The Breeding Farm
After exchanging a conversation with Ahn Moon-ho that no one else could ever be allowed to overhear, I boarded the escape craft with him and left the Dark Zone behind.
In the quarantine chamber, we came face-to-face with the prisoners who had been waiting for us the entire time.
"They're out! It's the Super Rookie and Ahn Moon-ho!"
"Damn it, I love you, Superus Rookius!"
"Super Rookie! Into my arms!!"
We had only ever been temporary allies. The moment the escape succeeded, they should have gone their own ways and been done with it. And yet, to my surprise, they had ignored even the guards' hurried orders to move along and sat here waiting for us for dozens of minutes.
I accepted their welcome with a sour look on my face, all the while scanning the officers who were watching our side with pointed interest.
Most of the low-ranking officers probably don't even know Ahn Moon-ho has been blacklisted. But some of the higher-ups will definitely wonder how he walked out of there alive with me today, blacklist and all.
I hadn't been blind to that risk when I decided to recruit him. There just wasn't much I could do about it right now.
One way or another, I was still nothing more than a single death-row inmate without a proper faction to my name. The prison, if it felt like it, could bury me by any means it chose.
I had no intention of going down quietly — but I also had no intention of making an enemy of the prison. Not yet.
I had no choice but to promise the prisoners a next time and leave first.
Time to start greasing some palms in earnest.
Thank god I had already established a line with Officer Park. If I had gone around looking like I was covering for a blacklisted inmate without that insurance in place, I would have been treated the same way.
To keep the guards from nursing any further suspicions, I left the quarantine chamber earlier than anyone else and submitted to the cargo valuation screening alone.
This Dark Zone expedition had been spent moving with a huge number of other prisoners and splitting the profits every which way, so the yield itself was nothing special.
That was inevitable. Most of the parts we had farmed while fighting the Machine Spirits had been immediately retrofitted and thrown straight back into combat. The other prisoners were probably in the same boat.
Tough day all around. And the actual take-home wasn't much either.
If I wanted to squeeze a little more personal profit out of this, I would have to roll a snowball with what I had held back instead of turning it over to the prison.
AAA Corp's open commission this time around, for instance, would go through just fine if I handed over the firing data from the semi-automatic shotgun I had used.
Ted Chan's Assigned Commission, which he had specifically placed with me, had been to bring back useful engineering tech or components from the Dark Zone. I planned to give him the AI chip and the compact power source.
Prisoners and the prison alike were still short on Dark Zone knowledge, so things like an AI chip and a compact power source would not fetch their real value by my standards. But Ted Chan, a pioneer of cutting-edge technology, would appraise them higher than the prison AI's cargo valuation ever would.
The public commission and the Assigned Commission are basically handled, so I'll set those aside. As for the personal commission the prison issued... I'll have to cancel that one.
Now that I had decided to recruit Ahn Moon-ho, the right move was to drop it as fast as possible. Dragging it out without canceling would only draw more eyes.
My head already throbbed at the thought of the cancellation fee, but this whole world ran on money. I was going to have to get used to swallowing that.
Last up: the regular sample-delivery contracts I signed with Control Corp and Medician Corp... this should cover those.
I sloshed the sample container. Inside, something like a dark, viscous slime wobbled back and forth.
At a glance it looked like a perfectly intact Machine Spirit. In truth, it was nothing more than a fragment. It was already half-dead, so there was no need to worry about it fusing with machinery as-is — though if you fed it enough nutrients, it might just come back to life.
Things had been so desperate that all we had managed with the boss Machine Spirit was to vent it into space, so I had not been able to get a tissue sample from it. Still, landing a sample from one of its underlings was better than nothing.
Plenty of corporations had not even gotten their hands on a proper Native Species sample, let alone a Machine Spirit. This one sample would be enough to satisfy both Mega Corps.
One sample, two contracts — that was a breach? This was where you borrowed the wisdom of the great King Solomon.
"Cut it in half!"
I divided the Machine Spirit fragment in the container down the middle, packed each piece separately, and called up PrisonNet's AI delivery service.
A massive mechanical arm descended from the ceiling of the cell block's common area and began shipping the two sample containers I had held out, along with a memory chip packed with Native Species hunting data, to each corporation.
The AI was nothing if not reliable at getting things done. Nothing to worry about for a while.
I dragged my sagging body along at a slow walk, wrung out from a cold worse than Antarctica in that sealed stretch of space and from being forced through a sci-fi horror genre I had zero interest in.
Someone ought to install a moving walkway that ran all the way to Cell Block H-050. Wouldn't that be nice. This prison, which ping-ponged endlessly between bleeding-edge and obsolete, apparently could not stand the sight of a prisoner living comfortably.
Then a racket rolled through the air. I turned my head and found a considerable number of prisoners gathered in their respective cell-block common areas, throwing a massive drinking party.
"Haha! Bring the booze and the girls! This is the hour of the heroes who brought treasure back from the Dark Zone!!"
"Hero this, champion that. C'mon, let's drink~"
"Heh heh heh. These lunatics."
"Today, from our Clan Success Myth, the member who posted our highest earnings and claimed economic freedom and independence — Mr. De Millian...!"
"I take the doneness of meat very seriously, you know? And this meat is not cooked... evenly~. Make it again and bring it back."
"Eat what's put in front of you!"
The sight of prisoners who had finished their Dark Zone expeditions ahead of me whooping and celebrating was, from the perspective of someone from 2020s Korea, a little fascinating.
Never mind that most of them belonged to clans of one size or another — the fact that people once divided by race and culture had been welded together by a single Dark Zone was genuinely impressive.
No, wait. I'm running with Lucy, who's from Russia. Maybe it's not that strange.
The Korea of this world, according to the lore, had aggressively pursued immigration policy for over a decade to solve its low birthrate, aging population, and shrinking labor force, absorbing a staggering number of foreigners as citizens. Language, skin color, religion, culture — they were already mixed together like a salad. Far too late to sort anyone out by those.
Hold on.
I was about to write it off as people being people wherever you go and get back on my way when I stopped walking and looked at that multiethnic drinking party again.
Why did this world's Korea suddenly throw itself into aggressive immigration?
I knew this world was a fictional one, born of creation. Creation permits anything, which means even settings that make no sense can be shrugged off and accepted. But the EFD developers had known Korea far too well. They had clearly built the Korea inside EFD by referencing the real one.
The Korea I had come from, as of the 2020s, was still ranked among the hardest countries in the world for foreigners to immigrate to — and at the same time, an amazing country that watched its population pyramid shatter under a collapsing birthrate and an aging society and never put together anything resembling a real solution.
And yet in this world, where science and technology had advanced to the extreme, Korea had rolled out immigration policy far faster than any other East Asian nation?
Why?
It itched too much to dismiss as mere creative license. Something about it did not sit right.
Then I remembered the conversation I had had with Ahn Moon-ho in the Dark Zone.
Other countries had a few Dark Zone entrances of their own, but no nation had as many as Korea. He had gone so far as to say the Dark Zone entrances beneath this prison alone outnumbered every other Dark Zone entrance on the planet combined.
And yet other countries did not explore and research Dark Zones like this. They sealed the entrances, sent down small research teams and survey parties on a regular schedule, and left it at that. Mobilizing hundreds of thousands of convicts in a full-scale campaign to conquer the Dark Zone was unique to Korea.
When you think about it, subcontracting the exploration and farming to disposable day labor is a lot more efficient than throwing precious specialists at it.
Take, for example, prisoners — people you can use and throw away without a second thought, people this dystopian society will never protect.
But Korea is not actually a country overflowing with violent criminals. If anything, the countries drowning in disposable convicts are the ones where incidents never stop. Korea has a fairly high rate of minor offenses, but its violent crime rate is dramatically lower than other nations. Through the 2020s, it was still considered a country with excellent public safety.
Which means this land should have been short on violent convicts to burn through Dark Zone exploration and farming.
...So on the very soil where Dark Zone research needed to be most active, there weren't enough violent criminals to throw into the Dark Zone. That would have been a problem.
So how do you solve that?
Secretly import criminals from other countries? Use soldiers, the next cheapest labor after convicts?
If they had chosen either of those, this world's Korea might never have slid into a dystopia. Ahn Moon-ho would not have called this society twisted, however rotten it might be.
No. The they Ahn Moon-ho had spoken of had solved the manpower — the convict — supply problem in a way that sat miles outside ordinary common sense.
They had sweet-talked the Korean government and the corporations into flooding the country with reckless, indiscriminate immigration policy. Then they had laid the table so that the overseas immigrants and undocumented residents pouring in from every corner of the world would naturally shatter domestic public safety and grow into criminals.
I was not saying every immigrant becomes a criminal. But if you deliberately take the brakes off a nation's public safety, neglect oversight, and loosen the shackles of the law — how are the ones who were rotten from the start supposed to not become criminals?
Criminals multiplied at a staggering rate, and this country's public safety was, quite literally, smashed to pieces. The result was an extreme dystopia that ranked dead last in human-rights consciousness and put gold-worship first.
America went first. Europe followed. In this world, Korea walked the same path.
Wreck a society that had been limping along well enough, then, from a society broken beyond repair, endlessly harvest the ever-growing supply of criminals as test subjects for the Dark Zone.
Only then did I understand what it meant that distinguishing "Koreans" in this world was meaningless.
Whether you were an original Korean, a Korean by immigration, or a self-proclaimed Korean who had been scooped up as an undocumented resident — all of you were being raised as Dark Zone test subjects in a brutal environment that left you no choice but to commit crimes.
This world's Korea was already a vast breeding facility, raising convicts to be used for the Dark Zone.
Ahn Moon-ho had probably come face-to-face with these truths naturally, in the course of his work as a Dark Zone researcher. He had claimed with his own mouth that he did not believe in conspiracy theories. In truth, he was the person closest to the real thing.
That's why he went after even more dangerous truths knowing full well it would get him killed, and ended up fleeing into this prison — which, if nothing else, is safer than the outside world.
This prison is the closest place to the Dark Zone. Ironically, it is also the farthest from them.
Beings like that always want to pick the fruit from the most dangerous place and enjoy it in the safest one.
So this is what it feels like when things you dismissed as game lore become reality. Gives me the creeps.
Before I knew it, I was back at my cell block. I unlocked the cell door with biometric authentication, trudged inside, and threw myself onto the bunk. My eyelids felt ready to collapse at any second.
It was not just physical and mental exhaustion. The more I knew about this world, the more crushingly I felt how much I did not know. A mind that had been perfectly orderly a moment ago felt like it had been scrambled in an instant.
I stared blankly at the cell ceiling for a long time. Then a thought struck me.
What the hell did the original owner of this body do to end up on death row?
It was one of the most important questions I had, and also one that showed no sign of ever being answered. I just could not remember anything.
Unlike the usual possession-story protagonist, I had not inherited this body's memories. It felt more like I had been handed an empty shell.
"...Don't obsess over problems I can't solve right now."
One way or another, my goal had not shifted even a fraction from the beginning. If the goal has not changed, then the path I am walking, the effort I will put in, and the knowledge I will use all stay the same.
Unless my will breaks first, or the goal is forced to change, I still will not hesitate to be thrown into the Dark Zone. Whatever it is, if I solve things one at a time, I will see the end eventually.
Before that, though, I intended to fix what I was lacking. Namely, the faction-building I had been putting off.
Building a faction takes capital and force, sure — but charisma and political maneuvering, the things that actually win you people, matter far more. If you cannot gather people, all the material wealth in the world is worthless.
As it happens, I am the fully equipped alpha male of every community.
Why? Because every Korean receives early political education from childhood.
The practical kind: opening with Uh... to seize the initiative, tearing down someone's reputation with What's jungle even doing?, and locking in minimum risk with maximum return via Can someone report our mid?
Starting tomorrow, I'd better pin on a gold badge.
Time to show them the spice of K-politics.