Intermission (1)

Only a pair of lifeless eyes from a kneeling youth gave off a bit of light in the middle of the darkness. Time ticked by indiscriminately. It was hard to tell how much time had already passed. However, he remained kneeling there, seemingly not caring or minding the time he lost from acting like a dead man there.

Well, the young man was dead. Now a ghost.

Yet it seemed like he was not even aware of this fact. Instead of being thrown into limbo, something pulled him into a void-like space. A very questionable being called the system was the culprit.

An impatient voice suddenly rang beside the lifeless-eyed young man's ears to wake him up from the trance.

"You know that you just died, right?"

The kneeling figure, which seemed to be a statue depicting the truest definition of hopelessness, didn't respond. It was ever silent, not even moving the slightest.

"Don't want to answer? Aiya, this poor bloke. But I can't blame you. You just experienced so much. Even I, made up of numbers and data, couldn't help but pity you. I wonder if you were so dead asleep when the Mighty Creator rained down some luck and fortune on the multiverse. You're so unlucky."

"Eh? Still waiting for a reply? How sad."

'Maybe all the breakups, treacheries, and zombie-biting paralyzed this guy and even made him brain-dead. Really, really, sad.' The system thought to itself. 

Then, it cheerfully continued.

"But hey! You don't have to worry anymore! Your luck and time to shine finally came! Listen up, poor bloke! It's because the Mighty Creator finally noticed you and bound you to me!"

The thing babbling knew that its newly found host wouldn't reply, so it went on with its explanation.

This time, it considerately made an intangible hologram-like screen appear before the young man's lifeless eyes. After that, with its childlike voice, it resumed its explanation.

"Host is now bound to me, so let me introduce myself. I will be your companion from now on and for your many years and missions to come. My name is 025, and my official system name is 'Crazy Villainess Saving System'! Just from the name, you can immediately infer that you will be saving many desperately in love crazy female villains out there in the whole multiverse! Host, isn't it amazing!? Are you excited?"

The sound of someone taking a deep breath echoed faintly in the space. Following that was a soft, hate-filled voice replying to the system.

"... I, who even failed to save myself, have to save... someone else?"

The system energetically responded, "Yup! That's your goal as my host! Through my help and guidance, you will tunnel through worlds and space and take over the bodies of some guys to save the villainesses who died tragically insane and enslaved by love. As someone who experienced getting driven insane, you should be able to relate to their experiences. Since every borrowed identity will make it convenient for you to be near these female villains, you will learn why and how they went mad."

".... I will be able to relate to them? On how they went mad?"

As he uttered these words, the man had to close his eyes at the sudden pain that tackled him inside out. The word 'mad' seemed to have triggered something within. Memories started to flow; they engulfed him as if they wanted to remind him of things he had just gone through.

Now, he remembered. The system was correct.

He died.

Emotionally.

After his father died from an orchestrated accident set up by his uncle, his mother committed suicide as she couldn't accept the fact that his father was already gone. He became orphaned and debt-riddled. It all started when his uncle sabotaged the company owned by his father from within.

The last blow was when the woman who had been his girlfriend for three years suddenly broke up with him, and not just on any day, but on the day his family fell from grace.

Mentally.

When he learned that a few minutes after their breakup, his good ex-girlfriend immediately accepted the marriage proposal from his cousin, Jiang Yun, the son of that same traitorous uncle who destroyed his family.

Now, everything he and his family once possessed was thoroughly stolen by his uncle and his family. When he thought of this, Jiang Li wanted to kill himself again as he felt like a failure of a human for letting all these happen.

It was very painful. Even in death, he felt tormented. 'If it wasn't for me...'

When the zombie apocalypse suddenly descended to the world after stupidly getting bitten by a zombified baby that fell from the fifteenth floor of a condo building, honestly, he did not even feel the pain of his flesh being torn from him. He did not even flinch at the pain of the virus slowly eating away at his sanity and humanity.

He couldn't care less if he became one of the first few people to die on the first day of the apocalypse.

Why would the dead even care if the world had ended?

Now, he was in a dark space he could not even name. A weird voice calling itself the system said that he had become bound to it. He did not understand how that happened and was not the least bit interested in knowing. But his task was to save somebody preyed upon by fate and love.

Lights seemed to return to his eyes, and he gradually raised his head. Not long after, bouts of crazed laughter reverberated within that space. They became louder as minutes passed.

Louder. Crazier.

The system's childlike voice let out a fearful sound as if it had been terrified by the host laughing without a stop.

"H-host? Are you still sane?" It asked in a small, fidgeting voice.

The man replied as he laughed, "Of course! I am sane! I am so sane that I know how crazy the world is. No, the universe is crazy. Some stupid thing here is making me save somebody else. Why? Just why? Who the heck do you think you are? What made you think you could act like fate and toy with me again? Bastard!!!"

"C-calm down! It's your duty now! You are the chosen one. Because you're also almost crazy, the Mighty Creator knew you're the best person for the task."

"Because I can understand them?"

"Yup! And also, also..."

The childlike voice seemed desperate to think of some reasons to justify why this person was made into a host.

"Y-you already tasted despair, so you can save them. And, and, actually, you don't have to feel so bad! I am a system, and in my shop, there are many amazing things you can buy: immortality, richness, intelligence..."

The panicky thing listed many delicious, nice-sounding offers. The system was just that scared by the man who suddenly started laughing and shouting madly.

The young man went silent as he sunk into deep contemplation.

The voice kept enumerating much stuff he only heard from legends and stupid fiction stories. As time passed, they were like that. The system's unease kept growing, and it was already thinking about why it had to be assigned to this line of tasks. It felt that it was hard. Its host was clearly not insane yet, but it was already difficult to deal with.

Finally, the young man seemed to have thought it all out and asked, "Is there a way for me to return and turn back time to when I was still younger?"

A light bulb lit up in the system's main brain. This could be its chance to convince it to accept its existence, and so it hurriedly replied,

"Yes! Definitely! Once you finished enough tasks and accumulated enough points, you may go back to your original world and steamroll every b*tch and betrayer from your past life!

You can return in time as long as you have enough points!"

To the young man's ears, that revelation sounded like the greatest melody he had ever heard in this conversation.

A wide and sinister smile formed on his lips. Joy seeped out of his slightly red eyes, and he was already imagining how to make those people's lives a hell greater than he had experienced.

Then, he declared to his system in a bright and reenergized voice.

"Bring it on! I'm up to the tasks!"

.....