Please Win Me Over

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After Lin En dies, he falls into a full-dive romance game and becomes a background NPC.

His character has only one bit of screen time: When a player selects a love interest to pursue, he dies tragically in a cutscene, dropping an heirloom that the player obtains. He becomes the first stepping stone on the chosen one's road to a life of success.

After his character exits the story, Lin En's consciousness is trapped in the System's recycling bin, waiting endlessly in a silence and void so terrible they could drive anyone mad.

Waiting for the player to reload and restart the story from the beginning... only to enter the cycle of death and despair once more.

He doesn't want to return to that terrifying darkness.

He has to find a way to keep participating without deviating from the story.

Lin En can't fight the program. To bypass the pivotal plot point where he "dies and drops an heirloom," the only way he can think of is

To enter the story himself and become one of the love interests.

That raises the question: As a male NPC cannon fodder in a straight romance game, how can he catch the interest of a straight male player?

Lin En looks at himself in the mirror. His face is almost identical to that of his mother, a princess once praised as "the Empire's White Rose" before she was secretly executed on charges of treason. He takes a deep breath...

And digs out the dress he'd hidden away.

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Ka Lai discovers a special romance option in his game.

For the first twenty-five years of his life, he'd followed the prescribed path: going to school and enlisting alongside the other children born in his cohort, fighting on the battlefield day after day like a machine, then buying the most popular stress-relief game with his comrades...

He was everyone's model citizen, the perfect standard. Nothing about his life was out of the ordinary, until he fell for someone who didn't fit any "norm."

That someone wasn't even real. He was just a program, yet Ka Lai was so obsessed that he wanted to stay in the virtual world forever for "him."

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Please read before starting:

* Ka Lai (gong) x Lin En (shou). The story focuses on the shou, with a strictly monogamous relationship in both body and heart. They return to the real world for a happy ending. The shou looks the same in the game and real world.

* Includes cross-dressing and disguises.

* The game world is a magical otherworld, and the real world is a futuristic interstellar setting. The worldbuilding is sloppy and far from rigorous; everything serves the romance.

* The title and blurb may change often during prepublication, but the main premise won't!

Theme: Take an active role in shaping your own destiny