Chapter 2

No.

He calmed down and thought it over. A management sim about building stuff, kicking off with a “person plummeting from the heights”? Did that make any sense?

Had he downloaded the wrong game?

Hastur ruthlessly ignored the fresh batch of subtitles that had popped up, logged out, and carefully inspected his helmet. He confirmed that the publisher for this Cyber Orphanage Simulator was indeed the Company, and that its category was listed as “management and construction.”

Two words in the promotional tags caught his eye, and they might explain why things had kicked off so bloody: rich storyline, and hellish difficulty.

It all made sense now. The Company was clearly gunning high, aiming to craft an AAA masterpiece that blended construction, plot, visual spectacle, and more.

Judging by the “overwhelmingly positive” ratings down below, most human players were eating up this combo of “build infrastructure and binge on story.” No one gave a damn about Hastur’s feelings.

No one stopped to think that there might be non-humans out there—like him—tormented by the “nesting desire” of so-called maturity. All he wanted after a long day was to unwind with a nice, cozy nesting game.

No one considered how the game’s plot had that orphan plummet to his death right in front of him. It was like some damn sadistic dev smirking as they pried a chunk from his lair, then smashed it to bits with an innocent grin—splat.

Hastur’s heart remained utterly still as he sentenced the vile dev to execution, then logged back in.

He was determined to uncover the cause of his inherent asset’s demise and grant the culprit an eternal nightmare.

Then he’d delete the game—and, while he was at it, go “delete” the writers who spiced up their plots with character deaths.

His vision gradually darkened, and the prologue’s title subtitle faded back into view.

Hastur steeled himself: the moment he gained free control, he’d head upstairs to check on the orphan. The hem of his yellow robe tightened along with his nerves.

The next second:

【Half a month later, Phoenix District · Hali Orphanage】

Hastur stared at the slowly scrolling subtitles. “…?”

Blinding daylight poured through the gaping windows and the walls riddled with holes, while the black sea beyond the office’s north window glittered with wavelets.

He wasn’t sure if it was his imagination, but at a certain angle, the vast swath of golden light reflecting off the sea’s surface seemed to form a massive grinning face—the game dev’s malice beaming right at him:

😀

Hastur: “…”

The yellow jellyfish creature puffed up slightly. In 0.01 seconds, it darted to the window.

Hastur leaned out and peered down at the sill below. Forget the body of his inherent asset—not even a bloodstain remained. Everything had been scrubbed clean.

It was as if that orphan, who had kicked off the whole catastrophe and heralded the fall of the era, had never existed at all.

“…” The yellow robe’s color deepened in an instant, shifting from innocent bright yellow to an ominous dark brown.

To be clear from the start: Hastur had many virtues.

His combat prowess was formidable, and his personality was easygoing and approachable.

Even among the generations of test subjects raised at the Research Center, his mental pollution ability and raw fighting strength ranked among the top two. Unlike his kin, he never struck first unless provoked—a true gentleman among monsters.

However.

“Refusing to strike back when maliciously provoked” was not among his virtues.

The only reason this broken game still existed was that mental pollution didn’t work well on electronic code.

But it shouldn’t be that way.

A bizarre palpitation suddenly welled up from deep within Hastur’s body, striking him hard.

It was as if a voice in his heart was rebuking him: You should have been able to do more… Hastur. If you couldn’t, it was only because you’re too weak right now…

Weak? Hastur couldn’t fathom where such an odd thought had come from.

Missing a bit of plot wasn’t the end of the world. It was just a game… Besides, he’d spotted the options on the launch screen: “New Game,” “Save File,” and “Load File.”

That was the magic of games, wasn’t it?

Real life couldn’t rewind, and humans he’d mentally polluted couldn’t recover.

But in a game, a new file would miraculously restore Nissen to normal—and resurrect his inherent asset!

But he shouldn’t be able to revert to normal.

There was that shadow of a voice again:

Work harder, Hastur! Corrupt the core data! Make him scream in idiocy even after a game restart!

“?” Hastur decided to add “split personality” to his next medical checkup list. To endure the endless loading screen PV, he pondered how best to “delete” the writers afterward.

Nightfall swallowed the light once more.

In the instant before the main storyline pulled him in, Hastur lightning-fast selected Save File. Then he rose decisively from the wooden backed chair, skirted past Nissen—who was trying to talk to him—and bolted from the office.

“H—why are you running?!”

Nissen stumbled after him, clearly angling for a full, unskippable dialogue:

“You gonna get the Hawk Gang to back you up? Don’t be stupid! If I made it through this orphanage’s door, it means I’ve already squared things with them. Didn’t you notice? Not a single one of their guys is here today—it’s just you and me chatting. I shelled out for them to soak up the booze in the Red Light District all night!”

Hastur tuned him out and pressed on upstairs.

The Hawk Gang? Could he stuff them and mount them as bird specimens for his lair?

He reached the room directly above the dean’s office in short order and flung up his robe’s hem to shoulder open the rickety wooden door—only it didn’t budge.

A faint white message floated up in the bottom left corner:

【Your character level is too low. Please level up and then allocate strength points!】

Hastur paused for less than half a second before dodging to the side, letting the tall, broad, beer-bellied man—who clearly lacked any athletic grace—slam headfirst into the door.

Crack!

“Ah—!” Nissen let out a wretched howl as he tumbled down with the door.

Thud!

The flimsy wood kicked up clouds of dust on the floor, swirling like psychedelic fog under the dim light.

Amid Nissen’s choking coughs, Hastur caught another sound: something soft hitting the ground, followed by a string of ragged, bloody coughs that left the source gasping for air.

As Nissen’s curses spiked in fury, Hastur vaulted over the door and the man, reaching the far side of the bed. There, on the floor, he found his inherent asset—still alive, for now:

It was a boy lacking a right leg, with a malformed left arm, shrunken and skeletal like a museum specimen.

He had snow-white hair, irises a pink like he’d just finished crying, and pupils that were murky red instead of clear.

Hastur circled the room once. He had no intention of testing his pathetic low-level strength by hoisting the boy. His goal was to hunt down and slaughter any would-be asset destroyer, then delete the game and its devs.

He found no trace of a killer, though he did notice something else:

Footprints stretching from the bedside to beneath the boy proved the child hadn’t rolled off the bed. He’d been crawling forward with difficulty, only to lose balance when startled by the door crashing open, sending him tumbling.

Following the trail of marks on the floor, it seemed the boy had been heading straight for the windowsill from the start. Without the door-busting interruption from the previous save, he might well have reached it—maybe even climbed onto it—before Nissen’s scream startled him into a fall.

In other words, tracing it back to the source…

The “asset destroyer” he’d wanted to eliminate was probably himself, for making Nissen scream.

Things got awkward fast.

Fortunately, Hastur never looked for fault in himself. He simply watched as Nissen clambered up and, with excessive enthusiasm, helped the boy back onto the bed. Then Nissen launched into a spiel about the orphanage’s facilities and medical care:

“Why were you headed for the windowsill? Trying to off yourself?”

He shouldn’t have asked, really.

Since he’d confirmed there was no asset destroyer, the plan should have been to quit, delete the game, and blitz the dev team.

But the game’s realism was uncanny. Beneath Nissen’s hormone-laden stench of desire, Hastur caught a far more familiar scent:

Adrenaline, cortisol… the pounding heart, sweat seeping through skin, the gulp of swallowed saliva. They wove together into a signal called “survival instinct.”

Back when he was a test subject, “housed” at the Research Center, he’d smelled it constantly from his peers.

For monsters like them, human pretensions of nobility and fashion were worthless—they wouldn’t save you through the next experiment or gu fight.

Beasthood was the truth.

Survival drive, hunger, lust for reproduction, nesting desire, the craving to evolve and grow stronger…

They might have been draped in human skin later on, but at their core, they were still monsters woven from the rawest, most primal urges.

Monsters weren’t swayed by fads or lofty ideals that humans idolized, but they always respected the primal call to survive.

Like hyenas or wolves forever wary of winter’s bite.

The game had replicated Hastur’s eerie voice to perfection—that weird, alien timbre forced into human speech.

Under the dim light, Nissen and the boy both went rigid despite themselves, cold sweat beading on their foreheads.

Nissen glanced at Hastur several times. Even though he couldn’t see the truth hidden beneath the hood this time, his expression still grew visibly uneasy.

But after sensing something off about Hastur—or rather, the Dean—the boy hesitated for a moment. Then he gritted his teeth hard. “You’re not H.J., are you?”

Once he took that first bold step, the words came more easily.

The boy laid it out clearly, his thoughts sharp and his words precise. “I don’t know why you’ve taken his place, but I can answer your question—because I want to escape this orphanage.”

“H.J. has no money, no way to protect himself. Half a year ago, the Hawk Gang’s thugs took over the orphanage and turned it into their base.”

“There were originally two or three healthy kids left in the place, but the Hawk Gang grabbed them and sold them off. I’m the only one still here, spared because of my deformities and constant illnesses, but… cough cough!”

The boy fought through a coughing fit as he continued. “But a few days ago, I overheard them talking in the drug lab next door. They said they were going to use me and H.J. to test their new batch of drugs.”

Hastur’s yellow robe rippled slightly. The boy managed to keep his voice steady, but his deformities made him unaccustomed to looking people in the eye. His gaze kept drifting to the floor.

He seemed ashamed of his own desperation, yet he pressed on with resolve. “I want to live.”

Even though I’m ugly and deformed. Even though I’m weak and useless. I still want to live.

Both the living monsters and the dead ones had thought the same.

“…”

Hastur hadn’t expected to see echoes of his own past in a mere game NPC—one who was so likely to die in the prologue that they never even got to show their face. It somewhat redeemed his opinion of the game’s designers—

But that didn’t justify cramming death and tragedy into what was supposed to be a relaxing building game!

“You will live.” To Hastur’s surprise, the Building Interface opened right then. He found it hard to stay focused, unconsciously extending tendrils driven by his Nesting Desire. “Just stay away from the windows.”

A translucent screen materialized before his eyes. Blue-and-white lines laid out the orphanage’s structure in full detail.

It was a rectangular building only two stories tall, but each floor soared six meters high, with extra space dug out below ground.

The blueprint skimmed over the basement, but it detailed the rooms on the first and second floors:

The entry hall on the first floor connected straight to the dining hall.

To either side of the dining hall lay the kitchen, the Dean’s Room, and the on-site school.

The entire second floor was designated as the orphanage dorms, with one shared bathroom.

At the moment, though, most of the dorm rooms—including the on-site school on the first floor—were marked in red as “Occupied.” Only the public areas on the first floor, the Dean’s Room, and the dorm room they were in on the second floor could be renovated.

Hastur immediately tore down part of the walls in the Dean’s Room. With zero construction funds, he had no choice but to rob Peter to pay Paul. He trapped Nissen—who was panicking and yelling, “You’re not H.J.? Who the hell are you? I’m telling the Hawk Gang—no! I’m going to the police station!”—inside a sealed 1×1.578-meter cubby. He rotated it upside down, shifted it to the ceiling of the first-floor entry hall, then warped the straight entry corridor into a twisted maze of chaos. Only then did he let out a slow breath.

He used the head from the real world for that one—the one with the helmet and a full set of facial features.

Lv Zhucao was right. This game really did satisfy his Nesting Desire. Getting his hands dirty felt pretty good.

In the night shadows, the yellow robe stretched out with him, like a flattened egg yolk jellyfish gone limp.

Hastur’s robe hem flipped up little waves as he kneaded the entire building like rubber clay, twisting it into a bizarre, utterly chaotic shape with no rhyme or reason. He swiftly demolished every rectangular object and room in the editable areas.

By the time he finished rerouting all the wiring and his yellow robe stretched out contentedly—like a cat waking from a nap and yawning luxuriously—the shouts erupted from downstairs. “Fuck! What the hell happened?! Did someone attack the orphanage?!”

~~~

Outside the orphanage.

The Hawk Gang thugs instinctively raised their guns and activated their combat cybernetic bodies. They stared in shock at the radically altered building before them. The booze they’d chugged in the Red Light District was almost entirely sobered now.

Just half a day earlier, the building in front of them had stood straight and rigid, like an upright coffin. Lal and the others had been joking around, saying, “Since we’re cooking up the new batch in a coffin, why not call it ‘Coffin Noodles’ or ‘Bone Ash’?”

But now, it looked like…

Words failed to capture the chaotic, malice-drenched form of the building—no rules, no patterns, just pure disorder.

Some of the thugs were already retching uncontrollably, dizzy and nauseous.

Only Lal, with his famously thick skull, dismissed the warped architecture and the others’ spasms as side effects from getting too high. He slurred through a grin, “What should we price Bone Ash at? This negative effect is kinda cool—could use it as a selling point to jack up the cost,” as he staggered toward the entrance.

The front door had vanished.

In the darkness of night, the orphanage crouched like a monster on the ground, its yawning black doorway a gaping maw.

The one among them vomiting the hardest trembled all over, his eyes fixed on the entrance with a manic glint. His chapped lips twitched, silently repeating the same word over and over:

“Tsathoggua… Tsathoggua…”

Suddenly.

A crackle like roasting meat ripped through the tense night air, followed by Lal’s agonized scream.

The thugs at the front bellowed in fury they couldn’t contain. They unloaded bullets and cannon fire into the pitch-black doorway that swallowed every spark of light without a trace, then halted in terrified hesitation before it.

No one dared charge into the darkness to see if it was some prankster at work.

Whispers of fear spread through the crowd like brittle shards:

“It’s real… Everything the Cradle Cult preaches is real! How else do you explain my T-1 flashbang not piercing that blackness?!”

“Satha-Hegla… Great Clock… No, no! If the Cradle Cult knows about Them, they must know how to drive Them away! Let’s find the Pontiff—”

“You high on dust or something? You wanna play hero and banish an eldritch god? Just ditch this spot and find somewhere else to hole up. I— Ah!!!”

Death descended upon the night like Hela’s black veil—silent and gentle.