Auto-Battle
"The Demon Immortal...!"
"Still, looking at that state of hers, she's clearly badly wounded."
"But Elder Wu said he wanted to deal with her personally."
"Hahaha, well, if we just capture her properly, that should settle it, shouldn't it? Bring in the Demon Immortal and Elder Wu might not only share what he obtained from the secret realm—he might even take us on as disciples."
"True enough. Elder Wu's generosity is exceptional."
The four cultivators eyed one another with smiling faces. Even wounded, this was still the Demon Immortal. Whoever stepped forward first would clearly be taking on the greatest risk, so none of them could help but watch the others carefully.
"Can't we get a little closer?"
"According to the survivors, any cultivator who enters a certain radius cannot escape the Demon Immortal's eyes no matter what methods they use. We need to maintain at least this much distance."
"But what about using the Dharma treasures Elder Wu gave us to conceal ourselves? Even the Demon Immortal can't match Elder Wu's power, can she?"
"Aha. Then why don't you go first?"
"Fine—but if I catch the Demon Immortal, make sure you put in a good word with Elder Wu for me."
Armed with a Dharma treasure received from a cultivator who had reached the Nascent Soul realm, one of them approached with confident strides, body concealed—until the moment he crossed a certain line. The Demon Immortal turned her head as if she had sensed something.
The cultivator froze in terror, but then the Demon Immortal's eyes—glowing blood-red like fresh gore—swept the area around him as if searching. Relief that the Dharma treasure was properly hiding him had barely begun to settle when—
The Demon Immortal opened her mouth.
"Auto-Battle."
Once a red dot appeared on the minimap, Auto-Battle was unavoidable. Blessed by the red star, the Demon Immortal charged forward. The instant she swung her one remaining arm, a force like a bursting crimson cloud erupted outward and scorched everything in every direction.
The cultivator yanked himself free in a panic and tried to flee—but before he could, a tiny, pure-white hand was already seizing him. The sight was so hair-raising that he burned his essence blood without hesitation, forcibly dragging up his cultivation arts.
Formless spiritual power exploded outward, striking at the Demon Immortal to drive her back—but before it could, her hand, wreathed in crimson energy, slipped through the Dharma treasure's defenses and the protection of his spiritual power as smoothly as piercing soft tofu. It drove in deeper still, tearing into his solar plexus as if ripping it free.
"No—Demon Immortal, please?!"
Despite his pleading, the Demon Immortal's hand tore out his Golden Core outright. She tossed the blood-soaked core into her mouth and, wrapping her teeth in crimson energy as if it were candy, crushed it to powder and swallowed it whole.
Stripped of his Golden Core and fallen to the level of a mere mortal, the cultivator died on the spot from the bleeding wound in his chest alone. Watching this, the remaining cultivators all tried to slip away from the Demon Immortal in secret—
"Where do you think you're going?"
The Demon Immortal turned her head, clearly aware of every one of them.
As the dead cultivator's corpse was ground down and the crimson energy it produced whirled inward, absorbed into the Demon Immortal's missing arm—flesh writhing as it regenerated—the cultivators went deathly pale. They looked at one another, nodded, and then scattered in every direction at once, bolting for their lives.
"Ah! My potions!!!"
The Demon Immortal went berserk and began chasing the cultivators down.
Thus began a desperate flight for survival. The cultivators frantically tried to signal the Nascent Soul cultivator who was tracking the Demon Immortal in order to kill her—but the Dharma treasures they had been given for signals and communication refused to work, as if broken.
They hadn't received defective ones from the start. They had clearly been sending periodic signals and messages. So had the mere act of falling under the Demon Immortal's gaze been enough to break the Dharma treasures?
Every time the screams of their fellow cultivators being devoured by the Demon Immortal and the vanishing of their spiritual power registered with vivid clarity through their spiritual senses, they immediately reversed direction and fled for all they were worth.
The only way to escape the Demon Immortal was to run. That thing was a predator that ate cultivators.
"Kyaaaagh! Fine—I'll kill you and chew you up!!!"
One late-stage Golden Core fiend cultivator abandoned flight and, as if determined to fight, revealed her true form and hurled her physical body forward. The Demon Immortal met the power struggle head-on, snapped all four of her limbs in a single exchange, and ate her on the spot. Witnessing that transcendent spectacle was more than enough to obliterate any remaining will to fight.
An ominous crimson death—was it shining on them now? Survival instinct rang its alarm bells like mad. Even as they burned their essence blood, poured spiritual power into techniques, and reinforced their bodies for a desperate escape, death drew closer by the second, and a suffocating terror clamped down around them.
"Ah... aah... aaaagh!!!"
In the end, one cultivator exhausted every last drop of spiritual power. His Dharma treasures became so much useless junk. Running on pure physical strength alone, he tumbled in an undignified heap and sprawled on the ground. He thrashed and crawled, scrabbling for even a single extra step of distance from the Demon Immortal closing in one footfall at a time—
"Ah. They got away."
The moment those words reached him, he came to his senses and looked around. The crimson energy that had been tightening around his throat second by second was nowhere to be found.
Covered in dirt, the cultivator carefully turned his head while still lying prone and looked behind him.
Barely two paces away, the Demon Immortal stood wreathed in crimson energy, staring blankly into empty air with blood-red eyes that glittered even through the red haze—as if she couldn't see him at all.
"I let one potion get away. What a waste."
And then, truly as if she could not see him, the Demon Immortal slowly turned and vanished from sight. Only then could the cultivator finally release the breath he had been holding. He was alive. He had survived.
He had grown far too arrogant simply because a Nascent Soul cultivator stood behind them. Their only role had been to report the Demon Immortal's location to Elder Wu and track her.
Even as the Demon Immortal, her appearance was nothing more than a young girl, and for all the rumors, she was a newcomer cultivator whose name had only been known for a little over a hundred years. Cursing himself for having taken her lightly and joined the hunt, the sole surviving cultivator forced his fear-locked body to move and began fleeing once more.
Anywhere farther from the Demon Immortal. Even a little farther.
"These potions' performance is pretty bad."
I stretched my left arm this way and that, as if working out the kinks. On the surface it had almost fully regenerated, but the inside was still half-empty.
Maybe it was because I'd offered up the entire left arm—essence blood and all—as a sacrifice. Under normal circumstances, three potions—no, three people—should have been more than enough to restore a single limb. I'd wolfed down more than six, and complete recovery was still nowhere in sight.
"From now on, I'm not using this unless it's an Eok-kka event."
It was great for inflating power for a single moment, but who knew recovery would be this slow? I'd just figured Cheon Nan-cho was trying to scare me.
Your notoriety spreads far and wide!
"Fortune, my ass?"
I grumbled at the event message that practically begged for a rebuttal, while still feeling relieved that at least no truly shitty event had popped up.
Not getting an Eok-kka event while chugging potions? I'd take it.
"Wonder where more monsters or neutral NPCs are hanging around."
I'd lost one earlier when it threw itself over the map boundary, tumbling and rolling to escape—but this time I was determined to kill every last one of them.
I set out again, searching for more sacrifices to restore my Slaughter Tribulation.
A portion of your held wealth is lost.
"Nope~ No regular currency on me."
Maybe it was because the event probability mod had jacked up the event rates, but rare events were popping up a lot more often too. Of course, since this was Immortal Cultivation Mode and currency items existed separately, the event did absolutely nothing—but originally it was a parentless bastard of an event that wiped a percentage of your gold.
"If I could fill my misfortune stacks with events like this, that'd be great!"
Plenty of misfortunes had negative effects that either didn't apply to me or barely counted as penalties. Things like Fraud, which the Reality Patch had rendered non-functional; Notoriety, which was already maxed out so the effect did nothing; and Spirit Stones, which counted as items that took up inventory slots, so docking gold or wealth carried zero penalty.
Conversely, events that raised fraud, boosted fame, or increased gold had become equally useless—but those were the kind you could just avoid by dodging their trigger conditions.
Through mountain climbing, you felt as though your stamina had increased.
A max HP increase event that triggers on mountain tiles.
A dying beggar appears.
A low-probability quest NPC rescue event that triggers on snowfield path tiles.
The Nightmare That Feeds on Fear descends!
Unlike the Gaze of the Nightmare—one of the Twelve Eok-kka—the Descent was just an event that, on night path tiles during a specific time window, guaranteed a random drop of one powerful nightmare-adjacent monster.
It had teleportation, auto-movement on hit, a reflection debuff, and a bloated health pool—a genuinely strong monster. But it had no boss monster classification, so it was a complete idiot of a mob. I flipped on Auto-Battle, killed it outright, and collected the drop items and Slaughter Tribulation.
"Hell yeah! This is what I'm talking about!"
Auto-movement on hit? Debuff reflection? HP pig?
Who cares if you can one-shot it?
If I'd been running my main dual-defense build, this would've been the most annoying monster imaginable—but the second I hit Auto-Battle, I one-shot the thing dead. Extreme offense builds really do have their romance!
In high spirits, I scooped up the drops, spun my almost fully recovered left arm around a few times, and headed for the next map.
At this rate, the moment recovery finished, I could head straight off to stabilize the Sea of Slaughter Tribulation!