The Heart of Rage
"Fucking hell…!"
The reason I was swearing even as my level rose was simple enough. I'd hit level 499 — the absolute ceiling of the Golden Core, the point where you had no choice but to break through to the next realm — and in all that time I hadn't so much as glimpsed a Training Ground or a single gift for Cheon Nan-cho. Six whole months of nonstop map-clearing, no rest, grinding myself into the dirt!
Granted, the only reason I'd leveled this fast was the experience booster I'd slapped on thanks to the two Humanity Clones still diligently training their spiritual energy. But that didn't mean I could just punch through the limit whenever I felt like it!
Listing out everything I needed for a breakthrough was enough to make my chest seize up.
Max every single stat to its absolute limit.
Craft or find the special consumable required for the breakthrough.
Attain an enlightenment deep enough to touch the Nascent Soul.
And finally, prepare for the Heavenly Tribulation event that would come crashing down the moment I broke through.
Every last one of them was a throat-tightening nightmare. Even the first item alone — pushing every stat to its cap — was more than a single Training Ground run could handle. It wasn't just a Golden Core realm problem. Because I'd also learned the body-refinement art of transformation, my stat ceilings had ballooned into something truly monstrous.
Right. I'd thought the whole "hybrid magic-swordsman" thing — dual cultivation of dharma and body — only came with an experience penalty. I had no idea the stat caps would inflate too and make climbing to the next realm a living hell!!!
Still, now that experience no longer mattered to me, the burden of running Auto-Battle had completely vanished.
No talent for combat? Yeah, Auto-Battle's got that covered!
Auto-Battle was god. Auto-Battle was invincible!
Rekindling that twisted faith, I kept clearing the map through the endless parade of events that still popped up at every possible moment. I was mid-thought about a monster being puppeted by a giant mushroom — wondering if I could peel the thing off and gift it to Cheon Nan-cho — when somewhere else entirely…
"Have we fully mapped the demon immortal's movement path?"
"Yes. She's completely surrounded! No matter which way she flees, we can send a signal at once."
"At last."
He had been forced to claw open an exit and crawl out of a legendary secret realm that had not opened in thousands of years. He'd left his natal Dharma Treasure behind with his eastern branch as a precaution against the unknown — and then the connection to that branch had been severed entirely.
After all that suffering, he'd flown east only to find the mountain range that had cradled his branch and its secret realm torn out by the roots, leaving nothing but a vast plain.
There was no need to hunt for a culprit. Rumors had already thundered across the region: some mad cultivator calling herself a demon immortal had simply ripped the spirit-rich mountains free and walked off with them.
He'd tried to track her down immediately, but the pursuit refused to stick with almost supernatural stubbornness. Even the tracking artifacts he'd claimed inside the secret realm kept jerking her trail around every few days, sending him on wild goose chases until he finally had no choice but to throw pure manpower at the problem.
With his entire eastern branch gone, all he had left were the spoils of the secret realm. He'd used those as collateral to hire other cultivators for the hunt — and now, at last, the encirclement was complete.
"I'll go myself."
A Nascent Soul cultivator, burning with the single-minded will to take revenge on the demon immortal, set out in person.
The hourglass flips over!
"You absolute piece of shit event—!"
Base Teleport!
Of course the Nascent Soul cultivator lost Yu Hee again. Trying to surround and catch someone who bounced around like a spatial-teleporting pinball — chaining regional travel, random events, and Base Teleport — was half a matter of pure luck to begin with.
Early-stage Nascent Soul cultivator U Yukgyeong tore the countryside apart hunting for the Yu Hee who'd been dumped back at her base by a debuff event, only to grab the back of his own neck much later when word came that the demon immortal had been sighted somewhere else entirely.
Yu Hee, blissfully unaware of any of this, was nestled in Togo's arms at the base like a spoiled child, sorting drop items and grinding them through a millstone.
Fit a cart wheel onto the millstone handle and the spinning wheel turned the stone for you — hands-free, fully automatic grinding!
I gathered the resulting liquids and powders, stuffed them into my inventory, or shoved them into my mouth and repeated the process. My mouth was tiny; there was only so much I could fit in at once. Nothing to be done about it.
"At least this run actually produced a harvest. Small mercies."
That didn't mean I'd found a gift for Cheon Nan-cho, or breakthrough materials, or consumables. It just meant I could finally swap out one of the low-grade Dharma Treasures I'd been stuck wearing for a superior one.
I replaced the old tier-1 prefix "Radiant" low-grade Dharma Treasure with the superior piece that had just dropped.
Even as a low-grade item, I'd kept it equipped to counter the debuffs from those eok-kka treasures — the Five, no, Six Great Calamity Dharma Treasures. But the new superior piece performed well enough that I swapped without a second thought.
◈ While held: Critical hit chance fixed at 85%. Critical damage +200%. On critical hit, accuracy and hit rate fixed at 95%.
◈ While held: Ignores Attack Locked and Action Locked debuffs.
◈ On use (once): Critical hit chance fixed +25%. Critical damage +500%.
A heart that pounds with rage as its sole motive force. Though it has no blood left to move, the heart never ceases its furious pulse, endlessly vomiting cold wrath.
A broken-tier-1 prefix treasure — the Rage prefix.
Even the extra random options that only started appearing at mid-grade and above had rolled absurdly clean. Debuff ignore was a little underwhelming, but setting that and the fixed crit chance and damage boosts aside, the remaining options were a straight upgrade over everything the old Radiant low-grade piece had offered.
I checked the options, then lifted my head and smiled up at Togo, who was still holding me in his arms.
"How's your body, Elder Togo? Still the same?"
"There's nothing to be done about it, child. Until I return to the upper realm, even recovery will not come easily."
Elder Togo was still convalescing. His realm had been forcibly dragged down several stages by the system of wealth and assets, and he'd lost the body he'd cultivated entirely. Every use of power now was literally burning what little lifespan he had left.
To wield the power of that SF-mode final weapon — a mythic-grade item — he had to expend his own Nascent Soul. Replenishing it demanded vast quantities of heavenly and earthly spiritual energy, and this base, more precisely this lower realm, simply could not supply it.
"I'll climb to the upper server as fast as I can!"
"Heh heh. Good. I'll be waiting."
I soaked up every bit of Elder Togo's proud, grandfatherly encouragement as he stroked my head, then strode out of the base with renewed energy. Maximum map farming. Maximum hunting for map objects and a Training Ground.
While sorting through the mods, I'd confirmed something surprising: the mods that blocked the appearance of Altars and Sanctuaries were not currently active. Which meant that in all this time, I had never once found either of them.
Or maybe neutral NPCs and monsters had smashed them all or hidden them away. Ever since the reality patch, map objects like these had become dramatically scarce.
Sanctuaries were the kind of map object that appeared on the map once you finished terrain scouting, so never having seen one was just pure rotten luck.
A Sanctuary only granted a single random buff for twenty-four hours if you found it — but there was a non-trivial chance a secret network would spawn nearby.
And Altars automatically applied their unique buff or debuff the moment you entered their area of influence, letting you permanently stamp that effect onto an item. In other words, Altars were a form of item enhancement.
Why the sudden obsession with map objects? Because leveling was locked. Experience still piled up and the Golden Core greedily swallowed every drop; slaughter energy kept accumulating, so I was still growing. But leveling up was the simplest, most direct way a player got stronger, wasn't it?
There was something called level correction.
By default it started at plus or minus ten from the player's level, shifting slightly with difficulty and active mods. From what I'd felt on my own skin, the Immortal Cultivation mode's range sat around twenty — and of course, at the realm where you broke through the limit, the whole system got completely reworked.
Roughly speaking, at level 499, anything under level 479 started dropping less experience and fewer items, but in exchange every one of my stats received a correction buff that made low-level mobs trivial to crush.
The reverse case — facing a monster twenty levels higher than me across a realm gap?
My attacks got shredded by percentage cuts from level correction.
That correction didn't apply to Auto-Battle, which ran on pure stat calculation, so I could still fight somehow. But if it was a boss and Auto-Battle wouldn't engage, I'd be right back to thrashing helplessly the way I had against that angel — unable to win no matter how hard I struggled.
I fought by crushing things under raw stats and slaughter energy. Strip those away and my power dropped off a cliff.