WeTried Translations

Translator/Editor: DereKimchi

Discord: https://dsc.gg/wetried

◈ Unlimited Money Shelter of the Apocalypse ◈

Chapter 20: Construction of Living Quarters

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International oil prices shot up more than 30 percent in a single day, but the lives of people in the Republic of Korea did not immediately undergo any drastic changes.

Oil prices had already been rising due to the ongoing Middle Eastern civil war, and people could not simply skip work because the Saudi crown prince had died.

Still, public sentiment had definitely changed.

Perhaps everyone was beginning to feel just how ominous the situation was becoming.

Tait: The world’s terrifying these days. France and Saudi are both going to shit?

Anon: Yeah, yeah. The world isn’t ending just because the Middle East is.

Anon: Bottom-tier college student starter pack: Your own life is a disaster, but you’re worried about the world ending.

If ordinary people could feel it, what about doctoral students serving a sentence in grad school for some terrible ‘crime’ they’d committed in college?

They were still toiling away in their Research Labs today, crying their distinctive call of, “Fuck, fuck,” as they worked their brains to the breaking point.

Even among engineering PhDs, who had the best employment prospects in Korea, two or three out of every ten could not find a job.

An employment rate of seventy to eighty percent might sound high, but it absolutely was not when the average age for earning a doctorate was thirty-three. It meant that even after pouring their entire youth into it, two out of ten still could not find work.

Doctors were finishing their residencies and becoming specialists around then, while PhDs still could not get jobs.

Was that not why every young person wanted to go to medical school these days?

ApuApu: I got scolded by a mean professor today and I’m sooo sad... Pwease comfort me....

Eom Taeyun, an astrophysics doctoral candidate expected to graduate soon, dealt with those shitty feelings by dumping a single post into an online community.

It might have looked a little inappropriate, but he considered it healthier than smoking a cigarette like everyone else.

Anon: This asshole is doing that fucking persona again.

Anon: Your mom.

The responses came exactly as expected.

But after grinning for only a moment, Taeyun was hit by a wave of emptiness.

‘What the fuck am I doing...?’

Taeyun was in his fourth year of a doctoral program, with graduation right around the corner.

Passing his dissertation review in his fourth year rather than taking five or six was considered doing quite well in this field. In astrophysics especially, he could be called fairly outstanding.

But the future still looked bleak for him.

A few companies had reached out because he had worked hard enough in research, but the highest offer was an annual salary of $48,000. Naturally, that was before taxes.

It was not a low amount for a field that did not make money, but his friends who had stopped at a bachelor’s degree and joined major semiconductor companies were becoming managers and bragging about six-figure salaries on KakaoTalk. Compared to that, it was not particularly high either.

‘Am I really only worth $50,000?’

He had published first-author papers in three of astronomy’s top journals, and they were offering $48,000? Making a living really was hard.

Just as he thought, ‘Should I become a YouTuber or something...?’ he heard a man’s voice beside him.

“Mr. Eom Taeyun?”

Taeyun turned in surprise. He had not sensed anyone approaching.

The man walking toward him looked to be in his late thirties or early forties.

He wore a neatly tailored suit and polished shoes. Nothing about him looked excessively expensive, yet he had the refined air of someone who had worked at a major corporation for a long time.

A woman who looked like an assistant manager stood beside him, seemingly there to assist him.

“...Who are you?”

Taeyun immediately became wary. He had done nothing wrong, but the man’s outfit somehow made him feel as though he had.

“How do you know me? If you came to see Professor Kim...”

Perhaps noticing Taeyun’s unease, the middle-aged man immediately smiled warmly.

“We came to see you, Mr. Eom Taeyun, not Professor Kim Hakcheol. ‘Signal Detection and Background Noise Removal Methods for Low-Noise X-Ray Detectors for High-Energy Astrophysical Observation.’ You wrote that paper, correct?”

“I did, but...”

“I’m Lee Junsu, Deputy General Manager at Astrazen Technology.”

Taeyun accepted the business card without thinking, then looked back and forth between it and the man’s face.

“...What do you need from me?”

“To put it simply.”

Lee Junsu smiled.

“Our company would like to recruit you, Mr. Eom. Could we speak for a moment?”

* * *

As soon as Taeyun reached a well-situated café near the university, he headed straight to the restroom to look up Astrazen Technology.

He was not foolish enough to take the bait just because someone had shown up in a convincing suit.

Of course, plenty of PhDs got scammed. But that was not because they were innocent or stupid. It was because they were desperate.

After earning a doctorate and being thrown into society at thirty-three, it was not easy to keep a clear head when employment kept falling through for one or two years. Taeyun had seen plenty of similar cases.

Fortunately, Astrazen Technology did not seem to be a scam company, at least.

It was a German startup founded around four years ago.

AI had become advanced enough these days to make websites like this for scams as well, but this site did not appear to be one of them.

There was just something about AI-made websites. You could always tell. They felt tacky somehow.

‘Hmm.’

From what he could see, it seemed to be a company conducting various physics-related research, including astronomy, astrophysics, and nuclear physics.

It was not an extraordinary company, but it was not a bad one either.

No, considering how few domestic companies employed astrophysics majors, this was actually a pretty decent option.

‘Let’s at least hear their terms.’

If they offered more than $48,000, he would have to give it some serious thought.

The moment he sat down at the café, Deputy General Manager Lee slid a sheet of paper across the table.

“This is what we have in mind for now.”

At the top of the page was an annual salary of $70,000, followed by a long list of cutting-edge equipment that would drive any astrophysicist crazy.

“Y-You really have all of this?”

Taeyun’s eyes widened in shock. Society had worn him down, but he had once been a scientist who majored in astrophysics because he admired the universe.

Lee answered at that moment.

“Of course. Salary is important to researchers, but surely what equipment they will use and what projects they will be assigned are just as important, right? Ha ha.”

“...That’s true.”

“I double-majored in physics myself once, so I understand how scientists feel. That is why we offer capable people the best possible terms.”

He spoke with the voice of a fisherman dangling bait.

But the fish beneath the water could not hear that voice.

* * *

One fortunate thing about Shelter Builder being a game was that it did not reflect real-world price shifts like the surge in international oil prices.

This incident had caused oil prices to rise around thirty percent in a short period, directly affecting asphalt, ready-mix concrete, and naphtha, a petrochemical raw material. Not to mention other construction materials.

But the prices of items offered by Shelter Builder remained exactly as they had been on the first day.

I had been unable to sleep until dawn because I was beginning to feel that the apocalypse was drawing near. The fear of not knowing how the world would end also played a part.

But the biggest reason was my growing conviction that the people behind those terrorist attacks were other Shelter Builder users.

I did not know whether some outside force was controlling those users. But their methods were too similar for me not to notice.

Unlike ordinary experts, if you had used Shelter Builder even once, like me, you could infer the method behind the attacks without much difficulty.

With just a few clicks, I could buy explosives powerful enough to easily blow up the National Assembly building, then transport them anywhere I wanted without leaving a trace.

All I had to do was place the explosives in an empty restroom or storage room and ignite them.

To people who knew nothing, it probably looked as though explosives had teleported in and detonated.

In any case, this incident made me certain of two things.

First, we would no longer be able to purchase items after the demo period ended.

Seriously, if I could buy items and move them wherever I wanted, why would I need to purchase mortars or expensive shells? Buying a few grenades and “summoning” them wherever I wanted would be precision bombing.

Shelter Builder had likely allowed that function to guarantee the greatest possible convenience in shelter construction, not to let us easily overcome the coming apocalypses with cheap tricks.

So it would be blocked. One hundred percent.

And second.

There was a high chance that Shelter Builder purchasers fell outside the normal range in terms of ideology or character.

After all, ordinary people would not spend Christmas Eve, a time they should be enjoying with family or friends, taking a survey that might never end.

They had to be someone like me who had always imagined things like this, someone kind enough that they could not walk past a pitiful part-timer, or someone wandering around alone on Christmas Eve with no family or friends to meet.

No matter how I thought about it, I figured the last group was probably the largest.

The proof was the Telegram chat I had joined.

Because the chat owner, ProSurvivalist1500, occasionally opened secret invitation links in overseas online communities, the Telegram chat had grown to around forty members by now.

And the average disposition of the users active there was not very good.

King250: Ramen isn’t preserved food, but that doesn’t make it bad food. You can crush and eat it, so it saves water, it has a six-month shelf life, and it’s high in calories.

King250: Those of you who stockpiled less than six months of food should just quietly buy ramen. You know survival food is fucking expensive these days because the world is getting dangerous. They say six months, but if you store it well, it lasts over a year.

Anon: But would you guys really share food if refugees asked for some after a war breaks out?

Kimo777: Tell those motherless dirt-poor bastards to starve to death~

Cham170: So says Your Highness~

OongNyamNyam19: But seriously, is the world really ending? Is it really true that the demo version ending means the world ends???

Arrow300: For real lol. A meal for refugees is one more day I get to live.

They were self-centered, selfish, morally lax, isolationist bystanders.

OongNyamNyam19: Please answer me T_T Nobody told me anything T_T

‘Hmm.’

And honestly, I did not think I was all that different from them. If I did not have robots, if I did not have Anne or the Juggernaut, would I still have let other people into the shelter?

I did not know.

If my parents or my younger sibling were still alive, I thought I might have.

“Anyway, let’s get back to what we were doing.”

“Shouldn’t you get more sleep?”

“The caffeine pills woke me right up. Since I’m already awake, I want to finish all of this before I sleep.”

Maybe it was because we had spent nearly ten days together, but speaking to Anne had become fairly comfortable.

The facility I would build today was the residential district I had kept putting off.

Our shelter produced 5,820 meals per day through hydroponic facilities and 900 meals through cultured meat facilities.

That came to 6,720 meals in total.

The groundwater eight hundred meters below ground had an extremely low chance of being contaminated by outside radiation. Even if there was a problem, the water pipes had separate purification equipment capable of filtering radioactive materials.

Granite regions were prone to producing naturally occurring radioactive materials such as radon in the first place.

Therefore, provided that no internal terrorism, rebellion, or problem with the power generation facilities occurred, our shelter could produce food for 6,720 people under any circumstances.

The preserved food warehouse also held five to six years’ worth of preserved food based on the shelter’s maximum capacity, in case of emergencies. As for necessities like salt, sugar, and vitamins, we had enough stored to last a full century.

We had also secured sufficient drinking water by using the additional 25,000-cubic-meter drinking-water reservoir. As befitted a reservoir that had cost more than $1 billion to build, it was filling with water in real time even now.

If the reservoir was full and each person drank two liters a day, based on the shelter’s maximum capacity, it would last around five years.

Even if we became completely isolated from the outside, the shelter had been designed to hold out for at least five years.

The reason I was saying all this was that residential facilities ultimately had to be built according to food and water production.

What would be the point of building ten thousand homes when I could feed only 6,700 people? There was no need to match the numbers perfectly in case of emergencies, but there was also no need to build far too many.

“Hey, Anne. Tell me how much space would be appropriate for a family of three.”

I had briefly treated Anne like Siri or Bixby, but Anne answered as expressionlessly as usual.

“If we consider the minimum, around 9 pyeong, or 320 square feet, would be sufficient. However, if it is an independent residential unit for long-term habitation over several decades, 20 pyeong, or around 710 square feet, would be necessary. You should note that this would cost $8.25 million for each residential unit.”

These days, $8.2 million was enough to put most apartments with views of the Han River to shame. It was ridiculously expensive, but if I built facilities capable of housing 2,000 households, I could settle it all with $16.4 billion.

Lotte World Tower, the “Sauron Tower” of Seoul’s Jamsil neighborhood, had cost around $4 billion to build, so that was enough to construct four of them.

‘...That’s cheap?’

At this point, I could probably make the rooms bigger.

It was not because I cared about human rights.

If people were locked in cramped spaces for decades without knowing when they could see the outside again, there was no way it would not affect their mental health.

Of course, the only people I cared about right now were the researchers. But if the mental health of their families deteriorated, it would inevitably affect the researchers as well.

Then research efficiency would worsen, and that would affect my life too.

Ultimately, it was necessary for my own sake.

“Doesn’t NASA have some kind of standard for long-term habitation? Like how much living space people need?”

“There is the NASA-STD-3001 Space Flight Human-System Standard.”

The document Anne handed me clearly organized the necessary living-space requirements for confined environments and long-term space missions, taking into account factors such as crew size, mission duration, required activities, and privacy.

“NASA calculates the minimum habitable volume in an enclosed space at around 25 cubic meters per person. For a family of three, that would be 75 cubic meters.”

“How much is that in pyeong?”

“Assuming a ceiling height of 2.5 meters, it would be around 30 square meters, or 9 pyeong.”

“...So that was the minimum you mentioned earlier.”

Then I decided to go big and build them at 25 pyeong, around 890 square feet. That was roughly the average living space for a middle-class household in Korea.

That meant each residential unit would cost $10.33 million, and 2,000 households would cost $20.66 billion.

That would be spacious enough for families of four, so it could house around 8,000 people at minimum.

‘A satellite operated by the United States costs more than this?’

In any case, the people who entered the shelter would receive a home worth at least $10 million, so they would not dare complain even if they were controlled a little.

What would happen if they complained?

They would be sent to the detention cells I was about to build.

For the record, our shelter had no lawyers.

And it never would.

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