Chapter 1: Dawn Breaks

As the first ray of dawn appeared in the sky, Light once again fell upon this Cursed Land, and the Darkness on the ground slowly receded like a tide.

The churning Darkness retreated into every corner like a living thing.

One Shadow stopped as it withdrew, caught at the boundary between the woods and the beach, as if hesitating over something.

Only when the bright sunlight was about to reach it did the Shadow reluctantly spit out the thing it had kept wrapped inside itself.

Then it slipped into the shade of the trees and vanished without a trace.

What the Shadow spat out was a body that constantly fell apart, reformed, and changed in ways words could hardly describe.

It was like a human-shaped wad of paper that had swollen into pulp after being soaked in water, except the material that had come apart wasn’t paper, but human tissue.

At first glance, it was as disgusting and grotesque as it could possibly be.

Fortunately, when sunlight fell upon the mass, the Darkness clinging to the body rose like thick fog and dispersed.

The body’s disintegration stopped.

A sound like a drumbeat rang out as the heart at the center of the ruined form began beating again, never to stop.

With each beat, drifting calcium and phosphorus reformed into Hydroxyapatite Crystals, creating a hard framework.

Collagen and nerve fibers attached to it, and then blood vessels and muscles began to grow across its surface.

The internal organs formed almost instantly, then were covered by spreading tissue and structures.

At the same time, skin began to grow, protecting the new flesh in the blink of an eye.

Then, a naked young man—

Well, to be precise, he wasn’t completely naked.

He was at least wearing a pair of shorts.

In any case, the man sat up on the beach and opened his eyes, regret filling his ink-black gaze.

Now, allow me to properly introduce this newly resurrected, deeply regretful unlucky bastard…

—Wen Zhi, twenty-four years old, was a Teacher…

He’d been an orphan since he was eight, and as an adult, he’d become a well-known Teacher in the field of managing troubled children.

As for why he’d become a Teacher for troubled children instead of working at an orphanage, it wasn’t because Wen Zhi had been a problem child himself.

Mainly, he thought that Teachers at orphanages didn’t make much money, while managing students with special needs let him donate plenty of things to the children at the orphanage every month.

All in all, thanks to his unique talent, Wen Zhi was like the top host in the escort business in his field…

If nothing unexpected happened, he might even reach Zhang ○ Feng’s level someday.

Of course, that was only if nothing unexpected happened.

The fact that Wen Zhi had ended up on this Deserted Island was proof enough that something unexpected had happened…

It all started two days ago.

That day, Wen Zhi received a file from a student he was friendly with at the school office.

The file contained a game.

According to the cute student with a healthy, sun-kissed complexion, it was a distinctive and very interesting survival horror game, so they had sent it to Wen Zhi for him to check out.

Curious, Wen Zhi opened the file, but before he could download and install it, his computer screen went black on its own.

When the computer lit up again, a webpage suddenly appeared on the screen.

It was pitch-black, with a single line of bright white text in the center:

“Do you want to know what it feels like to truly be alive?”

Beneath the text were two buttons.

One said “yes,” and the other also said “yes.”

Between the two buttons was an “OK,” and the close button in the corner of the page was a “√.”

“…”

After hesitating for a second, Wen Zhi immediately opened the Task Manager…

And, sure enough, found it completely useless.

As he considered whether to try something else, he noticed a small green ball floating on the webpage.

…Oh, right.

He’d almost forgotten the school still had this old computer.

Then what he had to do was simple—

—[Buruubu]****[Yura Yura]

Come forth! 360 Security Guard!

…In the end, the battle was devastating.

To put it simply, the computer exploded.

Literally.

Wen Zhi was closest to it, so he naturally took the blast right in the face.

Fortunately, his constitution was unusual, and he wasn’t seriously hurt.

Or rather, he’d recovered completely in the instant after being injured.

Even if his physical body was utterly destroyed, Wen Zhi could restore himself in the time it took to breathe.

So even though the computer explosion had reached the absurd force of nearly a kilogram of TNT, it still couldn’t send him to another world.

Just as Wen Zhi, his face covered in soot, sneered and thought, ‘That’s it?’

The other side chose to fight dirty.

Two ghostly claws reached out from the charred computer wreckage, one as black as ink and the other as white as moonlight.

They grabbed him and dragged him into a black-and-white vortex that had appeared out of nowhere.

Then Wen Zhi lost consciousness.

When he opened his eyes again, he found himself on a Deserted Island.

Returning to the present, after being tormented by the Darkness, Wen Zhi deeply regretted what he’d done.

He wondered why he’d been so curious that he had to open that file.

Otherwise, he wouldn’t be stuck here alone, playing a single-player survival game and wasting his time and life.

Thinking about what he’d gone through yesterday, Wen Zhi still felt a little shaken.

But he didn’t think he could blame his ordeal yesterday on his own carelessness.

Who could’ve known that what looked like an ordinary deserted-island survival game would turn out to be Rule-Based Horror?

And there wasn’t even a tutorial.

The moment it got dark, it killed you outright.

If it were a game, only a hardcore masochist would play it.

Forget it.

There was no point regretting it now.

He’d better think about how to handle the next nightfall.

He didn’t want to experience dying and coming back to life until his mind went blurry again.

He wasn’t afraid of death itself, but that didn’t mean he liked dying for no reason.

With that in mind, Wen Zhi slapped his cheeks, stood up, and cleared his head.

He decided to stop wasting time and ignored the Mother’s Phantom fading away beside him as he prepared to get moving.

The Mother’s Phantom’s eyes were also full of regret, because yesterday had truly been the closest Wen Zhi had ever come to actual death.

The strange Darkness had almost swallowed him whole.

If he hadn’t outmatched it, he would probably have been sleeping in the cool summer night by now.

Just as Wen Zhi was sorting out his thoughts and preparing to take action, a sea breeze blew past, making the bare-chested man shiver.

…Well, he should probably find something to cover himself with first.

Wen Zhi carefully looked around, trying to find something he could use to cover himself for the time being.

But soon, his attention was drawn to something else…

—An unusual Diary came into view.

For the Ghost, this was a situation it hadn’t encountered in countless days and nights.

Naturally, emotions it had never felt before began to spread through its thoughts.

Was it nervousness?

Anticipation?

Fear?

Or something else?

The Ghost didn’t know.

After all, it wasn’t very smart yet.

Perhaps throughout all those countless cycles of day and night, before it had grown numb, the Ghost had prayed and waited for a miracle and a change to arrive.

But now that a turning point had finally come, it was so bewildered that its thoughts nearly short-circuited.

Fortunately, it didn’t take long for the Ghost to recover from its brief shutdown.

It continued watching the man in front of it in silence.

Of course, watching him was about all the Ghost could do…

By the Ghost’s standards, the person before it was an ordinary human.

He looked quite good by human standards, though only average by its own.

—What was a human?

A question suddenly occurred to the Ghost, and then some fragments flashed through its mind.

—Humans are an exceedingly mediocre species.

They are born with incomplete minds, cannot sense Mana, and can barely produce Ether.

Thus, they are miserable creatures incapable of using magic.

Strange words bounced through the gaps in the Ghost’s thoughts like scattered marbles.

These memories and bits of knowledge were jumbled, fragmented, and disorganized.

They only surfaced when it made associations and tried to think.

The Ghost’s mind grew chaotic.

Countless memories and questions arose in its head, prompting it to think, and as it thought, it recalled even more.

In the end, the Ghost stopped thinking.

It decided that since it couldn’t make sense of any of it, it might as well leave it for later…

The Ghost turned its attention back to the human man before it.

Then it realized that at some point, the man had started walking toward it—or, more precisely, toward the Diary it was attached to.

“Zhelizenmehuiyouyibenrijiben (Why is there a Diary here?)”

As he walked, he made periodic fundamental sounds by vibrating the vocal cords in his throat.

—This was probably the human’s language.

The Ghost guessed that if it was right, the human before it had more or less the same speech mechanics and habits as the humans it knew.

As for his physical structure, the Ghost was 99.9 percent certain it was more or less the same as the humans in its Impression.

After all, it had watched Wen Zhi reassemble himself right in front of it…

The remaining 0.1 percent of uncertainty was because Wen Zhi had reassembled himself right in front of it…

—The humans in the memories I recalled didn’t come back to life after dying.

As the man drew nearer, the Ghost observed him more clearly.

It could now make out every change and detail in his body.

His muscles were beautifully shaped, like they had been carved from marble.

Even by the Ghost’s exacting standards, it could hardly find a flaw.

What a perfect body…

If only it could try touching him and see how he felt, but unfortunately, it had no physical form it could use to make contact…

A strange thought suddenly popped into the Ghost’s mind, but it immediately felt that something was wrong.

—No, wait.

I remember I was male when I was alive, too.

Why would I think something like that?

In the end, the Ghost could only attribute the strange thought to some kind of scientific curiosity…

It vaguely remembered that it had been a prominent figure in academia when it was alive.

Wanting to touch a nearly perfect biological body was perfectly normal…

Having managed to convince itself, the Ghost cast aside its stray thoughts and refocused on the man’s facial expressions.

The memory fragments that had surfaced a short while earlier told the Ghost that in the world where it had once lived, most species with a similar humanoid form shared the same facial expressions.

So, since it couldn’t yet decipher the man’s language, it could only try to guess his intentions from his expressions.

If the knowledge in the Ghost’s memories about human expressions was applicable, it could roughly tell that the man’s expression was one of confusion and curiosity, with little ill intent.

Even so, it couldn’t stop itself from feeling nervous and uneasy.

—What will he do?

Will he pick up the Diary?

What will happen to me if he does?

What will he do with the Diary?

Will anything else happen?

Everything was unknown, but beneath its fear and unease of the unknown, the Ghost had to admit that it was also filled with uncontrollable anticipation and excitement.

—I’ve wanted this situation to change for so long.

At last, under the Ghost’s watchful gaze, the man picked up the Diary.

A strange connection arose within the Ghost.