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-/-
Just because Jin had put onto himself the task of figuring out how to remake the concept of rendering, this time within the constraints of an eastern magic system, did not mean that progress on the rest of Skyrim stopped.
Hashimi was working her way through Whiterun, one building at a time.
While she called the reference images Jin left her from the original game, he remembered as quaint and cozy, she still expanded on everything.
The Companion's hall was now larger, looking like it might actually fit a bunch of warriors who, due to the fact that being part of a famous mercenary group was a relatively profitable endeavour, each had their own private rooms in the guild.
Jin asked her if she really wanted to use so much data on individual rooms that an experiencer might never enter, at which point she told him that just like how he'd rather invent an entire new technique to compress and process data so that he could have a realistic amount of inhabitants in every city, so did she have her own set of standards.
She'd expressed it differently, of course, but that's what she'd meant. Her words had been more along the lines of. "Ah, so you'll plop 50.000 people in Whiterun, and none of them will have serviceable homes, paths or places of labour? How about you go to the food hall, find a long, hard cucumber and shove up all the way up your-"
Jin knew when to back off, so he'd let the girl work on her private rooms, which, to be fair, only took her a few seconds per room once you really got down to the nitty gritty.
Thank the heavens for mind acceleration techniques and the fact that the Illusion Room Sect skipped all steps between imaging a design and producing it.
When Jin turned towards Francis, wanting to ask for some help in the graphics rendering of the effects, the old man, whose already grey hair was getting grayer by the day, simply glared at him.
"You include a questline like "In My Time of Need," where the experiencer needs to decide to trust either the escaped Redguard women or the Alik'r pursuers. An entirely unnecessary moral fable that takes one into six separate areas and increases neither direct or indirect combat ability, but instead develops critical thinking. You think it's easy to implement these things?" the old man asked rhetorically.
Jin hung his head and went to sit in his corner, where he promptly finished creating the requisite NPCs to make Whiterun feel like a real city.
He sighed in his room and took a sip of the tea that Bao had been supplying the struggling cultivators with.
His team were all becoming real game developers. Stressed and stretched out to their limits.
Even if he now had the rather unenviable task of creating qi data compression in addition to all his other tasks, his teammates didn't necessarily have the time to pick up his slack.
If he could only offload a few tasks…
-/-
"I liked your demo," Jin told Da Bendan, the wheat-haired boy who'd made an embarrassment of himself in the tournament. Hashimi had forwarded him an illusion of the boy's creation, where cultivation spells met special effects. It had been good.
The inner disciple sitting opposite Jin stuck his nose in the air and crowed. "Of course!" he exclaimed. "There is no one under the heavens who can match the destruction I wreak upon the world at the twitch of a finger!"
"You mean the illusion of destruction," Jin corrected, but the other boy simply shook his head.
"No!"
Jin rubbed at his temples and looked at the rather remote and empty pagoda at which he'd asked to meet the boy.
He'd done a background check on Da Bendan, and the guy had come up clean.
No real affiliation to any faction. Simply a specialist who was very good at re-creating the effects of spells but not at making the entirety of a scenario. Other teams hired him to do certain parts of their projects, such as the fire used by a fallen phoenix heavenly beast, or the water control of a kappa-kappa sinker.
If anything, Da Bendan was someone who should be ideologically opposite to Elder Lung's faction, seeing as he was passionate about creating his effects from scratch, carefully fitting them onto each individual situation rather than simply templating everything and re-using older effects.
Still, it was better to get it straight from the horse's mouth.
"I have to ask," Jin started as the wheat-haired boy looked at him curiously. "Why did you collaborate with Lung Junior at the tournament?"
Da Bendan shrugged. "You worked with that weird Hashimi girl, didn't you?" he returned the question.
Jin had to repress a roll of his eyes at this guy in particular, calling anyone weird.
"It was a safety in numbers scenario, the other two came to me because they'd heard of my prowess, and I decided to magnanimously aid them in surviving the first task of the tournament," Da Bendan explained.
"And your performance in the brackets? You weren't sabotaging the martial reputation of the sect?" he asked bluntly.
The other disciple scowled at him. "I didn't sabotage anything! The other sects now know that there's a spell user at the Illusion Room sect that they should fear!"
Jin looked at the guy with a blank look and tried to ascertain if he was telling the truth or was simply an Oscar-worthy actor. He eventually decided that if Da Bendan was that good at lying, he'd have no chance of ascertaining any sort of truth.
Also, he really needed the help.
"Alright, well, I need someone to create some effects for me," Jin eventually said and pulled out a scroll out of his sleeve. It contained all the information on the effects of the spells and shouts from Skyrim that someone needed to create the graphics for.
Francis had already "programmed" the engine that determined the interaction of the spells with reality, but lacked the aesthetic flair to really bring everything to life.
The scroll also contained the graphics of certain effects cast by enemies that the experiencer wouldn't have access to, but which were still important.
"I'd pay in sect contribution points, the usual fare," Jin said and handed the scroll to Da Bendan.
The other disciple, suddenly more serious, took it, unfurled it and furrowed his brows as he quickly read.
"Oakflesh, Pacify, Close Wounds, Sparks and these so-called shouts," he said slowly. "These are wildly different effects. A hundred different ones, this would take me months."
"Only the best, I have the sect contribution points," Jin replied to the unasked question of whether he could even afford it.
"What are you even making?" Da Bendan asked seriously with squinted eyes. "This is… What enemy has all these abilities? These are fifty different enemies, minimum."
Jin shrugged. Da Bendan obviously assumed that he was modelling the graphics of enemy action, after all, simply the concept of granting the experiencer abilities they did not have in real life was novel enough that nobody would even suspect it.
The boy would make the graphics triggered by the levers Francis had created. He didn't need to know anything more than that.
"The question is rather, can you do it?" Jin replied.
Da Bendan snorted. "I don't like these healing spells. More like boring spells. Also, summoning spectral wolves, why not just get a dog?" He paused. "The atronachs, though. That's going to look amazing."
"That sounds like a yes," Jin said.
"As long as you have coin," Da Bendan replied with a grin. "I have magic."
They shook hands, Jin slipping the boy the first fourth of the payment. He would check up on Da Bendan three times until the end, each time handing over a part of the remuneration.
"It looks like we have a deal," Jin said.
"It seems we do."
Jin wasn't really concerned with leaks. After all, nobody would be able to glimpse anything concrete from the effects Da Bendan had to make.
It was rather his next meeting which revealed more of the core of their scenario and which could unnecessarily spoil everything if it came out.
-/-
"Inner disciple Ting," Jin said warmly as he embraced the girl he was meeting with.
"Inner disciple Jin," the bun-haired girl replied before sitting down across from him on the large rock platform on the more uninhabited part of the inner ring. "I heard about your exploits at the tournament in Koncho. Congratulations."
Jin's smile twitched, and he was tempted to simply say that there had been no tournament in Koncho.
He somehow managed to refrain.
"I'm happy to see you at the sect," he said instead. "Your village outpost mission is finally over, and I heard you delivered one of the most accurate wyvern scenarios in the library when you came back, so you must have used the time well.
"Funny you say that," Ting replied with a clear, bell-like laugh. "I heard you killed a wyvern at the tournament."
Jin's mouth twitched again.
"I've been working on a scenario tangentially related to wyverns, or rather dragons. I was actually wondering if I could get your feedback on it," he said, once again diverting the topic.
Ting, thankfully, seemed to lose her interest in mentioning the tournament as the jade slip in Jin's hands came into view. Her green eyes gleamed, and she quickly snatched it out of his hands.
"Our scenario will require a variety of dragons, each with slightly different abilities and strengths," Jin confided in her. "They are somewhat complex creatures to make and are one of the most important parts of the scenario, so we want to do it well." He remembered how they'd decided to remove Alduin from the Helgen intro because they hadn't managed to make him imposing enough yet.
The current dragon was good, but had been a struggle. Unfortunately, they still needed a dozen or so other dragons, including Alduin, for whom they had a basic template but not a real end design.
"Well, considering how dangerous dragons are, I don't know why you're working on them," Ting replied, "but I'll gladly have a look." Her attention then promptly turned towards the jade slip, and her eyes turned blank.
A few minutes later, she came out again with a scrunched-up face, seemingly not knowing how to phrase what she doubtlessly wanted to say.
"I'd appreciate hearing your feedback," Jin said.
"Well," Ting started diplomatically. "You clearly took creative liberties with how dangerous dragons are if you're including it in a scenario. However, you also took liberties with their abilities, their flight patterns, scale dispersion, colour and essentially everything else."
"The abilities needn't be realistic," Jin said softly with a cringe.
"Why?" Ting asked with furrowed brows.
Jin waved the question off. "Obviously, whatever we make won't be up to the standard of someone who focused on realistic draconoid creatures for a decade."
"More than a decade," Ting corrected him. "I was promoted from the outer ring with a kobold-centric Illusion Room."
"Regardless," Jin said. "You're obviously well-suited from critiquing our feeble attempts." He spread out his arms. "Alas, in times like these, we can only turn towards the experts."
"I can point you towards the material that can help you improve your designs," she said.
Jin, flush with cash from the tournament and from the victory of The Last of Us from what seemed like years ago but was in all actuality two months, simply smiled.
"Perhaps we could arrange a collaboration. We still need many more dragons, the better the better."
"I was thinking of making a dragon scenario now that I've finished the wyvern one, actually," Ting said thoughtfully while tapping her chin with a finger and looking up at the blue winter sky. The temperatures were falling, and the leaves had left the trees. But being a cultivator meant one needn't care much about temperatures.
"Why the focus?" Jin asked curiously.
Ting looked him in the eyes, blushed, and looked away. She sighed. "They're just… so majestic," she whimpered. "So elegant, gracious, sleek, feral…"
Jin nodded and put a hand on her shoulder. "No need to say anything more," he said. "I'll pay flat in sect contribution points. One of the dragons will need special care; his potential is on the world-eater level, and he should somewhat fit that description while also representing a surmountable challenge."
Ting shook her head, returned to reality. "Well, dragons are technically a species that, if ascended, could end the world. Easy to take inspiration from some real historical events." She furrowed her brows. "Any reason you're not suggesting a collaboration percentage split?" she asked while shaking her head. "Not that I'd need it. Nice to have some low-stakes remuneration around here. Also," she paused, "well, I looked at your Illusion Rooms and heard they're doing very well in the library, but they're a bit too experimental for me."
"The project will take a decade at minimum for our team of three with outside assistance," Jin replied. "The dragons I need from you shouldn't take longer than a year since they're not based on reality and thus you have more allowances."
"That's quite the commitment," Ting commented. "A decade for a team? That's long. Mine took ten years, and I was working solo."
"I'd want a demo of the Alduin character described in the slip," Jin said, setting the topic back on course. "Then we can talk about the price."
Ting grinned cheekily, much more light-hearted now that she was back at the sect.
"You know what, you got yourself a deal."
They shook hands.
-/-
Jin sighed as he returned to his empty apartment and sat down at his desk.
A tiring day of negotiations and collaborations.
He briefly closed his eyes and fiddled with the image of the giant which would greet the experiencer once they closed in on Whiterun before opening his eyes again and cracking his neck to look at the blank scroll on the desk in front of him.
He picked up a quill and started writing the equations that he remembered from his previous life.
He wasn't a mathematician, nor was he a programmer.
But, well, someone had come up with the idea of a rendering engine and had managed to create one.
How hard could it really be?
-/-
AN: And when nobody needed him anymore, he returned. Let's finally finish this skyrim thing, it's been dragging too long. Patreon has a large backlog now. Tier 1 (free trial 1 week) (10), tier 2 (15) and tier 3 (21) chapters. Will have to find a reason to do a mass release one of these days.