I've Read Your Doujinshi

Akihabara.

This place, hailed as a holy land for anime fans, was filled with huge anime posters and girls in maid outfits handing out flyers.

"Wow... so this was the legendary Akihabara? There were so many people." Miko Yotsuya clutched tightly at the hem of Lin Xiao's clothes, looking around like a curious child.

With Lin Xiao, a "human self-propelled exorcism machine," around, she had not seen a single evil spirit all day, leaving her completely relaxed.

Walking ahead of them, Yukino Yukinoshita frowned slightly. She was clearly a little uncomfortable in an environment filled with exaggerated illustrations and noise.

However, the one acting most unusually was Sawamura Eriri, who was normally the most high-profile of them all.

The blonde twin-tailed young lady had, incredibly, put on a pair of thick black-rimmed glasses today. She had even worn a baseball cap that covered half her face, hunching timidly along the way.

"Eriri, are you sneaking around like a thief?" Lin Xiao knowingly poked her shoulder.

"W-What's it to you?! I'm allergic to ultraviolet rays, okay?!" Eriri roared in a guilty whisper like a cat whose tail had been stepped on, her eyes fixed in terror on a bookshelf not far away.

Following her gaze, Lin Xiao's lips immediately curled into a wicked grin.

He walked straight past Eriri to the bookshelf surrounded by countless otaku, then casually picked up a doujinshi marked [18+], whose protagonist was also a blonde, twin-tailed tsundere.

In the author credit section, four words were printed prominently—[Kashiwagi Eiri]!

"My, my, this art style, these incredibly delicate strokes..."

Holding the doujinshi, Lin Xiao deliberately raised his voice a little and turned toward the already petrified Eriri behind him. "Sawamura, why do I feel that the style of this wildly popular doujinshi artist called 'Kashiwagi Eiri' bears an astonishing resemblance to the 'masterpieces' you usually draw?"

The moment he said that, Eriri's face went from deathly pale to blazing red!

"Y-Y-Y-Y-You're talking nonsense!!!"

Eriri rushed over and stammered furiously, "W-What Kashiwagi Eiri?! I don't know her at all! I'm the ace of the art club! How could I possibly draw this... this shameless stuff?!"

However, she moved too wildly. With a "snap," the zipper of Eriri's bag flew open, and several unfinished doujinshi sketches scattered across the floor without the slightest mercy.

The air fell deathly silent in that instant.

Yukino Yukinoshita elegantly bent down and picked up one of the sketches. Her cool eyes swept over it, and then her entire body seemed to freeze. A rare blush instantly spread across her fair cheeks.

"S-Sawamura..." Yukino took a deep breath with great difficulty, turned the drawing over, and stared at Eriri—who was nearly dying of shame—with the look of someone staring at a deformed alien creature.

"Although I have heard of underground doujin culture... I truly cannot understand it. Why were the two women in this drawing entangled in a pose that completely violated common sense regarding human skeletal mechanics and biological reproduction?!"

"Had the obscene filth in your head piled up to the point where even the fundamental laws of physics had to be twisted?"

"AAAAAAAAH!!! Shut up! Don't look! Don't say it out loud!!!"

Eriri completely broke down. Squatting on the floor with her ears covered, her golden twin tails drooped limply as she let out the miserable whine of a defeated dog. "Just let me die... Let the Earth be destroyed... Lin Xiao, you bastard, why did you have to bring me to this floor?! Waaaaah..."

Watching Eriri suffer such a tragic "social death" in Akihabara's doujinshi section, Lin Xiao laughed without the slightest guilt. Then he led the three utterly disoriented girls to an upscale café to rest.

They sat on the café's incredibly soft private booth sofa.

Eriri held the menu in front of her face as if she were a corpse that had lost its soul.

Yukino, meanwhile, drank three glasses of ice water in a row before she barely managed to banish those "unspeakable" images from her mind. Yet the way she looked at Eriri was still filled with profound disdain.

With nothing better to do, Lin Xiao leisurely took a sip of coffee and opened the Myriad Worlds Chat Group.

At that moment, an extremely strange atmosphere filled the group.

That was because the newly joined [The Shut-In Princess of Eientei] was making "fourth-wall-breaking" remarks that were enough to overturn everyone's worldview.

[The Shut-In Princess of Eientei]: "So, Batman, Naruto, and that magical girl, you don't need to keep asking me questions. The reason I know what will happen in your worlds is because, to me, all of you are just games I've played and manga I've read on my computer~"

[The Shut-In Princess of Eientei]: "Oh my, don't be so nervous. Since we met in the same chat group, everyone's already acquainted. Perhaps the Gensokyo I live in is nothing more than some little anime bullet-hell game in other people's eyes."

[The Shut-In Princess of Eientei]: "We're all two-dimensional characters, so life still has to go on! Don't worry about those vague and intangible things. Being happy is what matters most!"

Seeing Kaguya's nihilistic remarks, so characteristic of an internet-addicted shut-in, Naruto of Konoha Village, Shirou of Fuyuki City, and even the battle-hardened Batman all collectively crashed.

[The Boy Who Wants to Be a Hero]: "We... are merely characters in a manga?"

[Dark Knight of Gotham]: "That's impossible. My pain, my will, every drop of blood in Gotham City—they're all real."

[Dark Knight of Gotham]: "If this is merely a predetermined script, then what meaning does my struggle have..."

Faced with this existential crisis that amounted to a "dimensionality reduction strike," the old members' worldviews suffered an extremely severe blow.

Yet Kaguya, the culprit behind it all, not only felt no guilt whatsoever, but shamelessly dropped an even more explosive bomb.

[The Shut-In Princess of Eientei]: "Oh my, I told you not to dwell on it. To prove that I'm telling the truth, I have plenty of rare resources that drifted in from the outside world!"

[The Shut-In Princess of Eientei]: "@Dark Knight of Gotham, Big Bat, I have doujinshi of you and Joker here! They're drawn pretty intensely. Want to see?"

[The Shut-In Princess of Eientei]: "@The Underdog Who Wants to Be Hokage, Naruto, I've collected a huge pile of doujinshi of you and Sasuke too! They're absolutely uncensored and high-definition! (≖ᴗ≖)✧"

The moment she said that.

The entire Myriad Worlds Chat Group seemed, at that instant, to have been paused by some indescribable force of terror.

[The Underdog Who Wants to Be Hokage]: "D-Doujinshi? What's that? Can you eat it?"

[Dark Knight of Gotham]: "..."

Meanwhile, in the café of the real world.

Yukino Yukinoshita, who had just been trying to calm herself down, made the glass in her hand tremble violently when she saw the words "doujinshi" sent by Kaguya in the chat group.

Yukino slowly raised her head and looked at Lin Xiao across from her, her voice trembling slightly.

"L-Lin Xiao..." "The doujinshi that princess mentioned in the group... couldn't it mean... the kind of thing Sawamura just drew?!"

"Probably... yes."