Chapter 218
Chapter 218
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Translator: Ryuma
Chapter: 218
Chapter Title: 94. Influencer (4)
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Will to live is one of the most critical variables for someone preparing for the end times to manage.
In an era where everything is decaying, there aren't many ways to boost that will to live.
The one reliable means of strengthening it is other people.
Like family or lovers, for instance.
However, those relationships mean adding one more person (likely someone less survivable than yourself), and if conflicts arise between them, the negative impact often outweighs the benefits.
That's why I avoided gathering people around me early in the war.
So instead of increasing the will-to-live variable, I focused on keeping my existing resolve from breaking.
Adequate comfort, an environment free of annoyances, secured safety, and daily doses of fun are essential for maintaining it.
Deprive someone of those, pile on the stress, and they'll either go mad or start treating death lightly.
Dolsingman didn't respond to my question for a long while.
Only after quite some time did he reply.
Dolsingman's will seemed broken long ago.
I stepped in again to help.
Dolsingman responded like this:
For a moment, I pictured a man with hair falling out and a blackened face from arsenic poisoning, looking dead serious.
"Huh?"
This guy.
Was he always like this?
I'd never really chatted with him much, so I didn't have a full read on his personality, but I didn't remember him being this twisted.
Did the arsenic drive him mad, or was he always crazy?
I'd always enjoyed his posts with those healthy, attractive women, but if he's coming at me like this, I'm not letting it slide.
Tap tap tap
"......"
Look at this bastard.
*
Logging out of the SKELTON account wasn't something that happened often.
I never thought it would come to this, but if he's repaying kindness with enmity, I have no choice.
Well, it's killing two birds with one stone.
I get to punish Dolsingman for shitting on my pure goodwill, and eliminate a rival for the visual novel "The Hunter" I'm about to post.
From my long internet experience, Dolsingman strikes me as a highly neurotic guy.
That explains the divorce.
But I'm greater than he imagines.
While average Viva! Apocalypse! users stick to one account, I still have multiple spares.
During the armband incident, VivaBot banned all the dummy accounts Valentine made, but that lazy girl only hit the ones directly involved in armband manipulation.
Meaning some unused, uninvolved accounts are still around.
I activated one.
Tap tap tap
Nickname: factosman
"......"
When Viva! Apocalypse! users can't contain their rage and want to go masked, one common trick is changing their nickname.
I've done that primitive method myself.
But our board uses accounts.
No matter what nickname you change to, they can check the account info, the unique ID, and search every post that person ever made.
Sure enough, plenty of people have tried masking up, gone on a rampage, and gotten embarrassed when exposed.
But skilled, sophisticated users mask differently.
They switch accounts entirely.
With multiples, I can transform in a thousand ways.
It's like having multiple satellite rigs.
Earlier, I clearly saw Dolsingman's visual novel barely scraping into the popular posts.
I enjoyed the second one too, but the public found it bland.
Who wants to see an old guy's romance?
Especially with Dolsingman's face—far from beautiful—it just makes uninterested readers hit back instantly.
Meanwhile, comments numbered around five.
Not one genuinely liked it.
I probably appreciated his stuff the most?
Insulting and mistreating your fervent fan—who almost became your savior—is something no person should do.
So what I'm about to do is, in a way, only right.
In our brief chat, I clocked that Dolsingman has some intellectual pride and vanity.
For guys like that, crude one-dimensional insults won't sting as much as framing him as a fraud.
I went to his ambitious work "New Love" first post and commented.
The opening salvo.
As expected, Dolsingman bit immediately.
Responding here is amateur hour.
My goal isn't just to piss him off.
It's to devalue the whole story he slaved over with AI tools, jazz playlists, and contrived lines.
So my alt "factosman" says nothing more.
That leaves his angry rebuttals as embarrassing echoes of a hothead author.
Instead, I hit his other post—New Love Episode 2—with similar shade.
A message pinged soon after.
"......"
Dolsingman really isn't my match.
He's leagues below.
*
Like Pygmalion carving marble until he fell for his own statue, Park Gyu ran the AI image generator thousands of times and finally created a woman the board would love.
"......Hm."
Arms crossed, I admired my creation for a moment, then uploaded my new ambition: "The Hunter Begins Episode 1."
Posting on the board is like tossing a net.
Now just wait for the catch.
Stepped out for air and to check the facilities.
The broken generator now hummed powerfully, charging my batteries, and the second intake pipe—started last year—was finally gushing muddy water after long efforts.
A bit more work, and it'd produce enough for newcomers too.
Living solo while prepping for others feels contradictory, but who knows what the world holds.
Someone I know, someone I like, might show up at my bunker someday.
Back from the intake pipe work, it was already evening with the sun dipping.
And sure enough, comment notifications.
Heart pounding, I checked "The Hunter Begins Episode 1."
Three comments.
No positives. Even a warning message arrived.
If you're heading to the battlefield, focus on that—why mess with the internet?
Guess I need to take the post down for now.
Using Lightning's callsign outright was a blunder.
Fix that and reupload.
But why are the views and likes so pitiful?
No timing excuse—it went up during prime hours when posts flow freely.
I kept refreshing, hoping for more views that weren't coming.
"......"
For a split second, my eye twitched.
No luck, Dolsingman.
Of all times, right after I post, this hits my feed.
Check the content at least?
Click
Clicking the post, no wall of text or AI images unfolded.
Instead, center stage: a cozy photo of Dolsingman with a young woman.
And Dolsingman speaks to us.
Next panel, Dolsingman grins at us.
Not the talk for an arsenic-muncher.
But the reaction's wild.
In that short time, multiple positive comments piled up.
Bad vibe.
This is barreling toward "mainstream popular post," not scraping by.
"......"
What to do.
Logging out for a hate comment won't stop this flow.
But I have to do something.
Even keyboard war to turn it into a mudfight—can't let it hit popular.
As I reached for logout...
"?"
Beyond the photo, in the room where Dolsingman and the manager woman sat side by side, something hung.
A white cloth scrap with what looked like red paint Hanja.
Zoomed in on the red text.
-All Streams Return to the Source
That was it.
*
I'd overlooked it briefly.
One of the most traditional, still potent ways to sustain will to live: faith.
Whether true belief or blind, it gives reason to keep going.
Like cliques in class, the board has tight groups too.
Dolsingman hung with older users, respectable professions.
Asked his buddies about him.
Even the smartest, wisest lose judgment in prolonged horror.
My image of Dolsingman matched his friends' views.
Unlike the light nickname, cautious moves, measured words.
Early "New Love" had real pull, empathy, depth—even hooked me.
He's changed.
The arsenic-dying guy is a proselytizer from that cult trying to kill him.
Can't watch a glorious Viva! Apocalypse! OG spew such nonsense.
Messaged him.
That was our last exchange.
All Dolsingman's posts got deleted.
He never showed up again, nor did cult posts from his account.
The incident ended as a hiccup, but he influenced me a bit.
Showed me doomer perspectives wildly different from mine.
Probably more friends will vanish.