Chapter 2: It’s impossible to be broken!

“Su Na!” Charlie shouted after her.

Su Na paused and turned, but she didn’t spare him so much as a glance. Instead, she looked at the bald merchant and said, “By the way, do me a favor and pass a message to all the surrounding merchant guilds. Unless I personally authorize a purchase, it has absolutely nothing to do with me. Collect your payments from whoever actually takes the goods. Do whatever you have to do.”

Looking at Su Na’s icy expression, the bald merchant quickly nodded in agreement. Having delivered her piece, Su Na left the shop without once looking at Charlie again.

“Let’s go, let’s go. Home!”

The original owner had dressed up meticulously for this gathering, and Su Na was currently being tortured to death by the outfit. She kept feeling like the sleeves or some internal lining hadn’t been put on correctly, giving her all sorts of strange, lumpy sensations. It was suffocating and tight, making it hard to breathe. It was absolute torture.

Sometime later, as Su Na leaned against the carriage cushions, half-asleep, the System’s cold, mechanical voice suddenly shifted into a cute, high-pitched lolita voice:

[Host, I was only teasing you just now. Actually, there is no such thing as an obliteration penalty.]

Su Na cracked an eye open, her voice thick with grief and indignation as she recalled what had just transpired: “Screw your ancestors. It’s bad enough you confiscated my little brother, but now you want me to be a lick-dog for some phoenix-man? Even when bullying people, you shouldn’t just pick on one person so relentlessly.”

[Ahem… Host, please let me explain…]

“I don’t care what you say. It is absolutely impossible for me to repeat the original owner’s path of a submissive dog. I’d rather die right now!”

“I’m not listening, I’m not listening. I want to go home!”

[The System cannot fulfill the Host’s request.]

The System sounded a bit aggrieved: [You were already flattened into paste by a fully-insured semi-truck. I can’t send you back to that~]

Su Na sneered with contempt: “If you can bring me over here, why can’t you send me back? Is your system some cheap knock-off version?”

“If you can’t do it, then just kill me. For the sake of our brief acquaintance, make it quick.”

System: [……]

The veteran systems always said the easiest way to motivate a host was to threaten their life whenever they got difficult. But why wasn’t this one afraid of death?! As a newly appointed system, landing such a troublesome host on its very first run made it feel on the verge of a breakdown.

If its first mission failed, wouldn’t it be sent straight back to the factory to be recycled?

It could only be said that it had failed to account for the generational shift. In the past, which transmigrated or reborn protagonist wouldn’t cherish their life? After all, a miserable life was still better than a good death. Getting a second chance at life to work like an ox or a horse for a system, acting as a puppet, wasn’t that big of a deal.

But times had changed. In her previous life, Su Na had been an assembly-line worker, existing in a state of “living is fine, dying is fine too”—a classic case of the “living dead” mental state.

He had nothing left to lose in his past life anyway. If death was painless, it was practically a reward.

[Host… Master~ What exactly do you want to do to complete the mission~ We can negotiate for whatever you want! I beg of you! I really don’t want to be recycled!]

The System’s pleading, coquettish lolita voice made Su Na’s ears itch. She forced herself to take things slightly more seriously: “First of all, being a submissive lick-dog is a hard no. Absolutely out of the question! This Sigma male does not fall for traps!”

[But you’re a woman now!]

“I don’t care what I am, it’s about the attitude!”

“And honestly, does this romance novel world really revolve solely around one man? Is the planet going to explode on the spot if he’s not there? If things really can’t function without him, then we might as well let the world burn. Yours truly is not going to stick around to serve him.”

This was Su Na’s most genuine thought. He had lived his previous life miserably enough. To die and still not find peace, only to be dragged back to life to continue working like a dog—by what right?

To even have the most equalizing right of death taken away, were they treating him like some kind of biological battery?

In any case, he had made up his mind: what he did and didn’t do would be decided by himself. If that wasn’t acceptable, then so be it. He didn’t have to stay alive.

[…Fine.]

The System’s tone turned serious: [Actually, it’s not absolutely mandatory to take the route of aligning with the male and female leads. It’s just that, after my comprehensive evaluation, this path was deemed the safest way to complete the mission.]

[This world was not actually created by that romance novel. It is a newly born world, and the novel happened to share an extraordinarily high level of compatibility with it. Under highly specific circumstances, the novel became a medium that mapped external reality during the transition of this world from conceptual to physical.]

[To put it simply, this world is like an egg about to hatch, and the current male lead is the weak point of the eggshell. His future step-by-step ascent to the peak of this world is the final rehearsal of the world’s operation before the egg breaks.]

[As the primary driver of the world transitioning from concept to reality, the male lead will receive numerous gifts from the new world during this evolutionary process.]