadn’t made it past the fifth before dying eleven times.
It had been while he was shaving down a build for the transition from year five to year six that he ended up possessed into another world.
Of course, right now there were no in-game tooltips. No YouTube, either.
But hadn’t he already stuffed the gallery announcements full of early-game build guides, beginner tutorials, and every guide written by the resident veterans?
Lee Hwi-hyun simply could not understand why on earth people wouldn’t read them.
＊
The gallery’s general mood wasn’t exactly friendly to these whining newbies, either, probably because everyone had been burned by them so many times already.
So what if it was your first time playing a game? So what if you’d never played anything like this before? Who cared? It wasn’t as if you were the only one who’d been dropped here.
Even complete fresh newbies could, if they just read the guides and beat some discipline into their own heads, manage a quarantine zone beautifully, right alongside the veterans. By process of elimination, then, the players whose quarantine zones had gone to shit had to fall into one of the following categories.
Their mental had shattered, they’d read the guide however the hell they wanted, they were just whiners, or all three.
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