Chapter 02
I Want to Go Home (2)
Bang!
“…Huh!”
A loud crash from the door of the small house made my breath catch reflexively, my shoulders tensing up.
With a nervous glance toward the door, I pressed a trembling hand against my pounding chest.
And then—
krrrk…
grrk… grrrrk—
A scraping sound like fingernails dragging across wood followed.
And then—
David, I am here.
It’s me.
My son, David. My beloved… David… damn it, this place… left alone… □□… David… my David… won’t you open the door… you ungrateful thing… how dare you—!
A flood of auditory hallucinations poured in like noise pollution.
I covered my ears and quickly turned my head. Through the window set into the wall, the pitch-black sky came into view.
I stared at it for a moment before pulling a blanket around myself.
“…T-this thing… I still can’t get used to it even after ten days.”
Every time that shouting pierced my ears, my legs went weak and chills crawled up my spine. The alarm-like ringing in my head still hadn’t stopped either.
‘Even after being possessed… why did it have to be a horror game… I’m terrible with this kind of stuff.’
The original game was pixel art, so I could barely endure it back then.
…Actually, even that was kind of scary, but whatever.
I took a short breath and grabbed the item I had left in the corner of the room—my “Bag–Inventory.”
I opened it and dumped everything out. Several items rolled onto the floor.
One candlestick holder and one match.
Seven candles.
Five brass syringes.
Two pieces of dried meat.
I counted them one by one, then glanced outside as the darkness deepened.
plop.
I pulled out several candles from the wall and took them.
hiss—
whoooosh…
I lit one candle in the holder and turned my attention back to my left arm.
Two cross-shaped marks resembling vine patterns were engraved there.
I looked at my arm, then outside the window, then picked up one of the dropped items.
<Dried Meat>
Description: Meat of unknown origin, dried! Might give you energy… maybe?
These marks on my arm and this meat were proof that this world was inside the TTRPG-style horror game “Mirabilis,” and that my current body belonged to the player character David.
A game created by SFS Soft CEO Min Hana before she even founded the company.
A horror RPG set in a Western-style village, filled with grotesque monsters and strange systems, which made it infamous as a “pointlessly difficult, trash-tier hardcore game.”
That was one of the reasons for its notoriety.
‘Seriously… what kind of grudge did the director have against the world to make something like this?’
The space games she makes nowadays don’t have this kind of nonsense.
‘Who puts a system in a game where you lose all your save data and restart from the beginning when you lose all three lives? That’s insane.’
The cross marks represented lives. Or rather, hit points.
And once all lives were depleted, all progress would be wiped and the game would restart from the beginning.
Unlike other games where you return to a save point after losing all lives, this system was brutally unforgiving.
And I currently had two crosses on my arm.
Why not three?
Because—
‘Three minutes after I was possessed, I got my head ripped off by a monster.’
I died in agony and woke up again in the village of Letum, with one life already gone.
Even thinking about it made my back feel damp.
I clenched and unclenched my cold hands as the image of the monster’s gaping maw resurfaced behind my eyelids.
Just then—
krrrk—
BANG! BANG! BANG!
The horror event of Mirabilis—the hallucinated knocking at the door—sharpened my awareness again.
I forced myself to focus and looked down at the dried meat.
There were two ways to recover lost lives in Mirabilis.
One: get meals from the kitchen of the cathedral, the game’s main hub.
Two: consume a rare item—dried meat—which had such a terrible drop rate that even after searching the entire village, only two had been found.
The former wasn’t an option right now.
Because the cathedral was a truly horrific place.
‘That’s where I woke up after being possessed… probably.’
It was practically hell on earth.
At night, monsters roamed every district, and ghosts ran rampant. Human-shaped—or barely human-shaped—creatures wandered freely like water striders on a pond.
All the game’s horrors were rooted there.
And yet I was supposed to recover a lost life by going into that place?
‘Of course, I can’t avoid it forever.’
It had been ten days since I came to this world and experienced death for the first time.
During that time, I mostly stayed inside, avoiding the cathedral—the main story location.
I occasionally scavenged nearby for items, but even that was done cautiously, hiding and avoiding everything.
If I encountered monsters, I would die for sure. If I met NPCs, the story would advance.
And that was a problem.
If the story progressed, I’d be forced to say things like, “Hmm, so there’s something going on in the village. Don’t worry, I’ll handle it.” and head straight into danger.
At one point, I even considered living here like the protagonists of novels who decide to adapt.
I tried my best to adjust.
But living in a world without electricity, proper water treatment, delivery food, or internet was sheer torture.
And most of all, I couldn’t stand living under the same sky as those monsters.
That’s when the idea came to me.
‘What if clearing the game sends me home?’
That’s how stories usually go, right?
‘So eventually I’ll have to enter the cathedral…’
But not yet.
I needed preparation.
Item farming, planning, mental readiness—
‘…mental preparation!’
David, the original owner of this body, was a calm and disciplined holy knight.
Raised in the capital from childhood, he was ordered by higher authorities to investigate the anomalies in Letum village.
Originally from Letum himself, David learned the seriousness of the situation through testimonies and freely roamed the cathedral, the source of the corruption.
After much hardship, he eventually reached the proper ending.
But—
‘That’s David’s story.’
My nerves are nowhere near that strong.
If I had to compare them… maybe like a spider web?
Very easy to snap.
So why hadn’t I eaten the dried meat for ten days despite needing life recovery?
Because—
The strange description alone made me suspicious.
Who in the world would willingly eat something labeled like that?
‘I was actually testing other foods first, to see if anything else could restore life…’
But fate eventually cornered me.
It was better to maintain maximum lives, and I still had to go outside today.
I slowly picked up the dried meat, like retrieving a phone dropped into a toilet.
Staring at the wrinkled, dark-red piece of meat, I shut my eyes tightly.
‘This is fried chicken. This is a perfectly cooked sous-vide steak. Delicious food.’
And then—
I placed it on my tongue.
tap.
A small piece of meat touched my tongue.
A salty flavor lingered on the soft flesh, and unpleasant thoughts filled my mind.
‘Is… human flesh supposed to taste salty?’
…But jerky is salty too.
You season meat so it doesn’t spoil when drying it anyway!
What proof do I have that this is human flesh?!
Yeah, but still…
‘Th-this is a horror game world.’
Anything could happen.
Unfounded paranoia swirled in my mind, playing on my fragile nerves like an instrument.
After what felt like a long, long time—
whoooosh—
Bright light poured in through the window.
The noises at the door gradually stopped.
A strange chill disappeared, replaced by warmth as the candle flames around the room went out.
Sunlight tickled my eyelids, and I slowly opened my eyes.
I stared at the bright sun for a moment, then looked down at myself.
“….”
My tongue, irritated from the night of uncertainty, stung slightly.
Salty.
I smacked my lips a couple of times and curled up.
Tears welled up.
No matter how unlucky a person could be, how could I end up like this—working a new job, getting dragged into a horror game, leaving behind a comfortable life, forced to survive on something like this…
What kind of sin did I commit to deserve this?
‘Was it really that bad that I spent 13 minutes slacking off at work by pretending to get coffee?’
I wiped my eyes.
Crying only drained my hydration, but I couldn’t help it—it was genuinely miserable.
Still, I soon steadied my breathing.
‘Whatever it is, I have to adapt. I need to go home.’
At home, I could eat spicy fried chicken and watch American dramas. That was the kind of life worth fighting for.
Just as I was trying to calm myself—
My gaze fell on the scattered items on the bed… and the weasel standing on top of them.
…Huh?
“A… a w-weasel?”
A small, striped weasel with glossy black eyes tilted its head at me.
Startled, I quickly scanned the room.
The window I had slightly opened yesterday to throw out a rock-embedded apple was still open.
It must have gotten in through there.
‘W-what do I do… animal control? No, there’s no such thing here… so do I catch it? No, wait…?’
What if it bites me…?
While I was panicking—
thud!
The weasel’s tiny paw grabbed one of the dried meat pieces on the bed.
It clutched it firmly, then brought it to its mouth and bit down.
Then it raised its head—
whoosh—
And dashed out the window.
I sat there blinking, still trying to process what had just happened.
A moment later—
‘T-that thing… it took my dried meat… my extra life…’
“…it stole it?”
I shot up.
BANG, BANG!
patatata—!
I slammed the window and door shut and sprinted outside like a madman.
“Hey! Where did it go?!”
