Chapter 1
Chapter 1
Service Termination Notice
-[Notice] Service Termination Notice
Hello to all the users who played Abyss. This is the GM.
It feels like this may be the last time I greet you all like this.
Regrettably, Abyss will be terminating its service at the end of this year. All access to the game will only be available until 23:59 on December 31st, 20XX, after which gameplay will no longer be possible.
We are truly grateful and deeply sorry to all the users who loved Abyss until now.
“What is this supposed to mean….”
Sitting in front of my computer, I read the words reflected in my eyes.
“The service is being terminated, service termination… shutdown…?”
As if denying reality, I read it over and over again.
And yet the meaning of those words remained painfully clear, plunging me into despair once more.
“I kept calling it a dead game, but I never meant for it to actually die….”
Today, my only friend died.
In other words, the game I played had gone under.
It had already been half-dead to begin with, a game only the dedicated few still played, but I never imagined they would officially pull the plug like this. Service termination. No matter what, service termination?
“They said they’d patch it and revive it! They said they’d listen to the users!”
And after saying all that, this is how they stab us in the back?
They even held a user conference not long ago. I was so upset that I couldn’t attend because of something that came up!
Once again, I felt betrayed by the management. I was the idiot for trusting them.
“Ughhh….”
My insides felt like they were burning. There was no way I could endure this sober.
For moments like this, I pulled out the bottle with the red cap that I kept stocked in the fridge.
“I hoped I’d never have to use this.”
Truthfully, I wasn’t much of a drinker to begin with. It wasn’t something I particularly enjoyed.
Even so, whenever an unexpected disaster struck and I felt like borrowing the strength of alcohol, I always kept something strong prepared just in case.
“Kghhh….”
It felt like my throat was on fire. Maybe because it was straight soju without any snacks, but even my stomach felt like it was burning.
No, thinking about it again, it probably would’ve felt the same even with snacks. My insides were genuinely twisting apart right now.
Since I had a pretty low alcohol tolerance, the buzz hit me immediately. But unlike usual, my emotions were running wild, so the soju went down smoothly.
“I’m dying, seriously dying…. I’m really gonna die. You sons of bitches at Ionix….”
With my face flushed red, I cursed the game company. No exaggeration, it genuinely felt like I was dying.
Only after losing it did I realize how important it had been to me. I only now understood just how precious Abyss was in my life.
Maybe it was because I was drunk, but emotions suddenly welled up inside me, and after crying like a child for several minutes—
“What the hell am I even doing….”
Maybe the tears sobered me up a little. I placed the soju bottle down on the desk and picked up my phone to clear my head.
The place I logged into was the Abyss Gallery I visited regularly.
It was a community made for the dwindling number of users to share game information, complain about the game together, and otherwise socialize amongst themselves. Though of course, I never bothered with the socializing part.
“Looks like a lot of people came.”
Unlike before, when maybe one or two posts would appear every hour, the place was far more active now.
Apparently, after hearing the news that the game had died, people had come flooding in from all over.
Still, Abyss had once held a prestigious place in the gaming scene, so it seemed people at least still remembered the name.
As I quietly watched the chaos, I found myself wanting to join in too, so I made a post.
<It’s a depressing night haha….>
(Photo of two bottles of soju sitting on a desk)
Today is the day my only friend died
It was the first friend I made after turning twenty
But it passed away so meaninglessly
I’m even drinking a lot even though I normally don’t
You guys shouldn’t drink this stuff
-This guy’s really losing his mind lol
-It’s your fault though if you hadn’t done stuff like Camilla
-Shouldn’t you have taken better care of your friend?
-That friend is my friend though
-Wow your friend was popular
-Teacher, if you drink without snacks you’ll ruin your stomach at least eat some crackers with it
The reactions were unexpectedly heated. Since I’d been a top-ranked player and had posted strategy guides on the gallery a few times, comments poured in rapidly, recommendations stacked up generously, and the post was quickly promoted to the featured section.
“Heh.”
Watching it all, I let out a small laugh at the thought that maybe the days I’d spent playing hadn’t been meaningless after all.
But then the feeling faded again.
“What’s the point of any of this.”
The game itself was dead.
Maybe because the depression was consuming my body, my eyelids began growing heavier too.
Leaning my chair back and staring at the ceiling, the fluorescent lights flickered at the edge of my vision.
“I wish all of this was just a dream.”
I wished that when I woke up, the shutdown notice would be gone. I wished Abyss would become a god-tier game everyone played.
If that happened, I’d devote everything I had to playing it.
“Please make our game into a god-tier game....”
Though my mind was hazy, it was a sincere wish from the bottom of my heart.
“As if that’d ever happen….”
But ideals and reality were always different.
I was long past the age of dreaming, and unable to fight off the alcohol any longer, I eventually fell asleep.
Would you believe me if I said the world had changed after I woke up?
It wasn’t something like strange creatures suddenly flying through the sky, or a zombie outbreak, or society suddenly reversing the roles of men and women.
Compared to examples like those, it was a much smaller change.
The world hadn’t undergone some massive cataclysmic upheaval. It was a subtle change, but one far too significant to ignore.
First of all… the game I played had become a god-tier game overnight.
<Abyss Achieves #1 PC Cafe Market Share!>
<People Shocked by Abyss Pro Gamer Lee Junhyuk’s Salary—How Much Is It?>
The game I played, Abyss, was at best considered a decent game. Looking at it objectively, it was a dead game.
It had once shined brightly as the supposed hope of Korean games, only to steadily plummet downhill afterward.
The developers’ bizarre patches, the increasingly stagnant player base made up only of longtime veterans.
Terrible hero balance that never improved no matter how much they patched it. The constant drying up of new players.
With fewer than three thousand concurrent players, there had been no hope in sight.
Wasn’t it taking twenty minutes just to queue into a ranked game because there were so few players? Me being a top-ranked player was part of it, but fundamentally, it was undeniably a dead game with no people left.
“And yet now it looks like this.”
What the hell happened? My last memory before falling asleep was reading the service termination notice and going to bed devastated.
But after waking up, not only was the shutdown notice gone from the official site, it was now overflowing with announcements for various patches and events, as if the game had never been in danger of dying at all.
And that wasn’t the only change.
“Hm….”
I walked into the bathroom and looked at myself in the mirror once again.
Inside it stood a beautiful woman staring back at me.
“Is this for real. Seriously.”
I’d already looked several times, but I still couldn’t get used to it.
Yet the woman herself was incredibly familiar to me.
Because this woman was—
“Camilla.”
The character I mainly played in Abyss.
The familiar voice, the recognizable appearance, even the physique.
There was no way I wouldn’t recognize the character I’d spent thousands of matches with through thick and thin.
Right. I had become Camilla. Overnight, I had turned into a game character, into a woman.
And the game, Abyss, had become a god-tier game.
The first part was questionable, but the second part was undeniably good. There was nothing worse than a game shutting down, so if I added the pros and cons together, this had to count as a win.
Anyway, putting that aside.
“Why?”
Why though? Why had this happened? Naturally, that question couldn’t help but arise.
How this happened was impossible for anyone to explain, so I skipped over that part. What I wanted to know was the cause.
That was when something suddenly crossed my mind.
“Ah, no way.”
-I wish Abyss would become a god-tier game. I’d do anything for that.
Was it because of that drunken thought?
It sounded completely ridiculous, but it was the only explanation I had.
It was as if someone in the heavens had heard my desperate wish and granted it….
The moment I realized that, I rushed out of the bathroom and threw myself flat onto the floor.
“Thank you, thank you!”
Then, like a madwoman, I shouted my gratitude toward the sky.
This time, I would do everything possible as a user to make sure the game never died again. From now on, Abyss and I would remain together forever.
I quickly sat down in front of the computer and launched the familiar game, thinking to myself—
A once-in-a-lifetime opportunity had come to me.