Developer in the immortal World !

Dark Souls was a special game in many people's hearts. If they hated the painful experience of being forced to learn trick upon trick upon trick just to beat the first boss, or if they loved it, nobody could really say anything bad about the game's quality. Ignoring the bugs of course, and the sometimes horrible PvP which had been ruined by meta-slaves.

Anyway, Dark Souls was doubtlessly one of the most culturally relevant classics back from James' world and while Dragonslayer Ornstein wasn't a lord of cinder, or the final boss, he had been one of the enemies that Jin had most enjoyed beating back in his previous life.

To bring such an iconic and well-designed character to this world of cultivation would be an honour.

However, for him to be able to do so, he first needed to change the design up a bit. There wasn't anything he wanted to shift in terms of looks or weapon functionality, but…

Comparing games and illusion Rooms was a wasted effort, they were two different media. Naturally the first was more fun, which only made sense when one considered that the latter was only meant to improve a warrior or provide a useful training scenario.

It was because of this difference, the fact that video games and illusion Rooms were very much not the same thing, that translating between the two became a bit of a challenge.

There was one problem in particular, which would likely take Jin the rest of the week to resolve. Namely, while he had the perfect character template of Ornstein in his head in terms of looks and style, he was not a perfect simulation of how a knight with such a lance would actually fight.

This was perhaps the biggest difference between video games and illusion Rooms. Realism. After all, what was the point of fighting a yellow drake in a Room if it didn't actually behave or fight like a real yellow drake? Best case the training would be only marginally useful as a desensitisation strategy. Worst case it would inflate the confidence of the cultivator and make them commit a fatal mistake once they actually challenged the real thing.

Jin sort of wiggled out of this issue by focusing on monsters and combat styles that just didn't exist in this new world. However, Ornstein for all his iconic power was still a video game character with a fixed battle algorithm that could be exploited by people who'd never even wielded a weapon in real life. The algorithm he'd played against would be a joke to any cultivator. A bad joke.

That was why Jin's work would mostly consist of developing an actual fighting style for his version of Ornstein. He already had the figure, the dimensions, the weapon, the armour, the space. Now he just needed to polish those aspects. Make Ornstein a valid threat rather than just a nuisance. The dash would stay, as would the tight spearmanship. However, the gaps in the algorithm that represented the lack of actual skill or intelligence would be fixed.

It probably sounded to the outside as if Jin wanted to graft an artificial intelligence which could make real-time combat decisions, however, this was something that was completely beyond him at the moment.

This was why he was standing outside of his hut, the view still stunning him minute by minute, holding a broom in his hands as if he was wielding a spear. Slightly widened stance, confident. Dangerous. He thrust forward and enjoyed the fluidity of his body. Then he spun the broom in his hands as if wanting to deflect a hail of arrows, creating a violent circle.

A finger got in the way and the broom fell on the floor.

Jin bent down to pick it up and started again.

The body he'd inherited from the previous owner was several times better than the one he'd left behind when he'd transmigrated.

There was nothing to say about it. While James had lived in an inherently polluted world in one of the most unhealthy countries on the planet, this new body lived in a world where microplastics and pollutants didn't exist, the food was by default, always organic, and heavenly energy literally fell from the heavens to strengthen all living organisms.

Already just the average farmer was probably healthier and more athletic than any gold-medal-winning athlete in his last life.

Jin? A cultivator? He blew even that out of the water. Sure his cultivation didn't necessarily focus on physical aspects, but he'd still gone through the body-purifying stage of cultivation before focusing on mental techniques and spells.

This meant that the memory he had in his last life of legitimate spear-wielding techniques he'd seen in film or tutorials flowed through his new body and into the broom at an intense pace, something that would have been completely unachievable before. He was sure that by the end of the day, he would become more adept at wielding the weapon, and would have developed a decent understanding of how to create a good combat template for his Ornstein to use.

Jab, deflect, slash, parry, thrust. His body didn't seem capable of getting tired and Jin watched the sunset as he practised his broom techniques on the cliffs of the sect mountain. Other disciples came and went, walking the stone-paved path, occasionally laughing at him, and occasionally cheering him on. No one knew what he was doing, and he was fine with that.

When he did lay down the broom when the sun had set and Brother Lin had delivered the second batch of food for the day, he went straight into the lotus position on the green grass, not even bothering to go inside the house for this next part.

Quickly, faster than ever before he sank into a meditative trance. Considering that the illusion Room sect was essentially focused on creating only a specific type of product, they had gotten quite decent in creating techniques to develop that product with. The Room, empty as it was currently, was only one half of the equation, one that Jin hadn't focused on much. This was essentially the only real decision one could make when joining the sect. If one wanted to create the Rooms, or if one wanted to create the illusions. Jin had walked the path of illusions, and thus his main spell, the one that had at this point been carved into his very soul, was the mind-illusion spell.

In simple words it was a game-engine, just stuck there, inside his head.

In reality? It was much more complex like that.

Through meditating the cultivators of the sect were able to enter a sort of mental interface in which they were able to develop the individual aspects of the scenario they were trying to create, and then they would save them, like they did the catalogue of real-life experiences harvested from warriors, until they next had time to work on the project.

It was at this stage, that Jin's photographic memory flexed its muscles. The entire process of character design, which could sometimes take just as much as the insertion of the actual combat system, was finished in a flash. One simple flex of Jin's mental muscles made Dragonslayer Ornstein appear in front of him in the black space in all his glory. Golden spiky armour with mesh underclothes, a highly stylized lion-faced helmet with red plumage and an oddly designed spear and lance hybrid with a long blade and a cross-guard.

In simple words, the character looked exactly as he had looked in the games, but just with another added level of realism.

It was in the design of the space in which the scenario of the fight would take place that Jin hesitated. Quite frankly, what was really innovative was the character design concept. If he wanted to highlight that it might have made the most sense to use one of the standard battle templates, a large stone circle hovering high in the heavens under the ruthless sun. The cathedral-like structure in which one actually fought Ornstein in the games also had completely innovative architecture never before seen in this world. It was clearly western, and not just that, but also gothic, with its large stylised spire support structures and high windows.

In the end it probably made more sense to include it, just in case the judges didn't like the character design, they might be swayed by the architectural style. Another mental flex and the room in which the player would fight Ornstein was created.

As a last special addition, Jin also input the music. One of the aspects of illusion Room design that he considered to be undervalued was the emotional quotient. Experience showed that the more emotionally engaged the Room users were, the better they would be able to transfer any skills gained in the illusion back to reality.

Naturally, Jin understood perfectly why narrative structures and music were not generally part of the illusion Room design. After all, most illusion works were the result of one person's labour. And if the person already had to consume a lot of memories in regards to the creature they wanted to depict, create a functioning combat system which was the number one priority, then they would hardly find the time to make a narrative, let alone music to accompany the battle. In the austere and ascetic society Jin was now living in, those things would likely be considered wasteful.

He added it anyway. Ornstein stood in the middle of the cathedral, perfectly still while the orchestral choral-based ambience music started resounding from everywhere, but from nowhere. Not loud, since cultivators also depended on their sense of sound to fight sometimes, but enough to add to the experience.