The Elder Fruit

The second I got back to base, I shoved a favorability gift straight at Cheon Nan-cho. If I skipped it again, she was genuinely going to lose it on me.

"Who'd you kill to get this?"

"Come on, kill? If I did that, it'd get slaughter aura all over it and you couldn't even use it."

"Hmm. So you do know that much."

Which is exactly why I'd busted my ass hunting down secret rooms and treasure chests. Not that it mattered — the gift had just dropped as a mission reward anyway.

Looking ridiculously pleased, Cheon Nan-cho hugged the red fruit to her chest, announced she was going off to train, and vanished with a smile. I went looking for Elder Togo.

"Elder Togo!"

I dove straight into his arms and checked his spiritual energy. Still no sign of recovery. The old man was convalescing, and his qi wasn't budging.

Staying in the Lower Realm was already a problem. On top of that, he was recovering in my base, where spiritual energy was thin to begin with — that had to be the real bottleneck.

I'd even torn whole mountain ranges free and dragged them over just to pad the base's qi a little, but Lower Realm spiritual energy was nowhere near enough for Elder Togo to heal. Or so the help text and the man himself kept saying.

Personally, I figured it was simpler than that. The moment his Nascent Soul got assigned to me under Prisoner Mode, a level cap slapped him down and that was that. But whatever.

I ignored the faint irritation radiating from the Humanity Clones inside me and just nestled into Elder Togo's arms, soaking up the warmth for all it was worth.

Between the Humanity Clones and Yu I-seong ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠strong-arming me into it, I'd been throttling my slaughter aura to the absolute limit just so I could deal with low-level neutral NPCs — the kind that wouldn't even give experience if I killed them, thanks to the level gap. Now I let it unspool the way you finally unclench after holding something in too long.

Friendly NPCs and quest NPCs weren't affected by my slaughter aura — more precisely, they didn't take damage from it. But gray-dot neutrals? Just being exposed to ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠the aura counted as an attack. To talk to them or interact up close, I had to crush the slaughter down to almost nothing.

Which was exactly why I could let it completely loose around the green ones.

Elder Togo held me close and stroked my hair. At some point his eyes closed — probably off to visit the Humanity Clones inside my Golden Core again. I surrendered my whole body to the warmth, shut my eyes, and used the [Rest] emote like I was falling asleep, cutting my consciousness clean off.

Time passed.

More precisely: Yu Hee's time alone raced forward at a ridiculous clip.

I'd overused the Double Speed Mod so hard in the first Training Ground that it had started firing off on its own whenever it felt like it, nibbling away at my slaughter energy and growing in the process. By now it had evolved into a monstrous mode running at over forty times normal speed.

Maybe that was why. Ever since the first map, hammering Double Speed in the Training Ground had completely wrecked Yu Hee's sense of time, and it still couldn't count the hours properly. She was reduced to asking Cheon Nan-cho or San Gi-yeon at the base how many days had gone by — except even that had a blind spot.

The base itself fell under Base Management Mode, which meant it sat squarely inside Double Speed's area of effect. Classic mod-array priority conflict.

Double Speed, used from the very beginning as a pure quality-of-life tool, stacked influence over almost every other mode right alongside Auto-Battle. While Yu Hee trained hard, goofed off at base, or rested in her Mental World — always, constantly, without a single pause — it kept running.

Between the Training Ground bug and the way she grew stronger by devouring other lives through slaughter, that relentless acceleration was basically the reason she'd hit the end of Golden Core so absurdly fast.

But right now, while Yu Hee was taking [Rest], Double Speed couldn't do a thing.

That was because Double Speed had originally been carved out of the twofold time acceleration baked into the Rest emote. So only in this one window — with Double Speed completely disabled — did game time flow at its proper doubled rate.

And it was the only moment the star that had been watching Yu Hee from the Upper Realm could interfere.

"What the hell. Felt like I had a nightmare."

I blinked, eyes opening and closing, trying to drag the dream back into focus. Nothing stuck. My head felt packed full of fog.

"I think I heard chains clanking. What was that — some kind of prophetic dream?"

All that remained was the sound of iron links, and—

"They said not to skip. So the Humanity Clones showed up in the dream? No, wait — I'm a cultivator. Why am I even dreaming? Isn't that basically a debuff?"

No idea.

Elder Togo had laid me on the bed and gone somewhere. Out for another walk, maybe?

"Well, I rested enough. Time to head out again!"

Cheon Nan-cho had planted a Keep Out marker for her training session. Elder Togo was either out walking or checking on the prisoner expedition on its way back. I tracked down San Gi-yeon, hit her with a [Greeting], and left the base once more.

Alright. Back to grinding the map circuit!

Something told me luck was on my side this time.

I'd barely stepped out of the base and already triggered the shiny-coin event that calls Minor Fortune three times in a row.

"Y-you're going to kill us, Demon Immortal!"

A noisy flock of peeping neutral NPCs ran into me. I yanked the golden scanner straight out of my heart and leveled it at them. They screamed, thrashing and tumbling as they tried to get clear, and I shouted:

"Cry out, Evil Karma Scanner!"

Beep.

Nothing.

"Ah, shit. Can't kill this one."

I'd only scanned the neutral NPC that spoke to me, and it gave zero reaction. I'd been ready to drop anything that so much as flinched.

"D-Demon Immortal! We have a request!"

Beep.

"Kh—?! What is this?!"

‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠

"Oh, you're fair game!"

The moment the scanner locked on, white smoke boiled off his searing skin. I pulled my slaughter aura free and smashed him flat with one hand like swatting a mosquito.

"...Huh? What."

No hit feedback. No slaughter energy coming in either.

I rolled my eyes toward the minimap.

Far off on the edge, a red arrow was still locked on the NPC I'd just attacked — once something registered as a combat target, there was no shaking it.

"It was a clone!"

I whipped the scanner across the rest of the neutrals in a rapid-fire of beeps. One of them twitched like it stung a little; otherwise, nothing special.

So they'd only sent a clone to mess with me? From the way things looked, that one had been leading the group earlier.

I triggered the Heavenly Slaughter Art to keep combat status active, and the fading red arrow snapped back to full color.

That one I was killing. A clone?!

I wanted to learn that too!

If I could just leave the head intact — or take it with me — maybe Cheon Nan-cho or Elder Togo could read something off it. With that thought, I spun a slaughter-energy wheel over my head and launched into the air.

Even without using Spoon just now, between my Dharma Treasures, equipped gear, and title effects, my accuracy and hit rate were locked near one hundred percent. One clean strike. If they dodged completely, fine — but if it connected, clone or defensive technique or whatever, the minimum damage alone should have dropped them dead on the spot.

Cultivators were basically cockroaches. Chop off their arms and legs, take their head, it still didn't kill them. Pull out the Golden Core or spiritual root that served as their nucleus and the soul just bailed, parasitized some mortal body, and came back. Absurd survival kit for a class.

The only reason I could kill them so easily was that my slaughter aura didn't stop at the clone — it killed the main body too, turned the soul into slaughter energy and experience, and swallowed the whole package.

Even so, if a cultivator committed the second they entered minimap range and ran for it, there were times I couldn't catch them.

But this time I'd killed the clone and still gotten none of that main-body death feedback.

So what actually shocked me wasn't that it was a clone. It was closer to: I hit a clone with near-perfect accuracy and hit rate, the pierce damage went through, and it still didn't die?

And that was with the yellow flash of a critical hit — the eighty-five percent chance from my heart Dharma Treasure — going off on top of it.

I flew after the frantically fleeing cultivator and shouted in a panic, terrified he'd bolt outside the zone:

"Your head! Just leave me your head!"

A head by itself wouldn't kill him anyway!