ACSP: Chapter 219: Turns Out There's a Hidden Plot Here Too!
"Stop talking crap! Even if the Boss hadn't stepped in, I had plenty of hidden cards left to pull. I could have absolutely still taken down that Uchiha Obito on my own...!" Li Dala barked, his face burning. He was already deeply irritated that his golden opportunity to show off in front of the twins had blown up in his face; hearing Ronan relentlessly rub salt into the wound made him feel incredibly defensive, forcing him to loudly justify his parameters.
Jiang Chen completely tuned out their bickering. Instead, he kept his focus on the Nangong sisters, pressing them for any granular, specific intelligence they might have regarding the instance's structural logic.
In truth, before entering this Secret Realm, he had explicitly reached out to Zhao Xuansu to gather some baseline reconnaissance. However, Zhao Xuansu rarely budgeted his stamina on this specific instance and didn't possess an optimized data log, only offering a few fragmented, surface-level pointers.
Initially, Jiang Chen figured that by stitching together Zhao Xuansu's fragments with his own absolute, encyclopedic knowledge of the original Naruto plotline from his past life, clearing this Secret Realm would be an effortless walk in the park.
But analyzing the chaotic state of the current deployment, it was glaringly obvious that his assumptions were flawed. The underlying script of this Secret Realm possessed an immense degree of dynamic freedom, heavily altering its narrative branches based entirely on the specific, unscripted inputs of the raiding party.
What Jiang Chen hadn't anticipated, however, was that while the Nangong twins claimed to have spent significant time grinding this zone, their raw power thresholds were simply too low. Lacking the financial backing or specialized resources of a major guild, the two sisters were essentially equivalent to budget cannon fodder in a high-tier instance like this.
They had previously found their poor track record too embarrassing to admit, which was why they had kept their mouths shut on the journey here. It wasn't until Jiang Chen took the initiative to scrutinize their data that their cheeks burned crimson, and they finally came clean.
As it turned out, the absolute highest Mission Progress they had ever scraped together in their lives was merely surviving until the Kakashi Hatake interception phase. And even then, it was never a clean, authoritative engagement. Sometimes their party synergy clicked and they could successfully gang up on the copy ninja; other times, they would mismanage a single frame and get entirely wiped out. In short, their historical clears relied almost entirely on a massive element of random luck.
"Big Brother Jiang Chen, please don't think we're just total trash," Nangong Fei said sheepishly, her eyes darting away nervously, completely resembling a self-conscious child who was terrified to maintain eye contact with her idol. "The structural difficulty scaling of this Secret Realm is notoriously overtuned. The vast majority of standard regional teams have their progress caps hard-locked exactly where ours is. Only those hyper-optimized, high-end corporate squads with full luxury configurations and legendary contracted characters can reliably break past the threshold and reach over 60% completion..."
"Even the fully optimized elite teams can only secure a 60% completion rate?" Jiang Chen pondered thoughtfully, his fingers lightly tapping the pommel of his sword. He fixed his gaze back onto Nangong Fei. "Then, is there a recorded historical metric for an absolute 100% perfect clear?"
"No, never," Nangong Fei shook her head definitively. "As far as the Magic City public registries go, the absolute peak completion record for this instance is held by a specialized vanguard squad led by Zhao Quan, the premier elite from the Zhao Family's Southern Pavilion. Their recorded completion metric settled at 80%."
Nangong Hong quickly chimed in, "Yeah, Big Brother Jiang Chen! When we were passing through the main distortion gate just now, didn't you stop to look at the global leaderboard carved onto the Secret Realm Stone Tablet right next to the entrance? All the regional historical records are explicitly detailed on it."
"Oh. I never waste my attention looking at those things," Jiang Chen shrugged nonchalantly.
He then proceeded to cross-examine the twins with a few alternative narrative and mechanical queries. Unfortunately, the operational boundaries of what the two sisters knew were far too superficial. Jiang Chen couldn't extract the deep, structural lore data he was actually hunting for.
As the pieces stood on the board, the only concrete, actionable intelligence he had verified was that the reigning record-holder was Zhao Quan at 80%, while the generic ceiling for high-tier standard teams sat firmly at 60%. If the instance's natural progression followed standard mechanical thresholds, his party's progress metric would likely hit a narrative wall right around that exact same bracket.
"Right..." Jiang Chen muttered, his eyes drifting back toward the thick, smoking canopy where Obito's headless corpse lay pinned. If an 80% or 100% clear existed, it meant there was a massive, hidden phase lurking right behind the curtain—one that the regional meta had completely failed to unlock.
Just then, Nangong Hong seemed to have a sudden breakthrough in her memories. She let out a sharp cry of surprise, snapping her fingers excitedly as she spun back toward Jiang Chen.
"Big Brother Jiang Chen! I just remembered something incredibly important! There was a massive rumor circulating around the Magic City forum a while back. Someone leaked that the Uchiha Obito encountered by Zhao Quan's squad was fundamentally different from the version every other team fights!"
A sharp, analytical glint cut through Jiang Chen's eyes. "Different? What do you mean by that?"
"I don't know the exact technical parameters," Nangong Hong explained rapidly, her voice rising with excitement. "But the leak claimed that the Obito faced by Zhao Quan's team possessed an absolutely perverted, rule-breaking ability—he was seemingly completely immune to all incoming physical and ninjutsu attacks! Zhao Quan's frontline was entirely wiped out multiple times by that specific version before they finally managed to find a mechanical exploit to put him down!"
She took a quick breath and added, "Back then, a lot of analysts speculated that the only reason the Southern Pavilion squad managed to breach the 80% completion mark was directly tied to defeating that special, immune version of Obito. The problem is, no matter how much other teams tried to replicate their runs, the Obito they encountered never possessed that invulnerability trick."
Hearing Nangong Hong's breakdown, Li Dala rested his chin in his hand, a smug, knowing grin spreading across his face. "Ah, it all makes sense now. This Zhao Quan guy must have stumbled his way into a specific Hidden Plot trigger, which forced the Uchiha Obito asset to load into a high-tier, berserk state."
However, the second the words left his mouth, Ronan let out a sharp, deeply cynical scoff. "Hidden Plot? Berserk state? Do you genuinely think you're sitting in a gaming capsule playing a virtual reality MMO?" From his biting, contemptuous delivery, it was clear he viewed Li Dala's pop-culture theories with absolute disdain.
Li Dala's face flushed as he prepared to aggressively defend his hypothesis, but before he could bark back, Jiang Chen's calm voice cut through the air.
"Actually, Li Dala is entirely right. This is indeed the structural logic of a Hidden Plot within this Secret Realm."
In truth, Jiang Chen had already been tracing the exact same narrative threads in his mind. He vividly remembered encountering a functionally identical mechanical anomaly back when he was clearing the [Forest of Death] instance. In that run, specific environmental variables had caused Gaara to force-awaken his berserk state far ahead of the standard script, which instantly unlocked a highly lucrative Hidden Mission.
While the exact emotional triggers between Gaara and Uchiha Obito were entirely different, the core system design was identical: if a raiding party satisfies a specific, unwritten narrative condition inside the instance, these so-called 'NPCs' will undergo a fundamental state-change.
And in this reality, a state-change for a key historical figure didn't just mean a cosmetic upgrade—it meant unlocking the true depth of the instance's latent progression.
If his deductions were accurate, Zhao Quan must have accidentally triggered the exact conditions required to force Obito's brain-waves to completely fracture, allowing him to successfully awaken the [Mangekyo Sharingan] and gain the absolute, space-time dominance of [Kamui]!
Based on the universal system principle that the raw lethality of a Secret Realm boss directly correlates to the generosity of its completion rewards... a Mangekyo-awakened Uchiha Obito would naturally exist on a completely different existential plane compared to the fragile, three-tomoe brat Ronan had just executed. Because the former is vastly more powerful, the system naturally allocates a massive, premium progress chunk upon his defeat.
Meanwhile, every other generic team failed to trigger that emotional threshold. They simply fought a standard, sub-optimal version of Obito, meaning their progress rewards were hard-capped at a meager 20%.
When analyzed through the lens of absolute lore logic, the entire mechanical mystery of the instance became crystal clear.
"Ha! See that? Even the Boss explicitly agrees with my deduction, and you're still sitting there playing the skeptic?" Catching Jiang Chen's validation, Li Dala immediately threw Ronan a thoroughly smug, insufferable look.
Ronan didn't bother firing back a retort. If the words had come solely from Li Dala—a guy who loved nothing more than talking big and running unoptimized assumptions—he would have ignored it entirely. But Jiang Chen was a completely different story. If the Boss stated that a hidden variable existed, then as far as Ronan was concerned, it was an absolute, indisputable reality.
Was this a text-book display of a double standard? Absolutely. The absolute peak, standard-issue double standard worthy of an untamed God-King.
But as Jiang Chen stared down at the headless, silent corpse pinned to the tree, a cold realization settled into his chest. If they had already executed this version of Obito, it meant they had missed the trigger frame. The version of the boss that could grant them a 100% perfect clear was already dead before he could even evolve.
Or was he?
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