A stiff smile froze on Ding Mingcang's face.
He had never expected such a response.
In his eyes,
as a dignified elder of the sect, having taken the initiative to propose a compromise,
a mere disciple—
not even an inner disciple, just a nominal one—
how dare they speak to him like this?
Around Ding Mingcang, imperceptible waves of energy surged and churned.
If not for the crowd watching, he would have struck without hesitation.
Zhao Wendao gave him a meaningful glance, forcing Ding Mingcang to suppress his killing intent.
"What a fine 'honor the bet'... Fine!"
Ding Mingcang gritted his teeth, his eyes locked onto Lu Ze.
"Then today, I shall witness just how 'endless' this Endless Mode truly is..."
"And how you plan to clear these stages!"
"If you can clear 50 stages in front of all the disciples, then this old man will gladly admit defeat!"
Though he hadn’t personally attempted Endless Mode, according to Qian Yutang’s intelligence, its difficulty was beyond ordinary comprehension.
Over the past three days, the sect’s highest record was only 20 stages.
And that was a miserable failure!
No matter how he thought about it, Lu Ze must have designed it deliberately to prevent anyone from clearing it.
Even he himself couldn’t do it.
"Very well, let’s begin then."
Lu Ze smiled faintly.
He had long anticipated Ding Mingcang’s refusal to back down.
Reaching this point was no surprise to him.
What a joke…
A mere fifty stages?
For someone like him—a professional in his past life who had collaborated with netizens to design challenges—it was child’s play.
Not just 50 stages.
Even 100, 1,000, or mindless auto-battle formations—he could devise them all.
"Wait!"
Seeing Lu Ze’s calm demeanor, Ding Mingcang stopped him with suspicion.
"First, I’ll have someone inspect whether you’ve tampered with the crystal or the Illusion Tower before you proceed!"
……
……
News of Lu Ze’s impending demonstration of Endless Mode at Lingxiao Plaza spread like wildfire.
"Elder Ding makes a fair point. If Junior Brother Lu deliberately made it impossible to clear, that’s hardly fair."
"Junior Brother Lu is truly bold, daring to defy the Second Elder in front of so many fellow disciples."
"Clearing 50 stages live? Impossible, right?"
"I can’t even get past the fifth stage…"
"Absolutely no way! The firepower by the tenth stage is inhuman! Fifty stages? No chance!"
"I even suspect there isn’t a fiftieth stage in the illusion."
"Junior Brother Lu must’ve been drunk when setting the zombie numbers. Let’s see how he handles this."
……
The disciples buzzed with discussion.
Even if Lu Ze was the creator of the illusion, no one believed he could reach the 50th stage.
The exponential difficulty spike in Endless Mode was undeniable.
With such absurd zombie numbers, everyone assumed cheating was the only way to clear it.
So when Ding Mingcang demanded an inspection of the crystal and Illusion Tower, the disciples found it perfectly reasonable.
After a thorough check confirmed no tampering, Lu Ze immersed his consciousness into the Illusion Tower, ready to begin his performance.
He projected the illusion’s visuals for all to see.
Ding Mingcang and the Enforcement Hall disciples stood guard, scrutinizing his every move.
The moment Lu Ze showed any sign of altering the crystal’s data, Ding Mingcang would seize him without hesitation.
All eyes were fixed on Lu Ze’s screen.
Yet the moment he entered, he paused at the Endless Mode selection, unmoving.
"Why isn’t he moving?"
"Is he scared now…?"
"Maybe he’s looking for a way to adjust the difficulty?"
"Hard to do… Elder Ding is watching."
……
The disciples grew restless.
At that moment, Lu Ze was deep in thought, frowning.
He was considering two things.
First, which stage to play.
Second, which formation to use.
If this weren’t a "live broadcast," his choices wouldn’t matter.
Not just 50 stages.
Even 500 or 5,000—he could clear them effortlessly.
The problem was,
he didn’t want to teach everyone how to clear Endless Mode at this stage.
For one, it would shorten players’ thinking time, affecting the game’s longevity.
And secondly…
If everyone knew how to clear Endless, where would he earn his Demon Points?
Take the classic Cob Cannon formation, for example.
Without exaggeration,
if he demonstrated how to set it up, disciples would master auto-battling Endless Mode by nightfall.
Even with adjusted difficulty, they’d easily reach a hundred stages.
That would kill their motivation to keep playing "Plants vs. Zombies."
Lu Ze knew he couldn’t choose such a brainless auto-battle formation.
Formation development was best left to the players themselves.
After brief deliberation, Lu Ze selected the third stage—Daytime Pool—for Endless Mode.
The pool’s presence reduced defensive pressure on the two water lanes, making it the easiest stage for demonstration.
As for the formation,
he chose a classic no-cannon setup.
No-cannon formations required more manual control, and he could intentionally mix in other plants to mislead players.
Once his plant cards were set, Lu Ze entered the game.
……
……
Below the stage,
countless eyes followed his every move.
When the disciples saw Lu Ze’s plant selection, confusion erupted.
"What’s this? Why isn’t Junior Brother Lu bringing Peashooters?"
"No regular Peashooters is one thing, but not even Snow Peas?"
"Forget Peashooters—he only brought one Fume Shroom and Gloom Shroom? How’s he clearing the first stage?"
"Relying on Potato Mines and Squash to trade for zombies? That’s a pure waste of spiritual energy!"
"Wait… he didn’t even bring Wall-nuts!"
"Is he trying to lose?"
"Has Junior Brother Lu given up?"
……
In the air,
Mu Yawen and Zhong Yi also observed Lu Ze’s actions.
"Senior Brother Zhong, isn’t Junior Brother Lu overconfident by not bringing Wall-nuts?"
Mu Yawen was puzzled.
He had a soft spot for the game’s tank plants.
Every stage required a full row of Tall-nuts and Pumpkin Shields, or he’d feel uneasy.
Seeing Lu Ze skip them entirely made his skin crawl.
"The first stage isn’t intense. The focus is accumulating spiritual energy, so skipping Wall-nuts is understandable."
Zhong Yi had more experience than most.
He frowned, analyzing the purpose behind each of Lu Ze’s choices.
The Twin Sunflower copy was to speed up energy collection—that made sense.
Potato Mines and Squash were to trade zombies for minimal cost early on—acceptable.
But why use 75-energy Fume Shrooms instead of Peashooters that synergized with Torchwoods?
The former even required an extra Coffee Bean to awaken!
If those choices were somewhat justifiable,
the most baffling was the Garlic.
In his eyes, this card was utterly useless.
Its effect was to make zombies switch lanes by repelling them with a foul stench.
All it did was change their path—it couldn’t kill them or even deal damage. Completely pointless.
Zhong Yi had only used it once during a story mission before tossing it into storage, where it gathered dust ever since.
Watching Lu Ze decisively pick up this stack of cards, Zhong Yi grew even more curious.
With these bizarre cards in hand,
how exactly did Lu Ze plan to hold out until the 50th wave?
ing gift was a patch of barren land, and disciples were all picked up along the way. He spent fifty years diligently building three "ramshackle little sects," thinking he could finally live a carefree life relying on his disciples. But right at the fifty-year mark, he was suddenly swept away by a spatial rift and exiled to the Chaos Desolation, the Disorderly Ruins. There was no spiritual energy there, only slaughter. Relying on the cultivation feedback from his disciples, Gu Changyuan hacked his way through a sea of blood for eleven hundred years. When the system finally fished him back out, he discovered the ramshackle little sects he'd built back then had developed a rather... unusual style. Hold on... I vanished for a thousand years, so how did my ramshackle little sects become holy lands?!
u Chenyuan transmigrated into a female-oriented novel about a real and fake heiress, becoming the CEO elder brother of both. Unfortunately, the entire Lu family—including himself, the CEO—were mere cannon fodder in the story. Determined to save himself, Lu Chenyuan took action. The spoiled, attention-seeking fake heiress? Thrown into the harsh realities of the working class to learn humility. The love-struck real heiress? Pushed toward academic excellence, so lofty goals would blind her to trivial romances. As for the betrayed, vengeful arranged marriage wife… the plot hadn’t even begun yet. There was still time—if he couldn’t handle her, he could at least avoid her. "CEO Lu, are you avoiding me?" Mo Qingli fixed her gaze on Lu Chenyuan. For the first time, the shrewd and calculating Lu Chenyuan felt a flicker of unease.
ut it can buy an entire year of absolutely perfect training results! Su Yu stared at his empty wallet and decisively opened up various online loan platforms. “Borrow a thousand bucks! Recharge my vitality!” Boom! His vitality broke a hundred points, shattering the limits of the human body! “Borrow ten thousand bucks! Recharge my combat skills!” Boom! A basic punching technique so common it was everywhere instantly maxed out, revealing the ultimate assassination technique of Five Elements Unity—Inner Force! When a rich kid hired assassins for a midnight ambush, aiming to break both of his legs, they instead ran headfirst into a monster—a human-shaped tyrannosaur, brimming with dragon-like vitality. With just two fingers, Su Yu snapped a steel staff reinforced with alloy. Staring at the killer’s stash of stolen cash—a staggering quarter-million dollars—he showed a corporate-sincere smile: “Thanks for the pre-exam gift pack, Mr. Zhao! I’m gonna go re-invest this!” Three days later, at the National Martial Arts College Entrance Exam, while everyone else struggled just to reach the passing line, Su Yu threw a single punch—and more than a thousand vitality points literally detonated the entire arena!
ive and Ruthless] Before his transmigration, Ye Xuan was playing a game called "Severing Emotions to Attain the Dao." The game's core wasn't about leveling up by fighting monsters, but about conquering various "bad women" with wicked personalities and cold, fickle natures. There was only one method to conquer them: stay unwaveringly by their side, then die at a critical moment, driving them to madness after losing the protagonist. The higher their level of regret, the higher the player's score. To dominate the server, Ye Xuan conquered all the bad women. In the early stages, he showered them with boundless tenderness, only to choose to sacrifice himself for them later, making them weep bitterly and drown in regret. Among them were: Xia Lengyue, the unfaithful immortal wife who chased after powerful men and discarded her husband like trash. Ye Qingcheng, the Demonic Venerable of the Joyous Union Sect, who appeared pure and innocent but was, in reality, promiscuous. Wu Lingxiao, the Empress of the Great Xia Dynasty, who lusted after men and loved maintaining a harem. Bai Qiangu of the Endless Demonic Sect: a bloodthirsty mass murderer. However, when the protagonist transmigrated into the game world, he made a horrifying discovery. Eight hundred years had already passed. The bad women he had conquered had now each become deities and revered ancestors. Faced with the endless stream of toxic women coming for him, Ye Xuan could only rely on his god-tier acting skills to carve a path of survival through this world of treacherous women.
