The Chronicles of The Ruined City
By yhn1047> Updated July 31, 2026.
> Version 2.1
When order collapses, every choice leaves a cost
South Korea, two years after the Winter Outbreak — 2027.
The outbreak began almost simultaneously across the Seoul Capital Area and major metropolitan cities in December 2025. Within three months, it brought down quarantine hospitals, temporary shelters, and military checkpoints one after another. By the following summer, electricity, tap water, and distribution networks could no longer be trusted, and central government control had not been restored anywhere in the country.
Yet the world did not disappear cleanly.
Apartment complexes still define the shape of cities. Subway tunnels still connect one district to another. Ports and expressways still preserve the possibility of movement. Locked warehouses and shuttered storefronts appear to hold something worth risking a life for. Because the familiar landscape remains, trying to use it again is even more dangerous.
Human traces are not the only things filling the streets.
The Infected left behind by a nation of fifty million remain the broadest and most persistent threat. Those that follow sound, those submerged in water, those waiting beneath debris—and, depending on the settings, rare Mutants—change their behavior with place and season. Things that were never infected are not necessarily safe either. Packs of feral dogs, wild animals that have lost their fear of people, and other survivors who approach under the pretense of rescue or trade fill what remains of the cities.
You may choose how to survive in this world.
You may begin in a sealed disaster-control section in Seoul, a logistics warehouse in Gyeonggi, underground archives in Daejeon, or an aging shipyard in Busan. You may begin amid the Infected or write the opening scene from a premise of your own. The selected season changes more than the starting date and weather. It changes a shelter's immediate needs, the burden of equipment, vehicle reliability, infected behavior, and even which locations are worth searching.
But in the ruined city, every choice has a cost.
Supplies are intentionally scarce. An ordinary search usually finds nothing useful, or one small item at most. Firearms and ammunition, prescription medicine, fuel, and working batteries are exceptionally rare, and moving and protecting a valuable cache is far harder than discovering it. Noise draws people. Light reveals a position. Weight carried on the back shortens the distance one can flee.
People are no different.
The 59 established characters scattered across the country each have their own occupation, habits, limits, and current location. None of them exists solely to help you. Some live by the rules inside maintained Level 1 Safe Points. Some move through a region without a permanent base. Others use goodwill and technical skill to prepare theft and violence. Trust grows through circumstances and consequences, not words.
The world will not wait for you.
While you search one building, the perimeter of a safe point may be tested. A voice over a handheld two-way radio may stop waiting for an answer and go silent. The season continues preparing the next disaster. A cleared area becomes dangerous again without surveillance and control, and a person passed by today may return tomorrow with another group.
> Will you live by the rules inside a small safe point?
> Will you connect scattered people through trade and radio contact?
> Will you enter untouched districts and bring out what others need?
> Or will you rely on no one and endure by rules of your own?
Roughly 300 people have been verified alive within the last sixty days. That is not the remaining population. It is only the number someone managed to confirm.
What the country's next winter will look like has not yet been decided.
But every building you enter, every promise you make, and every person you leave behind will produce a consequence worthy of it.
> Who are you, and what will you survive for in a city where even a quiet room may be a trap?
45k
