0. I Realized It Was an Academy Game After 10 Years
0. I Realized It Was an Academy Game After 10 Years
Traps, all clear.
Shelter condition, all clear.
Fence, all clear.
3650th tally mark carved into the stone record tablet—done.
Morning exercises began in the front yard, bathed in warm sunlight.
No commands were needed. After repeating something thousands of times, even someone with no sense of rhythm learned to keep the beat without them. Once the exercises were over, I went back into the house and grabbed my tools straightaway. No time to waste. If you didn't move your ass, you starved to death—that was uninhabited island life.
"Now what was I supposed to do today~"
I had to go to the beach, check whether any fish had gotten caught in the nets I'd set, pick a few coconuts, maintain my tools, send out some utterly pointless distress signals, and check whether anything had washed up on shore.
The morning alone was already that packed.
In the afternoon, I'd process the ingredients I'd gathered, hunt, dream up new traps to set around the house, and circle the whole island once.
A deserted island about the size of Ulleungdo—no people whatsoever, and yet an absolute ass-load of headaches.
In such a cramped place, what the hell was there to eat that made monsters overrun it? Just thinking about those tasteless little shits still made my teeth grind.
"Seriously, can't one person just drop in from somewhere? Even one more pair of hands would be nice. Hell, I'd take just someone to talk to."
I walked along, muttering words no one would ever hear.
My shovel, my companion of many long years, rested on my shoulder, a strip of well-dried jerky hung from my mouth, and the morning that began with a hummed tune was disgustingly refreshing.
Walking along, breathing in that crisp air—sometimes, no, actually quite often, I found myself craving foul air instead.
Exhaust fumes that stung the nose, thick cigarette smoke that choked your breath, the sticky smell of cosmetics caked onto a face. The fragrant aroma of coffee.
When I was hungry, the spicy scent of instant ramen that I'd boil in a pot of water and eat in front of the computer, blowing on each bite.
Those were the kinds of smells you could find anywhere.
But ten years had already passed since I'd last smelled any of them.
"I want ramen. Ramen, ramen, ramen..."
As I walked along mulling over old memories, a sea as blue and clear as a jewel spread out before my eyes. A familiar sight. This beach was, more than anything, the foundation of my life—the place I trudged in and out of until I was sick of it.
But as I stepped onto that foundation of my life, I spotted a sight unlike any other.
"Oh, a treasure ship?"
A ship had come riding the waves today.
A wrecked one, anyway.
Occasionally, shipwrecks like this rode the currents and washed up on shore. They came in all kinds—warships, merchant vessels, fishing boats—so I'd salvaged valuable materials from their wrecks before. You could almost call them supply drops the sea sometimes gave me.
The trade-off was the minor inconvenience of having to chop up any waterlogged, bloated corpses left aboard and bury them. If I put them in the ground as-is, they'd turn into zombies and spend the whole day pounding on my house's wooden walls.
For quality sleep alone, dismembering corpses was essential.
I set my basket on the ground and examined the debris of the shipwreck that had washed in. The planks that had once been the ship's hull bore ornate paintings, which told me this one was likely a passenger ship or a vessel belonging to some high-and-mighty noble.
There was no other reason to paint lavish decorations on the outside.
After rummaging for a while, I dragged a few planks that looked reasonably usable and an oak barrel with a satisfying heft onto the sand. Unfortunately, the rest of the items weren't much use.
"Oak barrel~ oak barrel~ what's inside, I wonder~"
Hopefully there would be something useful inside. Preserved food like pickles would be decent enough, gems I could cut up and play around with wouldn't be bad either, and clothes or oil would be great too. Pretty much anything had its uses.
I didn't call shipwrecks treasure ships for nothing. Sure, I was self-sufficient in food on this uninhabited island and made all sorts of things by processing raw materials, but for gems or vegetables I couldn't grow here, I had to rely on wrecks.
If I got lucky and some seeds came in, even better. Not that I'd ever seen a sprout—whether the soil here was just the absolute worst for farming, or the seeds had been ruined by seawater—but still, I could at least try.
"Why won't this thing open?"
Maybe because it had soaked up so much water, it was damn slippery. In the end, I wedged the blade of my shovel into the gap, forced the lid open, and stuck my head in to check the barrel's contents.
"Huh?"
A person? A woman? Pink hair—well, that was an interesting color. The heroine from a game I'd loved had pink hair too. And from the look of those pretty high-end clothes, she had to be some noble young lady or something.
"Looks like she hid in the oak barrel to survive."
Pretty common story.
Since it floats, if you got lucky, you could wash up on a beach like this... but most of the time, you'd just starve to death and drift forever as a corpse, or sink to the bottom. Still, this particular corpse seemed like it hadn't been dead long.
I pulled the pink-haired person out of the barrel. I laid the pink-haired person on the sand and gave her body a quick once-over. Her wet clothes clung to a voluptuous figure that snagged my eyes. I didn't have a taste for getting aroused by corpses, but a fresh one like this after so many years was a little... well.
Better to dismember and bury her in the graveyard fast. I felt like I might cross a line at this rate. No matter how deserted this island was, I didn't want to abandon my humanity.
Which meant I wasn't broken enough to do that kind of thing with a corpse while muttering creepy shit like "still warm..."
I raised my shovel high overhead. One good swing down and she'd become a lump of what used to be a person, same as all the other corpses buried in my graveyard. Surely a better fate for the deceased than becoming a zombie.
That was the very moment I was about to bring the shovel down. The corpse suddenly opened her eyes. Pink irises met my gaze. I froze with the shovel still raised overhead. Pink and gold eyes. Odd eyes. I knew a person—no, a character—with eyes like those.
Survival Academy.
Karina. The Church of Kalon's Saintess.
"...sa...ve...me..."
With those brief words, she closed her eyes again. She seemed to have fainted.
"Everything on today's schedule is canceled."
I muttered the words—words no one would ever hear—out of sheer habit, and lifted her into my arms.