>Requirements for the First Level:

  >battle system (incomplete): weather system not implemented meaningfully

  >battle system (incomplete): Silenced Song sparkle cost is bugged

  >functional UI (incomplete): health bar system missing

  >original character, enemy and background assets (complete)

  >music (incomplete): music only plays for tiny percentage of level

  >summoning mechanic (not implemented)

  Zan Xinyi stands up abruptly from the couch.

  “I’m going to bed,” she says, ignoring the fact that it definitely isn’t bedtime, and slams the door to her room shut. With the knowledge that Jiang Jin can hear everything, her argument with the system happens on her laptop instead of out loud, furious typing smothering her urge to scream and shout.

  You didn’t say anything about having a summoning mechanic for the first level. You can’t throw in new complex requirements at the last moment.

  >A gacha game needs a gacha.

  But not on the first level! It’s marketing! The player is getting introduced to the characters that they will then want to pay to pull for! If you’d wanted it, you should have been more clear. A summoning mechanic is not automatically part of the first level.

  She’s unkindly reminded of when she’d been working at Ninecent, desperately arguing over things that she couldn’t care less about, desperately holding on to projects that would be thrown in the garbage can in less than a week.

  At least when she’d been a janitor, what she’d thrown away was always actual trash.

  There’s a pause in the reply, where all she has to do is sit and stare at the one part of the hallucination that never fades. The blood red timer.

  Then something different appears.

  >Rewards for completion of the First Level Mission

  >5 spins (One 3 star GUARANTEED)

  >Rewards for completion of the First Level Mission (summoning mechanic included)

  >5 spins (One 3 star GUARANTEED, one dimensional conversion GUARANTEED)

  “Dimensional conversion?” Zan Xinyi mouths.

  >DIMENSIONAL CONVERSION: One action taken from SUNNY DAYS SPARKLE POWER: ENDLESS HELL will be converted into reality. The Witch Beneath Clear Skies has TWO CARDS available for conversion.

  Her fingers drop back onto the keyboard.

  I can’t use the Siren’s abilities?

  >The user is unqualified.

  She’s already acting like she’s going to get this. Like she deserves to get this. Like this is an actual bonus reward, and not just extra work at the last possible minute.

  Don’t ever do this again. Clarify everything at the beginning of the mission.

  No response.

  If she were alone, she could punch the wall, and in fact her bedroom is littered with violent outbursts and disorder from the last year of her being, in fact, alone.

  Zan Xinyi’s nails dig into the palm of her hands until they start to bleed because she isn’t alone, she’s living with other people, and there’s nothing like hearing a blow through a thin wall.

  Then comes a faint knock on the door.

  “Don’t disturb me,” Zan Xinyi snarls. “I’m thinking.”

  “Um,” Jiang Jin says, unusually tentative. “It’s not that I want to disturb you, but Wei Shengyuan went out into the hall because he sensed something weird, and I’m also hearing something that I don’t like, but it’s not that different from what I normally hear on this floor so it shouldn’t be crazy, right? And I still hear Wei Shengyuan’s heartbeat just fine. His breathing is also normal. He just hasn’t come back.”

  This is Zan Xinyi’s fault. She forgot, for a luxurious moment, that she was living in hell. You’d think she wouldn’t forget, with the light still tinted green from the fog outside her bedroom window.

  But she’d been living in hell long before then, and she’d managed to forget then too.

  She opens her bedroom door, her laptop still held in one hand.

  “What kind of sounds, how long have you been hearing them, and when did Wei Shengyuan leave?”

  Jiang Jin, ever since taking up residence here, has taken to layering colorful clothes on top of each other, a polka dot patterned t-shirt over a striped long sleeve shirt, a skirt over a more practical pair of jeans. She picks at the frayed edge of one of her sleeves with one hand while her other rests on a bell tied to her belt.

  The bell is clapperless, unable to ring naturally, but Jiang Jin likes to use it whenever she’s concentrating on projecting sound outside the building.

  If it works, it works.

  “Like this kind of slithery sound,” Jiang Jin says.

  Zan Xinyi stops.

  “Like a snake? A giant snake?”

  “No! Uhm. Scales have this specific sound. This doesn’t sound like scales. If anything, it sounds like-- do you know what rhubarb sounds like? There was this Xiaohongshu trend of showing it growing mostly in total darkness except for occasional candlelight--”

  “No.”

  This narrative has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road. If you see it on Amazon, please report it.

  “Ah! There’s this kind of crack and scream when it grows quickly. So imagine a slithery sound, but occasionally it cracks and screams. But like. In a plant way. It’s a plant scream.”

  “And you thought this was normal?”

  “It’s sounded like that ever since I arrived! And you guys didn’t comment on it, and nothing happened...well, until a few minutes after Wei Shengyuan left.”

  “When did he leave.”

  How long was she alone in her room, getting pissed off.

  “Not long ago! Fifteen minutes....twenty minutes?”

  That’s a long time to be investigating something on the floor she’s already thoroughly cleared out. And that they all live on.

  Except for that bathtub down the hall, but Zan Xinyi saw the woman turn to dust when she last checked in there. Surely this isn’t...

  Zan Xinyi goes out and reaches for the doorknob to open the door to the hall.

  “Don’t do that! You shouldn’t!”

  “Don’t open the door and investigate?” Zan Xinyi repeats.

  “What if the plants get inside? I can hear them. I think they're all down the hall. Moving.”

  Please mention that earlier. Zan Xinyi’s hand is so tight around the doorknob that she fears leaving fingerprints embedded in the metal.

  “If you can hear that, why did Wei Shengyuan go outside?”

  “I don’t know! I wanted to ask you about it, but he just went out! He said he could hear something, but I’m the one with good hearing and when I asked about the slithering he looked at me like I was crazy, so I don’t think he was hearing that.”

  “You said he went out twenty minutes ago.”

  “Yes, but he said he’d be fine and I can tell he’s still alive and all...Have you seen Wei Shengyuan practice with his water element? It’s really badass.”

  Zan Xinyi closes her eyes and opens them again. Avoids slamming her head into a wall. Then she tries to peer out the peephole in the door.

  It’s useless.

  On the other side, all she can see is green.

  “You said you can hear him breathing,” Zan Xinyi says, focus narrowing and narrowing as her heart starts to beat faster.

  “Yes, so he’s definitely still--.”

  Zan Xinyi takes in a deep breath and then yells.

  “Wei Shengyuan! Hold your breath if you can hear me!”

  Zan Xinyi waits for five long seconds in the silence of the room and then turns to Jiang Jin, who nods at her rapidly, eyes wide.

  Now, they have a methodology.

  Zan Xinyi carefully puts down her laptop and then cups both hands around her mouth so she can get louder.

  “Did the plant get you? Can you talk right now? If you can talk, just start talking, we can definitely hear you! Two short breaths for if the plant down the hall got you.”

  “Two short breaths,” Jiang Jin reports.

  Awesome. She’s going to go hoarse.

  “Three short rapid breaths if you’re dying!”

  She looks back at Jiang Jin.

  “Only one fast breath,” Jiang Jin reports. “Then he went back to normal.”

  Wow, now he’s getting complicated.

  “He’s not alright, but if he’s dying, he’s probably dying slowly,” Zan Xinyi says. “Though, isn’t everyone.”

  “No?” Jiang Jin says. “I don’t think of myself as slowly dying?”

  Ignoring that, Zan Xinyi bites her lip as she plans out her options. What she wants to do is throttle Wei Shengyuan, but a plant is probably already doing that for her.

  She’d love to use her broom, but her broom is blunt force-- for a large plant, she wants blades, or fire. Something good against oversized weeds. Like Wei Shengyuan’s water blades. Why the hell did he go out alone?

  Or she needs something special.

  Grimly, Zan Xinyi’s eyes once again flick to the red numbers at the edge of her vision. Seven days remain.

  Despite all her railing and her complaints, getting the game level done in a week is completely doable. Putting in the health bar doesn’t need to be complicated, that’s having numbers appear on screen that the game was already calculating. The system was bitching about the weather tag system not being well integrated, but that’s because the card that used the weather tag system the most obviously was the one that was bugged out and never got played. It’s not her fault that the weather tag for the level is ‘cloud’ but the Siren’s tag is ‘storm’ and the Witch’s tag is ‘clear’, so it’s difficult to show the system she’s designed in her notes. Well. It is her fault because she decided the level would be cloudy, but it’s not her fault that neither the Siren or the Witch have the cloudy tag. That’s on Wei Shengyuan for designing them. And anyway, fixing the bug will fulfill the issue, at least until further levels demand more integration and complexity. And the Silenced Song bug doesn’t even need to be fixed if she just changes the card’s stated requirements to match what’s actually happening.

  So that means that the only real problems are that she needs more music from Jiang Jin, and she needs to throw in the gacha mechanic.

  Now, in order to get the gacha mechanic fully set up, she needs Wei Shengyuan to draw up the background of the menu, character portraits, special effects-- everything.

  But that would be doing things well, instead of getting things done.

  At the core, it’s just clicking a button to gamble. Everything else can come later.

  Zan Xinyi steps away from the door and flips open her laptop again, opening a new page for an even more hurried negotiation with her system.

  I want a bonus for finishing a week early.

  >No bonus available

  The bonus: Letting me pick which of the Witch’s two cards I pull. I want a guarantee, like how I could guarantee what came from a spin.

  “Uhm, Zan Xinyi? Are we going to go after him?”

  No response. Zan Xinyi grimaces.

  I’ll sacrifice my spins instead. I don’t need--

  >Reward for completion: Updated. On completion of every requirement, 1 dimensional conversion to be named from two options.

  It’s a victory, but it’s a hollow one.

  The game will get its gacha, and the currency that she’s paying it in will be--

  How long she thinks Wei Shengyuan will live.

  “Get back to work,” Zan Xinyi says.

  “What?” Jiang Jin says.

  “You said you’d make at least two more music tracks for the first level,” Zan Xinyi says. “I need them as soon as possible. Within the next...” How long is this going to take. What is the shittiest possible way to make this work? Coding is not fast. “The next...”

  She turns back to the door.

  “Wei Shengyuan!” She yells. “Can you live for three hours? One breath for each hour!”

  “But the hallway-- it’s right there.” Jiang Jin says. “An hour? Three hours? Why would it take that long?” She’s pale, one hand constantly on the bell.

  “How many breaths did he take,” Zan Xinyi says. This is a time relevant situation.

  “He took two,” Jiang Jin says. “But they both sounded bad.”

  That’s not good, Wei Shengyuan is a stubborn bastard who hates asking for help. If he took two breaths, that means that one hour is closer to the truth. Is he bleeding out? But if that were the case, his heartbeat would be different, and Jiang Jin is insisting it’s normal.

  “Then you’ve got thirty minutes per track,” Zan Xinyi says. “It’s fine if you’re just putting trumpets over a zither. It doesn’t have to sound good. There’s no access to your room right now, so you’ll have to do it all right here.”

  She reaches for her mask tag and slaps it on her broken phone.

  “Use this to record.”

  Then she sits down with her back against the front door, and begins to code while Wei Shengyuan dies.

  patreon members who can read 10 chapters ahead. And a third thank you to everyone who has left a review! A bonus chapter will come out after 4 more reviews. And, because I'm on Rising Stars now, I'm also offering a bonus chapter for reaching 250 followers.