Horror

I’m the number-one player in a horror game, and my clingy online boyfriend is ruining my clear times.

To get rid of him, I sneak into an SSS-ranked instance and send him a photo of my nemesis, the boss, claiming I’ve fallen for someone else.

His reply comes instantly: that is his photo.

Now he’s coming to find me.

[A brother-obsessed System top + mystery + male/male romance + a horror-game NPC + two powerful leads + wish fulfillment + the Fourth Calamity]

Your newly bonded System tells you that you’re actually cannon fodder in a melodramatic romance novel. Your opening act is to humiliate the campus beauty and beat up the man she’s cheating with: the classic setup for an overpowered hero’s rise.

But when he coaches you through your lines, he’s so embarrassed that he stammers and stalls. His tone turns peculiar, yet he still mischievously coaxes you along.

[Ge, repeat after me. Thirty years on one bank of the river, thirty on the other. Never look down on… um…]

And you, Zhao Xiuming, can only ask, “Huh?”

You know there’s more to the System than he lets on, even if he insists he’s an adorable Cuddling System, a warm, nurturing system.

But at school, you encounter a campus beauty carrying a ghost fetus.

At the hospital, her lover rises from the dead as an alien creature, muttering, “Bro, you smell so good.”

In your rented room, you share a bed with a blood-drenched young boy pretending to be a girl.

At your part-time job, the killer in the shop can’t get enough of you. And when you enter an isolated-island horror story, you finally discover who you are…

You, Zhao Xiuming, are certain the Horror System is keeping you captive as his pet. He even plays puppy in front of you on purpose. [Woof.]

Then you realize you aren’t normal either. You stop fearing the System and praise him. “Good boy, Little Darling.”

Before you read: Don’t approach this as a conventional story about a player clearing instances. The protagonist is an anomaly NPC, through and through. Read it as a mystery.

Players from different horror games enter the protagonist’s world, creating all kinds of instances. The “Fourth Calamity” tag is a tongue-in-cheek reference to the havoc players wreak on a world’s native inhabitants.

When the apocalypse came, I struggled to stay alive.

Then the zombie king ate a hopeless romantic’s brain—and fell hopelessly in love with me.

Every day, I opened my door to find him offering me fresh food, eager to please.

Until he read a book called The Rules of a Shady Merchant.

Then the food came with a price.

“One sausage for a hug.

One bag of bread for a kiss.”

“What about hot pot?”

I asked nervously.

The zombie king chuckled and beckoned me closer.

“That costs a little more.

Come here, and I’ll explain it to you.

Slowly.”

The parents of a missing boy came to me for help. They wanted me to find their son.

But every sign pointed to the boy already being dead-while his heart was still beating.

I was a bridesmaid at my friend’s wedding, but the bridesmaid’s red envelope I received was stuffed with spirit money.

My friend got into a fight with the groom’s side.

The groom stormed in with a group of people, trapped us in the room, and even threatened that when they came to “tease the bridesmaids” that night, he’d make sure I paid for it.

What he didn’t know was this: seal paper money inside a red envelope, and a hundred ghosts will come to feast.

That night, every ghost for miles around came to offer their congratulations.

And I was the sole Earth Master successor.

I used brutal methods to murder ten innocent residents, then found a blind man with an unbearably tragic past to take the fall.

In the interrogation room, the police officer asked me, “Are you even human?” Human? Of course I wasn’t human. I was a god.

Young Master Li loved eating fish.

Every month, he went through more than a dozen enormous fish, each longer than a grown man was tall.

Delivering fish for the Li Family should have been an easy, well-paying job, but in just three short months, seven or eight drivers had collapsed one after another.

When Peng You, the owner of the logistics company, came to me, his face looked downright sickly.

“Brother Long, this whole thing is just too damn strange. What we loaded onto the truck was definitely fish.”

Bootleg Black Wukong was all the rage among my classmates.

One of its scenic areas was called the Land of Mahayana.

Everyone who played it became obsessed and went there to check in.

But not a single one of them came back.

I received that pirated disc too.

What they didn’t know was that I was the only Earth Master successor.

A buddy of mine who drove a big rig had been tricked onto the dead-end road at the foot of Huai Mountain.

By the time I got the news, he had already gone missing.

His relatives were crying so hard they were on the verge of fainting.

I tried to comfort them. “That road had a Mount Tai Stone placed there to suppress it. Nothing too serious should happen.”

But one of the family members handed me a phone. On the screen was a photo of the Mount Tai Stone, split clean in two.

“Wang Cheng sent this back before he disappeared.”

I am blind, and I make my living reading feng shui.

That day, a seductive woman came to my fortune-telling stall and said she dreamed every night of a man coming to see her.

After I went to her home, the dog she kept caught my attention.

It was clearly a Yin-Yang Dog!