Immortal Paladin

[POV: Wen Yuhan]

Lost Paladin Online had begun  with little expectations from the crowd.

When it was first announced, few people paid it any real attention. Another fantasy MMO in an already saturated market, another promise of immersion and innovation that would likely fade within months. Expectations were low, bordering on nonexistent.

Then it exploded.

Applications flooded in from every corner of the world, their numbers climbing day by day. Servers filled faster than anyone had anticipated, and still the demand did not slow. What truly baffled the public was not just the player count, but the model. The game was completely free. No subscription fees. No cosmetic shops. No microtransactions of any kind.

That alone should have made it impossible.

People asked the obvious questions. Where was the funding coming from? How could a game of this scale sustain itself without monetization? Theories spread across forums and social media, ranging from venture capital backing to elaborate money-laundering schemes.

No one seriously considered the truth.

Magic, after all, was not an acceptable answer.

In reality, the “owner” of the Source simply worked himself to the brink. Da Wei used his very existence to prop the system up, bending causality, information, and infrastructure in ways no human accountant could comprehend. When one was effectively part of the internet itself, money became a solvable problem.

On the surface, the finances traced back to a web of shell companies. A primary tech firm based in China. Secondary corporations scattered across Europe, Southeast Asia, and North America. Clean books, plausible investments, immaculate paper trails.

Behind all of it, there was only Da Wei.

Lost Paladin Online became a cultural phenomenon almost overnight. Short-form videos showcasing absurd boss fights and unexpected player solutions dominated feeds. Guides dissected playstyles, builds, and strange mechanics no other game had ever attempted. Communities sprang up organically, forming guilds, theorycraft circles, lore forums, and meme groups at a pace that left even veteran industry analysts stunned.

The game did not just attract players. It captured them.

From behind the eyes of her incarnation, Wen Yuhan watched it all unfold. She observed the swelling numbers, the fervent discussions, the way the world slowly but surely bent its attention toward this single, improbable creation.

It was, undeniably, a sensation.

Of course, there was a reason behind the game’s overwhelming success.

Compared to its predecessor, Lost Paladin Online was genuinely fun to play, regardless of age or nationality. Its systems were intuitive without being shallow, deep without being obtuse. More importantly, it became a space where the cultural divide between East and West quietly eroded. Language barriers mattered less. Playstyles blended. Within the world of the game, everyone shared the same starting point.

They were all paladins.

The single-player storyline mode played no small part in this. It was ambitious to a fault, drawing players in with a tightly woven narrative before gently transitioning them into the online world. By the time they crossed that threshold, most players were already emotionally invested, acclimated to the setting, and eager to see how the story would unfold alongside others.

Yet the game’s true selling point lay elsewhere.

The NPCs could talk.

Not in the stiff, branching-dialogue sense common to RPGs, but in full, fluid conversations. Players could speak to them through their microphones, argue with them, joke with them, even form long-running relationships defined by memory and context. The NPCs responded naturally, adapting their tone, recalling past interactions, and reacting in ways that felt unsettlingly human.

This alone earned Lost Paladin Online a notorious reputation within the gaming industry. Analysts called it impossible. Developers dissected footage frame by frame, trying to reverse-engineer the technology. Some accused the company of deliberately hoarding breakthroughs and stalling industry progress.

The truth was simpler, and far more embarrassing.

Even the developers did not understand how it worked.

It was the same technology that had given the game’s predecessor its small but devoted occult following. The NPC models had been there from the beginning. Only now, refined and unleashed at scale, did the world finally notice.

Because of how advanced the interactions were, players were actively encouraged to role-play. Immersion was not just cosmetic; it carried tangible advantages. Those who treated the world as real found doors opening more easily, quests branching more richly, and opportunities appearing that others never saw. Those who refused to engage were not punished, exactly, but they missed out on something intangible yet profound.

A noble experience, as the community put it.

Role-play also shaped progression. Although canonically every player arrived in the world as a “Paladin,” that title was more a narrative anchor than a limitation. Players could pursue wildly different paths, developing into assassins, casters, frontline fighters, or hybrid roles that defied easy categorization. Their builds grew organically from how they acted, not just which skills they selected.

If the game had a flaw, it was its difficulty.

Lost Paladin Online did not hold hands. Death was frequent, setbacks were harsh, and victories had to be earned. Under normal circumstances, that alone might have driven players away.

Instead, it was largely ignored.

The reason was the game’s most dangerous feature: immersion. There was a subtle, almost supernatural pull to it, one that made players subconsciously feel as though they truly existed within that world. Failure stung. Success mattered. And logging out always felt like leaving something unfinished behind.

For better or worse, Lost Paladin Online did not merely entertain its players.

It convinced them they belonged.

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[POV: Saber_Arthur]

Among the many playstyles that emerged within Lost Paladin Online, the most popular by far was the Heroic Paladin playstyle.

Its creator was a player known as Saber_Arthur, a blond warrior woman who embodied the image of a flawless, goody-two-shoes paladin. Her build revolved around the classical ideals of the role: unyielding defense, decisive frontline presence, and unwavering protection of allies. She played as though honor itself were a stat.

The build was closely tied to the Martial Alliance, a major faction whose head was the NPC Yuen Fu. Under his banner, Saber_Arthur distinguished herself not through flashy damage numbers, but through consistency, judgment, and an almost stubborn refusal to abandon anyone on the battlefield.

What most players did not know was that Saber_Arthur was actually played by a man.

The secret remained intact largely because of how convincing the performance was. Her behavior never slipped. Her voice chat was carefully avoided or masked. It helped that the player did voice acting as a side gig. Over time, the character’s reputation grew beyond the player behind her, becoming an icon in her own right.

Of course, popularity brought consequences.

Fan art began circulating, many of which depicted Saber_Arthur standing beside Yuen Fu in dramatic or intimate poses. The community embraced the pairing with alarming enthusiasm. Within the Martial Alliance itself, her in-game character received more than a hundred marriage proposals from various clans and ambitious young masters.

Each one was quietly deleted.

Behind the screen, the player hesitated every time. The political and material benefits were obvious. Marriage in the Martial Alliance opened doors to resources, influence, and powerful quest chains. Yet accepting even one proposal carried implications he was not prepared to deal with, both in-game and out.

At one point, Yuen Fu himself reacted to the flood of requests with visible displeasure.

“No, no. Saber is like a daughter to me,” the NPC declared flatly. “I will not give her to anyone.”

The line instantly became famous.

Because of Saber_Arthur’s success, countless players attempted to imitate her style. The Heroic Paladin became the gold standard for orthodox tanks, characters who could stand at the center of chaos and keep everyone alive through sheer presence alone.

Healing played an equally important role. While Saber_Arthur was not the strongest healer numerically, her timely support and battlefield awareness dramatically improved NPC survival rates. This, in turn, made her one of the most efficient players when it came to farming reputation.

In a game where relationships mattered as much as raw power, Saber_Arthur did not just block attacks.

She saved people.

And that was enough.

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[POV: Hellspawn_Fanarys]

If the topic turned to celebrity players, Hellspawn_Fanarys could never be left out.

Her character was a hellfire demoness, all blazing horns, molten skin, and voluptuous curves, matched only by a personality just as overwhelming. Unlike Saber_Arthur, who embodied orthodox virtue, Hellspawn_Fanarys leaned fully into something far darker. She role-played as an unapologetic villain.

Alignment, however, meant little in Lost Paladin Online. The game did not judge players by good or evil, only by reputation. And Hellspawn_Fanarys’ reputation was catastrophically negative.

“Hahahahahahahahaha!” her character would shriek, flames coiling around her spear. “If you want to live, give me your treasures!”

In one infamous encounter, a Heavenly Temple cultivator tried to bargain.

“This is my treasure,” he pleaded. “A sacred spear passed down through my clan—”

He never finished the sentence.

Once Hellspawn_Fanarys squeezed every last bit of value out of him, she killed him anyway. His followers died shortly after, hunted down one by one. The betrayal cut especially deep because, moments earlier, she had promised them safety.

Behind the character was a sly, sharp-minded woman who wrote novels for a living.

She approached the game the same way she approached stories. After studying the overarching plot, identifying key NPCs, and parsing the narrative parameters of the world, she quickly learned who was dangerous and who was exploitable. With carefully chosen words and feigned sincerity, she convinced enemies that she could be reasoned with, even trusted.

Then she stabbed them in the back.

This became known as the Betrayal Playstyle.

While it was considered inferior to the infamous style pioneered by Corvus, Hellspawn_Fanarys refined it into something even more extreme. Over time, it evolved into what players later called the War Criminal Playstyle.

By deliberately accumulating massive negative reputation, she ensured that entire factions would mark her as a priority target. Raids were dispatched specifically to hunt her down. Instead of fleeing, she embraced the attention, turning every pursuit into an opportunity for ambushes, counter-farming, and coordinated slaughter alongside other players who followed her lead.

Eventually, the faction targeting her would collapse under repeated losses.

When that happened, an adjacent faction would inherit the grudge.

And the cycle would begin anew.

The Heavenly Temple suffered especially badly.

The NPC Lu Gao quickly learned to exploit this situation, redirecting hostility and leveraging the chaos Hellspawn_Fanarys caused to weaken enemy operations elsewhere. Under his guidance, her notoriety became a strategic asset rather than a liability.

By then, Hellspawn_Fanarys had earned her reputation.

She was chaotic, theatrical, and merciless, a player who did not hesitate to use deception, cruelty, and spectacle to achieve her goals. To some, she was a menace.

To others, she was a legend.

Either way, when her name appeared on the battlefield, everyone knew something was about to burn.

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[POV: Corvus_Murder]

Speaking of betrayal, there was Corvus_Murder.

Unlike most high-profile players, Corvus did not focus on combat at all. Instead, he poured nearly everything into a single stat: charisma. Through relentless optimization and shameless abuse of dialogue systems, reputation mechanics, and persuasion checks, he became the only known player to unlock the Dual Cultivation perk.

The perk’s implications were exactly what most people imagined.

There were plenty of steamy encounters, but Lost Paladin Online handled them tastefully, or cruelly, depending on perspective. Scenes faded to black, or were summarized through elegant narrative text describing the “deepening of bonds” and “mutual cultivation of spirit and intent.” Corvus was mildly disappointed by the lack of explicit visuals, but that never stopped him from following through on his plans.

His method was simple, and vile.

He wooed women. He gained their trust. He harvested the benefits. Then he stabbed them in the back.

Naturally, this meant his PvP skills lagged far behind front-line players. In a straight fight, Corvus was mediocre at best. But his playstyle was never about fair fights. It was about positioning, influence, and control.

He was so effective that he eventually infiltrated deep behind enemy lines, to the point where he became a concubine to a powerful woman within an opposing faction. Through her, he gained access to restricted areas, internal communications, and military planning sessions.

At one point, he was quite literally preparing to lead an army belonging to the enemy faction.

If full defection had been possible, Corvus would have taken it without hesitation. Unfortunately for him, orders from the NPC Hei Mao were absolute. The system treated those commands as binding narrative anchors.

Still, Corvus took pride in being a player, not a slave to the system.

By carefully combing through side quests, hidden flags, and obscure dialogue branches, he managed to divert the narrative itself. Instead of defecting alone, he engineered events so that the woman he had ensnared defected with him, bringing her influence, subordinates, and resources into his camp.

It was strange.

At times, Corvus felt less like he was playing an MMO and more like he had stumbled into a hyper-realistic dating sim with political consequences. He fondly remembered his time in LLO, where the system had outright forbidden harem mechanics. That limitation, it seemed, no longer existed.

The realization was… encouraging.

Through patience and deception, Corvus perfected what players later dubbed the Trickster Playstyle. He specialized in turning enemies into allies, hollowing out factions from the inside, and building an invisible force deep within hostile territory. Before long, he held respectable authority in both the enemy camp and the player camp, a man trusted by neither side and indispensable to both.

For a while, everything went perfectly.

Then someone on his side ratted him out.

The fallout was immediate and catastrophic. Allegiances shattered, secrets surfaced, and what had once been a carefully controlled infiltration spiraled into chaos.

Now, instead of manipulating an enemy faction from the shadows, Corvus_Murder found himself in the middle of a full-blown civil war, scrambling to clean up the mess he had created before it consumed him as well.

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[POV: Robin_Hoodie]

The culprit behind Corvus_Murder’s predicament was none other than Robin_Hoodie.

She never set out to sabotage anyone.

Unlike the other celebrity players, Robin_Hoodie never developed a deliberate or optimized playstyle. She played the game the way she always played games: following curiosity wherever it led. Lore fascinated her, and Ding Cai’s faction just happened to be the perfect place to find it.

So how did she end up ratting out Corvus_Murder?

Pure accident.

It happened during an open campfire discussion, one of those casual gatherings where players swapped stories about builds, exploits, and strange mechanics. Robin had been animatedly discussing emerging playstyles when she casually mentioned something she shouldn’t have known, a detail about internal power shifts and hidden leadership struggles.

No one noticed at first.

What none of them knew was that a spy had already infiltrated their ranks.

Worse, that spy had shapeshifted into a horse.

When the truth came out, it shook Robin deeply. The realization that the world could deceive players so thoroughly ignited something in her. From that moment on, she became obsessed, not with power or rankings, but with understanding the world itself.

She devoted herself to research.

The Great Desert alone proved overwhelming. Lore drops hinted at a universe far larger than the Hollowed World, references to forgotten realms, sealed dimensions, and fractured timelines scattered beyond the current map. Each discovery pulled her further down the rabbit hole.

Over time, her approach crystallized into what players would later call the Lore Adventurer Playstyle.

She roamed freely, chasing rumors, uncovering buried truths, helping NPCs, and stumbling into treasures no one else even knew existed. Unlike rigid builds that relied on repetition and efficiency, her playstyle demanded luck, intuition, clever routing, and meticulous party configuration.

Her greatest strength was her mouth.

Robin could talk her way out of almost anything. She had a knack for drawing attention, defusing hostility, and turning danger into opportunity. That talent alone would have made her successful.

What truly baffled the community, however, was her party.

Every single member was an NPC.

A shaman from Ward. A swordsman from the Martial Alliance. A flamboyant pirate from the Union. Even a Guardian from the Holy Empire.

Their backgrounds clashed. Their factions were incompatible. Their chemistry made no sense.

And somehow, they all followed her.

The group was absurdly diverse, frighteningly competent, and, to the community’s endless annoyance, unfairly handsome! Without any prompting, players began referring to Robin’s party as the first Harem Party of LPO.

Just like that, the Lore Adventurer Playstyle was renamed the Harem Playstyle.

Robin hated it.

“Why are you following me?!” she protested more than once. “Please stop, people are misunderstanding—”

“But you saved my life.”

“I owe everything to you.”

“Don’t get me wrong, I’m only interested in the treasure you’re chasing. I just don’t mind the company.”

“For honor!”

Robin groaned.

Ugh.

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[POV: Terrible_Shura_Ivan]

Terrible_Shura_Ivan was having the time of his life.

He had always loved souls-like games, the kind where death was frequent, pain was expected, and victory felt earned through stubborn persistence. Within the Riverfall Realm, under the banner of the Ren Zhe faction, he lived exactly that fantasy. Over and over, he charged from the spawn area straight into enemy territory, dying, reviving, and returning with even greater ferocity.

He was a true berserker.

Propriety bored him. Small talk annoyed him. Unlike other players who abused the dialogue system to squeeze every possible advantage out of NPC interactions, Terrible_Shura_Ivan barely spoke at all.

Instead, he blasted music.

Heavy, full-metal songs thundered through his room, and through a quirk of the system, those songs were projected directly into the game world. Ivan never questioned it. To him, it was just ambiance, something to heighten the adrenaline while he fought.

To everyone else, it was terror.

Among the Heavenly Temple cultivators, whispers spread quickly. If you heard your own heartbeat pounding like a war drum, if metal screamed and thunder roared in the air, then the Asura had arrived.

Panic often followed.

Yet the psychological effect was not limited to enemies. Among friendly NPCs, Terrible_Shura_Ivan was spoken of as a legendary hero, one whose arrival was heralded by the heavens themselves. Some swore the skies sang for him when he entered the battlefield.

There was even an infamous incident when he charged into combat while blasting a ridiculous K-pop song.

The result was utter confusion.

Enemies hesitated. Allies froze. Formations broke down. Ivan, completely unaware of the chaos he had caused, used the opening to slaughter his way to victory.

Another time, he played a slow shooting song to “rest,” unintentionally turning the battlefield into something solemn and oppressive. There were dozens of such incidents, each more absurd than the last.

The truth was simple.

Terrible_Shura_Ivan had no idea any of this was happening.

What most players failed to realize was that the people of the Hollowed World did not share the same language system as the players. It was only through the magic of the Source that communication was possible at all. Music, however, was different.

The songs Ivan played were not transmitted as raw sound.

They were translated, too.

Meaning, the intent, emotion, and rhythm were interpreted by the world itself, manifesting as symbolic pressure, awe, dread, or confusion. The music carried no direct combat effect, but it became a special phenomenon that added into the ambience.

For intelligent enemies unfamiliar with such sounds, it was deeply unsettling. For allies, it became inspirational, even mythic.

Player-to-player communication suffered whenever Ivan was nearby, but against NPC factions, it proved devastatingly effective.

Over time, the community gave it a name.

The Barbarian Bard Playstyle.

Ivan never noticed.

He just kept charging forward, axe raised, music blaring, and smiling like he had found the perfect game.

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[POV: Gab_Yggdra]

Last but not the least, there was Gab_Yggdra.

While other players were busy exploring the world, unraveling lore, or refining elegant playstyles, Gab_Yggdra dedicated himself to a far nobler pursuit.

Being an absolute menace.

He had recently unlocked Polymorph and Charm, and from that moment on, the Hollowed World was never the same again. His curiosity was… unconventional. For instance, what exactly happened if you turned a human into a sheep and then charmed the sheep? Could the sheep be negotiated with? Could it be led into battle? Could it be sold?

These were the kinds of questions Gab_Yggdra asked himself daily.

At first, his goal had been to find bugs to exploit. He found none. Instead, he discovered something far better… creative abuse! Enemy cultivators were suddenly surrounded by chickens that were, in fact, polymorphed players. At just the right moment, the spell would be undone, and the “livestock” would leap at them with blades drawn.

There was also the infamous incident where Gab_Yggdra, whose character model was a rooster, strutted deep into enemy territory and began singing a national anthem in flawless clarity.

A singing rooster was not something one simply ignored.

Cultivators gathered. Curiosity bloomed. Confusion followed.

That was when his allies planted explosive scrolls, completed objectives, and secured their escape routes. When the time was right, Gab_Yggdra dropped his own explosives directly into the crowd, died in the blast with a triumphant cackle, and resurrected safely back at base.

His personal favorite, however, was the Trojan Horse strategy.

A speaker-specialized player would approach the enemy camp, declaring that his lord wished to defect. As proof of sincerity, he would present “a thousand heads of the enemy.” Those heads were, in fact, players using Fake Death, piled neatly together.

Once the offering was inspected and accepted…

Voila!

The “corpses” sprang back to life. Gab_Yggdra flooded them with buffs. Chaos erupted.

It became so bad that Gab_Yggdra earned a bounty all his own. His wanted posters circulated across multiple factions, depicting a smug-looking rooster with exaggerated crimes listed beneath his name.

The player behind Gab_Yggdra cackled endlessly each time he saw one.

Soon, players began calling his approach the Troll Playstyle.

Ironically, despite all his efforts, Gab_Yggdra never once found a real bug to exploit. It didn’t discourage him in the slightest. If anything, it pushed him further into experimentation.

Before long, an NPC following began to form around him. Cultivators with strange ideas, questionable morals, and an alarming enthusiasm for chaos gathered under his influence. The Ren Jingyi faction found itself plagued by an ever-growing group of lunatics running amok.

And when asked who was responsible?

The answer was simple.

The lack of bugs.