TL: Hua

Chapter 62

The game plotline was actually very simple.

Players become junior disciples of the Tianyuan Sect and grow into powerful figures through various forms of cultivation.

However, the beta test opened four years ago did not develop to the final plot, and the only three chapters of plot available were lackluster. If not for the brilliant setting of the villain, probably no one would have patronized such a boring game.

Of course, this excludes Pei Yun, an investor who is foolish and has too much money.

Despite being the villain, one could see from the refinement of the modeling that the creative team had poured a massive amount of effort into him. He was also the only fully fleshed-out boss in the completed three chapters.

The villain, Ji Xuan. His parents died at the hands of demons when he was young. During his wanderings, he was taken in by the Old Demon Venerable due to his extraordinary talent. On the surface, he was a personal disciple, but in reality, he was a “medicine human” serving as a vessel for reincarnation.

The Old Demon Venerable had adopted many medicine humans over the years, but they died one after another; in the end, Ji Xuan was the only survivor. Consequently, he naturally became the Old Demon Venerable’s sole heir, granted access to all heavenly treasures, and personally taught secret techniques—all so that one day, the old man could smoothly seize this young body for himself.

But a man like Ji Xuan could never willingly let himself be controlled or wait for death.

Taking advantage of the Old Demon Venerable’s seclusion, he secretly cultivated his own forces. Finally, on the day before the old man emerged from seclusion, Ji Xuan beheaded him with his own hands and became the new demon lord of the demon realm.

In the beta version, there was only one plotline associated with him, namely the “Mirror of Rewind” quest in Chapter 3.

Ji Xuan, who successfully usurped power, held a stable position in the demon realm for more than ten years, during which he eliminated many city lords with malicious intentions and thus gained widespread fame. One day, however, he discovered that the destruction of his family years ago was no accident but the work of several disciples from the Tianyuan Sect. Thus, he led his armies to slaughter their way into the sect, vowing to repay the blood debt.

The Tianyuan Sect was powerless to resist and had to seek another way out.

At the final moment, the sect elders would give the player a divine mirror left by the founding ancestor. The player had to choose a point in time to return to the past and use any means necessary to save the sect.

Consequently, some players chose to return to Ji Xuan’s youth, becoming fellow medicine humans adopted alongside him.

However, they almost invariably died from qi deviation during their cultivation.

Others chose to return to the time he had just become the demon lord, becoming a subordinate by his side and serving him meticulously to gain his trust, only to attempt an assassination once that trust peaked.

Unfortunately, none of the assassinations succeeded. The final outcome was either being held at sword point by Ji Xuan or having one’s vital points crushed by his foot as he coldly interrogated them for the mastermind.

Those with even worse luck might be exposed at the very start and thrown into the water dungeon to endure endless torture.

The game creators had endowed this character with an extremely high degree of freedom and intelligence; all developments were free from fixed script control.

Because of this, the first three chapters of the plot always ended abruptly in various player failures.

Reading to this point, Pei Yingye actually had some doubts. Perhaps the makeshift team behind the production hadn’t even thought out the subsequent plot; they might have swindled millions from his father and released this half-finished product to fleece consumers.

Of course, it couldn’t be ruled out that they intended to decide the direction of future development based on the feedback from the beta version.

In short, if not for Ji Xuan’s breathtaking character model and a group of masochistic face-con players with too much time on their hands, the game would never have had even a shred of popularity.

In fact, on the third day of testing, some people were so impatient that they forced the mission to fail early just so they could skip to the final segment and joyfully accept Ji Xuan’s punishment.

One could say it was very perverted.

“The moral degeneration of the world is getting worse day by day. People aren’t what they used to be…”

Can’t you people have some sense of boundaries regarding someone else’s partner?

While grumbling internally, Pei Yingye couldn’t help but continue scrolling down.

Four years ago, roughly within the month after he had woken up, perhaps because the freedom granted by the team was too high, the Ji Xuan in the rewind quest acted with increasing lack of restraint. The methods he used to eliminate players gradually became extreme. Players participating in the test were hospitalized one after another for reasons like mental power damage, and some even fell into brief comas.

Unable to explain or fix Ji Xuan’s abnormal behavior, the game team had no choice but to shut down the servers urgently to prevent the situation from escalating.

“Nine Days and Nights Across the Sea” wasn’t exactly an irreplaceable, finely crafted game. It barely ranked among the myriads of entertainment options on the StarNet, let alone after such an incident. Not long after the shutdown, it quickly vanished from public view, replaced by other novelties that popped up.

It must have been difficult for his dad to obtain such detailed information, considering only twenty or thirty people participated in the test back then.

The latter half of the materials recorded the interaction data between players and Ji Xuan during the test, as well as…

A detailed sketch of Ji Xuan treading a player underfoot.

Attached next to it were several thousand words of insights, detailing an analysis of how to naturally and without affectation trigger the ending of being personally disciplined by Ji Xuan.

Pei Yingye expressionlessly closed the file, lamenting that the world truly contained all sorts of people. To his surprise, he had actually accepted all his long-held conjectures about Ji Xuan with such ease. Though many unknowns remained, like how Ji Xuan got here, his true relationship with the Ji family, or the possibility that the villain in the game was played by a real person found by the creators, none of that really mattered.

But actually, none of those matters.

What matters is that Ji Xuan is Ji Xuan. He was the first person to discover the intricate connection between Ji Xuan and this game; they had met four years ago.

And…

Ji Xuan tacitly approved of his approach and tacitly approved of his increasingly audacious behavior.

Whether in the past or present, he was always the most special one.

Because of this stack of materials, Pei Yingye stayed awake nearly all night. The chaotic words and images refused to leave his mind until the horizon turned pale. He only managed to close his eyes briefly before being jolted awake by a piercing alarm.

Comrade Pei Yun woke up slightly earlier than him. When Pei Yingye went downstairs, his father was sitting sloppily at the dining table eating breakfast. Having also admired beauty all night, his father’s mood was visibly much better than Pei Yingye’s.

Looking up and seeing Pei Yingye, he burst out laughing. Pei Yingye’s face was a mix of speechlessness and confusion, but Pei Yun offered no explanation. He patted his son’s shoulder and left the house humming a little tune.

It wasn’t the first time his father had acted out of character, so Pei Yingye didn’t bother with him. The result was that when he rushed into a boring 8 AM lecture with obvious dark circles under his eyes, he unsurprisingly caught someone’s attention.

Ji Xuan was already sitting in his usual spot by the window, the morning light outlining a soft halo around him through the glass. He was idly twirling a pen. When he looked up and saw Pei Yingye’s hair blown wild by the wind and the prominent shadows under his eyes, his brow twitched slightly.

Pei Yingye didn’t bother tidying his messy hair; he slumped directly against the back of his chair, his long legs barely managing to stretch out in the cramped space.

“Out catching thieves last night?”

Ji Xuan reached out and touched his lower eyelid. Before Pei Yingye could dodge, his skin was struck by the chill of the cool fingertip.

“No, I was reading something. Slept late.”

Ji Xuan withdrew his hand, the pen making a beautiful circle between his fingers. “What could be so engrossing that you’d forget to sleep and eat?”

His tone held a hint of playfulness and mockery.

Pei Yingye opened his mouth, the words “about you” rolling around in his throat before he forced himself to swallow them back down.

He couldn’t exactly say, I was watching you play the villain boss in a half-dead game and reading about a bunch of perverts with questionable fetishes who spent every day trying to get you to abuse them, could he?

He couldn’t help but glance at Ji Xuan’s hand propped on the desk edge twirling the pen. Distinct knuckles, slender and powerful… for a moment, it subtly overlapped with the image in the files of him gripping a player’s throat.

Pei Yingye wondered: Back then, I didn’t do something like intentionally loitering in front of him just to speedrun to the ending where I get kicked, right?

“…Just some expansion on mecha theory,” Pei Yingye said, shifting the topic awkwardly as he opened the textbook on the light screen. “I assume they don’t take attendance for this class?”

Ji Xuan looked at him for two seconds with a half-smile, didn’t press further, and turned back to the old professor on the podium, who was beginning his rambling lecture.

But Pei Yingye couldn’t concentrate at all. From the corner of his eye, he saw Ji Xuan leaning back in a relaxed posture. His profile, which looked sharp and aloof in the morning light, sometimes overlapped with and sometimes separated from the NPC described in the data who roamed the nine realms.

He recalled the description of the last event, how Ji Xuan’s methods of eliminating players escalated during that month, uncontrollably “expelling” all players… And then what happened to him after the game shut down?

“Ah Ye,” Ji Xuan spoke suddenly, interrupting his wandering thoughts.

“Hmm?” Pei Yingye’s heart jumped, thinking his thoughts had been read.

Ji Xuan didn’t look at him but merely tapped the light screen with his pen. “He’s about to look at you for the third time. If you’re distracted again, I suspect he’ll wipe out your participation score.”

Pei Yingye snapped his head up, meeting the meaningful gaze of the old professor. He grinned innocently, tapped randomly on the light screen a few times, and began to pretend he was listening intently.

When the bell finally rang, Pei Yingye stood up, wanting to go out for some fresh air.

However, before he could pull his legs out from between the desk and chair, he heard a familiar voice—

“Brother.” Shaikh suddenly appeared out of nowhere, slowly sat down in front of Ji Xuan’s seat, and turned around. “Long time no see; I’ve missed you so much.”

Pei Yingye immediately sat right back down in his seat.

The noise he made caused Shaikh to glance at him briefly, but then the latter turned his gaze back to Ji Xuan as if nothing had happened, looking all smiles.

“I heard you performed a great service at the North Star Fortress. I haven’t had the chance to congratulate you—” As Shaikh spoke, he pulled out an exquisite long gift box and opened it in front of Ji Xuan.

“This is a specialty from the planet Raslav, where I was training. The moment I saw it, I thought it suited you perfectly, brother.”

Inside the box lay a short sword.

The scabbard was matte and etched with ice-crack patterns, and the pommel was set with a deep, dark blue gem that refracted crystalline light under the sun.

Shaikh offered the short sword to Ji Xuan with both hands, his intimate and fawning attitude mixed with a few hints of hidden, indiscernible emotion.

“It’s beautiful, isn’t it? Everything from the materials to the forging technique is unique to Raslav. I felt… it suits Brother very well, so I bought it.”

Both Ji Xuan’s and Pei Yingye’s eyes fell upon the short sword.

Pei Yingye naturally recognized the material, which was a metal unique to Raslav. It had special properties and extremely low output. Shaikh wasn’t lying, but for this thing to appear here and be given to Ji Xuan in this manner, the meaning was entirely different.

What, still haven’t given up on trying to pry away my corner?

Pei Yingye clenched his jaw and leaned toward Ji Xuan’s ear, whispering, “This stuff is dead easy to get. I can get you as much as you want. Besides, what kind of killing power can a fancy-looking knife have?”

Ji Xuan glanced at him, his expression unchanged. He reached out, his fingertip touching the scabbard, sliding gently along the ice-crack patterns.

Then, he suddenly gripped the scabbard and pulled. The blade was not yet sharpened, and the steel glinted coldly in the sun. Ji Xuan toyed with it for a moment. Though he still lacked expression, Pei Yingye felt, for some reason, that he liked it.

Then, Ji Xuan’s finger paused on the blue gem at the end of the scabbard. He looked up at Shaikh and asked flatly, “How much?”

Shaikh understood his meaning instantly and said aggrievedly, “Do you really need to be so fair and square with me?”

Ji Xuan said, “I do.”

Shaikh knew that if he insisted on not telling him, Ji Xuan wouldn’t ask further, but the short sword would simply be returned untouched. After thinking for a moment, he quoted a price far lower than the actual amount: “One thousand.”

Ji Xuan expected this kind of answer and didn’t say more. He pulled out his terminal and transferred ten thousand to him.

Seeing the notification on his terminal, the smile on Shaikh’s face froze. A flash of gloom flickered through his eyes, which had been full of smiles, but it vanished instantly, making one wonder if it was just an illusion.

“Ji Xuan,” he spoke again, his voice still soft. “Must you draw the line so clearly?”

Ji Xuan didn’t say a word; he simply sheathed the short sword with a clean, sharp “click.” He placed the blade casually on the tabletop, neither putting it away immediately nor pushing it back—a cold, detached gesture that seemed to say, “If you’re not satisfied, feel free to take it back right now.”

Watching from the side, the fire in Pei Yingye’s heart suddenly died down by half, replaced by a surge of near-schadenfreude satisfaction. He let out a snort and leaned back lazily, draping his arm over the back of Ji Xuan’s chair in a posture radiating possessiveness.

“Alright, Cousin. The transaction is settled, so there’s no need to linger here. Though, if you ask me, this thing might be too blunt even for peeling fruit—”

“Just keep it in the dorm as a decoration.” He reached out and cupped Ji Xuan’s hand from below, even giving it a deliberate little toss. “Next time, I’ll get you a better one.”

He then raised his chin and looked at Shaikh provocatively, his eyes practically shouting: Why are you still dawdling? Get lost.

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