Going on Strike
The Golden Core spun slowly, lazily, orbiting along the wheel's path.
Along the trajectory of that turning Core, vast quantities of spiritual energy clung to it like molten sugar syrup dripping from the burning flames of slaughter, coating it evenly, bit by bit. The layer was so impossibly thin it was practically invisible—and as that film of spiritual energy was absorbed into the Core, again and again and again, there came a moment when the Core had clearly grown, if only by a speck of dust.
Growth was a generous word for it. It was closer to forcibly inflating something like a hollow sugar puff.
The Golden Core gets fragile? As if anything's going to attack a Golden Core sitting inside a Mental World. You'd have to cut through the wheel—my true-name Dharma Treasure—open the gate to the Mental World, tank the slaughter pouring out of the Sea of Slaughter, and then somehow hit the Core hidden inside the tower. Good luck with that.
And that penalty about spiritual energy control going unstable, about techniques and artifacts rooted in spiritual power making the Core shudder and potentially collapse?
I don't have any spiritual-energy-based skills anyway!!!!
Thanks to the wheel, there was some kind of compatibility with spiritual energy—but every single skill I actually possessed ran on slaughter coefficients. Slaughter skills, the lot of them!
You could argue the wheel was the one exception—my true-name Dharma Treasure, a dedicated weapon with my soul bound to it through spiritual energy—but that was a non-issue. Just run it on mental force plus slaughter instead of spiritual energy. Done.
Hmm. A stray thought about the Humanity Clones inside the Golden Core made me peek inward.
They were huddled together in there, holding pot lids against the slaughter-flames that had burrowed all the way into the Core, while scooping up the sugar-syrup spiritual energy being absorbed into the Core with ladles and pouring it into cardboard boxes to harden into fortress walls.
Looks like they're pretty busy in there too!
Anyway, I turned every scrap of my attention back to burning slaughter and feeding spiritual energy into the Golden Core.
Which was only possible because this secret realm was overflowing with spiritual energy. It was basically a spiritual-power boost event!
Just like the Training Ground.
"Hoo..."
The Sea of Slaughter filling the Mental World had shrunk a little. In exchange—if you could call it that—spiritual power began radiating from the Golden Core, which had successfully evolved from a candy sprinkle into an actual hard candy, and started illuminating the Mental World.
The ratio had shifted from an extreme nine-to-one all the way to seven-to-three. That was how much slaughter I'd permanently burned away, and how much spiritual power I'd stockpiled in one go by devouring every last scrap of spiritual energy in an entire secret realm.
"At least my level didn't drop, but... ugh."
I'd definitely burned through too much slaughter. The amount regenerating from the circulation within the Sea of Slaughter had plummeted. At this rate, I couldn't even use my transformation skill.
Unless I permanently carved away more slaughter, the regenerating amount from circulation had dropped so hard I couldn't transform at all.
"I'll just find a Training Ground and restock slaughter before I level up and break my limits."
"So, newborn—did you make any progress?"
"Yes, Elder Togo! Thank you!"
"A month seems rather short for claiming great results, does it not?"
"Huh? A whole month already?!"
It barely felt like four days in the secret realm?! You bastard—Double Speed Mod! You again! Give me back my sense of time! Your activation is so completely random my time perception is totally wrecked!
Granted, stripping a secret realm bare of spiritual energy in four days was a little fast. But a whole month is ridiculous! What a waste of time! Level and stats completely unchanged! At this point it's basically an idle game, isn't it?
Which, from the perspective of a player character stuck inside a garbage idle game, is a catastrophe!
"I'll go check the results of my training, then!"
"Be careful out there, newborn."
Curious just how meaningfully my experience gain rate had improved, I left the base immediately and headed out onto the map.
"Now this is a game..."
I'd only converted a single low-level map into slaughter and experience, and my exp bar had filled by over ten percent. At this rate, I could just run Auto-Battle and farm same-level maps!
Clearing one map only took a day or two, after all.
As long as no Eok-kka events went off!
Judging by how eerily quiet my senses were, I wasn't picking up any premonition of an Eok-kka event. Something I'd noticed now that I had more spiritual power: detecting Eok-kka event foreshadowing—or the events themselves—seemed to be spiritual-energy-based.
The chaos-mingled 'Gar' appears!
Against elite mobs, the exp loss from Auto-Battle was too painful, so I handled those with manual combat. Even with my slaughter depleted, Chopsticks and Spoon alone dealt more than enough damage—blatant overkill, really.
"Not having an AoE is a little annoying, though..."
Bombs were a large-scale AoE with a genuinely long cast and prep time, so they were terrible for farming trash mobs in bulk. And I wasn't about to burn massive amounts of slaughter on transformation or Laws just to clear regular enemies.
Well, once I mastered the Chopsticks skill, I could spam them as a pseudo-AoE.
The problem was neutral NPCs, humanoid monsters, or beasts and abominations that carried Golden Cores—those didn't die to one or two Chopsticks, and they had ways of blocking or dodging them.
"First, hit late-stage Golden Core... find a Training Ground to restock slaughter and inflate my stats... hunt down consumables for the limit break... haaah..."
I opened a notepad and started listing everything I needed to do, one by one—and then the existential dread hit me out of nowhere.
Fuck. Why did I have to get dropped into this garbage-ass game.
No, scratch that—why did I have to end up somewhere with this broken xianxia mode slapped on top.
Why only me!
You're really gonna say that? You, who treated that game like it was your entire life and poured tens of thousands of hours into it?
Right—if you clung to it that hard, shouldn't you be thanking whoever reincarnated you?
"Oh, come on, that's still—"
I turned toward the voice coming from inside me and saw the Humanity Clones, nestled in the cardboard fortress they'd built by slathering melted spiritual energy onto cardboard inside the now-enlarged Golden Core, cheerfully playing a board game together.
"Stop goofing off and get to work!"
Our job is basically just picking up a conscience and stabbing you with it, though?
"You little shits—oh, fine, is that how it is? Since you're me and I'm you anyway, how about this!"
I focused my mind. Slaughter drawn up from the Sea of Slaughter took shape atop the tower in the Mental World, forcibly summoning the Humanity Clones out of the Golden Core, forging bodies for them and dragging them into the open.
Every face was identical, but each Humanity Clone was wildly distinct in personality. They flailed in panic, trying to say something—I forced their mouths shut. They might have worn an older version of my appearance, but every last one of them was still just a Mortal.
"If all you're going to do is hole up inside and nag me, then you do it yourselves!"
With that declaration, I fled straight into the Golden Core—into the interior.
The Humanity Clones were still reeling from the main body's sudden strike announcement when one of them, first among them, concentrated the way they used to observe the outside world from within—focusing from atop the tower.
"...Huh. It works."
A Mortal Humanity Clone from a past life began to move the body of a Golden Core cultivator who had transcended the mundane world.
"For real. Can't use slaughter, but... hmm. Chopsticks."
Just by saying the skill name, slaughter moved on its own, and two chopsticks settled into her hand.
"Want to take turns?"
What Yu Hee hadn't accounted for was this: even if they were nothing more than Mortals, the Humanity Clones were still other versions of herself, complete with past-life memories.
In other words, those Humanity Clones were the same idiots who had poured over fifty thousand hours into this garbage game—which meant that, in a certain sense, they were pure gamers whose entire focus was on simple leveling, event checks, and gear farming, far more than Hee-a, who actually cared about getting stronger as a cultivator.
Until now, the past-life Humanity Clones had been stuck inside with nothing to do but watch, backseat-game, and stab Hee-a with a conscience whenever she was about to do something stupid—or just mess around among themselves. Now, thanks to Hee-a's whim, they could move the body.
Naturally, more than a dozen Humanity Clones immediately started checking and verifying every single thing each of them personally considered important.
One of them, possessed by the spirit of an organization freak, started sorting through Hee-a's inventory—the one she always just hit auto-sort on—along with the consumable slots and the gear loaded into the quick slots.
Another one shouted that you couldn't move on to the next map until you'd personally checked every single mark that popped up on the minimap after terrain scouting, instead of just Auto-Battling through the hunting and calling it done.
Yet another, possessed by the spirit of an aesthetic maniac, tried to change Hee-a's costume—the pure white mourning robes she insisted on wearing every single day, even if it meant using mods to keep them on.
And while the Humanity Clones failed to reach any kind of consensus and absolute pandemonium broke out among them—
Hee-a's consciousness was sprawled out asleep inside the cardboard fortress the Humanity Clones had so diligently built within the Golden Core.