Chương 56: Skyrim and breaking my finger

Jin chewed on the tip of a fountain pen as he stared at the roll of parchment unfurled in front of him. One would assume that a project as large as remaking Skyrim would be daunting for a leader of a team of three, but this was actually the first project that wasn't on a deadline, so he experienced it as rather relaxing instead. The girl back at that outpost on the way to the Mad Monks Sect had been working on her Wyrm scenario for ten years. For Dragonslayer Ornstein, he'd had two weeks.

Outlast had been half a year, The Last of Us barely a few months. The reason he'd been so fast had been because with the mental techniques of the sect, he could often create something as long as he could think of it. Work started happening at the speed of thought, and considering that a mind cultivator's speed of thought was even more accelerated than that of a normal human, that really meant something.

Considering the fact that cultivators inherently had more stamina than baseline humans, the workflow became a joke in comparison to the effort that Jin had had to undergo in his last life to do basically anything. The issue that cultivators here encountered was the fact that they didn't have a proper sense of time due to the fact that their lives were extended. Thus, they took longer to complete more basic tasks.

Additionally, the creative labour of coming up with what to do turned into a bigger issue than actually making the thing. The demands for realism were the highest they could be since the cultivators using the Rooms to practice combat needed to rely on the experience in matters of literal life and death. That sort of realism, well, it took work. But to Jin, who already knew what to do, where, how, and when, realism was the only thing he really needed to work on; the skeleton was already there.

Also, he'd been trained in his work ethic in the fast paced world of modern Earth where life-spans were shorts and the patience of the free market was shorter. It took him less time to make the connections he needed to create something because he'd just been trying to make those connections quicker for so long. That very specific training had then met the upgraded hardware of a cultivator body and created a beautiful synergy that could increase shareholder value at a mouth-watering speed.

In other words, he could steal the creativity of modernity, and use the hardware of a cultivator body better due to his more sophisticated mental software. In addition, while high level cultivators were certainly educated, their education was skewed. General knowledge as Jin had received on Earth became king once it grew to create a web large enough to create new ideas every time it came into contact with new information.

So, to him, honestly, porting Skyrim, a scenario that he was planning on taking at least 69 days to finish, wasn't as big of an issue as it might have been for someone else, especially because he could take his time for once. All bigger projects depended on the ability to break the big into the small, so Jin had started with a simple enough idea to crash test his developing team on. Skyrim had nine large cities, but the game started in Helgen, a military outpost town.

Making the initial sequence, the road to Helgen, the execution and Aldiun's attack, which resulted in a flight scene to the tower, would be the first step. Taking this as its own thing, independent of the rest of the game, meant that the three co-workers could learn to synergise and develop the design principles which would serve as guiding lights for the rest of the project in a lower-demand environment.

Hashimi would do the surroundings, counting the grains of sand and dirt on the floor and redesign the buildings to be foreign but not too foreign. Jin would take charge of the characters, friendly and otherwise, and Francis would clean up in between those two large parts of the scenario. A very basic division of tasks, with everything else being a team effort.

A few days ago, Jin had given Hashimi the general outline of Helgen and had also given Francis the basics of the logic that would drive the narrative of the story. Hashimi would develop the surroundings while Francis would start working on the logic system, or in other words, the game engine, which determined particle interactions in response to mental inputs.

Jin meanwhile had started drawing out the larger narrative, sketching out the pantheon of Daedra and Aedra that he remembered and thinking of ways to include them into the starting sequence. Elder Scrolls did a fairly decent job of introducing the core narrative of the game with the starting scenes. There was the Empire, the Stormcloaks, and then there was the big fuck you dragon set on ending the world.

Unfortunately, while Elder Scrolls had been able to play off the nostalgia and the fact that players had already played the previous games and thus knew some of the lore and systems in place, Jin's test subjects- valuable Experiencers would be going in blind. It wasn't enough to simply show the Stormcloaks and Aldiun, Jin also needed to include at least minor hints at the magic system and the pantheon of celestial beings which would be impacting the narrative.

Alduin's sequence could be extended to give a somewhat straightforward introduction to the Thu'um, but the magic and the pantheons would need more work. Unauthorized tale usage: if you spot this story on Amazon, report the violation. One simple solution was to make Lokir, the horse-thief captured and executed as a rebel, a worshiper of Nocturnal. Jin could already imagine the dialogue; it didn't need to provide more than a hint, the hint was enough.

Before Lokir tried to escape he could swear, something along the lines of, 'By Nocturnal, I refuse to be executed for a crime I didn't even commit!' At which point, a Stormcloak prisoner could reply, 'Imperials, don't desecrate my body more than it needs to be by executing me next to someone who worships one of the daedric princes!'

Then Lokir would run, leaving it open if his slip of admitting that he worshipped Nocturnal was something that would have drawn harsher consequences than the belittlement of the other prisoners. And… Instead of being shot down by arrows, Lokir could be blasted to death by an Imperial mage using Sparks on him. This would generate excitement to later find the spellbook of Sparks under the tower, while also visually introducing the magic system to the Experiencer without lengthy exposition.

Jin nodded to himself happily and started noting down these small changes which he hoped would slowly cascade into a narrative more fit for a first time Experiencer of the world he was copying this time. The next few hours were spent going through every interaction, every line of dialogue and every sequence to clarify and guide the Experiencer towards a better understanding of the scenario and the world they now inhabited.

The fact that Ulfric and Tullius as the leaders of both their respective factions were already present meant that their spoken lines could be somewhat extended just to showcase the divide between Stormcloaks and the Empire even better. A small sequence where Ulfric used the shout as well, showing that it wasn't a dragon-exclusive power, was added. The man could be seen using it at some point during the fleeing to the tower scene, perhaps fighting Imperials or the dragon with his shouts.

Perhaps the Imperial mage who had killed Lokir could be shown throwing a few extra spells at Alduin? Maybe summoning an Atronarch or two, casting a higher-tier destruction spell than sparks? Alduin, the only other entity present, had to be given more shouts so it became very obvious that his words were invoking the magical effects. After several more of these changes, sweat slowly starting to build on Jin's brow, he finally put down his pen and rolled up the pieces of parchment he'd filled up.

Just redesigning the Helgen experience from a dialogue and action perspective had taken several hours. He hadn't done any of the character modelling yet. He sighed and decided that he might as well start. Thankfully he didn't have to design the Experiencer since every one of them would simply bring with them their own body, but there were several people present that needed a lot of effort put in them.

Aldiun, obviously, would serve as a base for other dragons, but also potentially the most important enemy to design properly. He needed to be intimidating enough to invoke a sense of fear and urgency in the Experiencer. Additionally, Ulfric and General Tullius would need a certain amount of care put into their appearance considering their importance. Jin dragged a hand down his face, pulled up the still mostly empty Illusion Room in which he'd started storing sequences and got to work.

Alduin would be first, he'd need the most feedback to get him to an acceptable level. Ulfric and Tullius were at least human, and thus not that hard to nail down. -/- Despite the Elder Scrolls project being relatively simple in comparison to Jin's previous sufferings due to a lack of deadline, when he had finished his seventh hour of working on it, Jin was happy to have something else to justifiably do.

The technique scroll on templating thrown at him by Elder Flower had been deemed a priority, and under threat of experiencing Thousand Years of Death from the Elder, Jin had been strongly incentivised to learn it by the time the war ended and she was back. He thus happily put aside the Illusion Room in which he was storing his progress, encrypted backups also being saved in his brain, and started quickly rereading the scroll to catch himself up to where he'd stopped yesterday.

The templating technique started quite simply. All cultivators learned how to manipulate their surroundings with qi; Jin himself had drenched himself with water he'd tried to carry numerous times because he'd been too lazy to get out of bed. So, what was the difference between manipulating the external world and manipulating the internal world that was the body? In many ways, not that much. In some more? A lot. The thing was that qi was generally used as a reinforcement for the actions committed by the body.

The first exercise of templating flipped that interaction on its head. The body became the thing that followed the action of the qi. Jin held up his forefinger, one of the suggested starting points, and first withdrew the qi passively and automatically strengthened his body from the small appendage. Then he brought it back with a heavy added dose of intentionality. His qi filled the finger and he was completely aware of the way it did so.

Then he curled the qi along the line that the finger could follow, taking the biology along with the journey of the spiritual energy. Jin's finger curled, and the cultivator let go of the technique with a sigh. The issue was that if the biological had to follow the spiritual, it also tried to do so when the spiritual did something impossible for the biological. For example, if Jin had tried curling the qi backwards, instead of forwards in his finger, he would have gotten one broken finger in return.

Moving your body with qi rather than the actual bioelectrical brain signals designed to do exactly that was an incredibly hard task. Thankfully, one's understanding of one's body was about as instinctual as it could get, so the logic of reality determining the feasibility of actions didn't as much require studying thousands of manuals on physics, but rather simply being very, very in tune with the body. Something that could be achieved by meditation, stretching and exercise.

Jin held a different finger this time, the pinky, and curled it again. Then he tried wagging it and hissed in pain as the qi went too far to the left, the finger following. He cut the connection and looked dissatisfied at his slowly bruising pinky. Slow and steady.

Considering how, in his past life, Jin had mostly been responsible for providing the uh and ah when a character on screen used a cool technique, this had left him somewhat unprepared for the dull, time-consuming, and painful reality of actually mastering a combat technique from scratch. To learn even the first step of templating, body control, would require weeks if not months. What Jin had just done with his finger, finding out the limits of its mobility, would have to be done with every single part of his body.

He wasn't really looking forward to it.