The Show Is About to Begin
They had already watched the greatest, finest, most spectacular shows on the surface to the point of nausea.
Up there, there was no entertainment left worth scraping together. Nothing even stirred their interest.
But the underground?
In an instant, as if a mind map were being redrawn, the lines that had been shooting toward the surface in a spiderweb began to pivot, angling down.
The fulcrum sat at the exact midpoint between above and below: a single broker.
A voice perfectly scrambled by AI — untraceable, unanalyzable — spilled from the speaker. Speaker 4, the one attached to Monitor 4.
Monitor 5 lit up, and Speaker 5 hummed to life.
Unlike the first two voices, this one — even allowing for the AI modulation — was excessively calm. The content, however, was anything but.
Speaker 2. Anyone listening could tell the speaker was buzzing like a child who could not sit still.
The monotone from Speaker 3 carried a genuine note of boredom.
Speaker 3 offered no reply, as if refusing to take the bait.
Meanwhile, a massive holographic projection filled the enormous cavern.
At last, the show had begun.
The moment the show started, Speaker 1 broke a long silence with a single word.
And then, without pausing to decide who would go first, they cut one another's voices at the same time.
A single line the Super Rookie had tossed out in a slapdash trailer compilation — right before he caved in someone's skull — had just reminded them of their viewing etiquette.
This is sudden, but I have a confession to make.
I got rich.
Back in the real world, I was the kind of ordinary citizen who, even when ordering a single fried chicken, would seriously weigh the minimum order, the delivery tip, and whether the combo actually beat buying à la carte on value. By some twist of fate, I had become a winner at life in this place — punching a balance of fifty million won in a single month.
If I weren't spending twenty-four hours a day in a prison, I'd probably be a premium listing on the marriage market by now.
So this is what it feels like to watch money pile up.
They say every solid, upstanding adult eventually has that day — the day you smile at the paycheck landing in your account, month after month, right on schedule. I finally understood the feeling. Back in my old life, I couldn't have called myself comfortable even as a polite lie.
"…Guess I should get to work."
I'd given myself the day off from the Darkzone, so there was no reason to go down there. This early in the story, as long as you dropped in at least once a week, the prison didn't make an issue of it.
But work has a way of presenting itself the moment you breathe. I stood up in the spacious cell I'd ended up with to myself and got ready for an "outing," if you could call it that.
Today's business was a personal consultation.
It was starter content that newbies naturally ran into once they got comfortable with EFD and started unlocking things one by one. The condition was extremely simple.
Hit a bank balance of fifty million.
Didn't think I'd be doing a personal consultation already. The money piled up faster than I expected.
Even when I'd been running the Darkzone alone, I'd been setting consecutive profit records, and I'd hit the jackpot again right after recruiting Lucy. Hauling out loot and farmed items I never could have carried by myself — that was what had juiced the overall yield. Even after splitting the take with Lucy fifty-fifty, the pie itself had been so huge that I'd still managed to put away fifty million won.
Clunk.
I scratched my head, opened the cell door, and stepped out onto the usual scene: inmates with nothing better to do, gathered in twos and threes, snickering among themselves.
"Hey. You know this is our turf, right? I warned you last time."
"Bullshit. Know-nothing nobodies talking like they matter. We're all death row anyway — you gonna do worse than kill me? If you're scared, get lost."
"Come on, then! Come on~!"
Everyone here was equally a condemned man now, so nobody bothered ranking anyone by what they'd been on the outside. They'd simply found a new way to sort each other. Darkzone experience. Yield records. And the two cleanest measures of what someone was actually worth: money and violence.
Those idiots had gone past showing off their shackles. They were bragging about how much more extra their remaining shelf life was than the next guy's.
Was that it? Had some unknown virus that slowly melted human intelligence started spreading through this prison?
Unable to confirm any direct or indirect factors that degrade human intelligence. However, obsolete technology from a prior era may pose a risk of impairing prisoner cognitive function.
"It's not my brain you're dulling. It's your mood."
I decided to leave the stale philosophical questions — like whether Crazy Clock could even feel emotions — for another time, and walked straight through the clusters of inmates who looked ready to tear one another's throats out.
Until just a few days ago, these same guys had given me attitude. The moment they saw me now, every last one of them shut his mouth and looked away. In Cell Block H-050, the highest yield rate, the strongest combat power, and the most practical Darkzone experience all belonged to a single person. Me.
"Take it easy, will you? Don't you get sick of brawling every single day? Try doing something productive once in a while."
A real man changes up the menu — spicy pork one day, a pork cutlet the next — because even eating nothing but bulgogi gets old if you do it every day. I tossed a few barbs at prisoners who were acting worse than children and headed for the common area where the elevator was.
Ordinarily, inmates were forbidden from using the elevator for anything except Darkzone access and the return trip to their cell block. I had secured a usage permit in advance.
Inmate No. 77777. Temporary elevator access confirmed.
At the AI voice from the elevator speaker, I pressed the button for the surface.
I could have spoofed the whole thing with Crazy Clock whenever I wanted, but I had no interest in flashing hidden power out of nowhere and jacking the prison's alert level to maximum.
Been a while since I breathed surface air.
Escaping a basement where you never saw sunlight — where even the air felt stale unless it had been run through the internal circulation system — was a surprisingly fresh feeling.
Seoul Southern Prison. Ground Floor 1.
From Ground Floor 1 on up lived the inmates who had already been here before the prison was reformed, along with the model prisoners the administration considered a little too valuable to send downstairs. The staff, of course, used an entirely separate building for lodging and amenities.
The air really is different up here.
On the day I'd been processed, a foul-tempered guard had beaten me and dragged me straight underground, so I hadn't known any better. The Ground Floor was far brighter and more comfortable than I'd imagined. People always said that no matter how you decorated a semi-basement or basement rental, it was still underground, and it wore a person down. Up here, though, I could almost believe that spending twenty-four hours behind bars wouldn't be so bad.
"Huh? Is that a mole? What's a mole doing up top?"
I was about to go looking for a correctional officer when a cluster of inmates enjoying their free time in the Ground Floor 1 common area locked onto me. They were wearing the same color uniform I was, and they still drew a line between us on the spot. The word they used for that line was mole.
Mole, because I'm a prisoner stuffed in the basement? Naming sense is garbage wherever you go.
They could have at least gone with cockroach or rat. That would have been a slur with some actual venom in it, the kind that suited nastier criminals.
I pulled my attention off them and started walking again. Another group that had come in from a different direction was already blocking my path.
"Whoa, whoa. Where's the fire?"
"A mole comes up to the surface, the first thing it does is say hello to its elders."
"Don't think I've seen this face. Fresh fish, isn't he?"
"No way a fresh fish rides the elevator up here alone, dumbass."
"Ohh. So a mole that's been stewing down there a while?"
The way they looked at me — like a monkey in a zoo cage — and the remarks they tossed out as if dismissing me were so natural they didn't even feel like ordinary mockery. We were the same species, the same rank, the same condemned men, and still that gaze and that posture carried an enormous gap. An unbreachable wall. The kind that could never be crossed and never be torn down.
Any Korean would have summed up the atmosphere in a single word.
Territorial.
The usual pattern of a closed-off group. It was also the atmosphere a veteran like me — someone who actually wanted the game to grow and thrive — hated more than anything. You should have been coddling the newbies just walking in the door and helping them grow, and instead you were throwing your weight around?
I'm itching to teach somebody a lesson.
One: pick up the guy throwing his weight around. … Six hundred twenty-four million, six hundred fifty-four thousand, six hundred seventy-two: put him back down.
I desperately swallowed the urge to deliver a veteran player's full-course "real education," smooth as a familiar road, and simply slipped past the inmates blocking my way.
Or rather, I tried to.
If not for the blade that slid toward my gut without a hint of warning.
CLANG!
I chopped the knife aside with the edge of my hand, seized his wrist, and yanked him in. A reaction like that would have startled most people. The man whose wrist I'd grabbed just looked at me like it was nothing and started setting up his next move.
A headbutt that rides the pull? He's graduated from street brawls a long time ago.
I barely slipped the natural headbutt, drove my elbow up, and cracked him across the jaw. That finally convinced him this wasn't going his way. He staggered back a few steps — and still kept the same blank face.
"Oh, he's got some hands."
"See? Told you he's a mole that's been stewing down there. Anyone who can come up alone can do at least this much."
"Yeah, fair. Hey, what's your inmate number? Forty thousand? Or are you a fifty-thousand-class?"
"Nah, with hands like that he's mid-to-late thirty thousands, easy~."
"Wanna bet?"
"You're on. Five hundred on late thirties."
"Five hundred on early forties."
I had no idea what these assholes thought they were doing, but one thing was obvious.
They look like parents who showed up for a kids' recital.
Should I just pick a fight here and be done with it? I was a basement inmate anyway. I probably wouldn't have to deal with these guys that often.
I was quietly reaching into my uniform for Pretty when the jingle of a keyring rang out from somewhere nearby.
"Urgh, I'm beat. Was yesterday's makgeolli a little too well-fermented? Hurk."
A man came walking up, lazily swinging the baton clipped to his keys. The inmates who had been crowding around me scattered in every direction. They looked disappointed to miss a good show — but getting out of there right now was clearly the higher priority.
I found myself face-to-face with a correctional officer whose Rose of Sharon rank badge sat on a uniform that reeked of liquor, and who had somehow already closed the distance to right in front of me.
"Hurk. Right on time. Shall we find somewhere quiet and talk business?"
The person EFD players formed a "cooperative relationship" with right after the merchant NPCs. One Rose of Sharon. Seventh-grade correctional officer. Alcoholic civil servant. Correctional Inspector Park Byeonggon.