The year changed.
I turned twenty-nine. And so my twenties are passing by entirely in prayer for the end of a world that hasn’t even arrived yet.
I have no regrets. This is better than regretting it later.
Besides, I don’t have anything to regret. At least, I still have things left to me.
A mountain, a house, and funds that have multiplied severalfold.
Even if the world doesn’t end, I’ll be able to spend the rest of my life without lacking anything.
So I calmly, steadily prepare for the future.
For every possible contingency to come. For the future that is certain to arrive.
This part of East Asia, including Korea, was decidedly slow to sense the changes in the world.
For one thing, it has four seasons.
Even if plants exploded in number, winter killed them off on its own, so they didn’t increase enough for us to feel it.
The climate was the same.
It only felt a little like it had gotten colder and hotter, but that was something that happened every year.
To people in this neighborhood, “record-breaking cold” or “record-breaking heat” was regarded as nothing more than, Hm, I see… another record being broken.
But the world was certainly falling apart. Such phenomena were occurring all over the world.
They simply drew less attention.
Plants weren’t only spreading acidic mucus spores.
Fungi, too, were reproducing like mad, and cases of invasive fungal infections in the body increased, frequently causing deaths among the immunocompromised.
Places with little medical infrastructure were especially like that. And those people did not receive attention.
On top of that, there was the increase in insects.
An increase in plants meant there was that much more to eat.
It was hard for people living in cities to feel it, but those in slightly remote areas definitely felt that the number of insects had increased.
Where we live, they all die off in winter, so again, we don’t really feel it.
There were many other signs as well.
Things like algal blooms exploding due to eutrophication in rivers, turning the waterways into green tea lattes?
Things like that becoming so severe that water supply systems were gradually being strained?
But those were indirect sensations. They weren’t things that directly harmed people.
The same went for the increased wildfires and more frequent blackouts.
They were threatening, but they didn’t directly take human lives.
The one thing that hit closest to home was heatstroke.
The sudden surge in heatstroke victims. Patients.
The increased humidity blocked the body’s heat dissipation. And so, when the body failed to regulate its temperature, it shut itself down.
Those who worked outdoors were especially exposed to that danger at all times.
People collapsing in a heap.
The elderly and the frail, in particular, suffered first.
IBRA had predicted that if plants increased, they would absorb that much carbon and prevent the Earth from heating up.
But the doctor had said that was an idea on the level of a middle schooler. And he had been right.
In truth, IBRA probably knew by now that they had completely botched it.
They simply weren’t saying so because if they did, they would have to take all the blame.
That was why, on the surface, they pretended things were going well, while behind the scenes they did all sorts of things to reverse the situation.
They cut down or burned with their own hands the plants that had multiplied beyond their control.
The area affected wasn’t small, either.
By now, they had probably stopped increasing plants and were only doing things to reduce them instead.
Of course, IBRA tried to dismiss the controversy by saying that controlling the number of plants was also part of their job.
The problem was that cutting down or burning those plants also contributed to the Earth heating up.
Burning plants that had gone to the trouble of absorbing carbon was an act that reduced all their efforts to nothing.
On top of that, dead plants produced methane when decomposing in oxygen-poor conditions.
Those bastards were the main culprits of global warming. They were far worse in quality than plain carbon.
That was why IBRA’s Project C.E. was a complete failure.
It was just people who didn’t want to take responsibility covering their own eyes and pretending nothing was wrong.
No, the people in charge now probably felt wronged too.
The current people in charge weren’t the first generation. The ones who had actually done it had already pulled out and were pretending they knew nothing.
But the world was still turning.
The world didn’t sense that it was fucked just because of heatstroke.
There still hadn’t been one direct blow. So until then, people’s sense of crisis wouldn’t sharply rise.
Which was the same as an opportunity for me.
A ship sank off the coast of the Indian Ocean.
The ship that sank was an oil tanker. A ship so huge ordinary people couldn’t even imagine it. If you saw it up close, it would be so big you’d be left speechless.
A ship like that split apart and sank, and the world paid attention to the incident for a very brief moment.
But the waters off the Indian Ocean were far too distant. It wasn’t as if many people had died, either.
So such accidents were quickly forgotten. Though I watched carefully.
Blackouts became more frequent.
At least our country was better off. Our country’s infrastructure was extremely well developed.
Places where power lines had been buried underground were almost never exposed to acidic mucus spores.
So cities and places where that had been done properly didn’t suffer large-scale blackouts.
Only places where utility poles still remained suffered such blackouts frequently.
In the United States, an automobile company issued a recall.
The underside of a car was constantly exposed to spores. So it was quite powerless against the spores’ continuous damage.
Minor breakdowns and corrosion—car companies probably had no choice but to feel wronged.
Who would have known that something like acidic mucus spores would become so common?
It wasn’t as if they had been made with that kind of thing in mind from the start.
But even those things were still at the level of incidents.
Of course, there were places that suffered enormous damage each time one occurred.
Even so, they did not directly affect people. They were merely inconvenient.
But their frequency was increasing.
Signs of chaos were becoming visible. Now all it needed was for one trigger to go off…
The problem was that I didn’t know what that trigger was.
Would anyone know, perhaps? Even at P, where the doctor was, they only cautiously predicted things that could happen.
And those predictions were far too broad. They were simply checking every possibility.
In the meantime, construction was completed.
The second building. My expansion base.
This place had a clear purpose. It would become a residence for the people I needed.
That was why my expansion base was a little bigger than the main base. For starters, it had five rooms and three bathrooms, so it could house a fairly large number of people.
But I wonder if I’ll ever have a use for it. Will there even be anyone who can come in here?
Even if the world ends and everyone is dying, I have no intention of showing kindness to just anyone and letting them in.
For what? Why on earth would I?
So perhaps this place might not receive even a single resident.
If that happens, well, I’ll use it as an emergency backup. What would be the problem?
Then one day, Baek Jin-ho called me.
He said we should meet. He said he had something to show me, then sent me a road-name address in Suwon.
I went. If he was trying to brag about something, of course I had to go see what it was.
Just what kind of scale would the young master of a conglomerate show me?
And what I saw was quite astonishing.
It was still in the trial stage… but even so, it was incredible.
“What do you think? This is the pinnacle of the latest technology.”
“You have every right to show off. It’s amazing.”
What he showed me was an AI smart farm. The entire building was one enormous farm, and fewer than three people were needed to operate all of it.
“After looking at your materials, I worked hard to persuade my father, you know. It was fortunate timing. Our company’s labor union is tough. So when I said it was an AI industry that didn’t use people, he was quite favorable toward it. He’s sick and tired of people, basically.”
I could understand. AI didn’t require labor costs. There was no need to pay night allowances, and it could work twenty-four hours a day, three hundred sixty-five days a year.
“Isn’t it cool? What’s even more impressive is that this was made purely with our company’s own technology.”
“It is. It’s extremely impressive.”
It was probably possible because it was Seonyang Group.
Electricity, electronics, engineering, food, construction… Seonyang had all of those as affiliates.
So something like this could be done as an internal project without outside help.
On top of that, the fact that Baek Jin-ho was the head of the future business division must have played a part.
What future industry could be more fitting than this? This was the true future industry.
Most importantly, Baek Jin-ho didn’t need to make this into a large-scale venture.
In other words, he didn’t need to think about profitability and make it into a continuously developing business.
Because everything was going to collapse anyway.
So an experimental building capable of continuous production was enough. And using that as a pretext, he could make various things one after another.
“This is the livestock barn.”
“Nice. It doesn’t feel like a livestock barn.”
“Right?”
I had thought about raising animals too. But that wasn’t easy. For starters, there was no way to deal with the manure.
But here, a perfect air-conditioning system and manure-processing technology solved even that.
It was truly what one could call technology. The taste of a conglomerate that an individual like me could never attempt, so to speak.
“But.”
“Yeah.”
“What about power?”
“That’s the problem.”
I was slightly disappointed by that answer.
The most important thing was missing. Without electricity, all of this was the same as not existing.
“What about water? Sustainability? Maintenance methods? Required personnel? You’re paying attention to all of that, right?”
“Hey. No matter what, I can’t make it that obvious. The people here don’t know the world is going to be fucked.”
True, that was the case. To them, electricity was simply something that existed.
They wouldn’t even think that it might disappear.
“Still, there is a way. So don’t worry.”
“What is it?”
“That’s still confidential. I need to watch it a little longer.”
Jin-ho’s expression as he said that did not show much worry. He probably did have something in mind, judging by that look.
“Fine. Whatever it is, I hope it works out.”
“It’ll work out. That part isn’t difficult. The problem is hiding the real intention and coming up with a suitable excuse. It’s killing me, man.”
And yet he looked relaxed.
He sure complains a lot. That wasn’t the expression of someone truly fretting.
Who would look at that and think so? Absolutely not.