At that moment, scattered bullet comments drifted across the sky.
[Eh? It really is Senior Brother Shen!]
[What kind of illusion is this? It looks so weird...]
[Why is Senior Brother Shen sitting in a jar?]
[Damn! Another one of Lu Ze's new illusions? Is it hard? Is it brutal?]
...
Seeing viewers enter the livestream, Shen Yan immediately perked up with full focus.
"Hard? No no no, not at all."
Maintaining a smile, Shen Yan painstakingly adjusted the force in his arms.
By now, he had already sensed the real challenge Lu Ze had designed into this illusion.
It was the highly unusual way of exerting force with the arms—
A bizarre sensation that made his mind and limbs feel completely uncoordinated...
Awkward. Extremely awkward.
But remembering Lu Ze's words, he figured he just hadn’t reached the state of "unity between man and hammer" yet, which eased his frustration somewhat.
Suppressing the urge to scream, he pressed on.
"This illusion was designed by Brother Lu to help me comprehend the wondrous state of unity between man and hammer... If any of you are interested, feel free to join in."
Shen Yan said with a smile.
The bullet comments immediately panicked.
[No thanks]
[Maybe next time]
[Just watching is torture...]
...
"How is it torture? It’s just using a hammer to walk instead of your limbs."
Shen Yan retorted.
By now, he had somewhat grasped the trick to pushing forward on flat ground, and he hobbled his way to a thick, withered tree.
"Look at the obstacles in those previous illusions—so difficult! Now look at Getting Over It—just a simple tree! All we have to do is climb over it!"
While chatting casually with the viewers, Shen Yan adjusted his arms and hooked the hammer onto a protruding branch of the tree.
"First like this, then like this... and with a little force—!"
With a sudden twist of his arms, he and the jar went flying into the air—
Only to crash hard onto the branch and bounce back to the ground, looking utterly disheveled.
But despite the mess, he had, against all odds, managed to get past the tree.
This came as a surprise to Lu Ze.
In his past life, this very tree had stumped countless beginners.
As expected of a skilled player—he made it through so smoothly.
If it were Zhong Yi, who knew how many tries it would’ve taken?
Back when Zhong Yi’s digital soul was serving as a beta tester for Lu Ze, even after the entire scene was fully built, he was still stuck staring blankly at the tree.
Even resorting to smacking the tree angrily with the hammer in frustration...
...
Of course, Lu Ze wasn’t worried.
In his past life, plenty of players had cleared the tree in one go, only to lose their minds later anyway.
After all, this wasn’t even the tutorial level.
True to his expectations, Shen Yan soon began tumbling down the first valley slope repeatedly.
The real difficulty of Getting Over It lay in the extreme discomfort of its controls.
After porting the 2D mechanics from his past life into the illusion, it became even more disorienting.
The slightest misstep would make his left and right hands work against each other.
Just like Shen Yan right now.
What he intended to do and what he actually did were often two completely different things.
The longer he played, the more a restless heat seemed to burn through his body.
A simple slope had already sent him crashing down over 20 times!
Meanwhile, more and more viewers were tuning into the stream.
[He fell again...]
[So brutal!]
[His arms are all twisted up from swinging that hammer]
[What kind of sadistic design is this? Just watching makes me physically uncomfortable]
[Only Senior Brother Shen could handle this! I’d be crying if it were me]
[Even Senior Brother’s expression is starting to look off...]
[Adding Lu Ze’s illusions to my blacklist from now on!]
[Agreed]
...
Noticing the growing flood of comments, Shen Yan hurriedly adjusted his expression.
After all, as the face of the Tianxuan Sect, he couldn’t afford to lose his composure.
"Junior brothers, Brother Lu’s illusions aren’t as bad as you think!"
He quickly defended Lu Ze.
"If you find the illusion torturous, it’s only because your Dao hearts aren’t yet steadfast enough."
"No matter how bitter or difficult this is, it’s still just an illusion... If you can’t face a trial meant to temper your will, how can you hope to overcome the tribulations on the path of immortality?"
"We’re just experiencing an illusion—you have to make sure you’re enjoying yourselves."
Forcing a strained smile, he continued:
"Do you know what it means to please yourself?"
"It’s about making yourself happy... Heh, hehehe..."
This sudden burst of motivational speaking left the viewers stunned, and they marveled:
[Senior Brother Shen’s mental fortitude is truly beyond ordinary people!]
[As expected of a natural-born Dao seed]
[I get it, but I’ll still just stick to watching...]
[Let’s all be happy! Everyone type ‘haha’ in the chat!]
[Haha]
...
Seeing the chat play along, Shen Yan felt gratified.
"When playing illusions, we must always smile—no frowning allowed."
With an eerie chuckle, he swung the hammer, inching his way upward.
Higher and higher.
"Like this... playing illusions with a smile..."
The moment the words left his mouth—
The hammer slipped into a crevice in the rocks, and a strange force sent him flying backward, all the way back to the bottom of the valley.
"GODDAMMIT!!! F!!!"
. As long as he maintains the villain image and follows the plot to the grand finale, he can obtain generous rewards and return to the real world. So Gu Chen'an entered the role and began to act as a scumbag villain, but who would have expected that the female leads could hear his inner thoughts. Miss Su from the Su family was shocked: "I originally thought Gu Chen'an was a scumbag, but I didn't expect he turned out to be a gentleman! What? You said I have to call off the engagement? I definitely won't, I'll piss you off!" Bai Yuan Tian was dumbfounded: "Young Master Gu is usually unreasonable and a complete brat, but he actually calls me little sweetie in his heart? What, Young Master Gu even said he likes me?" As the female leads' images collapsed more and more, the plot also collapsed with it. Gu Chen'an looked at all this chaos. "Ladies, don't aggro me, if you keep this up the male lead really will stab me, I still need to survive to the grand finale!"
s the Eldest Princess, renowned for her cold and aloof detachment, became the most docile of lambs, obeying his every command without question. But when the final move was played on the chessboard, as Gu Chenghan seized everything and ascended on the verge of apotheosis, that very Princess suddenly embraced him from behind, her tone carrying a dependence never heard before: "Wait... you haven't yet... commanded me to love you forever." Gu Chenghan froze abruptly. She... hadn't been hypnotized?! ... [The Eldest Princess's Diary] [When my soul was extracted, becoming the sole spectator outside my own shell] [At first, there was overwhelming fury, until I saw] [How he used my sword to effortlessly shatter my inescapable doom] [How he wielded my authority to eradicate fatal conspiracies I had never even detected] [Like a deity, he rescued me from the deep mire I was trapped in] [If not for those annoying vixens, he and I would be a match made in heaven] [I think I am ill, gravely ill] [My deity should belong to me alone] ... "Hypnosis? Oh, it succeeded, my dear Master." "Only this time, it's my turn to hypnotize you."
nd fell into a coma while saving his younger sister from an out-of-control car. He became a vegetable. No one knew that his consciousness had crossed into a world of cultivation. Over the course of sixty years, he began as the lowest kind of mine slave, struggling to survive amid mountains of corpses and seas of blood. By sheer chance, he eventually obtained the complete memories of a fallen Immortal King. Alchemy, medicine, formations, feng shui, physiognomy, artifact forging… Every great inheritance of the cultivation world was now his. But when he opened his eyes again, he discovered that ten full years had passed in the modern world. To pay for his treatment, his father had sold the family’s shop and house, leaving himself covered in lasting injuries and illness. His mother had cared for him day and night, and more than half of her hair had already turned white. His younger sister, who had been only fifteen back then, was now twenty-five. To help repay the family’s debts, she had been forced to lower her head and put on a smiling face in places of glittering lights and endless revelry. Only then did Chen Xuan understand that what he had lost was not merely ten years. He had lost the life his entire family was meant to have. The good news was that he had brought back the memories of an Immortal King’s entire lifetime. The bad news was that his soul had returned alone—his cultivation had not come with him. Spiritual energy was scarce, resources were depleted, and the modern world still had firearms, surveillance, capital, and laws. If he wanted to protect his family, break free from everyone’s control, and become truly invincible beneath the heavens, he would have to start all over again.
e bizarre and supernatural had descended. The previous emperor was a thoroughgoing tyrant; no longer satisfied with human women, he had set his sights on a stunningly beautiful supernatural entity. He met his end in his bedchamber, drained of all his vital essence. As the legitimate eldest son and crown prince, Wang Hao was thus hastily enthroned, becoming the young emperor of the Great Zhou Dynasty. No sooner had he awakened the "Imperial Sign-In Intelligence System" than he was assassinated by a Son of Destiny—a classic villain's opening. The Great Zhou, ravaged by the former emperor's excesses, was in national decline. The great families within its borders harbored their own treacherous schemes, martial sects began to defy the imperial court's decrees, and border armies, their pay and provisions in arrears, grumbled incessantly against the central government. Fortunately, the central capital was still held secure by the half-million Imperial Guards and fifty thousand Imperial Forest Army who obeyed the court's orders, along with the royal family's hidden reserves of power, barely managing to suppress the realm. As the Great Zhou's finances worsened and supernatural activities grew ever more frequent, the court sat atop a volcano. Ambitious plotters everywhere dreamed of overthrowing the dynasty, and even some reclusive ancient powers emerged, attempting to sway the tides of the world. At the first grand court assembly, the civil and military officials nearly came to blows, fighting tooth and nail over the allocation of fifty million taels of silver from the summer tax revenues. The spectacle opened Wang Hao's eyes—the Great Zhou's bureaucracy was not only corrupt but also martially proficient, a cabinet of all-rounders. Some officials even had the audacity to suggest the emperor release funds from the imperial privy purse to address the emergency. Wang Hao suddenly felt weary. Let it all burn.
