Chapter 2: Played a Horror Game Like a Parenting Sim

The door swung open, revealing a disaster zone: flickering lights, a living room splattered with unidentified red liquid, walls peeling with mold, and a couch buried under a thick layer of dust.

My eyebrows twitched. My gaze immediately locked onto a teenage boy lounging on the couch with his feet propped up on the coffee table.

He had a head of messy curls, five or six earrings dangling from his ears, and wore a pair of ripped jeans with chains hanging off them. He looked every bit a juvenile delinquent.

At the sound, he looked up at me, his eyes flickering with madness and bloodlust. "You're back. I'm starving. Hurry up and make dinner! I want braised eyeballs and fried hands."

The stream chat was immediately filled with schadenfreude.

[Holy shit! She ran into the secondary boss right off the bat. This newbie's luck is something else.]

[Whether she cooks or not, she's screwed. Unless she gouges out her own eyes and chops off her hands, hahaha!]

When I wasn't moving, the boy reached into his stomach, pulled out a sharp knife, and pointed it at my throat.

It wasn't that I hadn't noticed his movement, but my gaze remained fixed on his feet. Suddenly, I understood what one of the main tasks of this parenting game was.

As the mother, I was supposed to save this rebellious teenager. There was nothing I hated more than a school kid refusing to behave.

A problem child at such a young age... I was absolutely going to give him a proper taste of motherly love.

I grabbed a feather duster from nearby and smacked it hard across his leg. "Who do you think you're talking to? I'm your mother! Look at you—putting your feet up on the coffee table! What if we had guests over? How would that look? Put them down right now!"

The boy's phone slipped from his hand, clattering to the floor. He raised his head, staring at me blankly.

Comments of shock flashed across the screen.

[What the hell? Does this newbie have a death wish? She's bold enough to treat the secondary boss like that!]

[He is gonna bite her head off any second. Too bloody for me. I'm out.]

...

Oblivious, I grabbed the boy by the ear and yanked him to his feet.

"What are you staring at?" I glared. "If you don't clean this coffee table right now, I'll show you no mercy. And what the hell are you wearing? What that ridiculous haircut? Why aren't you in school today? Are you asking for a beating?"

The boy's expression shifted, but the bloody scene the viewers anticipated never happened. Instead, deep in his eyes, I caught a flicker of confusion and maybe even a hint of enjoyment.

The system's voice rang in my ear. "Son's favorability has increased to 30."

I blinked, wondering if the boy was a masochist, but this only solidified my theory: the mission of this parenting game was to whip a dysfunctional family into shape.

The boy stood up obediently and went to find a rag. I reached out and smacked him on the back of the head.

"Go cut that yellow mop off!" I added. "Throw away all that garbage on your ears! Do it immediately!"

The system's voice rang out again. "Son's favorability has increased to 50."

I looked down at my hand, completely convinced of my theory now. "One smack raises his favorability by 20 points? He really is a masochist!"

I ordered him to help me clean the house. No dinner until the entire place was spotless.

Under my strict supervision, he soon swapped out the dirty couch covers for clean ones. I replaced the broken lightbulbs, and we rolled a fresh layer of paint over the moldy walls.

The house was quickly restored to a pristine, orderly state. As I looked around the spotless home, my mood instantly lifted.

Realizing I still didn't know the boy's name, I gave his backside a light kick. "Go get your homework and textbooks. Let me see where you are with your studies."