Because I Cannot Hurt You - Chapter 18: Who uses who

A disappearing gold mine. An old family secret. An army officer carrying a grudge spanning two generations.

As a small time reporter at the local newspaper, Shen Yu already had enough on her plate. Biased managers, check. Long, brutal work hours, check. The department beauty snatching her big story opportunity, check. But now another problem has reared its head and it comes packaged in a young and attractive military officer. He is on the hunt for some legendary space gold and he will get her to help him, whether she likes it or not.

Secrets are abound and Shen Yu soon finds that not everything is not as simple as it seems. Even her own past becomes questionable the more time she spends on the quest. Events from decades ago are rising up to haunt her and she needs to find out the truth before it’s too late. If only she had a better partner.

Noah Carter wasn't special. A broke programmer working from his cluttered studio apartment, he spent his days applying for jobs, getting rejected, and scraping by with low-paying freelance gigs.One ordinary Tuesday, while debugging code at 3 AM surrounded by energy drink cans and ramen cups, Noah accidentally broke reality.He didn't mean to... it just sort of... happened.A system message appeared, floating in his vision. The Idle Tycoon System had chosen him. His first shop: a small bakery in a Magical Medieval world where demons, dragons and half-humans exist.Every sale generated automatic income, day after day. Every new world unlocked new opportunities.Noah brought it all back to Earth, selling what he could, keeping what he couldn't. One shop became two. Two became a hundred. A network spanning dimensions, time periods, and realities—all generating income while he slept.Countless years later, Noah raised his head from his pillow and realized something unexpected. The broke programmer who couldn't land an interview had become the richest man in the universe!

Within the dream of the dreamer, the one who was dreamed of awoke.

Sometimes dying isn’t even the worst part of your dayMark has been reincarnated into a dead town in a bog, one that has been recently destroyed and occupied by ravenous undead. They disappear every day and return again at night, mindless and hungry, hunting for any survivors. He’ll need to use cunning and subterfuge to avoid them, because since he was transported into the body of a child, he can’t level up. At least not yet.Bog Standard. It means “totally normal”, right? But for the small towns found in these bogs, there's no quick rescue and not much trade. Everything has to be made to last. To them, it means “excellent quality”. Mark will have to prove he's Bog Standard if he hopes to survive.This is an Isekai of excellent quality. It’s a progression fantasy set in a LitRPG world, rags to riches with an eventual OP main character. The pacing is slow-burn, incremental progression, sometimes slice-of-life, punctuated by moments of intense violence and possibly traumatic content.