How to Raise an Apocalyptic Villain

Q: How do you raise a world-ending villain?

A: Take him in when he's miserable and helpless, care for him devotedly, bandage his wounds, teach him to control his powers, show him the world outside, and patiently keep him warm and company. Then chop yourself into pieces and deliver them to him. :)

*** (Third-person narration)

I am a Villain System on the verge of being scrapped.

In all my years as a System, I can count my contracted partners on one hand.

Can't be helped. Hosts these days are harder and harder to fool. Even when they have no choice but to cooperate, they're wary and suspicious of me.

- "You want me to blow up headquarters? Yeah, I knew you were up to no good."

- "I got the villain's script? No way. Who'd willingly be a villain when they could live a perfectly good life?"

With one mission after another failing, the Transmigration Bureau's patience with me was all but gone.

This was my last chance. If I couldn't get my Host to willingly follow the plot, I'd risk being sent back to the factory for a complete overhaul.

Fortunately, I came up with a brilliant plan.

[Rather than parasitize my Host's mind and be an unwelcome alien presence, I should pretend to be a local and guide him toward the right destiny.]

Ever since Pei Xu could remember, he had never had enough to eat or warm clothes to wear. Beatings and punishments were part of everyday life.

No one had ever been kind to him, and he had never felt even the slightest joy in being alive.

At seventeen, he was beaten until his skin was torn and his flesh was bruised. He curled into a ball and collapsed in a dark, cramped alley.

Then she appeared.

She saved his life and led him away from the hellish first seventeen years of his life.

They huddled together in a tiny rental apartment. The power went out in the Lower City every night, but her eyes shone like stars.

For her sake, for the chance to give her a better life, and for the secret hope in his heart, Pei Xu worked odd jobs while studying, striving to become a dazzling new star of the Inner City.

What a pity.

Just as everything was starting to go well, he saw her mutilated corpse.

* Villainous male lead x an even more unscrupulous female lead, 1v1, happy ending

* Inspired by an internet meme. I won't make it too long. It'll probably be a sweet little story about two people who fall for each other. (Yes, somehow this is a sweet romance.)

* Extremely, extremely melodramatic, including but not limited to "he was the only light in my life" and "I died and he went mad," and so on. qwq

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