Chapter 1
Chapter 1
Author│Suhasuh
Published by│RoseN
Submission Email│editor@studiod.co.kr
ⓒ Suhasuh, 2020
This book is a copyrighted work protected by copyright law. Unauthorized reproduction, copying, or distribution is prohibited. Violation may lead to civil and criminal liability.
Ding.
Master! The diamond cart is full! Please empty the cart!
A push notification popped up with an alert sound right in the middle of a lecture.
Thankfully, I was in the back row and the professor’s voice was loud, or I’d have almost gotten a scolding. I forgot to switch my phone to silent mode before class started.
Maybe because of the alert sound, the classmate sitting next to me glanced my way. I switched my phone to silent mode and tapped the push notification, clicking my tongue in irritation.
“Still playing that? Aren’t you bored? You’re obsessive, seriously.”
She whispered a reprimand at me, but I just let it go in one ear and out the other. I’d heard that comment three times just today.
Whether others play a game for a long time or not, who cares? On my phone screen, the game name <Infinite Diamond> appeared along with a dwarf diligently swinging a pickaxe at a diamond vein.
After a brief loading, I logged into the game and found a cart bigger than the mine filled with diamonds.
Diamonds will not accumulate further until the cart is emptied.
With a red warning message, the dwarves with nothing to do were slacking off, rolling around under the cart.
When I tapped the cart, the dwarves immediately sprang into action, hastily dividing into two groups—half moved the diamonds to my vault, and half started swinging pickaxes at the vein.
My steadily rising diamond count, 9,8xx,xxx,xxx,xxx…. Just two more cart loads and emptying them would reach this game’s limit.
The target number needed to unlock the last remaining achievement was ‘999,999,999,999,999’.
The achievement name was [???], and the reward was also [???].
In the game’s official forum, it was treated as a gimmick—maybe the developers left the slot empty for a future update or made it as a placeholder and forgot about it—but the reason I’ve stuck with this game for over a year was simply to complete that achievement.
I can’t stand not knowing something, and if I start something, I have to see it through!
<Infinite Diamond> was one of the countless idle games that flooded the gaming market after the ‘Infinite XX’ type games became huge hits.
The game’s goal was to become the owner of a failing dwarf mining town, produce diamonds, and use those diamonds to revive the town.
There were diamonds you could get by tapping frantically, but ultimately, you had to upgrade the passive options that automatically produce diamonds so that the game would keep running even when turned off.
Hire a lot of dwarf miners, level them up, improve the quality of their pickaxes, and increase the size of the storage…
Once you’ve boosted the automatic production per second like that, all you had to do was turn off the game, wait for notifications to pop up, occasionally hop in, and move the diamonds from the overflowing carts to the vault.
Now nearing its first year, <Infinite Diamond> had been slapped together by the developer without much expectation, just following a popular template. As a result, updates dwindled and stopped entirely just three months after launch, and even the official forum fell into such neglect that ads posted there were left undeleted—everything had ground to a halt.
It was barely running on its servers. With the company leaving the game to rot, most players abandoned it, and the only ones left were a few stubborn souls like me who couldn’t rest until they’d seen things through to the end.
Players like me, who had stuck with it for a whole year, emptying the diamond carts without a single day’s break, had long since conquered every piece of content the game had to offer—since there were no updates anyway.
The once-deserted dwarf village, after being upgraded to the max level using diamonds, had transformed into a vast empire.
With no use for diamonds left, I even possessed a filthy-rich avatar, bought every useless item in the shop up to the limit, and changed the dwarves’ clothes and hair colors—things that had nothing to do with their diamond production at all.
Around this point, players who started wondering “What now?” left once more, and the truly remaining few had their eyes fixed on just one goal.
[???] achievement.
Even the random daily posts—like photos of record-breaking fish catches that had no connection to the game—became sparse on the official forum. The only topic that still sparked a flurry of comments was this.
That achievement, which no player had yet managed to unlock. The one you could earn when your diamond count hit 999,999,999,999,999.
At first, nobody even knew that achievement existed. That’s because the reward for achievements unlocked when reaching certain diamond-holding thresholds was itself “diamonds,” and people already overflowing with the stuff rarely bothered to complete them.
Plus, given the game’s nature, diamond output would explode exponentially at a certain point, so dozens of achievements would complete in a flash. Most players found it a huge hassle to tap through them one by one to claim rewards.
As if idle game players would enjoy going through all that tedious work.
Then one day, a player braved the annoyance and tapped the “complete all achievements” button, finally revealing the very last [???] achievement.
Even the player with the most diamonds back then only had them in the “hundreds of millions,” so seeing that number nearing a quadrillion sparked all sorts of chatter—bug, gimmick, game-crashing upon completion, you name it.
The goal of the remaining players who had consumed and savored every piece of content was set: to become a hero by achieving the [???] achievement before anyone else.
Of course, that hero will be me.
“Hey, hey, quit that game and come play ‘Terrarium Adventure’ with me. It’s currently in pre-registration and launches next month. Even the kids in our department have already claimed their nicknames and are waiting in line. Look at this.”
My classmate, dodging the professor’s gaze, handed me her phone. There was a dazzling game intro screen, as if the illustrators had poured their souls into it.
Every character was handsome and beautiful. It was a world apart from <Infinite Diamond>, a classic dot-graphic game.
“Same developer…”
Among the hundreds of character cards, game scenarios penned by famous novelists, and production costs in the tens of billions, one thing caught my eye the most.
More than the flashy ad copy, I noticed first that this game was from the same studio as <Infinite Diamond>. The thought immediately struck me that <Infinite Diamond> would soon shut down its servers.
“I’m making a guild, so you join too. I need people like you who play games super hard.”
She doesn’t understand my situation. What if the servers close before I even achieve the [???] achievement?
After that, my classmate kept talking about her expectations for <Terrarium Adventure> and eventually made me enter my number for pre-registration.
This was possible because I, who normally detest those random card-drawing games, was so preoccupied worrying about the achievement. Plus, the professor kept shooting us glances.
Feeling impatient, I kept tapping the cart to send it to the vault even before it was full of diamonds, then, realizing I couldn’t focus on the lecture like this, I decided to skip class on my own.
Taking the bus home while the sun was still high, I checked the official forum for the first time in a while. The remaining users were already worrying about the same thing as me.
Everyone seemed so focused on achieving the [???] achievement that they hadn’t even considered the possibility that the servers might close.
Well, since only users who had exhausted all content remained and no payments were being made, the server maintenance costs would keep running a deficit. There’s no way they’d leave a money-losing game running forever.
The service period has already hit the one-year mark, so they’ve fulfilled their duty. All that’s left is to slap together a server shutdown notice and close it down.
I left a few comments agreeing with the worries, then returned to the game screen. I entered the cash shop, which I hadn’t clicked on in months.
‘Production Speed Boost Buff’. I just need to send the full cart to the vault about two more times.
There’s nothing more foolish than spending money on a dead game… but my hesitation was brief. I purchased the 2x, 3x, 5x, 10x, and 20x boost items in order.
My phone vibrated long with text messages confirming the payments. The effects stack. Like the rotating speed of the bus wheels heading home, the dwarves began swinging their pickaxes like crazy. Now, once I get home, I’ll have to stare at my phone all day.
As I was taking off my shoes at the entrance, I heard a ding notification sound. I thought it might be the alert that the cart was full, so I quickly checked my phone, but it was a text message notification saying I had successfully pre-registered for <Terrarium Adventure>.
Thank you for pre-registering for <Terrarium Adventure>, the beautiful RPG you cultivate with your own hands. Welcome, Druid. Blah blah….
Come to think of it, I was wondering when I had turned off silent mode when a push message popped up saying the cart was full.
I had diligently tapped to move one cart’s worth on the bus, so if my prediction was right, this was the last one. Worship me, stagnant waters1, for I shall be the first to clear the [???] achievement!
Eager to take screenshots, I roughly threw off my bag and sat down on the doorstep. Thump-thump, was the loading always this slow? 80%, 90%, 100%… Done!
A full diamond cart and a red warning message: ‘Diamonds will no longer accumulate until the cart is emptied.’ Checking the number of diamonds I had, it seemed about right.
When I touched the cart, the dwarves hurriedly began moving it to the vault. Diamonds pouring into the underground vault: 999,999,999,999,999! It’s full!
It seemed the ‘limit value’ of the game, guessed by some users, was indeed correct. The screen was filled without restraint with a spectacle of the number 9. Now, the achievement I’d been waiting for! The [???] achievement completion button was lit blue.
Ah, how long I had longed for this moment! I took a screenshot to show the diamond count clearly, and then another screenshot of the activated screen before pressing the completion button.
I endured it well, in this third-rate game with no world view or scenario, only the production of diamonds! (Though that’s the charm of idle games.)
If this were a CD game, pressing the completion button would have immediately triggered the game ending! With trembling hands, I touched the button. And then….
Congratulations! You have completed the [???] achievement!
You have obtained ??? as a reward!
What? Is that it? As usual when completing an achievement, the dwarves briefly clapped for me and then went back to swinging their pickaxes.
So anticlimactic. It didn’t crash the game like someone feared, nor did it fail to complete due to a gimmick, nor did it reveal a hidden story. What on earth is ‘???’? Opening my inventory, there was a black cube-shaped item with the name ‘???’ that I’d never seen before.
Surprisingly, a command ‘Use’ existed. It’s like a bug item with no image—could this really break the game?
I finished taking a screenshot and pressed the use button. One side of the cube opened, and a golden key popped out. The item was named ‘Mysterious Key.’ It was so huge that it covered the entire game screen.
What is this? Whether the game had truly glitched and affected my phone, I couldn’t even use the screenshot function. The game could crash, but my phone couldn’t.
How much did this cost! I hurriedly tapped the screen, pressed the power button, and tried the volume keys, but the phone froze on the key screen, refusing to move or turn off.
After all the effort I put into playing this game, you’re breaking my phone at the last minute? And I even made payments! Since my phone was out of warranty, I felt a pang of worry about repair costs.
That’s when it happened. The screen brightness, which I had turned way down to save battery, started increasing on its own. Trembling at the thought that my phone had truly broken, I stared at the screen.
And then… it was suspiciously not just a brightness issue… enough to blind my eyes… flash! And…?
Just as I thought, ‘This damn phone dares to light up the whole house…!’ — it wasn’t my house anymore.
1. Goin-mul (고인물, lit. “stagnant water”) — Korean gaming slang for long-time veteran players who have stuck with a game for years, like water that has pooled in one spot for a long time.
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