“OKAY, BUCKLE UP, BECAUSE IT’S TIME FOR ADVENTURE!”

“No, it’s not.”

Kiwi frowned. “You’re such a negative nelly. Has anyone told you that?”

“Only you, Kiwi, and this is the eighteenth time you have said it in the past one thousand loops.” Budou, in exact contrast to the things said last chapter, had gained an eidetic memory (perfect recall) due to his obsessive binging of the complete archives of Project Gutenberg, the entire libraries of Royal Road, Scribble Hub, Neovel, Tapas, Webtoons, Wattpad, Moonquill, and Archive of Our Own, as well as every single video game marked “cyoa” on itch.io, had gained the intellect of five geniuses put together. He was now smarter than any being on planet Earth, or at least any being on the continents of Alabaster or Chicken Coop, as if anyone was paying attention to continuity anymore.

“What the toxic readers did to The Nothing Mage is despicable,” Budou would often say.

“And the way that readers are so mean to authors in general is mean. They often give 0.5 ratings just because the characters did something that they don’t like, rather than actually feeling like the story is one of the worst of all-time. Based on a bell-curve, fifty percent of all ratings should be between 2.5 and 3.5 stars. But instead, the vast majority of stories are either 4.5 stars, 5 stars, or 0.5 stars. The first two are because people are generally more positive than the star rating system gives credit for. The last one is because people like to use the star rating as a weapon to silence the stories that have content they don’t like.”

“You mean like homosexuality?” Budou asked.

Kiwi nodded. “You know from the shameful incident of the Nothing Mage how that tends to go.”

“Yeah...”

“So we can’t let that happen anymore, Kiwi said. “We need to escape this time loop before our clear sexual tension gets out of hand.”

“Our clear... what?”

The two stared at each other and looked deeply into each other’s eyes for some time.

But because they were both heterosexual, that was the end of that line of thought and it of course never came up again.

However...

If the fans demanded it, the R-18 love scene would play out. If the fans did not, then this scene would never be mentioned again and the plot would move forward as normal.

But the love scene was the only way they were ever getting that soul crystal and leveling up their powers.

So... The readers needed to choose extremely wisely.

Spite the toxic readers and get the love chapter?

Or more forward with the plot and perhaps find out who that mysterious figure from a few chapters ago was?

We would see...