In an open-plan room of about forty square meters, the curtains were drawn. A man with shaggy, shoulder-length hair lay on the bed.

As if he was feeling unwell, he furrowed his brow and tossed and turned a few times. At last, he opened his eyes, his face heavy with fatigue.

“Ugh…”

A low, hoarse groan escaped him before he could stop it.

The first thing he did after waking was instinctively reach across the bed for his phone and check the time.

9:36.

The light slipping through the gaps on either side of the curtains made it clear that it was morning.

After checking the time, the man felt a dull ache in his head. He pressed a hand to his forehead and rubbed it hard as memories from the past dozen years flashed through his mind.

Most of them were hazy. Only when a cool-faced young girl appeared did the memories come into sharper focus.

“No… that’s…”

“My memories… something’s wrong…”

Confusion showed in Yimo’s brown eyes.

Yimo was twenty years old.

As far back as he could remember, he’d been living in a privately run orphanage.

Later, after the orphanage closed, he and a girl one year younger than him were adopted by an elderly businessman who had lost his wife and had no children.

The businessman never treated them with much parental affection, but he gave them plenty of money. For a while, Yimo and his adoptive sister, who wasn’t related to him by blood, enjoyed a fairly good life.

But in the end, the businessman was investigated for tax evasion and for withholding payments and wages. Once things went south, he vanished without a trace.

Yimo and his sister, who wasn’t related to him by blood, were left struggling to get by, never knowing where their next meal would come from.

It was then that Yimo, determined not to be separated from his sister,

dropped out after middle school and raised her himself.

The year that followed was hard, but it was also warm and happy.

But…

Now his sister was gone, and he was all alone.

In between, there’d been a period when he’d given up on himself.

Yimo blamed himself for everything that had gone wrong.

Maybe suffering really did make people stronger. After his sister was gone, Yimo gradually started earning money.

A lot of money, in fact.

.

That was how he remembered it, anyway.

But… Yimo felt strange now.

His memories of the past two years…

It was as if he’d forgotten a lot, as if a lot was missing.

Important things, but he couldn’t remember what they were.

Even his most recent memories had grown hazy, as though he’d been asleep for a very, very long time.

Unable to make sense of it, Yimo glanced at his phone again and checked the year and month.

The date… was correct.

Only after checking did he confirm for certain that he hadn’t slept through a very, very long time.

Still half-asleep, he lifted his head and saw that the wardrobe opposite the bed was open. It was packed with all kinds of pretty dresses. A visceral revulsion rose up in him, urging him out of bed to shut the wardrobe doors.

Those… were all part of his dark past.

He didn’t want to see them.

Just seeing them made his heart ache.

Back on the bed, he looked at the masses of streaming equipment around his computer. He didn’t feel like working, so he lay down again and decided to play on his phone for a while.

Out of habit, he opened QQ. When he saw that a certain someone still hadn’t come online, as usual, he lost interest.

“Maybe I’ll sleep some more…”

“Maybe I’m still not fully awake…”

The muddled, jumbled state of his memories made him want to sleep a little longer.

But just as he was about to put down his phone, an app on the home screen caught his eye. It stood out at a glance.

『Become an Idol!』

The name was awful. It didn’t tell you what kind of app it was at all. But the icon showed a beautiful girl with long silver hair and a cool expression, and the caption underneath read, “Get a Girlfriend at the Start.” Yimo figured it had to be some trashy gacha game.

As a professional gaming VTuber, Yimo was certain he’d never downloaded this game.

So there was only one possibility: some other app had bundled it with an ad and installed it on his home screen.

Normally, Yimo would’ve dragged it straight to the trash and uninstalled it without a second thought.

But as a gaming VTuber, he couldn’t resist tapping on it.

Maybe he could use it as stream content.

His viewers liked watching him roast trash games, too.

Of course, that was just an excuse.

The real reason Yimo tapped on it was that the silver-haired girl in the app icon looked so much like his sister from back then.

Honestly, aside from her hair color and the fact that she’d grown even prettier, they were practically identical!

It was… eerily uncanny.

“It doesn’t even have ads?”

“That’s rare.” Yimo couldn’t help commenting.

Yimo opened the app and froze for a moment.

Because this wasn’t a beautiful-girl gacha game at all. It was a gaming platform!

It had games of all kinds.

Puzzle games, shooters, horror games, large-scale story-driven dungeon games, romance games with beautiful girls, competitive fighting games…

“Uh…”

“All these games can run on a phone?” Yimo frowned slightly. Something didn’t add up.

On a computer, a platform like this would be perfectly normal. But on a phone? That was just ridiculous, wasn’t it?

Out of habit, Yimo went to check the store first and see what kinds of money-grabbing offers it had.

『Your level is too low to access this feature.』

Instead, that was the message that appeared on the screen.

“Got it, got it. It needs a tutorial, a beginner’s guide, and an account registration, right?”

“Ha… it’s all the same old tricks! Next they’ll hit me with a beginner’s bundle and limited-time top-ups—one yuan, six yuan, thirty-eight yuan—and promise a huge haul worth 399, right?”

Yimo didn’t give up. It was all stream material, after all, so he figured he might as well register an account. But when he tapped “Me,” he froze.

He was already logged in, and the account showed Lv. 0.

An automatically created account wasn’t all that strange. But seeing the name Yimo listed as the player? That was unsettling.

“Damn… bundled software really is trash. It’s stealing my personal information!”

As a VTuber, his personal information was absolutely private. He couldn’t let anyone steal or misuse it—the consequences could be disastrous!

Yimo was getting angry now. He decided to exit the app and uninstall it right away.

But no matter what he tried, he couldn’t get out.

“This is just a virus, isn’t it…”

“Curiosity killed the cat. I fell for it!”

With dead-fish eyes, Yimo stared at his phone, wanting to smash it hard against the floor and stomp on it a few times to vent his anger.

But he’d paid good money for it, so he only imagined doing it.

Just as Yimo was about to force the phone to shut down, a window suddenly popped up on the app screen.

『Remaining points: 0.』

『Automatically matching a game.』

『Game type: Random.』

『Matching game… Countdown: 10, 9, 8…』

As Yimo watched the countdown on the screen, an inexplicable sense of dread welled up from deep inside him.

Below it, he saw two options: “Confirm” and “Cancel.”

Yimo instinctively tapped “Cancel,” but the two gray characters didn’t respond at all. All he could do was stare at the countdown, completely at a loss.

『4, 3, 2…』

『Game matched successfully. Enjoy the game, and good luck surviving.』

Click…

In that instant, before Yimo could even think, his mind went completely blank. Then he lost consciousness.

The damn app hadn’t given him the option to refuse at all.