[Blurb to be completed]
Liyue is a PC (Player Character), a character controlled by a player in a role-playing game.
"Sigh, they're gone." He confided in a friend, his voice full of pain. "The player who controlled my body abandoned the game just like that, leaving me alone to struggle in this cold, cruel world."
"From now on, I'll have to negotiate back and forth with my advisor on my own: first draft, second draft, third draft, first review, second review, final review. I'll have to debug code comments across a screen full of code over and over, then have the program crash during the acceptance demo and make my advisor pound the keyboard and yell, 'You can't even run a basic calculation, and you expect to get a job?' Then I'll have to cram at the last minute and click through a PPT full of comments so furiously during my thesis defense that sparks fly from the keys!"
His friend smiled awkwardly, understanding how much he wanted to graduate on time.
"How could anyone do this? They're treating me like the protagonist of some porn game!" Liyue protested. "I'm the shared male lead in seven horror RPGs, but they just had to install some beautification mods, a human-form mod, and social interaction mods. And now they've abandoned the game, but not before installing a gentleman mod on me!"
His friend, who didn't play games, asked curiously, "What's a gentleman mod?"
Liyue fell silent at once. He stammered, half-truthfully, "It turns me from a horror RPG protagonist into... uh, the protagonist of certain dating sims? Oh my god!" He suddenly realized something. "Wait, going from horror to pervy means I won't have to survive by selling blood and gore anymore! I can make a living by selling my affections!"
"That's great! So they really did have the foresight to plan this!" Liyue grabbed his friend's hand and gazed deeply into his eyes. "My friend, we won't be able to see each other much from now on. I'm going to sell myself to a man-eating house, a giant moth, an awakened AI, an octopus monster in the snowy mountains, a demon's child, a wandering ghost king, an alien parasite... and make my living there!"
"Seven targets in all. From a gaming perspective, that's simply..." He murmured, leaping out of his seat and speaking with shy sincerity. "Don't make me enjoy this too much!"
This time, his friend finally understood. He smiled faintly, then lifted his head off his shoulders. As Liyue stared in shock, the head in his arms never blinked. "Little Fish, there aren't seven. There's only one."
"You counted wrong." The head gradually turned into a gray-white stone carving. "No matter how many there are, I'll tear them apart and grind them to dust until I'm the only one left by your side."
And Liyue was thinking: Oh my god, it wasn't seven targets. It was eight!
[Reading Guide]
★ Nonhuman x enthusiastic angel puppy
★ The male lead gets it wrong. He still has to run for his life and survive, but now he'll be surviving while selling himself (not really).
★ Includes death-and-reload scenes, like playing a game, and may be a little gory.
★ The man-eating house was inspired by the house in American Horror Story: Murder House. The awakened AI was inspired by American Horror Stories and Westworld. The alien parasite was inspired by Alien.
★ The seme's species may change before the story begins.
Theme: Only when we love this world are we truly living in it.