Pursuing Immortality - Chapter 236

After being torn from the only life she knew, 16-year-old Margo is forced into a new home with strangers who call themselves her parents. Haunted by memories of her past and consumed by feelings of isolation, she struggles to adapt to her unfamiliar surroundings. School offers little relief—until she meets Lucien, a mysterious boy who appears just when she needs a friend the most.Gabriel is everything Margo needs: kind, attentive, and always ready to whisk her away from her troubles. Each night, he invites her to secret places—an abandoned playground, a fog-choked garden, a crumbling train station at the edge of town—each more unsettling than the last. Yet with every chilling rendezvous, Margo feels more alive... more seen.But something isn’t right. Gabriel never comes to school during the day. Her adoptive parents never see him. And when they catch her talking to thin air, their concern deepens into fear. They say Gabriel isn't real—that he’s a figment of her imagination. Margo wants to believe them, but Gabriel feels real. More real than anything else in her life.As the nights grow colder and more twisted, Gabriel’s true nature begins to surface. Shadows move where they shouldn’t. Time warps in his presence. And the places they visit seem to echo with whispers from another world. Margo is forced to ask herself: Who—or what—is Gabriel? Why does he only want her? And what will happen on the final night he asks her to come with him?As the line between reality and delusion begins to crumble, Margo must make an impossible choice: stay in a world where she feels loved, or return to one that barely feels real.But one thing is certain—some friendships never let go.

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.

After being bound to the melon-eating system, Jiang Ning, who is a turtle, knows what everyone in the entertainment industry thinks, but she doesn’t know that everyone can hear her voice.

So everyone discovered that wherever Jiang Ning went, there were melons.

[The Wen Run actor is actually a pua wife, a rotten person who bullies his assistant! 】

[The agent who copied the composer was an undercover agent bribed by his teammates to sell his music scores to his teammates? 】

[The divorced Xiaohua was actually cheated on by her biological sister, and she also has a collecting hobby? 】

[The popular young boy is actually an old dog who changed his name by six years and replaced his teammates in the debut? 】

Everyone followed Jiang Ning to happily eat melon, and found that Jiang Ning’s status had quietly changed, and the entertainment industry had also undergone tremendous changes.

Investors, the director actually gave countless resources to each of them, just asking her to predict whether the project would be profitable and popular.

One day, the entertainment industry suddenly made an announcement that every employee must pass an exam before they can stay in or enter the entertainment industry. Then everyone discovered that during the online proctored exams for actors, singing editors, rap editors, etc. , the invigilator sitting above was none other than Jiang Ning.

Netizens: 6

A few years later, the Flower Kingdom took off in all aspects, and the person receiving the Best Contribution Award in the news was the 18th-line Jiang Ning who was ridiculed in the past.

Netizen: 999 (6 times turned over)

- Description from novelbuddy

In the fully immersive and realistic RPG online game [Illusory World], which has been in official public beta testing for its fourth year, Violet, one of the top players, experiences an unpredictable twist while participating in the conquest of a special dungeon. With her eyes closed and then opened, Violet finds herself no longer in the game world but in a completely new and unknown place, separated from the modern society behind it. Here, there is no doubt that it is the real world. Violet’s incredible adventure begins, but this world seems somewhat different from what she had expected. Enemy A: Why? You’re just a priestess, aren’t you!? Violet: Is there a problem between me being a priestess and me being able to beat you with a stick? Drop your loot and hand it over!