Chapter 32: Talk Shit or get Shittalked

The first problem that came up when he and Hashimi started working together on their version of The Last of Us was whether they should leave the cutscenes as they were to include Sarah's death and other such things.

In the end, Jin decided that when stealing someone's intellectual property that had worked very well in another world, there was no point in changing more stuff than one had to. They were already going to have to change all of the character designs and the architecture; if they started changing the narrative and the missions (beyond the necessary), they would really be putting themselves up against the wall and pulling the trigger. At that point, they might as well make their own thing.

With that settled, Jin started working on the character designs and Hashimi on the spatial requirements, both their paths intersecting bit by bit as they progressed through the beginning stages of the narrative. 

There was only one issue left.

The enemies.

Jin had gone to the army encampment a few more times to check up on the zombies there and had confirmed that at no point had they started to change from the very basic version that everyone knew and loved. They shuffled, they walked, they swung their hands in wide motions and tried to bite you.

Suffice it to say they were a bit less complicated than the zombies in The Last of Us who went through a variety of stages depending on how long the corpse had been infected by the aggressive fungi which had been the cause of the apocalypse and had spread across the world with the globalised flour shipments.

It was here that Jin had a choice to make. Simplifying the zombie enemies for the entirety of the experience would necessitate some light changes but nothing groundbreaking. In his opinion, however, it would detract from the whole thing and make it less… engaging.

He had another option then, the option to simply leave it as it was.

After thinking about it for a few days as they finished modelling the starter town of post-apocalypse Boston and the first few missions where nothing came up that necessitated a decision, he came to an interesting conclusion.

He needed to participate in this challenge partially because Elder Flower wanted him to, partially because he wanted to advance his career and partially because it was just a good thing to do.

However, his work was already leaning in a different direction than most other disciples were probably going to take. He couldn't imagine that anyone else would create a narrative piece. They would likely just go for an endless horde of zombies, focusing their energy primarily on the combat mechanics.

Jin was doing something completely different that would hopefully help soldiers in another way. It would make them more experienced in a variety of situations, and underscore the gravity of the situation, of course, it would also give them some fighting experience.

Considering that there was no known cure for the process of zombification, and cultivators likely wouldn't care that much if the mortal world collapsed under the disease as long as they could keep cultivating in their mountains, The Last of Us captured one of the potential futures that could arise if humanity fended off the border incursion, but let the virus rampage through its population.

It would never happen exactly like The Last of Us foretold, but the gist of a possibility was there. Enough to create fear, at least.

Anyway, the realisation that Jin had come to was the fact that he was already doing something completely different, so why would he stick to depicting the zombies exactly as they were in reality?

At the end of the day, once you were doing something different, you had to completely lean into it and succeed or fail on your own merit. You didn't compromise a vision just because someone might not like it or appreciate it as long as the internal logic behind the value was sound. If it failed, maybe the world just hadn't been ready.

Additionally, at the end of the day, making a variety of zombies would make the game more fun to play and the experience more rewarding to go through. This meant that even if he didn't win the competition, he could very well put the scenario into the library and start receiving sect points from people who went to try it out.

And that was why he decided to keep the game as it was, at least in the sense of the zombies. The only thing he removed was the story of how it was the fungi that caused the infection and simply left the whole thing unexplained.

Nobody knew yet in what way the virus functioned so it didn't matter as much how he picked its symptoms. However, spreading false information by making a fake backstory to the infection was probably not a great idea.

-/-

Jin curiously tilted his head as he walked into the clearing where back in the early days of his inner disciplehood he had met Elder Flower for combat training.

The woman was waiting for him just as she had been all those months ago and the only difference was that to his eyes she looked to be a bit fatigued.

He remorsefully hung his head as he realised that despite how much he liked to slander her in his mind about how she wasn't doing much, as an Elder she surely had responsibilities that required an exertion of her mental and physical energies. Maybe the sect leader had asked her to bring her a cup of water.

"Elder Flower," he greeted, coming to a stop in the middle of the grassy clearing to look up at the woman sitting in a lotus position on the large grey boulder under the tree with her head propped on a hand.

"Jin," she replied. "How is the project going?" she asked.

The inner disciple, seeing an opportunity to communicate his woes, crossed his arms and sighed demonstratively. "Did you know that Lung Junior paid the inner disciples I was interested in working with to not collaborate with me?"

"You do know that his name isn't Lung Junior, right?" Elder Flower asked, interrupting the direction of the conversation.

Jin blinked In surprise. "Well, yes, I just don't know his actual name. Do you?"

An awkward silence passed through the clearing for a few seconds before Elder Flower awkwardly coughed into her hand. "Anyway, yes, these are the sorts of tactics you can expect from the noble faction."

Jin held up a hand and gave it a twirl, "And this, is there anything I could maybe do about that so I don't get sabotaged in the future?" he asked.

Elder Flower tilted her head for a second, seemingly deep in thought, before nodding once. "Not really," she said. "It's not like they're not allowed to pay people to do stuff. Also, it doesn't do much. I found that people who sabotage others this way generally waste time they could have spent improving their actual project. In a way, they drag you down, but they also drag you down themselves, which means that you end up on the same level in the end. You could have both delivered a better Illusion Room had there been no sabotage, but there's nothing you can do about the small-mindedness of other people."

"So I should just," Jin trailed off. "Turn the other cheek?"

At this particular phrasing, the woman gave him a confused look. "What cheek? Just get promoted to core disciple before him and then corner him into receiving some pointers. A black eye should solve the problem for future inner disciples who have to share a ring with him."

On the outside, Jin nodded thoughtfully as if this suggestion made perfect sense. On the inside, however, he threw up his hands in the air.

"Why can't I just beat him up now then?" he asked.

Elder Flower put up a hand as if putting a stop to the idea before it could finish coalescing. "No one said anything about beating anyone up; it's called trading pointers. As for why you can't do it now… It's because, with his clan's influence, he has more clout than you when you're on the same level. If you're promoted, that's not true anymore. There's only so far nepotism can get you," she said with a faraway look in her eyes.

"Okay, so get promoted, trade pointers and then forget about it," Jin muttered thoughtfully. When in Rome, do as the Romans do? he guessed.

"But you did start on the project, right?" Elder Flower asked curiously. "Or have you not found a team yet?"

"I managed to find one recently promoted girl who's proving to be pretty good at designing the space while I do the characters," Jin said. "Her work has a decent amount of artistic value," Jin replied.

"Characters, as in plural?" Elder Flower asked. "I'm assuming you're committing to another one of your more complex structures, then?" She didn't look like she was too enthused about that, but neither was she particularly disappointed. It seemed that Jin had simply acted within the realm of expectations.

"Yes, considering that the end product is still meant for mortal hands and that my cultivation has improved somewhat in the past months, I have access to more data. I've decided to create a cross-country quest of meaning focused on exploring the complexity of the human condition. It will be a post-apocalyptic world and seen through the eyes of an embittered and cynical alcoholic who regains his hope in humanity and his ability to love by bonding with a young girl who reminds him of the daughter who died in his arms twenty years ago. Unfortunately, the fate of his new emotional attachment sits on a knife's edge as her body might contain the cure for the plague, asking the question of whether we can sacrifice those we love for the greater good or if it is an impossibility for those of us who were broken before by the harsh circumstances of life and who just found something new to cling to," Jin narrated.

Elder Flower stared at him with glassy eyes at that explanation for a few seconds while the words registered in her mind. "And the zombies?" she asked, as if unsure if that was even a question worth asking considering what she'd just heard.

Jin perked up. "Oh yes, there will be those as well. They'll represent a threat on the purely physical level but also serve as a strong metaphor for the all-consuming ideology of capitali- I mean cultivation." He reassured.

"That's good?" Flower stated unsurely.

The woman was much more destabilised and confused than she had been in any previous interaction so the disciple was sort of curious what she had been doing recently to have entered such a state. Maybe he'd been a bit mean to her in his thoughts earlier. This seemed to go a bit deeper than just getting a glass of water. Maybe she'd been forced to cook a meal as well or to spend an equivalent amount of energy on some other task.

"Yes, well, it's chugging along nicely. We'll be done by the deadline, and then we have to see, I guess. I wonder what the others have managed to create." Jin paused, suddenly remembering something. "Oh, and also, the zombies will be evolving beyond the basic version we've seen at the army camp. There will be a certain variety to spice things up."

"Why?" Elder Flower asked, and the simple question pierced straight through the middle of Jin's reasoning.

Why? It was easy enough to answer. It was because Jin was a hack who, if he simply created a combat simulator, would lose to inner disciples much more experienced than him. To avoid looking like a fraud then, his only other option was to leverage the cultural prowess of his previous world into this relatively undeveloped one via his photographic memory. All the while pretending that he wasn't just shifting the goalpost of the project due to personal inadequacy but because of some sort of philosophical conviction. Unfortunately, he only had the capacity to make the games of this previous life fit the aesthetic of this new world and didn't trust himself to change the narrative to fit the history, which just made him a slightly more complex asset stripper. 'A man's gotta eat,' he justified himself. But of course, he couldn't tell that Elder Flower.

"I was just thinking since it's sort of a disease, there are probably stages of progression. I mean, if you leave someone sick for long enough, then they start developing different symptoms, right?" he weakly argued at the blank stare of his superior. The disciple coughed into his hand. "I mean, it's all about the feeling in the end, right? I'll leave the specifics of the combat to the other people. I mean, the corpses haven't been infected that recently, so I'm sure maybe we haven't seen the extent of their transformation?"

"Who said it's a disease?" Elder Flower muttered more to herself. "I guess you could call qi infections that?" she asked herself as if unsure. She then shook her head as if awakening from a fever dream and seemed to get a bit angry. "That is by far this stupidest-" she was suddenly interrupted by, weirdly enough, a paper aeroplane flying into the clearing and almost bumping into her ear if she hadn't leaned backwards to dodge.

The paper seemingly wasn't an attack or else Elder Flower would have surely reacted more adversely, which reassured Jin. However, he remained wary as the paper unfurled itself and started burning at the same time as a voice which he recognised to belong to General Shroud started to resound from it.

"I have some bad news," the voice said. "Whatever this zombification process is, it hasn't reached its later stages yet. At least not in the corpses which have been brought from the dark side. The oldest ones have mutated, is the best word I can find, and have lost certain abilities but have gained others. It is an odd development for sure, but there is likely to be more of the previous variety at the border conflict, which doesn't invalidate whatever work the disciples have done yet. It simply means that the scenarios will have to be expanded in scope to contain this new information."

Both Jin and Elder Flower listened intently to the message, after which the latter looked almost disbelievingly at the former before standing up and promptly disappearing faster than Jin's eyes could track.

Jin let out a sigh of relief that he hadn't even known had been building in his lungs. "Saved by the bell," he muttered to himself. "You're a lucky little bastard," he finished with a small smile, patting himself on the back.

Then Elder Flower, as if having forgotten a purse, reappeared by his side, grabbed him by the shoulder and brought him with her to wherever she was going in a swirl of nausea-inducing colours and movement.

Bleurgh. 

-/-

AN: The development process for the game is a bit different this time since the needs are evolving as we speak, there is a team, and Jin has shakier theoretical reasons for doing what he's doing (IMO). There will also not really be a second character who is the focus of the experience like Xiao was for Outlast, but I'll think of something about how to present it. I'm trying to find a balance between explaining the game for those who don't know it and not info-dumping. The Zombie arc is about to end on Patreon if you want to hop over and help a struggling artist out.