I Became A Ghost In A Horror Game
Chapter 123: (Side Story) Ha-rims Bag and Red Dream

“It’s a bit awkward for me to say this, but this situation is quite absurd…”“Yeah. It’s a bit awkward for Ha-rim to say that.”

“Um, I guess so.”

Currently, the Mystery Exploration Club was in a standoff with a door from the club room.

The reason is my bag.

Because I’d been stuffing all sorts of bizarre things into it, it reacted with Alice’s items that were already inside and went berserk.

So now, inside the club room, a bag with eyes and legs was crawling around.

“I knew something like this would happen ever since you started putting all sorts of junk in your bag.”

“Ugh, my blanket…! The bag is chewing on my blanket!”

“But it doesn’t seem dangerous?”

“Perhaps the tools and junk inside the bag got mixed up, and a specific tool’s activation conditions were accidentally met.”

I added that in that case, a tool with relatively easy activation conditions would have been activated, and if the activation conditions were easy, its power would be weak.

“So, not all the tools in the bag have gone berserk.”

“Sorry, guys… I’ll pick up less junk from now on.”

“So you’re not saying you’ll stop picking it up altogether.”

I can’t pass by things that might be helpful someday!

I believe without a doubt that these things will be helpful.

But I should restrain myself… right?

“So, what was activated?”

I answered Kyeong-min’s question.

“It seems like the arm of the Under-the-Bed Darkness monster and the sleep mushroom, which has sleep-inducing properties, were activated. Neither of them is a particularly threatening tool.”

“The Darkness monster’s arm disappears if you hit it roughly, right?”

Suho said, recalling past encounters with monsters.

As soon as he recalled that, he looked for something that could be used as a weapon and grabbed it.

“You should be able to defeat it with that. But if you hit the sleep mushroom, it’ll release sleep spores and make everyone sleepy, right?”

“Then, wouldn’t it be enough to just hit it and go to sleep without bothering to call Alice?”

“Hmm, now that I think about it… Should we just hit it and take a nap?”

“Sometimes, taking a nap can be nice. We used to sit around in the room and sleep together…”

Suho immediately opened the door and hit the monsterfied bag with the weapon he was holding.

Seeing it writhing in pain, I thought, if I can inflict pain, maybe I can tame it?

Suho swung the weapon again, and as a result of the monster being defeated, the club room was filled with spores.

And so, the others and I all fell into the world of sleep.

“Huh?”

And I woke up in a dream.

I was momentarily dumbfounded by the contradiction of falling asleep and waking up, but since I’d experienced it a few times, I quickly adapted.

“It’s a lucid dream!”

“But did lucid dreams always have the feature of dreaming together?”

To my question, Kyeong-min recalled related information.

“It’s probably a separate phenomenon called dream walking.”

An occult phenomenon where you enter another person’s dream.

It’s also called a shared dream, so it fits this situation.

Perhaps because the entity that made us dream was a monster, it was easy to get caught up in this phenomenon.

“Umm… I feel kind of scared.”

Eun-jeong whined.

“I guess so. When we’ve fallen into dreams before, it was when we were in danger.”

However, unlike then, it wasn’t caused by an external attack, so we can enjoy the current phenomenon.

I comforted Eun-jeong and walked through the dream world.

“It’s so dreamlike. It’s sparkling and beautiful.”

Clouds of various colors. Mists of similar properties.

In between them, unidentified light sources shimmer and bewitch the eyes.

Eun-jeong, who had been blankly watching the splendid sight, murmured.

“It’s pretty, but it’s blurry… It feels like it’ll disappear any second.”

“It’s just a dream after all. We’ll wake up eventually.”

“Then we can just dream it again, right?”

It would be nice if I could see this sight again with my friends.

It would be even better if Alice was with us next time.

“But guys, I just had a scary thought.”

“What is it?”

“This is a shared dream, right? What if one of us has a nightmare or something? When we’re stressed, scary things sometimes appear in our dreams.”

“Hearing you say something ominous makes me feel like it’s really going to happen…”

“Actually, this is a nightmare. You’re dreaming alone, and we’re fake.”

“Huh, really?”

“No, I’m not?”

Bickering, bickering!

While Suho and Eun-jeong were bickering.

I was worried that the dream might really turn into a nightmare.

Ominous premonitions are often correct, and dreams are unpredictable and uncontrollable.

Hmm, I was going to get a good night’s sleep, but maybe I was being too naive.

That’s when I slightly raised my guard.

Whoosh-!

“Hey, I think something just passed by.”

“Your imagination?”

“According to clichés, it’s never just your imagination.”

A sense of unease.

In this dreamlike and unique dream world, feeling a sense of unease wasn’t difficult.

But I felt that something with an unusually high degree of unease was approaching from beyond.

When we looked at the same place at the same time, there was…

A storm raging.

A storm mixed with a girl’s laughter was approaching, scattering the clouds and mists in the dream!

“Why is there a storm in the dream!”

I didn’t think that storm was just a simple recreation of a natural disaster created by the dream.

I thought it was something more complex. Something more terrifying.

“Let’s run away!”

After running away for a while, we finally managed to evade the storm.

Even though it was a dream, we were all exhausted.

What was that storm?

It felt somewhat familiar… As I slowly pondered, I felt the figure of a bird fly past my eyes.

Wait, that bird!

“It’s a dodo bird! I’ve seen that guy before.”

I remembered it as one of Alice’s monsters.

I think it was a monster who liked racing.

I still remember the time I won a race by scheming.

It was nice to see it in my dream.

Why did this monster come out in my dream?

When I looked at it, I could see that the dodo bird was racing with other monsters.

And not only the dodo bird, but also many other monsters were competing with each other.

“They’re competing so intensely.”

“They really seem to like competing.”

They were racing, kicking balls, and taking tests non-stop and desperately, as if they were metaphorically depicting our competitive society.

Their competition seems foolish, as if they live for the competition rather than competing for themselves.

But what makes us unable to laugh is the thought that we too might be living like them.

As I was contemplating, the monsters who were with the dodo bird approached us.

Huh?

“Fight.”

“Huh? We don’t want to.”

The dodo bird suddenly told us to fight.

We expressed our intention to refuse, but the dodo bird opened its beak as if it was angry and repeated the same words.

“Fight! Fight!”

The other surrounding monsters were also approaching us.

I felt that the atmosphere was unusual.

Our surroundings were mostly filled with red monsters.

“Compete! We have to compete! To do that, we have to run!”

“We want to stay still…”

“To stay still, you have to run. To run, you have to run twice as fast. Even breathing isn’t free. At least not in this red country! The Red Queen is watching us!”

“Let’s compete with grades! Private education! Everyone else is doing it!”

“We don’t have time for this!”

When Eun-jeong cowered and hid behind Suho in the atmosphere that forced competition.

A voice that stopped the monsters was heard.

“Stop it.”

“Huh!”

The voice came from a hole in the ground.

Alice was glaring at the monsters with a fierce look in her eyes.

“I know your nature well, but don’t make things difficult for the children.”

Alice, who popped out of the hole, brushed the dirt off her clothes and stood in front of us.

Just by doing that, the red monsters grumbled and returned to their positions.

“It’s Alice! Is this also a dream? Hey!”

“Slap!”

“…Even if it’s a dream, please don’t suddenly slap my butt. This is a dream, but this body is the real body, you know?”

“So Alice is dreaming too?”

“No. I came into the dream with my body as it is on the Monkey Dream Train. It’s a space where the dreams of people who are sleeping somewhere in the world are woven together like a net. Does it make sense if you think of it as the internet?”

So, what was Alice doing in the space called a dream?

It seemed like Alice had brought those red monsters, and when I looked closely, I could see that there were also monsters who were working, not just competing.

“Isn’t that Ariel?”

Oh. It really is.

Jack and Ariel, Little Red Riding Hood, and Pinocchio are all gathered.

Only Uncle Peter is missing this time too.

Ariel, who is working hard among the red monsters, can be seen.

“The elegant me… why am I doing this hard labor…”

She complained, but she was working diligently.

Carrying red bricks, is she being punished for something?

I thought Alice had forgiven her for the Angel incident.

“What are those guys doing?”

“Um, I’m just making them work as compensation for helping them, whether directly or indirectly.”

Alice said with a face that looked like her heart was completely relieved.

It was a stark contrast to the expressions of the other suffering devils.

Pinocchio, who found us from afar, approached us.

“Alice’s children. I usually don’t say things like this, but the labor is too harsh. I can’t even sleep because it’s a dream. They say you should just be average to live comfortably, but they’re only making me, who has production abilities, work… Please stop her…”

Then she suddenly complained.

Pinocchio, who is usually quiet and doesn’t talk first, was quite shocking.

How much work have they given her?

Ariel, who was on the other side, said angrily.

“We’re suffering enough…! Don’t rest, and do your share!”

And then Little Red Riding Hood and Jack also groaned and muttered.

“This is… the pain of labor… but Alice is just watching comfortably… I feel like a revolutionary ideology as thick as blood is rising from my chest…!”

“I’m… happy because it’s like tilling a field… Uwah!”

“Hey! Jack! Don’t fall down, work! Damn it, Peter Pan… It’s good that you gave me the materials with the power to create Neverland, but you’re the only one who slipped away…!”

“Hey! Hurry up and work!”

Alice, who was brutally making them work, was a bit unfamiliar.

I hid my confusion and asked Alice why she was making them do such a job.

“It’s to build a castle.”

Alice said that she would build a red castle in her dream.

This was to prepare for the upcoming disaster, and she added that if she had this, she would be able to deal with any enemy.

“Alice is super strong now, right?”

“That’s right. But it’s better to be prepared. I’m not invincible, you know.”

“Is that so? Then, should we help too?”

“I’m going to refuse because it seems like it will touch the Child Protection Act. Instead, should I show you the construction site from the sky so you won’t be bored?”

Alice summoned a monster that could fly and put us on it.

Then we flew into the sky, and the red castle, which was built on a larger scale than I thought, made me admire it.

The tiles had a regular pattern like a chessboard, and there were various places such as stadiums, colosseums, and testing grounds, so it was fun to watch.

“It’s like a theme park…”

“It’s unfinished, so I might have to redo everything.”

“…Um. You said it was prepared for danger, right?”

“That’s right. Did you come up with any good ideas, Ha-rim?”

“That’s right! In my opinion… it would be nice to add symmetry. So, like this, spheres floating in the sky like the sun…”

“Oh… that’s cool, isn’t it?”

We didn’t know how time was passing until we woke up from our sleep that day because we were so busy deciding on the concept of the castle.

It was Pinocchio who was getting more and more tired as our ideas were added, but it was a really fun day.

Engineers being overworked is a universal truth.

If you’re curious about the April 1st chapter, here you go: Chapter 122.5

As always, if you spot any mistakes, feel free to let me know—and I hope you enjoyed the read!

—Chip>