Thank you to my new Patrons: Anoop Karnik, Davy Davis, Noasm Strebor, Ivan, nils, nmv9989, Evans Moss, John Zuple, Jonathan Prouty
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It was after leaving his meeting with Elder Flower that Jin returned to his rooms, where he found his servant, Bao, already bringing him another pot of tea alongside two cups. A plate of food was already on the table. Some sort of noodles with rice and red meat. Another plate of green circular vegetables that seemed steamed.
The cultivation world had a weird fascination with hot leaf juice, and Jin was learning to enjoy it as well. As long as he didn't have to make it himself, it was fine. Easier to drink than water, at least.
"Good match," Bao said after finishing with her arrangement on the low table on the bamboo straw mat.
"You went?" Jin asked. Other than having Bao do some basic tasks, which saved him maybe two hours per day by not doing them himself, he didn't interact with her much.
"Of course, I'm still on the lookout, just in case," the woman said, before sighing dreamily. "I saw him today, my future husband."
"Really?"
"Yes, he was wearing an orange robe and wielding a staff. His majestic bald head gleamed in the sun like a diamond. He was focused, ferocious, and brave. He rushed through a fireball and knocked out his opponent with a simple spin of his staff."
Jin paused. "Isn't that what I did?" he asked, confusedly.
Bao rolled her eyes. "Not the way he did it," she replied.
"Well, good luck with your matrimony. I worked with the Mad Monks once. If this guy is a part of the sect, maybe you can get an in by mentioning my name," Jin said off-handedly, already starting to think about Skyrim.
A moment of silence filled the space between the two before Bao nodded and left the room. "Thanks!" she said enthusiastically before closing the room behind her.
Jin was already gone into his own mind, swimming amongst the assets he'd created. He'd been working a lot on character creation recently. But he needed a break, or else he was going to hit someone. Deciding to make the cities of Skyrim populated by an actually reasonable amount of people was one thing; actually doing it was another.
For the more meaningless NPCs, he'd refined a very effective process, which meant that each one of them barely took him a minute of thinking time. Converted to real-life seconds, considering that the techniques of the Illusion Room sect mainly focused on effectively doing things like that, that was about 5 seconds of real time. But still, everyone needed a break.
He especially didn't want to exhaust himself, considering that he was set to fight another match tomorrow. That's why he decided to work on a more simple addition to the scenario which wouldn't require much focus. No originality needed.
The music.
He'd always liked Skyrim's music and sound design in his last life. If you ignored the fact that using a blunt weapon sounded like using a sword, that was. It was nice of the sound design team to also include different sounds for different terrains.
Of course, the Illusion Room sect, which didn't simply use a physics engine but rather recreated reality, did not need any help creating ambient sound. There were enough files in the library to fill the entirety of Skyrim with the appropriate sounds five times over.
No, only the music was still needed. And maybe later, the sound effects of the spells and creatures that didn't actually exist. Everything else was simple enough.
A quick scrub of his memories quickly provided him with a Skyrim ambient music mix that was almost as long as an entire day. He simply added the Morrowind and Oblivion ambient on top to reach that number of hours. Unfortunately, considering that he was going to be creating something that cultivators would likely take a minimum of 60 full days to complete, he needed some add-ons so the sounds wouldn't get too repetitive.
Thankfully, he'd listened to several hundred hours of classical music in his life, and it was a simple process of a few hours to remix the appropriate compositions to the ambient sounds fitting the different environments. Vivaldi's four seasons are separated and put into the appropriate environments of harsh snowy mountains, peaceful summer fields, colourful trees and budding flower spring waters respectively. Some Mozart for the funny parts, Bach for the dramatic parts, Beethoven for the parts that were in between. Etc. Magic Flute for the streets, Bach for the meets and a little bit of Für Elise for the sheets.
"Horrible joke," Jin muttered in his mind before continuing. He added compositions by Alkan, Zelenka and Kuchar for the parts that were missing for the underground parts of the game. Nobody would appreciate the joke, but such was life sometimes; you had to make it funny for yourself.
His decision to work on the music to relax himself quickly began to work, and extending his 24 hour ambient music set to one lasting 72 hours was easy enough. Once he started struggling to put the piece together, he simply quit. Seventy-two hours remixed throughout around 1440 hours was enough to not bore anyone. It meant everyone would hear a repeat perhaps once every day and not more than twenty times per piece. Also, he had to keep some original compositions for future works and not drain his reserve dry on one project. Considering that Vivaldi had written more than 200 hours of music in his lifetime, and other composers showing similar productivity levels, Jin wouldn't run out anytime soon, even if he didn't personally know more than 1% of classical music out there.
Jin finished his work on the sound with a neat little bow, reminding himself to make the music optional for anyone who wanted to opt out and simply listen to the realistic ambience sounds of their own breathing, walking and dying whenever an enemy managed to rip out their guts.
Whatever inner peace he'd managed to find was then promptly upturned when Hashimi barged into his rooms and unceremoniously sat down opposite him to pour herself a cup of Bao's brew.
It was funny how the servant already knew to put out two cups for exactly such occasions.
She'd have to get used to Francis as well when they returned to the sect. The fact that the team used his rooms as an office meant that his private space essentially didn't exist.
He sort of hoped that Bao could get hitched before they returned to their mountain; however, then he could find himself a servant actually willing to work normal hours. Just in case it was ever needed in the future. He wasn't too bitter about it though. The Spirit Stones he'd managed to get from Elder Flower by getting so far in the tournament had already made it worth it putting up with the weird woman.
"I'll tell you," Hashimi said after taking a loud slurp from her cup and taking a slice of meat from Jin's dinner, "that Da Bendan guy is absolutely hilarious."
"Who?" Jin asked confusedly.
"The stupid one whose spells look like the qi equivalent of a fart," Hashimi explained.
"Ah, the wheat-hair."
"Yeah, that one, he's really good at making the visual effects of techniques, but his attempt at recreating that in reality, wow, what a stinker," Hashimi continued prattling on before stretching her arms in the air, turning to the left, and then turning to the right.
"The display was fairly pathetic," Jin agreed.
"Anyway, not like we had some sort of loser's table or anything upon coming back, but the two of us got talking about how our tournament experience has been going. Funny how that purple cloud sect guy also gave them the materials needed to pass the first round."
"Well, if his goal was to allow our sect to embarrass themselves, then he more than succeeded," Jin said with a sigh. He hoped he managed to convincingly lose a match before going up against that young-looking man. Dude was angry. And apparently capable of taking down two wyverns and carrying three Illusion Room disciples through the first round all at once in less than three days. In other words, nothing Jin wanted to mess with.
"What have you been working on?" Hashimi suddenly asked.
"What makes you think I've worked on anything?" Jin asked with a quirked eyebrow.
"Because you're always working on something," Hashimi said with a roll of her eyes. "You blitz through creating your assets like you've already had the groundwork inserted into your brain, it's crazy. The only way that makes sense is if you're at it 24/7."
Jin sipped at his tea to hide his smile. The fact that he wasn't in fact working 24/7 but simply relying on his past knowledge to appear so was a secret nobody was allowed to know. Ever.
"Well, I did create a 72-hour ambient music soundtrack for the different environments and situations in the game. I was thinking of playing it in the background in non-combat situations to increase immersion," he briefly explained.
"I quite liked the music in your Dragonslayer scenario." Hashimi extended a hand towards him. "Gimme."
Jin rolled his eyes, fished out a jade slip from his pocket, quickly inserted the data and handed it over.
Hashimi unceremoniously made a copy and closed her eyes to start listening, likely in her own accelerated mindspace.
Jin paused. If the Elders of the sect ever figured out a way for cultivators to share a mind space running at the speed of the slowest participant while everyone completed their workflow in their own subspace, then collaboration would increase in speed by several factors.
In the two seconds it took him to have that thought, Hashimi had opened her eyes again and was giving him a wide-eyed look. Her pupils had dilated and were taking up almost the entirety of the space usually reserved for her chocolate-brown iris.
"You made this?" she asked.
Jin couldn't very well tell her no, so he did the opposite. "Yes."
"You made this in the time between now and when we got back earlier. Three hours. This?"
Jin paused before nodding. He'd essentially picked some of the best pieces of classical music he knew, already filtered as the best because he'd heard them in the first place. If somebody told him they'd created 72 hours of high-quality composition in three hours, even with a time-dilation mindspace-nonsense, he'd laugh in their face.
Hashimi suddenly stood up, although the gesture was a bit wooden. She'd gone pale in the face.
"Where are you going?" Jin asked with furrowed eyebrows.
"Getting my work equipment from my room and coming back, I need to start working," the girl replied.
"You had a serious fight today, you can rest too, you know," Jin reminded her.
Hashimi simply looked at him blankly. "You wouldn't get it," she said before exiting the room and coming back a minute later, already engrossed in her task of creating the spaces of Skyrim.
At a lack of anything else to do, Jin pulled out one of the spirit stones he'd gotten from Elder Flower and tried playing with the illusion technique she'd shown him to surround in black qi and thus prevent the light from leaking out.
After trying for a few minutes, he absorbed the qi in the stone to advance his own cultivation. The minuscule changes that still needed to be made to his body for it to become a perfect vessel for qi were progressing nicely. The spirit stones would increase progress significantly, in that Elder Flower had been right.
If nothing else, becoming stronger was its own form of strength, even if Jin would have preferred relative obscurity as a scenario designer who seldom left the mountain.
Hours passed, the sun set, and the time for sleep soon approached.
Hashimi worked steadily while Jin cultivated rapidly with the help of the spirit stones.
Having a large source of qi nearby increased the speed by a multitude, although the stone already looked sort of depleted. It would probably be able to last another two hours. So what, small spirit stones could increase cultivation speed by a factor of x2 for about 5 hours? That meant that a five-hour session became a 10-hour session.
Going by the speed at which Jin normally cultivated, finishing the spirit stone tomorrow would mean that he could take a break from cultivating for one day before restarting to keep his usual momentum. He just needed to be careful to not advance to core formation too early. It would likely mean a whole new set of tasks and responsibilities. Better keep that advancement in reserve until he had the accompanying set of work accomplishments to also advance to core disciple.
Hashimi suddenly groaned and opened her eyes. "I need a break," she muttered.
Jin suddenly had a thought.
"Hey, Hashimi," he said.
"Yeah?"
"What do you think about adding defunct Oblivion gates to the cities, to showcase some older lore to accompany what experiencers will find in books and old tales?" he asked.
Hashimi paused. "Doesn't that make zero sense in the history of the world you described to me?" she asked. "The gates were destroyed during the Oblivion crisis."
"Yeah, but think about it. It would look really cool."
"That's not a reason."
"So that's a no?"
"Yes."
"So, a yes?"
"No, I said yes to the no, it's a no." She chuckled. "Thanks."
"Why?"
"For reminding me that you can also be a dumbass sometimes."
"It wasn't such a bad idea," Jin argued. "It would add a certain je-ne-sais-quoi."
"Jin, it's a really stupid idea to contradict your own history for the cool effect. People will notice. Rather than Je-ne-sais-quoi, it's more of a je-ne-sais-pourquoi."
Jin crossed his arms. "This is why you don't have a boyfriend."
"This is why YOU don't have one."
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AN: Read ahead on Patreon! Tournament arc is over on there!