The Cannon Fodder 'Seme' is the Center of Attention Again (Quick Transmigration) - Chapter 7

“Host, are you all right?!”

The moment 888 emerged from the dark room, it first scanned Li Qingran from head to toe. After confirming he was merely a bit damp and had no obvious physical injuries, it breathed a sigh of relief before moving on to other concerns.

“What exactly happened just now? Why was I suddenly thrown into the dark room?”

“Well, I ran into an Alpha in his rut in the alley,” Li Qingran said honestly.

His tone was flat, as if he were simply reporting a basic experimental procedure.

888’s virtual wires practically stood on end.

An Alpha in his rut!

Generally speaking, a system is sent to the dark room because the host is about to engage in “censored” plot content. To protect the hosts’ privacy, the system is locked in a closed room during these times, severing all contact.

While “censored” content doesn’t only refer to adult themes, an Alpha in rut who has completely lost his mind could practically rub against a tree trunk! Its host was a clean-cut, elegant Alpha who was often mistaken for a beautiful Omega when not releasing pheromones. Furthermore, as a cannon fodder, his pheromones likely wouldn’t be particularly dominant.

888, having never seen Li Qingran suppress an Alpha with pheromones, grew more terrified the more it thought about it. Its virtual eyes instinctively tried to scan Li Qingran’s lower body.

“Host, you didn’t just…”

“No.”

Before 888’s detection beam could sweep over him again, Li Qingran denied the suspicion. However, just because he hadn’t engaged in an overly intimate relationship with that Alpha didn’t mean the original plot was written that way.

Thinking of the man’s terrifying influence—able to paralyze an entire street just to find him—and that scent of gunpowder that still lingered around him, Li Qingran pursed his lips and suggested to 888:

“I think you should apply to the main system for the original plot segment of what just happened. That Alpha seemed like an important story character.”

“Huh?”

The current in 888’s display, which was shifting through colors, suddenly stuttered. It seemed to freeze for a second before reacting.

“An important character? An important character?!”

It was unclear if 888’s program data was malfunctioning or if it simply didn’t believe Li Qingran’s guess. After repeating the words twice, it suddenly started laughing.

“How could that be? Impossible. Host, you must have guessed wrong. How could he be an important character? Your character is probably more important than his, ha ha ha ha!”

Li Qingran said nothing.

888 couldn’t stop talking; it even started trying to comfort Li Qingran in reverse.

“Don’t worry, Host. He definitely won’t be an important character. After all, we’re just minor employees in the Cannon Fodder Department. We don’t have enough screen time to meet so many im… im…”

888 couldn’t finish. Its voice grew smaller and smaller until it vanished completely.

The silence in Li Qingran’s mind lasted for quite a while before 888 let out a broken scream:

“HOW CAN HE BE AN IMPORTANT CHARACTER!!!”

How could an important character in a small world have a “dark room” plot with a cannon fodder—especially one about to go offline?! 888 didn’t believe it, nor did it want to.

However, as it looked at the plot fragment the main system had just sent, it didn’t even need to look at the details. The dozen or so words in the first line, which the main system had specifically pinned, enlarged, and bolded, were enough to make it want to throw itself into the System Reformer for a total overhaul.

Plot Fragment Line 1: Characters involved in this segment: Villain—Jiang Siran.

Jiang Siran. The Villain.

888 wanted to laugh again—the kind of laugh where you strip off your clothes and run down the street waving your arms. But it couldn’t. It had no clothes. It had no arms.

So, at this moment, even though it desperately wanted to scream and flee, 888 could only stand there and stare at the plot fragment, despairingly accepting a reality it didn’t want: yes, the plot had deviated. Again. Completely.

888 stared at the name “Su Jingyi” following immediately after “Jiang Siran” and felt like it might be better off just crashing its own system.

According to the original world line, this segment should have featured Su Jingyi choosing to go for a drive to clear his head after being cheated on by the Scum Alpha. Unwilling to be followed by Gu Shiyu, he chose this deserted path while hiding from the Protagonist Gong. There, he should have encountered the Villain, who had collapsed in the alley after being drugged into an enforced rut.

Although the two wouldn’t have a substantial relationship, through Su Jingyi’s accidental and panicked comfort, Jiang Siran would become hopelessly obsessed with the scent of his pheromones, thus beginning the “war for the wife” against the Protagonist Gong.

Due to his overly aggressive and extreme methods, he would not only highlight how moving the Protagonist Gong’s restrained love was but also solidify himself as the story’s ultimate villain.

But now, the Protagonist Shou who was supposed to appear was nowhere to be found. The person acting out the plot with the Villain was a cannon fodder who was supposed to be offline.

So, how is the “war for the wife” supposed to unfold now? Whose love is the Protagonist Gong’s restrained affection supposed to highlight? Can this villain even be a villain anymore? ARGH!!!

Looking at this tangled mess of a plot, 888 wished it could explode on the spot. Heaven knows it transferred from the Protagonist Department to the Cannon Fodder Department just to have less work and clock out early. Now it felt like it was doing more worrying and handling more troublesome plots than it ever did with protagonists!

“Host, what do we do? I feel like we are a bit dead right now…” 888 was no longer worried about when it would clock out, but whether the world would collapse.

“Probably not. After all, I told him my name was Su Jingyi.”

“What?” 888’s virtual eyes slowly widened.

“I mean, when Jiang Siran asked for my name, I told him I was Su Jingyi,” Li Qingran repeated patiently. “So, fundamentally speaking, this plot point shouldn’t have collapsed.”

888: “…”

Really? Dear Host, please look into my eyes and answer again. Do you really believe this plot hasn’t collapsed?

“You are an Alpha, and the Protagonist Shou is an Omega. Anyone with half a brain should know the two of you aren’t the same person!”

Su Jingyi wasn’t Cinderella; he didn’t transform into an Alpha at the stroke of midnight.

“Jiang Siran will definitely find out that the person in the alley wasn’t the Protagonist Shou.”

“What does that matter?” Li Qingran wasn’t as anxious as 888; in fact, he was incredibly calm. “If he cannot find the Alpha who actually helped him, he will naturally continue to entangle the Omega whose name was explicitly mentioned.”

As long as the two of them interact, Jiang Siran can become obsessed with Su Jingyi’s pheromones just like in the original plot. It might just be a bit delayed—just like his own clock-out time.

“But, he ‘cannot find’ you?” The half-paralyzed 888 didn’t understand.

“It means that by then, I will have already left this world. How is he supposed to find me?”

During the conversation, Li Qingran finished changing into his bar work uniform and adjusted his tie. He closed the locker with a sharp click, and his suit-clad Alpha reflection appeared in the long mirror on the door. He lowered his eyes, leisurely rolling up his sleeves. His beautiful features carried a natural air of detachment, yet his words remained gentle.

“So, relax. Things are not as bad as you imagine.”

Li Qingran looked up at his reflection, meeting 888’s gaze through the mirror. “Didn’t you say today was a beautiful day and we would definitely be able to clock out?”

“Ah… well, that is true…” 888 whispered.

It was just… watching Li Qingran roll up his sleeves and leave the breakroom to play out the final plot, 888 couldn’t shake the feeling that something was wrong. And that feeling didn’t come from Li Qingran’s logic, but from the world itself.

Low level, huh? 888 fell into silence as it looked at the world rank on the mission panel.

The clouds in the sky seemed even thicker now. Even though the rain had stopped, the sunlight was still tightly blocked. The dark clouds pressed down on the city like mountains, and the wind carried an indescribable sense of oppression.

Heavy. Irritable.

“F*ck!”

Qi Ziyan scratched the back of his neck harshly and then kicked the coffee table in front of him. The wine bottles wobbled and knocked against each other; several fell off the edge, shattering on the floor and creating even more noise.

“How should I know why he isn’t at work yet? Shouldn’t I be asking you that? You told me he starts at eight today. I have been waiting here for a damn hour and haven’t seen a single sign of him! Gu Shiyu, tell the truth, are you really not just messing with me?!”

Qi Ziyan reached out to scratch his neck again. The accumulating itch at his gland, combined with an inexplicable internal irritability, made it impossible for him to listen to anything Gu Shiyu said.

“I have seriously had enough. He is just a Scum Alpha. Is it worth us designing a plan with this much effort? I even have to get involved personally… No! I changed my mind! I am not going to step onto the field and let that idiot Scum Alpha get the better of me. Just wait, I will go find a dozen ‘Strong Alphas’ right now. The result will be way more effective at stimulating Xiao Yi than I would be as an Omega!”

“What do you mean ‘no’? Today I am going to—”

Thud!

As he spoke to Gu Shiyu on the phone, Qi Ziyan marched toward the door with aggressive momentum. He didn’t successfully charge into the downstairs dance hall to pull in a dozen crooked Alphas as planned. Instead, he slammed into a wall of flesh.

The phone was knocked from his ear. He instinctively reached out to catch it but only touched a damp chill. Time suddenly seemed to slow down; the lights blurred, and the surrounding music vanished. Qi Ziyan stared at the Alpha before him, his eyes slowly widening, his mouth slightly ajar.

A few more words seemed to come from the phone call that hadn’t been ended, but Qi Ziyan couldn’t hear them. He only knew that the bubble that had burst in his dream had appeared before him perfectly intact.

He opened his mouth to say something, but a faint yet incredibly present woody fragrance wafted toward him first. Mixed within it was a light scent of gunpowder, like a spark blown by the wind, landing on the back of Qi Ziyan’s neck.

Qi Ziyan seemed to hear a boom. In the next second, something exploded from the soft flesh on the back of his neck. The itch became even more pronounced.

Li Qingran watched as the Omega before him blinked. Before he could even greet him, a sudden flush surged onto the Omega’s face. Simultaneously, an extremely dense scent of honey began to spread rapidly in all directions.

He instinctively wanted to step back, but the other had already coiled around him like a vine clinging to a tree.

The alarm for high pheromone concentration in the air immediately went off. At the same time, two mechanical arms quickly reached out from inside the room, pulling the two people stalled at the doorway inside.

Thud!

As the door slammed shut, a heavy iron gate dropped from above the door frame to the floor.

“What happened?”

At the moment Su Jingyi and Gu Shiyu stepped into the bar, they suddenly heard someone asking.

“It seems an Omega upstairs has fallen into Heat.”

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