Encounter (1)

— Encounter (1) — Hanmaum Apartment, Unit 501

"…Oh."

The status window had changed. Changed by far, far too much in a single instant. I read through it all over again, slowly and carefully, just to be sure I was actually understanding it right.

"Please tell me the shop window didn't get a makeover too."

I remembered all too well that I still had one free-use voucher I hadn't touched.

"…This is an absolute jackpot, isn't it?"

The single word every citizen of this country holds dear to their heart. Passive income. And it kept flowing even in the moments I was asleep. What made it even sweeter was that the rewards for killing zombies came in on a separate track. Which meant that while every other bastard out there was breaking his back hunting, I was sitting pretty, dual-boxing.

"Holy shit, so this is why I used to multi-client and multibox."

Of course it was true. But when I'm the one reaping the benefits, well — that's an entirely different conversation. The only proposition left in this world that was genuinely fair was the one that said: get bitten, become a zombie. And even that didn't apply to me, seeing as I could buy a Zombie Cure from the shop.

Squelch.

My right foot, which had been rocking on its heel, stepped down on something sticky. I could already see that the living room was soaked through with the rotting blood of the mother and daughter.

"Fuck, the stench of blood."

The taste of iron, like chewing on metal, coated my mouth in a film of grime. The moment I turned to hurry out of the apartment, a sudden question surfaced in my mind.

Could I use a mental-type skill on those zombie corpses too?

When I cast Lack Identification on the daughter's zombie, a small message window popped up.

So the mother's attention had been lacking. Then what about the mother zombie?

So the daughter had been lacking. Had it been that way ever since they turned, or had it always been that way? It was a family that could wring tears out of anyone. A daughter who ached for her mother's attention, and a mother who only became what her daughter had craved after both of them had turned into zombies. Then the two of ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠them, side by side in undeath, had their throats torn out by me.

Staring at the bad ending I had authored made it painfully obvious just how green I still was. Did I really think that screaming just trust me at people would make a single soul on this godforsaken earth actually trust me? And the fact that the starter skill handed to me alongside the cult leader class was Lack Identification — that alone was enough to make me slap my own thigh.

Identify a person's deficiency, then fill it. Proselytizing, in the end, had to take place inside an environment the target was incapable of refusing.

'The opening was good. Everything up to promising I'd save the daughter was good. The problem was the way I careened off the rails right after that.'

Thinking back on it, it had been clumsy. Uncouth. As a cult leader — as the founder of the exacting, iron-fisted faith I intended to build — I was, frankly, a disqualifying specimen.

"Reflect. Fuck it, let's reflect some more."

Confucius said that if three people walk together, at least one of them has something to teach you — turns out even a pair of goddamn zombies had a lesson to offer.

I shut the door behind me in a hurry and started farming the remaining units. The farther down the floors I went, the more I saw the stairwell smeared thick with the blood of the zombie bastards I'd killed.

Bzzzz—

Flies had already found the corpses and swarmed them in a frenzy. Shit. Give it a little more time and the maggots would take over. Just picturing the worms that would soon wriggle and writhe through those zombie bodies made my stomach heave, food or no food.

This was no longer a place anyone could linger in. I could have hurled the bodies outside one by one, but I felt no particular need to. I had no intention of staying here long anyway.

Tap, tap.

On my way back to my own unit, I used my telekinesis to fling the dead uncle zombie lying in front of my door out into the open air.

Thud—

A sound like an egg cracking came from somewhere below. I didn't bother checking. I just closed the open front door and stepped inside.

I picked up the smartphone lying beside my bed. The power button still refused to respond. It needed charging. The wall charger was useless — I'd already confirmed while looting the other units that both water and electricity were cut off. A portable battery would do the trick, but none of the apartments I'd ransacked had one.

Then again, in an age where people break out in tremors the moment their phone leaves their hand, even I would have grabbed a power bank before a pack of ramen.

'I could've sworn there was a portable battery in the shop window…'

The price alone made my hands shake, but I had no choice but to buy it. I pulled the battery from my inventory and plugged it into the phone.

"Information. Get the lay of the land first. That comes before everything."

I knew it from watching that lunatic MadmanCheol firing up a YouTube livestream even while the world was being severed at the joints. The internet must have been boiling over. No — if anything, it would have been running even hotter than usual. People forcibly confined to their homes would have been marinating in raw, stomach-churning anxiety. The hunger for information was, in a situation like this, the most natural human instinct imaginable.

My finger kept drifting back toward the Ulsan high school girl, but I barely managed to tap the Incheon Survivors chat room instead. Ulsan was simply too far from Incheon. A place I couldn't reach no matter how badly I wanted to. The messages had stopped flowing ages ago; the room wasn't even updating anymore. An Incheon survivors' chat where no new message would ever arrive. Still, I scrolled up and checked the most recent thing anyone had posted.

What a fucking sex-crazed degenerate. I ignored the nutrition-free drivel and started skimming back through the earlier messages.

So the bastard had been running his mouth since back then, huh.

From that point on, it was an endless keyboard war between the SexMachine and the sex-crazed bastard. I scrolled down fast, and then something odd caught my eye — a photograph showing a translucent membrane draped ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠over an entire city.

Oh, for fuck's sake. I kept scrolling down, and only now did something actually useful swim into view.

God, why do these bastards fight about everything? And seriously, where the hell did the room admin run off to?

Found it.

My eyes lit up the instant I laid them on the one thing I'd wanted most of all.

Incheon Central Library.

Newbie Dragon Slayer.

Sex-crazed degenerates truly do exist in every corner of the world.