Chapter 1

Chapter 1 : This Is a Survival Story (1)

〈BEST〉Random-Romance-Fantasy-Reader-Passing-By

Why does the second male lead only ever give without holding anything back?

???: Our cozy trash does not know how to do that.

〈BEST〉(•ˋ _ ˊ•)

〈BEST〉Only-Rocky-Roads-for-Sek-Iwon

✔‘Do you want to die first, or should I die first?’

Kill me first and go.

〈BEST〉King-Meow-Go-Home

He is going to get completely wrecked by our Karon later anyway.

[Exiting the comments for the selected chapter.]

[I do not know why you want to see them.]

[I say I would rather recommend viewing the next chapter.]

Yeah, sure. Recommending the next chapter now, are we?

I glared at the shameless system that gobbled up an absurd number of points for designated viewing and only now had the nerve to start giving advice.

I rummaged around in case there was a better option, but that failed too.

Some readers occasionally left a trail of spoilers in the comments, so I had allowed myself a shallow little hope.

My choice to prioritize cost-effectiveness had failed.

Should I really have listened to the system and viewed the main text instead?

“Cough—!”

Blood surged up in a gush.

It felt as though the ending were waving at me from far away.

Calling me to hurry over to the afterlife.

[1 hour remains before the penalty suspension ends.

The original work has been significantly affected, and a branching path has been created.

Please beware of the aftereffects of the penalty.]

Of course, before that, there was still the backlash from that wide-area skill I had cast in a fit of temper.

Even so, the reward for enduring all that godawful suffering came rushing over me like a tide.

[I recall it as a wistful memory...( *︾▽︾)]

You system bastard, shut up already.

It had all begun with a trivial accident that dropped me into a forest that would not have lost out even to the Amazon.

---

Ding!

[True name 〈Iwon〉 ……Processing…… Identity confirmed.]

[This is inside a □ work titled 〈Your ■■ for □■ Me〉.]

[We aim to provide enjoyable ori□inal-work appreciation and an im■ersive expe□ience.]

[The command □□ will shortly ■□ㄷ――▽ㅅ〓∞∏]

[!ERROR!]

[……Processing……]

[I hope you survi■e.]

[BEEEEEP――――――]

…

…

…

The forest was damp.

As I was soaked by the mist the trees exhaled whenever dawn broke and by the heavy rain that came down whenever I started to forget it might, I found myself thinking that this was fortunate.

At least I would not die of thirst.

Fuck, how many days had it been?

Clutching my growling, starving stomach, I forced my feet onward.

I had heard that starving to death was quite painful. There was a reason people said that even a ghost looked better if it had died on a full stomach.

“If I could at least eat a hot meal before I die, I would have no regrets.”

My head drooped weakly.

My dirt-caked toes came into view.

Stuck in the sucking mud and smeared into a filthy mess, they were no different from my situation.

I had not been given anything even resembling shoes from the start. All I had were a thin tunic and a pair of wide trousers that came down to my calves.

Talk about foul taste.

[This is inside the original work 〈Your Regret After Killing Me〉.]

[▶Load Original Work (╶1P)]

By now, I had grown used to the words that never disappeared from the corner of my vision to the point that they no longer bothered me.

At least enough to know that they were not a simple hallucination, and that I was not floundering around in some absurd delusion cooked up by my own brain.

It would have been even better if I had thrown out ideas like kidnapping, confinement, being stranded, or going missing before I suffered from hunger and the rashes and swelling from my scraped bare skin.

But for four days, I had been wandering through this damned forest—through this cursed original work called 〈Your Regret After Killing Me〉.

It was a phenomenon I could neither deny, understand, nor empathize with, yet I had no choice but to accept it.

Because if I did not, then it meant I had truly gone insane.

I kneaded my waterlogged, shriveled fingers and pressed myself against a tree trunk that shielded me from the rain.

After walking through the downpour for half a day, I was a complete mess.

“A cigarette……”

…which I did not have.

I frowned as I reached for a cigarette that was not there out of habit.

I knew what the source of my anxiety was.

Even when all I had left was the animal instinct of starvation, I still kept digging through my thoughts, trying to recover my memory. Day and night, even in my sleep.

Because none of this made any sense.

When I came to with a ringing in my ears that felt as though it were slicing them apart, and saw my vision filled with red [ERROR] text, my first thought had been, Ah, this is a dream.

Which was only natural, because the moment those fragments of broken script vanished, I became aware that I was walking somewhere.

Before I could even be flustered by the unfamiliar scenery, I should have questioned the act itself.

As though time had been carved away, I had already been trudging through the muddy forest before I was even conscious—

How was that supposed to make sense?

My last memory had been a scene from the monotonous life I repeated every day.

At best, I was the kind of ghost who spent each day clutching at the ragged end of delusion and putting on a convincing imitation of living. Lately, I had not even picked up a brush in a long time, merely draping myself in the hollow prestige of a better past.

Before I was thrown into this place, I had just been one mediocre artist among many.

Which, in other words, meant I was not a person suited for survival.

Maybe some higher-dimensional being had taken one look at my pathetic state and thrown me into this hell. No, was this actually hell?

“If you are just going to let that talent rot, then give it to me and go hole yourself up in a temple somewhere.”

A useless voice, like an auditory hallucination, swept through my mind.

When had that been? One of my nosy friends had said it while dragging me out after I had refused to leave the house for half a year.

“You were right about everything. I should have given it to you and shut myself away. This place…… a temple would be better.”

So if you are going to work me like this, at least throw me proper food, a house, and clothes first, System.

“Shouldn’t you at least tell me where to get points?”

Load Original Work? What was this, grapes on the vine? Dried pollack hanging from the ceiling? Shouldn’t you tell me the method before torturing me with false hope?

I had no way of knowing whether the errors had been fixed or not, and did that thing realize that the abandoned, survival-unfit me was on the verge of death?

“Ugh!”

I had been grumbling inwardly while touching the empty corner of my mouth for no reason, and I slipped on the moss clinging to a tree root.

I knew, of course, that things would be slipperier than usual in the rain.

But the pain from the dry branch beside it scraping the top of my foot was worse than the fact that I had twisted my ankle.

“Ha, this is driving me insane.”

I pulled out the splintered fragment and washed away the dirt and blood clinging to me in the drizzling rain.

The blood was coming out in alarming gulps. I needed to stop it.

I looked around, grabbed some suitable grass, and wrapped it tightly around my foot. It stung even more, but I had nothing better.

I thought about tearing my clothes to use instead, but the crude fabric was so tough that only my fingers hurt.

In movies and novels, they always ripped so easily. For a moment, I regretted never having worked on my grip strength, and then even that thought vanished.

[You have achieved the achievement 〈Try Looking Where You Are Going〉.]

[You gain points +1P.]

I was grimacing and enduring the pain in the top of my foot when words suddenly filled my vision.

“An achievement?”

As though it had reacted to my words, a mass of unreleased achievement milestones buried under question marks appeared before my eyes, packed so densely they nearly blotted everything out, then vanished again.

That thing had never reacted before, even when I had forced myself through the embarrassment and rattled off words like status window, system, level up, quest, and mission while asking where the hell I was supposed to get those worthless points.

But an achieeevement?

The achievement had appeared with such exquisite timing that it was almost as if it had understood my complaints.

As though this whole situation—me standing here bleeding all over the place—were the very result the system bastard had been steering me toward this whole time—

The fact that I was even thinking that was proof enough that I was no longer in my right mind.

The moment I gained the point, the words ‘Load Original Work’ sparkled even more brightly in the corner of my vision, but I ignored them.

What I needed was not some uncertain original work. What I needed was a proper house. Not a useless excuse for one made by roughly tying together thick branches.

I had not eaten anything, and on top of that, I had spent four days suffering from insomnia. Even today, I had woken repeatedly because of the rain that had started before dawn.

And if something from the original work suddenly sprang out, I was in no state to deal with it.

“I am sleepy. I hurt. I am cold. I just want to stop getting rained on.”

Limping on my busted foot, I left the spot behind.

Even though it was obvious that no matter how far I went, there would be nothing but endless forest and not the slightest trace that intelligent life existed here.

---

I take that back. There was a house.

Not a five-star hotel, but more than enough to keep the rain off me.

The moment I confirmed that, I collapsed and blacked out so completely it would have been believable if someone said I had fainted from hunger. My film simply cut out.

When I opened my eyes again, it was dawn.

As the dim, brightening light crept in, the surrounding state of things came into view—the remains of a house, too ruined to really be called one.

In the tiny space, no more than a few pyeong across, weeds ran wild. Vines were wrapped thickly around the walls, and thick tree roots had ripped through the ground here and there.

Most of it had broken down and disappeared, but it seemed that the small portion of the roof that remained had just barely shielded me from last night’s rain.

“Somehow I found a place fit to lie down before passing out.”

Now that I was in my right mind, one thing was absolutely clear: what I had done was insane. I had really gone to sleep in a place open on all sides.

“……This is not an apocalypse genre, right?”

Looking at the ruined house site, I felt wretched.

Maybe surviving this far without any background knowledge at all had been a miracle in itself.

I kept staring at the sparkling text in the corner of my vision.

My last line of defense, the one I could not postpone any longer, was right there.

The original work……

“Achievement.”

Once again, the screen filled with phrases smothered under question marks. But that was not what I wanted to see.

What I was looking at was the very top line.

[Points Held: 1P]

That was why.

To think it had taken me four whole days to discover the simple algorithm: complete an achievement, receive points, and use those points to load the original work.

My mental state was rotten.

I fixed my gaze on the very first completed entry among the countless ‘???’s—the achievement called 〈Try Looking Where You Are Going〉.

“If all the other achievements are like this, then this is basically a random playthrough……”

Let us stop that horrifying line of thought right there.

More importantly, there was the crucial question of whether I should spend my precious 1P on loading the original work.

A point I had no idea when or where I might obtain again, and a function called Load Original Work that I had no idea how many more points it would keep devouring.

In truth, it was not even a dilemma. I would need to resolve that if I wanted the story to tell me what came next.

It was a tutorial.

That thing.

Either I stayed trapped in the forest forever and turned this into a survival story, or I moved on to the next stage.

The decision did not take long.

I swept back the hair that had fallen forward in long, drooping strands while I kept my head bowed.

“Do it. Spend it. Let us go. I am reading this.”

If I had no information, then wandering around like this until I died would be the faster outcome.

I needed to check what kind of original work I had been shoved into and forced to suffer through.

Even if it did not address the problem bearing down on me this instant, it should at least help me understand this godforsaken reality I had been dumped into.

“Load Original Work.”

[A scene from 〈Your Regret After Killing Me〉 is being loaded.]

[1 point has been deducted.]

Even if it was not a three-dimensional hologram or some vivid 4D experience, I had expected at least a 3D or, failing that, a 2D image.

Mm. I had overestimated it.

No sooner had the point deduction message vanished than a window popped up that looked exactly like a web novel reader.

Black text began to fill an eye-friendly off-white page, and once a single page was packed full, the writing stopped.

「(Excerpt omitted)……She barely managed to draw a ragged breath as she glared ahead. The war, born from long-standing hostility, bled without end, and Ariti had to be trampled in a pool of blood spilled by her own people.

“What did you just say?”

Ariti’s hair, which would normally have been a pale blue, was thoroughly stained with blood, making it resemble Karon’s blood-red eyes as he stared coldly at her.

In the middle of the battlefield, thick with the stench of blood, Karon swept back his jet-black hair with an elegant gesture.

Forcing his sharp eyes into a softer curve.

“I said we should stop. This pointless war.”

Ariti’s blue-green eyes trembled minutely. This endless slaughter could be stopped? Just like that? So easily?

Steadying the heart that threatened to waver under the enemy’s honeyed tongue, Ariti barely forced strength into her injured leg and endured.

Even though her delicate, trembling leg had long since lost its function.

“Then that means—”

“—Ah, but there is a condition.”

Karon murmured, moving his pale face even closer as his red lips parted.

“I suppose I shall have to take you. There should be spoils of war to complete the picture, should there not be?”

Faced with Karon’s gaze, slithering over her like a snake, Ariti could not quite……(To be continued)」

The instant I finished reading the last line, the letters began to disappear, scattering pale motes of light as though they somehow knew I was done.

I stared blankly at the afterimage, then found myself a little bewildered.

“Um, what…… was that?”

Surely that lunatic confessing in the middle of a blood-soaked battlefield was not the male lead.

The genre seemed very, very strange.

It definitely seemed to be a romance, but the setting was anything but ordinary.

“What exactly is he taking as spoils of war?”

The idea that this was a world where a blood-starved madman of a male lead ran wild made the back of my neck throb.

The problem was that there was no way to tell whether that part was the beginning of the original work, the middle, or the end.

The end of the war? A truce? The middle of the war?

Whatever it was, I sincerely hoped the protagonists would beat each other up and fall in love all on their own.