Take It Out on the Substitute

May 10th, Gospel Country, the baths of the Funeral Agency. It was seven in the morning, and daylight had already broken. Yaxiu walked over in his swim trunks and heard voices coming from inside. Peeking in, he found that someone had already claimed spots in the bath. *Splash!* Yaxiu dove straight in, kicking up a ring of spray. Igola promptly used a sorcery spirit to blow the droplets right back, his face full of disgust. "( *￣︿￣) Yaxiu, how old are you this year? Did you even graduate from the senior class at the rearing institute?" On the other side, Harvey lay on a hydro-massage lounger submerged in the water, puffing on cat grass smoke while bubbling jets kneaded his muscles. The necromancer had also switched on the overhead sunlamp, basking beneath its warm yellow glow with the utmost contentment. He was the very picture of the saying, *anywhere is a beach if your heart is in it.* Frankly, compared to Yaxiu and Igola, Harvey was actually quite normal. With his dark skin, he looked like a common laborer, and he never spoke with biting sarcasm. Though his moral baseline was low, his desires were equally modest—he was simply the type to take things as they came. If Harvey had arrived in Gospel Country all on his own, he probably would have ended up as a stray drifter waiting to be picked up by some wealthy cougar, doing chores by day and robbing graves by night, living a thoroughly cozy life. Even taking into account his necrophilia and his sweet tooth, neither really harmed anyone else—one only troubled corpses, and the other only troubled himself. When Yaxiu really thought about it, it was almost acceptable... Yaxiu splashed water onto his face and submerged his entire head into the pool. *I'm doomed,* Yaxiu thought. Spending too much time around this crowd had lowered his standards so far that Harvey, simply by being marginally less vile than Igola and Annan, actually started looking decent. "What were you two chatting about just now?" Yaxiu asked, relaxing his body in the bath. His stiff muscles answered his pampering with aches. "Igola, are you recommending movies again?" "Why would I recommend anything when you never watch them?" Igola said coldly. "The one I recommended last time, *A Wife's Redemption*, is the single most unmissable masterpiece in Gospel Country over the past decade." "It's not that I didn't want to watch it, but where would I find the time—" "Can't you just watch it on thirty-two-times speed?" "If I had a gun right now, I'd shoot you dead on the spot and then ask you why you didn't dodge." "We were talking about artistic creation," Harvey said, exhaling a wisp of pale green cat smoke. "Specifically, how to craft a good character." Although it felt a little bizarre for them to be discussing this, Yaxiu didn't think much of it and casually remarked, "Then you've come to the right man. Character design is my bread and butter. You'd better wash your ears and listen closely to every pearly drop of wisdom I'm about to drop." "What, were you a novelist before? What famous masterpieces did you write? I do read when I have free time; perhaps I've perused one of your grand works," Igola scoffed. "I didn't write books, but my profession demanded character design far more than writing ever could," Yaxiu said with easy confidence. "Our entire industry survives on crafting characters to fleece kids out of their money." Igola instinctively opened his mouth to retort, but after a moment's thought, he gave a pensive nod. "Right... You used to be a cult leader. You really are an expert." Yaxiu figured Igola must have developed some bizarre misconception about the job description of a cult leader, but he couldn't be bothered to correct him. He pressed on, "Crafting a great character involves many dimensions: appearance, personality, abilities, background, ideals, dreams... But when you boil it down to the essentials, it comes down to just two things: sexual functionality and practical utility." Igola and Harvey blinked, clearly stunned by Yaxiu's crude yet razor-sharp breakdown. "The beautiful-strong-tragic type, the unhinged beauties, the brooding cold machines, the dazzling high-born blossoms... The reason these archetypes resonate so deeply and gain immense popularity is that they satisfy those two fundamental needs: sexual appeal and practical utility. When designing a character, you only need to ask yourself two questions: Can this character arouse your desires? Can this character solve your problems? If the answer to both is yes, then you have a successful character. "As for whether that character becomes an enduring classic celebrated for generations, that depends on a spark of inspiration and the course of history. You can't force it." As an operations planner for a mobile game company, Yaxiu hadn't directly handled character creation, but he had attended the company's internal training seminars. He knew all too well how character designers methodically extracted cash from middle- and high-school students. If individual creation was like stumbling upon poetic inspiration by pure chance, then a mobile game company was an industrial assembly line, churning through permutations of trendy tropes to pack in 'sexual functionality' and 'gameplay utility' until the player couldn't resist opening Alipay at first glance. Harvey seemed deeply enlightened. Snapping his cat grass cigar, he climbed out of the tub and casually draped a towel over his shoulders. "As expected of a former cult leader. Coming to you was definitely the right call. Inspiration is burning through me right now, so I'm heading back to my room to create." Watching Harvey leave in such a rush, Yaxiu scratched his head. "Strange. Harvey doesn't look like the type who writes novels..." Igola also stepped out of the bath. He gave his long, dripping hair a shake, tossed a bath towel across his shoulders, and ran a hand through his damp bangs to sweep them back. He shot Yaxiu a sideways glance. "Who told you he was writing a novel?" Yaxiu froze as a sudden realization dawned on him. He stared wide-eyed at Igola. "When he asked for character design tips, he was planning to use them on a virtual character, right?" Igola looked back without a word and walked straight out of the bathhouse. Panic crept into Yaxiu's voice. "It's a virtual character, right!?" *** Yaxiu was left alone in the bath once more. Outside, the sun gradually climbed, ushering in a fresh day of blooming vitality for Azula as warm rays refracted through the bathwater. Yaxiu let the water's buoyancy lift his frame, floating motionless on the surface like a corpse. Three days ago, when Yaxiu had returned with Annan early in the morning, he had run into Igola and Harvey just as they clocked out from the Void Realm, sitting in the living room seemingly waiting for him. Feeling guilty that he hadn't brought back any gifts from his outing, Yaxiu had invited them to soak in the bath together, distracting them by venting about the Gospel political system. That seemed to have set a precedent. Over the past three days, whenever they clocked out from the Void Realm, they would come soak in the bath and exchange trash talk. In doing so, Yaxiu had quickly realized that their capacity for Void Realm exploration was formidable—both of them consistently arrived only after dawn, which meant they each spent a full six hours exploring the Time Continent. While they lacked a map and a sports car, falling far behind Yaxiu in terms of technique, flair, and depth, they clearly had their own unique means of exploration, matching Yaxiu in sheer stamina. Yaxiu even suspected they possessed mounts of their own. Otherwise, at least half their soul energy would have been burned just traveling, and they would have burned out in three hours rather than lasting six. Harvey's method was easy to guess: he was either riding a skeletal steed or a skeletal minion, or perhaps even improvising on the spot by mounting a skeletal Fishcleaver Dragon. Igola's was harder to pinpoint. Could his mind faction really be strong enough to hypnotize sapient creatures into serving as his mounts? No, that wasn't it. Yaxiu recalled asking Igola yesterday during their soak whether he had ever used mind miracles for anything illicit. Igola had replied: "First of all, what you're imagining is certainly within my power. But I can achieve that even without miracles, and I got bored of it long ago. Second, Yaxiu, shake the water out of that head of yours. If you could hypnotize anyone, why wouldn't you just hypnotize yourself? "Hypnotizing yourself is far simpler and more effective. You can set up whatever scenario, whatever partner, and whatever content you like. In reality, you might still be constrained by physical limits, but in a hallucination, you can be as vigorous as you wish... In truth, mind sorcerers rarely hypnotize others directly. Instead, they use linguistic and physical cues to guide others into arriving at the desired conclusion on their own. "Only clumsy mind sorcerers rely on miracles to force their objectives. Most of the time, the subject a mind sorcerer hypnotizes is themselves. "The mind faction exists not to twist others, but to shape oneself." So Igola most likely wasn't hypnotizing knowledge creatures—he was hypnotizing himself with the belief that *walking doesn't tire me in the slightest!* In truth, that was how normal sorcerers tackled the Void Realm: practitioners of different factions relied on their respective arts to overcome the environment's adverse effects. In the Sea of Knowledge, there was indeed no way around it; everyone started out clumsy and had to swim through with sheer grit. But once they reached the Time Continent, everyone possessed a foundation in their factions and could figure out ways to mitigate the environmental penalties. This was essentially a filter—sorcerers who couldn't conquer the environment were simply the failures in the sorcerer evolutionary hierarchy. In a sense, Yaxiu and his companions had been thoroughly spoiled by cruising through the upstream gold rain in a sports car, making them utter anomalies slipping through the cracks of that evolutionary system. Without properly cultivating their adaptability to unfamiliar environments, they would inevitably pay the price down the road. Yaxiu and his crew were well aware of this, yet none of them had any intention of making amends. *Cross that bridge when we get there. A person needs to have dreams; who says we'll ever have to pay that price?* With that thought, Yaxiu turned his ring to summon the Book of Gospel and flipped to the page for the *Sorcerer Manual*. A prompt immediately popped up. [Dead Frenzy Sword Princess's Growth Report: 5.3–5.9] [Swordsmanship Faction: Silver → Gold] [Light Sorcery Faction: Silver → Silver] [Water Sorcery Faction: Silver → Silver] [Mind Faction: Silver → Silver] [Sorcery Power: Gold Void Wings → Gold One Feather] [Training Evaluation: A!] [For achieving an A-rank evaluation, Dead Frenzy Sword Princess receives a class enhancement from the Sorcerer Manual: Wild Dancer → Clan-Exterminating Gold Sorcerer!] [Clan-Exterminating Gold Sorcerer Class Trait: Damage dealt to groups of knowledge creatures increased by 10%.] [Class Trial Quest 'Wild Dance' (10,000 slashes) complete! The Wild Dancer class trait is now permanently solidified!] [Wild Dancer (Permanent Class): Attacking the same target grants +2% attack speed, stacking up to 5 times. Lost immediately upon switching targets.] Over the past two days, their primary focus in the Void Realm had been helping Sword Princess complete her class trial quest. Fortunately, she had acquired the new miracle 'Blood Blossom Water Moon.' Not only was it an instant-cast, high-damage burst, but a single activation also stacked dozens of valid slashes; when used against clustered swarms, it could land hundreds in an instant. Even so, Yaxiu and the others had wiped out over a dozen nests of White Raptors, Dire Wolf Dragons, and Ferry Bird Dragons over the last two days. Sword Princess's new class, 'Clan-Exterminating Gold Sorcerer,' was clearly related to that. The essence materials gained from raiding those nests and exterminating entire clans had been more than enough to feed Sword Princess's 'Surge' and 'Moon Silk' sorcery spirits, as well as the Black and White Witch's 'Water Line' and 'Sharp Claw' spirits, up to Two Wings. Yaxiu checked Sword Princess's interface and saw that her class entry had indeed updated to [Clan-Exterminating Gold Sorcerer / Wild Dancer]. However, even with her swordsmanship faction advancing from Silver to Gold, her evaluation had only reached an A. It seemed an S-rank was reserved exclusively for breakthroughs in sorcery power. That made sense. If S-ranks were easy to achieve and class trial quests triggered readily, wouldn't every operator end up with a dozen classes by the late game? Yaxiu even imagined an introduction line: *Standing before you is the Wild Dancer of the Tempest, the White Flame upon the Tomb, the Sword Sovereign who wields the Scepter of Death, the Clan-Exterminator of Fishcleaver Dragons... the Dead Frenzy Sword Princess, master of twenty-three classes!* Though there were no unexpected surprises, Sword Princess's progress hadn't disappointed him in the slightest. But when Yaxiu opened the Black and White Witch's growth report, his good mood for the day came to an abrupt end. [Black and White Witch's Growth Report: 5.3–5.9] [Mind Faction: Silver → Silver] [Fist and Claw Faction: Gold → Gold] [Time Faction: Silver → Silver] [Water Sorcery Faction: Silver → Silver] [Sorcery Power: Gold One Feather → Gold Two Feathers] [Training Evaluation: B!] [For achieving a B-rank evaluation, Black and White Witch receives a class enhancement from the Sorcerer Manual: Clan-Exterminating Follower!] [Clan-Exterminating Follower: Damage dealt to groups of knowledge creatures increased by 5%.] A B-rank evaluation!? This was the first time Yaxiu had ever received such a low grade—this wasn't just a spanking for the Witch, it was a direct slap to his own face! Still soaking in the water, he quickly calmed down. Previously, Sword Princess had been a blank slate starting from scratch, leveling rapidly and naturally earning high marks. The Witch, on the other hand, had started at Two Wings, with her primary faction already at Gold rank and several secondary factions established. Achieving massive leaps in a short period was simply impossible—not to mention that she was under the 'Curse of the Bronze Dragon,' unable to undergo regular training and forced to spend every day on leisure. If Sword Princess hadn't pushed her swordsmanship faction to Gold rank this week, her evaluation likely would have been a B as well. In other words, starting next week, unless the operators achieved major breakthroughs like 'substantial sorcery power increases' or 'advancing a faction to Gold rank,' they would probably only pull B-ranks or even C-ranks. *Should I pull the gacha?* Yaxiu glanced at his savings and let out the weary sigh of a destitute breadwinner. Lately, their intake of sorcery spirits hadn't been large; they mostly harvested raw materials to feed their existing spirits. Furthermore, after Yaxiu advanced to Two Wings, the recycling price for one-winged sorcery spirits had dropped to 5 points, and two-winged spirits fetched only 10 points. After a full week of accumulation, he had only reached 211 points, still quite a ways off from the double-yield first-purchase tier of 328. As for this week's training policy, things would naturally proceed as usual: the Witch would continue her leisure, while Sword Princess trained... Yaxiu paused, recalling that he had promised to arrange some recreational activities for Sword Princess. Sword Princess had three action points in total, and a single leisure activity cost two. Besides, once she had indulged in recreation, Yaxiu wasn't ruthless enough to make her jump right back into training. The main issue was that training right after leisure would yield poor results. It was like sneaking in a mobile game on the toilet at work; once you returned to your desk, your mind would still be preoccupied with how you could have played that last match better. So it would be leisure plus rest, allowing Sword Princess to savor a taste of rosy school life. Now then, which day should he give her off? Yaxiu thought it over and scheduled her 'Rosy Day' for tomorrow, the 11th. He had originally considered today, but today was somewhat special. To avoid complications, it was safer to have Sword Princess attend school and train as usual. With the training policy set, Yaxiu headed back to his room to change. When he emerged, he found everyone gathered in the living room, and by the looks of it, they weren't having breakfast. "You're just in time, Yaxiu," Igola said. "Come answer a multiple-choice question." "Do you prefer this one?" Igola held out a potion vial filled with a dreamy, shimmering pink liquid. "Or do you prefer this?" Lisi hoisted a bloodstained spiked club. "Or perhaps this?" Annan dangled a pair of silver handcuffs from her fingers. Handcuffs + spiked club + aphrodisiac = ? Yaxiu's mind spun at breakneck speed. He instantly channeled his sorcery spirit and summoned his Substitute. The Substitute struck a battle-ready stance, primed to walk through fire and brimstone for Yaxiu— "Whatever grudge you have, take it out on the Substitute! Leave me out of this!" Substitute: "..."