I Became A Ghost In A Horror Game-Chapter 123: Side Story) Ha-rim’s Bag and the Red Dream

“I mean, it’s not really my place to say this, but this is honestly such an absurd situation...”

“Yeah. It’s not really Ha-rim’s place to say it either, though.”

“Mmm, right.”

Currently, the Mystery Exploration Club was in a standoff in front of their clubroom, with a single door between them and the chaos inside.

And the cause of it all... was my bag.

Since I always stuffed all sorts of bizarre junk into it, it reacted to the items from Alice I had stored earlier—and went berserk.

So right now, inside the clubroom, my bag was crawling around with eyes and legs.

“I had a feeling ever since you started °• N 𝑜 v 𝑒 l i g h t •° putting random junk in your bag.”

“Waaah! My blanket...! The bag’s chewing up my blanket!”

“Well, it doesn’t look dangerous though?”

“Probably the junk and tools in the bag got mixed in a way that accidentally fulfilled the activation condition of some tool.”

I added that if that were the case, it was probably a tool with relatively easy activation requirements, and if the activation condition was easy, the tool’s effect would likely be weak too.

“So that means not all the tools in the bag went out of control.”

“I’m sorry, guys... I’ll pick up less junk from now on.”

“So you’re not saying you’ll stop, just less.”

There are some things you just can’t pass up... They might be useful someday!

I firmly believe they’ll come in handy.

Still, maybe I should... hold back a little...

“Then what exactly is activated in there?”

I answered Kyung-min’s question.

“It looks like the arm of the Under-Bed Darkness Ghost and the sleep mushroom that causes people to fall asleep. Neither of them are particularly dangerous tools.”

“The arm of the Darkness Ghost just disappears if you smack it a bit.”

Soo-ho said, recalling when we fought off ghosts in the past.

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

“That should be enough to deal with it. But if you hit the sleep mushroom, won’t it release sleep spores and make everyone drowsy?”

“Well, then instead of calling Alice over, can’t we just whack it and take a nap?”

“Huh... when you put it that way... Should we just hit it and get some sleep?”

“Taking a nap once in a while isn’t so bad. We used to all nap together in the room back then too...”

Soo-ho immediately opened the door and hit the ghostified bag with the weapon in his hand.

As it twisted in pain, I began to wonder—if it could feel pain, maybe we could tame it?

Soo-ho struck it again, and with the recoil from defeating the ghost, the entire clubroom filled with spores.

And just like that, all of us kids slipped into the world of dreams.

“Mm?”

And then... I opened my eyes inside a dream.

At first, the contradiction of falling asleep but opening my eyes confused me—but I’d experienced this a few times, so I quickly adapted.

“It’s a lucid dream!”

“But wait—do lucid dreams even let everyone dream together?”

At Ha-rim’s question, Kyung-min recalled some related information.

It was probably something called dream walking.

An occult phenomenon where someone enters another person’s dream.

Also known as a shared dream—so it would fit this situation pretty well.

Maybe because the entity that made us dream was a ghost, we ended up getting pulled into this kind of phenomenon easily.

“Ugh... I feel kind of scared.”

Eun-jung whimpered.

“Well, yeah. Whenever we’ve fallen into a dream before, it was always when we were in danger.”

But unlike those times, this wasn’t triggered by an outside attack, so we might actually be able to enjoy it this time.

Shin Ha-rim gently reassured Eun-jung as they walked through the dream world.

“It’s so dreamy. Sparkling and beautiful.”

Multicolored clouds. Fog of similar texture.

Mysterious glowing lights flickered between them, dazzling the eyes.

Eun-jung, gazing blankly at the stunning scenery, murmured.

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

“Well, it is a dream, after all. We’ll wake up eventually.”

“Then... can’t we just dream it again?”

It’d be really nice to see this sight again with my friends.

Even better if Alice was with us next time.

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

“What is it?”

“This is a shared dream, right? What if one of us starts having a nightmare? Like, when you’re stressed, scary stuff sometimes shows up in your dreams...”

“You saying that makes it feel way too likely now...”

“Actually, this is a nightmare. You’re the only real one dreaming, and the rest of us are fakes.”

“Gasp! Seriously?!”

“Nope.”

Whap whap!

While Soo-ho and Eun-jung bickered like always,

Shin Ha-rim couldn’t help but worry—what if this really did turn into a nightmare?

Bad feelings were almost never wrong, and dreams had a mind of their own—unpredictable and chaotic.

Mm... maybe I was too relaxed, thinking we could just take a pleasant nap.

Just as I raised my guard a little—

Shooook—!

“Wait, something just passed by, didn’t it?”

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“Your imagination?”

“If we go by the cliché, it’s never just your imagination.”

A sense of wrongness.

In this dreamy, strange world, it wasn’t hard to feel something was off.

But this was something far worse than usual—it was approaching from the other side.

And when all the kids turned to look in the same direction—

A storm was raging.

A girl’s laughter was mixed into the wind, and the storm tore through the dream’s clouds and fog as it came closer!

“Why is there a storm in a dream?!”

Shin Ha-rim had a hunch—that storm wasn’t just a dream-generated natural disaster.

It had to be something far more complex. Far more terrifying.

“Let’s run for now!”

We ran for what felt like ages before finally managing to escape the storm.

Even though it was a dream, we were all completely drained.

What was that storm?

It felt... familiar somehow. As I was slowly going over it in my mind, I sensed the shape of a bird flying past in front of me.

Wait—that bird!

“It’s the Dodo Bird! I’ve seen it before!”

I remembered—it was one of Alice’s ghosts.

I think it liked racing.

I vaguely remembered winning a race against it with some clever trick.

Seeing it again in a dream was kind of nostalgic.

Why did it show up in my dream?

As I looked at it, I saw that the Dodo Bird was racing with other ghosts.

And not just the Dodo—tons of ghosts were each competing in their own way.

“Wow, they’re competing like crazy.”

“Guess they really like competition.”

Running nonstop, playing ball, taking tests—like a metaphor for our competition-based society.

They didn’t seem to be competing for something, but living because of competition. It looked kind of stupid.

But the reason I couldn’t laugh it off was because maybe... we were living just like them.

As I watched them with those thoughts in mind, the ghosts that were with the Dodo Bird started approaching us.

Uh-oh?

“Fight.”

This translation is the intellectual property of Novelight.

“...Huh? But we don’t want to fight.”

The Dodo Bird suddenly told us to fight.

We expressed our refusal, but the Dodo Bird opened its beak wide and repeated the same words angrily.

“Fight! Fight!”

The surrounding ghosts also began closing in on us.

We could feel the atmosphere turning dangerous.

We were soon surrounded by mostly red-colored ghosts.

“Compete! You have to compete! And to do that—run!”

“But we just want to stay still...”

“To stay still, you have to run. And to run, you have to run twice as fast. Even breathing isn’t free—not in the Red Kingdom! The Red Queen is watching us!”

“Let’s compete with test scores! Private tutoring! Everyone else is doing it!”

“There’s no time to be standing around like this aaaaaagh!”

Amid the atmosphere that was pressuring us into competition, Eun-jung shrank back and hid behind Soo-ho.

And then—

“Stop it.”

“Gasp!”

A voice came from a hole that had opened in the ground.

From that hole, Alice was glaring at the ghosts with dagger-like eyes.

“I know your nature well enough, but don’t go making trouble for the kids.”

Alice climbed out of the hole and dusted the dirt off her clothes, standing in front of us.

Just that alone made the red ghosts grumble and retreat to their places.

“It’s Alice! Wait—this is a dream too, right? Hmph!”

Smack!

“...Even if it’s a dream, could you not suddenly smack my butt? This is a dream world, yes, but this body is my real one, you know?”

“So Alice is dreaming too?”

“No. I came into the dream exactly as I am using the Monkey Dream Train.

It’s a space woven like a net out of the dreams of sleeping people from all over the world.

Think of it like the Internet—it’ll make sense.”

Then... what was Alice doing in this dream space?

It looked like the red ghosts had been brought here by her too, and upon closer inspection, some of them weren’t just competing—they were working.

“Hey, isn’t that Ariel?”

Ah. It really was.

Jack, Ariel, Red Riding Hood, and even Pinocchio were all gathered.

Only Peter wasn’t here again.

Ariel could be seen among the red ghosts, hard at work.

“So elegant, and yet... why am I doing this kind of heavy labor...”

She grumbled but continued to work diligently.

Carrying red bricks—was this some kind of punishment?

I thought Alice had already forgiven her for the angel incident.

“What are they doing?”

“Mm, indirectly or directly, I’m just making them work as payment for the help I gave them.”

Alice said this with a completely refreshed look on her face.

It stood in stark contrast to the other demons, who looked exhausted.

Pinocchio, who had spotted us from afar, walked over.

“They’re Alice’s children.

I don’t usually say this, but the labor is too harsh.

And since it’s a dream, we can’t even sleep.

They say to live comfortably you should just do an average amount of work, but I’m the only one being exploited because I can craft things... Someone, please make her stop...”

He suddenly launched into a complaint.

It was pretty shocking to see Pinocchio—usually so quiet—speak first like that.

Just how much had she made them work?

From the other side, Ariel shouted in frustration.

“We’re working plenty too...! Don’t slack off! Work my share too!”

And right after, Red Riding Hood and Jack muttered with groaning voices:

“This is... the pain of labor... but Alice just watches us comfortably... I feel this thick, blood-colored revolutionary spirit rising from my chest...!”

“Feels like I’m farming... I kind of enjoy it... thud!”

“Hey! Jack! Don’t collapse—keep working! Damn that Peter Pan bastard... He gave us the materials to make Neverland, then slipped away on his own...!”

“Ahem! Get back to work!”

Alice’s merciless enforcement of labor felt a little unfamiliar.

Still stunned, I asked her—why was she making them do this?

“To build a castle.”

Alice explained that she was building a red castle inside the dream.

It was to prepare for a disaster that’s coming, and once it’s complete, she’d be able to face any enemy, no matter who they were.

“But Alice—you’re already super strong.”

“That’s true. But it’s better to be prepared, isn’t it? I’m not invincible after all.”

“Really? Then should we help out too?”

“I’d rather not—you might get me in trouble with child labor laws. Instead, why don’t I show you the construction site from above so you won’t be bored?”

Alice summoned a rideable ghost and had us climb aboard.

We flew up into the sky, and from above, the red castle’s scale was enough to take our breath away.

Even the tiles had a chessboard-like pattern, and scattered across the area were stadiums, colosseums, exam halls—so many different kinds of places that it was genuinely fun to look at.

“It’s like a theme park...”

“It’s unfinished, so we might have to tear it all down and rebuild, though.”

“...Hmm. You said this was for preparing for danger, right?”

“Exactly. What—is a good idea forming in your head, Ha-rim?”

“Yes! I think... adding some symmetry would be nice. Like this—floating orbs in the sky, like the sun...”

“Oho... that’s pretty stylish.”

We ended up spending the whole time before we woke up coming up with concepts for the castle.

The more ideas we added, the more miserable Pinocchio became—but it was a truly fun day.