Too Many Cooks Make a Dual Core
Too many boatmen and the boat goes up the mountain.
But if all those boatmen were essentially a single hive mind sharing every thought in real time—wasn't that basically a dual-core processor?
"Calling us a dual core is a stretch when even all of us combined still can't match the main body, right?"
"That's a fair point, but the main body's asleep right now."
"No need to poke her awake. Let's just do our own thing. Once she comes to, she'll read everything we did anyway."
There was no way a bunch of Humanity Clones—mere Mortals—could pilot a cultivator's body without running into problems.
The biggest issue was that, unlike the main body, they couldn't consciously wield slaughter energy.
And since the Heavenly Slaughter Art was a passive skill that enabled the use of combat skills and consumables even outside of battle, the Humanity Clones couldn't activate it at will either.
"Thank god we've got Auto-Battle."
"Honestly though, isn't the main body way too Auto-Battle one-trick?"
"True. Even when we use it, we get this level of performance."
"Yeah, but Auto-Battle eats into the experience gains. That's a straight-up loss."
"But none of us can do manual combat, can we?"
"Wait—don't we have one?"
The Humanity Clones rotated, and a new one took the controls.
She clenched and unclenched her hands, sat down, stood up, and ran through a quick physical systems check. Then she pulled an enormous lance from the inventory, hefted it, and swung it through the empty air.
"Wielding it with an actual body really drives the feel home."
"You're the only one who properly learned spear arts from Elder Togo!"
"Go fight something! If it gets dangerous, just flip on Auto-Battle!"
"The rest of us can't even draw out the body's full performance, so manual combat's off the table for us anyway!"
"Hmm. Wonder if it'll work. Let's try it out on a low-level map first."
What the Humanity Clones hadn't accounted for was that the spear arts Elder Togo had casually taught them were, in fact, a formidable martial art of the caliber a peak Hwashin-realm cultivator would still remember.
Even a mere fragment of that art, reproduced faithfully, meant this particular Humanity Clone possessed an overwhelming talent for the spear compared to the others.
And of course, that formidable martial art unleashed its full majesty through Hia's absurd physical stats—all three thousand of them. Even without being able to properly use slaughter energy, even without activating a transformation skill as a simple passive to inflate those stats further, it was more than enough.
The massive lance, utterly mismatched to the small girl's frame, thrust forward like a shot from a cannon. The tip wavered for an instant, and phantom spear strikes split into multiple afterimages, skewering five charging monsters clean through. Experience poured in, and the Humanity Clones in the Mental World let out a collective cheer.
An elite monster's blow slipped harmlessly between the swaying spear strikes, missing the Humanity Clone who had hidden her body like a mirage. In the next heartbeat she emerged from a blind spot, hurling herself and the lance together in a single strike that smashed the creature to pieces.
"Clap clap clap clap!!!"
"This manual combat has romance written all over it…!"
"Doesn't the main body do pretty well in close combat too?"
"That's just a brawl."
"She just crushes everything with raw physical stats and slaughter energy."
"Hoo…"
Compared to practicing spear arts inside the mind, moving the actual body made slaughter energy and spiritual power flow along naturally, as if clinging to every motion.
That was how she'd been able to turn ordinary monsters—and even elites—into shish kebabs. The moment that sensation was shared, the Humanity Clones reached a near-unanimous decision: the one who'd learned spear arts would keep holding the manual-combat controls, so they could keep awakening that feeling.
"While the main body's holed up, we play the game as hard as we can."
"Let's not touch the neutral NPCs, okay? Okay?"
"Our notoriety and grudge values are so high that neutral NPCs barely even show up anymore."
"Red dots are monsters, sure, but NPCs have so much slaughter energy piled on them that killing them is a net experience loss."
That was the biggest difference between Yu Hee and the Humanity Clones.
Yu Hee had stacked slaughter energy from the very beginning, tanked attacks with regeneration, and fought by swinging slaughter energy around—her default stance was always first strike, always ambush. The Humanity Clones, on the other hand, preferred observe-then-retreat, or observe-then-raid.
"Ack! A glowing prefix! Auto-Battle banned!"
"Switch to manual! We are not pulling the suicidal stunt of running Auto-Battle against a Tier-1 prefix!"
"Event! Temporary retreat until the event debuff clears!"
Charitably, they were safety-first. Uncharitably, they were a pack of cowards. Even if the Humanity Clones treated everything like a game, the Reality Patch meant monster attacks hurt—and from a Mortal's perspective, the only sensible move was to avoid danger at all costs.
What kept them from giving up entirely was the one Humanity Clone carrying the entire manual-combat load by herself.
A single unrestrained spear strike carved a monster into six pieces. A short spear, buffed with Spoon, was thrown and punched a massive doughnut hole through a fleeing monster. The enormous lance traced a circle through the air, blanketing her body and intercepting a wave of attacks in a single instant—then the spear tip closed the distance and danced, whirled by the small girl, until the elite monster was diced into cube steak and shattered.
Death in the shape of a little girl, white and spotless without a single drop of blood or a single wound, strolling forward with a metal instrument of slaughter in hand—the sight was so threatening that monsters instinctively tried to flee.
"Doesn't something feel kind of tingly, though?"
"Is that arrhythmia?"
"Doesn't feel like it. And it only happens during manual combat."
"I think… spiritual power is accumulating."
Even among the Humanity Clones, each one felt things differently—so only two of them noticed it at all. In other words, out of a dozen-odd Humanity Clones, only two had any talent for spiritual power.
That was why the realization came late. But once it landed, it was unmistakable.
"What Elder taught us wasn't spear arts. It was a kind of technique—a spell art."
"That's… possible!"
"No way a cultivator would bother remembering some Mortal-grade martial art!"
"Then what's the deal with the Mortal over here who remembered it and is actually using it?"
"What else? She's a freak! Anyway—the point is, it's spiritual power stacking, not slaughter energy, right?"
The swinging spear became a conduit. From the tip, faint spiritual energy bloomed and gathered, following the trajectory of the supple, dancing spear point, exerting a fragile power of its own.
Even without activating the Soft Body Art, the sheer physical stats she possessed were enough that even that meager spiritual energy—without a scrap of slaughter energy—could smash elite monsters flat.
Spiritual energy that should have collided with slaughter energy and vanished instead rode the spear tip and flowed back in naturally, riding the experience gains.
Manual combat without slaughter energy.
Spear arts that gathered spiritual energy.
And Humanity Clones who, unlike the main body, could actually sense spiritual power. That combination confirmed it: they could kill monsters and stack spiritual power instead of slaughter energy. The Humanity Clones locked into total agreement.
"Spiritual power! Let's stack spiritual power!"
"The main body can't use spiritual power anyway! This is ours!"
"It's not that she can't use it—she just doesn't, and she can't control it! Either way, I'm in!"
"Stack that spiritual power hard!"
"But… what do we do about that?"
At one clone's words, the Humanity Clone piloting the body turned her gaze. Thanks to her transcendent physical abilities, she could make out a small fence far in the distance.
A fence cobbled together from a few weathered wooden planks.
"…The Training Ground."
"If we go in there, don't we have to wake the main body?"
"We can't use the slaughter energy or stat bugs."
"No—we can make skills in there instead!"
"We need spiritual-power-based skills too!"
"But efficiency-wise, the main body doing it would still be broken as hell, right?"
"True. Right now she could grow a whole new Sea of Slaughter, or yank up stats by the hundreds."
"The Training Ground will pop up again later anyway! And she's the one who went inside and left everything to us!"
"Is that how it works?"
The debate among the Humanity Clones dragged on longer than expected. They shared thoughts, yes—but each was still an individual personality with its own quirks.
And the Training Ground was important enough to warrant the argument.
Right now they couldn't farm skill experience through combat. Inside the Training Ground, actions registered as training rather than combat, so skill experience still came in—letting them create new skills or push existing ones toward mastery. They could also massively stockpile slaughter energy or jack up their stats.
"Should we ask the main body?"
"She only just locked herself inside, didn't she?"
"Hold on, I'll go ask!"
One Humanity Clone hopped onto a waterwheel in the Mental World and flew up toward the Golden Core, trying to re-enter the inner world—but Yu Hee was already sprawled out inside, dead asleep.
"Yeah, she's completely out. And I can't get in. Feels like the main body alone is filling the entire interior of the Golden Core."
The Humanity Clone poked at the Golden Core reflecting the Mental World a few times. Watching her, the others finally aligned on the only remaining option: decide among themselves.
"We're going in."
And so, while Yu Hee snored away inside the Golden Core's inner world—using herself as a medium to stabilize a Golden Core that had been force-slathered with spiritual energy until it swelled unstably like an overstuffed cream puff—the Humanity Clones piloting the body stepped into the Training Ground.
Entering the Training Ground.