Chapter Sixty: I Am Going to Kill the Emperor

"A note before watching: This video explores an entirely brand-new true ending route..."
"The missing person has returned!"
"Thank goodness, it's Master Pure Fan, we're saved!"
"We thought you got locked up for soliciting prostitutes."

Just as the video was clicked open, before even reaching the main content, the impatient fans began flooding the bullet comments. During this period, all the other uploaders were recording *Legends of Wuxia*, but Pure Fan was missing, which had worried his fans sick.

Instead of explaining what he had been up to during this time as the fans expected, the video began by directly playing a piece of lore voiced by Pure Fan himself.

...

The Heavenly Book is a divine artifact of the Heavenly Dao.

Legend has it that in primeval times, legends of gods and immortals still existed in this realm, and the strength of the strong among the human race was beyond anything seen today. It is even said that supreme beings such as the Dao Ancestor and the Buddha could disrupt the boundaries of space and time with a single person's strength, and even reenact earth, water, fire, and wind to open up heaven and earth!

With humans and immortals living together, numerous inconveniences naturally arose. At some unknown point in time, a chaotic battle broke out, throwing space and time into disorder and causing permanent damage to the world. The primeval supreme beings faded away into the distance. Mortals could even step into other shattered worlds through the Scars of Heaven, bringing back knowledge that did not belong to the current age.

There were also eccentric individuals, descendants of the powerful, those bestowed with divine martial arts by the heavens, and those who achieved sudden enlightenment, who compiled the martial Dao.

To the extreme of martial arts, one shatters the firmament and shakes the universe. There were also powerful individuals who refined their physical bodies and vital energy, achieved the gathering of the three flowers and the five qi toward their origin, and accomplished the return of the ninety-nine to one, gaining enlightenment from the power of origin. Ultimately, they attained the divine Dao, formed their own worlds, and practiced the Dao of opening heaven and earth, earning the title of Martial Gods.

The world ushered in a true golden age of martial arts.

However, such powerful martial arts caused increasingly more damage to the world. Therefore, after Nüwa patched the sky, the Human Sovereign and Martial Emperor "severed the connection between heaven and earth."

From then on, heaven and humanity were forever separated.

Deities and immortals no longer existed in the mortal realm, divine martial arts were cut off, and true martial arts gradually faded into obscurity. Grotto-heavens, blessed lands, and spiritual islands overseas still retained a shred of spiritual qi, but they could no longer influence the mortal world.

The only exception was the "Heavenly Book."

...

The above serves as the background introducing the key item of *Legends of Wuxia*. These easter egg details would allow observant players to solve puzzles in the mid-game, discovering them through ancient books and ruins. They could be treated either as game lore or as misconceptions passed down by mortals.

However, from the perspective of time travel, lore enthusiasts tended to believe this was largely the true setting, which was precisely what caused this chaotic spacetime.

Players who didn't care about the plot wouldn't mind either, simply treating the Heavenly Book as a standard protagonist's golden finger. It was normal for the protagonist of a wuxia game to view their own stats; even without the Heavenly Book, a function to display stats directly to the player would be provided, otherwise the game would be unplayable.

"Is this game lore? Is this in the game? Isn't this low-wuxia?"
"Probably. Some ruins in the game have it; you might have missed it. Just look at it as a legend. Players training in divine arts can never become Martial Gods, anyway. Besides, the records of legends in various places vary, so none of them can be considered official lore."
"When asked, Youxuan's staff all say they aren't clear about this section. It must be lore written personally by the Dragon King. Since the Dragon King isn't replying, maybe there will be crossovers in future works?"
"This should be the version of the lore most widely circulated in the game that Master Pure Fan found. Nüwa patching the sky was to repair the battlefield of the Martial Gods; you can see it in the Five Poisons Sect."
"Although the world of *Legends of Wuxia* has non-wuxia elements, all these myths can generally be regarded as legends, so they're pretty useless."

The Dao of Heaven is forty-nine, with fifty being the total, leaving one escapee.

In many primordial-style web novels, the escaped "one" might be a new Primordial Purple Qi, the protagonist themselves, or an opportunity like the Chaos Pearl...

In the world of *Legends of Wuxia*, the Heavenly Book was that "one."

It was the least wuxia element of all.

If the protagonist controlled by the player was a transmigrator, entering the game and clicking "The winds and clouds of the world emerge from our generation" would trigger it. After character creation, the initial short segment used several high-end original illustrations and a storyteller's narration as a transition.

The plot recounted how the protagonist bought this scroll of the Heavenly Book at a modern antique stall before time-traveling. Original illustrations were used because this installment didn't have many modern plot segments anyway; Gu Meng was not going to deliberately build a modern urban modeling scene for just a few minutes of plot, which would waste money and burden the players' hardware.

If the ending at the end of the game involved traveling back in time, it would be a short animation, likewise without in-game engine footage.

Following a chaotic brawl generated in-game by wuxia characters, the storyteller's narration would kick in, briefly explaining the chaotic yet self-consistent faction distributions and anecdotal legends of this vast pugilistic world.

At this point, the Heavenly Book would present questions—
"Which wuxia master do you like the most?"
"Which pugilistic beauties do you like? (Multiple choices allowed)"
"What type of martial arts do you hope to specialize in?"
...

"If you traveled to a wuxia world, what kind of hero do you hope to become?"

All of these questions would grant corresponding bonuses. Whatever martial arts the player liked, their talent for those martial arts would increase. Whatever beauties they liked, their initial favorability and affinity would increase. Selecting all of them was essentially equivalent to the player becoming a succubus.

This was when the Heavenly Book first displayed its might.

Learning from the lessons of his previous work, Gu Meng completely ignored outsiders interfering in professional matters this time. Last time, due to tight schedules and the fear that his own interference would ruin a good script, he didn't meddle too much, which almost made the ending unsalvageable. This time, he still had to trust himself.

In this installment, he absolutely had to leave players the freedom to build a harem!

Racy content and harems were two different concepts. Gu Meng dropping racy content just meant removing heavy-handed eroticism, not that he wouldn't let players pursue multiple romantic interests.

The text was actually quite rich; the visual presentation was just a bit more implicit. The scale was slightly larger than certain versions of *Jin Yong Qunxia Zhuan 5* from his past life, though naturally inferior to certain versions of *Jin Yong Qunxia Zhuan X*.

In multiple playthroughs, many bonuses would carry over. If one consistently selected all the well-known beauties, it was very likely that upon landing, the transmigrator would have a bunch of past-life lovers coming looking for them.

Normally, after the Q&A ended and the player gained control, their initial landing point would be one of several beginner villages. The specific location could also be chosen by the player, though it might not be as convenient for leveling up as those beginner villages.

Every beginner village was specially designed with low-difficulty quests that rewarded low-threshold initial martial arts. If skipped entirely, the default starting location was Niu Village.

If the player chose an original canon character like Lin Pingzhi, like Bai Cai did, there would be no time-travel opening, nor would they start in a beginner village, but the protagonist would still quickly acquire the Heavenly Book through various methods.

Such as fishing, falling from the sky, digging up treasure, or even obtaining the book in a dream.

The opening animation would also differ. Choosing Lin Pingzhi would grant an extra camera shot of Asia the Invincible during the opening martial arts brawl showcasing various martial arts. Choosing the young master of the Juxian Manor would grant an extra camera shot of Chief Qiao.

It was precisely details like this that earned the praise of players for their artisan spirit, marveling at how meticulous Youxuan was.

In reality, it was just that Gu Meng felt such minor optimizations by the "System Brother" were very cheap, so he threw in a few extra.

Antiques, fishing, and obtaining books in dreams were merely prologue plots—simple applications of a few common tropes found in web novels used as transitions.