Chapter 42 Let's Make a Wuxia Drama Together!

"Man, there are so many characters. Who should I pick?"

Bocai hesitated for a moment at the character selection screen.

When starting a game for the first time, most players usually choose to customize their protagonist. After all, it offers a stronger sense of immersion.

Some people would simply use a photo of themselves or Daniel Wu, maybe with a bit of retouching, for the protagonist's face.

High-quality men in Huaguo all possess Daniel Wu-tier looks!

That is a kind of confidence, too!

Some streamers who love to mess around would sculpt cosmic horror faces during character creation.

Currently, on Bilibili, there are also some content creators who choose an original novel protagonist, reenacting a series of events from the source material and treating it like a martial arts film.

Uploaders who make various game and film commentary videos also had fresh material to work with.

Starting off with: "My name is Duan Yu, Prince of Dali's Southern Pacification Commandery. Once upon a time, my brain turned to mush from reading Buddhist scriptures. Today, I suddenly attained enlightenment; I'm going to master the Six-Veined Divine Sword! I'll pull myself together and hustle for my career!"

"It is my unshirkable duty to revitalize the Dali Duan clan!"

They instantly transform into a parallel-world protagonist who actively hacks, levels up, boosts their combat power, and dominates the server—the ultimate overachieving dual-cheat pairing of Demi-Gods and Semi-Devils.

Or perhaps they start as wretched characters like the young master of the Juxian Manor, telling the story from a villain's perspective.

"My name is You Tanzhi, and I am..."

Eventually, at a crucial moment, they alter their fate, ruthlessly violating Azu to drag her back and turn her into a star-struck fanatic.

Even though the website doesn't allow streaming such content, plenty of players would definitely do it.

However, the game doesn't encourage this style of play; the core theme remains "a true hero of the martial arts world."

The cutscenes in between contained nothing of the sort. The spiced-up version featuring the actual process is something players could never get their hands on—that was exclusively enjoyed by Gu Meng alone.

Unless some legendary modder manages to create an adult mod.

For this game, the system's primary contribution lay in the skill tree and dynamically generated combat moves. When a master executed a basic move, it flowed entirely from the heart and mind, completely devoid of rigid, formulaic choreography. This combat mechanism was utterly impossible to modify, falling completely outside the realm of human comprehension.

As for the rest, if Gu Meng felt like opening up mod support after a while, he could do so. Elite modders could create mods that grant all secret manuals and divine weapons right from the start, or overhaul side quests that the system hadn't heavily intervened in.

Without mods, most female characters experiencing such trauma would seize the opportunity to commit suicide. A single misstep would severely tank the protagonist's chivalric reputation, making them reviled by all and resulting in a net negative yield.

Flower-picking scoundrels and the like were just too low-class.

Not only did the designer Gu Meng despise them (though they were implemented in *Heroes X*).

Even the bandits and mountain outlaws in the game had every right to look down upon rapists and abduction villains.

According to post-release statistics, Yun Zhonghe's kill rate among the Four Evils even managed to surpass that of Ye Erniang, the most heinous of them all.

Aside from NPCs with weak starting martial arts like Duan Yu and You Tanzhi, uploaders in advanced playthroughs could also choose powerful villains as starting points for their videos.

For instance, Xiao Zhi from *Demi-Gods and Semi-Devils* successfully snatches the Six-Veined Divine Sword, masters the North-Soaring Divine Skill to fire beams all over the place, and even steals the sound system right out of Chief Qiao's hat.

Finally, he defeats that pretentious hidden boss from Shaolin, the Clearing Monk.

The dream world-line where the Tibetan National Preceptor, the Great Wheel King, and the ultimate intellect-combat powerhouse ranks number one in dominating the entire server was born!

In fact, while releasing the game, Gu Meng was already engaging in similar operations. Holding the copyrights, he could produce official authorized tie-in animations.

This idea actually came to him from plotting tropes he had seen in novels before transmigrating.

He had read quite a few web novels about game development.

In one novel, the protagonist's system specialized in exploiting bugs. That should be a different type from his own system... right?

Well, it probably wasn't! (Said with a trembling voice)

The bug last time happened for various reasons; first of all, that demo itself had issues. His own system should be pretty reliable... probably.

He forgot the exact game mentioned in that novel, but anyway, the AI of the NPCs in that game was trained to be exceptionally sophisticated by the protagonist's system.

It could spawn countless otherworldly adventure storylines.

Consequently, a multitude of players and production companies collaborated with that protagonist, using the game to produce otherworldly anime series.

It directly slashed the prices of cookie-cutter otherworldly anime, monopolized the industry, and ensured a never-ending supply of otherworldly shows to watch.

Gu Meng's game didn't feature an AI that powerful; it couldn't generate such a massive volume of non-repetitive dialogue and plots.

Because his system focused its enhancements primarily on action sequences, it could only guarantee an extraordinary variety of combat choreography.

If two peerless master NPCs of roughly equal skill fought each other, the win rate might be three-to-seven or fifty-fifty, and death matches frequently ended in a mutual draw where both perished together.

Yet while the outcome might be similar, the process and the sequence of moves executed were often entirely different. They could fight a thousand times without repeating.

Much like making two artificial intelligences play chess—they won't always follow the exact same game record.

Master NPCs possessed countless flashes of brilliance and subtle micro-variations. A slight advantage in positioning or footwork could cause the subsequent fighting style to diverge completely.

Such breathtaking combat was simply impossible to grow tired of. Not everyone could decipher chess records, but everyone loved watching fights and cybernetic cricket matches.

Still, this only applied to the action sequences. Many narrative arcs possessed strong convergence forces; all the various branches were pre-arranged side-quest scripts, strictly categorized into good or bad.

The plot provided by Gu Meng had been entirely reviewed by himself. It consisted of the original novel's storyline combined with the early protagonist arc he wrote himself, plus sections written by the Edamame copywriting team—everything was completely normal.

The fan-fiction style of defying the heavens and altering destiny was immensely satisfying.

Ultimately, witnessing the realm plunged into chaos with the Mongol-Yuan invasion.

After the protagonist comprehended the world, the common people, and his own heart, he awakened. His martial arts imbued him with the spirit of "justice," akin to Master Guo or Li Xunhuan.

The storyline where he remained behind in ancient times to guard a desolate, isolated city—embodying the creed that a true hero of great stature serves his country and its people—was equally searing.

"Cries of the bereaved fill the wasted earth, blood paints the city red; all for the single thought of saving the common people."

The folks at Edamame were truly professionals; their writing was superior to Gu Meng's.

Li Yan, the current acting lead of the copywriting team, even mentioned that when writing this portion of the plot, they referenced memoirs of modern revolutionaries.

They poured those genuine emotions of national salvation and survival into shaping the ideological transformation of the protagonist who chose to stay behind.

After reading it, Gu Meng was moved almost to tears. Before transmigrating, he was merely an ordinary struggling web novel author. Much like how Youxuan's new employees felt a sense of shared honor upon completing *Chronicles of Heroes: True*, Gu Meng also felt a profound sense of shared honor after participating in the creation of the national salvation arc.

He had originally considered letting the full system write it if this plot segment failed to meet expectations, but that was no longer necessary.

Aside from the main plot, Gu Meng had personally checked all the human-written text this time around. Absolutely no one had sneaked in any self-indulgent tropes intended to forcefully torture the protagonist or cuckold him.

The system simply generated other branching texts rapidly based on foundational texts such as the "original martial arts novels," the "creative content by Gu Meng and the Edamame copywriting team," and Gu Meng's specific instructions.

There might be some exceptionally elusive hidden plots generated by the system that Gu Meng failed to trigger, but this time he had learned his lesson. His instructions explicitly forbade the system from torturing the protagonist, requiring that all negative storylines must have a resolution.

Unlike the last game where, no matter what actions were taken, the heroine would inevitably fall during the second half of her freshman year—that kind of predestined betrayal would never happen again.

To take a step back, even if unexpected anomalies truly occurred in this game that Gu Meng couldn't comprehend—

For instance, if there were a hidden saboteur playing a sophisticated long con that he failed to notice, resulting in a massive toxic landmine similar to the "Pure Love" incident orchestrated by Meng Juju—Gu Meng's instructions would still ensure that such torture plots had a feasible resolution.

Getting saved by a bug's accident once was enough; Gu Meng didn't harbor the delusion that such good fortune would repeat itself over and over again.

Gu Meng had to rely on himself!

He wasn't the kind of person who relied on bugs to bail him out the moment a game was released... probably.