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-/-
Next was Lung Junior's and his friends' Illusion Room, and it was then that the mood of the judges and the participating disciples changed a bit.
It was the first time Elder Lung had anything good to say. "A good and fitting terrain, taken straight from the border conflicts," he praised.
Elder Flower, who unfortunately had a moral compass and would thus always find her meritocratic ideas beaten out by nepotism in a grander setting, also nodded. "The most accurate rendition of a combat scenario until now," she said with a blank face.
The disciples also viewed the experience and suddenly became a tad disheartened, obviously realising that Lung Junior's Room was pretty good.
"Wait," Hashimi mumbled next to Jin as some teams departed. They were likely the ones who had been disqualified, but they had been holding on to hope that if all were disqualified, a new selection would occur.
"This is wrong," the girl continued.
"What do you mean?" Jin asked, as the judges, for the first time, didn't lower a wooden pillar holding up the Illusion Room but kept it standing.
"From what you've shown me, their scenario has barely changed since you, ah, righteously got viewing rights as payment for the pain caused upon your person," Hashimi said.
"It was pretty last minute," Jin reminded her. "They can't do that much that fast," he said as he looked at Private Yang fighting alongside his fake comrades on the screen above.
"But considering the quality they reached after a few weeks, having an additional week at the end should have allowed another jump in quality," Hashimi argued.
"You're saying the incidence points don't provide a reasonable progression vector?" Jin asked curiously. "We only saw two stages, and maybe they peaked early so they could get on stage without looking so tired."
Hashimi bit her lower lip. "I don't know," she muttered. "Something doesn't seem right to me," she finished with a shrug.
The scenario on the podium finished with a now absolutely haggard-looking Private Yang exiting it.
The dude had been going through scenarios for several hours now while only being a mortal.
As if to showcase the callousness that came from misunderstanding a mortal's actual stamina -after all, what frame of reference did cultivators have?- The general did not switch out the soldier but bid the man to continue the testing.
It almost made Jin think that this was a punishment. Or was there a deeper underlying reason why the general had brought only one soldier with him?
"Oh, it's us, it's us," Hashimi suddenly said from beside him, ripping Jin from the thoughts he had been having.
He looked up to see Private Yang approach their Illusion Room and get sucked in.
The first scene of The Last of Us started playing on the floating projection, and the mood of the clearing immediately shifted.
This was the first time that a house was being shown in the mirage.
Someone laughed.
Jin looked over to see that it was Lung Junior.
"We gambled because we had no other choice," he told Hashimi. "Let's see if it pays off."
Everyone at the clearing spectated with rapt attention the development of Yang's playthrough of The Last of Us, not necessarily because they agreed with the scenario but because it was different from the other things they'd seen today.
Contrary to Jin's expectations, people didn't actually lose their patience with how long the narrative was, despite it taking several hours. Maybe that was because they were all cultivators, used to meditating and cultivating for days on end. Similarly, the older one grew, the more quickly time passed since one saw it in relation to the length of one's life.
For someone 10 years old, a week felt like a year. For an 80-year-old, it felt like a day. For someone who was 500? As was possible in the cultivation world? Perhaps it was only the blink of an eye.
Through Joel's daughter dying miserably in his arms to the time-skip to Boston, where he and Tess were tasked with bringing Ellie to Salt Lake City, nobody averted their eyes, and only some inner disciples snickered or made disparaging comments before returning to a state of focus when noting that nobody else was engaging with them.
The first time Yang confronted the clickers in the dark, only a spirit stone shard lighting his way, everyone held their breath. Later, when he was pulled up in a rope trap by the paranoid Bill and had to fight upside down, someone gasped.
Undoubtedly, of course, the person suffering the most was the soldier actually working his way through the Room.
-/-
It was after having seen the large hole in the ground filled with decomposed dead bodies, some of them still grasping whatever they'd managed to evacuate with in their hands, that Yang's mood finally turned from bad to apocalyptic.
He'd been fighting these zombies for hours on end now at the general's behest, who had claimed that the data would be most relevant if a single soldier went through all the so-called scenarios.
It was a gruelling, thankless job going through those Illusion Rooms, especially considering that since all of them were at least somewhat different, he hadn't been able to get used to the attack patterns of the zombies enough to fight them on automatic mode. Similarly, every one of those cultivators had given the walking corpses their own rotten smell that his nose had to get used to from the beginning.
Getting into the latest Illusion Room had at first been a respite. Some of the tasks he'd received in the form of notes, creepily enough, raised in front of his eyes by his own hands, were very easy. Some were walking around, and some were talking to people. But… The more time he spent in this Illusion Room, the more the thin line between reality and fiction blurred.
He found himself feeling empathy for some of the constructs and some genuine sadness at how his partner, Tess, had died after being infected.
When Ellie, his young companion, busted out another one of her abysmal jokes: "Why did the scarecrow get promoted? Because he was outstanding in his field..." He didn't even have the energy to rebuke her, but simply gave a hollow laugh as they marched towards their next destination.
-/-
After the two characters on the mirage screen, of which it was sometimes hard to determine which one was real and which one was the illusion, lost their means of transportation, arriving in Pittsburgh and teamed up with Henry and Sam, the two brothers, Jin couldn't help but lean in more closely in expectation.
Arguably, the game's horrible and moving moments had been happening since the beginning—the death of Joel's daughter, Tess, the way the paranoid Bill lived… But it was in Pittsburgh, where the experiencer reached the approximate middle of the narrative, that the immersion was heightened enough for the same gut punch to have an even larger effect.
-/-
After having run through what felt like the entirety of the city to finally escape it with their two new compatriots, Yang was horrified to realise that his body was locked up again, signifying another scene that he could not interrupt. He gazed helplessly at the young Sam, who suddenly looked up from his fetal position in the dilapidated shack outside of the city in which they had found shelter. There was no more humanity in his gaze.
The little boy jumped at Ellie, who just stood there in shock, before being promptly bisected by his own brother mid-air.
Henry, with a look of misery in his eyes that Yang had never seen before, looked down at the trembling arm holding the cutlass they'd liberated from some of the bandits in the city.
Then, just as the paralysis left Yang's body and he reached out a hand to stop what he knew was coming, Ellie, sitting on the floor, had blood splatters on her face; Henry turned the sword on himself and stabbed himself right through the heart.
Yang weakly lowered his extended hand as he trembled in place.
"No," he whispered. "Not like this."
Ellie screamed from her position on the floor, small body wracked by sobs.
-/-
After Henry and Sam's deaths, the disciples shifted uncomfortably in their positions. They didn't seem all that dismissive anymore, although, from the general mutterings, they didn't really think that Jin's Illusion Room represented any sort of competition.
That had been the problem with the whole challenge. Unable to compete on the combat level, Jin had been forced to go into the path of narrative.
The narrative was particularly powerful in a world that didn't have much of it.
People on modern Earth had grown numb to stories. After all, they were encumbered by narratives every day. Thousands of mini-narratives were consumed on social media. Generally, after work, people would go home to consume a larger-scale narrative in the form of a movie, an episode, or a video game. Even marketing used narratives to drive home the fact that it was their product that represented the platonic ideal of all products.
Here in this world, where opportunities that could have been were not, like Illusion Rooms, even the simplest story could impress the masses.
It had been the same back on Earth. In ancient times where there had been no entertainment to be had, people enjoyed going to a circus and paid to see a particularly hairy woman. In the modern era, such a thing was considered not only gauche but also uninteresting. With a simple tap on the screen, one could summon thousands of more interesting things. There was an active competition going on for people's attention spans.
Even then, The Last of Us stood out as a sublime narrative in a world of stories at war.
In this world, where people had no defences against narratives? Where the technology of Illusion Rooms could bring a narrative closer to the experiencer than any technology on Earth?
Looking around the disciples and even the Elders, Jin knew that even while losing, he had won.
The Last of Us fulfilled the army's criteria only in a very abstract sense: immersion, morale, and more fighting towards the end. But it was new, and new things were often disregarded.
However, judging by the facial expressions of the other disciples and even the stone-faced Elders, Jin knew that if he put his scenario in the library, he'd harvest an incredible amount of contribution points from his fellow disciples as they went on to experience and dissect it.
It was a professional curiosity, he imagined. Even if he'd lost the formula race because what he'd built hadn't necessarily been a car in the strictest sense, industry insiders were the ones who looked at all possibilities in their field.
Victory in defeat, he was still a bit salty that he'd been put into a situation where this was all that he could pursue.
-/-
AN: I just realised the value I put on stories is too high because I am a writer. RIP due to personal bias. Read ahead and support me on Patreonê. I'm actually currently working on an ad for this story, and have three options. In five days there will be an exclusive vote on patreon about which one I should use.