Chapter 13: How its going

Jin was sitting inside the room he'd been given, designing the scenario. He had outlined some of the important characters and decided on the ways that different technologies would be represented in a more cultivation-friendly manner.

It had been a week since he'd pitched the original idea to Elder Flower and had gotten the green light. Ever since then, he'd been working uninterruptedly.

The lessons that he'd used to have with Elder Flower back at the Illusion Room Sect had been put on hold. It seemed like she did not want to entertain the possibility of being spied on as she taught him, which left her no choice but to interrupt the practice entirely. They were on another sect's mountain and there was no way to truly know what kind of spells were woven into the place. Well, there was a way, but Elder Flower simply wasn't powerful enough, and if she had been she wouldn't have been sent on such an insignificant mission but would have rather become the sect leader.

She had for the most part taken to just enjoying the hot springs that the monks had at a higher part of their mountain and occasionally chatting with Jin over dinner. The rest of the time she spent meditating in her room.

That was one thing that freed up time for Jin to work like a horse. Another was the fact that as an outsider he obviously did not have access to any sort of library. This meant that his favourite pastime was also gone. There was nothing to read since he hadn't known they would be staying for so long and he hadn't brought anything.

Socialisation was out. He was encouraged to move about as little as possible unless accompanied, and the monks here were not interested in idle chatter.

The only thing that remained was cultivating. However, whatever quick progress he had made immediately after transmigrating and becoming an inner disciple had slowed to a crawl that he understood was actually the norm. He was still in the middle of the foundation establishment phase and it looked like he would remain there for a very long time. The process of cultivating the stage involved a lot of meditation and the cycling of qi inside of one's body through distinct patterns which were individual to every cultivation technique. Through time this would refine the body to become the perfect container for qi, slowly using the ingredients that he ate, or at least the mystical parts of it, to replace those of his cells that were deemed unworthy by the heavens to channel their energy.

In one week, Jin had progressed in the middle of the foundation establishment stage by 1%. This hinted at the fact that he would need a hundred weeks to attain the late stage of foundation establishment. 100 weeks was just short of two years, but the issue was that he noticed, that as every week passed, it became more and more difficult to continue. Not to any truly ridiculous degree, but to a noticeable one.

The only other thing of note that he was doing during all of this time was working on his project.

He'd started constructing the first minutes of the scenario, which was much more complicated than he had assumed initially. The fact that he had only ever developed one Illusion Room, which had consisted of only one actual room and one Dragonslayer Ornstein, had made him underestimate the difficulty of creating a progression of environments. He had started on a long road initially, which the experiencer would have to walk down slowly to get to the menacing Mount Massive Asylum glaring down at them from its perch on the hill.

Just this walk alone had already been taking way too many resources. That's why he shortened it. Now it was just 30 seconds long or so. 30 seconds spent on a dirt road, walking forward with everything that entailed. Thankfully a mortal's senses were weak, which allowed the view of the valley the asylum was hidden inside to not be too sharply refined in terms of visuals. On the way to the asylum, the experiencer met an inmate who'd managed to escape. The man was of course quite insane, but the short conversation one could have with him could be summed up as follows.

'They're doing horrible things. Someone has to stop them. I can't stay. I have to leave, don't talk to me, don't talk to me, don't talk to me, don't talk to me.' Throughout all of this, the inmate's eyes would twitch in different directions as if he was seeing things that weren't there.

Unlike if this had occurred in real life, Jin didn't have to be afraid of the experiencer simply turning around and leaving at this ominous and deranged-sounding conversation from the clearly insane man dressed in bloody rags. The point of the scenario was to clear it and if one didn't one wouldn't receive the appropriate rewards. Namely the position of an outer disciple in the Mad Monks Sect.

The experiencer would then eventually get off the road when they saw the asylum and walk through a forest to get close to it from a stealthy angle rather than going down the main road like the original protagonist had done in their car. After all, they were here on a mission of espionage, not that of reporting. It was a very subtle difference. The night was setting in as they approached, casting the building that they were getting closer to into a pallid gloom. Jin had decided to retain the original architecture while changing the inside of it. He didn't particularly care if people found the look weird. If anything it would increase one's sense of estrangement from reality. Obviously, the main door would be locked, as it had been in the game. The experience would walk around the empty grounds trying to find a way in.

Meanwhile, from the windows, moving shadows cast against the glass would move and quickly disappear again. Splatters of liquid would sometimes gush onto the see-through surface.

The experiencer would eventually find a way up to the second floor, which they would immediately use to go inside. They would come into a room that would have perhaps looked like a lounge if it hadn't been completely trashed. Chairs had been thrown against the walls with their broken legs lying on the floor. Shelves full of trinkets had been knocked over, and the walls had been scratched at, leaving behind traces of blood.

The wall didn't collapse behind them yet, as their goal was still to investigate the matter. If they went back out they were free to do so, but going back in the second time would just be harder.

The goal in this case was not to provide a good player experience, but to challenge people even more than the original game had. There was a quest line, yes, and occasionally the experiencer would find themselves holding up notes that their body had inadvertently made to increase the immersion. But, everything else was left up to the person doing the playing.

That was how far Jin had come in terms of the actual scenario and it had taken him a whole week.

It just went to show how much more work he had to do. Although he hadn't only been working on the approach of the asylum. He'd also been working on designing the important characters whenever he felt bored of just dealing with architecture and the roads and trees.

The most important character that he had to nail down for the moment was Chris Walker. A large and grotesque man who led the experiencer on their first few chase scenes. Chris had a rather intense backstory and considering that he provided a large part of the horror in the first half of the game, Jin was putting a decent amount of effort into the design.

He had already created the insane man's outside appearance, which was that of a large hulking fat man with a mutilated face. Most prominent was the scalped forehead which Chris himself claimed gave him a sort of third eye and the missing nose and mouth which the man had done himself in a bout of extreme anxiety.

Chris's main fixation was on an exaggerated version of military protocol due to his past as a discharged military officer. This was the reason why he was so intent on patrolling the asylum and ended up attacking the experiencer and chasing them for the first half of the game.

The experiencer could find out more about the past of Chris Walker by reading some case files that the demonic cultivators had left behind about the man's past. After all, while they might not have an in-universe reason to study the mental diseases and histories of their inmates as much as Mount Massive Asylum had in the original games, they still were trying to perhaps find what sort of psychology and life story was most compatible with that of the dark god they were trying to summon.

This at least was Jin's excuse for including all of the rolls of parchment and paper which depicted the various phobias, anxieties and fixations of the madmen trapped in the asylum/demonic cultivator fortress.

Jin had already input all of the information he remembered about Chris while creating some more of it to complement the experience. He just hadn't designed the rooms in which these files could be read yet.

Done with the outside appearance of Chris, Jin was just in the process of animating the construct to showcase the appropriate movements for such a large man. Suddenly there was a light tapping at the paper door to the room he'd been given in the large temple outpost meant for visitors.

Even if apparently the Mad Monks didn't get a lot of visitors considering there hadn't been any new arrivals since he and Flower had come.

"Come inside," Jin said to whomever was there. Meanwhile, he quickly saved the progress that he had made in the privacy of his own mind and disentangled the mental threads he had been reinforcing with qi to create the large data structures.

He was becoming more and more like a computer as he walked the path of an Illusion Room cultivator.

The paper door slid open, revealing the dignified visage of Elder Zhang, the Elder responsible for the outer disciple ring on this mountain.

Jin stood up and bowed. "Greetings Elder Zhang. What can this inner disciple do for you?" he asked.

Elder Zhang replied with a nod of his own. "Greetings inner disciple Jin. Rather than being here to inquire as to the progress of your work, I have come with some rather good news," the man announced.

Jin raised an eyebrow but didn't further question. If Elder Zhang had something to tell him, he would himself have no standing to elicit an answer that wasn't forthcoming.

"After looking at your Illusion Room containing the entity known as Dragonslayer Ornstein, we have decided on how to help you further enhance the combat style of said entity. This is a way to repay in advance the purchase of the Illusion Room for use by our outer disciples," Elder Zhang said.

Jin nodded thoughtfully. While he had shown the Mad Monks his lance-wielding Ornstein, and they had liked it, he naturally had had no power to truly negotiate anything in that regard. This had been Elder Flower's job. She has been involved in negotiations, probably about this exact topic for the last week on the occasion that she wasn't bathing or getting massages. This was apparently the result. A very satisfying one all in all. Jin wanted to improve Dragonslayer Ornstein, and the training that the Mad Monks could offer would undoubtedly help with that.

In return, he would simply have to infuse a new Room with the Ornstein scenario and give it to them. In the end, the cost would only amount to one Room considering that Jin's version of the scenario could be put into more Rooms which would later, back at his sect, enter the library after he was satisfied with them.

All in all, it was a good deal and it seemed that either Elder Flower was a good negotiator, or the Mad monks didn't put that much value on teaching someone a few of their tricks. Or maybe they were just trying to further motivate him to work on his horror scenario.

Jin bowed again after he considered the deal. "Thank you for this opportunity, Elder Zhang," he said.

The Elder stroked a frail liver-spotted old hand through his long white beard and slowly nodded with an imperceptible gaze at the younger man. "Follow me then inner disciple Jin," and turned to leave.

Jin's body stuttered for a second, unsure if to follow or not. He had just finished a 7-hour marathon of scenario design, and he hadn't expected that the offer of tutelage would be consummated immediately.

Nevertheless when opportunities came one had to grasp them. Quite frankly he needed something else to start filling his days with, or he was going to go quite insane. Outlast was not an easy game to trawl through in his memories and to bring into this world considering the genre that it so exemplified. He had not slept very well for a week now, haunted by bad dreams of insanity and death.

It was as he followed the Elder out of the outpost, that the sun assaulted his eyes as if it was a thunderbolt thrown at him by a nascent soul-level cultivator. He inadvertently raised a hand to shield his eyes.

How long had he not been outside? he asked himself. Too long for his mental health to bear the deprivation, was the answer. He sighed. He would have to remember to not get so involved in the workflow in the future. Fiddling with the mental threads and creating scenarios and characters in his mind was very fun, which was what allowed him to do it for so many hours every day, but it wasn't a replacement for vitamin D. Most likely, at least, Jin didn't quite know how his new cultivator biology affected these things.

He would have to start involving more outside activities again in the future whenever he has such a job going on, or else he just might turn into a complete shut-in. He followed Elder Zhang as these thoughts flitted through his head. Rather than taking any path that Jin had taken before, mainly the one leading down to the outer ring, they ascended slightly, walking up as the peach and viola trees grew slightly sparser. However, while he was able to make out the start of the inner ring signified by a gigantic gate of wood, not so dissimilar to the one they had back in the Illusion Room Sect, he realised that what they were walking towards was a simple clearing, rather than the inner ring. It was there that a bald-headed inner disciple was waiting for them.

Jin wasn't able to determine their identity because the Mad Monks distinguished themselves from each other with their garb in any way, but simply because he knew this particular inner disciple. It was Disciple Shen.

Elder Zhang and Jin approached the younger androgynous-looking man until they were all standing on the slightly dirt-trodden clearing. Upon arrival however, Elder Zhang simply disappeared into wisps of smoke, which dispersed into the clear sunny sky.

"Talk about a dramatic exit," Jin decisively did not mutter to himself, before turning to inner disciple Shen and bowing. "Inner disciple Jin greets inner disciple Shen. I imagine that you are to be my tutor?" he asked.

Inner disciple Shen looked at Jin with his androgynous face before eventually nodding.

"I was told that you needed guidance in the way of the staff, although I am unsure if I can give it to you considering that what you are using is decisively not a staff. Although perhaps everything is in fact a staff when one considers the simple properties of the weapon?" the man mattered to himself while tapping a finger to his chin.

A tick mark was already threatening to start developing on Jin's forehead but he took a calming breath and continued smiling. Perhaps someone else would have been insulted by the fact that their teacher was to be just another inner disciple. But what one had to consider in this case was that Jin himself was very young for an inner disciple due to his very recent attainment of the role. Inner disciples ranged in age from anything between 18 to 200. It could very well be that Shen's life experience was nine times more than that of Jin. Another important thing was the fact that while Jin was learning a mental cultivation method, Shen had likely been working on his body for more than a century now. Not only on this body but also specifically on the weapon skills associated with such a path. It would be completely irrelevant of Jin to say that the man had nothing to teach him. And even if the boy had a limited amount of things to teach, Jin was very much more likely to finish the Outlast scenario and leave the mountain than to exhaust what he had to learn. After all, he couldn't imagine that he would be here for longer than a year, and his ability to wield a lance would definitely require more than that to reach the point when he would need the personal attention of a core disciple instead.

"Inner disciple Jin is happy to learn," he thus said cheerily.

Shen nodded absentmindedly, a hand going inside of his robe to what must have been a dimensional pouch at his hip, because from inside his robe, he pulled out two things that never would have fit into it otherwise. It was a large wooden construct, which Jin immediately identified as the replica of the weapon that he had given Ornstein.

The wooden lance flew through the air and Jin caught it in his hands, idly twirling it to his side.

Inner disciple Shen meanwhile hefted a quarterstaff which was much less long than what Jin had available to him.

"What has been granted by the heavens cannot be taught and thus the only way forward is to correct the mistakes of those that know nothing," Shen said as an explanation for how their tutelage was going to go.

Having grown slightly adept at analysing the nonsense the man liked spouting, Jin understood that while Shen would not be instructing him in any particular techniques of the sect, which were understandably limited to those actually in the sect, Shen would allow Jin to spar with him and correct any mistakes that the latter made.

"Let's do this."

-/-

AN: Would appreciate a review and a rating if you've enjoyed the story :)