The Golden Barcode Scanner
"Demon Immortal, they say you devour people! I've brought medicine ground from hundreds of mortals — please grant my request!!"
"What the hell is this bastard yapping about, showing up with some low-level green trash he can't even use?"
He was crushed flat in the Demon Immortal's hand and died.
"These are cultivators from a rival sect I took prisoner! If the Demon Immortal grants my request, I shall offer every last one of them!!!"
"You can't trade prisoners! And I don't deal with monsters!!!"
He was torn apart by the Demon Immortal and died.
"O Demon Immortal! Destroy even that insolent one's sect, and we shall become your hands and feet!!!"
"Ah, shit. I freed the prisoners and they turned out to be red monsters. They all look human on the outside, so you can't tell them apart."
Most of the cultivators freed from captivity became pools of blood on the spot and were swallowed whole by the Demon Immortal.
"Just… spare our lives…"
"Grays, get lost. You two greens — if you've got a request, spit it out. I'll hear you out."
And so, through the cultivators who walked away with their lives, a rumor spread across Gi-gye.
A rumor that the Demon Immortal could see colors.
To ordinary cultivators, it might have been nothing more than idle gossip. But for those who had lived long enough, and for the great sects whose vaults overflowed with ancient records, it was something else entirely. They immediately launched a full cross-verification, hunting for any scrap of intelligence that might help them track a giant.
"Too few categories for it to be a Karmic Eye that sees karma. According to the memories pulled from the souls of the rogue cultivators who heard the Demon Immortal speak, there are only three: red, gray, and green."
"Red means kill. Gray means kill or spare. Green means spare. If you simply set thresholds for Evil Karma and Good Karma, couldn't you still call it a Karmic Eye?"
"Don't think that simply. The real problem right now isn't whether it is a Karmic Eye or not."
"…True enough."
"These lunatics. They're flocking in droves, each one convinced on zero evidence that they'll show up green in the Demon Immortal's eyes."
"And yet one heretical sect was actually wiped out by the Demon Immortal — for no reason other than that some ridiculous green 'asked' for it. Meanwhile another green received every kind of Dharma tool and elixir and breezed past their realm bottleneck."
"Haa… what a mess."
It was a problem born of a madness unique to cultivators: if it meant growing stronger, if it meant raising their realm, if it meant stretching their lifespan even a little further — they would sell off disciples and masters alike, and bet nearly everything they had on the table, so long as they themselves were not among the stakes.
Of course, the real joke was that most of them never realized they were on the table. The majority received a red verdict and became the Demon Immortal's next meal. That was the problem.
And the worse problem was that no one could stop the tide.
Even if the entrenched sects banded together to pin the Demon Immortal down, most of those power brokers were currently sealed inside a Secret Realm that opened once every few thousand years, all of them chasing the next breakthrough!
Until now, the Demon Immortal had been regarded as an unstable Transcendent gone mad — a walking disaster that stirred up Slaughter Tribulations wherever she went. But with survivors suddenly multiplying, a new breed of cultivator had appeared: people who saw the Demon Immortal as a kind of wish-granting opportunity.
If only she had kept killing everyone the way she used to, leaving one or two alive at most, sealing the mouths would have been easy.
While sect masters, elders, and cultivators of every stripe clutched their heads over the mess, the Demon Immortal herself — which is to say, Yu Hee — was clutching hers just as hard.
"No, seriously, why am I not allowed to kill neutral NPCs?!"
"It's not 'don't kill them at all.' It's 'don't touch the good NPCs with a lot of Good Karma,' because it raises the difficulty of the bottleneck breakthrough. Got it?"
"You do know that clearing on higher difficulty means the rewards are stacked, right?!"
"What are you, a tin can?! Huh?!"
"Why the hell are you suddenly bringing up the Ironman Mode creator?!"
"Because you just said the exact same thing that guy did!"
"AAAAAARGH!!!"
Yu I-seong looked down with thoroughly cooled eyes at the lunatic — no, at the main body — thrashing on the floor, clutching her head and rolling around.
Just stepping out into the Mental World to hold a conversation already hurt like death. And this main-body idiot was spouting nonsense on top of it.
At least the Tower's protection had grown stronger. Small mercies.
"If you're confused, call me. I told you — my finisher has no cost. It's just a basic attack with a passive attached."
"I! Hurt! From the aftershock alone! That thing!"
"That's because the main body stacked too much notoriety. You could always start rebuilding your reputation now."
"Is that even possible?"
"You'd know better than I would. Of course not. I was just saying it."
"Aaagh!"
Yu I-seong approached the main body, who was thrashing about with a look of pure injustice, and held out her own heart — which is to say, her golden spear — as if offering it to Yu Hee.
"What's this."
"Hold on to it. Strictly speaking, it's my Natal Dharma Treasure, so it should roughly sort out whether a neutral NPC is a good one or a bad one."
"And what's the standard for that?"
"Whatever we decide. From our past life."
"So ordinary mortals get to jerk me around however they want? Fine — I'll take it! Because that's my heart too, anyway!"
"Not like the main body has any facial expressions left."
"Fuck."
She finally spat out a curse she had been holding back more often these days, radiating pure irritation. Leaving the main body behind, Yu I-seong forced her creaking body back into motion and fled inward.
Having achieved Transcendence only made the Slaughter Tribulation crush her harder.
Screams. Shouts. Begging.
Every time the great sea of Slaughter Tribulation surged and cycled, a single drop of that slaughter-laden water carried the howling of countless souls that had once been alive — their agony, their curses — gnawing relentlessly at her fragile spirit.
So the pain she felt from the Slaughter Tribulation was the scream of her own soul.
Stage One Transcendence was nowhere near enough to endure this slaughter.
Then there was no choice but to climb higher.
With that resolve, the moment Yu I-seong withdrew into the interior, Yu Hee used the golden spear as a cane and pushed herself upright.
She had accepted it with great enthusiasm. Now what was she supposed to do with it.
The instant she left the Mental World, the golden spear — spear-shaped though it was — dissolved into formless golden light, as if its true essence were nothing but heart. Watching it, I thought of the consciences the Humanity Clones used to carry around.
Those girls had transformed their consciences into all kinds of different weapons.
What shape would be good for deciding whether a neutral NPC deserved to die or live? I didn't have a spear skill, so the whole "stab the ones who should die and spare the ones who should live" routine was off the table.
"Hmm."
I looked down at the golden barcode scanner in my hand.
I pressed the button. A rainbow beam shot out with a beep.
"Oh."
Weird. I couldn't sense Yu I-seong inside at all, and I had no idea how I was even using Aurora. There was a slight spiritual energy cost, but that was clearly from me using it instead of I-seong, so at least that checked out.
"Demon Immortal?!"
Beep.
"AAAAAARGH!!!"
"Whoa, it has an attack function too!"
Practical review: ninety out of a hundred. The ten-point deduction was for that annoying beep-beep sound. Also, the attack power was dirtier and lower than expected.
Then, on a whim, I pressed it against the back of my own hand with a beep — and watched my arm get deleted. Only then did I nod.
Ah. Right. Notoriety-scaling damage. That was it.
I poured Slaughter Tribulation into the stump and wriggled the arm back into existence, but regeneration was slow. Was there a healing-reduction debuff attached, or had my notoriety simply ballooned the proportional damage into the stratosphere? Who knew.
What a ridiculously cost-efficient scanner, though.
Beep.
"Such grace…!"
"You've lived a really good life, huh?"
No, seriously — one scan and burns covering half his body healed all at once? I couldn't even begin to guess how cleanly this guy had lived. Was he some kind of hero?
Anyway, after acquiring the golden scanner, I started beeping every neutral NPC I ran into, and what I learned was that most of them winced or flinched like it stung.
The ones whose burns healed, whose fatigue vanished, or whose skin improved numbered only a handful. Some neutral NPCs got no effect at all.
It never showed me a clear standard, so I still didn't fully understand it — but the important part was that this thing was pretty fun!
Interacting with neutral NPCs was especially delicious.
In the original game, the only way to interact with neutral NPCs had been through emotes, after all! That was half the reason I'd installed Prisoner Mode in the first place.
At any rate, I had thoroughly enjoyed interacting with the neutral NPCs who had been spawning all over the map lately — some of them even seeking me out on purpose — so I was thinking about heading back to base when—
"…Where am I supposed to put this."
I had hit a serious problem.
My right hand was for pulling weapons out of inventory. My left hand was for consuming items or operating the system UI.
My head pulled out the wheel, and my back pulled out the Chopsticks.
"Do I have to stick it in my mouth like Cheon Nan-cho?"
But then I'd feel gross every time I took it out! Besides, this thing only looked like a barcode scanner. In reality it was the golden spear Yu I-seong carried around — her heart.
It was also a Natal Dharma Treasure, so using it felt like my soul was the same as hers, like it would listen to me. That made it a little weird.
Heart. Heart.
Where does the heart come from, if you think about it.
A beating heart comes from the heart itself! From the heart!
I immediately reshaped the barcode scanner into a short golden spear and drove it into my heart.