After Mistaking the Demon Lords for Family

Also known as "A Happy Family" [All powerful characters x lighthearted comedy x mutual healing]

[Upcoming story: "Bring a System Home and Seize the Throne"]

System mission: Win over Shen Yi, the great villain who slaughtered the entire martial world, and save the martial arts world.

But the System kicks its Host, Huo Ru, fifteen years into the past by mistake. Its permissions are reduced, all its skills are wiped, and it's forced to stay silent.

With no intention of winning anyone over, she spends all her points saving the wrong "mother," mistakes someone else for her "father," and scolds a "little punk" on the street--

Only to save a genius sect leader being hunted by her sect, mistake a top assassin who has retired from the business for her father,

and discover that the little punk is none other than the future great villain himself.

Fortunately, she has no idea.

Unfortunately, she has no idea!

The little punk, kindly taken in by her mother, clings to her from then on.

He always follows at her heels, but when she catches him, he insists, "I'm not here to protect you or anything. It's all for Mom."

*

Shen Yi, the great villain who slaughtered the martial world, is reborn at the age of ten.

He thought he would have no choice but to walk that old path of blood and fire again, but then he meets a girl who never appeared in his fate: Huo Ru.

At first, they can't stand each other.

She thinks he's gloomy, and he finds her annoying.

But at some point, he realizes she's like a little sun--

The world in her eyes is always gentle and bright.

No massacred cities, no one hunting them, no being driven into a dead end.

She's so, so good that he can't bear to risk losing her, not even a little.

The world is so good that he still has the chance to meet someone like her.

*

The road here was all wind and snow. On the way home, someone takes your hand, and you no longer have to wander the world alone.

---Upcoming story: "Bring a System Home and Seize the Throne"---

After Ming Zhao dies, she drifts through the human world for decades.

The King of Hell tells her that she has unfinished business--

but even she can't remember what it is.

Until she discovers that her lover from her previous life, in an attempt to bring her back to life, was deceived and brainwashed by the "WTF System," stripped of his memories, and turned into its sharpest weapon.

At that moment, she thinks she's finally found the answer.

So she makes a pact with her soul and forces her way into the System's world, securing a wager:

She'll earn enough points to complete missions with him. Without telling him anything about their previous life, if he can remember everything on his own, he will be set free.

The final mission takes place in a notoriously angsty novel.

According to the plot, she should be crushed, used, and sacrificed.

But Ming Zhao has never been one to meekly endure abuse.

She changes her fate as usual.

Only this time, something begins to go wrong--

The farther she strays from the plot, the more clearly the blank spaces in the story reveal her past life.

Her dormant ambition awakens, too.

In her previous life, she was the daughter of a military family. Her ambitions were suppressed and her position stripped from her because she was a woman, and she ultimately died amid betrayal by her closest family and the power struggles of the imperial court.

At last, Ming Zhao understands--

The unfinished business that kept her wandering the human world for decades

was never just about her lover.

It was about the self that the era and her gender had buried with their own hands.

The empress who should have held the world in her grasp, with a sword pointed at the realm.

So, given another chance, should she fight for the throne?

She should!

She'll make the world rewrite its rules through rebellion.

She'll reclaim everything through ambition.

She wants this vast realm, and she wants to crown the self who has finally awakened within her.

---Second upcoming story: "Desire Settlement in Progress"---

At eighteen, Xu Zhiwei bound herself to a System:

Whenever someone fantasized about her, she would earn a reward.

But she found the notifications annoying and muted them for ten years.

At twenty-eight, the System is about to expire. Its Controller arrives and discovers that she's earned only three thousand yuan in ten years--

while others have already made millions using the same System.

Three months on the clock.

She can't win by quantity, so she has to focus on quality.

The System's most valuable source of fantasies

is the calm, abstinent, extremely rational CTO at her company.

What she doesn't know is--

he's bound to the same System.

By day, he uses data and rules to build barriers she can't overcome;

by night, he precisely collects every desire for him in an anonymous livestream.

The even more absurd truth is--

The anonymous male streamer she's been watching for seven years to unwind,

the one she's "trained" and dreamed about night after night,

is none other than him.

He's always known she's his first viewer and his longest-standing patron.

He's listened to every "instruction" she's given him, and in the dead of night, has felt the System's burning fantasy notifications sent because of her.

When the hunter knows the prey has already stepped into the trap,

and the prey holds the only key that can pierce the hunter's disguise--

Xu Zhiwei decides to press that button herself.

The project presentation ends and everyone leaves. She stays behind, turns off the projector, but doesn't leave.

The cold light of the conference room falls on her, and in the eyes of Cheng Jia, watching through the blinds from the other side of the wall.

She picks up the internal phone on the table and dials the extension to his office.

The line connects. Both ends are silent but for their breathing.

She looks at the eyes beyond the window, now suddenly dark and deep, and speaks into the receiver in the tone he knows so well, one ingrained in his instincts over seven years.

"Mr. Cheng."

"That 'Exclusive Dream' series in your livestream, the one that hasn't been updated in ages..."

"I'll renew it tonight."

---End of upcoming story blurb---

Theme: An ordinary, happy life is the greatest extraordinary thing of all.