A/N: Due to my retreat from writing long fanfiction (and I mean long, my total word count was once over 2.5 million here on FFN, in about 17 total fics counting the few short ones or spin-offs/side-stories) I seem to have issues being quite as committed, because my recent resurgence (see my new RWBY fic) hasn't gotten much in reviews.
This is supposed to be based on DW8 Extreme Legends, Ambition Mode to be specific, but with more realistic troop numbers on the enemy team with suitably scaled level progression (e.g. Diaochan will be basically wading into seas of enemies every single time, hundreds to start, then thousands, then tens of thousands, and let's not even think about what will happen when she swoops down upon Cao Cao's 250,000-strong army at Chi Bi to forcibly recruit the Wei senior officers). I will mostly stick to things a Chinese person could possibly know of or notice, but of course there's stuff like the positional numerals and stuff that Diaochan will have to figure out herself.
Summary: For most, beauty is practically a curse. Diaochan had been no different… until now. She has no idea what this whole mess even is, but… she'll make what she can of it, and if Nu Wa and Lady Wangmu's interference says anything… Well, they say that "Life is just God's game…" So perhaps the Curse of Beauty can be inverted? Maybe?
Chapter 1: I Have No Idea What I'm Doing
Diaochan stared at her wardrobe.
She stared some more.
It did not stare back.
However, it also did not change.
There were a grand total of three outfits inside. Diaochan felt sick even looking at them, they were just another reminder as to her new life and sudden responsibilities.
It was not only because they were all intensely lewd and she would be ashamed to wear them, even in private with Lu Bu, there were other reasons too. She'd seen the three outfits in her wardrobe when she reached her rooms the night before this whole mess started and assumed they were for the perverse desires of Dong Zhuo the next time he'd call her to his chambers. HOW HAD THEY FOLLOWED HER TO THIS VILLAGE IN NORTHERN CHINA? Also, WHY WERE ALL THE BUILDINGS BUILT SO OPEN GIVEN HOW COLD WINTERS SURELY WERE HERE IN THE NORTH? If she hadn't known better from asking around, she'd have thought they were in the southern, Wu-Yue provinces, south of the Chang Jiang…
Initially, she had been mystified when she'd awoken in a hut in a small village, mystified by how her mind told her this was all perfectly normal. It shouldn't have been, but asking around the village she learnt that they were building a city here, recruiting an army, and so on, and all of it was under her direction, somehow.
How was this even possible? Beyond the sense that her soul was connected to this place and was issuing orders and coordinating construction, farming and other efforts? Why were these men—and there were plenty of men and women in the village—all actually obeying her?
If they were recruiting an army, where were the soldiers, save for the guard at the "gate" at the road out of the vast clearing the hopeful city was in? She could not find even one soldier!
That had been before she realized the outfit she was walking around in as if it was a second skin was worse than the lewdest of prostitutes. Then she shut herself in her hut believing herself to be drowning in some sort of delusion. A couple hours into the self-confinement she'd been concerned about how she was supposed to be the village leader, but then there was simply a feeling that the village was able to run itself with simply her presence, like something in the back of her mind. She wanted to go outside and explore the village that she had somehow built some more, but she was simply unable to wear the clothes the ridiculously well dressed "peasant" girls in the village wore, or even borrow clothes off the "peasant" men.
That was not arrogance or anything of the sort, because when she dared to poke her head out of the flap of cloth that served as her door in the summer and asked, they loaned her clothes… and she found that they turned practically into steel in her hands, unwilling to be put on. She'd left them there overnight, and tried again in the morning, and still they hardened at her touch, though a quick test showed they did not do so when she poked the clothes of a villager or did not intend to put them on. An attempt to trick whatever curse put this delusion on her had ended up with her arms and head trapped in one set of clothes for nearly a tenth of a shichen (each day was twelve shichen so Europeans would recognize this as 12 minutes) before she gave up… and the clothes allowed themselves to be taken off.
It was also the second day when Diaochan realized she had felt neither hunger nor thirst nor any need to visit a bathroom. The result was discovering that trying to excrete waste gave no results. By this point Diaochan was convinced she was insane and tried to hurt herself by punching a wall. There was no pain, and the wall didn't do anything funny either.
WHAT IS HAPPENING TO ME?
Diaochan stared at her wardrobe.
She stared some more.
Then she reached in and grabbed the soft, thin pink outfit, by far the most revoltingly lewd with the front opened all the way down to her waistband, and with no skirt, instead having strips of cloth that ended up showing her butt off to anyone who cared to look from her rear sides. Perhaps in another time and place Diaochan would rather have slit her own throat than go out in public in such shameful wear, but, if this village truly was somehow under her responsibility…
She had to find out how to make the village more prosperous.
Also, she'd already tested hurting herself, starting with fist and wall and ending with knife to finger, and given up on snapping out of this delusion via that. Sure, she might talk about dying of shame and stuff but she was also pragmatic enough to not try too hard given a little time to think and avoid an overreaction.
She discovered the town hall (Diaochan Fu i.e. "Diaochan's Office") right next to her hut just by looking at it and seeing the characters for "town hall" pop up over it in her mind of all places. She wished it was just a normal sign.
And there was a normal sign instead.
She blinked. I wish a chest full of gold could appear in front of me.
Nothing happened.
Further testing showed that the things she could make happen with a thought were only reasonable things, things that would make sense. So, she wandered into the main town square, seeing a number of empty building slots around the square and a dug-out pit of some sort in the center, as if waiting for something. She tried to walk onto the wood surrounding the pit… but was somehow unable. Walking into people did nothing other than her stopping, the people hanging around didn't take note of her unless she made eye contact and desired to hear their opinions. It was as if she was a spirit of some sort. Maybe this is the afterlife, and I was pushed around enough in life that my version of heaven in death was to be in charge of my own village? If that's the case I feel sorry for Lu Bu… maybe he'll pay more attention to Lingqi and her poor mother with me dead, hopefully find comfort in his true wife instead of a manipulative mistress like me… Any outsider hearing these thoughts would probably be able to tell that Diaochan didn't have much in the way of self-respect at this point. That would soon change.
She went around seeking the thoughts of the people. Apparently one of the farmers hanging around the town square in a moment of down time was interested in poetry, and the "peasant" girls with obscenely nice dresses for their station just wanted peace to come soon.
…Wait, where was the smell? People who didn't have lots of access to soap for washing should not be almost completely free of odor! And there seemed to be little if any smell of feces either!
It only took a moment of asking to find out.
"What do you mean you dump it in the pool beside my house and it magically loses its stench? And the pool's water is used as fertilizer? I'm not a goddess you know!" Actually, she had some doubts even as she yelled that.
"Um, Diaochan Cunzhang (Village Leader)?" The blacksmith contributed as she gaped at the "gate" guard who stood at the mouth out of the town square. The road there led to the road out into the forests and away from this amazing valley they had found and apparently created this village in, which apparently no enemy had found to date given the lack of troops and it still being in one piece despite that. Diaochan didn't really want to know.
"Yes?"
"Given Lady Wangmu and Nu Wa themselves rescued each us from certain death, told us to live here, and to await you, you pretty much are. Also, they said that you are considered by many to be the most beautiful mortal woman in China, so you may as well count yourself some manner of deity if not an outright goddess given their blessings. That being said, might I introduce you to some of the weapons I can import materials for and build? Our coffers are enough to buy something more decent than the basics you have equipped…"
"What do I have equipped? And how does equipping things work if I don't carry them on me?" Diaochan asked, strongly suspecting she didn't want to hear the answer. She had never trained in the fighting arts, though admittedly since it wasn't SO different from dancing in the requirements…
"Well, let me check the cabinets…" The Blacksmith opened up a very tall cabinet "you usually go out with an iron whip and twin swords at present, though you can change it up. They should disappear from the cabinets at the same time you disappear from the gate, according to Lady Nu Wa."
"How does that even… well I'll test it, Guard, I'm heading out… I need to figure out what this heading out business even works like."
"Be careful out there, milady." The Guard said with a nod.
"Thank you." She said to the guard out of politeness
Diaochan made it two steps out of the village square before she smacked face-first into a sign that appeared out of nowhere in mid-air. Maybe this is just another delusion? She looked closer. It read a series of levels, "Beginner", "Easy", "Normal", "Hard", "Chaos" and "Ultimate". She picked "Beginner" just in case, but before her hand could reach the letters they faded with "Beginner" selected, just by a thought. Then it showed her four choices for battles to participate in. She picked the Yellow Turban Rebellion, which had one star for difficulty like the others, but said it gave Materials, whatever that was. In the meantime she was wondering, wasn't the Rebellion already over? Anyhow, she felt it was a safer bet than whatever the Allies or Fame things were about, because it said it was a small-scale battle and since clearly she HAD to go to battle she might as well start small.
Then she saw darkness.
"I feels kind of bad how our Goddess has to do so much work herself so soon after arriving…" The Guard said as said goddess dissolved in a cloud of golden particles which faded moments later. "Dealing with the documents at the town hall to run this village, disappear to who knows where to fight battles to bring home loot and more people…"
"None of us can really keep up with her with how she is ordained by two of the creation goddesses, not anywhere near full time at least. Maybe she'll come back with new allies who can help her, if only a little. The blessings of Lady Wangmu and Nu Wa, for a mission to lead this world to prosperity, must be a heavy burden to bear…" The Blacksmith answered. "If only my foot was still good to help… and she was willing to risk the lives of more people in battle than just herself."
The guard sighed too, before they said goodbye and the Blacksmith went back to making farming tools in expectations for increasing numbers of settlers now that they had a village leader. People were trickling slowly into the settlement, after all…
There was a description of some sort, floating before her eyes in the endless, weightless darkness. It had numbers Diaochan did not understood, next to a bust image of her, showing her upper torso to hair. Huh, my hair turned brown somehow, I didn't even notice… this picture looks like it's smiling invitingly… ugh, and given these ridiculous clothes it forces me to wear it makes me look like a slut…
A corner of her mind she'd repressed long ago whispered to her that that was essentially what she had been before this abrupt shift in her life, a seductress to bend men to the will of her puppeteer. Then the description shifted to someone else who she didn't know. Wait, am I still going to come out as "me"?
A map appeared in her mind, with a bunch of red dots, a couple red circles, and a red circle with a helmet icon inside. There were also some blue dots, for troops she knew somehow, subconsciously, to be her own, but no blue circles. So… circles were special somehow? And she bet the helmet icon was the enemy general?
There was also a timer, which she puzzled over momentarily before deciding she could figure out how her strange new world measured time during the actual battle, or how its numbers worked for that matter, because she couldn't understand the characters used for the numbers.
Unfortunately that mental readiness was what prompted the battle to actually begin. Diaochan suddenly found herself at the head of a group of friendly soldiers (where did they come from?), holding an iron whip with twin swords at her hips. She found that she could not even feel their weight as she broke into a run toward where her map said the enemies were. Then she stopped in place and the troops behind her did the same once they caught up (I'm faster than them by quite a bit?), keeping her attention on the timer that was ticking down… so it seemed to be a base-ten numeric system… except the larger units of time were 60 smaller ones… She knew from her old idle-time readings that some parts of China did have 60 Miao (seconds) in every Fen (minute), so why not refer to them as that?
Well, it was time to get what they'd come here for, presumably killing all the enemy would give her the rest of the time span to search for crates—presumably—of "materials"? She didn't really want to kill anyone, but it seemed that whatever this curse or delusion was it required her to do so to advance the interests of the settlement put under her charge…
Oh how very wrong (and annoyed) she would be about how these "Skirmish" missions worked.
A/N: My misconception the first time I went to battle (and got Pang Tong on the first go without paying attention to the description for which officers are there… ye gods that outfit must cook him alive given how Diaochan walks around the base).
This will be a mostly humorous (it gets a bit morbid once casualty counts start really piling up, in the sense of "I've killed more than a thousand people in ten minutes? I didn't even notice…") series expounding the game mechanics. In other words, it's a whine fic on my part. Also, after testing up to Normal difficulty Diaochan will stick to Beginner for a very long time because there are no difficulty bonuses to rewards until after that and she feels it best to play it safe. The effect on rewards and experience and such is actually part of the Curse, a calibration of Diaochan's Imperial Aura before the beginning of a battle.
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