Chapter 89
Chapter 89
The children clutching Lee Sea’s clothes had turned pale.
Seven orphans.
To them, the Mapo Police Station Shelter looked less like salvation and more like the mouth of a giant monster.
The chilling barrels of the Atlas Guardian rising above the walls, and the heavily armed guards standing watch at the gate.
For children who had spent ten years hiding like rats, the pressure was overwhelming.
“Kids, it’s okay. This place is safe.”
Lee Sea comforted them, but the end of her voice trembled slightly.
She was afraid too.
After all, she had walked into the lair of the infamous killer—the Bomb Maniac.
Even after deciding to come here, she had hesitated dozens, hundreds of times about turning back.
But she trusted Yoon Sungjun.
He had shared food and supplies with them for years despite struggling just to feed himself.
Just then—
A little girl who had been playing in the dirt inside the fortress courtyard brushed off her muddy hands and ran over.
It was Sungjun’s daughter, Yebin.
“Welcome!”
Yebin bounced over to the wary orphans.
She rummaged through her pocket and pulled out a handful of colorful things.
“Here, eat this.”
The children’s eyes widened.
Lollipops.
Children born after the collapse had never seen such things before.
They blinked in confusion.
“What… is this?”
“It’s candy! The giant mister gave it to me. It’s super sweet.”
Yebin skillfully unwrapped one and placed it into the mouth of the smallest child.
Suck.
The child’s eyes instantly widened.
The intense sweetness—the first they had ever tasted—made their eyelashes tremble.
The fear frozen on the child’s face melted away.
“It’s… delicious!”
“Right? The food here is really good too. Yesterday we had tonkatsu. Do you know what tonkatsu is?”
Yebin’s cheerful bragging disarmed the children completely.
For them, a single candy was more powerful than any weapon.
“Yebin, show them around the shelter.”
“Okay!”
Sungjun gently pushed the children aside and greeted Lee Sea.
“You’ve arrived. Please come inside.”
The moment Lee Sea stepped into the lobby—
She inhaled sharply.
“Ah…”
The light was dazzling.
White illumination poured from the LED floodlights on the ceiling.
After living in a dim basement for years, it felt like her eyes had been blind and suddenly opened again.
Outside was a hell where mutants howled.
But inside these thick walls was another world.
She felt it instinctively.
Here, the children could live safely.
“Welcome, Ms. Lee Sea.”
First-floor command room.
A man in a clean suit greeted her.
It was Yoon Imsu.
Offering her a seat, he spoke bluntly.
“The children will be cared for by our childcare staff. Food, sleeping arrangements, and education will all be provided.”
Lee Sea’s mouth opened at the word education.
Just like Kang Shinhyuk, the collapse had happened while she was still young, preventing her from receiving proper schooling.
As a child she had hated studying and thought it useless.
But when crisis struck, the educated thought differently.
Knowledge itself was not the key.
It was the ability to think.
She had felt the painful difference between those who were educated and those who were not.
“Thank you… What work should I do? Purify drinking water? Or contaminated food—”
“No.”
Yoon Imsu shook his head.
“The drinking water is already purified by a Mana Purification Tank operating 24 hours a day. And every three days we hunt Beak-Chickens and store them in refrigerators. We even have surplus jerky. There’s no need to purify spoiled meat.”
Lee Sea’s eyes widened.
The most urgent survival problems had already been solved here.
Then why was she needed?
“You have a different task.”
Yoon Imsu pointed to a glass bottle filled with black liquid on the table.
“I heard you’ve seen this before. This is Mutant Bio-Crude Oil mined by the Director.”
“…Oil?”
Only now did Lee Sea realize what she had purified earlier was crude oil.
“Yes. But it’s like contaminated meat. Because of mana toxicity and impurities, using it directly will melt engines. Your mission is to completely erase the mana toxicity from this oil.”
Yoon Imsu’s eyes gleamed.
“If you refine this, we can run generators and vehicles here at Mapo Police Station. It will be the beginning of an energy revolution.”
A sense of belonging.
And responsibility.
She wasn’t just freeloading for food.
She would become a critical component of this fortress.
Lee Sea clenched her fists.
“I’ll do it. I’ll definitely succeed.”
“This is insane.”
Engineering Corps Design Office.
Team Leader Han Daeman clicked his tongue while looking at the pile of books on the desk.
They were all technical books from before the collapse.
Naturally, Bomb Maniac had provided them.
“I didn’t study even when I was young. And now I have to do it at this age.”
“The Director told us to study, so what choice do we have?”
“Ugh…”
“Studying without purpose is hard. But this knowledge has immediate use.”
Design Team Leader Lee Mira adjusted her glasses and reviewed the documents.
“The crude oil analysis results are in. The carbon chains are longer and more complex than typical fossil fuels. It resembles concentrated animal fat.”
“Carbon chain? What’s that?”
“You don’t need to know. The important part is that more than 70% of it is diesel-range fuel.”
“So gasoline cars can’t run?”
“No. You saw it yourself. The diesel generator broke down quickly. We need to separate gasoline and diesel.”
“Distillation. But weren’t we planning that after securing the Incheon Petrochemical Complex?”
“We recruited Lee Sea. Distillation itself isn’t that difficult. We can produce enough for our own use.”
Lee Mira drew a graph on the whiteboard.
“Gasoline boils between 30°C and 120°C. Diesel between 250°C and 350°C. The range between 150°C and 250°C is kerosene.”
“Kerosene?”
“Yes. It’s used for heating and aviation fuel. You might not be familiar with it. Even before the collapse kerosene heaters were considered outdated.”
Han Daeman puffed his chest proudly.
“I know it well. We’re from the same generation, Mira. It smelled a bit, but the heating power was amazing.”
“Exactly. And in our situation, kerosene will be very useful. Diesel for generators and trucks, gasoline for cars, but for lamps at night and winter heating, kerosene is extremely efficient.”
Yoon Imsu nodded.
“That means we can save electricity. Nothing goes to waste.”
“Of course. Using boiling point differences, we’ll collect gasoline, kerosene, and diesel in order. However, we don’t have equipment to handle the asphalt residue at the highest temperatures, so we’ll discard that.”
“Asphalt? What a waste.”
“Asphalt solidifies at room temperature. Storing it requires constant heating, which wastes fuel. And unless you want the entire Mapo Police Station smelling like sulfur and tar, you’d better follow my advice. The distillation pipes could clog and explode.”
“Ugh… I see.”
“Don’t regret it. Long ago natural gas was simply burned because there was no way to transport it. We’re the same right now—we don’t have gas capture technology.”
“Mira, you really know everything.”
“I studied the books the Director gave me. I’m grateful for the opportunity.”
She smiled bitterly.
Without Bomb Maniac, she would have been more useless than an F-Rank Awakened.
Now she was full of motivation.
For the first time, she had the power to change the world.
“Let’s build the distillation unit.”
Fire lit their eyes.
The days of welding broken rifle barrels were over.
The next day, the sound of hammering and welding echoed through Mapo Police Station.
“Tighten the cooling coil! Gas will leak! Team Leader Kim, do we have more coils?”
“Wait! I’m machining them with 0.1mm precision!”
Kim Jihoon carved copper pipes salvaged from scrap vehicles into spiral coils.
They would condense vapor back into liquid.
Nearby, Han Daeman wrestled with a discarded LPG gas cylinder.
“Hrrgh!”
[Metal Compression]
Under his grip, the steel cylinder neck bent like taffy and fused perfectly with a high-pressure hydraulic valve.
Even microscopic gaps that welding couldn’t seal were crushed shut by force.
“Good. Boiler complete.”
After hours of work—
A bizarre yet sturdy silver contraption of drums and pipes emerged.
[Crude Oil Distillation Unit]
“Now we just need the raw material.”
At that moment, Sungjun and several men rolled in a huge drum.
It contained Mutant Bio-Crude Oil pumped from Gongdeok Station’s underground.
A reinforced glass viewing port allowed them to see the thick black liquid sloshing inside.
“Ms. Lee Sea, please.”
Lee Sea stood before the drum with a determined expression.
She placed both hands on its surface.
“Hoo…”
White mana flowed from her body.
[Mana Erasure]
Humm—
The drum vibrated slightly.
Through the viewing window, red sparks flickered inside the black oil.
They were the mana toxins embedded within.
“Ugh…”
Cold sweat ran down Lee Sea’s forehead.
This wasn’t purification.
She was erasing the very existence of the mana.
Time passed slowly.
Ten minutes.
Thirty.
One hour.
The engineers held their breath.
After four hours—
“It’s done!”
Han Daeman shouted.
The liquid inside had changed.
The blackness that once swallowed light vanished.
Only clear amber liquid remained.
“Zero toxicity reaction. Mana level zero.”
At Yoon Imsu’s confirmation, Lee Sea collapsed weakly.
“It took longer than I expected…”
“One drum is 200 liters. Enough to fill a Carnival’s fuel tank three times.”
“Then that’s about 2,500 km of driving. Three round trips between Seoul and Busan. Well… not possible now since highways are destroyed.”
Han Daeman, the only one with long-distance driving experience, said proudly.
Yoon Imsu laughed.
“Even purifying one drum per day should be enough for us.”
“We could sell it on the market for cores. Fuel is expensive.”
Lee Mira reminded them.
“But remember. This is crude oil. After distillation, only about half remains. Gasoline and diesel will be in a 3:7 ratio. Tell the farming team to prioritize diesel vehicles.”
“Understood.”
“Good work, Ms. Sea. Now it’s our turn.”
Lee Mira guided her away.
Han Daeman pumped the purified crude into the distillation unit.
Kim Jihoon lit the burner.
Hiss—
The thermometer needle slowly climbed.
Yoon Imsu shouted.
“Opening the valve!”
Cold groundwater cooled the copper coils.
Hot vapor condensed into droplets.
Drip.
Drip.
“It’s coming out!”
A yellow liquid began collecting in a 20-liter plastic container.
Gasoline.
Then kerosene.
When the temperature rose past 250°C, darker liquid poured from another outlet.
Diesel.
“We did it! We actually did it!”
The engineers embraced each other, cheering.
Ten years after the descent.
Humanity had produced fuel again.
Watching them, Lee Mira felt her chest swell with emotion.
“Everyone remember this. None of this would have been possible without the Director’s support.”