Chapter Eight - Investigating Someone

Tyler was stunned for a moment and darted his glaring gaze toward the male lead's stall. David did this on purpose, didn't he? He had a hunch that this person wasn't as simple as just another male lead doing OOC. It was a rule that the leads are supposed to follow the world rules. But the fact that David suddenly changed was very strange.

At this, Tyler couldn't help but purse his lips. He wanted to stay away from his person to secretly keep an eye on him if the male lead shows other changes. He had to find the mystery behind sudden change! But this person wasn't giving him a chance to investigate!

Tyler rubbed his forehead that was throbbing. Just as he was thinking about dealing with the situation, the host dropped another bomb on him.

"Our winner would have gotten a chance to get two precious gifts! One was marketing the game they created for the competition internationally, and second was to give a chance to collaborate with the topmost gaming firm—Flybird Corporation!" Then he licked his lips and said, "Since it's a tie, Softech Gaming and Techno World can collaborate with the world-class company! Isn't it exciting?"

Everyone clapped and cheered at this.

Tyler froze. Collaboration? He remembered that in the novel, Flybird was a worldwide famous gaming company that had initiated such a competition in this country.

If Softech Gaming was the most powerful firm in the country, Flybird was well-known throughout the world. Unfortunately, the villain lost his chance to get the attention of such a successful company, and the male lead had snatched this opportunity.

Who knew things would turn out this way after Tyler had decided to change his character settings? He didn't want to collaborate with David!

At this moment, Tyler felt like his entire world had crumbled. No! He had to find a way to get out of such a situation! In the novel, the male and female leads had traveled to the main office of Flybird and lived under the same roof. Their budding romance had been successful at that time. But why did Tyler suddenly feel like he was slowly taking the position of the female lead?

What kind of coincidence is that?

Before he could do anything, he felt someone's gaze boring on his back. He flinched and looked toward the male lead's stall. David was glancing at him at this moment with a smirk on his face.

Seeing such an expression, Tyler's anger rose to another level. He packed his laptop and whispered to his assistant. "Tell the host that I'm not collaborating."

"Where are you going, boss?" The assistant blurted.

Tyler paused and thought for a while. "Home." He wanted to investigate the male lead properly this time. He had first thought that this was a glitch in the system, but seeing how the storyline was still going on properly except for this male lead, he was curious about it. For this, he needed a few days alone to go through his system and buy a few things to investigate the male lead.

Three reasons were possible for the male lead to act this way: first was that the male lead was a person like Tyler who had been transmigrating from one world to another without a pause, and suddenly the restrictions of character settings were lifted. The second was a ghost possession because of the glitch in the system. And third was perhaps an unknown reason because of Tyler's missing memories.

He was more inclined toward the last reason because this kind of amnesia had been a sore spot for him. He had been troubled by this memory loss for decades, and now that the male lead was acting differently, Tyler felt like it might be related to his memory loss.

If he failed to investigate this issue properly, he wouldn't be able to live peacefully anymore.

Thinking like that, Tyler pressed his lips in a thin line and walked out, ignoring the curious gaze of David that still seemed to follow him until he disappeared.

…

When he came back home, it was already late evening. He made himself dinner, noodles and milk, before opening the system interface again. This kind of system had always remained silent. Other than error warning while OOCing, he hadn't received any other troublesome notifications yet. But he felt like there should be a warning or something similar to that.

But as soon as he pressed the notification tab, he only saw a string of error warnings that seemed to have occurred recently. His eyebrow crease went deeper after seeing that. He knew what an error warning meant. Whenever such a warning would come, a beep sound would frequently occur until he clicked the notification.

This had always given him a headache back when he still used to follow the character settings. But this time, not only the error warning didn't create such a disturbance, Tyler couldn't even see the details of the warning. Just as he opened the first warning tab, only one sentence appeared at the top:

'Error—click the icon below to get more information'

Tyler moved his eyes below this sentence only to find everything else was blurred as if someone had erased it.

He narrowed his eyes at that. What kind of situation was this? There was definitely something wrong with the system. Otherwise, why would this male lead act like this all of a sudden?

Then he clicked open the help option in the footer section of the interface. This option would work only five times in a world. In a desperate situation, he would ask a few queries to the system to get an appropriate answer.

Thinking like that, he wrote down a question—

'Is there something wrong with the male lead?'

Tyler pressed enter. He joined his hands and supported his chin, squinting his eyes at the floating window of the system.

One minute passed, it changed to two, three, and half an hour, but the system remained silent. Tyler gnashed his teeth and closed the window in anger. This kind of system often irritated him the most!

Back when he would use this helpline once or twice in a world, he would get an automatic reply that the system was finding a proper solution. And even if the system couldn't find an answer, it would copy and paste one line:

'We can't answer this question, and we humbly apologize for this.'

But this time, when Tyler asked about the male lead, not only the system didn't answer. It also remained silent for as long as half an hour! This had never happened before! He would always have to wait five minutes at most to get an answer.

He took a few deep breaths to calm himself before opening the system again. He went at the shopping menu only to find a sentence in the top of the page:

'This page is under maintenance. Please come back later.'

And later, the rest of the page remained blurred.

Veins popped on his forehead. This stupid system! Fine, if the system weren't helping him, he would just keep the camera on and use technology to find the truth.

Just as he opened the camera, the male lead appeared before his eyes inside a car. But this person was going somewhere. Tyler squinted his eyes and continued to look at this guy guiding the steering wheel on the road.

After ten minutes of staring, he suddenly realized that David's car was around a familiar place. He narrowed his eyes and continued to look until his doubt began to deepen even more.

After that, David stopped and opened the car. With a flash, the camera reached above and hovered over his head. There were a series of double-story buildings on both sides of the road. Each house had a Christmas tree in the front yard with a well-maintained garage.

It looked like a wealthy neighborhood. But Tyler wasn't in a mood to appreciate it because this was where he was living! Within a second, David's gaze darted toward Tyler's place, and a smile formed on his face.

Seeing that smile, a chill was sent down on Tyler's spine. What was David doing here?!