Maybe because he’d studied a little at home and practiced beforehand, the drone training wasn’t as hard as he’d expected.
The written exam especially sounded manageable. It used a question-bank format, and the pass rate was around sixty percent, so they said he could get through it with just a bit of studying.
It would probably be about as easy as the written driver’s license test.
“Come back at the same time tomorrow and finish the rest of your flight hours. Your written exam is next Wednesday.”
“Got it.”
At the instructor’s words, Junho nodded.
He’d thought he’d be nervous since it was his first time, but once he got there, the atmosphere was relaxed and the curriculum was straightforward enough.
As long as you passed the written test, the Class 3 drone license could be obtained just by completing six hours of flight training at a place like this.
At first, he’d planned to get Class 2.
But Class 2 required more flight time, and the practical exam was trickier.
Taking cost, time, and difficulty into account, he’d changed course and gone with Class 3.
'Honestly, it wouldn’t matter even if I didn’t get it...'
Still, once the shelter was complete, he’d be flying drones there regularly, and it seemed safer to have at least a Class 3 license in case he flew outside a permitted zone or something went wrong.
The best option was to eliminate anything that might become an unnecessary problem.
After spending the day at the drone training center, the brothers finished up their schedule and returned home.
***
After an early dinner, Junhyeok said he was heading to his MMA gym, and Junho, out of habit, went down to the basement.
There was still a mountain of things he needed to learn, and even more information he needed to know in advance.
There was a huge difference between something he’d only planned out in his head and actually building it for real.
But still—
“...I never would’ve guessed I’d end up researching septic systems of all things.”
Junho knew perfectly well how important wastewater and sewage treatment was in the apocalypse.
At first, he’d simply planned to install a massive septic tank, one big enough to keep working even if sludge built up for years.
But he’d quickly realized something.
That wouldn’t be nearly enough.
No—in South Korea, if your wastewater treatment facilities didn’t meet the standards, you didn’t even get the building permit in the first place.
And on top of that, the shelter Junho was planning assumed a complete collapse of social infrastructure.
That meant the shelter needed to purify its own wastewater internally, treat it cleanly enough to meet environmental discharge standards, ✪ Nоvеlіgһt ✪ (Official version) and release it safely.
On top of that, it needed a fully self-sufficient system that could even handle the sludge on its own.
“Hmm. In the end, do I have to build an artificial wetland for final discharge?”
Practically speaking, that seemed like the only option.
The site Junho had already chosen for the shelter was in a remote area with no connection to the public sewer system.
So from the beginning, he would have to build an independent wastewater treatment system that met environmental standards.
“For small-scale systems with less than twenty cubic meters of daily wastewater output, an individual wastewater treatment facility must be installed... and in that case, the discharge-water quality standards under the Water Environment Conservation Act require BOD of twenty milligrams per liter or less...”
After reading through the relevant laws for a few more minutes, Junho said,
“Fuck this.”
Why?
“Because money solves everything.”
Sewage sludge, artificial wetlands, all that crap—he could just throw in a high-end system that handled everything automatically.
Who the hell drops hundreds of millions of won on nothing but septic and wastewater treatment for a single building out in the sticks?
Yeah. Me.
Once he thought about it that way, the other issues became a lot easier to deal with too.
And the most important one of all was the shelter site itself.
“Haneul Forest Campground.”
That place in Namyangju was where Junho had stayed the longest when he was traveling alone.
It was remote, and only one road connected to it, so accessibility was terrible. But that was exactly what made it an advantage.
The only reason Junho had gone there in the first place was pure chance.
If food hadn’t become a problem, he probably would’ve stayed there the whole time.
The buildings were sturdy, and mountains surrounded the place on all sides.
On top of that, it was one of the rare places where the drinking-water problem—which mattered as much as food in the apocalypse—had been completely solved.
But most importantly—
“Even before the apocalypse hit... nobody had been there for years.”
It wasn’t just the campground. The entire surrounding area had been empty.
After searching the area thoroughly for several days, he hadn’t found any signs of people having lived nearby—not to mention zombies or corpses.
In other words, the campground and the roughly one-kilometer radius around it had already been an isolated safe zone before the apocalypse ever began.
Junho searched for it on a portal site.
“Haneul Forest Campground. Namyangju... here it is.”
There were plenty of campgrounds with that name across the country, but only one in Namyangju.
It didn’t show up in the map app, though. That meant it had already gone out of business.
Junho entered the lot number and searched the auction listings.
After a few clicks, a familiar map screen came up.
Just as he’d expected.
It looked like the tenant had been running the campground business, then got hit head-on by COVID and went under. After shutting it down and leaving, the property had gone to auction.
The buildings and land belonged to the local government, but the private operator who held the usage rights hadn’t been able to pay off the debts, so the whole thing had gotten tangled up in lawsuits.
In the end, the local government had terminated the lease, and then the creditors had filed claims for the return of the lease deposit, and so on and so forth...
“Luckily, the land itself belongs to the local government... so once the lawsuit’s over, it should be clean.”
Junho read the auction property report carefully.
“No occupant. Vacant possession possible.”
As expected, nobody had been living on the campground site for a long time.
The auction had already failed several times, so the minimum bid had dropped, and there were about three weeks left until the next bidding date.
But Junho already knew it wouldn’t sell.
“If I end up winning the bid in April at the earliest, or June at the latest...”
Since it was government property, the procedures would be complicated, so it would probably take several more months before it truly became his land.
The kind of situation that should’ve been a headache.
But Junho wasn’t worried at all.
“This too can be solved with money.”
He knew a lawyer who’d be good at this sort of thing.
Naturally, it was someone he’d met in the apocalypse before his regression.
“Lee Dongcheol. By now he’s probably opened his practice in Busan and is out there with his eyes peeled for anything that’ll make money.”
He hadn’t exactly liked the guy, but money was going to turn into worthless paper once the world ended anyway, so he might as well let him make some before then.
***
“Namyangju? Why Namyangju of all places? Isn’t that too far? No, wait. If we’re only talking about safety, wouldn’t it be better to go way out into the mountains in Gangwon or Gyeongsang or somewhere?”
Back from his workout, Junhyeok tilted his head at his brother, who was tearing into chicken drumsticks like it hadn’t already been hours since dinner.
“Most people would think that. But total countryside won’t work. If I want to build something on the scale I’m thinking of, even getting permits will be a pain in the ass. Gangwon especially would probably be loaded with regulations.”
“Really? But didn’t you say you were going to buy a closed school at auction? Wouldn’t there be way more of those out in the provinces?”
“There are. But here’s the thing.”
This time Junho picked up a piece of spicy soy-sauce chicken and went on.
“First off, it’s rare to find a closed school with a location as perfect as the one I picked. And think about it. In some tiny rural area with barely any people, say somebody starts pouring tens of billions—hell, more than a hundred billion won—into some big project. It’s guaranteed to draw attention. The whole area’s gonna get curious about what we’re doing.”
“Really?”
Junhyeok, still a twenty-two-year-old who didn’t fully understand how the world worked yet, looked unconvinced.
Junho nodded and kept explaining.
“Yeah. The local big shots, politicians, government officials, even the townspeople. Every last one of them would start poking around every day, wondering what some outsiders were up to. And it wouldn’t just be curiosity. They’d be a massive pain in the ass, trying to see what they could squeeze out of us.”
“Oh...”
“And if the outsiders throwing money around are a couple of clueless guys in their twenties? The people in that town would all collude and try to steam us alive.”
“Yeah, I can see that.”
Thinking of all the stories he’d seen online about rural gatekeeping, Junhyeok nodded.
“So Namyangju’s better? I’ve never even been there.”
“Way better. For starters, it’s still part of the greater Seoul area, and the population’s over seven hundred thousand. And it’s huge.”
“Really?”
Watching how happily his brother was eating the chicken, Junhyeok started craving some himself. He picked up a piece and searched Namyangju on his phone.
“Whoa...”
Even at a glance, it looked seven or eight times larger than Bucheon.
“If it’s a place the size of Namyangju, whatever we do won’t stand out that much. And I told you already. That campground and the area around it had been uninhabited since before the apocalypse even started.”
“And from what we saw today, it’s already gone to auction?”
“Yeah. It’s perfect for a shelter site.”
“Yeah. I just thought... maybe farther south would be better. You know how in movies and webtoons, whenever something huge happens in Korea, everybody evacuates south?”
“That’s exactly why the shelter has to be at Haneul Forest Campground.”
“Huh...?”
At that abrupt turn, Junhyeok tilted his head.
After polishing off an entire chicken by himself in barely ten minutes, Junho filled a cup with zero-calorie cola and said,
“Like you said, when the apocalypse hit, everybody headed south at first. Especially people from Seoul and the greater metro area—they all got funneled into places like Suwon, Yongin, and Osan. So what do you think happened?”
“...Oh!”
“Yeah. Hell. Not thousands. Not tens of thousands. Hundreds of thousands. Or was it in the millions? Either way, that many people flooded in—how the hell was anyone supposed to handle that? New infections kept breaking out, supplies ran short... eventually people ended up pushing all the way down toward Sejong and Daejeon.”
“A-and after that?”
“Later on, I heard stories from survivors who came up from down there. Apparently the government gave up. Even the military made South Gyeongsang and South Jeolla—the areas with shipyards, steel mills, and nuclear plants—their top priority, so the inland central region was practically abandoned.”
“Jesus...”
“So the evacuees split off into dozens of separate groups, and then it was chaos. They fought each other, everything went to shit. They blamed the government and the military... and eventually started treating them like mortal enemies.”
“That’s insane.”
“Yeah, it was. Which is why we absolutely cannot go south. It has to be the metro area—but not somewhere glued right to Seoul. Somewhere a little farther out is best. If you’re too close to Seoul, there’ll be zombies and looters everywhere.”
“Somewhere a little farther out...”
“Yeah. That’s why places like Namyangju or Gwangju in Gyeonggi are the best. But Gwangju’s south of the Han River, so that’s out for now. Namyangju touches Seoul a little too, but it’s north of the Han and so wide that it’s fine. It’s almost the size of Seoul, but the population isn’t even a tenth of it. And it’s surrounded by mountains, so movement in and out is hard.”
“I see. Namyangju, huh...”
Finally convinced, Junhyeok switched between aerial view and street view for the place Junho had chosen as the shelter site.
“But man, this closed school? Campground? It’s pretty big.”
“Right? Even when I stayed there for a while, I thought it felt big. But when I checked the distances in aerial view, even though it’s just a branch school, the school building alone is almost fifty meters long. There’s also a separate storage building and staff housing, and since they added a restaurant building while running the campground, it’s got a ton of potential uses too.”
During the time he’d stayed there before his regression, Junho had gradually started turning his vague shelter concept into something more concrete.
Where and how many solar panels to install. How many rooms to build, and where. How to use the auxiliary buildings like the storage space and restaurant.
And now, as he checked the exact size of Haneul Forest Campground and the remaining facilities on the map site in actual numbers, his plans were being refined into something even more realistic.
'I need to do as much testing and practice as possible at this house. That way I can reduce mistakes when I get to the shelter.'
“But what’s this about going to Busan?”
Junhyeok’s question pulled Junho out of his thoughts.
“There’s someone I need to meet. Anyway... I’ll tell you later. It’s not right away. I won’t be going for a few months, so you don’t need to worry about it.”
“Uh... okay.”
At the sudden heaviness in Junho’s face, Junhyeok didn’t ask anything else.
The truth was, he was curious.
What exactly had happened in that prophetic dream of his brother’s? Who was this person he had to go all the way to Busan to meet?
He wanted badly to know what had happened in detail.
Especially—
'He’s never said a single thing about what happened to me.'
That was true. Whenever his brother talked about the prophetic dream, he never once said what had happened to Junhyeok himself.
But Junhyeok could guess.
'That night, when he got up to drink water and looked at me...'
That look in his brother’s eyes back then.
At the time, he hadn’t understood it at all. He’d just thought, What the hell is wrong with this guy?
But after thinking it over—
'It was too tender. Like he was looking at someone who’d come back from the dead.'
The moment Junhyeok realized that a few days ago, a chill had gone down his spine.
In his brother’s dream, he had probably died.
Or turned into a zombie.
'Ah, whatever. That’s not happening now, right? I’m going to the shelter with him.'
Forcing away the ugly thought, Junhyeok steadied himself.
If he stayed with his brother—the one who had already lived through the future in his dreams—then whatever happened, they’d endure it and figure it out.
“What the hell, man! That’s just wrong. Eating all the drumsticks is not something society can allow. Are your morals seriously that bad?”
“What? You little punk, you said you weren’t gonna eat them.”
“I was gonna have them tomorrow morning. You seriously don’t know cold fried chicken slaps?”
“I don’t, punk. Just order another one.”
Junho sheepishly tapping at his phone, and Junhyeok mock-scolding him for it—
No matter how much the future changed, some things about the two brothers never would.
