The screen glowed in the darkness of my room. My eyes burned. My hands trembled over the mouse, slick with sweat and energy drink residue.
Three years. Three goddamn years I'd been grinding this route.
On the monitor, Baek Museong — the stoic, silver-haired swordsman with abs carved by the gods themselves — stood in the moonlit courtyard of the Jade Pavilion. Across from him, Ahyun.
An SSS heroine.
A peasant girl he'd taken from the Kang family during the early-game event — the daughter of a simple farmer who was a servant to a secondary NPC.
Yet God, or the developers, had compensated her in other ways.
Long azure hair tumbling past her shoulders. And her body — breasts absurdly huge for her small frame, heavy and round beneath her thin silk robes, proportions that made her one of the most beloved heroines in the entire playerbase.
She was innocent.
She blushed when you held her hand. And that was exactly what made her route such a nightmare. Ahyun hated you from the start. She was wary, guarded, and her starting disposition sat at a brutal -30. You had to claw your way up from distrust to tolerance to fondness to love, one agonizing interaction at a time. Most players gave up on her within the first twenty hours.
I'd spent three years.
The cutscene dialogue box appeared.
"I have always loved you, Ahyun."
Museong's confession triggered the hidden affection meter I'd been nursing for one hundred and sixty-seven in-game days. I watched the pink bar above Ahyun's portrait explode past the final threshold, shattering into golden sparks.
[PASSION LEVEL: MAX]
[HIDDEN EVENT UNLOCKED: Moonlit Surrender]
My palms went slick.
"Yes," I whispered. "Yes, yes, yes—"
Ahyun stepped forward. Her lips quivered.
"Baek... I've waited so long to hear those words. Every night in the dormitory, I thought only of you. Every morning at the training grounds, I watched only you."
She pressed herself against him. Her hands found his chest. His found her waist.
"Then let me show you," Baek murmured, "what I should have shown you long ago."
He pulled the silk sash of her inner robe. The fabric parted. Beneath, her body was rendered in painstaking detail — heavy, round breasts that swayed as the cloth fell away, dark nipples stiffening in the night air. Baek's calloused hands reached up, cupping them, squeezing until the soft flesh bulged between his fingers.
She gasped. He leaned in, mouth finding her neck, kissing along the curve of her throat while his thumbs dragged across her nipples.
His lips trailed lower. He kissed the swell of her left breast, then the right, his tongue tracing slow circles around one stiff peak.
"No—" Her voice broke. Her fingers clawed at his robes.
She ran her small hands across his chest, his stomach, tracing the ridges of his abs with trembling fingers.
He pushed her gently onto the silk bedding. Those enormous breasts settled against her ribcage, still swaying with her quickened breathing. He crawled over her, one knee between her thighs, and kissed her mouth for the first time. Her legs parted. His hand slid down her bare stomach, fingers trailing along the curve of her hip, reaching the hem of her panties—
The screen went black.
A single line of elegant calligraphy faded in.
"The moon watched over their union until dawn..."
Then the main menu loaded.
I stared at the screen.
The silence in my room was absolute.
"FUCK! FUCK YOU! TRASH FUCKING GAME!"
My fist slammed the desk so hard the monitor shook. Empty cans of Red Bull toppled and clattered to the floor. My mechanical keyboard jumped. The LED strips along my ceiling flickered.
"MOTHERFUCKING — PIECE OF — GODDAMN FADE TO BLACK BULLSHIT!"
I shoved back from the desk. My gaming chair rolled into the pile of instant ramen cups behind me. I stood up, pacing, pulling at my greasy hair with both hands.
Murim Conquest: Path of the Sword Saint.
That was the name of this infuriating, cock-teasing masterpiece of a game. A sprawling open-world RPG set in the Murim — a vast martial arts realm of warring factions, ancient techniques, and legendary weapons. Over three hundred explorable locations. A dynamic reputation system. Real-time combat that was genuinely excellent.
And heroines.
God, the heroines.
Two hundred and fourteen of them. Each one fully voiced. Each one with branching relationship paths, unique personality quirks, hidden backstories, and — if you were skilled enough, patient enough, and degenerate enough — unlockable intimacy events.
I'd played this game over a hundred times.
I knew every route. Every hidden flag. Every obscure dialogue trigger that most players would never find in a lifetime. I'd mapped the affection algorithms. I'd reverse-engineered the reputation thresholds. I'd written goddamn spreadsheets.
And every single time, EVERY time, the game blue-balled me.
The problem was simple and enraging.
Museong, the main character, was a martial arts obsessed lunatic. A sword-brained idiot. A combat-addicted psychopath who treated every heroine interaction as a stepping stone to the next fight. His personality stats were hardcoded:
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BAEK MUSEONG
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Martial Spirit .............. 97 / 100
Battle Instinct ............. 94 / 100
Discipline .................. 91 / 100
Honor ....................... 88 / 100
Emotional Awareness ......... 22 / 100
Romantic Interest ........... 14 / 100
Sexual Desire ................ 3 / 100
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Three. Out of a hundred.
The man was practically asexual.
No matter how perfectly I orchestrated the seduction routes, no matter how many affection points I stacked, moonlit walks, accidental bath encounters, jealousy events—the game's AI would always pull Baek back to his sword training. His meditation. His breakthrough attempts.
The climactic scenes always cut to black. A poetic line about the moon or the wind or whatever pretentious garbage the writers used to cover the fact that they'd animated the heroines' nude models in exquisite detail and then refused to let you do anything with them.
I collapsed back into my chair.
The monitor still showed the main menu. Ahyun's figure stood among the other heroines in the background art.
"You deserved better," I muttered at her portrait. "I would have given you better."
And it wasn't just the main route. That was the truly maddening part.
The game had secondary playable characters. Side routes where you could control other martial artists — members of the Orthodox Faction, the Unorthodox Faction, or the Royal Faction. Three great powers that dominated the Murim.
In the main storyline, these three factions were perpetually at each other's throats — border skirmishes, assassinations, political marriages, espionage — until the Demonic Invasion arc in the early game, when ancient demons breached the barrier between realms and all three factions were forced into an uneasy alliance to survive.
But unless you were a completionist lunatic — which, admittedly, I was — you'd never push that far into the protection storyline. The Demonic Invasion was designed for masochists who enjoyed hundred-hour combat gauntlets.
I didn't care about demons. I didn't care about saving the Murim.
I cared about one thing.
Breaking the heroines. Enslaving them. Fucking their brains out.
Not in some cruel way. Well. Maybe a little cruel. But mostly I wanted what the game promised and never delivered. The full, uncensored, no-fade-to-black conquest of every single one of those two hundred and fourteen women. The shy librarian of the Heavenly Scripture Pavilion. The sadistic whip-wielding enforcer of the Unorthodox Faction. The ice-cold princess of the Royal Court who secretly wrote filthy poetry. The twin assassins. The mature widow sect leader. The fallen saint.
All of them.
The secondary characters had different personality stats than Museong. Some even had decent Romantic Interest values. But none of them could accumulate enough Seduction Points to trigger anything beyond groping. The system was rigged. The affection thresholds for advanced intimacy events scaled exponentially, and only the main character had the stat growth and event access to even approach them.
And the main character was a sword-fucking monk.
I opened my spreadsheet on the second monitor. Rows and rows of data. Heroine names, affection breakpoints, required flags, optimal gift sequences, dialogue trees mapped to the seventh branch. Three years of work.
Three years.
For fade to black.
"If it were me," I said to the empty room. My voice was hoarse from energy drinks and rage. "If I were in that world — not controlling some brain-dead martial arts robot, but actually there—"
I leaned forward.
"I would have broken every single one of them. Even with the worst stats. Even with the worst starting character. Seduction isn't numbers on a screen. It's knowing what someone wants and giving it until they can't breathe without you."
I knew these heroines better than the developers did. I knew their fears, their desires, their trauma, their kinks. Ahyun had abandonment issues from her mother's death and had had an early lover.
Namgung Seol dressed like a man — bound her chest, wore masculine robes, spoke in clipped military tones — but underneath all that armor was a woman who craved the exact opposite of what she projected. Submission. Total, abject surrender. She wanted someone strong enough to tear through every layer of her act, pin her down, and fill her until she couldn't think straight. Breed her stupid. Pump her so full of cum it leaked out for days. Her Sexual Desire stat was secretly the highest among the heroines at 96. The twin assassins, Lua and Yua, had a competitive dynamic that could be weaponized into a threesome if you played them against each other correctly.
I knew everything.
And I could do nothing.
My cursor hovered over the game icon on my desktop. I right-clicked.
The option appeared. Uninstall.
"Three years," I said. "Three years of my life for nothing."
I clicked it.
The progress bar filled. Files deleted. Save data — hundreds of save files — erased.
Murim Conquest: Path of the Sword Saint has been successfully uninstalled.
"I would have done it better," I spat at the empty space where the game had been. "A thousand times better. Every heroine. Every route. No pulling punches. I would have made them scream my name until their throats gave out."
I stood up. My legs wobbled. My vision blurred at the edges.
How long had I been sitting here? I glanced at my phone. The battery was dead. The clock on my second monitor read 4:47 AM. I'd started this final session... when? Two days ago? The curtains were drawn. I couldn't tell if it was night or morning outside. Probably didn't matter.
I stumbled toward my bed. The room spun. My chest felt tight. My heart was doing something strange — skipping, then slamming.
Forty-eight hours. No sleep. No food. Nothing but caffeine and spite keeping me upright.
I didn't think about it. I was too angry to think about it.
My knees hit the mattress. I fell forward, face-first into the unwashed pillow.
"I would have... done it... so much better..."
The words came out muffled.
My heart stuttered.
Then it beat once, hard, like a fist punching the inside of my ribcage.
It didn't beat again.
There was no pain. No dramatic final thought. No life flashing before my eyes. Just a warm darkness.
I was dead.
Then... light.
A translucent screen materialized in the void before me. The exact same UI style as—
No way.
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🎊 CONGRATULATIONS! 🎊
Player [JINHAE] has demonstrated UNPARALLELED dedication to the pursuit of romantic conquest.
Total Playtime: 11,847 hours
Heroines Encountered: 214/214
Intimacy Events Triggered: 187/214
Intimacy Events Completed: 0/214
Assessment: MAXIMUM KNOWLEDGE. ZERO RESULTS.
The System has determined that you possess the theoretical expertise but lack the proper... vessel.
This issue will now be corrected.
You claimed you could do better.
Prove it.
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My mouth opened. No sound came out. I was nothing but awareness floating in blue void, staring at a screen that shouldn't exist.
The notification dissolved.
A new one took its place.
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Welcome, Player.
Initiating Login...
[ MURIM CONQUEST: PATH OF THE SWORD SAINT ]
Please select your difficulty.
► HELL
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The title hung in the void for a second. Then the screen glitched. The text scrambled. A harsh buzzing sound filled the emptiness, like a thousand broken monitors screaming at once.
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[E̸R̶R̷O̵R̷]̶ ̸[̶E̸R̵R̸O̶R̷]̷ ̴[̵E̶R̵R̸O̷R̶]̵
T̶i̷t̶l̸e̶ ̸O̸v̵e̸r̷r̸i̶d̸e̵ ̷D̵e̷t̴e̶c̸t̷e̵d̶.̵.̷.̶
Player Profile Incompatible with Original Parameters.
Recalibrating...
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The broken text collapsed. Rebuilt itself. Letter by letter.
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[ MURIM CONQUEST: BREAKING SSS-RANK HEROINES ]
Difficulty: HELL
► CONFIRM
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I tried to scream.
The screen shattered into a billion fragments of light, and the void swallowed me whole.