Chapter 185 - The Addict II

2

Dofarming.

A newly coined term that literally meant farming dopamine. Back when civilization was still intact, it mostly described the behavior of internet specters who roamed around looking for sensational videos, news, and the like.

But even after the world ended, history marched forward.

In this age of apocalypse, we had finally succeeded in making “dofarming” a reality—not as a mere metaphor, but in the truest sense of the word.

“I-I'm happy...!”

Sim Aryeon trembled.

“Wh-what is this? This happiness? All I did was cook some rice and eat it. All I did was eat a l-lump of carbohydrates! Happiness! Overwhelming happiness is washing over me! Guild Leader! What on earth...?”

“It's Dopamine, a new variety of rice that will provide the Korean Peninsula's staple food from now on.”

“It's s-so delicious! I could stuff my face with nothing but white rice three meals a day and scream with happiness! I've been missing out on life all this time... D-do ordinary people feel this happy...? Have they been living every day listening to this d-dreamlike melody, without the tiniest trace of depression?”

“No. I doubt ordinary people were quite that happy with their lives either...”

Who could ever have predicted it?

The fourth industrial revolution, following the first, second, and third, turned out to be neither an AI revolution nor a robotics revolution, but an “agricultural revolution.”

Now every patch of arable land on the Korean Peninsula produced Dopamine.

It looked exactly like rice, so a foreign visitor might well have gotten their dates mixed up and thought, “Huh? Is this Joseon, not modern Korea?”

“It fills your stomach, and happiness comes along for free... Th-this is insane. This crop is insane, Guild Leader...”

Did Dopamine deplete the soil's fertility, then? Not that either.

In fact, it used far less of the soil's nutrients than growing actual rice. Spread fertilizer and keep diligently transplanting the seedlings, and Dopamine literally replicated itself.

Naturally, the atmosphere on SG Net changed dramatically too.

-Anonymous: Confession) I used to post anonymously all the time and leave nasty comments.

-Anonymous: But after about a month of eating Dopamine, I started wondering why I'd lived that way. Gripping my teeth and hunting for other people's flaws wasn't going to make my own life any better...

-Anonymous: In particular, I want to apologize to WitchTrialJudge, a regular on this board. I was the one who kept calling you a middle-aged train otaku in the comments on your posts.

-Anonymous: I smugly insulted you, saying an awakened who represents the Korean Peninsula should show a little more dignity, that it was your responsibility as a public figure. But really, I just wanted to make you unhappy to pay for my own unhappiness.

-Anonymous: I regret my past. Will you forgive someone like me, WitchTrialJudge?

└[Three Thousand]WitchTrialJudge: Of course I forgive you^^ But which city do you live in, my friend?

Even changes like these were relatively minor.

On top of them came an upheaval that truly shook heaven and earth.

-Goryeojang: I'm retiring from SG Net.

Sim Aryeon announced she was quitting SG Net!

-Goryeojang: I'm busy with my real life.

Sim Aryeon used the words “real life”!

-Goryeojang: If I've hurt anyone during my time here, I'd like to take this opportunity to apologize. I'm sorry.

Sim Aryeon apologized!

I was so utterly shocked that my jaw fell out of its socket.

Across all the time spanning 671 runs, whenever SG Net had been invented and Sim Aryeon had survived, she had never once abandoned her identity as the Goryeojang Villain.

And now she had turned her back on the online world? She was devoting herself solely to living as the Saintess of the North in Pyongyang? Could such a thing actually happen?

“Aryeon. You... Are you serious about this?”

“Huh? Y-yes. These days, eating Dopamine and going about my daily life just makes me happier than crapping out pointless posts on SG Net...?”

Of course, despite saying that, the Goryeojang Villain secretly returned to SG Net a week later.

Leaving me with the immortal line, [“Guild Leader, it turns out you can't live on happiness alone (smile).”]

But looked at the other way around, that meant the Goryeojang Villain had voluntarily stayed off SG Net for an entire week.

My dislocated jaw showed no sign of returning to its rightful place.

“Is that really such an astonishing event...?”

“Try living as long as I have, Commander Noh Doha. I've seen the sun rise in the west plenty of times, but I've never seen Aryeon do that.”

“More impressed by a single internet troll than the movement of celestial bodies. What a worthwhile life you've led as a regressor...”

“By the way, Commander, aren't you eating any? Dopamine, I mean.”

“No.”

Noh Doha replied as though the question was a nuisance. She shuffled through her paperwork, sipping the coffee I'd made her with a singular lack of enjoyment.

“It may have passed fifty years' worth of side-effect testing, but why would I consume such a suspicious plant from the void? I have no intention of taking a job as a human test subject...”

“But it's practically a drug with zero side effects. It makes you incredibly happy. You should have statistics right there showing that life satisfaction is far higher now than it was when civilization was intact.”

“Oh. Happiness. What a sweet sound...”

Noh Doha sneered.

“I've lived without that crap, and I'll keep living without it. Well, I am grateful that Dopamine has caused crime and public complaints to plummet and labor productivity to soar, drastically reducing my workload as Commander...”

“Hmm.”

“And Undertaker. Do you think I don't know your sordid little motives? You just want to sneak a look at me grinning like an idiot in a haze of happiness, don't you...?”

“You've misunderstood.”

How did she know? Had Noh Doha acquired Mind Reading too? She really was uncannily sharp.

“Oh, right. The Magical Girl Council has requested that we share some Dopamine seeds. In exchange, they're offering us more farmland to use in Kyushu...”

“Is there anything to think about? Share them. We should share good things with one another in difficult times.”

“Heh.”

Noh Doha's eye curved behind her monocle.

“You're not deliberately expanding the scale of testing to make sure this miracle crop really has no side effects? Undertaker. Haven't you been abstaining from Dopamine entirely, just like me...?”

I remained silent in the face of that suspicion.

Because it was about half true.

Ultimately, all human civilization amounted to nothing more than a struggle to achieve a single word: happiness.

The minimum condition for happiness, and its average standard, was “avoiding unhappiness.” In short, not having one's rights violated.

As a society's membership grew to a hundred, a thousand, and tens of millions, the happiness it pursued converged ever closer to that average.

That was why the laws of any society that had grown beyond a certain size always focused on the minimum condition for happiness: preventing the violation of rights.

Individuals had no choice but to find the rest of their happiness for themselves, and “society's happiness” and “individual happiness” were separated in principle.

To achieve both kinds of happiness simultaneously, bridging a gulf as vast as the tens or hundreds of millions of people involved.

Wasn't that the ultimate goal of humanity and civilization?

'Dopamine might become the tool that lets human civilization reach its pinnacle.'

It might sound ridiculous, but I seriously considered the possibility.

After all, life was painful for countless people.

What if we could give them a crop loaded with effects that increased alertness, relieved fatigue, boosted productivity, and reduced hunger, yet had a completely empty list of side effects?

Perhaps life could finally become not suffering, but a lucky little blessing.

As a regressor who had lived for far more than several thousand years, I couldn't help worrying about the world that would come after all the anomalies had been defeated.

'If Dopamine truly has no side effects, the Sword Marquis will be humanity's eternal savior.'

And if you've listened to my story this far, I'm sure you can easily imagine what came next.

Unfortunately, the miracle crop that brought everyone “happiness” failed to deliver a “happy ending.”

“Undertaker.”

One year later, Dang Seorin came to see me and spoke.

“Not a single child has been born in Busan this year.”

3

By now, news that Korea's birth rate was setting new world records by the day was hardly anything new.

But it had never actually reached 0%. Not even in an apocalypse where anomalies had taken over the world.

Dang Seorin was telling me that this extraordinary record had been set in none other than Busan.

“... Not even one?”

“Right. None.”

At first hearing, her tone sounded detached.

It was a kind of defense mechanism. The more serious the situation, the colder Dang Seorin's voice became.

A characteristic of someone whose entire organization would crumble if she faltered.

“I couldn't believe it either, so I cross-checked several times. With so many people living in Busan, how could there possibly be no newborns at all? Maybe they simply hadn't given birth at a hospital or a clinic.”

“...”

“But it's certain. This year, not a single new human being has been born.”

Yet to Dang Seorin, I was also the one confidant with whom she could briefly let that coldness fall away.

After a moment of silence, she parted her lips, laying a layer of personal truth over the objective facts.

“All the babies were stillborn.”

According to Dang Seorin's investigation, it reportedly happened in every case around the eighth week after conception.

The child nestled in the womb would “stop” growing.

Its body would even curl up and shrink further and further.

As though it did not want to leave even a trace in this world.

As though every pregnancy had been nothing more than “imaginary.”

“...”

“...”

As those spoken reports and written records were conveyed to me, I could only remain silent.

Dang Seorin and I already had our suspicions about what lay behind this bizarre phenomenon. What had caused it.

And so, without a word, we also shared the premonition that this would not be a story confined to some city clinging to the southern edge of the peninsula.

“Of course, this strange phenomenon might only be happening in Busan.”

It wasn't.

A week later, Cheon Yohwa came to Busan and said:

“Teacher. The babies are dying.”

“...”

“No, maybe I should say they're disappearing rather than dying. Anyway, they're vanishing. Constantly.”

From Busan, Sejong, Pyongyang, Daejeon, southern Seoul, and even the Japanese archipelago—from every city and remote village where humans scraped out a living in this harsh world—the same news arrived.

Children were not being born.

No human being was visiting this earth. Not anymore.

“...”

“...”

The Regression Alliance's meeting room sank into a bleak silence.

Lee Hayul, the one among us who had knocked on the world's door most recently, murmured quietly.

“... Maybe it's just this year?”

It wasn't.

A year later, the same reports came in.

“Busan. The birth rate is zero.”

“Ugh. Not a single child has been born in Sejong either.”

“N-none in Pyongyang either...”

It was strange.

There were no unhappy humans anymore. Apart from an exceedingly small minority—truly minuscule—who deliberately abstained from Dopamine, like Noh Doha, everyone had become happy.

Human civilization had finally reached its pinnacle.

And at the moment it reached that highest point, for some reason, humanity suddenly exercised its veto over the repetition of life.

Why?

Everyone had witnessed the phenomenon of people “not having children because life was unhappy.”

But its exact opposite, the strange phenomenon of “children not being born even though life was happier than ever”?

There was no precedent.

The cause, however, was clear.

“There's one thing we can try.”

The people gathered in the meeting room turned toward me.

“This is undoubtedly the work of an anomaly. Something sinister related to Dopamine is happening to the fetuses.”

Cheon Yohwa tilted her head.

“But Teacher. We've observed the fetuses in all sorts of ways, and they really do suddenly start shrinking from the eighth week, even though nothing has happened.”

“Yes. That's how it looked when observed from the outside. Put another way, it means the anomalous phenomenon is occurring not on the fetus's exterior, but on the ‘inside.’”

“Inside the fetus...? What do you mean?”

“Dreams.”

I smoothly shifted my gaze to one side of the meeting room. Fairy No. 264 was playing there, stacking Lego bricks.

Looking at the anomaly whose name was written “fairy” but read “dream demon,” I said:

“I'll enter the babies' dreams myself and find out what anomaly is kidnapping our futures.”