“Damn it.”
As if something were choking him,
the man kept his head lowered, fists clenched, cursing.
‘...?’
I wasn’t sure,
but whatever he’d just tried clearly hadn’t gone well.
‘Did the skill fail to trigger properly?’
While I watched, curious about the reason,
something caught my eye.
‘That orchard... I’d only thought it looked beautiful.’
Unlike the outside, ruled by a brutal winter,
the orchard looked like it was in peak harvest.
I’d thought it was simply beautiful—
but it wasn’t.
‘That ground...’
Ill-matched with those plentiful trees,
the soil beneath the orchard—
was
‘as if a drought had hit,’
cracked like a desert,
so lifeless I could hardly feel any vitality.
[Skill — Growth Acceleration]
Only then
did I recall the description of his skill I’d seen.
[Pulls up the earth’s vitality to rapidly accelerate a plant’s growth.]
[Vitality consumption becomes extreme, but plants can grow in any environment.]
“...Hmm.”
Consumption of vitality.
After confirming that phrasing,
I moved far away from the orchard,
to the inside of the Wall,
and looked down at the ground.
Unlike over by the orchard, there was still quite a lot of snow piled up,
melting into water, then freezing again, glazing the ground with ice.
I cleared the snow nearby,
PAK!
stamped my foot to break the ice crusting the ground,
and exposed the soil beneath.
Then,
looking closely at the soil—
[Ingredient Identification (Enhanced)]
[Soil]
—I confirmed one thing.
“...So that’s what it is.”
I remembered what I’d thought first upon coming to Gyeonggi Province.
‘This looks favorable for vampires to move around...’
The weather was what it was,
and the sky was wrapped in unknown gray cloud, not a shred ~Nоvеl𝕚ght~ of proper sunlight.
In the cold of winter,
most monsters had gone out to [Monsterland] at the outskirts, so there wouldn’t be many corpses returning to the earth.
So,
it was only natural.
[Freshness : Lowest]
The land in this whole area—
its vitality...
had decayed to the limit.
Seeing that phrasing, I thought:
“To earn trust, I have to show them something worthy of trust—wasn’t that it?”
That “something,”
by the look of it,
“...seems like something I can show them pretty easily.”
****
The northeastern corner of Gapyeong County.
There stood the Northern base of the Association.
“So what’s that guy been doing?”
A suspicious man had joined them—
and a few days had passed.
“Nothing special, I hear. Sometimes looks around inside to see what’s there, comes out to eat at mealtime...”
“Haah. Feeding a suspicious bastard like that, seriously.”
“Well... food’s always precious, sure. Still, he doesn’t seem like a bad man.”
Two men were gathered.
“If it were up to me, I’d have a bout with him, but there hasn’t been a good pretext. Shame.”
“Ha-ha... You really do think about testing fists first whenever you meet someone new.”
“I can’t help it. I need to know—whether he’s stronger than me, or I’m stronger than him.”
This was the power gathered by Gyeonggi Province’s Awakeners—
the Association’s Northern base.
Of course, that didn’t mean every survivor in the east of Gyeonggi lived here.
There were plenty living in other bases too.
This base was, so to speak, a kind of capital.
It influenced the survivors spread across northern Gyeonggi,
serving as the center of their exchange.
And because it held such an important position,
there was plenty of work to do.
The three executives each worked in their own domain, advising one another as they handled matters.
“So, are you going to keep your distance from Iseo?”
“Yeah. You may think differently, but... I think that’s the right call.”
“Hmm... If that’s your judgment, I’ve no authority to say otherwise.”
Lately,
Gang Jaeho had been distancing himself from their shaman.
‘Right now, I find it hard to trust Iseo.’
That was the conclusion he’d reached.
Han Iseo was also someone who had built her position here through continued activity.
He couldn’t kick her out just because he doubted her.
‘At the very least, I have to make sure she doesn’t encroach on the area I manage.’
So—
he discussed group affairs only with the one person he still thought he could trust:
Park Junggu.
“Anyway, why did you call me?”
“What do you mean why? Do I need a reason to call you?”
“That’s not it. I’m saying it feels like you had a reason this time.”
Junggu narrowed his eyes, crossing his arms.
“If this is about excluding Iseo again like last time, say so now. I’m against it.”
“Junggu...”
“You’re free to doubt Iseo, but I don’t see her as someone who’d be so easily dominated by another’s power. More importantly—”
It wasn’t mere affection for people that made Junggu trust Han Iseo.
What he trusted was
Han Iseo’s ability, proven through her work as their shaman—
‘the genuine power to communicate with spirits.’
When he’d first learned spirits existed, that power had been deeply unsettling.
When he realized
most of the spirits she communed with weren’t from this Earth—
it was even more unsettling.
However—
“When it comes to mental abilities, she’s stronger than anyone here.”
With help from those spirits,
she possessed the most powerful mind-related abilities of anyone here.
“I know you’re the suspicious type. I don’t know what made you that way... but I let it slide because I figured that’s not bad for the group’s safety.”
If anyone in the group were to be controlled by an outsider,
it would be himself—or the Druid in front of him.
Not Han Iseo. That was Junggu’s view.
That was why he trusted her words.
“But don’t try to force that view on me.”
“...I’m not here to harp on that again. That’s not why I called you.”
“Hm? Then why?”
“You know.”
In this group—
and in charge of logistics for survivors throughout northern Gyeonggi—
Gang Jaeho.
And
the most important task he oversaw was, of course, this:
“Food.”
“Yes.”
Winter had come far too fast—and far too severe.
An environment where even weeds you could forage no longer grew.
Out on the streets, it was monsters or zombies roaming.
Survivors had to secure food by special means.
One of those was the Druid’s [Growth Acceleration].
“As I said before: the vitality of the earth around here has all decayed.”
“...Haah.”
A problem had begun
in triggering that skill.
“Is there nothing you can do?”
“I’ve drawn out all the vitality from this area. There’s no way here.”
To begin with,
his job was Druid.
He might be in charge of logistics now,
but that job wasn’t a production class.
On the contrary, it was clearly a combat class specialized for the front line.
“Even making trees grow became usable as if it were a production job due to circumstances. Originally, it’s a combat skill.”
In truth,
this problem stemmed largely from the difference in job archetypes.
Otherwise,
a production skill wouldn’t have a clause about decaying vitality.
‘It was a combat skill—making trees grow in any environment to pin down the enemy’s feet.’
For now, because of the cold, they’d built walls and settled.
But before that, they’d been fighting monsters daily.
Each time, this skill had saved Jaeho’s life.
Back then,
the clause about decaying vitality wasn’t a major downside.
Used strictly as a combat skill, it was no problem at all.
Whether the vitality decayed or not—
unless you were a production class constantly producing food in one place,
you had no reason to care about decaying vitality.
“Now that we’re trying to use it as a production skill, the downside’s showing itself.”
And in fact,
this wasn’t the first time the downside appeared.
“Among the survivor bases around here that are decent...”
“You know already. I’ve been to every base at least in the north.”
He had already moved among several bases, using each land’s vitality
to produce food.
He wasn’t originally active in the north, either.
From down south to up here in the north,
he produced food by exploiting the land’s vitality as much as possible, and the last place he reached was this northern area.
“This area had the most monsters, so the bodies from monsters killing each other helped the vitality of the earth—that’s why it lasted longer.”
The food thus produced had become the Association’s staple.
In return, they received useful goods or different kinds of food from other Association branches in other regions.
“Right... then we’ll have to find another base. We should find one, but—”
“Yes, the problem is—”
Junggu sighed.
“There’s nowhere to go.”
Ordinarily, it wouldn’t be a problem to this extent.
No matter how much vitality he consumed,
it wasn’t enough to drain all the vitality in Gyeonggi soil.
In fact,
if you went just a bit away from this base, you’d find land with intact vitality.
Even so, the reason they sighed was—
“You know. In this environment, developing a new base isn’t easy.”
“Right.”
It was an environment where even moving was hard thanks to the brutal cold.
The Wall blocked the blizzards enough for activity inside—
but outside, only combat classes capable of withstanding serious cold could move around.
If those combat classes mobilized, stabilizing a specific area was possible.
The problem was turning it into a base.
The enormous walls erected at each Gyeonggi survivor base—
they blocked some of the cold and offered safety from external threats.
‘One of the few safe zones for humanity in this world.’
There was an Awakener with the job [Architect], now active in the west.
These walls had been built when he traveled all over Gyeonggi with the Chair—
for survivor groups who promised to cooperate with the Association.
But
most of those walls had been built long ago,
and it had been quite a while since a new base was established.
‘This cold.’
It would be nice to raise new walls—
but that takes time.
It used to be relatively doable...
“Building new walls while defending against monster attacks in this cold? From what I see, impossible.”
As the cold worsened,
even the Awakener out west found it hard to build walls.
As a result, most survivors now clustered in existing bases.
Since there were so few survivors left,
perhaps it was fortunate there was enough space even with the few bases.
“We still have to do it, Junggu.”
“Hoo.”
“There are very few Awakeners who can produce food, even counting me. If I’m taken out, it’ll be a big problem.”
“Yeah, it would. There’s a limit to filling bellies with points.”
Junggu could only keep sighing.
‘The Chair and the elites are gone, and now I can’t even trust Iseo.’
He oversaw the group’s combat classes.
They often went outside to look for usable food and items.
They also frequently hunted monsters to level up and secure local safety.
“In this environment, that kind of grand project is impossible.”
Because of that,
he couldn’t nod comfortably.
In the end,
the meeting between the two executives ended with no progress.
“Hoo...”
Finishing the talk, Jaeho stepped outside.
As he sighed, his breath showed white.
“Damn this...!”
Staring at the steam of his own breath,
Jaeho burst out in anger.
If only it were a matter of fighting and winning against monsters—
that might have been better than now.
But after this cold swept in,
they had to fight the environment.
Against this inexplicable extreme climate,
all he could do...
“Damn this environment...!”
was simply
look up at the sky and spit curses.
