Chapter 63 I Want War to Rise Across This Land

"Burn my decaying body, the raging holy flames."

The moment PureFan entered just the opening line, the game automatically played a grand, AI-synthesized voiceover.

"What is joy in life, and what is bitterness in death? To do good and eliminate evil, for the sake of the light alone. Joy and sorrow, grief and happiness, all return to dust. Pity us mortals, who suffer troubles indeed so many! Pity us mortals, who suffer troubles indeed so many!"

As the scripture recitation finished, the pitch-black Demonic Cult dungeon space suddenly blazed with brilliant light.

It presented a colorful shade of black, and the screen began to vibrate.

Bullet comments flashed across the screen:
"What's happening? What's happening?"
"Unleash yourself!"
"Ohhhhh!"
"Do you also want to become the light?"

To everyone's surprise, the previously lifeless statue of the Bright Lord began to tremble and shake, its fingers twitching slightly as it slowly opened its eyes.

"Ah, that scared the hell out of me!"
"What the heck, is this thing alive?"
"It's haunted!"
"Is it really okay for a martial arts game to pull something like this?"
"It's just a dungeon, no big deal. Some dungeons even feature legends of immortals."

Amidst the rolling barrage of comments, light and shadow shifted unpredictably across the surface of the statue, alternating between black and white a total of seven times.

It was hard to tell whether the entire statue exuded divinity or demonic nature at this point, appearing half-god and half-devil.

Immediately afterward, the statue's massive hand gripped the giant axe at its side, pointing the blade directly at the protagonist.

Players often encountered various bizarre and mystical entities within dungeons, and the protagonist's strength was not subject to level caps; PureFan's character had long since mastered supreme divine arts.

Armed with these peerless martial arts, he would kill gods if they blocked his path, and slaughter Buddhas if they stood in his way!

A fierce battle was about to erupt at any second.

"Defeat him, and we shall be the Bright Lord of this era."

...

This clash truly belonged to the realm of immortals fighting among themselves.

The supreme martial art created for PureFan's character simply borrowed the name "Great-Shift of the Universe," but to say it had anything to do with the original version would be a stretch—they were as related as chalk and cheese.

With a casual display of genuine Qi materialization, he conjured up extremely flamboyant visual effects and destructive explosions.

On the opposing side, the Bright Lord statue was clearly no human. With just a few simple axe swings, it cleanly and decisively cleaved through whatever flashy special effect was thrown its way, giving off a strong sense of a single axe breaking through ten thousand techniques.

PureFan very decisively turned on full auto-pilot.

This level of duel was far beyond the reaction speed of a normal human. Even on normal difficulty, many enemy moves required automatic micro-adjustments, and attempting to control it manually would only yield a negative effect.

In the heat of the fierce battle, Teacher PureFan even dropped a casual remark:

"This kind of flashy combat has way too many details shifting at high speeds. Even though I'm using top-tier equipment, if the game's optimization wasn't up to par, a bit of stuttering would be completely normal. But there's none at all. Gu Meng must be making a large-scale action game like this for the first time, and he even used cutting-edge action motion capture modules. To be able to pull off this level of quality is seriously impressive."

"Truth be told, it's damn impressive."
"Watching these moves feels just like watching a martial arts movie."
"It's already in the Xianxia art style now, it's a Xianxia movie."
"Still, compared to the choreography, the special effects are a bit tacky. The protagonist's particle effects are almost like light pollution; I actually prefer the Bright Lord's style of using direct moves instead."
"It's already amazing that they didn't use cheap, traditional domestic five-cent special effects. Given their manpower and time constraints, we shouldn't ask for more."

Amidst the discussion, during the very first solo attempt, the protagonist was neatly killed.

No matter; players had plenty of lives.

PureFan opened the celestial scroll to load his save, and quite simply tried again.

After dying once against the same opponent, the protagonist would actually grow stronger.

It was worth mentioning that the current stats on PureFan's build were exceptionally high. Configured with supreme divine arts as well, it was vastly superior to that Exorcism Divine Sword.

PureFan's version had fused all the easily obtainable divine arts together. Even though they were all top-tier colored divine arts, there were still tiers among such legendary abilities.

Under normal circumstances in the main world, it didn't make much difference, but if they had substituted Bai Cai's previous divine art here, even if trained to max level, it certainly wouldn't have lasted more than a few rounds under the lingering shadow of the Bright Lord.

In various dungeons, the Bright Lord's remnant shadow was virtually the strongest max-level monster in existence.

The video cut to a fast-forward here, showing the protagonist dying another seven or eight times, all while remaining in auto-mode.

PureFan provided a voiceover explanation: "My save file has integrated most of the golden-tier divine arts, but due to time constraints, I probably missed a few. Perhaps the absolute most perfect configuration could clear this Bright Lord on the first try. We're just playing on normal difficulty and dying a few times to raise the AI's adaptation to make a point. Anyway, let's first figure out the solution."

On the final attempt, this even stronger protagonist gathered his Qi into weapons via the Great-Shift of the Universe, condensing it into a giant axe to counter-attack with a head-on collision.

In the flash of lightning and flint, he dodged past the Bright Lord's blade and lopped off its head.

A smile appeared on the face of the severed head; the radiance upon the Bright Lord froze, no longer transforming into darkness, and the protagonist seated himself upon the lotus throne.

The scene shifted, returning once more to the Demonic Cult. In a miraculous turn of events, the protagonist now permanently retained his martial arts visual effects.

Such effects could normally only be exhibited when a master exerted their full internal energy.

Moreover, according to the game's lore, only martial arts masters had a subtle chance of catching a glimpse of each other's full-power combat auras; ordinary people could not see them under normal circumstances.

Yet returning here this time, the player could manually toggle the effects off. If left on, every passing NPC would look at the protagonist as if they had seen a ghost, clearly indicating that they could perceive those glowing effects.

Members of the Demonic Cult, however, immediately dropped to their knees and kowtowed.

The protagonist had also acquired minor supernatural traits, such as remaining unburned by fire, refusing to drown in water, and effortlessly hovering in mid-air for brief moments.

In truth, these abilities could also be unlocked by practicing corresponding martial arts, so they were not overly bizarre.

Here, the protagonist's abilities had become permanent fixtures, requiring no consumption of genuine Qi, yet his overall combat prowess had still not broken through the absolute limit.

PureFan tested it again: the protagonist's stamina and Qi regeneration had improved further, though not reaching a qualitative leap, and getting swarmed would still result in death.

He still had to follow the Demonic Cult route and become the Cult Leader.

Gathering the strength of the masses to overthrow the imperial court.

This time, the cult members were once again urged: To do good and eliminate evil, for the sake of the light alone.

Originally, the Demonic Cult advocated brutal annihilation, harbored no aversion to taking lives, and placed its faith entirely within the spiritual realm.

Even if the protagonist used the majesty of the Cult Leader to keep them in check, some would still disobey and commit various bizarre actions.

They could not be easily reined in.

If the Demonic Cult Leader route continued to develop, either the protagonist would degenerate into a supreme arch-villain—which was a choice left entirely to the player, as some cult branch factions in the extreme late game would even perform blood sacrifices on entire villages during demonic ritual ceremonies—

Or the protagonist would reach his breaking point, break away from the Demonic Cult, and enter the bad-ending route where even as a villain, he could only end up as a half-baked minor antagonist.

Now, however, things were different. Cult member after cult member truly abandoned evil to embrace goodness, laying down their butcher knives to instantly become Buddhas on the spot.

The protagonist could either directly order the most heinous sinners among them to execute themselves while the rest joined the rebellion, or allow everyone to redeem their crimes through meritorious service.

As mentioned earlier, the core issue with the true ending in the game was that a single person in the main world could not suppress the entire realm; merely killing an emperor could not solve the problem.

The protagonist could only become a sect master or cult leader and could not genuinely recruit a massive army on his own—this wasn't that kind of game.

If one wanted numerous disciples in a martial arts world on that scale, there were only two options: one was the Righteous Alliance uniting all major sects (though the righteous faction was a dish of loose sand and refused to rebel), and the other was the Demonic Cult.

Now, with a Demonic Cult that could be completely controlled, rebellion was finally feasible. The player simply needed to lead the cult to attack several major cities, including the capital—though there weren't all that many cities in the game.

Afterwards, players could choose to occupy them. This gameplay mechanic also existed in the bad-ending route of "Demonic Corruption over the Land," functioning similarly to the city-defense routes as a special alternative playstyle.

It was designed relatively simply, placing greater emphasis on the narrative.

On the arch-villain route, the protagonist slaughtering all his friends and family was quite impactful, representing a true dark fantasy style.

The city-defense route was about saving the country and its people, whereas the demonic corruption route was about plunging the nation into ruin and bringing disaster to the populace.

After finishing that ending, the map was covered in patches of black flames, and the narration would declare that the mortal realm had descended into hell.

It was the darkest hour of the Jianghu under demonic corruption, accompanied by illustrations of the protagonist slaughtering cities and executing prisoners of war.

Although Gu Meng never directly asked the players whether the price was worth it, any normal person naturally knew that it was a bad ending.

With this new branch, however, the map was instead painted in vibrant crimson and blazing flames.

The narration shifted to a more neutral tone, declaring that weapons of war had arisen across the land.