After some searching, and with the bullet comments’ guidance, Zhou Yue spotted a pitch-black cavern that seemed to have no end.
“What kind of lousy place is this? Why’d they make it so narrow...?”
Crawling through the cramped stone tunnel and grumbling all the while, Zhou Yue finally reached the mouth of a somewhat more spacious cavern.
In the pitch-black mist, where he could not even see his own hand in front of his face, a katana gleaming with purple light stood out sharply.
“Holy crap! A new weapon!”
Zhou Yue’s eyes lit up at once.
Compared to the dull, utterly ordinary Kusabimaru in his hand, this katana radiating a purple glow was obviously a high-grade treasure.
“I’m rich! So that lousy notice was a lie after all. There really is a high-level magical treasure hidden in this cave... My luck has finally turned around! Hahaha!”
Without giving it much thought, Zhou Yue leaped into the pit with a hearty laugh.
He had just reached out to take the purple katana when a chill suddenly swept over him, making him shudder.
“Gah...!”
Zhou Yue’s scalp instantly went numb. His fingers jerked back as though he had been shocked, and he retreated two steps with a pale face.
Illuminated by the katana’s eerie purple glow, Zhou Yue finally saw the truth.
The purple katana was not an unattended treasure at all. It was clutched in the hand of a headless corpse demon.
Noticing Zhou Yue’s arrival, the Headless shifted its body. An indescribably eerie sensation instantly engulfed the cavern.
A faint line of text appeared before Zhou Yue’s eyes:
【Dread】
As the purple bar beneath the word Dread slowly rose, Zhou Yue was overcome by a familiar sensation.
“This is... Ghost Town? A sanity meter!?”
Zhou Yue immediately realized where that familiarity came from. It was the same method Lu Ze had once used in the famous soul cultivator horror realm, Ghost Town, a place that had scared countless soul cultivators witless.
The energy bar beneath the word Dread worked just like a sanity meter. It would affect both his mind and his body!
“So that means...”
Zhou Yue watched as the Headless drew closer and closer, then licked his slightly purplish lips.
“I have to fight this monster... while my sanity is dropping?”
Under the influence of the Fear-Soul Entangling Formation, Zhou Yue was obviously unable to control the fear welling up inside him.
But his longstanding desire for battle made him bristle with fighting spirit.
In Ghost Town, the players had no means of fighting back and could only run.
But in Sekiro, the player still had the Kusabimaru in hand—and their own skill.
Zhou Yue did his best to steady his mind and raised the Kusabimaru. His gaze sharpened.
“Heh... I wouldn’t be afraid of you even empty-handed, let alone with a sword in hand. Quit playing tricks and come meet your end!”
...
Three minutes later.
“No!”
“No, no, no!!”
“Don’t come any closer!!!”
Zhou Yue let out an utterly miserable howl.
He had originally thought that with a weapon in hand and his own mastery of the controls, things couldn’t possibly be worse than Ghost Town.
Only after actually engaging the enemy did he realize how horribly, ridiculously wrong he had been.
In Ghost Town, once a ghost caught you, death came in an instant. In the blink of an eye, you became a soul.
But the Headless in front of him would actually grab him and beat him senseless!
And the deathblow was the worst of all. The creature would flicker behind Zhou Yue, then viciously reach between his legs from behind.
Once the execution animation played, the humiliation was indescribable.
It was even more unbearable than being killed outright.
After resurrecting at the Sculptor’s Idol, Zhou Yue’s first reaction was to touch his backside. Then he cursed under his breath:
“Junior Brother Lu, your design is way too twisted!!”
Recalling the battle just now, he felt increasingly shaken.
The purple mist surrounding the Headless affected his bodily functions, causing his movements to slow involuntarily. He could not even perform a proper quickstep.
The most infuriating part was the Dread posture gauge, which worked much like a sanity meter.
Every slash from the Headless increased the Dread gauge unless Zhou Yue executed a perfect deflection.
The fuller the Dread gauge became, the more severe the fear effect inflicted upon him.
Even without those environmental factors, the Headless’s fast-and-slow attacks were already an extremely difficult challenge for players at their current stage.
To make matters worse, Zhou Yue had to fight the Headless while suffering the effects of both the purple mist and the Dread gauge.
In Lu Ze’s previous life, the Headless had been considered a fairly troublesome elite enemy.
Before obtaining Divine Confetti and the Purple Umbrella, it would not be an exaggeration to call it an impossible monster.
The Headless within this illusion, enhanced by the fear effects of the Fear-Soul Entangling Formation, was even more absurdly difficult—several Genichiros harder than the original version from his previous life.
Seeing the miserable state Zhou Yue had been reduced to, the bullet comments immediately began cheering themselves up at his expense.
【I told you—how could Old Zhou’s luck possibly turn around?】
【The Headless’s cave is hidden so well that not just anyone could stumble across a monster like this.】
【It feels like Old Demon Lu designed this specifically for True Disciple Zhou...】
【Give it up, Old Zhou! Come back after your stats have improved!】
【Stop being so stubborn.】
...
“You’re all right... The Headless really is a tough one.”
Looking at the comments’ advice, Zhou Yue smiled faintly. Then, without turning his head, he once again ran toward the depths of the mountain cave where the Headless waited.
With that, he boldly flung out his grappling hook, his body swinging over a bottomless ravine.
“I, Zhou Yue, believe in fate, but I refuse to submit to it... Even if misfortune truly exists in this world, it’s no reason to flee in the middle of battle!”
Crack!
“Holy crap!! Why does this tree branch break too?!”
“Damn it!!!”
【Death】!
...
...
Before long, an entire day and night had passed.
“Oh, I can’t do this anymore... I’m done...”
Zhou Yue sat at the Sculptor’s Idol, resurrected for who knew how many times. His face was utterly dejected, his eyes vacant and his spirit crushed as he stared at the sky.
The Headless had abused him for an entire night, and he still had not found the slightest way to deal with it.
With the Fear-Soul Entangling Formation amplifying its effects, Dread was ridiculously powerful. The difficulty was far beyond that of the original game.
“I spoke too soon... Maybe I should put the Headless aside for now.”
Zhou Yue rubbed the space between his brows. For the first time, he found himself considering giving up.
Sekiro was undeniably difficult, but countless players still became obsessed with clashing blades.
The reason was that after overcoming a difficult challenge through their own efforts, the joy of growth and the sense of accomplishment filled the vast emotional void left by all the suffering.
But Zhou Yue had gone too long without tasting the joy of victory, and naturally, his motivation had begun to wane.
Of course, this was not entirely his fault.
Zhou Yue had been so focused on fighting that he had completely failed to realize how even a small amount of Divine Confetti could dramatically increase his damage against the Headless...
“Let’s watch Old Zhong for a while and calm down.”
Zhou Yue decided to relax for the time being.
What exhausted him was not merely the humiliation of dying over and over again. More importantly, Dread had been directly tormenting his mind.
It was no different from spending an entire night inside a haunted house in Ghost Town on Nightmare difficulty.
Zhou Yue had just opened the livestream illusion and entered Zhong Yi’s stream when he heard Zhong Yi shouting.
“Hahahaha!! I finally beat it!!!”
“What!?”
Zhou Yue was startled. Taking a closer look, he saw Zhong Yi standing beside the corpse of the Samurai General, laughing uproariously. He looked even happier than Zhou Yue had after defeating Gyoubu Oniwa without taking a hit.
“...”
The corners of Zhou Yue’s mouth twitched slightly.
Good grief, everyone’s already made it past Gyoubu Oniwa, while Zhong Yi has only just defeated his first Samurai General…
Still, for Zhong Yi, that was already an exceptional performance.
Zhong Yi had defeated the Samurai General.
The moment those words were spoken, Zhou Yue’s brows suddenly lifted.
He remembered that before Lu Ze left, he had given him an item and told him to open it when Zhong Yi defeated the Samurai General.
“Right, Junior Brother Lu did say…”
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."
e, Immortal Body, Transmigration, System, Progression Fantasy, Academy Setting, Third-Person Perspective. Alternate Title: Transmigrating into a High Martial World and Reading Live Comments. Bad news: I transmigrated. This is a terrifying high-martial world, and my original, pathetically weak body fell into a coma and never woke up. Good news: I got a Popularity Points system upon arrival. I can see live comments and even create an unkillable alternate identity. Starting out, the alternate identity has all stats at 1. The system tells me that to grow stronger, I must participate in the plot, gain popularity points to allocate stats and grow stronger, and ultimately awaken my original body. And so, carrying my original body on my back, I officially entered Huaqing Academy, where the story's protagonist resides. From that moment on, Chen Guan kicked the original plot to pieces. Live Comments: [Doesn't anyone find this mysterious coffin guy creepy? He can summon indescribable grey misty hands.] [Is this guy a hero or a villain? What kind of onion became a spirit?] [By the way, does anyone know who's in the coffin? Shouldn't the debt for saving his life be repaid by now?] [According to unofficial histories, the person in the coffin was Chen Guan's first love. Their love was once passionate and earth-shattering, but they were separated by life and death due to worldly circumstances. What a star-crossed pair.] ... Years later, the world knew of a demon god born from a coffin, shrouded in grey mist, impossible to gaze upon directly. His foremost divine emissary often wielded a scythe, reaping lives like the god of death. As war approached, facing former friends and a boundless sea of enemies, Chen Guan merely raised his scythe. "Would you like to dance as well?"
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.
grated, and just when he finally managed to get into an elite academy, he discovered that he actually had a system, and the way to earn rewards was extremely ridiculous. So for the sake of rewards, he had no choice but to start acting ridiculous as well. Su Cheng: "It's nothing but system quests after all." But later, what confused Su Cheng was that while he was already quite ridiculous, he never expected those serious characters to gradually become ridiculous too. And the way they looked at him became increasingly strange... (This synopsis doesn't do it justice, please read the full story)
