Four technicians arrived at the shelter.

On the surface, they looked like utterly ordinary middle-aged men of South Korea.

They all looked like good people, and in fact, they had the basic manners to match their appearances.

“Then we’ll be in your care for a while.”

Though their appearance was ordinary, all over their bodies were scars left behind by the Apocalypse.

Missing fingers or toes, the edge of an earlobe cut away, limping when they walked, or seemingly walking fine but twisting uncomfortably when they sat down.

The one leading this team was a man named Park Han-yul, who shared the same family name as me.

He was younger than the others, but with the most brilliant career and the most knowledge.

To the point that he had entered the Seoul Administrative Government’s temporary IT Engineer Corps, which supposedly only connections could get you into, entirely on skill alone.

“This isn’t particularly difficult. It’s not making something at Ground Zero, but closer to porting something that already exists.”

The task that Yoo Jeong-min hadn’t been able to properly touch for over a month—they claimed they could finish in just one week.

I could have told Yoo Jeong-min directly, but since she was now in a relationship with Cheon Young-jae, I instead whispered to him that this was a chance for her to learn a trick or two from veterans.

Cheon Young-jae seemed annoyed by my meddling, but perhaps because he too thought our elite group had no room for idle manpower, he urged Yoo Jeong-min to join the work.

Though we had borne unintended risk and danger, Park Penguin was highly satisfied with the matter of Kim Min-young’s recruitment.

Especially with Academy, who he said he liked very much.

And with good reason.

Truly a pearl in the mud.

Personally, more than his combat strength or leadership, what impressed me most was his systematic, scholarly debriefing and analytical skills.

They say that those who have only studied shallowly are desperate to show it off, while those who have studied deeply appear as though they haven’t studied at all—and he was exactly that.

Park °• N 𝑜 v 𝑒 l i g h t •° Penguin’s quick dispatch of technicians was also an expression of his satisfaction.

It would be nonsense for me, with my level of knowledge and skill, to judge them—but according to Yoo Jeong-min, they were like ghosts.

Watching them up close, I could see work proceeding smoothly in real time.

The nostalgic Failnet interface, clicking on posts that actually opened, edits and deletions reflected, recommendations and hot boards.

Failnet was an icon of an entire era, alongside the collapsing Republic of Korea.

Perhaps because of that, the technicians frequently dug up old memories and marveled at Failnet’s creator.

“Man. How could anyone have thought to make something like this?”

“Melon Mask was a genius, sure, but I think John Naenon was no less impressive.”

“True. Melon had billions piled up even before the war and influenced even the U.S. government, while John Naenon didn’t really have anything besides some fame on the internet, right?”

“Yeah. Even if he made money, compared to Melon it must have been a drop in the bucket.”

Personally, I don’t tend to engage in deep conversation with people I only brush past, and I prefer to minimize talk.

But this time was different.

I wanted to join in.

“John Naenon was an incredible man, yes.”

Why not? The flow of conversation was praising John Naenon—my idol, who had transcended into a god. How could I, Skeleton, his first and greatest disciple, let it pass?

“Oh! Skeleton-nim.”

Though my merits cannot reach the divine John Naenon, in popularity among mortals I had easily surpassed him.

When I joined in, even the technicians seemed pleased.

By evening, we held a modest dinner party, both welcoming and consoling them.

Though modest, we had put care into the food.

Kim Daram had gone out with her husband earlier to hunt wild boar. Thin slices of its meat, dried, then boiled with autumn-stored vegetables, soy sauce, and seasonings into a hot pot.

Cheon Young-jae, surprisingly skilled at cooking, had prepared it himself with Yoo Jeong-min.

The alcohol was cheap spirit diluted with water and chilled outside until a thin ice crust formed.

Any drinker would know—the cold masks the bad taste of bad liquor.

Normally I neither drank nor enjoyed it, but given the occasion I joined for a few cups.

“There’s one problem.”

The one who spoke was B—so called because he refused to give his real name, and aside from the leader, it was the only label I could use.

B was older than Park Han-yul and had a longer career. He had skills equal to Park Han-yul’s, but his personality kept him from stepping forward as a leader.

Like those characters in dramas who aren’t executives but hold irreplaceable positions, guarding an independent domain for decades.

“Connecting to Necropolis isn’t going well.”

“Really?”

“Yes. The other parts are fine, but Necropolis—honestly, no one knows how it actually works, right?”

“Well, that’s true.”

Not just B.

C and D also said they kept running into errors when trying to access Necropolis.

Valentine—once an engineer, now no doubt serving as an angel under the god John Naenon—had left documentation, but even that wasn’t enough.

“Maybe the Necropolis environment itself has changed.”

Park Han-yul, who had been silent, chewed on a piece of cabbage and fixed his gaze on me.

He had something to say.

I readied myself to listen.

“I’ve used Necropolis since its introduction in Korea. From a creator’s perspective, not a user’s.”

To be honest, Necropolis was a network I almost never touched.

Its awkward method and crude interface were bad enough, but more than that, it buried individuality.

In Necropolis, even Skeleton was just another dead soul.

Every message came from a different direction, incoherent, echoing, ephemeral.

From the beginning, it was structured so that named users and social bonds could not even form.

Like a collection of conversations held alone, facing a wall.

So I rarely used Necropolis, and I knew nothing of its subtle changes.

But Park Han-yul knew them well.

“Compared to its early days, it’s gotten sluggish. And messages arrive scrambled.”

“How do you mean?”

“Back then, Koreans could only see Korean posts. If you tinkered with the connection options, you could view foreign ones too, though it was tedious. Now it’s completely different.”

“You mean foreign messages appear without changing settings?”

“Yes.”

Park Han-yul nodded.

On his face—half tipsy, half serious—I saw a faint trace of fear that even alcohol couldn’t hide.

“...Even translated.”

“Translated?”

Translation isn’t free.

Viva! Apocalypse!’s automatic translation was the cutting edge of modern technology, made by Melon Mask’s top linguists and engineers with the power of A.I. and big data.

Necropolis had nothing of the sort.

Necropolis was a crude medium, discovered by chance by DeadmanWalking, who himself didn’t even know how it worked.

It was little more than a broken-down vehicle, with no messaging system, no user categorization—certainly not automatic translation.

And that wasn’t all.

“I tracked one of the repeated messages. Turned out it originated in the U.S. over two years ago.”

“A message from the U.S.?”

“Yes. A message sent at least two years ago, somehow perfectly translated into Korean, appearing on a Korean’s phone two years later. As if it had just been posted by a user moments ago.”

DeadmanWalking once likened Necropolis to an echo.

Perhaps what we were seeing now was its true nature, exactly as he foresaw.

“At any rate, I think that’s what’s causing the connection problems.”

This was a problem.

A big problem.

The second Failnet, like John Naenon’s creation, was designed without any physical servers.

It depended entirely on Necropolis.

If Necropolis couldn’t connect, my plan was dead before it began.

It seemed I would have to contact DeadmanWalking after all.

He would reply.

If he was alive.

While I sat in gloom at the thought, the conversation on the other side grew lively.

Normally I disliked listening to others’ chatter, but it felt wrong to leave, and besides, the hot pot was nearly gone. So I stayed a bit longer.

And a rather interesting topic came up.

“I was actually a doomist, you know.”

D suddenly confessed to being a former doomist.

Everyone, not just me, stared in surprise.

Especially B, who seemed close to him, looked baffled.

“What do you mean, Manager Kim? You were just like me, broke and found in a shelter.”

At that, the others laughed, even Yoo Jeong-min and Cheon Young-jae joining in.

I didn’t laugh.

Perhaps because I’d never been ruined and driven to a shelter like them.

“It’s true. I was a doomist. I subscribed to Melon Mask’s Apocalypse Communications and signed up for Viva! Apocalypse! too.”

B insisted passionately that he too had once been a doomist like me.

One of the technicians asked curtly,

“So why’d you quit?”

B drooped his shoulders theatrically and answered,

“My wife told me to cancel.”

At those words, I straightened up.

I had been planning to get up soon, but this man—he was telling a good story.

And there were many like him.

People who had subscribed to Viva! Apocalypse! behind their wives’ backs, only to be caught and forced to pay penalties and return the device.

The subscription fee itself wasn’t so bad.

About 100 dollars a month.

To someone unfamiliar, that might sound absurdly cheap for such a high-tech satellite receiver.

They might ask: “Wouldn’t Melon Mask lose money, letting people rent such a device for so little?”

Wasn’t he destined for bankruptcy if war never came?

That was the common refrain, so I’ll skip it.

But Melon Mask wasn’t that naive.

The contract was clear.

Before the war, usage of the satellite receiver was billed by the megabyte.

As I recall, once traffic reached a gigabyte, the user owed at least 1.5 million won.

What most didn’t know was that our receiver had a home LAN port.

Before the war, every Viva! Apocalypse! user in Korea had plugged their home internet into the receiver to connect.

The obscenely rich—or those who didn’t read the manual—were the ones stuck with those crushing bills.

In that sense, D was one of the few pureblood users left.

He even remembered the days of plugging in LAN cables.

Naturally, he knew John Naenon.

“John Naenon. I thought he was a clown, but I was shocked. Never thought he’d achieve something so great.”

This was a rare find.

I hadn’t expected to meet another pureblood here.

I sat with him and struck up a separate conversation.

“Well, he did get ousted in an ugly way, but I respect him. You have to consider the effort he put in to translate good posts, spending his own time. Sure, wrapping them as his own was against etiquette, but still.”

I thought: I could become good friends with this man.

So I asked,

“By any chance, did you ever attend John Naenon’s offline meetups?”

If you did, there was nothing more to say.

We were sworn brothers.

At least while the liquor lingered, we’d be brothers.

D smirked and replied,

“Why?”

“?”

“Why would I go to something like that? Honestly, the guy was kind of weird.”

“......”

I suddenly understood why this man had failed.

The mood quieted.

The drinking party was winding down.

Everyone clustered in small groups, chatting with those they felt closest to.

D too seemed to be collecting his thoughts.

He had something to say.

“Sometimes I wonder.”

He began.

Perhaps it was the perfect moment to break the silence—or maybe the others had run out of topics—for all eyes turned to him.

He had everyone’s attention, but his gaze was elsewhere.

“I wonder what would have happened if I’d made different choices back then.”

He gave a wry smile.

“Is that so?”

As expected, he was looking backward. 𝚏𝗿𝗲𝐞𝐰𝚎𝕓𝐧𝚘𝘃𝗲𝐥.𝐜𝚘𝕞

That was common.

Those who had lost everything could only look to the past.

Because even if they looked to the future, they knew nothing there could replace what they had lost.

But being a technician, D took it a step further.

“I’ve made scenarios, you see.”

“Scenarios?”

“Yes. At every turning point, before and after the war—if I had made different choices, what kind of future would have unfolded?”

It was curious.

Not that I wasn’t interested.

It was a fresh way of looking at the past, though personally, I doubted it was good for one’s mental health.

But everyone had their own way of coping.

“For example...”

Everyone turned their gaze the same way.

Back to before the war.

To the past, where all that was now lost still existed.