Chương 55: Skill trees boop

Lung Junior ran through the dark tunnels beneath the asylum, his steps echoing loudly against the metal pipes, attracting all the miscreants around him to his position. A flash of pain against his forehead, he went down. Suddenly, he was surrounded, kicks, fists and crude weapons raining down on his form. He cringed at every strike as he tried to half-heartedly extradite himself from his position, but it was of no use, and he ended up dying.

A second later, he found himself outside the Illusion Room titled Outlast in the library. It glowed an ominous purple at him and pulsed, as if it were a heart feeding and receiving energy from some larger cosmic force. Lung Junior fell to his knees, a sweat outbreak staining his robes and his hair. A hand went up to his own heart, beating as rapidly as a rabbit's.

"What's happening?" Follower X78S8LKR said from his right, causing Lung Junior to turn and glare at the nondescript scion of a lesser house. The cultivator in question placatingly raised his hands and took a step back. Lung Junior slowly raised a trembling hand towards the Illusion Room. The indignity inflicted on him by that moronic blithering idiot was too big of a stain on his honour for him to be able to ignore it. He had to show the welp his place. But was there another way?

His followers looked on as the shaking hand continued moving forward, but failed to reach the Illusion Room. They looked towards the inner disciple who'd brought them here to witness the glorious moment of showing that upstart his place. At the same rate as Lung Junior's hand was moving towards the Illusion Room, his body was moving back, meaning that there was no true advancement in the act.

After a few more minutes of dramatic suspense in which an awkward silence descended, nobody saying anything, Lung Junior finally managed to touch the Illusion Room again and was sucked in. Not even fifteen minutes later, a fresh new scream resounded through the library. -/-"So, the magic system isn't based on qi?" Hashimi asked confusedly as she looked at the first sequence that Jin had squeaked out with a drab visual design.

It was her job to improve on it, but she also had questions about other aspects of the scenario. Skyrim, of course, started with the iconic sequence of coming on the prisoner wagon to Helgen, where one was to be executed because the Imperial captain in charge there was too mentally disabled to do the paperwork to realise that someone wasn't a Stormcloak.

"Yeah, I don't want to complicate the whole thing too much. Mana exists in the air just like qi; you can store it, put points in either having a higher capacity, or better regeneration," Jin replied.

"And you can learn the spells from consuming these books?" Hashimi asked dubiously.

"Yes, instant learning, we don't want to bog down people too much with having to read actual theory for systems that don't exist," Jin reassured her with a nod.

"But why change it?" Francis asked suddenly, interrupting them.

"What's the point of having something like 'Sparks,' when in reality the heavenly lightning downwards wind-defying dragon's embrace cousin's brother's milkman's wife's potato peeler is a real technique?"

"Because the scenario is supposed to alienate people from reality to achieve its own sense of immersion. The experiencers should create a unique story different from anything in real life so that they may grow from it without bothering with things like feasibility and such," Jin calmly explained again. He was willing to do so again and again until it clicked; that was how working in a team was sometimes.

"At least you didn't complicate the way basic skills like swordsmanship and archery work," Francis said with a sigh. One interesting part about changing Skyrim to function in an immersive Illusion Room scenario was that it made many things in the game simpler. There was no reason to, and also no way to, quantify swordsmanship and have an experimenter advance it in terms of levels.

If someone started in Helgen but was already a master swordsman in reality, then those were the sword skills they could use to fight their way through the underground to Riverwood. Similarly, someone would either fail or succeed at lockpicking based on their own merit, without the need for a system to support them with randomly generated numbers based on their skill percentage.

This implementation essentially eliminated most of the warrior and the thief skill trees as things like pickpocketing, smithing, sneaking and weapons mastery became a direct reflection of what the experiencer was capable of. The tale has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation. Things like magic and the Thu'um would be the main abilities that the experiencer would be able to unlock simply based on the way they interacted with their surroundings. Read a spell tome?

Congratulations, you knew a spell that would grow more powerful the more you used it, or if you took the requisite perks. You found a word wall and had enough dragon souls? Congrats, you now knew a shout. Jin imagined that most people would play Skyrim as spellblades due to these system changes. Cultivators would enter the world with whatever skills they had in either sword, staff or bow and acquire magical abilities or shouts that would synergise with those skills.

Due to the fact that those weapons, or even bare-handed fighting skills, had been painfully acquired in reality and the improvement of which was partially also the purpose of the Illusion Room, would also mean there would be fewer pure-magic casters, probably. After all, after learning the sword for fifty years, you'd also be unlikely to ditch it to throw around magic which you couldn't use in reality. Jin was foreseeing a future in which…

"It's a good testing ground, I'm surprised nobody has thought of it yet," Francis muttered.

"Give them access to easily attainable and scalable various skill-sets; they can then determine which ones fit their combat style the best based on pure practice rather than theory. In reality, they can then better prioritise what to learn, or put focus on next."

"Exactly," Jin said with a happy nod.

"In the future, it might be beneficial to develop a skill library, an Illusion Room in which someone can simply try out all the different skills cultivators have to better see which ones fit their fighting style." Francis tilted his head before shaking it.

"It's good we're doing it with imaginary skills," he eventually decided.

"It's not like cultivators would ever part with enough specifics about how their techniques work for us to ever make something like that."

"An old man in the family is a treasure," Hashimi said with a pleased sigh.

"It sounded like a good idea at first, but we could have spent years chasing it." Francis gave an ugly grimace and hung his head.

"I'm really not that old," he complained.

"So wise…" Jin whispered while nodding.

"Are any of us truly old?"

"Age is just a number," Hashimi agreed.

"Youth is just a feeling," she finished and shot Francis a thumbs-up.

"I hate both of you," Francis said, "equally."

"No need to get grumpy gramps," Hashimi said with a giggle. Francis flippantly flipped her off, causing the girl to descend into even more laughter and also show Jin the middle finger. Jin simply shook his head and started noting down the various types of enchantments he wanted in the game. Enchanting would be one of the things that could be learned just like magic in the game; he just wanted to remove the pesky soul gems mechanic, it was too dangerous a thing to hint at, trapping souls and using them as fuel.

-/- Xiao Yung had arrived at the border in a large wooden ship which had flown through the air at a rapid pace. Ever since then, his days had simply consisted of going to the front with the normal Imperial soldiers and fighting the zombies because he was too weak to contribute to the battles between cultivators and demons… For now.

"Honestly, in terms of difficulty, it's a bit refreshing," Xiao Yung muttered as he extended his staff to help an armoured soldier who'd been knocked down by a duo of zombies who had started desperately clawing at his helmet.

"Dragonslayer Ornstein was much more difficult," he determined with a painful grimace as he spun, his staff crushing the heads of about fifteen adversaries. His allies ducked underneath the strike, already having gotten used to his fighting style. He shuddered. All Mad Monks Sect disciples had been forced to pick one of the Illusion Rooms the sect had gathered and play through them to train for the front lines, where they were going to earn sect contribution points.

Despite the fact that his Illusion Room had been titled quite simply, Dragonslayer Ornstein, Xiao had known that he'd drawn the short end of the stick in comparison to his fellow disciples fighting the comparably tougher sounding Soul Crushing Wave of Jiangshi, or the Heaven Defying Sword Gods of the 12th Crucible. He'd known that the scenario would not be what he expected, or wanted, when he'd read the signature of the monster who'd created the test, which he'd passed to join the sect.

Anything the depraved mind of the dead-eyed monster who'd created the test came up with couldn't be good. So, he'd been relatively unsurprised that as his fellow disciples started confidently defeating the enemies in the other Illusion Rooms, he was still stuck in the same cycle of being gutted like a fish by the lion-headed freak in metal armour and the bladed staff.

It had almost reached the point where the inner disciple overseeing the process had started getting worried for Xiao, suggesting that it was perhaps unwise to go to the border. Then the bald man had tried the Illusion Room himself and came out sweating profusely and acknowledging that the level of challenge was a bit skewed. Xiao twirled on the battlefield, zombies falling around him with crushed heads and limbs.

But if nothing else, that sallow-faced bastard had challenged Xiao just enough for him to grow, no matter how much that likely hadn't been the intended effect. He'd taken the torture sent out by the entrance Illusion Room and the combat one and used them both to steel himself for the challenges ahead.

A crash suddenly resounded through the battlefield, followed immediately by a shockwave that Xiao barely withstood but that threw everyone around him, zombies, mortal soldiers, and outer disciples of various sects, to the ground. He looked up at a place he'd been trying to avoid looking at. A place where cultivators and Demons duked it out, throwing cataclysms at each other as if they were simple pebbles.

Every now and again, an attack would come through and just wipe out of existence a large swath of the lower battlefield. It was a reminder that he'd just started his journey of strength and that he still had far to go. This time, however, he was glad he'd looked. He caught it just in time. The beige-robed female cultivator cooly sheathed her sword far above in the sky. The head of the freakishly large black snake-like demon she'd been fighting tumbled down to the Earth, followed by the body.

The head spun, the body wound in itself before they both crashed down on the side of a hill jutting out of the body-covered, barren landscape that was the border region. A cheer suddenly started resounding throughout the mortal army, who were pushing themselves to their feet. Xiao didn't truly know the significance of what had occurred, but his roar joined the cacophony. A demon had been slain, and a cultivator had emerged victorious; that was all he had to know.

The battle restarted with the morale of the human army boosted, a brief glance upwards showed the cultivator who had killed the large demon suddenly being engaged by a dozen or so shadowy and deformed figures, an Imperial general quickly flying to her aid. Xiao dodged a swipe that came a bit too close to his face for comfort and refocused himself. He couldn't change what happened above. If the Heavens truly willed it, he could be wiped out of existence by an errant attack of a nascent soul cultivator any second.

It was time to focus on the things he could change, an easily understandable number that would determine the amount of sect contribution points he'd receive. That number was currently 421 zombies.