Come Gather: A Prisoner's Cell
EFD was packed with content. Setting aside the straightforward PvP of users pointing guns at each other, it was no exaggeration to say the game had crammed in nearly every growth, collection, management, and idle system imaginable.
And today, I intended to unlock one of them.
The first system on the list went by the name Come Gather: A Prisoner's Cell.
Much like a certain game where you borrow money under duress from a raccoon—high priest of an evil animal cult—to purchase an island and run it into the ground, EFD gave every user a personal crafting space. Since every player was a convict by design, you started in the tightest solitary cell imaginable and expanded your private quarters by paying the prison a set sum and handing over the required materials.
The layout was similar to the personal spaces—cells—that NPCs already occupied, but not quite the same. The uses were considerably more varied.
Once you unlocked a solitary-cell-sized room and finished the first expansion, the basic workbench, the basic warehouse, and the basic rest area opened up, right?
As a ten-year hardcore veteran, I had maxed out every new crafting feature the moment it dropped, so I had the unlock order and the upgrade paths memorized down to the last screw.
"Boss, are you really knocking this down?"
"Yeah."
Which was why the first thing I needed to do was deposit five million won with the prison and start the first-stage cell expansion.
Five million won was a staggering fortune to ordinary inmates scraping by day to day, or to the long-termers who burned whatever they earned just to keep their lifeline ticking and drown themselves in vice. I handed that fortune over in a single stroke, received the prison's expansion permit, and immediately went to work with my cellmates.
The friends next door were, of course, all evicted via the perfectly lawful exercise of our rights—namely, our fists.
"Heave!"
The wall went down without a fight under the sledgehammer one of my cellmates swung with everything he had. Just as I'd expected, they'd slathered the concrete on a little thicker than usual and skipped the rebar entirely. I supposed the thinking was that a wall between two cells wasn't worth the steel. Real world or virtual, Korea was still Korea.
"But Boss, what are you expanding the cell for? I heard this kind of thing is usually just rich bosses with their own crews throwing money away."
"Those idiots expand like morons because they want to show off their cash and their clout. I'm expanding because I've got uses for the space."
It hadn't mattered much when this was just a game. Now that EFD's world had become reality, I had to treat everything around me as a potential threat. The more room I had to work with, the more I could prepare, the further I pulled ahead of everyone else—the lower the risk dropped, every single time.
"Boss! I ordered the furniture from the Neutral Zone Market like you said! They'll deliver it soon!"
"Good. Now grab a sledgehammer and start cleaning up that wall."
"When this is done, you're really buying us jjajangmyeon, right?"
"It's a blessed moving day. Of course we're having jjajangmyeon. You—get those wires connected properly. If something shorts, we all die today."
"Ah, don't worry about it. You think this is my first time handling this stuff on the outside? These days, even burglary is a skilled profession."
"Congratulations. You're a real resume."
Once a thief, always a thief. I smacked the back of his head as he stood there advertising skills that were, to be fair, genuinely useful for actual burglary.
While the others threw themselves into the expansion, I started building out my personal workspace.
I hadn't understood it when I was just playing the game, but here, a convict paying tribute to the prison and announcing, I'd like to expand my personal space, if you please, apparently meant you were serious about building a faction. By now the news that I'd started construction had almost certainly spread through the whole block.
A freshman Orange who hadn't even been inside two weeks, pulling in a fortune after only two Darkzone deployments, and now expanding his cell on top of it—that was genuine headline material. Proof was already wandering the halls: inmates from other blocks, here and there, sniffing around Cell Block H-050.
I'd already fallen out with the death-row old-timers who'd been the fixtures of H-050, so they weren't about to run off the spies on my behalf.
Which is exactly why they never crawl out of the bottom of the food chain. All they ever do is get squeezed.
Screee. Scrape.
Using tools and building materials I'd bought from a shop in the H-088 Commercial Zone, I put together a personal workbench and a warehouse, piece by piece. The prison had a habit of looking the other way on just about anything so long as inmates didn't cross a certain line, and they didn't interfere with my crafting.
The workbench and warehouse are good enough. Those guys can handle the rest area themselves.
A warehouse for storing a convict's personal effects, and a workbench for researching and fabricating basic gear and consumables—both done. Last of all, I hung a cheap curtain rod and a curtain for security, and that was that.
From here on, as long as I kept paying the prison regular tribute the same way I renewed my Human Rights Guarantee Period, my cell would be spared any surprise inspections. And even if the guards decided they didn't like my face, I was a death-row inmate. I had nothing to lose.
Because I wasn't a useless death-row inmate. I was a useful one.
Death-row convicts with no power, no backing, and no money were destined to watch their Time-Limited Human Rights expire and get culled from the herd. But a death-row inmate who had even one of the three was harder to touch than almost anyone else in this place.
Death-row inmates are the core labor force that throws itself into Special Duty harder than anyone. The prison can't just lean on them without thinking it through.
And I was the Super Rookie who'd pulled in about 3,300 after only two Darkzone runs. As long as I didn't cross the line—and as long as I kept deploying into the Darkzone—the prison would leave me alone and watch. They might even go a step further and try to stay on my good side.
That about covers the basics. Time to buy the essentials.
I went ahead and built shelves for supplies while I was at it. Once I finished my personal setup, the empty stretches of floor kept catching my eye. I didn't need to fill them in a panic, but I did need to wring every drop of efficiency out of the EFD knowledge and experience I was carrying.
"Hey. I'm going shopping. Have this finished by dinner."
"You're not eating jjajangmyeon with us?"
"I already put the order in. Eat as much as you want."
I'd thrown in fried dumplings and a generous helping of jjamppong broth, so they wouldn't have much to complain about.
While they worked themselves filthy with paint and cement dust, I slipped out of the cell and took a leisurely stroll through the prison by daylight. It had a different flavor from the night walk I'd been forced to take before. This place reeked of people far more than I had expected.
"You son of a bitch! This is all the tribute you've got?!"
"I-I'm sorry…!"
In a corner, an inmate was beating a weaker one half to death and screaming in his face.
"I carved the bastard's eyes out while he was sleeping. Wasn't even that big a deal, honestly."
"Watch yourself, you moron. Next time it could be you."
"Then I just hit first, before they hit me."
"Heh. Crazy bastard. You're gonna shit blood for real one of these days."
"Yeah, sure."
Inmates rolling and smoking fake tobacco leaves that an AI had 3D-printed and issued in place of the real thing.
"Fuck, just knock a little more off. This is how you treat me?"
"And what exactly are we to each other, you idiot? No money, get lost. Or go sell your ass and come back with some."
"It's cheap homemade crap anyway, right? Come on, cut me a deal."
"If it bothers you that much, go buy the 'real' stuff the Family boys move. I sell to people who can pay. That's it."
Inmates haggling over some suspicious "merchandise" whose purpose I couldn't even guess. Strip out the jumpsuits and the barred cells, and the scene wouldn't have looked much different from the world outside.
Everyone's working so hard.
I moved on, glancing around the way you look at animals locked in zoo enclosures.
A prison is an equally closed space and an equally open one. Reading the mood of a group is laughably easy. Keeping an individual's secrets is nearly impossible. If you wanted to button the first button right in a place like this, the paradox was that you had to survive well. Anything would do. I had to throw every means at my disposal into making sure the people around me understood I was not someone they could afford to take lightly.
In international diplomacy they call this the hedgehog strategy, don't they?
The logic was simple: mix in the unspoken threat that if you touch me, you won't walk away clean either, and the other side will start treating you with respect. In that sense, I figured I was doing a pretty solid job of keeping the hedgehog strategy. Solid enough to walk into Cell Block H-088—the home turf of the Gwangsu Family, the same people who had casually tried to take my life—all by myself.
"Hey. Over there."
"Shit, that psycho actually came back…!"
"Go tell the boss! Now!"
This time the thugs who ran in packs were a lot quicker on their feet than before. No surprise. Last time they'd herded me into Lee Sena's shop and still failed to finish the job, and Gwangsu had taken them apart for it. For a bunch of children playing big brother and little brother, they sure gave feedback fast on this kind of thing.
Not that it's any of my business.
Gwangsu, his crew, whatever. My attention had been pointed somewhere else for a while now.
"Oh! It's been a while, valued customer!"
I headed into the deeper stretch of Cell Block H-088, where the Special Merchants had each carved out a stall, and found Lee Sena waving at me from outside her shop for some reason. This was the Underground 3rd Floor, a place that never saw a scrap of sunlight, and yet she had a parasol and a sunbed set up and was thoroughly enjoying a tan. She must have built herself an artificial sun when I wasn't looking.
"Wait! Why are you just walking past?! We can at least say hello, can't we?!"
"I'm not on special terms with a lunatic sunbathing dozens of meters underground in a box with no windows."
"It's the vibe! The mood! Humans are simple animals—just believing they feel something is enough to dump hormones everywhere!"
Humans being animals jerked around by their hormones was fair enough. I just wished she wouldn't lump me in with the same brand of weirdo.
I walked past Lee Sena—who was squawking after me like a child—and turned down the passage on the right. I hadn't come to Cell Block H-088 today to adopt another Cutie from her tool shop. The interested party, however, seemed genuinely shaken by that fact, and came hurrying after me.
"I heard you made a ton of money this time! So why aren't you coming to my shop?!"
"Because you handed me an exo-suit battery pack that wasn't even charged, and I nearly died?"
"Did I…?"
"Count yourself lucky I didn't ask for a refund."
"…I'm sorry."
I left her wilting behind me and picked up the pace. What appeared shortly after was Vladimir Borscht's General Store.
The enormous shop had earned the name General Store in the most literal sense—it bought everything and sold everything—and it carried another nickname besides: the Daiso of South Seoul Prison.
Today I wasn't here to drop a fortune on a single piece of gear. I was here to bulk-buy the miscellaneous things I needed right now.
I approached a store so vast that Lee Sena's tool shop couldn't begin to compare, and two massive Slavic men who'd been guarding the entrance stepped forward.
"The main floor is open only to 'veterans' the boss has personally recognized."
"If you wish to sell items or arrange financing, please continue to the right and use the pawnshop window in the alley."
Unlike merchant NPCs like Lee Sena and Ted Chan, who would do basic business with anyone who paid on time, Vladimir Borshch was a more specialized NPC. He required a separate affinity grind. You had to hit a certain friendship threshold just to open the first floor. Sell or buy above a set amount to open the second. Complete the solo quests he handed out to open the third.
The fourth and final floor only opened after you'd maxed his friendship, finished every quest, and proven you were, by every measure that mattered, the finest death-row inmate alive.
The method for becoming the finest death-row inmate alive was extremely simple. Collect one of every rarest item that could only be found in the Darkzone, and bring them to him.
Vladimir Borshch was a collector of almost pathological enthusiasm, a broker, and the world's greatest entertainer—a man who took money to sell the deaths and suffering of death-row convicts.
So there was no need to take the long way around. Touch the shame a person never wants seen, or scratch the itch they can't reach, and they react instantly. Maybe Lee Sena was right, and humans really were just simple animals jerked around by their hormones.
"Tell your boss this. I'm the only one who can meet his customers' needs. And if he wants proof, I'll take the test."
One of the scowling grizzly bears half-turned, muttered something into an intercom, then looked back at me with a startled expression. I already knew what the answer would be.
"The boss has granted you entry. Enjoy your visit."
At last the sealed doorway opened, and a glittering otherworld spilled out in front of me—so lavish it was hard to believe this was still a prison.