“It's more fun here than I thought. It’s like a pandemonium.”

Haesang is a designer who uses the virtual world Lola to create Dream Theater, a first-person virtual theater based on the client’s memories. She was one of the first designers to develop Dream Theater but hasn’t received many commissions lately. One day, Haesang gets a strange request from a man who wants her to create a Dream Theater based on his memories.

The memory of the client, Gyeongju, is full of misery. He had been a renowned chiropractor, but bad luck struck him one after another. His father died, he lost his job due to medical malpractice, and, to make matters worse, his younger brother was found dead among the homeless after a fight with him and fled home. Disillusioned, Gyeongju takes a job as a security guard at Samae-won, a homeless rehabilitation center that offers good pay as well as room and board. It sits on a remote cape by the Yellow Sea, were drift ice floats down due to abnormal climate. When Gyeongju arrives at Samae-won, plopped in the middle of the nowhere plateau, he hears a rumor circulating among the homeless: that the key to immortality has been discovered and that random tickets are being issued to homeless people as test subjects. Gyeongju becomes obsessed with the idea that his younger brother Seungju’s death may be connected to this.

Suffering from guilt, Gyeongju notices that Park Jaeyi, his co-worker who joined him as a security guard, is secretly searching for something among the homeless. One day, while on an early morning patrol, Gyeongju discovers mysterious footprints leading to the mountains behind Samae-won. At the end of the trail, he finds Jaeyi, who should be sleeping in the dorm, covered in blood in the cold snow at dawn. As he is carried to the hospital by Gyeongju, Jaeyi calls out Haesang’s name even when he drifts in and out of consciousness.

Wild nature: the ultimate human desire to endure, face, and overcome

The novel’s virtual reality world of Lola is a giant metaphor for this world. But humanity doesn’t stop at wandering forever through the arcade. Jeong You-Jeong reveals human nature through the Dream Theater—humans will still seek out entertainment even in eternity, and they want to face themselves. In this sense, Gyeongju’s desire to design a dream theater in the most rigorous way for himself offers the readers a lot to ponder.

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