The contest to decide which Illusion Room would be used as an instruction tool for the army had been announced on incredibly short notice. It was matched only by the short amount of time that people had to complete their submissions before the deadline.

It was thus not particularly fortuitous, that Jin, from his first visit to the library to look at the transmission techniques onwards, had needed four days to learn how to encrypt information onto jade slips to allow file transference between him and Hashimi.

The girl meanwhile had needed five days to do the same, which was necessary since at some point she would also be sending data the other way around rather than just unravelling it.

While they'd been working on this rather unfortunately necessary project, it had soon crystallised that to stop potential further sabotage by Lung Junior, it was best to not let it be easily perceivable that they were working together.

This was why the two of them couldn't use any of the public rooms set aside for collaboration and were forced to make do with one of their apartments.

Considering that Hashimi's was filled with too many paintings and the supplies necessary for creating them to walk more than one metre in any direction, the dubious honour of hosting the unlikely duo fell on Jin's personal space.

It wasn't a big sacrifice of course, hardly mentionable as long as it was towards the goal of ultimate victory. Even if he sometimes grumbled that the girl forgot to take off her shoes when entering.

Scratch that, not sometimes but always.

"For fuck's sake! How many times do I have to tell you," he started from where he was sitting down at his simple wooden work desk, scribbling notes into a large roll of parchment as he saw the tall girl enter from his periphery.

Just because he'd been stuck learning the information transmission technique for so long didn't mean he could get other stuff done in the meantime.

The dark-skinned girl paused in her steps with her dirty feet raised in the air, set to take another crushing step against the hygiene of mankind. She cringed, like a child being caught in the act, before hopping around madly, falling over twice and finally managing to take off the offensive footwear.

"Sorry about that!" she said loudly and came over to sit next to Jin, reading the words he was writing down over his shoulder.

"Did anyone see you?" the boy muttered as he quickly finished up a paragraph.

"Yeah, Arshat saw us again. I'm pretty sure he thinks we're sleeping together," she said blithely, causing Jin to sputter. If he'd been drinking water he would have done a spit-take.

"He winked at me," Hashimi added.

Jin's face looked like he had bitten into a lemon. "Well, I guess it's better for him to think that than to know that we're working together," he muttered awkwardly.

The dark-skinned turned towards him with an offended look. "Is it so gross for you to imagine this body?" she said running her two hands down her curves which were hidden primarily by the beige robe that most inner disciples wore, not by their lack of existence.

Had he been back in America Jin would have pleaded the fifth at this point, unfortunately, there was no such easy escape available here. Especially when faced with someone who'd badger his nerves out of existence if he didn't give her a sufficient answer.

"You're like a sister to me?" he tried weakly, only to get a deadpan glare in return.

"Yesterday, you said that you're glad I'm not your sister, considering how you never would have gotten any peace until you'd moved out."

"Well, to be fair," Jin argued. "That is generally how people feel about their actual sisters."

Hashimi gave him a dubious look. "Hmmmmm," she hummed noncommittally. "Whatever you say, virgin."

Jin gave her a flat stare. He was very much beyond the age in which accusations of virginity would make him flustered.

He'd had sex in his last life, lots of it, in fact, despite the pandemic having put a bit of a damper on it in the later stages.

He suddenly remembered that technically, however, inhabiting a new body, … that he had never… he pulled the face.

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Hashimi's eyes widened as they locked in on him. Her hands shot up to her mouth as she gasped dramatically. "No," she whispered as if shaken by the insinuation.

One should note here that while cultivators and nobles didn't partake as much in sexual and romantic acts due to their inherent disinterest and prudishness, people with commoner backgrounds like he and Hashimi had often done the deed already.

At the end of the day, even if the concept of marriage still existed well and good, that didn't mean that people couldn't experiment a bit before getting hitched for life with one person.

"Leave me alone," Jin grumbled, not having any proof in this world that he had touched the pussy.

"Come on, Jin, there's nothing to be ashamed of, although maybe on our next trip outside of the sect, we can pass by a bigger town that has an establishment where we could find someone to take care of that last bit of…" she trailed off. Likely because of the look that Jin was leveraging at her.

It was a gaze of sheer disgust at the suggestion. Going to a brothel in a world where slavery existed simply meant becoming a rapist. The fact that the suggestion itself was coming from a woman just went to show how sexism was often perpetuated also by the oppressed gender in any given society.

Hashimi of course misunderstood his look of horror. She looked around shiftily, as if afraid that someone was going to overhear her next words. She leaned in to whisper closer to his ear. "Or do you prefer…" She put a big pause. "The flute?" she asked innocently with a blushing face.

"I will literally punch you," Jin said calmly. It was smart of Hashimi to notice that if his anger was cold, then the possibility of retaliation was actually much more likely than if it had been hot.

She mimed locking her mouth shut and leaned back in her chair. "It's okay. We don't have to talk about it," she said magnanimously. It would have been believable if she had not then spent the rest of the session giving him pitying looks.

-/-

One of the integral parts of the emotional effect that The Last of Us had on the player was created by the opening cutscene and the gameplay in which one played as Sarah, the daughter of the main protagonist Joel.

It was here that as one walked around the average American suburban house of the family, while the father was gone for work or other such things, one discovered hints about the incoming zombie apocalypse. Hospitalisation and street violence rates were soaring, and when you turned on the TV, the news reporters were talking about what seemed to be a fantastically unreal situation.

It was then that Joel returned, panicked and one got to play as a concerned father trying to evacuate his daughter from the dead zone that their hometown had become alongside his brother and their truck.

Then, in a confrontation with a soldier sent to create a buffer zone around the city, which was essentially gone, Sarah was shot and died in Joel's, the player's, arms.

It was this piece of initial trauma which was integral to understanding the tragic existence of the main character. Losing your child and then becoming a numb adult with non-existent coping mechanisms was the normal progression of such an event.

Then later being forced to work with another girl oddly similar to the daughter one had lost, naturally led to the opening up of the previously closed emotional pathways and it was this slow recovery from the trauma which made the last scene of the game so impactful. Joel had to choose to either let Ellie die for a chance to defeat the virus or to save her and potentially doom humanity.

Of course, the entirety of the beginning cutscene would have to be changed dramatically to fit into the cultivation land structure.

The entire house that Sarah and Joey were first seen in had to change to something more palatable to the mediaeval Asian palate of the world that Jin now inhabited.

It was here that the information-sharing technique both he and Hashimi had learned in the library came in handy. Joey was able to model a minimal requirement of structure that the scene and the gameplay needed in the introduction. Namely, the fact that it started inside a house with an open patio (a zombie would later crash through it). Then the streets which led to the eventual encounter with a soldier sent to quarantine the town.

As an interface between the two of them served as was usual in such cases, an Illusion Room in which they had both logged their signature for admin access.

Jin had dumped the base model of the level design into it so that Hashimi could start working on it and had then started working on the character design and the physics of the environment.

It was here that Hashimi impressed him because only in a few hours she had managed to create a rough 3D sketch of how the entire thing should look like.

Jin dropped into the still somewhat shoddy rendition of the now higher class house in which the subject would appear the first time they entered the Illusion Room and quickly shuffled himself through the sequences that led to the end of the cutscene at which Sarah died.

"Oh, you just died in my arms tonight," the boy quietly sang to himself as he gladly admitted that he wouldn't have been able to do what Hashimi had accomplished even if he'd had twice the amount of time.

Not only was she somewhat artistically talented which made the entire thing look better than he likely could have made it, but she stuck to the briefing with remarkable dedication.

The house looked lived in, but not like there had been too much effort put into doing so.

The roads in which the escape scenes occurred were sufficiently muddy and dirty to justify their use by what was the equivalent of medieval peasants with perhaps Roman levels of technology, while the cart that replaced the pick-up truck in the whole thing was rough and prone to splintering as one would expect.

The horses and the horrified masses filling the currently empty streets were up to Jin. He'd be able to reuse the movement models in the original game but would have to reskin the clothing of the people to fit the times.

"Very good," he complimented as he exited the illusion.

For her part, Hashimi was already starting to look drained even though they hadn't even properly started the marathon yet, but the genuine compliment seemed to brighten her mood and she gave him a bright smile. She wasn't a real game dev yet, obviously. A true game developer could marathon for 72 hours and the only thing that made them smile was black coffee with a dash of angustine bitters.

However, in an odd twisted expectations the smile that the girl was forming turned into a worried frown.

"Looking at the beginning part again, I have to ask. Is it necessary to have the daughter die in the arms of the experiencer before we start with the rest of the narrative?" she asked. "While we've made good progress in the last few hours, this will still need at least one more day to complete. I'm afraid that we might be losing too much time we could be spending doing something else."

Jin for his part nodded sagely as she worded her genuine and justified concerns.

The truth of the matter was that he knew exactly what kind of impact The Last of Us should have on the player. It shouldn't be any different here. It triggered all of the same emotions which weren't exclusive to Earth's modern era. Love for potential children and the human race and whatnot and not wanting it to go extinct. Being able to form parasocial relationships with pieces of media would, if anything, be even more powerful here since people hadn't experienced it before and because the Illusion Room, in comparison to a game, was fully immersive. They would smell Sarah, they would feel the slick blood escaping the dying child's body, and they would hear her ragged last breaths as the light left her eyes and her body turned cold.

The main issue, in this case, was that while he could change the surroundings and the character designs to fit more into the settings that he now inhabited, he didn't have time to create other narrative threats to build the necessary tension and emotional immersion that the beginning had seemed to create back in his world.

In the end, he had just about enough time to mirror essentially from the game everything that he could, and maybe then later he could start adding his own things. However, individuating the product based on personal preferences, beyond the necessary ones of setting and character design could also go very wrong. After all, the game had worked very well in his last life. Why change it?

For the moment, the only thing he could do to assuage Hashimi's worries was to nod seriously at her. "I assure you, Sarah's death and its realism are absolutely integral to the plot." He silently sent an apology to all the mortals in the army who actually had daughters, or children at all, and how this scene would likely impact them a bit more than it did the average virgin gamer on Earth.