Players All Think the Background Character Is the World-Destroying Boss

Coming soon: After Rebirth, the Most Hated Student at the Elite Academy. Click the author's profile to see how baby Xie Ci gets revenge on the rotten ones! [Comment threads are now open to everyone. Come join in!] At some point, Yu Zhou realized that something was seriously wrong with the world. For example, a classmate ate a poisonous fungus cultivated in the laboratory and died, only to come back to life the next day. The other students who witnessed the death didn't think anything was strange. Even his familiar older brother and childhood friend... they all seemed to be getting stranger and stranger. In the shadows, indescribable monsters seemed to stir, whispering their thick, damp love for him. One day, red rain drifted down and the whole world changed. A voice rang out in Yu Zhou's mind: [The official launch of Weird Invasion begins now! Players, enjoy an Earth online experience unlike any other!] Looking at the labels that had suddenly appeared above the heads of these strangers, such as "Whale," "Top-Ranked B-King," "Hard-Boiled Mystery Expert," and "Airheaded Beauty," he suddenly understood. So the strange people were all players in a game! And he had no special aura. He was just an ordinary background NPC. But when Yu Zhou opened the game forum, he was immediately struck dumb: #Developers, explain how my gorgeous wife Yu Zhou turned into a world-ending boss!# Yu Zhou: Me? A world-ending boss? * In 207X, the fully immersive simulation game Weird Invasion took the world by storm, and its NPC Yu Zhou became a major focus for players. Players first encountered him in a video of a closed-beta expert clearing a stage. A psychiatrist turned butcher was searching the hospital rooms one by one. His butcher's knife was covered in blood, the rest of the team had been wiped out, and even the battle-hardened expert had nowhere left to run. When Yu Zhou appeared, every player assumed he was just a pretty vase there to get killed. After all, he looked so fragile, so breakable, so utterly helpless. But he merely called out, "Doctor, is my prescription ready?" The violent, terrifying psychiatrist instantly calmed down and returned to his refined, humanlike appearance. He even greeted Yu Zhou with a smile, like a vicious dog who immediately became docile when his master showed up. The closed-beta expert escaped death and, with Yu Zhou's directions, managed to get out of the hospital. He became the first high-level player in the world to clear an S-rank instance. After the game's official launch, players discovered even more surprises: all the powerful NPCs were connected to Yu Zhou! Powerful A, a government bigwig who had returned from an infinite-flow world, was his older brother. Players thought he and Yu Zhou had a bad relationship, until they saw Powerful A embrace Yu Zhou tenderly: "Xiao Zhou, you don't have to repay me. Your big brother only wants you to stay away from those other men." Powerful B, a future savior, was his childhood friend. Powerful B looked down at the players with contempt, while black shadows wrapped Yu Zhou tightly in their embrace, as if to say: "Anyone who covets Yu Zhou will die." Powerful C, the boss of an SSS-rank horror instance set in Miao territory, was his upperclassman. After Yu Zhou beat Powerful C in a dream one night, he didn't get angry. Instead, he said suggestively: "I've raised a bunch of adorable pets. Are you really not interested in trying them out?" Powerful D, the founder of a chaotic neutral organization, was his crazed fan. Players thought he was always targeting Yu Zhou because he hated him. But it turned out he was driven mad by love and wanted to have sex with Yu Zhou. His expression was wild: "We killed the same person, and we're stained with the same blood. Now we're one." After that, the players all became devoted fans. "My delicate, beautiful wife, I'll protect you!!!" Yu Zhou quickly became a hugely popular character around the world. His merchandise sold out instantly, and every forum post about him became a hit. Then the game's final storyline was accidentally leaked. Yu Zhou had evolved into an incredibly terrifying, crazed, unrestrained evil spirit, eventually becoming the world-ending boss feared by the whole world! The forum exploded, and one Sherlock Holmes-style sleuth pieced the whole thing together. "Now I get why so many evil-spirit bosses are soothed by Yu Zhou. They're all just Yu Zhou's dogs!" "Once Yu Zhou's favorability goes over 30, the player's health bar mysteriously drops to zero. The final boss must be killing them because he doesn't want to have any extra feelings!" "No wonder so many powerful NPCs treasure Yu Zhou. Powerful people really do attract other powerful people, especially the kind of powerful person who wants to destroy the world!" Yu Zhou only had six dots to offer in response: "..." #He's really just an ordinary background NPC# Content warnings: 1. Yu Zhou is the center of the entire game and all its players. Without him, the game world and the real world would lose all meaning. Everyone loves and dotes on him. 2. The true love interest is his childhood friend: a mentally unstable, antisocial gong x a cold, beautiful, highly intelligent shou with (fake) mental stability. Both leads are extremely powerful and wildly idealized. 3. I couldn't find anything to read, so I decided to write this myself. Please be kind about the writing. Theme: The distance between my soul and me is so vast, yet my existence is so real.