[Welcome to the newly renovated ‘Evelyn’s Manor’, Player Yoon Heesoo!]

[From now on, Player Yoon Heesoo can play the game as the healer ‘Evelyn’.]

[You can clear and exit the game when you successfully raise all male protagonists’ affection to 100% and fulfill your mission as a healer.]

[However, if you fail to raise all male protagonists’ affection to 100% and fulfill your mission as a healer within one year, Player Yoon Heesoo will die.]

What kind of miraculous nonsense is this?

In the dead of night, when everyone was asleep. It was already bewildering enough to wake up in some shabby four-person dormitory. Before she could even grasp the situation, Heesoo, no, Evelyn felt nauseous from the barrage of messages.

‘Where am I now?’

She clearly remembered returning home in a half-conscious state after finishing overtime work and sitting in front of her computer. Since tomorrow was the weekend, she had been excited about playing games as much as she wanted before falling asleep, so she opened the internet and found the problematic email.

It was an email titled ‘Hello. This is the Operation Team of 〈Evelyn’s Manor〉.’

〈Evelyn’s Manor〉.

Among R-rated reverse harem game enthusiasts, it was known as a ‘hell game’ failure. Initially, many users flocked to Evelyn’s Manor, drawn by the insanely beautiful illustrations, but within a day, numerous negative reviews filled the review section.

Comments:

Developers, if you have any conscience, just remove the R-rating.

The female lead is supposed to be an R-rated physical healer, but she can’t do anything with the male leads, what are we supposed to do?]

Seriously– if raising affection is this hellish from the start, how are we supposed to progress through the game?

I only feel sorry for the illustrator. Thought we finally found a god-tier game, but it’s a failure among failures.

Users enraged by the nearly impossible difficulty of story progression left scathing reviews and abandoned the game. Afterward, it became known among enthusiasts as the ultimate hell game. And now, an email had arrived from the operation team of such a notorious game.

‘Why would the operation team email me?’

She opened the email with half curiosity and half suspicion that it might be a phishing attempt.

[Hello, Player heechoo1004.

We invite you, one of our early users, to the test server of the newly renovated ‘Evelyn’s Manor’. Please download the attached file below and run the game. However, please note that once you start the game, you cannot exit until completion, so please run it with caution. May the blessing of Helios, the game’s deity, be with you, player.]

…Is this real? I hope my recently purchased gaming computer won’t be infected with viruses as soon as I download this.

After accessing the 〈Evelyn’s Manor〉 website for the first time in a while, she found a notice about balance patches. Only after confirming that the email address shown at the bottom of the notice matched the operation team’s email address did she quietly clench her fists.

‘Wow, amazing.’

I should praise myself for not deleting it and playing occasionally. When she was about to delete it after seeing the bad ending where she died by the male leads’ hands for the 25th time, she kept it as a collection because the male leads’ faces were exactly her type.

Now it might be possible to play it properly rather than just keep it as a collection. She even took out a beer from the refrigerator to properly enjoy the night and immediately downloaded the file attached to the email. The sentence stating that the game couldn’t be terminated until completion once started had long since been pushed to the periphery of her vision.

Taking a sip of the carbonated beer, she clicked to run the game. Suddenly, a red light flashed from the monitor screen, and her vision became distorted.

And when she opened her eyes again, she was on an old bed in this musty, sweat-scented four-person dormitory. Looking at the frilly clothes once, then at the people snoring in deep sleep, a deranged laugh escaped between Evelyn’s lips.

“Hahaha.”

So they’re telling me to become a physical healer and capture all the male leads? And they even added this ‘healer’s mission’ or whatever that wasn’t in the original game.

Like someone who had lost all their screws, she sat on the bed letting out dry laughs when someone muttered a curse that was close to sleep-talking. Feeling somewhat like crying, Evelyn took a deep breath before getting up from her spot.

‘Stay calm.’

Could this perhaps be a dream? The kind of dream that feels so real it’s creepy. Maybe she was having this terrible dream as a side effect of playing reverse harem games every night recently. However, her hope that this might be a dream was crushed by the vivid pain when she pinched her cheek and twisted her thigh.

‘This is actually reality?’

Why did it have to be an R-rated reverse harem game of all things? Moreover, this game’s world setting is quite devastating. While she was busy denying the reality that had suddenly hit her, a system message that was familiar from games suddenly appeared before her eyes.

[Sub-quest 〈Escape from the Margrave’s Castle〉 has arrived.]

Leave the Margrave’s castle immediately and head to the adjacent forest. If you succeed in reaching the forest without being spotted by anyone, you can unlock two useful skills for clearing the game.

…Skills? Before the patch, the setting definitely required the female lead to blindly engage physically with the male leads for healing to be possible, without any skills.

‘At this point, isn’t this more than just a patch – they’ve completely overhauled the game?’

Still, given that the starting point is the Margrave’s castle, it seemed the story’s setting and flow were similar to pre-patch.

‘Though by story flow, I only know a few main quests.’

Even the sub-quest content was exactly as she remembered, except for the added skill reward. Since sitting here wracking her brain wouldn’t get her back to reality anyway, Evelyn decided to follow the system’s guidance for now.

Before turning the bedroom doorknob, Evelyn pulled out a large robe of unknown ownership from the old wardrobe. This was to fulfill the system’s requirement of reaching the forest without being spotted by anyone. As soon as she left what appeared to be the servants’ quarters, a massive gray castle appeared before her.

‘But how do I get to the forest?’

Although she might be a veteran of this game, this world was completely foreign to her, naturally. She had no way of knowing the paths in this game world where minor details were all omitted. As if reading Evelyn’s inner thoughts, suddenly a square message window appeared before her eyes again.

[A small gift from the development team has arrived for test players. You can use a mini-map that shows male protagonists’ locations marked in red while playing the game. The mini-map can only be checked within a 100m radius.]

A red dot flickered precariously at a point not too far from where she was. Muffling her footsteps as much as possible, Evelyn moved toward the location marked by the red dot. Fortunately, perhaps due to the late hour, she managed to pass through the servants’ back door without encountering anyone.

But the real problem started at the forest entrance.