Chapter 1

One of my hobbies is playing games and I am particularly excited about horror games but, since it is a game, it sometimes gets me thinking about what I would do if I was the main character in one of them. I would probably die in the least scariest way. The only exception would be, if I became the main character of the horror game I recently started playing, which is called “Black Castle”. I would rather throw myself out of the window right away.

I say this because “Black Castle” is one hell of a game which creates sympathy for the characters no matter how evil or graphic they are. As a player, it makes me wonder if there is any other game that is this crappy.

I usually am not the type of person who would get stuck on one thing, so it feels strange to me to hang onto a game for a couple of days just so I could see the hidden ending. Hidden ending?. Yes, there is one in this game. It’s actually called “Real ending” or “Happy ending”, but it is considered a hidden one because it was still not revealed yet. No one had discovered it as of now. Even the most prominent game players could barely avoid the death ending, so it would only be natural that no one was able to find it. I’ve started the game from the starting point so often that I’ve already  completely memorized everything. I didn’t even go too far off from the games start, but the protagonist had already died due to my brief mistake, not long after, I died again before I could even reach the checkpoint so I had to restart from the beginning and the protagonist had to suffer yet again.

But I never stopped playing this game.

The ones getting killed in the game were the characters, and not me the player.

I killed the protagonist several times already,  but I could always reset it again.

There were so many other games that were better, but I just had to see the hidden ending.

I never should have done that.

Because the next day when I woke up, I became a character in the “Black Castle”.

I woke up realizing that something was wrong. The style and interior was something that I have never seen before, but I was wondering why everything that I’d seen seemed so familiar. I even looked out of the window thinking that this could not be the only thing familiar, but I just got more miserable. Outside of the window, a graceful crimson moon was floating in the cloudless sky.

Whenever I played “Black Castle” a crimson moon would always appear outside of the window in the game.

‘I entered the game world too’.

Of course, I have never seen this in reality. I’ve only read about it in romance and fantasy novels.

Am I the pathetic protagonist, Lena, who gets beaten up like dog shit? How many times has she died, gotten hurt and ran away?

I immediately looked into the mirror. I thought that a cute little girl with pink eyes and sky blue hair would be reflected in it, but no. It was common brown hair and creepy red eyes that looked back at me.

What the hell is this?

Why do I look like Tess Voncador?!

Tess Voncador is the adoptive daughter of the Voncador family. Mrs. Voncador, who felt sorry for Tess who as a little child was living on the streets ever since she had lost her parents, adopted her and raised her together with her biological daughter Lena, but Tess grew up being a strange child. People didn’t like Tess who never smiled even once. But with Mrs. Voncadors warm affection, both Tess and Lena grew up without much trouble. Until that incident happened.

In the silence of the night, bandits attacked the Voncador household, they firstly killed the mother then proceeded to kidnap Lena. Due to this terrible incident, the Voncador mansion was turned upside down in panic and the struggle to find Lena. However, Lena was never found, and the whole Voncador mansion fell into a deep sorrow except the young Tess who did not even shed one single tear in this tragedy.

The game begins when the missing Lena returns to the mansion on her 19th birthday.

Lena, who had a birthday party, with everyone’s good wishes and in a happy mood from meeting so many new people, decided to head back to the Black Castle, where Tess was staying in, so she could celebrate her birthday together with her sister. But as soon as Lena stepped into the castle, the curse of the Black Castle awakened and soon, terrible monsters started opening their eyes. Lena avoided all of the monsters and one by one she was able to defeat all of them as well as break the curse of the Black Castle. As everyone had already suspected it, the cause of everything was Tess, and now with the curse over the castle being gone, Tess was finally defeated.

The game has a similar progression, but has multiple endings. The endings depend on items or hidden events that a player acquires and unlocks throughout the game play. I myself played the game over and over again to see new endings. But I don’t know all of the items that are important for the game…

Either way, in all of those multiple endings, Tess dies in a variety of ways. She falls off of a height and dies, gets eaten, gets chopped up to death.

I ended up as the character that is destined to die! There is no dream or hope of survival. It is safe to say that the purpose of this character’s creation was death.

“No…..maybe…..”

Rather, isn’t it a good thing to not be in the body of the main character? If Tess, the culprit of everything, used the curse of the Black Castle to torment Lena, she would have to die. But what if Lena doesn’t go through all of those scary things?, if Lena doesn’t go through them, then Tess wouldn’t die either.

This is a good thing!

No. There is no way that I, who possessed Tess’s body and who was not Tess to begin with, would know how to awaken the curse but I was curious, what power did Tess use to manipulate the monsters of the Black Castle?  Besides her gloomy personality, Tess was an ordinary human being.

*hic, hic, hic…*

Just then I was able to hear a woman’s cry in the hallway outside of the room. There were no signs of the sun rising yet, but the sound of crying in the middle of the night was very strange. It somehow felt ominous, I carefully  opened the door and looked to the side where the sound of crying was coming from. The hallway was dark, it was not even lit up by the moonlight and besides the sound of crying, there was no other sound that could be heard. Unlike the relatively warm room, the air that hung in the hallway was chilling and as my eyes got used to the darkness, a woman’s back was gradually getting more visible in the dark.

She was wearing a long black dress and the front of it was covered by a white apron, she looked like a maid from the old era.

And that maid seemed to be the source of the crying sounds.