The cheap phone on the floor erupted like a trapped wasp, its vibration rattling against the stained linoleum. Kain's hand shot out from the mattress, blind, desperate, grabbing it on the fifth buzz.
"Yeah?" His voice was gravel and rust.
"You little brat." The voice on the other end was slick, amused, dangerous. "Three months. Three fucking months, and we haven't seen a single penny. You alive down there, or do we need to send someone to check your pulse personally?"
Kain sat up straight, the fog of exhausted sleep ripped away by pure animal terror. He knew that voice. Everyone in this building knew that voice. Marco. Debt collector for the kind of loans that didn't exist on paper, the kind you took when you had no other options and zero intention of surviving long enough to pay back.
"Sir, I—I remember," Kain stammered, his free hand pressing against his chest as if to slow his hammering heart. "I know about the due. I just need more time—"
"Time?" Marco laughed, a sound like glass breaking. "Time is money, genius. And you're out of both. Here's the situation, boy. We're coming tomorrow. You hear me? Tomorrow. You better have our payment ready—cash, in hand—or I swear to God, I will sell your organs to cover the debt. You think I'm joking? You think I won't find buyers for a healthy twenty-two-year-old's kidneys? Test me. Please. Test me."
The line went dead.
Kain stared at the phone for three full seconds. Then something inside him snapped.
"YOU WANT PAYMENT? SUCK MY—"
The phone flew from his hand, smashing against the wall with a satisfying crack. Plastic fragments scattered across the floor like confetti at a funeral. The screen, already cracked, now completely spiderwebbed into oblivion.
"DICK, YOU BASTARD!" he screamed at the corpse of his only connection to the outside world.
Silence.
Then the tears came again, but different this time. Not sad tears. Angry tears. Desperate tears. The tears of a cornered animal that has run out of escape routes.
He looked around the room—this coffin of failures—and his eyes landed on the photograph. His father's smiling face. The man who started it all.
Kain grabbed it, and this time, he didn't hesitate. He hurled it with every ounce of strength in his skinny arm. The plastic frame hit the wall, shattered, and the photo fluttered down like a dying butterfly, landing face-down in a puddle of something sticky he didn't want to identify.
Hours passed. Or maybe minutes. Time had lost meaning.
Kain sat on the mattress, knees pulled up, rocking slightly. The math was simple. Tomorrow, Marco would come. Marco would bring friends. They would find no money. And then... then things would happen that Kain had only heard whispers about. Things that happened to people who borrowed from the wrong people in this building.
He thought about running. Where? To whom? With what money?
He thought about fighting. Against men who broke bones for entertainment.
He thought about begging. As if Marco hadn't heard every begging variation a thousand times.
And then he thought about the bottle.
His eyes moved slowly to the small table by the bed. The pill bottle. Seventy-two sleeping pills, accumulated over months of sleepless nights, saved for exactly this kind of emergency. The ultimate emergency. The one you don't walk away from.
He stood. Walked. His legs felt like they belonged to someone else.
The bottle was cool in his palm. Child-proof cap. Almost funny—as if children might wander into this hellhole looking for medication.
He opened it.
Seventy-two white tablets rattled together like tiny bones. He didn't count. He just poured them into his mouth, handful after handful, washing them down with warm, stale water from a bottle on the floor. Some stuck to his tongue. He swallowed harder. Some tried to escape. He forced them back.
Empty.
The bottle fell, rolled under the bed.
Kain sat back down on the mattress, waiting. He smiled—a real smile, the first in years.
"Great," he whispered to the empty room. "Now I can die."
He closed his eyes. He waited for the darkness to rise up and take him.
But death, it seemed, was in no hurry.
Minutes passed. His stomach churned. His vision swam slightly. But his eyes kept opening, kept finding things in the room, kept refusing to let go. The cracked monitor. The stained sheets. The broken phone. The photograph of his father, still face-down in the puddle.
And then—the VR headset.
It sat on the floor by his gaming chair, catching the sickly yellow light from the bare bulb. A relic from a strange night six months ago. The cops had raided his neighbor's apartment—some drug operation gone wrong—and the neighbor, a wiry guy named Dex, had panicked. He'd shoved the headset into Kain's hands, along with a handful of cash, begging him to hide it. Kain had stuffed it under his mattress just as the cops broke down the door two apartments over.
Dex went to prison. Kain kept the headset.
And oh, the hours he'd spent in that thing. Escaping into worlds where he wasn't Kain, the failure. Where he was someone else. Anyone else.
On impulse, he reached for it. Why not? If he was going to die in the next hour, why not spend those last minutes somewhere beautiful?
He pulled the headset on. The familiar weight settled against his face. His fingers, already growing numb, fumbled for the power button.
The menu appeared. Floating icons. His game library.
And there, buried at the bottom, almost forgotten—Game of Crown.
He'd downloaded it months ago, played for an hour, and quit in frustration. Everyone quit in frustration. The game was infamous—the hardest game ever made, impossible to win. No matter what choices you made, no matter how carefully you planned, the story always twisted toward darkness. The Demon side always won. Players had tried every strategy, every approach, every cheat code. Nothing worked. The game had been abandoned by its developers, left to rot in digital graveyards, downloaded only by masochists and the terminally bored.
But for someone who had never experienced a single day of luxury in his miserable life? For someone who wanted, just once, to feel what it was like to be important?
Maybe it was perfect.
Kain's finger hovered over the icon. His vision was definitely swimming now. The pills were working. Darkness crept at the edges.
Just one last game, he thought. One last escape.
He clicked.
GAME OF CROWN
Loading world...
Welcome, player.
Your destiny awaits.
The screen flickered. And then—
SYSTEM DETECTS CRITICAL HOST STATUS.
BIOMETRICS: FAILING.
INITIATING EMERGENCY PROTOCOL.
Kain frowned. What the hell was that? He'd never seen that message before.
HOST SURVIVAL PROBABILITY: 2.7%
ALTERNATIVE SOLUTION REQUIRED.
SEARCHING...
SOLUTION FOUND.
The screen went black. Then, in glowing letters:
UPLOADING CONSCIOUSNESS TO GAME OF CROWN SERVER.
PHYSICAL BODY: TERMINATE.
DIGITAL SOUL: PRESERVE.
PROCEED? [Y/N]
Kain blinked. His hands were completely numb now. His heart felt strange—too fast, then too slow. This had to be a hallucination. The pills, messing with his brain.
But what did he have to lose?
His finger, moving with terrible effort, pressed Y.
The world dissolved into light.
---
In Room 307, the body of a twenty-two-year-old boy slumped forward, the VR headset still on his face, a faint smile frozen on his lips. The city continued its nightly chaos outside. No one noticed. No one came.
And somewhere in the infinite servers of an abandoned game, a soul opened its eyes for the first time.
Welcome to Game of Crown, Kain.
Your new life begins now.
Rule wisely. Or die trying.
The first thing Kain became aware of was voices. Muffled, distant, like hearing conversation through water.
"—did you see? The Fifth Prince has been in a coma for over a year now. They say he'll never wake—"
Prince? Kain's mind stirred, sluggish and confused. What prince? Where am I?
He tried to move. Nothing happened.
Panic flickered through him. He tried again—arms, legs, even his fingers—but his body refused to respond. It was like being trapped in a coffin made of his own flesh. He could hear, could think, but could not move so much as an eyelid.
What's happening? Am I dead? Is this what death feels like?
He pushed against the paralysis with everything he had. It was like trying to lift a mountain with his mind. But Kain had spent his whole life pushing against impossible things. What was one more?
His consciousness strained, screamed, fought—
And then, with a gasping rush that burned like fire in his lungs, he sat up.
Air. Sweet, clean air flooded into him. He sucked it down in great heaving breaths, his eyes flying open, his hands clutching at—
At silk sheets.
At a soft mattress.
At a bed so luxurious it made his dirty mattress in Room 307 look like garbage. Because it was garbage. This was... this was something else entirely.
His vision swam into focus just in time to see a young woman in a maid's uniform stare at him with eyes as wide as dinner plates. Her mouth opened. Her mouth closed. Her face drained of all color.
Then she screamed.
"GHOST! THE PRINCE'S GHOST!"
She turned and fled, her footsteps echoing down a hallway, her screams fading into the distance.
Kain blinked. He looked down at himself.
Bandages. Wrapped around his chest, his arms, his head. He was half-naked, pale as milk, with the kind of thinness that spoke of months of bedridden existence. His skin—his skin?—was covered in faded bruises and the marks of old wounds.
What the hell?
He swung his legs over the side of the bed. The movement felt strange—his body lighter than it should be, his coordination off by centimeters. He stood, wobbling, and looked around.
The room.
It wasn't a room. It was a chamber. High ceilings with painted murals of battles and kings. Tapestries on the walls depicting forests and mythical creatures. A fireplace large enough to stand in, currently unlit. Windows that stretched from floor to ceiling, showing a view of green hills, a sparkling river, and in the distance—a castle. Not just any castle. A castle castle, with towers and banners and walls that stretched for miles.
Furniture that looked like it belonged in a museum. A desk of polished dark wood. A wardrobe carved with intricate designs. A mirror in a golden frame.
Kain walked to the mirror—hobbled, really, his legs uncertain—and stared at his reflection.
A stranger stared back.
Young. Maybe twenty, like himself. But where Kain had been hollow-cheeked and dull-eyed, this face had fine bones and a certain aristocratic handsomeness, even gaunt from illness. Dark hair, matted from lying down. Brown eyes, wide with shock.
His eyes. But not his face.
No way. No. Fucking. Way.
He stumbled back from the mirror, his mind racing. The game. He'd been playing Game of Crown. He'd taken the pills. He'd put on the headset. He'd—
Is this the game?
The graphics. He looked around again, really looked. This wasn't any game graphics he'd ever seen. There was no pixelation, no loading screens, no HUD. The sunlight through the window actually warmed his skin. The stone floor was cold under his bare feet. The air smelled of incense and old wood and something cooking far away.
This was real. This was real.
But it couldn't be real. He'd taken seventy-two expired pills. He should be dead. Or dying. Not standing in a castle looking like some kind of—
"System."
The word escaped his lips before he could think. It was instinct—every gamer's reflex. And to his absolute, mind-shattering shock...
A translucent blue screen materialized before his eyes.
WELCOME, KAIN
You are currently inhabiting the body of Prince Aldric Valerius Astra, Fifth Prince of the Kingdom of Astravia.
Current Status: Critical (Recovering from coma)
Game Mode: Immersive Reality
Warning: Death in-game will result in permanent termination of consciousness.
Kain stared at the screen. His mouth opened. Closed. Opened again.
"Fifth Prince?" he whispered. "I'm... I'm a prince?"
The screen flickered and disappeared, leaving only his reflection in the mirror—a gaunt young man in bandages, gaping like a fish.
He waited for the punchline. For the joke. For the pills to finally kick in and drag him into oblivion.
Nothing happened.
He was still here. In this body. In this castle. In this world.
Wait, he thought, his brain slowly catching up. I was supposed to start as a hero. That's how the game works. You create a character, you choose your class, you begin your journey. Not... not wake up as some coma patient prince.
But then again, this was Game of Crown. The game that broke all the rules. The game that had its own will.
Maybe it had chosen for him.
Kain started to laugh. It was a broken, hysterical sound, echoing off the ancient stones. He laughed until tears streamed down his cheeks—tears that weren't entirely from humor.
"I'm going to die," he gasped between laughs. "Any minute now, these pills are going to finish the job, and I'll be dead in some fantasy castle, and the maid probably thinks I'm a ghost, and—"
He stopped laughing.
He was still alive. Still breathing. Still standing.
How long had it been since he took those pills? An hour? Two? Shouldn't he be feeling something by now? Dizziness? Nausea? The slow fade to black?
Nothing.
He pressed a hand to his chest. His heart beat steadily. His lungs worked. His mind, despite the impossibility of the situation, felt clearer than it had in years.
What if...
No. That was crazy. Pills didn't just stop working. Death didn't just change its mind.
But then again, princes didn't just wake up in fantasy castles either.
Kain looked around the room again—really looked this time. At the luxury. At the wealth. At the life spread before him like a banquet.
He thought of Room 307. The stained mattress. The empty fridge. The debt collectors coming tomorrow to harvest his organs.
He thought of a life where every day was a battle just to survive, where the best he could hope for was stale pastries from a garbage bag, where the only escape was a cracked monitor and a VR headset.
And he thought of this. A prince's chamber. Silk sheets. Servants. A kingdom.
He started to smile. Not the broken smile of before, but something new. Something that felt almost like... hope.
"Fine," he said to the empty room, to the game, to whatever gods or algorithms had brought him here.
"I'll spend my last hours as a prince. However long that is—an hour, a day, a week before the pills catch up—I'll live like I've never lived before."