BaoBao's Origin 1 Performance and Evaluation

Luna regained consciousness and found herself back in the black claustrophobic space. Her body felt light and comfortable again. It felt as if her experience of dying just moments ago was nothing but a bad dream.

"Is it always like this here?" Luna looked at BaoBao who was in the space with her instead of talking to her through telepathy like the first time they met.

BaoBao looked around the seemingly empty space. "Seems like it..."

"It can't be changed?"

"This space is supposed to reflect the host's heart. I've never heard of it changing its appearance before."

"So my heart's black?"

"I don't know. We've never considered interpreting its appearance."

"Doesn't matter then." Luna had only asked about it in passing. "Would you know what happens in the rest of the story?"

"Yup! I will know everything along with the results of your performance."

"So?"

"ZhangYong interrogated the spy, found out about ZiYao, and delivered justice. It's a happy ending for everyone. Except you..."

Luna sighed softly. "Wanting a happy ending for myself would be asking for too much. I don't even know if I can pass my mission or not."

Silence hung in the air. BaoBao was not continuing on to the results like Luna expected. "Is there something wrong?"

"What? No. Why?" BaoBao said it so defensively that Luna began suspecting something.

"I failed, didn't I?"

"Huh?! No! How did you come up with that conclusion?"

"You weren't moving on to the results."

"You- You didn't ask for it..."

Luna simply raised an eyebrow in response.

"It's a B... We only scrapped past the flogging event... Although we managed to escape the marriage, we still died after being played with..." BaoBao sighed.

Only when hosts get an S grade would they be noticed by the administrators immediately. Otherwise, they would need to constantly get A grades before they would be noticed. Those scoring any poorer than that would be left alone and the system would take very long before it could advance into a higher grade system.

"That's true." Luna nodded.

BaoBao was already sad about it. He believed that Luna who did all the hard work would be equally upset and disappointed. He had witnessed first-hand how much effort she put into training and into outwitting the plot. He looked at her listless expression and felt like he had to say something.

"Well, the soul was still pacified because it was not some weak powerless person anymore and we lived freely and happily for a good 5 years in the wild!"

"Mm." Luna agreed with him.

"So- So... Don't mind the grade! We did great and that the original soul must be really happy with us!"

Luna finally realised that he was trying to comfort her. "Just so you know, I'm fine, I did whatever I could already."

BaoBao was speechless. He could not understand how she could accept her grade like it like another boring piece of information.

BaoBao begun weighing the pros and cons of being with Luna. He wanted to become a higher grade system as soon as possible but that was dependent on their host's performance. The logical and normal thing to do was to abandon Luna now. No matter how many times he repeated his calculations, or changed the variables, the probability of her succeeding was too low for his liking. There was only one issue. He did not feel like leaving Luna. He had fun with her and experienced other more complicated but often nice feelings. Moreover, she had awed him whenever her predictions beat his.

[Maybe my data will be proven wrong again.] BaoBao reasoned with himself. He ended up blaming the administrators for being blind to her efforts and for giving her a lower grade than she deserved.

Suddenly, he received a message from the administrators. BaoBao momentarily freaked out as he thought that the administrators heard his thought. However, he shouted in joy when he read the message. "Our grade got changed to S!!!"

Luna looked at him with widened eyes. "Could grades change like this?"

"No! This is a first! Thanks to our good performance, they allowed me to share certain information with you to aid in your understanding of how our grades seem to work differently in our case!"

Suddenly, BaoBao stopped and simply stared at Luna. She still looked as calm as ever.

"Go on and share the information with me."

"Why don't you seem happy? Aren't you happy?" BaoBao was confused. [Does she really not care about anything?]

Luna got more confused than him. "Happy about?"

"Our S grade. They praised us. I praised you."

"Oh. I'm glad that you got the recognition you wanted BaoBao! Well done!" Luna smiled gently and praised him too. Luna felt more surprised than she was happy. This was the first time she received such an exceptional result. She did not dare to believe it.

BaoBao sulked a little. "I wasn't asking to be praised... Ah, forget it. I'll tell you about my purpose now. We normally receive missions related to fixing major problems. For example, resolving a bug that infiltrated into the world or when the second female lead or some other major character died with too strong a grievance. Things like that cause too much of a disturbance in the world's consciousness, which could cause the world to crumble and cease to exist."

"And all of you help those worlds for the fun of it?"

"Sort of? We don't need them but the more worlds that exist, the more data we can gather. It's beneficial for us if they survive. Also, the more stable the worlds are, the easier it is for us to transverse time and space. The destruction of worlds create black holes and warps things."

Luna nodded to indicate for him to continue with his explanation.

"We only recently started to deal with smaller issues. Like the grievances of side unknown characters that gained a consciousness of their own. Although the disturbance they cause is not anything significant, it affects the stability of the world and creates loopholes for bugs to even happen.

However, this matter is quite tricky. If hosts do too well and outdo the original leads and second leads, it forces a creation of another main character which absorbs the power of the world's consciousness.

What happened in our case is that we appeased the original soul while keeping the world's balance. In a sense, our performance was perfect! That was why a B performance like ours will receive an S ranked evaluation."

"So... My inability to create exceptional results is actually now... Useful?" Luna clarified.

"You got it!"

Luna waited a while more to make sure that BaoBao was done with sharing. Since BaoBao did not bring up the system market that he mentioned by accident, she inferred that it was still confidential information.

Meanwhile, BaoBao was secretly complaining to himself. [What stingy administrators... They still want to confirm the worth of this department before opening up resources for us to use.]

"Shall we move on to the next world then?" Luna asked.

"Sure!" BaoBao put in the request to be assigned to the next world.

"Will I know which world I'll be sent to?"

BaoBao pouted. "You could, but not now."

"Alright." Suddenly, a hard and painful tug on her soul came without warning and knocked her out cold.

BaoBao pursed his lips when he saw her face contort a little in pain just before she disappeared from the space.

[Ah... I forgot to remind her of the pain...]