Three years into lockdown, L-City is a ghost of itself. Its crime rates have drastically increased— violent crimes as a matter of course (as the infected tend to lose empathy and even their awareness of others) as well as daggizo related scams/fake news. Pale imitations of their former selves, the residents have slowly gotten used to the horrors of the disease, to wasting away alone and mostly forgotten by anyone outside of their city. They have even created a separate waste category for the loose hands that litter the streets, an initially terrifying sight that has become commonplace. A group of infected residents called “white dogs” (can also read as “white ones”) are actively protesting the lockdown. They believe the central government has some sinister plan for L-City (which its residents are blindly accepting) and that’s why the city was locked down, not because of the outbreak. They assert daggizo is actually not that dangerous. The white dogs, though in various states of severe skin deterioration, stand out from the other residents due to their energy and sense of purpose. Strangely enough, most white dogs haven’t lost their hands, an oddity in a society where every other infected person has lost a hand or other extremities. Dong-hui recently failed a test that all government employees must take regularly to make sure they’re still qualified for their posts. He is temporarily reassigned to the record keeping center as his continued employment by the city is reassessed. Shortly after, he meets the new head of the white dogs, Hui-ra Jung. Though she is a little older now (in her teens), Dong-hui recognizes her as the little girl his wife had befriended years ago, saying she looked just like their daughter Go-yoh. Back then, he instantly took a dislike to the young Hui-ra and after dropping her off at her home in the Sand Village (the poorest part of town, the barricaded outpost of the white dogs), the couple never sees the girl again. By the time he meets Hui-ra as the leader of the white dogs, he and his wife aren’t together anymore. He barely recalls his daughter. Before they separated, his wife lost her right hand to daggizo and the rest of her symptoms accelerated alarmingly. Some time later, he is shocked to see her when she comes to his office to register for disability/welfare benefits. He recognizes her but she has no idea who he is and what he was to her.
Five years into the lockdown, the white dogs have stepped up their protests— they demand their right as citizens to look at records, to check the shipments trucked into L-City. They believe that L-City is slowly being turned into a dumpsite for waste materials and that the central government has cut off their city to everything outside it to create an enormous landfill for hazardous waste. After years of protest, the city agrees to let the white dogs access all city records, search the trucks, look at anything they want to try to find proof of their suspicions. Dong-hui has been reassigned to the record keeping office due to his poor test results. He also becomes infected and his right hand ultimately falls off. While he is working with his new coworker Kei at his new job, he experiences temporary periods of partial blindness (at times, all he can see are shapes/lights) and bouts of forgetfulness. He loses himself in this desensitized, sterilized version of reality and finds it surprisingly comfortable to deaden his emotions. As his symptoms worsen, he also loses all memory of his wife and his daughter. He starts to lose his sense of himself as an individual. He wakes from this fugue state only to stumble upon a shocking revelation: the children have mysteriously disappeared from L-City. Census records show the only children remaining in the area are in Sand Village.
Dong-hui heads to Sand Village and meets Hui-ra again—he doesn’t remember her but she remembers him. She tells him there aren’t any children in the village either. She is the closest in age to being a child at 18. Back in the office, he and Kei admit they remember the other saying they had had a child at some point. Dong-hui doesn’t know for sure whether he was ever married, ever lived with someone he loved, let alone had a child. Kei pulls him aside to tell him Sand Village doesn’t exist anymore— it’s been condemned and is empty of any residences. She worries that he is rebelling against the disease and living inside a world of his own making. Alarmed, he visits the village again where he sees people living their lives and going about their business, supremely unconcerned whether L-City residents believe they exist or not. He also sees a child, the first he has seen in years. He realizes that it’s Kei who is wrong. Like everyone else in L-City, she doesn’t want to look, doesn’t want to search for the missing children, doesn’t want to know what it means that the children are gone. But here in Sand Village, the white dogs are actively rebelling against such complacency. Dong-hui starts to think he might find Go-yoh if he can learn how to be like the white dogs. Back in the office, he finds a video interview of himself in Kei’s computer (her job is to erase the records he compresses and replace them with new, made-up records) from five years ago. It’s an interview of him reporting Go-yoh’s infection. He erases all records of himself and replaces the info with a new record of him failing the second reassessment exam and resigning from his job. He will live in Sand Village so he can learn how to fight the spread of daggizo within himself and search for his daughter.
While residing in the village, he learns that all the waste materials L-City imports in an agreement with central government get sent to Sand Village to be treated. Every time the village’s rudimentary incinerator (which the city touts as a state-of-the art waste management plant) burns through the waste, the residents have to contend with a black smog that then settles into the topsoil and has to be dug out in dark chunks. Dong-hui slowly starts to change— Hui-ra notices and his ex, who has woken out of her fugue state and recognizes him this time, also comments on the difference. She is the first one to realize and alert him to the fact that his right hand, which had fallen off, has somehow reattached to his body. He was able to reverse the effects of the disease on his body. Now he looks more like the other white dogs— heavy flaking of the skin, with no detachment of extremities. During this time period, he remembers what he longed and tried so hard to forget—his daughter Go-yoh died from daggizo years ago. When L-City announces that all the village residents will need to move out so the area can be condemned, the white dogs decide that they will quietly move back to the city in groups and continue planning to reveal the conspiracy they have uncovered. L-City has been importing vast quantities of “piplin,” a hazardous chemical byproduct from Zeus Group into the city, uncaring of the unknown effects it’ll have on the residents. But it’s too late. Thanks to L-City’s insidious brainwashing of its residents and exploitation of their need to feel safe from daggizo, everyone believes that the import of waste materials is a boon to the city. Even when the white dogs manage to hack the official broadcast with a few images calling out the disappearance of the city’s children, no one really cares. They don’t want to know or be reminded of something that might mess with their warped idea of reality. As Hui-ra, Dong-hui, and another white dog ally successfully escape capture after hacking the broadcast, a grim question remains: what happens now?