Chapter 1: Waiting Room (1)

In modern society, countless people spent their lives striving for wealth and pursuing goals of their own.

Even so, the vast majority eventually ran up against the limits imposed upon them and went on to live ordinary lives.

Han Su-myeon, a twenty-seven-year-old young man, was an exceptionally timid and ordinary person.

Su-myeon was rather pleased with the fact that he possessed the rare talent of being content with an ordinary life.

That was how he saw himself, at least, and in any case, he liked living that way.

“....”

But today, he opened his eyes to an eerie atmosphere that was anything but ordinary.

Looking around, he found himself in a small, square room covered in unfamiliar, yellowed wallpaper.

“...Kidnapped...?”

Hadn’t he clearly fallen asleep while playing a horror game, his one and only hobby?

Not only were his surroundings completely unfamiliar, but perhaps because he had spent the night lying on the floor, his lower back ached terribly.

What had happened to his cheap but surprisingly comfortable bed for him to wake up sprawled in a shabby place like this?

Worse still, the floor was covered in an old carpet that seemed to have soaked up moisture from somewhere. It was damp and musty, unpleasant even to look at.

“Is this a dream...?”

The room looked exactly like something out of the game he had been playing right before he fell asleep, and he was still wearing his pajamas.

He did not actually feel cold, yet the air entering his lungs carried a strange chill that raised goosebumps across his skin.

Bewildered by the surreal situation, Su-myeon cautiously opened the door and stepped outside.

“What the hell....”

“Where... am I?”

“You don’t know where this is either?”

The moment he opened the door, a murmur of voices reached his ears.

The corridor had no windows at all, with identical doors stretching away in a row, making it resemble an enormous, aging hotel.

The wallpaper and carpet were the same as those inside his room, while fluorescent lights overhead illuminated the hallway with an unsettling buzz.

The sight made his skin crawl.

It looked exactly like a scene from the game he had just been playing.

Still, with people crowded throughout the corridor, his confusion outweighed his fear.

“Does anyone know where this is?”

At the sound of someone shouting, Su-myeon felt the tips of his fingers turn cold.

Wasn’t that the exact same line spoken at the very beginning of the game’s first chapter?

Then, amid the surreal surroundings, an unfamiliar phone—one he could not even remember picking up—suddenly rang.

[Safety Rules of Happy Ellis Hotel]

When Su-myeon checked the rules displayed over the antique-looking notice, he clutched his forehead.

Evidence far too clear to dismiss as simple confusion had appeared right before his eyes.

‘Damn it....’

The game I was playing has become reality.

***

CHAPTER. 1

Ellis Hotel

[1. Do not enter a room again once you have left it. The Housekeeper is tidying the guest room :)]

“So none of you know where this is?”

“I... I can’t even tell where this corridor ends.”

Before Su-myeon knew it, fifteen people had gathered in the corridor outside his room.

With more than a dozen people murmuring in such a narrow hallway, their voices echoed off the walls until the noise grew surprisingly loud.

Those with more assertive personalities stepped forward and tried to gather information, but Su-myeon was the type who preferred to stay quietly in the back at times like this.

When this many people were gathered together, keeping quiet usually allowed him to hear more anyway.

‘...Oh. Including me, there are sixteen?’

As Su-myeon counted the people around him, he felt both relieved and uneasy.

The game he had been playing.

Commonly abbreviated as UTG, it was fairly popular among horror game enthusiasts.

Its main story followed the detective protagonist, Kang Han-su, who was swept up in a series of abnormal phenomena and forced to investigate ghost stories, save people, and find a way back to reality.

The game had been released quite a long time ago, had even spawned several fan games, and enjoyed a solid cult following.

The first chapter of the original game, Ellis Hotel, began with fifteen people.

‘Ellis Hotel, in particular, had that shitty condition where you could randomly get dragged inside while you were asleep, without needing to meet any other special requirements....’

The protagonist himself had ended up here purely by chance and discovered for the first time that ghost stories truly existed.

And somehow, Su-myeon had been thrown into the same scenario as a sixteenth person—someone who had never existed in the original game.

He had not possessed the body of an existing character.

He had simply been added as an entirely new person.

‘At least that means I haven’t possessed some character who’s guaranteed to die....’

Even as he instinctively analyzed the situation, Su-myeon’s thoughts remained hazy, as though he had yet to fully wake up.

Usually, people who found themselves transported into novels or games were exceptional in one way or another.

But he was just an ordinary guy.

No, maybe calling himself ordinary was just a way to console himself.

He was nothing more than a mediocre nobody!

“For now, let’s move together.”

At the sound of that voice, Su-myeon craned his neck and peered through the crowd to find the speaker.

“If we’ve all been kidnapped and brought somewhere unfamiliar, it should be safer to stay together.”

The protagonist of the game Su-myeon knew.

Kang Han-su.

Since this was his very first line in the game, Su-myeon found himself wanting to see him with his own eyes despite all the confusion.

“I’m Detective Kang Han-su of the Seoul Southern Police Station Violent Crimes Unit.”

He was a tall man with a broad, sturdy build.

Even another man would have found his physique impressive, and his eyes were sharp and fierce.

Combined with the police ID he showed everyone and an appearance that practically screamed protagonist at first glance, his presence seemed to ease some of the group’s anxiety.

Seeing the protagonist standing there in the flesh only made everything feel even less real to Su-myeon.

But then he remembered the first incident that was supposed to happen and hurriedly looked around.

Among the people preparing to move, he spotted a shaggy-haired man frantically searching through his pockets.

“Wait, wait!”

Sure enough, just as Su-myeon remembered, the shaggy-haired man raised a hand and hurriedly turned out every pocket on his clothes.

“I think I left my wallet inside. Please wait a second.”

Which room did I come out of again?

Since all the doors looked identical, as did the wallpaper and carpet, the man hesitated as he glanced from one door to another.

Meanwhile, Su-myeon found himself agonizing over an entirely different problem.

[1. Do not enter a room again once you have left it. The Housekeeper is tidying the guest room :)]

The first safety rule.

As if to demonstrate just how serious that rule was, the shaggy-haired man was supposed to become the scenario’s first victim right about now.

The moment he found the room he had emerged from and set one foot inside, the thing waiting within would devour his head.

“Oh, was it not this one?”

When the shaggy-haired man abruptly yanked open the door in front of him, Su-myeon’s heart dropped.

If events followed the same sequence as the game, it was the next door.

The moment he opened that one and stepped inside, a maw crammed with razor-sharp teeth, like some grotesque steel trap, would appear.

A tattered rabbit head with an enormous mouth stretched wide open.

Until that point, it merely looked like something one might see in a cheap horror movie.

That impression vanished the instant the costume head clamped down on the man’s skull and crunched through it until brain matter spilled onto the floor....

‘And I’m supposed to watch that happen in real life right now...?’

Absolutely not!

If he actually witnessed something like that, he was certain it would haunt his nightmares for the rest of his life.

He liked horror games, but only because everything in them was fake and staged.

Because Su-myeon knew far too well what was about to happen, he eventually found himself unable to stay silent.

“I don’t think you should open that.”

It was the moment Su-myeon, the new sixteenth guest, first interfered with the course of the game.

“Pardon? What do you mean?”

The shaggy-haired man turned toward him, one hand still resting on the doorknob, and Su-myeon cautiously brought up the first excuse that came to mind.

“No... I mean, didn’t everyone get a phone?”

The phone given to each guest.

It was essentially a kind of key card.

“Ah, that’s true. It did say not to enter a room again after leaving it....”

“Wouldn’t it actually be better if the Housekeeper were inside? We could ask them where we are....”

“But we were all out here in the hallway. None of us saw a Housekeeper enter any of the rooms.”

The others began murmuring among themselves.

Su-myeon quietly breathed a sigh of relief and stepped back again.

Usually, in stories like this, people who were transported into novels or games would charge straight into the action, desperately trying to save everyone.

But Su-myeon had no desire whatsoever to draw that kind of attention to himself.

For someone who, until yesterday, had simply stayed cooped up in his room tapping away at a computer, suddenly taking charge of a group of people was no easy feat.

‘That’s something only people who are used to doing it can pull off....’

Besides, wasn’t Kang Han-su, the game’s protagonist, supposed to take care of saving people?

Su-myeon figured his own role should simply be to help Kang Han-su reach the true ending and save more survivors than he had in the original game.

After all, that was exactly what Su-myeon had done as a player until now.

“Ah, then I’ll just grab it really quick.”

But while Su-myeon was stepping back, the shaggy-haired man—the most proactive person there and therefore the number-one candidate to die—reached for the doorknob again.

At the sight, Su-myeon lunged forward without thinking and grabbed the man’s hand.

You crazy bastard, I’m telling you, you’ll die if you open it?!

“Ah, what the hell? Seriously!”

Everyone was already on edge after suddenly being thrown into an unfamiliar place.

The shaggy-haired man shouted at Su-myeon for grabbing his hand out of nowhere.

Even the people who had begun drifting away turned their attention back toward them.

Having unintentionally made himself the center of attention, Su-myeon immediately felt deeply uncomfortable.

He frantically wondered what he could say, then an idea occurred to him.

“Does anyone here have any belongings besides the phone exactly as they remember them?”

He had absolutely no intention of drawing even more attention by announcing something like, ‘I’ve played this game before!’

All he needed to do was help people enough to keep his conscience clear, then make sure he survived.

“Something about this is strange.”

To convince them that there was no reason to go back into the rooms and break the rule, Su-myeon continued.

“I was asleep, and when I opened my eyes, I was here. But when I woke up, I was already wearing my glasses.”

He had definitely taken them off before going to sleep.

Wasn’t that strange?

As if to provide further proof, Su-myeon gestured toward his clothes.

A white cotton T-shirt and black sweatpants.

Anyone looking at him would think he had simply gotten out of bed.

And as a Korean, there was no chance he would have gone to sleep with his shoes on, yet even his sneakers were properly fitted on his feet.

“The things you remember having before you came here might not be the same things you have now.”

As Su-myeon said this and adjusted his glasses, the shaggy-haired man finally seemed convinced and released the doorknob again.

Maybe there really was no reason to assume something like his wallet would still be there after he had been kidnapped in the first place...?

The shaggy-haired man muttered to himself, then ran both hands roughly through his already disheveled hair, looking thoroughly confused.

“Haah.... Damn it, then what the hell....”

At last, he seemed to give up on his wallet and stepped back with a sigh.

Su-myeon released a small breath of relief inwardly.

That should have saved him.

The shaggy-haired man.

The man whose name Su-myeon had never even learned in the game because he had died first.

A faint sense of anticipation rose within him.

Maybe this time, he would finally get to learn the name he had never known.

“Then let’s get moving.”

When Han-su stepped forward again to lead the group, the people who had been murmuring among themselves gathered behind him.

Since the same seemingly endless corridor stretched away in both directions, everyone naturally began following Han-su, who had been the first to start moving.

“Then we should also....”

Go.

Just as Su-myeon was about to say that to the shaggy-haired man, an unfamiliar hand suddenly appeared between them.

The instant he noticed that the back of the hand was covered in tattoos, the intruding hand abruptly seized the door and yanked it open.

Before Su-myeon could even react, the man shoved the shaggy-haired man into the room.

“Uh...?”

The door flew open.

Its panel swung directly between Su-myeon and the shaggy-haired man, preventing him from grabbing hold of him.

The old reddish-brown wooden door filled Su-myeon’s vision.

All he could hear was the shaggy-haired man’s bewildered voice from the other side.

“Hey!”

Startled, Su-myeon shoved aside the man who had opened the door and looked inside.