Cultivating in Online Games

Chapter 7 – Yao encounter

A spring rain fell on the other side of the Canglan Mountains, while two monks sheltered from it in a dilapidated temple.

The old monk sat cross-legged in meditation, and after a while, let out a snore.

The younger monk at one side: “?”

Grandmaster Tanji was such a great personage, a monk who had reincarnated for nine lifetimes and who had been born with Mahayana realm power. He had long escaped from the trappings of mortal flesh, so how could he fall asleep, and snore while he did?

“Master?” the young monk said quietly.

Grandmaster Tanji opened his eyes slowly, blinking drowsily and rubbing them. He said to his disciple, puzzled, “I seem to have fallen asleep?”

“Not only that, you snored,” the young monk said bluntly.

He hadn’t been shaving his head for long and was Grandmaster Tanji’s youngest disciple. He didn’t get social norms, and he didn’t understand that some things shouldn’t be pointed out even if you had noticed them, so he was very straightforward with everyone.

Grandmaster Tanji didn’t mind, however. Holding a string of prayer beads, he shifted several beads through his fingers before replying, “I had a dream.”

“A dream of the future?” the young monk asked.

With Grandmaster Tanji’s cultivation, if he had suddenly fallen asleep, he must have communed with the cosmos and gleaned some part of heaven’s arrangement.

Grandmaster Tanji shook his head. “No. I dreamed that I had been picking herbs on a mountain and collected many spiritual cultivators who had not yet embodied themselves. In front of a small temple, I set up a charity healing booth, using the qi of the spiritual cultivators to treat the common people, while helping the spiritual cultivators accumulate merit and come closer to a human form.”

“What kind of a spiritual cultivator would be willing to do such a thing?” the young monk asked.

Spiritual cultivators were born from and nourished by the natural world, managing to survive for thousands or tens of thousands of years without being plucked by humans or beasts, hiding from cultivators and magical creatures alike as they waited to be able to take human form, living a fearful life.

Grandmaster Tanji didn’t reply. He studied the young monk’s face, then suddenly said, “Pick up a stick around the size of a zen staff, then take off one of your sleeves and tie it to your waist.”

The young monk couldn’t make any sense of this, but he followed Grandmaster Tanji’s instructions.

Before becoming a monk, he had been a warrior of Jianghu[1] and had developed a tough body. When wearing a monk robe, it ordinarily didn’t show, but now that his arm was exposed, one could see the defined shapes of his muscles.

Leaning on a wooden stick the height of a man, he didn’t seem like a monk as he stood before Grandmaster Tanji.

Grandmaster Tanji nodded in satisfaction. “There’s the resemblance.”

“What resemblance?” The young monk rubbed his bald head, not understanding what was with his master today.

Grandmaster Tanji didn’t respond, only gazed at the fine rain outside. “Times have changed. After the collapse of the Pillar of Heaven, the nine heavens have become one. With the destruction of the upper heavens, which once held eight-tenths of the spiritual energy in the world, the energy has returned to the mortal realm. Even this spring drizzle now holds an amount of spiritual energy that’s difficult to imagine.”

“Yeah,” the young monk said, nodding.

“Spiritual cultivators will find it easier to take in spiritual energy than ever, but they will also have more trouble than ever becoming embodied,” Grandmaster Tanji said.

Spiritual cultivators were nourished by heaven and earth, but after they developed consciousnesses and before they became embodied, they could easily become coveted by other races, and often would get refined into elixirs before ever having a chance to become human. When once in a while, one managed to become embodied, they would owe a lot of karmic debt and be bound to repay it for the rest of their lives. Some spiritual cultivators had to use up all their cultivations in order to repay their debts.

After the collapse of the Pillar of Heaven, Grandmaster Tanji had always been considering the future path of the human realm, in order to prevent the surplus of spiritual energy from turning this world back into the desolate battlefield of primordial times, where the common people would struggle to survive.

The dream had given Grandmaster Tanji a new idea.

“The forces must keep each other in check,” Grandmaster Tanji said.

He walked out of the temple and into the rain, craning his neck to see the temple’s old inscription. The spring rain washed away the dust covering the sign, revealing the words “Tanye Temple”.

Staring at those two words, Grandmaster Tanji thought back to his dream. After a while, he spoke to his disciple. “Why don’t we stay here? Your master will open a healing booth, while you can stay at my side and keep everyone in order.”

“We’re staying here?” the young monk said, pointing to the deserted and leaky temple.

“Right here. After the rain stops, you can help your master renovate this temple.” Grandmaster Tanji gave his disciple a wink. “After all, we’re both En Pee Sees.”

“Huh?” the young monk said, bewildered.

Back in the Nine Heavens VR game, Dugu Zhuo stared wordlessly at the three incomprehensible characters in “BUG”.

“Did you feel like everything froze for a moment just now?” Qingyue love asked Long @ Aotian.

“It did seem like it,” Long @ Aotian said. “The time didn’t change, though. Were we just imagining it?”

“The game servers aren’t stable yet, I guess,” Qingyue love mused. “This is a beta test, after all, so there might still be bugs around.”

Dugu Zhuo put away the jade slip, gazing at the two players following him. He originally hadn’t wanted to get too involved with other players besides Ye Zhou, but now that he thought about it, these two had their uses.

Walking to the Tanye Temple’s door, he picked up a twig and copied out a crooked “BUG” in the dirt.

Qingyue love, who was always one step behind him, read it. “Bug? Why are you writing that?”

Baa-hg? So this was the word that they had been speaking just now.

“I also felt that time stopped just now,” Dugu Zhuo said to cover his tracks.

“I guess everyone felt it,” Long @ Aotian said. “It must’ve really froze. How could there be a freeze in a VR game? After I log off, I’m going to report this to customer service and suggest they hurry up and fix this bug.”

With these words, Dugu Zhuo felt he had some understanding of the word “bug”. In order to confirm his knowledge, he asked, “Have you found any other baahgs?”

“Your English pronunciation is a bit off,” said Long @ Aotian. “Aside from the freeze-up earlier, I haven’t found any other issues. Except that you seem kind of like a bug.”

“Me?” Dugu Zhuo said. “Is something wrong with me?”

“Everyone’s leveling up alongside each other right now,” Long @ Aotian said. “Even if you used a consumable, it instantly killed about a dozen monsters, so how isn’t that a bug? What was that item called? Send it to me and let me see if there’s a mistaken value. If there was a problem with it, I’ll report it as an oversight along with the freeze.”

Dugu Zhuo isolated the key terms. Problem, mistaken value, oversight…

Based on Dugu Zhuo’s understanding, an existence which was not subject to regulations, which would be sought out and eradicated by those regulations, would be called a bug.

He ignored Long @ Aotian’s request for the item and turned around, walking out of Tanye Temple. Long @ Aotian quickly kept up, saying, “Don’t be so stingy. If you have a good item, you should share it for everyone to enjoy. You could share where you got it too. Even if it’s single-use, that’s still not bad. The game’s brand new, and a strong item like that would be worth money.”

Qingyue love and Long @ Aotian both followed him away from Tanye Temple like they were joined at the hip, one obsessed with appearance, one wanting information on powerful items. At their feet, a black cat also prowled on light paws.

The cat’s pawpads were soft and made no sound with their steps, so neither Qingyue nor Aotian noticed him.

Dugu Zhuo, however, immediately sensed a yao aura. In a casual grab, he picked up that cat by its scruff.

“Huh? Since when was this cat following us?” Long @ Aotian said. “Is it a yao?”

“Woah! Such a cute kitty! Can I pet you?” Qingyue love asked.

“Don’t even think about touching me!” The black cat licked its paw. “The game has restrictions against harassing players. Of course, I can always pet myself. Ahh, how am I so cute?”

The cat put a paw against its mouth and breathed in deeply, looking entranced.

Qingyue immediately lost interest. Looking dispirited, she said, “You’re too scummy. What a waste of a cute kitty’s face.”

Long @ Aotian didn’t like cats much in the first place and had a lot of resistance against the black cat’s outward appearance. He said warily, “Why are you following us?”

“Who’s following you? I’m following him,” the black cat said, twisting its body. It was still being held in the air by Dugu Zhuo, and couldn’t move much. “I was pretty impressed with the way you tested that old monk. You didn’t get punished, and you even obtained information. I thought I’d come ask whether you knew any way for yao to level up.”

“Can’t yao do missions like the rest of us?” Qingyue asked.

The black cat let his head droop. “Ah, we can’t do the same tasks as humans, and we also can’t heal people for experience like the spirits. Low-level yao can’t defeat monsters either, so leveling up is ridiculously hard. You can tell just by looking at how the yao rank on the leaderboard.”

Long @ Aotian opened the leaderboard, filtering for yao players, and saw that they were all level 1.

“I was wondering why I didn’t get a reply after asking for help all that time ago!” said Long @ Aotian. “So they’re just level 1!”

“Asking for help?” Dugu Zhuo asked.

“We thought you were a boss earlier, so we asked our friends for help,” Qingyue said. “We never got a reply, and it turns out it was because the yao haven’t found a way to level up.”

“Back in the PC edition, every race did the same missions. The new edition has been changed too much,” the black cat sighed. “I made an agreement with a player back then for him to take me for the life release task, thinking that I might get experience, but I got killed by the monk instead. There’s no way for me to level up in Tanye Temple, so I need to find something else.”

Dugu Zhuo set down the miserable-looking cat and thought about the yao he had met before.

Some yao dedicated themselves to cultivating and refining the essence of the sun and moon, progressing at a slower speed, while other yao entranced people to take their vital essences. They cultivated much faster, but would also face more difficult heavenly tribulations[2].

“Yao should be able to gain power from bathing in moonlight,” Dugu Zhuo told the black cat. “It’ll go faster if you obtain a cultivation technique. You can also always try enchanting people.”

“I do have an innate ability called Beguile, which doesn’t work on monsters,” the black cat said. “I also have a cultivation technique called the Moon Worship Chant. The game opened at 8 in the morning, though, so there hasn’t been any moonlight yet.”

After some thinking, he leapt onto an ordinary civilian NPC who stood near the Tanye Temple and activated his Beguile ability. He gave that NPC a coy “meow”.

The person instantly hugged the cat like he was possessed, putting his face against the cat’s fur and breathing in deeply. He then lost all strength in his body and fell over.

“Hey? I leveled up! I went all the way to level 5!” the cat exclaimed happily. “So the innate ability of yao is for sucking out the vital energy of NPCs to level up. The experience gain is so quick. I’m going to find more humans…”

He had barely finished talking when the greeting monk outside the temple doors somehow brought out a monk staff and smashed it down onto the black cat. “Ho!” he yelled. “Audacious evil spirit, how dare you harm humans in front of the Tanye Temple!”

Black cat: “…”

Apparently, each race had to find the right place to gain levels. Near the Tanye Temple, all wicked beings would be banished!