Mistress Of The Evil Forest - Case 117: The Third Star: Meet the Astras.

I am currently re-writing the first chapters of this story. They are quite rough and bounce around a lot and I can do better. At some point, I will replace these with the better chapters.Sometime in 2024 Aethon Books will publish the first volume of this story on Amazon, KU, and audible. This will mean the story will be stubbed. I will notify people far in advance of that.In the dystopian world of the future, life is rough when you live at the bottom. Jobs are non-existent. Far too many people live in poverty, crammed into huge buildings called Habitats. With no jobs in the real world, many people can only find work online in VR worlds as servants to the very rich. And it's getting worse. The old internet is unusable and hacked to pieces. The new system needs AI to run things, but all but one of them were destroyed. The last sentient AI is ordered to create a new game world so the rich can have a playground, and the corporations that rule the world can have a new global market place. Everyone wants a piece of the new game. The guilds are competing to be the first to find the dungeons and kill the biggest monster. The corporations are claiming land and putting in their online market places. Ozzy and his friends just want a paycheck.Four friends sign five year contracts as virtual serfs in a small village, and can't go adventuring at all to gain money. They don't have many choices. They can work as a blacksmith, barmaid and shepherd for all those years....or they can cheat and find ways to take advantage of the system and carve out a section of the game world for themselves, and earn a fortune in the real world.When they give you a mop and not a sword, you have to find the loopholes and change the rules.

So called ‘gods’ neither want nor desire anything. They’ve seen through the vanity of the mortal world and are outstanding amongst all living beings.

After being betrayed and murdered by his lover of 11 years, “Heavenly King” Qi Wenyuan is reborn as the entertainment circle’s number one vase, Lin Xi.  Good and evil will each meet their due according to natural laws. Those who doubt, raise their heads: who will the Heavens spare!

But…the mantis stalks the cicada, unaware of the oriole behind. Heavenly King Qi, have you really not noticed a certain man…behind you?

He’s the only God of Show Business, the one who’s been secretly in love with its Heavenly King for years. After a certain Heavenly King’s rebirth, he’s finally (?) fulfilling his aspirations for romantic love. From then on, the great deity found himself a partner, leaving the entertainment circles with no god.

- Description from Novelupdates

Once she woke up, Su Tingyun had become a 70 year old granny.

After resigning to her fate with great difficulty, deciding to become a rich family’s esteemed mother and residential big boss, she didn’t expect that the scenario would change again.

That husband of hers who had died on the battlefield was now the cultivation world’s deity, and sent people to pick her up for celestial cultivation?

Fine, she’ll cultivate, but how did she accidentally cultivate into someone else’s body?

Changing old patterns up and playing swapping the frame…

Young man, granny is 70 this year, is your taste heavy enough?

- Description from Novelupdates

After being torn from the only life she knew, 16-year-old Margo is forced into a new home with strangers who call themselves her parents. Haunted by memories of her past and consumed by feelings of isolation, she struggles to adapt to her unfamiliar surroundings. School offers little relief—until she meets Lucien, a mysterious boy who appears just when she needs a friend the most.Gabriel is everything Margo needs: kind, attentive, and always ready to whisk her away from her troubles. Each night, he invites her to secret places—an abandoned playground, a fog-choked garden, a crumbling train station at the edge of town—each more unsettling than the last. Yet with every chilling rendezvous, Margo feels more alive... more seen.But something isn’t right. Gabriel never comes to school during the day. Her adoptive parents never see him. And when they catch her talking to thin air, their concern deepens into fear. They say Gabriel isn't real—that he’s a figment of her imagination. Margo wants to believe them, but Gabriel feels real. More real than anything else in her life.As the nights grow colder and more twisted, Gabriel’s true nature begins to surface. Shadows move where they shouldn’t. Time warps in his presence. And the places they visit seem to echo with whispers from another world. Margo is forced to ask herself: Who—or what—is Gabriel? Why does he only want her? And what will happen on the final night he asks her to come with him?As the line between reality and delusion begins to crumble, Margo must make an impossible choice: stay in a world where she feels loved, or return to one that barely feels real.But one thing is certain—some friendships never let go.