Prologue
There were three things one had to watch out for on the jianghu: women, children, and old men.
But among people who read wuxia novels, there was always debate over one more category that ought to be added to the list.
The disabled.
The wording was brutal, sure, but it was an unavoidable truth.
What about the blind beggar asking for scraps in the street, who turned out to be the leader of the Beggars' Sect?
What about the one-armed drifter who was really a Plum Blossom Swordsman from Mount Hua who had long since descended the mountain?
What about the Heavenly Demon, who was apparently lame?
Characters like that — the sort who appeared now and then like a cliché, only to leave a deep impression. Were there not such people everywhere?
Maybe I’d been hit by a late-blooming case of second-year syndrome after I got older, because there was a time when I’d been swallowed up by that kind of concept and customized my characters around it.
Looking back now, I even wondered why I liked those kinds of concepts so much.
If I hadn’t, I wouldn’t have ended up in this state.
***
The wuxia sandbox RPG Daemyeong Pungwhajeon.
It was the landmark game that had led me into the world of martial arts fiction.
Of course, “landmark” was only true for me.
Daemyeong Pungwhajeon was unusual in that it focused less on the thrill of martial power and more on sandbox freedom.
From your year of birth to your traits, sect, clan, physical features, and past history — even the faint alternate-history vibe woven into the very setting of the game — you could set every last thing about your character exactly as you pleased.
It was a game with an extraordinary degree of freedom, where you could customize everything.
The problem, as a game, was that in granting you all that freedom, it had also thrown away everything that should have been the foundation of an actual game.
The story had to be pieced together by reading setting books or picking up scattered items hidden all over the map and checking their descriptions.
Combat was turn-based RPG fare that often skipped straight to plain text like, [○○ used the martial art "Dog-Beating Staff Technique"! The effect was tremendous!]
The clunky UI, the repetitive grind, the nonsense story events that sometimes got sprung on you out of nowhere…
Damn it, the more I wrote about it, the more annoying things there were.
And yet it absolutely delivered on one thing: freedom. That is, the sense that I was actually roleplaying inside this wuxia world. For that reason, it had a quiet popularity among people who loved this kind of wuxia game.
Especially for people like me, who were obsessed with sandbox games even before wuxia entered the picture, it was the kind of game you could cling to all day and happily waste your life on.
From the start, I’d approached it as a sandbox game, and because of this damned game, I’d fallen headfirst into wuxia.
Eat, shit, game.
Eat, shit, game.
And whenever I was too lazy to go to the bathroom or too lazy to get up for food, I’d set takeout and a 1.5-liter plastic bottle on my desk and reduce the movement between eating and shitting to an absolute minimum. I kept that up for a month.
By the time I came to my senses, my playtime had reached 500 hours.
Compared to the real veterans, I was still just a baby newbie, but the fact that I’d blown 500 hours of my life in a single month was a once-in-a-lifetime experience — one I should never repeat.
Sorry, Mom and Dad.
Among all those saves, the one I’d poured the most care into was my mute swordsman.
Especially that one — after I’d botched my second and third saves, I’d gone back with my teeth clenched and even built out his backstory in detail, so it was still the save I felt most attached to.
An orphan after a Blood Sect raid, raised by a mysterious master who had retired from the jianghu and was living in seclusion, only to have that master killed by the demonic sect and be forced to step out into the martial world himself.
The defining feature of this character was that, as a penalty, he was mute — but in exchange, he had the trait Mind's Eye, which made exploration easier.
What’s more, Mind's Eye would even show enemy weak points and the right timing to exploit them, which made combat much easier.
Of course, situations outside battle were fairly inconvenient — like when a patrol of government soldiers stopped you for inspection, or when you had to speak with a debater, or when some misunderstanding arose and you needed to explain yourself —
but wasn’t overcoming even those obstacles and finding a way through exactly the charm of a sandbox game?
That each thing I did affected the game was the greatest joy of sandbox play.
Even after 500 hours, there was still more to dig out of the game.
Even if you cleared it with one save, character details and backstory fragments were hidden all over the place, and players would go hunting for them like connoisseurs tearing into lamb chops.
I’d been devouring the game like a madman too, but only after I wandered through the community did I realize I still didn’t understand even 20 percent of the setting.
What’s more, that fate quest was set to trigger only on rainy days, so I still vividly remembered the time I spent all day climbing peaks only for the quest never to appear, and I sent some innocent keyboard to an early grave.
That long, painstakingly nurtured save had finally reached its end.
The Heavenly Demon of my fourth save had fallen as well, and the ending scroll had begun to rise slowly.
"Man, I'm really exhausted."
Realizing the save was near its end, I’d buried my face in the monitor, living neither by day nor by night.
I’d already been awake well over twenty-four hours. Maybe thirty?
"I should really get some sleep now…."
Seeing the ending scroll finish and the main screen return, I shut off the computer and threw myself onto the bed.
The eyes that had been so alert in front of the monitor grew heavy the moment my head hit the pillow.
The world spun. Was it because I’d been awake too long?
I forced my throbbing head down into the pillow and tried, however clumsily, to fall asleep.
Then, with my eyes squeezed shut and my breath slowing, I thought I could smell something burning from somewhere.
Was somebody next door cooking something in the middle of the night? Or had a fire broken out somewhere?
"…."
Something was wrong.
The smell of burning didn’t fade. It only grew clearer.
"Hack, hack…!"
I could feel acrid smoke filling my lungs.
Ah. This really was a fire.
The smell was similar to the time I’d tried to fry an egg and gotten distracted by a game, only to burn the whole thing to a crisp.
"…!"
Strange.
My body wouldn’t move.
As if something had me in its grip, I struggled with all my strength, but I couldn’t break free.
Then, I forced my eyes wide open.
Where the hell am I this time?
I had come to an entirely different world.
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