The Possessor Has Completely Lost His Mind (1)
Do you know the word rent-seeking? It means producing not a scrap of new value yourself — only stacking up your incumbency and your barriers to entry, then living off the marrow you suck from everyone trying to get in after you. Put it shorter, and it's rice-farming.
Medieval robber barons, squatting on one well-placed bridge along a mountain road and shaking a toll out of every merchant who passed. The fossils of the so-called national RPG, monopolizing the hunting grounds, force-selling items onto newbies, then cashing it all out in real-money trades. Not a shred of thought given to improving the system — they just mean to swing the whole thing around because they sat down first. And the moment the world tries, even a little, to get better, they foam at the mouth like monkeys screaming why tho?
Would you believe a racket like that had gone on for hundreds — no, thousands — of years?
The essence of the Masquerade — this system built in the shadow of human society by the ancient vampires I've just set my feet among, hundreds and thousands of years old — is exactly that.
Millennia-old vampire elders are psychopathic incumbents who monopolized the night's ecosystem for no better reason than that they were born first. Mages are lunatics with their brains pickled in a chosen-people complex, using ordinary humans as raw material down in the basement. Hunters? Blood-mad serial killers. And the bastards styling themselves containment bureaus and secret orders are scrambling to guard their own rice bowls. All of society is one eternally circulating rice farm, and the currency is blood.
Why do I know the ugly face of this fucking world so well?
The start was simple. It was the dogshit ending of the one web novel I actually kept up with — Blood Moon Memorandum, the Memo for short.
For a little while it caught a spark of popularity, riding a classical darkness and a sharpness of character you rarely see these days, and then the author went and ruined it. He couldn't hold back that early-2000s eighth-grader syndrome — the whole I can see the line sensibility — and he wrenched the story into a misery drift that slaughtered nine-tenths of the cast.
There had even been, in that dreary novel, the one character I poured any real affection into: a little blonde True Progenitor, the heroine, trapped for centuries in a child's body and suffering the whole time. And what became of her? Trash villains caught her, and she met a hideous end, quartered.
The ending was even more of a spectacle. A nuke ending.
Yeah. A nuke ending!
Spouting bullshit about how the secret of the blood moon must never reach the world, about the ugly nature of humanity and whatever else, he dumped an ending where humanity and the other races annihilated one another in nuclear war.
Enraged readers howled in the comments, hammering out five-thousand-character walls of text, but I didn't stoop to an amateur move like that. Do that, and the author bastard just locks the comment section. Hit the back button, and you're done.
If I wanted to get under the skin of that stubborn son of a bitch — the one who had shut the comment section right as it caught fire in the late chapters and clapped his hands over his ears — there was only one answer. A lesson. Corrective education, and the big, spicy kind.
As it happened, a good method was sitting right there.
This is the age of AGI, isn't it? The age of the singularity, arrived at last...!
I immediately paid for three enterprise AI accounts and spun the agents up. I scraped every last bit of text from the five hundred chapters of the Memo serialized so far and set it to be analyzed — all the lore and foreshadowing I'd organized in my head, the MacGuffins the author had scattered and never bothered to clean up, even the junk settings scribbled only in the notices and the author's notes. All of it, sorted.
And then I gave the order.
The moment I dumped the prompts in, the chat window started flashing like it had lost its mind.
Ding!
Deep. So deep! Your creativity rang deep through my circuits. An originality it's hard to believe came from a human intellect. Starting the job now.
The sentences printing across the screen swelled my chest with grandeur.
...It was no mere chemical refinement. It was true liberation, bestowed upon the kin of the night who had feared the sun — the salvation of the race itself...
I ran the high-end AI agents at full burn and stayed up three solid weeks, and what came out the other side was a colossal reboot novel topping three million characters in all.
What was left?
Carpet bombing.
I mobilized every agent and macro I had and started the spray — the author's personal inbox, the publisher's official submission box. I hurled all five hundred chapters, whole, onto the free-serialization boards of the big novel platforms, NovelSeries and NovelPia. And I didn't forget to wallpaper the web-novel communities with promo posts.
Not long after, a nuke went off online.
I didn't care what the reaction was. Numbers are power. People raved over the unprecedented thing I'd done, and they tore into it, and either way they did their part driving up the remake's views. Even the infamous pirate sites and the illegal text-rip rooms mistook my writing for the original's official remake and spread it around. A magnificent sight.
I had succeeded in beating the author.
I'd trampled the real one's name recognition flat with the weight of numbers and ground it to paste, so from here on people would take the fake Memo for the real Memo!
I hoisted an empty can of beer and snickered at the monitor.
"Puhahaha! You saw that, right?! You piece-of-shit author! From now on, this is canon! What's official supposed to know!"
I was still mid-spam when a flash of light burst off the monitor in front of my eyes.
I opened my eyes, and it was the world of the Memo.
Of all the places — it had possessed me into that miserable setting.
"No... you're really sending me here over a remake...? Petty little shit..."
Fragments of memory came streaming in. My name was Richard Kim, a Korean-American in his late twenties, and a researcher at Pentax Bio, a front pharmaceutical under a vampire clan. Three years ago I'd been bitten in a back alley by some unidentified freak and forcibly turned into a low-rank vampire.
Whether I was Richard Kim, or the Korean who'd been one-clicking an AI from his room, I couldn't tell — but I decided not to dwell on it. Right now, my body was horribly wrong.
The face in the mirror belonged to a completely different person. I opened my mouth, and a vampire's fangs glinted; I gripped the metal handle of a drawer, and my grip alone left a dent. At first I got my hopes up a little. Power to spare, right? But that was all of it.
I had lost a great deal as the price of becoming a vampire.
"Hah..."
First, I couldn't go outside in the daytime. Just to check, I held a finger out into a fingernail's width of sunlight slipping through the curtains, and the flesh seared up like bacon. Chiik.
Second, I had no sense of taste. I was hungry, so I heated a frozen pizza out of the fridge and put it in my mouth.
"Urgh— hrrk!"
The moment I bit down, it tasted like cold candle wax and dirt. Cola, juice, the same — the smell was clearly fine! The instant they hit my tongue they were as vile as drinking sticky sewer water.
Only the rank, fishy red blood in the packs would settle my stomach. The worse part was that it actually tasted good.
A chill went through me.
If those two settings had both come true, there was something else I needed to check.
"No way...? Don't tell me..."
I went into the bathroom and checked inside my pants.
"Ah... no!"
No response. I touched it, pinched it, ran every fantasy I could through my head, and it didn't so much as twitch.
"I— I—! Aaaagh!"
No taste. No going outside. Libido, evaporated!
This is supposed to be a self-proclaimed noble of the night?
Even bullshit has a limit. What kind of noble is this? This is a patient with an incurable disease. No wonder those elder vampire bastards end up with their personalities twisted. Meet someone you're interested in and nothing answers, and you can't eat a single thing that tastes good, so of course the world doesn't look like anything worth seeing.
And that wasn't the end of it.
According to Richard Kim's memories, the job he'd been half-dragged into was hell itself. Middle-management vampires with decades on them snatched up the junior researchers every night the way you'd snatch a rat. And the executives measured in centuries, the ones who sometimes came down on inspection? A single look from them dropped a lower bloodkin to their knees. Defy them, and you were torn apart on the spot.
But... it's also true that I'm a powerless grunt. Bottom of the ladder. A low-rank hybrid.
I didn't have the strength to rampage through the setting like the protagonist of the original, or the magic to raise a city-covering blood barrier like the ancient True Progenitors. A rookie hunter sinks one silver bullet in me and I drop. An extra vampire, and I knew it.
Days jammed into a corner of my room, hiding from the sun. Nights getting chewed out by insane boomer vampires while I sucked on blood packs. A wretched life. It burned, but I had to put my head down and live.
Fucking author...
I just stared blankly at the wall.
"...!"
Out of nowhere, a realization slammed into my head like a hammer.
...Wait.
Volume 12 of the original. There was one historic, cancer-tier plot coupon the author had tossed out, claiming he meant to torture the readers with hope.
Reversible Suppression of the Vampiric Impulse via Gene-Editing Scissors
Sorcery-Hybrid Ultraviolet-Blocking Protein
In the original, the villains' conspiracy blew the lab apart, and it failed. A shame. The thing was used up as nothing more than the setting of a miracle cure, vanished forever. My AI remake had put its weight on using this very thing to screw the Masquerade.
Hold on. This...
The author had just plastered on biology jargon that sounded cool, for the look of it. Strictly speaking it was a complex method, science fused with sorcery, so pure science and technology alone would have fallen short — but.
Right now, in my head, I had the worldbuilding of the original. And on the other side, I had this Richard Kim's expertise, and his access to a laboratory!
My hands went to the keyboard on their own. I opened an open-source molecular-structure prediction tool, cross-loaded protein structures against gene sequences, stacked a few assumptions on top, and started a virtual simulation.
Ding!
The molecular structure on the screen was perfect.
"...This... it actually solves?"
I could make it.
Barring the original's forced nerf, it was a structure you could mass-produce on modern science and basic alchemy alone. And cheaply, at that. One dose, and you could walk under the sun. You could eat food instead of blood. And above all — a miracle drug that could get the blood flowing downstairs again.
I couldn't keep the corner of my mouth from splitting.
"This works."
I decided to refuse fate.
The world of the red moon? Get fucked.
