The Old Farm

1.

As a super-lucky player, Yu Huai received an invitation to the beta test of the full-dive game Old-Time Farm.

[Reminder: You cannot log out before completing the game. To finish, you must collect everything, earn every achievement, and max out every NPC's affection.]

So Yu Huai ditched his real-life 996 work schedule and went all out with a 007 schedule in Old-Time Farm.

The game, however, was set in a post-apocalyptic world after a natural disaster, where resources were scarce. There were mushroom forests taller than trees, swamps crawling with tentacles and poisonous frogs, valleys filled with giant flying centipedes...

[Please choose a location for your farm.]

Yu Huai: ...Pick your damn self.

Luckily, his super-lucky constitution was still with him. On the very first day of the game, he got a ring that boosted his luck. Maybe this lousy game wasn't so bad after all.

2.

Yu Huai never imagined that the hardest achievement in this lousy game would be maxing out every NPC's affection: the seemingly gentle, secretly yandere boy next door; the irritable evil dragon living in the valley; the gloomy poet who made it rain mushrooms whenever he got angry; the merman who flooded Yu Huai with pearls every time he cried...

The quickest way to raise an NPC's affection was to give them gifts. Looking at his dirt-poor farm, Yu Huai put his knowledge of resource cycling in survival games to use.

He gave the pearls that fell when the merman cried to the poet who had traveled from afar.

He put the love letter the poet had written him in his neighbor's mailbox.

He gave the rare gems his neighbor had gifted him to the evil dragon in the valley...

Then, on the day every NPC's affection reached 99, Yu Huai wept with joy, thinking he could finally leave this soul-crushing game. But his luck finally failed him.

Every NPC he'd charmed showed up at the farm, and each recognized the things the others treasured as soon as they saw them. "This is the token of love I gave Xiao Huai!"

Yu Huai said calmly, "Hear me out, I can expl... explain!"

Forget it. Just haul me straight to the crematorium.

The good news: Even after the jealous showdown, the NPCs' affection stayed at 99, and some of them seemed ready to take things even further.

The bad news: Those twisted creeps locked him inside, leaving him facing an indefinite confinement, and his legs would never close again.

P.S.:

1. All the NPCs in this blurb are gongs. The gong is split into multiple incarnations, but they aren't separate personalities. Their personalities and personas are all performances put on by the gong.

2. This is neither a conventional farming novel nor a conventional Cthulhu setting. The gong is a primordial god who is both innocent and evil, a giant octopus in his true form, and utterly lovesick.

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