System

"Haah..."

First things first, I stuffed the cigarette packs into a trash bag. I'd never smoked a day in my life — not in the army, not out in the world — and yet of all things, this new body had.

Well, the guilt's completely gone now.

I hadn't even known, because no scene of smoking existed anywhere in my residual memories. ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠Only the memorable moments had stuck with me, and most of those involved investing or hanging out with friends — smoking was such an everyday habit that it had apparently never registered at all.

Tap-tap-tap.

With the memo on "me" finished, I moved on to writing up my abilities.

Hmm... it's a long list, but how many of these are actually useful?

Against the Stalker anomaly, the ones that had pulled their weight were the Status Window, Hint, and Perspective — those three. The Bad Ending and Save & Load that came afterward looked useless in any real fight.

Tap.

With a pen clamped between my teeth, I stared at the save window floating before my eyes and thought.

It really is the appendix of abilities...

"Ghost story" seemed to refer to my battle with the Stalker over the rules. So the power was unusable during a ghost story — the exact time when crisis situations were most frequent...

Earlier, wanting to know exactly what kind of ability it was, I'd tested it a few times. The instant I used it, my viewpoint lurched and I was back at a spot I'd occupied in the past, and the small cut I'd made on my finger was gone.

For an ordinary person in the modern world, it seemed like something you'd use for playing the market — except the problem was that this was a supernatural power. In your typical ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠ghost-story fiction, anyone who used an ability like this to destabilize markets was guaranteed to have something come knocking. Besides, I had 300 million won sitting in my account with another five million arriving every month; I had no desire to take that kind of gamble.

It feels like there's some meaning behind it, though...

Shifting my gaze, I looked at the lifespan counter in the lower left corner, still ticking down.

A lifespan that kept draining away at a perfectly consistent rate, even across Save & Load. The problem was that the clock seemed to have started from the moment I escaped the ghost story. I was 25 — did that mean I'd live to 125? But the fact that the System went out of its way to display it at all made me suspect it meant something else entirely. For now, there was far too little information to go on, so I filed it away and moved on.

Tap.

Inventory. The thing that had let me figure out half of what this System really was. I'd gotten excited when I first saw Save & Load, run experiment after experiment, crashed back down into disappointment, and then turned to testing the Inventory instead.

Maximum quantity was 99 per item. The weight limit sat around 20 kilograms. Ignore the count and store a single object, and it could hold something as big as a large refrigerator — anything beyond that in volume or weight would need further testing. And it could store up to twenty different types of items... and so on, there were all sorts of rules, but what had helped my deduction most were those differently portioned servings of rice stored inside.

For fuck's sake — inventory is a game feature.

It called itself a "System," so I'd turned over every possibility. Games, manga, films, novels — every medium where a system could plausibly show up. But drop an inventory like that into a novel or a manga, and readers would curse you into the ground over it. What the hell is this supposed to be? The only medium that could survive such a bizarre classification scheme was games, and games alone.

A gimmick that requires one grain of rice, a gimmick that requires a whole sack — sorting items like that lets creators recycle the same object endlessly without a hitch. Players might rage about not being able to pull a single grain while holding an entire sack, but they'd swallow it and move on. That's the unwritten contract.

So it's probably the kind of game where you can open the system menu mid-play.

My conclusion: the System's origins lay firmly on the game side of the fence.

"Bad endings work like a recollection room. A sudden TS into a lewd body. A game system. Lewd futanari anomalies."

When I laid all the evidence side by side, the place I currently found myself in appeared to be an eroge.

Fuck. It's a god-tier game.

Genre: TS, futanari, ghost stories. Seemed to be a game about using rules to run from futanari anomalies — or beat them.

But could a game even implement all this?

The rules could be skirted or negotiated through any number of avenues — roles, restrictions, deals. I alone had summoned a police tactical unit and shattered a speed limit by invoking a role; there were endless ways to route around the rules or reinforce them. The Stalker, for its part, had flipped the entire board on the condition that it duel the Faceless Ones, the living incarnations of the rules.

With volume this unhinged, it's either a visual novel or a god-tier game.

A stab of anxiety hit me. Lore this vast either unfolds slowly across a visual novel, or it's a god-tier game with a truly deranged amount of content. The famous visual novel was FaXe/stay night — a world where even the protagonist could drop dead without warning, riddled with things that never let you relax. And if it was a god-tier game, that came with its own problem: there was bound to be a main route where the protagonist clawed through crisis after crisis, and waiting at the end of that route would be a final boss tied to some world-level catastrophe.

Wait — is the Save function just there to keep me from dying?

I'd never actually died before, but if it existed to send me back whenever I died — inside a ghost story, or out here in reality — then before it was any kind of safety net, I could end up trapped in a loop where I couldn't die even if I wanted to.

"Nah... surely not."

I prayed, silently and sincerely, that this was just a filthy eroge for screwing around in. A game with this much content could never be anything that shallow — but God, did I hope...

Well, going by the Stalker, at least the first ten years look problem-free.

I scrolled the Stalker's epilogue from the top, letting it run. The same space. The two of them, still at it. Past the thirty-year mark they were coming and going as they pleased — reverse-rape, cosplay, the works — living lovey-dovey as could be, and honestly...

Should I have just thrown the match?

For a second I genuinely considered scrapping every one of these worries, filling out the invitation, and just living with the Stalker forever — but no. I needed to know what kind of place this world really was first, so I kept scrolling.

Huh?

Year ninety. The ninth year in real time, change finally came to the space where only the two of them had ever been. The alley that had formed the ghost story's domain widened out considerably, and other anomalies began to show themselves. They greeted the Stalker and me with respect, with gratitude. Some of them looked powerful at a glance, some looked weak, and something one hundred percent indistinguishable from a human even dropped by for a visit before leaving.

If those were humans, then this was an organization — one with real infrastructure, cooperating with humanity itself...

Since when does the Stalker need something like that?

The sight of it turning the entire world into a mirror of water with its crystal power was still burned vividly into my mind. It had apparently rigged "crystallizing a woman as a joke" as the trigger condition for that ability — but even that was a shackle imposed by the rules, which meant that originally, like its physical prowess, the power had probably been boundless. A being like that, building an organization? Even framing it as protection for me didn't wash — it was glued to my side every waking hour anyway. Which meant there had to be a reason it needed one... and if something existed out there that the Stalker had to build an organization just to keep in check... then what the hell had happened to the real world?

Go outside. Please, just once, go outside.

I paged through the days one after another, but only the Stalker and the powerful-looking anomalies ever went out; I myself never once set foot beyond that alley, and the information never came.

And then, year one hundred. The tenth year in real time. The screen cut off on the two of them mid-kiss, living out the same day as ever.

"Fuck!"

SLAM!

So that's ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠why they banned the sound.

I'd hammered the desk in a flash of rage, but my head, cold as ever, was already dissecting why the epilogue's audio had been silenced. Because somewhere past day one hundred, they might have said something important.

"I'm learning to read lips."

Thanks to the Stalker being no ordinary existence, there was a staggering amount of information to mine. However many days it took — that part didn't matter ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠— I was going to analyze every shape those mouths made.

The instant the thought formed—

"What?"

"Hold on — hold on. Everything I just guessed was right?"

A warning window, up for only the briefest of moments. A message printed as if to declare that no further analysis would be tolerated — and then the System sank back into its usual silence.

The analysis itself is dangerous?

The warning had appeared out of nowhere. It rattled me badly enough that I replayed the whole sequence point by point, and before long I wrung out the largest conclusion the limited information would allow.

...Is it something I'm not meant to know?

Something you must never call. Something you must never know. Both were staples of fiction. One of them might surface in that ninth year, or might already exist somewhere out there right now. Or perhaps it didn't exist in this worldline at all — and the moment I learned of it, it could cross over. Framed that way, it actually made sense.

Was that... a crisis? Just now?

A message from the System, claiming to have my interests at heart. And yet back during the Stalker ghost story, it had only appeared when reality-alteration came into play, and only to feed me the bare minimum of information. This warning, I guessed, only surfaced in genuinely dire situations, and only when the logic of it held up. And the fact that it had intervened the very second the words "lip-reading" left my mouth — that pointed to something dangerous to invoke at all, dangerous even to name.

"Whatever."

It was an IF worldline. The thing might not exist in this world at all — or it might amount to nothing. The ghost story genre drowned in variables to begin with; taken to the extreme, it wouldn't even be strange if a rock I idly chucked down some street triggered a butterfly effect and plunged the entire world into crisis.

"I'll just use the invitation. Simple as that."

Truth be told, that reason outweighed all the others.

Surely the Stalker would take my parents in too...?