The First Boss of Strange Tales

[The “Heart-Pounding South Seas” instance has been cleared.]

In the third year of the spiritual qi revival, all of humanity was swept into the real-world supernatural game, “Strange Tales.”

The game randomly draws urban legends to generate instances. Win, and the instance’s boss becomes a guardian deity protecting the region, keeping all evil at bay. Lose, and the supernatural beings fully revive, swallowing up every area involved in the instance!

The stakes are enormous.

Players taking part in the instances and viewers watching the livestreams hate nothing more than useless idiots who drag everyone down.

Unfortunately, when a calamity-level instance opens, one such idiot gets matched into it.

Long silver-gray hair, a world-weary face, and a sickly air. He sleeps while everyone else fights and takes a bath while everyone else runs for their lives.

No matter how good-looking he is, he can’t hide that “I don’t want to live, so let’s all die together” vibe. He’s practically a walking obituary.

Then they check his profile:

A 24-karat newbie.

Everyone’s vision goes black. Damn it, the boss could swallow him in one bite!

No one knows that Wei E was once swept into an even higher-dimensional infinite world.

There, a minor instance came every three days and a major instance every five. Each one was oppressive, insane, and desperate, driving people to their deaths. Not a single player could last three years. Wei E was the first with a chance of making it to his third year, right up until he blew up the Main God.

As the Main God’s realm collapsed,

Wei E thought back on three years of endless instances and five years of fighting for his life, and swore fiercely: If I get another life, I absolutely won’t get involved!

He opened his eyes and found himself back on the familiar Blue Star.

Before he could even celebrate, he discovered… the Main God had come out with him too :)

·

The day the hunting ground was destroyed, the Main God swore that sooner or later it would kill that insolent ant.

Whenever Wei E looked up while brushing his teeth, he could see the words in the mirror: “In one hundred days, I shall kill you.”

On day fifty, a player confessed to Wei E.

On day thirty, Wei E reached the top of “Strange Tales’” list of most charming men.

On day ten, an instance boss threw itself into his arms.

On day five, day three, every day, someone on the forums declared they were Wei E’s dog.

On the final day, the Main God really did seize Wei E by the throat, its voice dark and crazed. “I told you, sooner or later I would kill you.”

But looking at Wei E’s weary, curling lips, it thought perhaps it should try another approach.

For example, being underneath him.

When Wei E solved the first calamity instance, some people thought it was just luck.

Only after one disaster-level instance after another was overcome, turning certain death into survival, did they realize it wasn’t luck. It was hope, rekindling the wasteland:

Slay the Dragon King in the ghost-haunted waters of southern Fujian

Burn the bones at the mountain stronghold in southern Yunnan

Enter the Dragon Gate beneath the ghost-head guillotine

Snatch living souls from the Kitchen God’s jaws

…

In this absurd, hopeless world, he was the walking

First Boss!

Note:

A nontraditional infinite-flow story.

A mad, fragmentary evil god with many secret identities as the gong x a ruthless, cool-headed shou: Yan Ling x Wei E

The pairing cannot be split, reversed, or shipped with anyone else. One-on-one.

The cover is used with exclusive authorization for the web novel.

The author enjoys commissioning art and may change the cover from time to time during serialization. I love every cover, so please don’t argue about it.

Reader’s guide: Don’t mention other authors or their works in my comments, and don’t mention me in other authors’ comments. No comparisons meant to put anyone down, and no irrelevant comments of any kind. Do not reverse or split the pairing. Don’t try to guess every instance from the blurb or cobble together those four lines of doggerel [.

December 2022: Screenshots archived. Any plagiarism will be pursued.

A related upcoming story about a world where the supernatural has revived: “I’m a Half-Immortal in the Supernatural World.”

Three years after graduating, Cen Xu, a broke archaeology major, finally inherits the family business and becomes…

a fortune-teller under an overpass [.

But as soon as he puts up his sign, a ghost smashes his door in the middle of the night, saying he won’t do business with an amateur who switched careers halfway through.

Cen Xu: “????”

Come on, sir. Do you need the right pedigree to swindle people?

Making a living is hard, the rent is due, and after his stall gets trashed for the nth time, Cen Xu takes a deep breath, rolls up his sleeves, and gives all the demons and monsters a benevolent smile.

What kind of age are we living in, if people still discriminate against career changers without the right degree? To hell with them!

Years later, after breaking the ghost ferry on the Yellow River, pacifying the corpse-strewn banks of East Bay, and solving the blood-knife case over a yin-yang ley line that had been at odds for thirty years… Cen Xu, the strange-path leader who holds first-rank talismans and the true teachings of many mountain lineages, sighs to his devoted admirers: “I really don’t want to become an immortal.”

After all, immortals still have to work a 9-to-9 schedule.

A 9-to-9 schedule: a modern half-immortal’s part-time job in the Underworld, working from nine in the morning to nine at night, with only one day off a year.

Unfortunately, the King of Hell offered him a generous salary.

*

“There’s only one kind of ghost in this world: a poor ghost.”

Cen Xu.

A supernatural folk-custom story, about a broke, cool guy falling in love [x]

A wealthy heir with a wife, all thanks to his money, gong x a shou who makes a comeback from nowhere and beats up all the martial-world factions

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