MTL - The Nation’s Male God Fell In Love With Me - Chapter 21 Arbor grows cool in summer

Song Yi found herself transmigrated into a novel, becoming the female protagonist of an old-school Mary Sue story.Gentle, kind, beautiful, and graceful, she was the unattainable ideal in everyone’s heart. The aloof top student fell from his pedestal for her sake, while the reclusive young man fought against his family for her.All of this sounded quite nice, but there was just one problem – this novel had a bad ending!!!

How long can one ignore the voices in their head?Nine years. To Mark, that was the limit.For the majority of his life, Mark White has been fighting a constant battle for his sanity. The voices in his head pushed him toward madness one whisper at a time, and the music he used to ward against them was gradually losing its effects.As his mental state slowly deteriorated, Mark spent more of his time working on a game he had been developing and lamenting his lack of romantic experience.One night, the voices dealt him a powerful blow, bringing their battle to an end. To his surprise, Mark won the battle, but that came at a great cost.The voices might have disappeared, but a visual hallucination arrived to replace them, taking the form of a character from his game: Maids VS Apocalypse. Little did he know that the real apocalypse was already coming for him.

I am currently re-writing the first chapters of this story. They are quite rough and bounce around a lot and I can do better. At some point, I will replace these with the better chapters.Sometime in 2024 Aethon Books will publish the first volume of this story on Amazon, KU, and audible. This will mean the story will be stubbed. I will notify people far in advance of that.In the dystopian world of the future, life is rough when you live at the bottom. Jobs are non-existent. Far too many people live in poverty, crammed into huge buildings called Habitats. With no jobs in the real world, many people can only find work online in VR worlds as servants to the very rich. And it's getting worse. The old internet is unusable and hacked to pieces. The new system needs AI to run things, but all but one of them were destroyed. The last sentient AI is ordered to create a new game world so the rich can have a playground, and the corporations that rule the world can have a new global market place. Everyone wants a piece of the new game. The guilds are competing to be the first to find the dungeons and kill the biggest monster. The corporations are claiming land and putting in their online market places. Ozzy and his friends just want a paycheck.Four friends sign five year contracts as virtual serfs in a small village, and can't go adventuring at all to gain money. They don't have many choices. They can work as a blacksmith, barmaid and shepherd for all those years....or they can cheat and find ways to take advantage of the system and carve out a section of the game world for themselves, and earn a fortune in the real world.When they give you a mop and not a sword, you have to find the loopholes and change the rules.

Rex was an ordinary salaryman, resigned to a dull life of monotony in a towering megacity. But his world shatters when he’s conscripted by Nexum Dynamics, a ruthless megacorporation, and thrust into a brutal war for a barren, alien world. The planet holds unimaginable riches, but it’s also swarming with the Krhyssari, an insectoid race that dominates the surface with their hive-mind precision and relentless aggression. Amid the carnage, Rex had an extraordinary encounter with Cleo, an ancient AI, a survivor of a long-extinct civilization. Cleo isn’t just an artificial intelligence; she’s a consciousness imbued with memories of her people’s interstellar empire and equipped with advanced bio-nanotechnology. Offering Rex a new purpose and unmatched power, she transforms his fragile human body into a hybrid of living metal and flesh, making him the ultimate weapon. But Cleo is more than a tool of war. As she journeys alongside Rex, her cold, logical algorithms evolve, shaped by his humanity. Together, they form a bond that transcends the boundaries of man and machine, discovering love in the midst of chaos. As Rex and Cleo fight for survival, they uncover a shared ambition, to rise as intergalactic overlords, uniting or conquering the galaxy.