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?
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."
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?!
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.
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.
