Another day was over.
Under the office fluorescent lights, I stared at the monitor until my eyes stung, then looked at the clock.
Before I knew it, it was 10 p.m.
If I wanted to get to work tomorrow morning, I had to hurry home.
I dragged myself into the elevator and looked in the mirror.
“Is this even a human face?”
Some zombie bastard was glaring back at me.
Sometimes.
No, every day, I wondered if living like this was really right.
Korean society was now hardening into a place where class mobility was almost impossible.
Prices were soaring by the day, currency was melting away under inflation, and asset values kept rising, so I had no idea when I’d ever save up enough money to succeed.
Having failed the birth gacha and grown up in an orphanage, could I really climb the social ladder?
My team leader always said,
“If you want to survive in this field, you have to work twice as hard as everyone else.”
In short, it was bullshit.
I felt like my body was being ground down every day. If I lost my health, wasn’t that the end?
I wished I had an opportunity too.
A society where, even if you started from the bottom, there was room to improve.
Wouldn’t I have lived a much better life than this if I’d been born into the baby boomer generation instead?
Well, thinking about that was nothing but pointless.
A bottom-rung life like this inevitably ends up searching for vicarious satisfaction.
For me, that was Primitive Age Online.
By the time I got home it was midnight, so even dreaming of playing games on weekdays was out of the question.
My gaming time was always crammed entirely into the weekend.
Primitive Age Online was a game where you became the chieftain of a tribe in the hunting age, developed your tribe, and expanded your territory through hunting and conquest.
In reality, I was a slave to a black company, but inside the game, I could do anything I wanted.
I could establish a kingdom, unite multiple kingdoms, and aim for world conquest.
The fact that I could keep developing and create a future completely different from the present was also a major advantage.
My only pleasure was boiling a pack of ramen on the weekend, sitting down at my computer, and managing the daily lives of my tribespeople.
One day, a strange email arrived in my inbox.
The sender was Primitive Soft.
[You are invited to the open beta for Primitive Age Online 2.]
At first, I thought it was spam.
These days, you could click the wrong link in a spam email, get your computer infected with a virus, and have your bank accounts completely drained, so I agonized over it.
Then I looked at the bottom of the email.
[To “BlackCompanySlave.”]
Do game company servers get hacked these days too?
No.
I also wondered whether a hacker would really go through all the trouble of breaking into a game company’s server just to loot some individual’s computer.
I was seriously conflicted, but the main reason I clicked the email was that even if a hacker installed a virus on my computer and tore it apart, there’d be nothing to find except the one terabyte of videos saved on Jikbakguri.
When I clicked the link, the game launched automatically without any particular installation process.
“Holy shit... Is this even possible? A web game?”
A familiar UI appeared on the screen, but the graphics had become far more elaborate.
It was hard to believe.
They say technological advancement has reached a point where ordinary people can’t keep up, and it seemed that was true.
As an old hand at Primitive Age Online, I knew that the game’s difficulty could vary depending on customization.
People usually thought it was best for a tribal chief or ruler to dump everything into intelligence, but you had to take into account that the game’s starting point was the primitive age.
A huge body reaching 190 centimeters and densely compressed practical muscle.
Add geometric tattoos to the face capable of intimidating opponents, put an axe in his hand, and the alpha-male barbarian was complete.
I dumped my stats into strength and stamina.
If you were a chieftain in the primitive age, leading your tribe members into war in a big rush was basically part of daily life. If your physical specs were lacking, an early instant death was guaranteed.
I opened the options tab.
The customization had become more detailed.
Values like climate adaptability, wound recovery speed, night vision, charisma, and enhanced memory had been subdivided.
I prioritized the ones directly connected to survival and combat here too.
Hypothermia resistance. Food poisoning resistance. Infection resistance. Wound recovery speed.
They might seem like nothing, but in the primitive age, even tetanus meant death.
You had to make a character that could resist pathogens as much as possible and survive even barehanded.
In exchange, I’d take a penalty in intellectual development...
But that much was fine.
Focusing on survival first was the standard rule.
Just as I was about to press the start button, I noticed a phrase in tiny letters: “This open beta supports cheats.”
“Oho.”
Primitive Age Online was a game with an extremely long play cycle, so without cheats, they probably wouldn’t be able to achieve the purpose of the open beta.
That must be why they had temporarily added the feature.
[Only one cheat may be selected.]
There were all sorts of cheats.
Vigorous libido, exceptional intelligence, perfect body, hyper-regeneration, and more.
Then, at the very end, I saw the “Immortality” cheat.
“Immortality?”
What was immortality?
It meant you didn’t die of old age.
Even if you suffered a fatal wound, you would recover, and you wouldn’t have to play across generations.
That was an enormous merit.
Continuing the bloodline in the primitive age was extremely difficult.
In that era, the strongest guy was king.
The same applied even after developing into a confederated state.
Contrary to what one might think, the era in which royal authority was inherited on the principle of succession by the eldest son had not actually lasted that long in human history.
If immortality was possible, there would be no leakage of power.
Since you wouldn’t die, deification was possible, and since the character would continue developing, it could truly be called a broken cheat.
Naturally, it probably wouldn’t be applicable in the official release.
“Not bad for a quick bit of fun.”
I applied immortality and pressed the start button.
At that moment.
The monitor’s frame distorted as if it were shattering.
“Uwaak!”
My vision gradually darkened, and it felt as if I were being sucked into deep water.
My hearing faded, then sound suddenly rushed in.
The sound of wind scraping through the forest.
The smell of wet earth and sap.
I snapped my eyes open.
Huge leaves were swaying overhead.
Did plants like that exist in the world?
Reflexively, I searched my pants pocket.
“......”
An old leather cord was wrapped around my waist, and a flint and bone knife hung from it.
Was this a dream...?
I had no choice but to think so.
When I raised myself up, I saw that my entire body was wrapped in muscle.
My upper body was bare, and all I had on was a leather skirt.
Slap!
I slapped my cheek.
“Fuck!”
A stinging pain climbed up my nerves.
The pain was identical to reality.
Which meant this wasn’t a dream.
“S-status window?”
“......”
“Skill! Stats! UI! Log out!”
None of the commands worked.
My hands and feet began to tremble.
Something that should only happen in novels had happened to me?
I pulled myself together and examined my surroundings.
I was in a fairly dense forest.
Beneath the layer of dry fallen leaves on the ground, small mushrooms and earthworms poked out and wriggled.
The birds were not singing.
A wolf’s howl came from far away.
First, I looked for footprints.
It was absurd beyond belief, but if I stayed alone in the forest, there was a high chance I’d be hunted down by carnivores.
Another way to describe the primitive age was the age of survival.
Everything around you was a threat, and humans were not predators.
Fortunately, there were human footprints beneath my feet.
Marks with a wide forefoot and a long big toe.
A little distance away, smaller footprints overlapped them.
Soon, a cave appeared.
The entrance gaped open beneath a rocky ledge about twice the height of a person, and the dirt around it was densely stamped with bare footprints.
Wide adult footprints, smaller child footprints layered over them, and even two long scraped lines as if something had been dragged.
When I took two or three more steps closer, I heard murmuring from inside the cave.
‘This has to be it... right?’
The tutorial for Primitive Age Online also began with finding your tribe in the forest.
But this wasn’t the “1” that I used to play. It was the new game, wasn’t it?
What if I wasn’t the chieftain here?
Cannibalism happened commonly in this era, so I’d end up as a lump of meat just like that.
No matter how good my physical specs were, I couldn’t cut down dozens of people all by myself.
A commotion arose inside the cave, and primitive people came pouring out, filling the entrance in a rush.
The men wore short shoulder cloaks and waistcloths woven from tree-bark fiber, and perhaps because there had been a battle, they were covered in blood here and there.
Some were wounded too.
In their hands were stone axes and spears tipped with bone that had been hardened by scorching them in fire.
Around their necks hung necklaces of animal teeth and shells, so they literally looked as if they had stepped right out of the game.
Sweat ran down my forehead.
There was a stone axe at my waist, but I had no idea what would happen if I fought a desperate battle against more than ten primitive men.
Fortunately, women and even children came rushing out as well.
There were nearly thirty of them.
That was about the same scale as the starting group in Primitive Age Online.
A musty odor drifted out from inside the cave.
Among them, a man who looked quite old—though in reality, he was probably in his thirties—approached and shouted.
“Whirlwind!”
“Uwooo!”
“Great warrior!”
I could roughly guess the situation.
In the game too, once you finished moving to the cave, a battle immediately followed.
It was a fight with a small tribe over fertile land, and upon victory, you could absorb the enemy’s supplies and population.
In the game, you just armed everyone roughly and charged.
But if this turned into an all-out battle in reality, neither side would come out unscathed.
‘This... seems like I’m fucked, doesn’t it?’