Development covered 14 Sep 2026 to 16 Sep 2026 (commit dates).
There are 103 quests in the Mortal World of Myriad Immortal Sect, spread across ten batches, one per realm. Each has a card in the Quest Hall with a short hook, and a closing scene you read when you hand it in. This stretch was almost entirely about those two pieces of text, which is most of writing game quests.
The problem was easy to name once I looked at the cards side by side. They were task orders. "Gather roadside herbs, three of them." The objective already says that. The hook was spending its one line repeating the checkbox underneath it.
A three-line rubric
I wrote down what a quest's text owes the player and kept it short enough to score quickly.
First, the hook up front: why must you act? Who is at risk, what is owed, what is counting down. Second, the afterglow at turn-in: the closing scene should land the result and then lean towards the next hook, not stop dead on "you did it". Third, each batch should feel like a chapter, so the last quest of a realm closes an act and opens the next.
Each card got a score from zero to two on each line. Then fresh readers, who had not written any of it, scored all 103 against those three standards. The second batch's hooks averaged 0.6 out of 2, which is a polite way of saying a new player's first two hours were written as a to-do list. The third batch was already at full marks, and I left it alone.
The difference between a stance and a stake
The most useful distinction from the scoring rounds was between a stance and a stake.
A stance says how the character feels: the sect is proud, the elder is worried. A stake says what happens if you do nothing. One of the rewrites changed a hook about the sect preparing for war into one where you count the sect's swords and there are not enough. Same quest, same objective. One version describes a mood. The other gives you a reason to walk out of the gate.
On the second pass, sixteen fields still scored one out of two. Ten were hooks that said what to do without saying what it costs. Six were closing scenes that closed inward, wrapping up neatly, instead of handing you the thread of the next quest. A wolf mentioned at the end of one quest, which becomes the next quest's wolves, is a small thing, and it is the difference between a chain and a list.
If you want to see how that reads in practice, the opening act, the Qi Condensation chapter, is a fair sample of the rewritten cards.
Choices that only one branch could hear
Twelve story choices had a structural problem I would not have found by reading the source files.
Ten of them, from the third batch on, had no branch text at all, so pressing Decide finished the objective with nothing shown. Each now has two labelled branches written from the dilemma in the design. The other problem was sneakier. In the two anchor quests of the first two hours, the strongest closing line in the early game was shared between both branches, but the way the scene was assembled attached shared trailing lines to the second branch only. Pick the first option and you never heard it.
Both branches now carry it, and in one of them each branch also gets its own morning-after cost. The walkthrough for a senior's slight shows one of those two early choices from the player's side.
Walls of text and a reward that did nothing
Some closing scenes were single paragraphs of 130 to 285 words. Nothing in them was wrong. On a phone, in a dialogue panel, they read as a wall. Re-pacing them into two or three beats did more than any rewording.
And one reward was simply hollow. A mid-batch quest handed out a heart-method manual whose story describes it as steadiness against inner demons. Studying it unlocked the technique every character already starts with, then reported "learned". The manual now teaches a modest art of its own that ties back into the passages where the story needs that steadiness. The site's guide to manuals and techniques explains how studying a manual works.
What a rubric buys you
Writing game quests at this scale drifts the same way code does. Each card was fine when it was written, and nobody rereads 103 of them in one sitting. A rubric small enough to apply in a few seconds per card makes the rereading possible, and scoring by someone who did not write the text keeps you from grading your own intentions.
The rewritten story starts at the sect gate: read the first chapter's quests for free in your browser.
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