Night Parade of a Hundred Million Ghosts. Rule - 1
Mmm… hmm… mmm…
When I asked about the rules, Kkamangi hummed thoughtfully and flicked its eyes toward somewhere off to the side.
"Time? I'm short on time?"
-That's right! Even if we skip the middle sections, starting from the very basics eats up a lot of time, you see…
"The blue letters said there's a currency that can extend time — what is it?"
-The currency of the Anomaly World is lifespan!
Ah.
The moment I heard that, I pulled up my system window.
> REMAINING LIFESPAN
99 years, 364 days, 22 hours, 15 minutes
My remaining time. No — my remaining life.
"What's it worth? How much per hour? I've saved up a fair bit."
-In Anomaly World terms, it's 500 million won per year! In the real world, that comes to 5 billion.
Five billion…
At that, I turned on my AI assistant and ran the exchange rate.
If one year was worth 500 million, then thirty days — a single month — came out to 41.1 million won. One day was 1.37 million won. That worked out to 57,000 won an hour, 950 won a minute, and roughly 16 won per second.
That's way too much, though?
By game standards, this was supposed to be the prologue. A hundred years for clearing the Stalker was absurd. Even five to ten years would have been generous as starting currency.
Wait… did I take out a hidden boss or something…? No, right?
It had been ridiculously hard to escape from it. And if the base-form Stalker was just an ordinary prologue anomaly whose job was to teach you the gimmick, everything suddenly made sense.
The wall was a gimmick. The rules stayed gentle early on because you were simply meant to walk forward — the player just had to keep moving ahead to clear it. The one real difference was that I'd gone in personally and been molested, so when I climaxed I trembled for minutes afterward — a game presumably wouldn't do that.
Fuck, seriously…
If the design was: deliberately get caught to make trades, raise your value until the Stalker takes an interest in you, then unlock the hidden boss — the Stalker using its crystal ability — then the bizarrely brutal difficulty explained itself completely. Originally, you were just supposed to walk in a straight line without looking back, bump into a few walls, watch a couple of cutscenes, keep walking, and escape from the police station. That was the whole prologue.
It also made sense that the system screens came flooding in unlocked the moment the Stalker fight ended. The status window, hints, and point of view were things you understood far better by experiencing them firsthand, while the epilogue, inventory, save function, and lifespan — the currency — were systems you could grasp immediately just by clicking through them afterward.
-Um, excuse me? Hello? Customer? Two minutes have passed.
"Ah… ah, right, sorry. I think some memories just came back to me. So how much is it to extend the time?"
-Ahaha, congratulations! A session with a senior raconteur costs 5 hours of lifespan per hour.
So roughly 280,000 won, then.
Considering lawyers charged 100,000 to 200,000 won an hour for consultations, that was expensive — and yet I couldn't shake the feeling that The Company hadn't set that price for no reason. At the very least, I'd be getting my money's worth.
"How do I pay?"
-Simply think of the amount of time in your head, then intend to pay it toward your chosen recipient! In this case, you'd designate The Company's senior raconteur.
Pay 5 hours of lifespan to The Company's senior raconteur.
-Lifespan: 5 hours. Received, thank you!
"But why is it 5 billion in the real world?"
-Let me explain from the ground up! Lifespan is what the world grants you when you defeat an anomaly or escape from one. And an ordinary human who has never experienced an anomaly can only use 10 years of it.
"Why?"
-Because anomalies are trials meant for humans! It simply wouldn't make sense for a hero who has endured trials to carry the same vessel as an ordinary person, would it?
"So the more anomalies you face, the wider your vessel grows, and the more lifespan you can draw on? What's the cap?"
-The maximum is 200 years — the threshold of immortality! Beyond that, no matter how much lifespan you stockpile, you will still grow old.
"Got it. So it's worth 5 billion because the wealthy buy it all up."
-Yes, exactly! And since even the rich have to be frugal, I hear they only spend it on sleep hours or genuinely important moments.
"Then rich people deliberately seeking out anomalies to widen their vessels…?"
-The smaller rich can manage it, but proper chaebol heirs had better be ready to take a bamboo spear to the ribs. Even anomalies play the stock market, you know!
Ah.
No lengthy explanation required — "even anomalies play the stock market" made everything click into place. A chaebol's owner-risk extended into the Anomaly World; if their stock price dropped, the anomaly would come collecting with a bamboo spear in hand. That was why even the enormously wealthy couldn't just waltz in here whenever they pleased.
-Actually, there used to be a way to cheese Grade 3 anomalies, you see.
"So somebody rigged it with the anomaly itself to pass the trial?"
-Oh goodness, no, no. That would be… hmm… in human terms, something like carving a person apart piece by piece and cooking them. What actually happened was that professionals of the Anomaly World targeted a harmless anomaly and carried clients through it.
"A carry?"
-Yes, a carry! And the one who ran the carry, along with every single person who rode it — they're all being cooked by now. It's been about forty years? I hear they've spent those fifty years being cooked while still fully conscious, though I can't say for certain.
"…"
-Anomalies are trials. Because those people tried to cheat the trial, the anomaly itself grew stronger, and when the other anomalies heard the news, they pitched in too — binding every karma-linked human who had already cleared it into the rules and crushing them. It was a perfectly justified grievance, so even the Human Dignity Committee turned a blind eye. They're probably still being cooked alive as we speak?
I'd forgotten. Forgotten that this was a ghost story world.
Just like the parallel world's bad ending, where the Stalker multiplied the flow of time and violated me for a hundred years — if you truly enrage something here, you can end up in a state worse than death.
-Anomalies are trials for humankind. And as such, they possess a desire for trials.
-So please, never carelessly circumvent the rules just because an anomaly seems easy. Anomalies dream day and night of circumventing the rules themselves. If a human who enters bends them with clever wordplay, the anomaly will answer by bending them in an even worse way.
Hearing that, I thought back to the mirror-world Stalker.
Its speed limit had been clamped down harder than ever, and yet it had exploited the changed environment to move at terrifying speed. Looking back now, pulling that off must have demanded tremendous creativity and endless, obsessive practice. And since the anomaly is the one who sets its own constraints and environment, it's actually the human side that benefits from playing by the rules.
Anomalies are always straining to slip free of their rules — so if a human breaks them first, or squirms out with wordplay, the anomaly retaliates with something worse.
Afraid I might forget, I took out my phone and jotted down a memo.
-Mmm… I've gone and rambled, haven't I. I'm so sorry!
"No, it's fine. Could you give me some concrete examples of rule circumvention? This stuff is important."
-An example, hmm… Do you happen to know what a No-Sex Room is? A room you cannot leave unless you have sex?
"Uh… yeah, I know that one."
I was suddenly, fully awake. Coming right on the heels of horrific torture talk, a sudden No-Sex Room example was… quite a lot, honestly.
-Lewd examples are simply what makes memories stick the longest! Whether for anomalies or for humans.
"Fair enough."
-Then let me continue using the No-Sex Room as our example!
-Say someone is exploring an anomalous mansion and gets trapped inside one of its rooms. What do you suppose the way out is?
As Kkamangi spoke, a screen flickered into existence before me. A black-haired woman with a ponytail, dressed in Chinese-style clothing — and a futanari on the verge of taking her. The sudden, explicit image snapped my drowsy eyes wide open and sent my concentration soaring.
"Have sex with the anomaly that owns the room?"
-Yes! That's the textbook solution. Usually you have sex, or pay for it through a trade with something equivalent to sex.
"Okay, and?"
-But look closely — there's a flower sitting on the table, isn't there? Oh my? You rubbed the pistil and the stamen together, and the door opened. Now, does this count as circumvention?
"Seems pretty creative to me."
-Doesn't it? But the anomaly isn't being foolish — it placed that flower there on purpose. When you design a room like that and start layering in all sorts of elements, a constraint becomes necessary, and that constraint is the flower with its pistil and stamen, you see.
"Ah."
-Now then, a question! Suppose someone uses an ability to conjure a flower with a pistil and stamen, rubs them together, and opens the door. How do the rules respond?
"They penalize the explorer who used the ability?"
-Correct! But not the perfect answer. Penalties are something the rules themselves rather dislike, so they're only invoked when a truly enormous variable has been introduced.
-Normally, in a case like this, the rules respond by granting the anomaly additional abilities or gimmicks to compensate — or by lifting the restriction on further ability use.
-Say the stage after the No-Sex Room is an 'endless pursuit where anyone caught is violated without end.' The rules might release the anomaly's speed limiter entirely, or hand it a means of transport!
At those words, the chains and the faceless men that had bound the Stalker for thirty minutes rose in my memory.
The chains and the fire station that had bought me time. The passersby who had fed me information. The SWAT team that had supplied the direct, raw force my escape required. Every one of them had filled the gaps in my information and my hours, aided me with force, and driven the Stalker into a corner.
-In other words, in a ghost story you must never use your abilities carelessly, without cause. The stronger your base abilities are, the more the rules — once they've sized you up — will grant in return. For anomalies and humans alike!
"Then what happens when a human is simply stronger and beats the anomaly down?"
-If the human invaded that anomaly's domain and triggered the ghost story, the anomaly receives power to match. And if they didn't… well, then it's just a fair fight, isn't it?
"Huh. Yeah, I suppose so."
-Being strong does a human no good either, you know! The stronger you are, the greater the emotional stimulation the anomaly experiences — and it's precisely then that anomalies who have spent ages sharpening themselves on the rules come calling to challenge you.
The balance is actually pretty well-tuned, isn't it?
If you're strong, anomalies that have properly whetted themselves against the rules come to challenge you. If you're weak, you have to face the rules as written while the rules themselves shore up what you lack. Come to think of it, that was probably why the Stalker had restricted its own ability use — because if it unleashed its full power freely, the rules would only compensate for it.
Wait, this is way beyond normal eroge volume, isn't it?
A hidden gimmick attached to the prologue boss is rare even in the DLC of major releases. And they stuffed all this into an eroge? It would absolutely have gone viral. The possibility that this world was a parallel-universe eroge I simply didn't know about was gaining serious ground.
-Now then! Let me finally explain what the rules actually are.
"Go ahead."
-Mmm… to understand the rules, you first need to know about collective spirits.
"Collective spirits?"
-The soul of a dead human is called a ghost, yes? A collective spirit is what is born when those ghosts gather together!
"Like a combining robot?"
-Similar, but not quite! A collective spirit is a being born when souls that share the same meaning bind themselves into one.
"Ghosts sharing the same ideology or purpose merge of their own will and are born anew?"
-Yes! Sharp as ever, customer.
"Then… the rules are a collective of countless ghosts?"
-Yes, exactly! A collective spirit — the Night Parade of a Hundred Million Ghosts, one hundred million souls gathered as one. That is the true essence of the rules.