Changing the genre of your own life is a terrible idea. I don't recommend it.
When I switched the world settings from [High Fantasy] to [Survival Horror], I expected the lighting to get dim and the music to get spooky. I didn't expect the rain.
It was pouring. Not a refreshing spring shower, but a heavy, freezing deluge that smelled like old copper and felt like needles. Thunder rumbled constantly, but it wasn't natural thunder. It sounded like someone dragging a heavy metal table across a concrete floor in the sky.
I huddled under the awning of a blacksmith’s shop in what used to be the Starter Village.
My health bar was blinking in the corner of my vision, keeping time with the pounding headache behind my eyes.
[HP: 2/100]
[Status: Hypothermia (Mild), Glitched, Hunted]
"Great," I shivered, hugging my knees. My hoodie was soaked through. The hole in my chest—the glitch Seraphina gave me—was sizzling every time a raindrop hit it. "I’m going to die of pneumonia before the monster even gets here."
I looked out at the village.
This was Oakhaven. I wrote this place in the prologue. It was supposed to be a "quaint, bustling hamlet with thatched roofs and happy peasants."
Now, under the horror filter, it was a nightmare.
The thatched roofs looked like matted hair. The windows of the houses were pitch black, looking like empty eye sockets. There were no happy peasants. The few NPCs remaining were standing perfectly still in the middle of the mud streets, facing the forest, their heads twitching slightly.
They were glitching.
One farmer was holding a rake, but his arm was detached, floating six inches away from his shoulder. Another woman was waist-deep in the cobblestones, clipped through the ground geometry.
"Hey," I whispered to the nearest NPC, a blacksmith who was hammering an invisible sword on a nonexistent anvil. "You realize the world is ending, right?"
The blacksmith didn't stop pantomiming. "Nice weather for crops," he droned in a monotone voice.
"Yeah. Sure is."
I checked the [Map].
The edges of the parchment were burning. A jagged red line was slowly eating its way toward the center of the village. The Editor. It was still out there, chewing through the data, deleting the trees I’d just run through.
It was slow, methodical, and silent. And it was hungry.
I needed to get to the Capital. The Narrative Core was there—the giant typewriter that controlled reality. If I could get to the keyboard, I could patch the world. I could fix the glitch. I could delete the Editor.
But the Capital was behind a Level 90 firewall. I didn't have the Source Points to hack it.
I needed a key.
Or rather, I needed a "Chosen One."
ns216.73.216.10da2
and then Add to home screen.