Players Conquer the World with Secret Identities

For the sake of a ten-million prize, Zhu Ling joins a full-dive game called The Contest for the Throne. But with terrible luck from the start, her initial identity is a princess fleeing her homeland amid turmoil in the Qiang Kingdom. It pours with rain, and pursuers are closing in behind her. All she has is an empty player interface and a System that does nothing but nag. Zhu Ling: … Heaven wants her dead. After barely completing the hellishly difficult beginner quest, she unlocks the player forum, only to discover that of the eighty million who signed up and the more than three million who qualified, fewer than a hundred players are left. Zhu Ling: …? A hardcore casual survival game, just as advertised. To survive to the end, she promptly fabricates a nonexistent sect and puts on nonexistent secret identities A scholar of humble origins who cares about the world, a cool doctor equally skilled with sword and medicine, a dashing and highly skilled swordsman, an alluring puppet master who is neither wholly good nor evil… Wearing her secret identities, she serves up the latest plot previews and makes the players on the forum cry and wail, wishing they could take the game's awful developers down with them. Zhu Ling smiles faintly, quietly claiming all the credit. * The story hasn't even reached its halfway point, yet fewer than ten competitors remain. Players eliminated after “dying” keep an eye on the forum and follow the plot previews, becoming utterly obsessed with the new characters In other words, they go crazy one by one, grin through the angst, and keep working hard to achieve the game's goal of “making everyone suffer together.” So when the story reaches its finale, the little princess at the heart of the faction brings along the new characters the players love and asks them for help, the players, dazed with infatuation, happily “sell” themselves to her. From then on, the Qiang Kingdom rises to greatness. Zhu Ling sweeps through the seven kingdoms, becomes ruler of all under heaven, and achieves an unprecedented feat: [All Nations Pay Homage Beneath the Imperial Crown] Reader's note: 1. Any poems and other sources quoted in the story will be cited in detail in the author's notes. 2. The heroine has a golden finger, and this is a wish-fulfillment story, not a conventional political intrigue novel. The author's skills are limited, so apologies in advance for any plot holes. 3. This is an ensemble story with elements of the Fourth Calamity, set in a fictional dynasty. No historical nitpicking, please, and don't derail the discussion. Theme: Life is as brief as a mayfly's. All that matters is having a clear conscience.