WeTried Translations
Translator/Editor: DereKimchi
Discord: https://dsc.gg/wetried
◈ Unlimited Money Shelter of the Apocalypse ◈
Chapter 14: The Community’s One and Only God Descends...!
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For people living in the mountains, the deadliest disasters are heavy rain and wildfires.
Heavy rain causes landslides that sweep away everything above ground, while wildfires reduce everything on top to ash.
But I hadn't particularly considered either when building my shelter.
Neither heavy rain nor wildfire could directly affect my shelter, which was buried deep underground.
Of course, if a massive landslide completely buried the main entrance in earth and debris, that would become a headache in many ways. Still, with heavy equipment, I could clear away a pile of dirt somehow.
That heavy equipment guzzled fuel, and gasoline becomes unusable from oxidation after six months of storage, while diesel lasts a little over a year, but...
At that point, I could use the Juggernaut or electrically powered heavy machinery. It wasn't something I needed to worry about right now.
[ ■ Large Command and Control Display System ]
• Military-grade micro-LED video wall system
• Description: An ultra-high-resolution panoramic display system operated by major command headquarters around the world. It clearly displays critical CCTV feeds, power grid status, and satellite map data with minimal power consumption.
• Unit Price: $12 million
• Status: [Available for Purchase]
Because I was too busy furnishing the place I would live in!
“Ughhh...”
I honestly thought my eyes would fall out after staying up all night choosing items for the central control room.
Why didn't I just use the items Anne recommended instead of making myself suffer for no reason?
Ironically, Anne's recommendations were so good that they were exactly why this was taking so long.
“Administrator, this model is far superior to the one you just selected in terms of tactical data-processing versatility.”
“Then what about this one?”
“That model was adopted by the German Ministry of Defense for its highest-grade bunkers...”
Was this how it felt to walk into a used-car dealership for a cheap little Ray or Matiz and come out having signed for a fully loaded Grandeur instead?
Every time I listened to Anne's expert explanations, I kept upgrading the specs one step at a time until things ended up like this.
Maybe it was because Anne was a futuristic android, but once they set out to sell something, they were really good at it.
Anyway, the result of my all-nighter immediately appeared before me as a beautiful 3D blueprint.
First, the main operations control room covered 300 pyeong, roughly 1,000 square meters, with an eight-meter ceiling.
I had made the ceiling as high as possible to organically arrange the large tactical screens and two-level monitoring consoles.
From the Administrator's seat, I would have a perfect view of every screen in the operations control room. Those screens would display real-time visualizations of the shelter's internal and external CCTV feeds, weather conditions, sensor networks, power grid status, and more.
As the fruit of my sleepless night, I had acquired a large command display, EMP protection and power-control equipment, independent physical-security server racks, and consoles integrating biometric authentication with blast-door controls.
There was also an independent life-support room, an emergency power equipment room, a mini greenhouse, and even a buffer area between my private residential zone and the corridors.
Altogether, it covered 700 pyeong, about 2,300 square meters.
An elementary school field was usually around 900 pyeong, so it was a space slightly smaller than that, used only by the androids and me.
In practice, I would be using it mostly alone. It was so spacious that it might even feel excessive.
Still, if I was going to live somewhere, I wanted it to be a big place.
The final cost of excavation and structural construction alone for these spaces was...
“$631 million.”
“Thank you.”
I spared no expense on the computers the androids would use, the communications equipment, security systems, and control systems.
The largest expense was a two-meter-thick ultra-heavy titanium-alloy composite blast door. Just one of those cost a staggering $120 million.
As a result, the total cost of completing the central control room came to $1.14 billion.
Considering it would be the final stronghold where I would spend the most time from now on, it was practically a bargain(?) even after covering it with cutting-edge equipment.
It wasn't as if there was anywhere else left to spend more money.
$1 billion might not sound like much, but building the Pentagon alone had cost nearly $2 billion. When I thought about that, I had actually spent an enormous amount.
“I recommend that you get some sleep soon.”
“Yeah. I should sleep now...”
I threw myself onto the sleeping bag spread across the floor. Beyond the ridge, the first sunrise of the new year was slowly appearing.
Today was January 1. The new year of 2027 had begun.
There were now twenty-two days left until the end.
* * *
Over the next three days, I built a maintenance bay for equipment and vehicles, an armory to stockpile weapons, and garages for the vehicles I would use in the future.
Since the Republic of Korea was a country with no oil production whatsoever, I focused on electric vehicles for the garages.
I also checked on the outside world whenever I had time.
Fortunately, aside from France suffering a large-scale terror attack and Italy declaring a national emergency because of wildfires, no particularly notable megadisaster occurred.
At least, that was fortunate from my perspective.
The only unusual developments were that temperatures across India had fallen below freezing due to abnormal weather, causing snow to fall, and that Japan had suffered a magnitude-seven earthquake.
HotGalleryUser: Snow fell in New Delhi, India, for the first time in recorded history. Damn. (1921)
Anonymous: Another earthquake in Japan;;
Whenever something like this happened, I realized that without Starlink, I probably wouldn't know anything about the outside world.
“Do you have any plans for today?”
“I was going to look around the area surrounding the shelter.”
I needed to identify the main routes, choke points, and paths an enemy might use to infiltrate.
I felt that it was time to start paying attention to the outside of the shelter too.
I'd served as a squad leader during my military service and worked all sorts of posts, so I was confident that I knew more about the military than the average person.
But I wasn't enough of an expert to personally identify key choke points and infiltration routes.
Honestly, I probably knew less than a sergeant.
In the end, I decided to ask for help from the combat expert who had been standing in a corner of the shelter for nearly a week, the Juggernaut.
“People usually call that neglect.”
Anne added that from the side, but I lightly ignored them.
A moment later, the Juggernaut approached, revealing its massive body.
Its heavy footsteps pressed into the dirt, while its armor plates meshed together with a distinctive metallic scraping sound.
If super-soldiers from a science-fiction film walked into reality, this was exactly how they would feel. Its appearance made a man's heart race every time I saw it.
The Juggernaut stopped in front of me and lowered its heavy red-lensed visor.
Without saying a word, it nodded once and started forward.
Couldn't it speak?
Still, it honestly seemed cooler that way. Since we were connected, there was no need to communicate through words.
“I'll stay here.”
“Anne?”
“Have a safe trip.”
“...”
I didn't add anything either and followed behind the Juggernaut. It didn't open its mouth even once before we reached our destination.
Maybe because the ground was covered in dirt and fallen leaves, its footsteps weren't as loud as expected for its size. Instead, the dull friction of its armor plates and internal frame moving together was louder.
It was nowhere close to stealthy movement.
But the Juggernaut was closer in purpose to an armored vehicle or tank than a scout. In that case, this level of noise was understandable. A real tank would be incomparably louder than the Juggernaut.
Still, where exactly was it taking me?
It had been left in a corner of the shelter since its performance test on the first day. When had it even learned the terrain? It probably had some separate means of reconnaissance that I didn't know about.
Clack.
The Juggernaut walking ahead stopped.
It raised one massive armored finger, pointed to a spot ahead, and looked down at me.
There should have been nothing beyond the red visor except optical sensors, but for some reason, I had the strange feeling that a battle-hardened veteran soldier was silently looking down at me.
Fortunately, since I was connected to the Juggernaut, I immediately understood the meaning of the places it pointed out.
Key infiltration routes and choke points.
Every location the Juggernaut indicated was a narrow, rough pass stretching between valleys. Some were blocked on both sides by sheer rock walls, while others had ground covered in irregularly sized stones that made even walking difficult.
If someone tried to cross this mountain and approach my shelter, they would have no choice but to pass through those points.
In other words, if I monitored those points properly, I could detect people or groups approaching from outside at a very early stage.
The Juggernaut began guiding me again. At the next location, concealing machine gunners or gun-port bunkers would likely allow one-sided fire through concentrated firepower.
I carefully marked those places on a map. I planned to use it as a reference later when installing observation posts or surveillance cameras.
And there was something else surprising.
We continued searching the area for about two hours, but we didn't encounter a single lost hiker or wild ginseng digger.
In my experience, this wasn't a mountain completely devoid of people. The Juggernaut's advance-detection capabilities seemed far more impressive than I expected.
And there was one more surprising thing.
The Juggernaut didn't say a single word over those two hours. I tried to start a conversation at least twenty times, but every time, it merely looked down at me silently and remained quiet to the end.
Of course, I knew that a quiet soldier was much more useful for controlling civilians than a talkative one, but after being around Anne, the contrast was almost painful.
If I hadn't put that robot in my brain, I might have died of frustration.
“Let's rest for a bit.”
After walking mountain paths for several hours, I was starting to get tired. I sat down on the bare ground and took out the water and gimbap I had packed beforehand.
As I roughly filled my stomach with water and gimbap, I checked the community out of habit.
Anonymous: They say the climate crisis means the world ends in 2027~ (7)
Anonymous: Why don't those fucking Lotte Giants assholes quit baseball and get desk jobs? Seriously, my grandma could throw better than that. (11)
Anonymous: Wasn't this the Man United forum? Why are we suddenly pretending to be survivalists?
Anonymous: How do I stop water deer and wild boars when I farm in the mountains? They keep eating all my vegetables;; (33)
Anonymous: How to survive when war breaks out in Korea (81)
Maybe because of the ominous international situation, the survivalist forum had gained a strange sort of energy compared to before. I could definitely feel that there were far more new users.
Survivor13: It is nice that there are more newbies lately. I thought the forum was gonna die after half the junior mods quietly bailed;;
Survivor92: Five named regulars disappeared too lol
I browsed Korean communities until I had eaten about half the gimbap, then immediately switched to an overseas community.
RalRal: R.I.P ZOMBIE_MAN :(
Kemono: he 100% dead
Zombie_Man still hadn't returned. His family had even filed a missing-person report over the past few days, but not a single clue had been found.
Since the abduction had spread through a livestream, his disappearance had even made it onto California terrestrial broadcasts in an unusual case.
Naturally, discussion about Shelter Builder had died down too.
By this point, even users who couldn't take a hint seemed to have felt an unsettling sense of déjà vu from the fact that everyone who had mentioned the game had either disappeared or become unreachable.
Tsk.
Honestly, it was a little unfortunate.
The only reason I kept visiting communities was to obtain information related to Shelter Builder.
But all the clueless people had been hauled away, at least in my guess, while all the perceptive ones had gone underground like me. That made it nearly impossible to find information.
I could solve the other issues somehow through Anne, but Anne couldn't do anything about knowledge of the game itself.
That was information I could only obtain through other users.
Just when I was at a loss because I couldn't think of a solution, a new post caught my eye on an overseas community.
ProSurvivalist: Tеlegrаm rооm nеw. Only hυmаns whо wаnnа chаt sυrvivаlism cаsually. Rооm blоws in 10 min.
I remembered seeing reviews written like that before, with letters deliberately distorted so only Korean people could understand them.
Roughly translated, it meant, “Opened a new Telegram group. Only for people who want to casually chat about survivalism. The group will be deleted in ten minutes.”
A Telegram invitation link had been left alone at the bottom of the post.
Telegram?
Keeping in mind that this could be a shallow trap by an investigative agency, I checked ProSurvivalist's profile first.
Account created in August 2018. 1,030 posts. A whopping 5,000 comments. At the very least, it didn't look like an empty account hastily created by the government for a sting operation.
“...”
There was something I always said. If you wanted a return, you had to accept an appropriate amount of risk. And this risk was more than worth accepting.
Of course, if there was risk I could reduce, reducing it as much as possible was the basis of survival.
「You have purchased a Samsung smartphone.」
I immediately used the system to buy a burner phone, then turned on a VPN to route my connection through another location.
Even if I used an unused phone, traces of the carrier's IP would remain. But my main internet connection was Starlink. Even if investigators tried to trace the IP, the time required for their investigation would increase exponentially.
In my experience, even if they rushed, it would take at least two full weeks to submit a proper warrant to SpaceX headquarters and receive a response. That was without even mentioning how difficult it was to investigate Telegram.
This line of thought was only possible because there were just nineteen days left until the world ended. If it became too dangerous, I could simply buy another burner phone and switch to it.
In the meantime, the original post ProSurvivalist had uploaded was cleanly deleted.
That meant ten minutes had passed.
But using the link I had copied beforehand, I entered the Telegram group without delay.
The first thing that caught my eye upon entering was the notice pinned at the very top of the chat window.
ProSurvivalist1500: [Notice] Deep conversations about survivalism are welcome~ Anonymity doesn't matter~ When making a nickname, just put your specs as a number beside it~
Arrow300: Any recommendations for what I should do with $30 million?
Inu59: So fucking jealous, seriously;;;
Cham170: Under $100,000 = lowborn, $100,000 to $1 million = commoner, $1 million to $10 million = noble, $10 million to $100 million = royalty, $100 million to $1 billion = imperial family. Over $1 billion = god. No objections accepted.
“...”
It looked like I had come to the right place.
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