Amazing Misfortune!
By now, four layered Seas of Slaughter had taken shape inside Yu Hee's Mental World — but they were still anything but stable.
Especially since I-seong had carved the fourth one into four pieces and crammed them in by force. The slaughter energy couldn't even circulate properly yet. If you needed a comparison, it was like a conveyor-belt sushi place that had finished its expansion, stocked all the ingredients… and then completely failed to get the belt spinning.
What Yu Hee needed to do was get that circulation running again and reopen for business as fast as humanly possible. But one of her cooking arms had been blown clean off, so recovery obviously came first. Stabilization had been put on hold.
"Hold it, Main Body."
"Gyaaah! I told you not to stab me and then talk!"
I'd spotted some neutral NPCs and was rocketing toward them, ready to convert them into potions on the spot, when I-seong's merciless conscience-jab hit me mid-flight. I crashed straight into the ground and tumbled across the dirt in a flailing roll.
"When you stab me it hurts like hell!!!"
"D-Demoness!"
"Kh— all of you, flee at once!"
"But Master!"
"Go!!!"
I ignored the noisy neutral-NPC dialogue rising from the outfield and locked eyes with I-seong, who was glaring at me from within, spear in hand, still wracked with pain from the slaughter energy.
"The kids… how about we just leave the low-level neutral NPCs alone?"
"Seriously? I need to recover slaughter energy fast. More potions are better! And I still have to stabilize everything right after this."
"For the soft, fragile mental health of our pitiful little Humanities, who are still nothing but Mortals?"
"Hmm… is that it?"
"Alright, how about this, Main Body. You've been curious about my ultimate, right? Want me to tell you?"
"No — wait, I was curious about that, but the Mythic item options! Tell me about those first! I'm dying to know!"
I tore my gaze away from the neutral NPCs scuttling off into the distance and decided to play along with Yu I-seong for now.
"So what's this Aurora thing, then?"
"Put in terms extreme enough for Main Body to understand: fixed bonus damage proportional to notoriety, and healing proportional to renown."
"Based on my standards, or the NPC's?"
"NPC standards, obviously. If the opposing NPC is a bastard, they get carved up and die. If they're a good person, they get healed."
"What kind of half-screwed-together ultimate is that."
"The reason it split your slaughter energy, too — that was because Main Body's notoriety is so high."
"When you put it that way, it actually sounds kind of broken?"
"And it costs zero mental power, with almost no range limit."
"What the hell, that's completely busted?!"
I flicked a glance at the minimap. The neutral NPCs had all left its range — nothing showed up anymore. Satisfied, I dropped into a crouch right where I stood, pressed a hand to the ground, and muttered:
"Burrow."
Burrow
The earth splits open, carving a long tunnel in an instant.
The Master skill Burrow activated, and the ground tore open into a long tunnel in the blink of an eye. I drove a marker stone Cheon Nan-cho had made from slaughter-stone into the entrance, planted a few slaughter-forged words reading DIE around the area, and dove straight into the tunnel.
"A little disappointing, but stabilization comes first."
Once circulation was restored, slaughter energy would regenerate fast enough to patch up wounds like these in no time. I'd wanted to heal completely first, but if Yu I-seong was going to put her foot down that hard, fine. Whatever.
The Mental World was a complete disaster zone.
You could call it the aftershock of the forced temporary construction — yanking things out of the Training Ground and cramming in a shattered fourth sea against its will. With the Seas of Slaughter not doing their job, the Golden Core was propping up the Mental World instead, but it was so precarious that even the Wheel, which had been trying to go on strike, had stepped in to help.
The fourth Sea of Slaughter, split into four fragments, was fighting the other three seas independently. The clouds of killing intent had been shoved into a corner by the chaos. The Golden Core and the Wheel were barely holding the Mental World together, and the Tower looked ready to collapse at any second.
First priority: stabilize the great seas of slaughter and get circulation running again.
I forced the slaughter energy to move inside the Mental World.
The slaughter energy fought me every step of the way, but what I was doing was circulation — building an eternal battlefield where the seas constantly clashed and reproduced slaughter energy off each other. Slow as it was, the work was clearly progressing.
The problem was the fourth sea, quartered by Yu I-seong's ultimate.
No, seriously, why the hell won't this thing rejoin?!
How hard had she cut it that the slaughter energy was still recoiling from itself, refusing to fuse? Aurora's residual influence was absurdly strong. At this point, no amount of coaxing or soothing was going to do a damn thing.
How was I supposed to fix this?
"Hey, Yu I-seong, this is your— wait, shit, you already crawled back in again?! Hey! For real! Who just says their piece and bolts like that!"
But Main Body, what am I supposed to do? Even inside the Golden Core, the slaughter energy seeps in and it feels like I'm going to die.
"Tsk. Fine — any of the rest of you got a good idea?"
We all put our heads together, but collective intelligence didn't help much when we were all the same person. Decent suggestions refused to surface, and the whole thing felt endlessly stuck.
"Should I try absorbing it…?"
One of the Humanities offered to absorb the residual traces of Yu I-seong's Aurora the way you'd absorb spiritual power. The idea was scrapped immediately when the Humanity — made of slaughter energy itself — exploded on contact.
What if we just leave it like this and build circulation around it, Main Body?
"Doesn't that give you a headache?"
But Main Body — to make a fifth sea later, you'd need sixteen times the slaughter energy of the fourth. If it's already split into four pieces like this, wouldn't you only need four times each piece instead of sixteen times the whole?
"Hmm… so you're saying we hold out and aim for a late-game spike? Instead of immediately pushing total volume up eightfold, we settle for double, split the combat zones across four seas, and jack up slaughter regeneration that way… wait. Does this actually work?"
We kept turning it over together, and a surprisingly solid method popped out.
"If we use the Tower as the center, set the four-way-split Seas of Slaughter around it, and circulate them against the other seas…"
The fourth sea's total volume was still eight times larger, but split four ways, the slaughter energy I could draw at once had only doubled. On the other hand, circulation volume itself had quadrupled — which meant slaughter regeneration had quadrupled too.
As the Seas of Slaughter stabilized, the Mental World settled with them. Drawing slaughter energy from four separate seas at once, the Tower expanded in a flash — taller, broader. Only then did the clouds of killing intent resume their drift across the sky. The Wheel and the Golden Core let out sighs of relief, released their grip, and sank into rest.
I opened my eyes as I left the Mental World. Vast, resonant slaughter energy rose of its own accord and instantly finished healing my awkwardly moving left arm and the half-patched gash in my side.
"Worth the trouble."
The Status Window barely looked different, but with the Seas of Slaughter expanded, every slaughter-based skill had been reinforced, and my combat endurance had shot up by a huge margin. I was considerably stronger.
In a good mood, I climbed out of the tunnel I'd been using as a temporary base, ready to drop the event probability and head home — and that was the exact moment it hit.
An Eok-kka event is about to trigger.
Every hair on my head stood on end. The telltale omen of an Eok-kka event.
Of all the goddamn times — right when I'm trying to lower the event probability! I cursed inwardly even as I deployed my Chopsticks and hauled up slaughter energy. Come on, Wheel — get out here! Hey!
I was still grunting, trying to drag the uncooperative Wheel out of my head by force, when a crushing weight of spiritual power slammed down on me. I made a short, strangled sound and shrank in on myself.
Spiritual power of a completely different caliber — enough to pin someone who'd reached the end of late-stage Golden Core. My face went bloodless.
A cultivator past level 500 — early Nascent Soul.
The secret realm he'd used as his cave abode had been ripped away by Yu Hee, taking a lifetime's worth of wealth and Dharma treasures with it. Burning with vengeance, he had finally tracked her down to her very doorstep.
"Demoness! You little wretch! What have you done to my cave abode — my secret realm?!"
A neutral NPC, a gray dot — but the border around him marked him as boss-tier, and Auto-Battle was locked. I pulled up slaughter energy and wrapped myself in the Heavenly Slaughter Art, scattering the spiritual force packed into his roar. Even so, my body still prickled and went numb.
Come to think of it, when Elder Togo tore off that mountain-range tile before, the secret realm that came along as a freebie must have been this NPC's. Not that it mattered — I'd already converted the whole thing into spiritual power and dumped it into Golden Core expansion work.
I couldn't exactly hand it back. I absently stroked my stomach, and the neutral NPC's eyes gushed streams of blue spiritual light as he screamed like he was coughing up blood.
"The secret realm that left my sect with me and shared thousands of years of mountain and water — the homeland I tended with every ounce of passion I had — you wiped it out entirely! I will take my revenge right here!! DEMONEEEEESS!!!!"
A Nascent Soul cultivator who had, thanks to Yu Hee, lost home and fortune in a single stroke and been left with nothing but the power in his own hands. His cry was thick with raw, desperate grudge — and with it, the battle began.