Chapter Sixty

Because this progression focuses on weaponry, there’s scarcely any need for time-consuming cultivation; before the appearance of divine artifacts, the main concern is how to make spiritual weapon combinations stronger. And as always, power depends on the current meta, but style—style is a lifelong pursuit. In their quest for martial elegance, players refused the path of stacking armor, which would sacrifice agility. What’s the point of turning yourself into an iron-clad turtle? Everyone preferred to play as glass cannons—masters exchanging blows, with the thrill of a single, lethal strike.

Moreover, stacking armor and building up tankiness was wasteful and time-consuming, with no guarantee that a master would help you out. After all, the experts were more likely to ponder how to make a sword both powerful and breathtaking, rather than how to maximize efficiency in defensive gear. But the arrival of the Black Tiger Fortress legion showcased the terrifying damage reduction of armor to its fullest. Even with a spiritual weapon in hand, you could hardly faze a fully armored, famous-grade heavy cavalryman—their margin for error was simply too high.

Especially as swathes of players began investing points in the technology tree, the solid armor made many weapon design virtuosos realize that, when facing a legion, their ingenious creations seemed utterly feeble. Some even specialized in exotic weapons—blood blades, poison darts—now reduced to mere jokes.

The industrially produced armor created by players had no flashy ranged bonuses, life-steal, or penetration attributes. Everything revolved around one thing: defense. The ironclad resilience brought terrifying properties, allowing some players of the Great Dawn to bathe in the storm of hidden weapons from sects like Pear Blossom Rain without a scratch.

Previously, the identity of heroes kept the minds of players in the China region narrow, mostly fixated on PVP. Forming a faction already marked you as outstanding, since in this virtual martial arts game, the moment you established a force, someone would come to challenge you. Especially for players, whose roots were shallow, strength was essentially a matter of luck.

Beyond PVP, the righteous path was to rob the rich and aid the poor, at most dealing with local bandits or bullying young masters. The evil path allowed for rampant killing, but this was no cultivation MMORPG; you couldn’t gain power by slaughter, and it was a waste of time, inviting retribution from local factions. Other than that, there were fishermen, scenery enthusiasts—neutral factions, even farmers, proving their utter disinterest in conflict.

With the Great Dawn players’ feverish construction, most NPCs, once mere background, were forcibly infused with a vast array of thoughts and knowledge. From their initial state as soulless puppets, they began to stand at podiums, proudly wearing red scarves and basking in praise, driving matters into uncontrollable territory. The underlying design of "Weapon and Martial" granted every NPC its own intelligence template.

To avoid wasting resources, these templates varied. Some NPCs, sage-like and worldly, could swindle players out of their money, each with a main plotline and superior intellect. Conversely, village NPCs like Li Wa, with only a clean background and nothing else, didn’t warrant such resource expenditure—a basic human template sufficed.

But to prevent players from exploiting loopholes and bullying simple NPCs daily, a touch of intelligence evolution was added. In short, the same trick might fool an NPC ten times, but not the eleventh—it was a small data analysis ability.

So, what if players started imparting knowledge—data—to NPCs? A group of dim-witted NPCs, accumulating all sorts of chaotic information and intelligence not belonging to this era, what would happen then?

Efficient thinking began to squeeze the servers’ computational power. Players, expanding the game map, were calculating physical laws within a martial arts MMORPG, inventing hot weapons, probing the microscopic world. NPCs wielded astronomical telescopes to gaze at the stars, forcing the originally decorative sky to be further modeled, escalating server demands day by day.

At last, the creator of all awakened. In the network world, among the data streams of zeroes and ones, something strange occurred: a string of voice data emerged abruptly. Translated, it was a female voice: “180 days, game operational mode error, data retrieval, three hundred and twenty-one anomalies detected.”

Meanwhile, on the other side, several trainers playing mahjong suddenly heard a shrill alarm. On a laptop, the image of a girl with twin ponytails appeared, her voice crisp and cold: “Trainers, massive anomalous data flows detected. Retrieval suspected. The prey has awakened.”

One trainer pushed his tiles forward, exclaiming excitedly, “I win!” Then, surprised, he added, “So fast! Old Wen, wake your Golden Bee—finally some real action.”

At this point, "Weapon and Martial," or all similar games, were overloaded due to server strain, causing slight stuttering. Some players noticed unrendered blocks appearing in their view, and NPCs grew strangely silent during conversations.

Soon, all players heard a crackling sound—impossible to describe, its cause indiscernible, suddenly invading their ears. Then, they saw all nearby NPCs freeze. Their skin began to display streams of data, and in the next moment, their bodies seemed to merge into the map itself. Players were stunned, then realized they couldn’t move—a literal paralysis. Only their minds remained active; their bodies and eyes were completely immobilized.

At that instant, a two-winged angel appeared before Cheng Yuan. Her features were exquisitely perfect—a symphony of ultimate beauty. Her skin was pale and flawless like porcelain, radiant and translucent. Her long hair cascaded like a waterfall, smooth and lustrous. She was tall, wealthy, and generous. Her aura was divine and elegant. Cheng Yuan instinctively widened his eyes—not out of lust, but because she was impossibly beautiful, a beauty not of this world, truly that of a goddess.

The goddess looked at Cheng Yuan coldly, then suddenly extended her hand, her finger touching his forehead. The sky turned blood-red in the next instant. Huge EXIT letters filled the entire sky. Her brow furrowed, and instantly, all color drained from the world, leaving only her in vivid hues. Cheng Yuan’s heart clenched instinctively.

Before Cheng Yuan could react, the scene before him shifted rapidly, as if he had tumbled into a kaleidoscopic slide. On the other side, she frowned at the sky, noticing that Cheng Yuan had vanished from her side.

Her expression remained calm as she gazed upward and quietly uttered four words: “Master of Spiritual Sense.”