The Chilling Prologue

The moment he stepped outside, he saw a wrecked antique car.

As he approached to investigate, a line of text appeared.

'This used to be a luxury item, but now that all the roads have been swallowed by the woods, it has become nothing but useless scrap metal.'

From the car's appearance, Zai Zong roughly guessed that the game's setting was probably in the seventies or eighties.

Ahead of the vehicle was a doghouse, along with a black dog whimpering beside it.

Zai Zong cautiously walked over, afraid the dog might suddenly do something unexpected.

He had not forgotten that this was a horror game.

He had played a few horror games before, but they had all been terrible. They were not scary at all; they had even made him want to laugh.

But Dark Forest had performed pretty well so far, making him want to keep playing.

When he approached the black dog, another line of text quickly appeared.

'My dog... it does not have much time left. I should put it out of its misery.'

Was he supposed to kill the dog?

Zai Zong looked around.

No weapon?

Bare-handed?

After wandering around for a while and finding no weapon, he temporarily gave up on the idea of slaughtering the dog. He decided to head to Eastern Forest first to look for fuel!

Zai Zong climbed over the fence and entered the forest.

After only a few steps, he picked up an axe.

It immediately delighted him!

He finally had a weapon!

Now he would not be scared even if monsters came after him!

Zai Zong continued deeper into the forest with the axe, only to have his path blocked by a massive fallen tree trunk.

Following the game's prompt, he used the axe to chop through the trunk.

New text soon appeared below.

'These trees are growing too fast. At this rate, I will not be able to keep up with cutting them down.'

Those words caught Zai Zong's attention.

"Could it be that the trees in this game regenerate really quickly too?"

"Could the whole world have been swallowed by the forest?"

The game was becoming more and more captivating to him. Even though it was only a demo, its quality was clearly exceptional.

Zai Zong continued onward.

He followed the road and found animal corpses that had long since become skeletons, a moss-covered Route 50, and then an abandoned cabin.

The scenes made him increasingly uneasy, as though danger could descend at any moment.

As he ventured deeper, the forest's branches and leaves grew thicker and denser.

Gradually, eerie sound effects began to play. Zai Zong, who had been absorbed in the game, began to sweat and tense up.

Whether a horror game was scary or not depended heavily on its sound design!

That was exactly what Zai Zong was experiencing now.

The sounds were like whispers in his ear, constantly tugging at his emotions.

They trapped him in a suffocating atmosphere.

Mist began to rise in the dim forest.

Zai Zong pushed through the fog and entered a narrow Stone Crevice Path.

Then, in an instant, a flock of crows suddenly appeared, accompanied by relentless flapping wings and piercing cries.

"Fuck!"

Zai Zong shouted!

The sudden flock of crows caused quite a commotion in the quiet, eerie, misty forest. It scared the intensely focused Zai Zong so badly that his whole body jolted, and he cried out loudly!

Still, it was a false alarm! Just a false alarm!

Zai Zong immediately sped up and ran out of the Stone Crevice Path.

In an instant, the crows vanished from the sky, as if deliberately timed.

The forest returned to silence at that very moment.

"Goddamn it. Isn't this supposed to be the Prologue? A high-energy scare in the beginner level? What the hell!"

There was no question that Zai Zong had been scared.

For a moment, he did not really want to keep playing.

Although it had been a false alarm, anyone startled like that would feel like backing out.

It was not as if he absolutely had to play this game. Why make things difficult for himself?

Zai Zong stared at the game screen, gritted his teeth, and continued playing.

"As a veteran gamer, if I'm too scared to even play the Prologue, that'd be utterly humiliating!"

"I never thought a tiny top-down game could pull off scares like this. Developer, you've got guts!"

Then he steeled himself and kept playing.

Before long, he came upon another Stone Crevice Path.

This time, after the earlier scare, he half-closed his eyes and slowly stepped inside, ready for the second big scare!

But—

There was no scare. Instead, the game prompted him to craft a torch before he could venture deeper.

"A torch too? This game has crafting? They crammed so much content into such a small game—can the developer even handle it?"

Though he said that, Zai Zong still followed the tutorial and crafted a torch before cautiously stepping into the crevice again.

This time, nothing happened.

But the whispering sound effect by his ears gradually grew louder at some point.

The surroundings also became darker and more oppressive.

The towering trees had become nothing but black shadows, while tangled mist drifted through the air in waves.

The ground was covered in endless crisscrossing branches, stretching out like veins and impossible to ignore.

Within the cramped, dark crevice, only the reddish-orange glow of his torch illuminated the path around him, giving him the slightest sense of safety.

With his heart racing in that tense atmosphere, Zai Zong forced himself onward.

"Why the fuck did they make this game so damn oppressive!? Damn it!"

He cursed, but his footsteps never stopped.

Before long, he finally emerged from the crevice. For some reason, although nothing dangerous had happened, he felt as though he had narrowly escaped death.

He even let out a breath, as if he had just survived a fierce battle.

As he continued forward, he finally discovered a corpse on a strange tree covered in interwoven branches!

Zai Zong froze for a moment, then rubbed his eyes and stared again.

"Is that... a person?"

He was not sure, so he slowly approached. Afraid that another big scare might happen, he moved with trembling caution.

A line of text soon appeared below.

'In a few more days, he will be completely absorbed.'

Zai Zong:?

What did that mean?

The tree ate people?

This corpse that looked like a human would be absorbed by the tree?

"Fuck! Developer, you've got quite an imagination! You made an entire Man-Eating Forest!?"

Zai Zong began to feel a chill crawl over him.

As a veteran gamer, he could shoot apart anything in first-person shooters, slaughter his way through action games, rule supreme in role-playing games, and even pull off lightning drifts to take first place in racing games.

But he had never paid much attention to horror games because they were too niche and too bad. There were not many of them on the market, either.

So when faced with this Man-Eating Forest, he genuinely felt uncomfortable.

Throughout his gaming career, he had never been scared by so-called horror games, because they had all been terrible.

It was only after playing Dark Forest that he learned what fear actually felt like.

And this was only the demo's Prologue.

Who knew what the full version would be like, or how terrifying it would become?

Zai Zong looked at the human corpse in front of him and thought that since he had come this far, he had to grit his teeth and keep going!

So he continued deeper, wanting to see what else this Man-Eating Forest contained!

Zai Zong followed the road straight ahead, and before long, the surroundings brightened.

Had he made it out of the forest's densest area?

Soon, he found a man wearing a hat, bleeding and convulsing on the ground.

"Fuck, an NPC!"

"Could there be side quests in the Prologue?"

Without another word, Zai Zong immediately went over to speak with him, only to discover that the NPC had already passed out.

But as a player, it would be a disgrace to his identity if he did not loot him!

So Zai Zong searched the NPC and actually found a Metal Key marked with the number 21 on him.

There was also a note about the key below.

'If the forest has an exit, then this key must be the key to opening it.'

Zai Zong:

"I got a key item?"

Just as he was puzzled, the screen gradually faded to black.

A new cutscene began.

It showed a dim forest where the path could not be seen clearly.

A man was crouching with his back turned, examining someone who had fallen to the ground.

A line of text appeared below.

'I have never seen this unconscious man before.'

The moment Zai Zong saw that, he understood.

This was the follow-up to the protagonist encountering that NPC! It was being shown through a cutscene!

He did not say anything and continued watching.

In the game, the text continued.

'He carried only a key and a diary.'

The next scene showed a slightly balding man carrying the unconscious Hat Man over his shoulder as he walked slowly.

'Since he found a way to sneak in, he must know how to get out too.'

'He obviously will not obediently do as I say.'

'But...'

The screen showed a syringe filled with some unknown liquid, seemingly ready to inject someone.

Seeing this, Zai Zong recalled that the character he controlled was a doctor, as well as the locked doors in the house—one of which seemed to contain either a monster or a human. Then he remembered that, in the opening cutscene, the doctor seemed to have been ostracized.

When all those details came together, a shiver ran through his entire body.

Fuck!

Could the protagonist I'm controlling be some deranged doctor conducting human experiments?

Once that thought appeared, it could no longer be stopped.

"Fuck! This game is incredible!"

That was Zai Zong's evaluation after letting his imagination run wild.

The cutscene was not over yet. What appeared now was a pair of pupils.

Within them, the syringe was magnified without end.

Along with it came the doctor's final line.

'...That would not be difficult.'