Chapter 51 There Should Be a Hidden Ending

Part of Youxuan Games' source code was encrypted by the system, making it impossible to see anything through normal means, even with aggressive unpacking.

At most, one could only view the portions crafted by the employees, such as maps and skill special effects.

As for the complete picture, thanks to the system's optimization, no one—not even Gu Meng—knew exactly how many things were hidden within the game.

If it weren't for Brother System carrying him through countless trials and tribulations, the game might easily have failed its censorship review.

Consequently, all gameplay mechanics had to be discovered independently by content creators and players.

Over in Nandi City, Gou Tong, who had previously succeeded in uncovering the hidden gameplay in *Pure-Hearted Warrior Simulator*, was still racking his brains to find the solution to this true ending.

Meanwhile, another content creator renowned for finding gaming Easter eggs, known as "Teacher Chunfen," had already seen through it all.

His understanding of games far surpassed ordinary people's. If a game truly buried a wealth of content, left clues, and embodied the painstaking efforts of its designers, there were very few mechanics he could not unearth.

If reality were like *Ready Player One*, where a dying designer announced that massive wealth and game ownership would be bestowed upon the first person to solve three riddles and find the hidden Easter eggs, Chunfen was confident he could be that chosen one.

Although Teacher Chunfen didn't get his hands on the game as early as Master Gou, nor did he start much earlier than ordinary players—having just finished his third playthrough—he had already formed some ideas.

It must be pointed out that within this game, the system had provided corresponding solutions whenever situations arose in almost all side quests that were detrimental to the protagonist or where people could not be saved.

As a result, the longer one played and the deeper veteran players dug into the plot, the easier it was for them to walk into dead ends from which they could not escape.

Master Gou was deeply mired in this. Having received the game much earlier than other content creators and having been entrusted by Youxuan to produce a comprehensive walkthrough, he played with extreme meticulousness and was profoundly moved by the narrative.

The deeper he dug—attempting to utilize all sorts of items and martial arts across various side quests just like before—the further he was from achieving a fulfilling resolution.

He believed that even if he chose the city-defense route, given how heavily rendered and emphasized the plot was, there had to be a solution. He thought he could drag along a pig-teammate like the Song Dynasty to protect the common people and forge a glorious ending of peace throughout the realm.

Teacher Chunfen, however, had figured it out.

Saving the people of the Song Dynasty could not be done that way. Allowing the trash-like, worm-like, dog-shit Zhao family in the game to sit back and enjoy peace would also constitute a bad ending.

He was someone who valued logic and excelled at summarizing experiences.

He had already noticed that while the games created by President Gu were wildly imaginative in their presentation, their mechanics largely followed a set of consistent, rigorous rules.

For instance, as discerning players had already realized, being a wuxia fan-game, it intentionally supported players in altering the tragedies of the original work.

Fulfilling the childhood dream of upholding chivalry, eradicating injustices, and settling grudges with a swing of the sword.

Even some deeply gratifying actions yielded high rewards.

Take those defying-the-heavens plots in wuxia novels, such as Xue Bing being violated by the Embroidered Bandit—as long as the player went there, there would be a harvest.

The Xiao Li Flying Dagger storyline could either be exposed right from the start or played all the way through, intercepting the conspiracy at every critical juncture.

By fulfilling prerequisites and gathering evidence, the entire storyline read like a triumphant web novel.

The rewards were also extremely generous.

At the same time, President Gu had woven together so many plotlines that while each route slightly influenced the overall landscape of the wuxia world, every single storyline remained entirely logical when viewed as a standalone narrative.

As everyone knows, reality does not require logic, but stories do. Being able to weave so much content into a single massive map, grant players such immense freedom, and keep it all self-consistent was a skill in its own right.

President Gu had truly put his heart into it.

To this day, Chunfen had not found a single tragedy that was unalterable; every single one had a solution throughout the journey, and the logic held firm from start to finish.

The writing in this game was simply phenomenal, blending the writing styles of two masters with various advantages designed for contemporary players to easily comprehend. It could easily become a massive hit even as a standalone novel.

He had heard that most of it was completed by President Gu alone within half a year, while his main job was actually creating that set of action mocap modules and securing numerous patents. He was practically a superman.

However, the rule that every storyline had a solution did not apply to the ending.

Some bad endings were predetermined by initial causes; for instance, the protagonist's lonely lifetime was a choice of his own making. From the perspective of the protagonist on that route, perhaps it wasn't even a bad ending.

Similarly, entering a death seclusion in pursuit of immortality left one's life or death unknown. Some claimed the protagonist ascended to heaven in broad daylight, but in reality, the probability of suffering a qi deviation was high. An ending like that couldn't possibly be given a reverse solution, right?

The true daylight ascension ending should be the one where the protagonist time-traveled back to the modern era. The writing offered subtle differences as hints, but without providing an actual concrete result, it remained open to interpretation. Most players would probably lean toward treating this as a bad ending.

The city-defense route, however, was different. As a true ending that carried a somewhat mandated feel, an immense amount of space was devoted to it.

Playing it too much would give players the expectation of whether a solution existed here as well. Yet, based on the nature of other routes where stepping into the ending rarely brought about change, choosing this path and being doomed to die with the city aligned far better with the game's design philosophy.

Of course, this was merely Chunfen's speculation, but he felt he was likely correct. President Gu's design was at times wildly imaginative and at other times methodical as if thoroughly prepared, yet the cause and effect could still be traced.

Even the bug left behind out of necessity last time, upon retrospective analysis, followed a very clear train of thought.

Advertised as the spiritual successor to *Phoebe Master*, it featured the diary of the previous game's protagonist, while simultaneously presenting a female lead whose persona was entirely devoid of pure love. This led Chunfen to guess that this game was actually *Phoebe Master 2*, where that world of pure love was completely inverted.

Following this train of thought, he had figured out earlier than Gou Tong that the diary allowed the protagonist to awaken and reverse the setting disguised as a bug.

Well, the bug last time actually occurred because the system received erroneous commands. After the character profiles of the male and female leads had already been written by Meng Juju, the system received the demand from the flying old-timer Gu Ritian's planning proposal to "use 'Phoebe Master' as a selling point" to hoodwink players.

This left Brother System unable to comprehend whether it should kill him or kill his mother, ultimately resulting in a bug.

Meanwhile, Teacher Chunfen had already reached a certain resonance with the system.
He believed President Gu was an absolute genius. In a sense, this couldn't simply be described as excessive brain-buffing (*dihua*).

Chunfen had genuinely deduced the predicament the system was facing and understood the system's awesomeness, which was why he felt Gu Meng truly possessed an intelligence beyond mortal reach.

Returning to the game: assuming that stepping into the ending made it impossible to alter the grand trend of history, the game had nevertheless heavily rendered the tragic scenes of city-wide slaughter beforehand.

If the protagonist truly chose not to choose this route, no matter which other route was taken—seclusion, time-travel, founding a sect like Zhang Sanfeng...

Even if the game didn't actively bring it up, players would naturally recall those vacant, numb gazes of the refugees.

Was this really okay?

Moral interrogation shouldn't be something forcibly blurted out by the game developers—asking, "You've crossed the line, was this really worth it?"

This work handled it remarkably well. It simply laid the facts out, ensuring they genuinely existed within the game.

What's more, this segment of Song Dynasty history clearly still belonged to a realistic adaptation.

Having played through several cycles, the majority of Chinese players would naturally arrive at a certain question.

That is, should we try to save this world?

We players specialize in this; we're quite familiar with being saviors!