I Became a White-Haired Failure
One of China's Four Great Classical Novels — and once a recommended text for college entrance exams and essay prep — Romance of the Three Kingdoms. A true monument of human culture, the very emblem of an age of grand romance.
These days it gets mocked as a dusty old relic and roasted online without mercy, but even so, the fixed fanbase is solid enough that countless games still pour out every year.
"Haah… fuck, there's nothing to play."
But when the players' standards get too high, the developers start phoning it in. The market is flooded with kusoge so bad you burn out before you've even played half a day.
"Guess it's back to KOEI after all…"
They say the end of all tuning is stock, and sure enough I always end up crawling back to KOEI's Romance of the Three Kingdoms. Not that this bastard is free of problems either.
They've put out how many entries in the series, and all that improves is the graphics — the actual gameplay stays stuck in place. Any system that looks halfway decent gets surgically deleted with surgical precision.
And they always, always manage to wedge in at least one truly shitty feature. Sometimes it feels like they're trolling on purpose.
And that's not even the half of it.
They ship an untested alpha build under the name Base Edition. Then a year later they release the real complete version at the same price, rebranded as the Expansion.
And if you want the full one-hundred-percent experience? You have to dig up every last DLC like you're collecting Dragon Balls and buy them separately.
It's like a fish-bun vendor selling you empty buns first, then granting only the people who already bought the buns the right to purchase the red-bean filling — and charging five hundred won extra for the fish-cake broth on top.
Peak commercial bastardry, pure and simple.
"…Pseudo Three Kingdoms?"
That was when I spotted a game with a peculiar title in Steam's indie section. But pseudo? As in fake?
The name alone reeked of knockoff.
The screenshots, though, looked surprisingly solid. True to the title, it seemed to have flipped copyright the bird and straight-up copied KOEI's graphics and interface.
AI art being what it is these days, the illustrations looked decent enough too. The price was a tenth of KOEI's full package — and they were even giving away a free Female DLC.
On top of that, it was in the middle of an indie mega-sale: five thousand won, done. Still, better safe than sorry — I decided to skim the description.
The world's first immersive Romance of the Three Kingdoms experience. Astonishing realism — live the Three Kingdoms era for yourself.
For a game slapped together in Unity, the marketing was laying it on thick. Looked like an officer-based title, but the weird part was that there wasn't a single rating or review anywhere.
And that was exactly what hooked me. I'd played so many mediocre games I'd gone completely numb — so for once, I wanted to walk a path nobody else had taken.
Welcome to the world of Pseudo Three Kingdoms.
From this moment on, you will enter the Three Kingdoms era and forge a story of your own.
No option to pick an existing officer — so it was original-character play only? Well, that was the house rule for officer-based games anyway.
Please set your difficulty. Choose one of the following:
Beginner | Advanced | Expert
No questions, no preamble — straight to difficulty select. But asking me, a guy who'd been playing Three Kingdoms games for over a decade…
No contest. I picked Expert. Now for name, birth year, scenario—
"…?"
What the hell was this? No age, no scenario selection — it just started?
I hadn't even set a name. I hadn't touched the ability scores.
Whoooosh…
White smoke suddenly billowed up around me. Like fog swallowing a lost traveler, it blanked out my entire field of vision — and then even my eyelids slammed shut.
Nngh…
Then consciousness returned. A clean, rested feeling wrapped my whole body, as if I'd woken from a long sleep.
Had I dozed off mid-game? More accurately, I'd passed out before the game had even properly started.
"…?"
But this wasn't my room. Forget the room — I wasn't even sure this was still Korea.
A blue sky with zero fine dust. Air just dry enough to feel foreign, like I'd stepped off a plane somewhere overseas.
In the distance, where a horizon should have been, a vast and imposing city wall stretched along the skyline. People I'd never seen before wandered the streets in worn historical costumes.
When did I end up at a folk village? Completely lost, I grabbed a passing porter with a carrying frame on his back.
"Excuse me, mister? Is this Yongin?"
"Yongin? Where's that supposed to be? You been drinking in the middle of the day?"
"No… I don't drink. Are there folk villages somewhere other than Yongin?"
"This one's lost his mind. You're in the capital, boy."
"…"
I knew what "the capital" meant. The problem was that the only place in my entire life where that word belonged was inside the tattered copy of Romance of the Three Kingdoms sitting on my bookshelf.
Welcome to the world of the Three Kingdoms.
That was when it happened. Text floated up in front of my eyes like a VR overlay.
Passersby walked straight through it without the slightest reaction — so it was visible only to me. That much was clear.
You have taken your first steps as an ordinary citizen living in Luoyang, capital of the late Eastern Han.
"…"
What… the hell… was this? Late Eastern Han? So I'd been isekai'd into the game?
So this was what they meant by "immersive real Three Kingdoms"?
And then, alongside a full-body illustration of myself so pathetic I was embarrassed to look at it, my stats appeared. And those stats were…
A name I'd never heard of — Do Yeop — and a style name, Ji, had been assigned automatically. No specialties. No special abilities. Nothing.
And the real gut punch: Leadership, Might, Intelligence, Politics, and Charisma added up to a grand total of one hundred. I was a full-blown White-Haired Failure — a character whose total stats sat at 100 or below.
Liu Shan. Ma Mo. Cen Hun. Yang Song. Just hearing the names made your chest swell with… something. Easter-egg trash units, every last one of them.
And now I was about to join the club as White-Haired Failure Number Nine. Sure, a perfect 100 put me at the top of the garbage heap — but I was still a useless piece of shit you couldn't even stick on transport duty.
From this moment on, survive the bloody winds of chaos that are about to blow.
…Assuming you can.
Beep!
And then it was gone. The text vanished, leaving nothing but a smirk — as if it already knew I wasn't going to make it.
A new line of text appeared, announcing the present date. Setting aside the sheer chaos of the situation for a moment, I focused on that date.
I was in Luoyang, capital of the Eastern Han. And if it was the eighth lunar month of 189…
"How long has it been since the Son of Heaven passed?"
I asked the porter again. He glanced up at the white mourning banners hanging from the city walls.
"About four months, I'd say? That aside — word is the Grand General assassinated the old Empress Dowager. Who knows where this country's headed… tsk tsk."
"…"
Exactly as I'd expected. The previous emperor, Emperor Ling, had died in the fourth month, and his son, the young Emperor Shao, now sat on the throne.
But as the man said, the court was still a mess. He Jin held power as the maternal relative, and before long the eunuchs would push back.
Soon enough, a monster would arrive in Luoyang. And he would open the forbidden gate that led straight into the age of chaos.