Huai Xu refers to summer and is also another name for the fourth month of the lunar calendar.
Chu Huai Xu's birthday was on the first day of the fourth lunar month, which was how he got his name.
The game he was playing was called "Borrowed Sword."
It was the year 2045. As a young man born in the 2020s, he only needed to stick the wired patch to his temple and close his eyes to enter an incredibly realistic game world in this age of rapidly advancing technology.
These days, web novels about traveling to another world had already fallen out of fashion, because transmigration was no longer anything unusual.
For many people, games like this were basically equivalent to transmigration.
The only difference was that reality had laws to restrain people, while different games had different rules to restrict player behavior.
In some games with a high degree of freedom, players could even marry NPCs or other players and have children, with every step guaranteed to be included.
Thus, as the gaming era developed to this point, the Companion Industry had become somewhat distorted.
After all, in the early days, game companions might simply play games with you and connect over voice chat.
No matter how suggestive things got, at most they would flirt a little or make a few breathy noises for you.
Anything more would require meeting in person.
But by 2045, games had become so realistic that they truly felt immersive. If you were projected into another world and given a high degree of freedom, game companions became somewhat like male and female models personally coming down to work.
Or perhaps they were a little like the local guides who had suddenly become popular many years ago?
The difference was that local guides accompanied you when you traveled or went on a business trip somewhere else. These days, the place where they accompanied you had become the game world.
And Chu Huai Xu was an excellent professional model—no, wait, a game companion!
He traveled among all kinds of female bosses by himself and got five-star reviews from every one of them. Sometimes, he even shamelessly lived off them while pretending to be the one doing the favor. That absolutely required skill.
Fortunately, someone like him walked the righteous path and used his abilities at work, diligently serving as a model.
If he used those abilities in daily life, he would be guaranteed to be a scumbag.
At that moment, he was simply bored and wanted to test his luck by creating a new account in "Borrowed Sword."
"Borrowed Sword" had adopted the blind-box business model of some major gambling company, giving game accounts a certain blind-box quality as well.
Every account had to be purchased with money.
After creating an account, everything was unknown: what kind of starting setup it would have, which beginner village it would start in, and what its initial beginner quests would be.
Although the game had done a good job balancing its starting setups and would not give anyone an absurdly overpowered beginning, different people still liked different things, right?
Besides, the game had already been out for five years. Veteran players had figured out some of its tricks, and certain starting setups were more popular than others.
What was more, for some well-funded gaming guilds, rather than opening blind boxes, it was actually better to directly buy accounts that had already been created so they could make arrangements in advance.
As a result, some new accounts could be resold for a profit, and account creation gradually became popular.
Chu Huai Xu had a habit: at the beginning of every month, he would create three accounts.
He had always been quite lucky in this regard, and he had made a little money from it.
Most importantly, he had a steady pool of female guild-manager clients. They were the best buyers for his accounts, and one woman who treated him like a treasure often paid above market price.
This account today should fetch a good price.
That was because, immediately after logging in, the player would be hunted by a stubbled man while carrying a large amount of silver notes. It was clearly a Strong Main Quest Character.
"The early main quest is very clear. Quite a few guilds love buying accounts like this." Chu Huai Xu knew the game inside and out.
But who could have expected that he would run into trouble immediately after logging in today?
—He could not log out!
"That makes no sense." Chu Huai Xu was utterly baffled.
He had played "Borrowed Sword" for so long that he knew exactly how stable the game was.
"Borrowed Sword" was excellent in every respect. Its gameplay experience was superb, and it was currently a top-rated game by reputation.
Just how highly was its reputation regarded?
Even the "designer's mother" was still alive in the hearts of many players.
Unlike certain games, where even if the designer had ten mothers, it still would not be enough to curse them to death.
This was the first time Chu Huai Xu had encountered such a serious problem. He actually could not exit the game.
On top of that, many of his other game functions seemed to be unusable as well.
Some of them were basic functions.
For example, he could no longer listen to music while playing.
"Brightness adjustment is still here, at least."
A moment earlier, he had swiped upward with two fingers, and the entire world had brightened somewhat in his eyes. That was the brightness adjustment function.
"But why is the Pain Index adjustment gone too?" Chu Huai Xu was speechless.
He tried pinching himself hard, then grimaced in pain.
"No! This is definitely fucking 100% pain!" He was completely dumbfounded.
In "Borrowed Sword," the highest adjustable Pain Index was only 8%.
Players generally set it very low. Only some enthusiasts with particularly unusual tastes would satisfy certain abnormal needs in the game by setting the Pain Index higher.
Quite a few people would set the Pain Index infinitely close to zero.
Combined with the extremely high degree of freedom in "Borrowed Sword"—as mentioned earlier, even marriage and childbirth were possible—it was truly blessed with fertility. Thus, the legendary painless motherhood could actually be achieved in the game.
"But this pain is way too strange." Chu Huai Xu furrowed his brows tightly.
The upper limit set by the game was only 8%. This made no sense.
He looked at the corpse of the stubbled man on the ground and could not help sucking in a cold breath.
"In other words, if I had accidentally been slashed by him just now, wouldn't the pain have completely exploded?"
"If this kind of bug really exists, how many players would be driven away?" Chu Huai Xu could already imagine it.
Next, he checked all his game functions one by one and found that only a pitiful few could still be used.
He could not even contact the AI Customer Service.
That AI Customer Service had been trained by him for a long time and had long since become exactly the way he wanted.
Even stranger, Chu Huai Xu could check the time. He knew very clearly that the game timeline in "Borrowed Sword" had already reached the 1997th year of the Xuan Calendar.
Yet when he checked the time now, it displayed the 1990th year of the Xuan Calendar!
"This is fucking ridiculous!"
"The game has crashed, hasn't it?"
The heavy rain continued pouring down. Holding the oiled-paper umbrella, Chu Huai Xu stood on the path through the Dense Forest. The more he thought about it, the more wrong it felt.
He was, at the very least, a game male model who had read countless novels and watched countless anime and films.
"Don't tell me I transmigrated into 'Borrowed Sword'?"
He opened his Character Panel and checked the basic information of his game character.
He immediately discovered something strange in the character template section.
His template was actually labeled not as a player, but as an NPC!
At that moment, the sky collapsed for Chu Huai Xu.
"Damn it, I worked so hard to cling to rich women and put so much effort into being a male model. In the 'Borrowed Sword' Companion Industry, the older sisters and younger sisters even rated me second on the Sword for Hire Companion Must-Eat List. And I haven't even spent the money I saved!"
"I even took Sister Yun's commission for tonight."
"She's been separated from her husband for years, technically married but practically widowed, and has a mature woman's voice. She stayed up late yesterday to send me a voice message reserving a game for tomorrow night. Obviously, she was definitely going to extend the session!"
Chu Huai Xu could not help lowering his head. "Fuck!"
The annoyance of the night rain, the annoyance of the night rain.
Beneath the oiled-paper umbrella, Chu Huai Xu grew even more irritated.
He walked over to the stubbled man's corpse and slowly crouched down.
—Then he raised his hand and slapped him!
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