There were a lot of issues plaguing Jin's life recently. He'd been reborn into a world which didn't have a functional plumbing system. Everyone around him was suffering from some disease that made them unstable enough to declare blood feuds regularly. After this whole invasion thing was over, he would have to participate in a tournament and get his ass beaten. Additionally, because of his inability to compete with other disciples in the recent scenario competition with the traditional skills of the sect, he was forced to create a narrative structure game to at least make it look like he was trying. All the while, Lung Junior and his posse were trying to sabotage him.

However, when you boiled it down, all of this was relative. The Chinese had a saying: do not look at the nation's wealth, but at your neighbour's wealth.

It has been two days since the zombie mutation had been widely disseminated across the Inner Ring. A new enemy which abandoned eyesight for echolocation while also strengthening its basic physical capacities. Suffice it to say that it had changed the plans of more than just one team.

Recently, every time Jin went to eat at the food hall, he had the pleasure of seeing a bunch of otherwise haughty beige-robed disciples run around like headless chickens, trying to modify their scenarios to fit the new context.

It was very easy to see during the meals who was adapting better and who was adapting worse. Those who had been completely blindsided by the news simply sat there with their group in a daze, looking at nothing and not touching their food. It was obvious that they had started the creation process of the scenario in a way that made it hard to include new variables.

Creating scenarios was something that Jin could often only compare to art, but there was doubtlessly also a sort of coding logic to it. It was very easy to create a set of two incompatible parameters, which were not as easy to untangle unless one had left behind sufficient safe points and documentation. The joke, of course, was that just like most programmers from modern Earth, most Illusion Room cultivators didn’t bother doing that. The complexity of reversal and subsequent deviation was especially true in collaborative projects where, if several people made a mess, it would take all of them working together to fix it.

A group of rather richly dressed young men walked past Jin, where he was eating his ramen and sneered at him. He ignored them and looked into his broth, grimaced and saw the reflection of his face on the surface of the liquid in its bowl.

The team that had been seemingly the least impacted by the changing tides had been Lung Junior and his crew. They’d likely gotten the news as quickly as Jin had, considering their connections.

He’d done his best to mimic panic in the last few days to make it look like he had either screwed up the introduction of the new variable or that perhaps he hadn't even found a team in the first place. He let them think what they wanted. As long as he didn't stand out too much, they probably wouldn't even bother to investigate and find out that he was much further ahead than any of them thought.

Slow and steady wins the race was perhaps a motto everyone knew, but another motto had to do with being stealthy to avoid sabotage. In other words, if someone heard you sneaking up behind them, they’d likely dodge the stab in the back you were planning.

Regardless, in a slightly better mood, knowing that with the new information, several groups had likely been kicked out of the running, Jin quickly finished his food and started making his way home.

There was nothing better in life than seeing one's competitors suffer from the introduction of information one had been privileged to already. Was this what it felt like to be a senator with a stock brokerage account?

Unfortunately, once he arrived in the co-working space that he shared with Hashimi, his apartment, he received a confusing bit of news that would likely negatively impact his own efforts.

Hashimi was sitting on one of his two chairs, reading the plot summary of the next arc that they had to cover. It was the cannibal arc in which Ellie ended up being kidnapped by David, the leader of a group of survivors who had resorted to eating human flesh to stay alive in the harsh winter.

“I'm sorry, Jin, but I just can't work on this,” she started after the boy had entered his room. “Just reading about… I mean, eating other people, that's just… wrong!” she exclaimed loudly and slapped down the scroll that she'd been reading from.

Jin, for his part, gave her a confused look before seeing from her stern face that she was serious.

“What's the problem?” he asked.

“You don't see the problem?” Hashimi responded and sputtered, “They're eating other people. We can't show this!”

“But Hashimi,” Jin started before shutting his mouth and holding up a finger. “Can you just let me think for a second?” he asked before going to his bed and sitting down with arms crossed.

Hashimi awkwardly looked at him before nodding.

Jin, meanwhile, retreated into his mind to try to understand what was wrong.

The structure of The Last of Us wasn't that complicated, at least in comparison to some other games from Modern Earth.

The story has been illicitly taken; should you find it on Amazon, report the infringement.

Joel and Tess, two smugglers, hunted down a man, Robert, who owed them a shipment of weapons. After killing several of his guards and finding him, they discovered that Robert had given the shipment to the Fireflies because he owed them a favour. The Fireflies were a group fighting against the tyranny of the government forces who held up what little was left of civilisation. After killing Robert, they met Marlene, the leader of the Fireflies, who told them that they would receive twice the amount of weapons that they had lost if only they helped the Fireflies smuggle an object to the city hall outside of the still-inhabited Boston area under the control of the quarantine zone authorities.

The journey to get even to this point was relatively complex, including a lot of combat with enemies that weren't even zombies; Jin had, after some thinking, made this part much shorter to get to the meat more quickly.

Joel and Tess soon discovered that the object they were supposed to smuggle was actually a young girl supposedly immune to the virus, which had been the cause of the apocalypse. Tess got bitten and died, but not before entrusting the cynical Joel with the mission of bringing Ellie to wherever she had to go to give humanity one last chance of fighting back.

The pair continued their journey and acquired a horse with Bill's help, which allowed them to eventually reach the next city. However, once there, they were held up by a gang of humans and could only escape with the help of the two brothers, Sam and Henry.

Sam was only 13 years old and ended up getting infected in the process. Ellie desperately tried to make him drink her blood, hoping that there was something in it to reverse the infection, but it didn't work. Henry, the older brother, was forced to kill the younger one and then immediately committed suicide afterwards.

After meeting Joel's estranged brother and continuing their journey, Joel was eventually injured while looting a university campus, where they discovered that the Fireflies had moved to Salt Lake in Utah. It was at this point that the experiencer took control of Ellie and found themselves confronted with a group that wanted to recruit her due to her ability to hunt. After trading deer meat for restorative potions for Joel, the group leader, David, captured Ellie, and it was revealed that under his leadership his group had resorted to eating humans. The implication that came with her refusal was that if Ellie wouldn’t hunt for the group, she would provide sustenance in another way.

Joel eventually recovered enough to come and help but arrived too late, as Ellie had already committed her first murder of another human being in self-defence.

The reason Jin was confused as to why Hashimi suddenly refused to work on this part of the scenario was that they had already covered enough horrible topics. The fact that the scenario led the Experiencer to kill other humans, as well as zombies, was already controversial enough in Jin's personal opinion.

Hashimi also hadn't spoken about the long paths that had to be taken to move between certain locations, which, in Jin's opinion, were useful because they underlined that the age of man had ended. She hadn't complained about Tess’ sacrifice and her relatively pointless death. She hadn't complained about seeing Sam become infected and then being killed by his brother, who then committed suicide.

So why did this particular part of the scenario make her want to quit?

“We've already done so many horrible things. We have suicide,” Jin thus started, “we have murder, we have smuggling. What is it about this particular part that makes you not want to work on it?”

“It's because you can't eat people, Jin!” Hashimi exclaimed once again.

“I'm not advocating that we eat people! I'm pretty sure that the game argues against doing that. The people doing it, in fact, mostly die. Implying that they're being punished by the Heavens.”

Hashimi threw up her hands. “Did you grow up under a rock!?” she shouted. “It's just not done!”

Jin crossed his arms. He'd been afraid during the whole time that if deviating from the script provided by the game, which had been wildly successful, he would fail to create something which merited a subversion of tradition and thus allow them to compete in the first place.

Thinking about it, changing the fact that the group of people had debased themselves to eating other humans essentially made the whole arc of Ellies capture pointless. Sure, she would still undergo the traumatic experience of killing someone. However, not showing the fact that humans resorted to the lowest of the low just to survive kind of missed the point. The soldiers had to see the kind of world that their loss could create.

He anxiously thought about what kind of effect this could have on the overall structure. He was pretty sure that he told the whole story to Hashimi back when he’d explained his vision, but he couldn't deny that he was the one leading most of this project and might have forgotten to mention everything.

“So by refusing to work on it, you mean?” he trailed off.

“The whole house, the prison cell, the butchery, I'm not gonna do it,” the girl replied heatedly with a red face.

The way that Jin and Hashimi worked together was that the former gave the latter a base-level structure that she would elaborate on with the cultural elements and architectural aesthetic that she had mastered to a level higher than him. For this arc, he had given her the surroundings of this cannibal base and had specified that in the house, there should be a room with racks of meat and human bodies. It was rather grotesque, he admitted, seeing the skinned and disembowelled humans being hung up on hooks like cattle, but he hadn't expected such a reaction.

“Would it be okay if I do this part then?” he queried. They weren't really in a situation where they could stop dividing the tasks now, but he could take over some of the load. The results would probably just be disproportionately different enough to tear the Experiencer straight out of their immersion. He winced.

“If you told me clearly from the beginning, I wouldn't have started this at all,” Hashimi argued. “And no, I think this scenario shouldn't contain these themes at all. Eating humans that’s what monsters do. Monsters and demonic cultivators.”

Jin considered for a second. Hashimi’s reaction was too strong not to be genuine. She was also involved in the project, so it wasn’t like she wasn’t invested.

He was starting to feel like he was missing something.

It was almost like he was missing a cultural nuance. The equivalent of going to the middle east and suggesting to a Taliban member that their beard would look wonderful with a moustache to match it.

He dragged his hands down his face. “Explain, please,” he asked. “Explain from the beginning, explain like I’m five,” he begged the girl.

Hashimi reeled back as if surprised that he really didn’t know, despite all the previous indicators that he’d given that he really didn’t.

“I guess,” she started slowly, “that it all begins with the first demonic

cultivator.” A grimace. “Shi Xin Zhe.”