For the Mythic Item!
Whether it was the Reality Patch's influence or some error from a mode collision, I kept racking up experience while playing endless tag with a hidden-dungeon boss that was supposed to sit quietly in its boss room and wait.
For the mythic gear!
For the gear!!!
Listening to the humanity clones answer in chorus from inside me, I kept slaughtering Muscle Cows without pause. By the end I'd gotten so used to it that I could kill them mechanically even without Auto-Battle!
Of course, the game of tag with the boss mob chasing me grew more spectacular by the same measure.
No — the boss was using its minions as bait and digging traps?!
Naturally the minimap helped, and the system always blasted a booming entrance announcement before a dungeon boss popped out, so I could dodge every time — but it still made my blood run cold.
I had no idea how much time had passed, but the experience piled up smoothly until I'd filled more than half the bar. Lowering the event probability just in case of an Eok-kka event and grinding pure, honest labor had paid off.
Not that events stopped spawning entirely — but dungeon events were limited, so the odds of getting Eok-kka'd should drop!
Still, the Eok-kka that was meant to fire would fire, Main Body!
"Shut up!"
I planted my feet, thrust both hands forward, and concentrated slaughter energy into a short lunge that tore through empty air — the tunnel-digging technique I'd long since mastered. I was so used to it now that I could even dodge the Muscle Cows' most troublesome parries with off-beat tunnel attacks!
The flaming laser attacks were still untouchable, but the mythic-(pending)-grade bone helmet blocked them once, so no problem!
Scream at the unfairness of one-hit-for-you, one-hit-for-me turning into one-hit-for-you-only, you monsters!
I reprocessed Muscle Cows into ground meat with a rare weapon buffed by Spoon, then thriftily swallowed them whole as slaughter energy — and items still rained down in heaps.
All right, get to work, humanity clones!
The clone that only knew how to pour spiritual power permanently poured it out; the clone that only knew how to absorb spiritual power and experience sucked it all in; and together they funneled the dropped items into the inventory. Then the clones waiting inside me swarmed the new arrivals, checked every option, and sorted them at speed.
Useless junk was destroyed on the spot. Anything too good to waste was pulled out into the Mental World and tossed aside. On the tower standing in that world, five humanity clones snatched up items whose durability was already crumpling under the Sea of Slaughter, stuffed them into a millstone, and heaved with all their might until the gear was ground to powder. Four ordinary clones working together could just barely pulverize an item whose durability had hit rock bottom; the fifth, having turned its conscience into a shovel, scooped the wreckage and flung it down the tower.
In short: leftover gear was being used as foundation work to widen the tower's base.
On top of that, any consumable that permanently raised stats went straight into a quick slot and got used immediately, while low-level or low-grade trash consumables were destroyed — real-time inventory cleanup.
Main Body! Main Body! We can't take any more! The inventory's full!
Nothing else fits! Even Tier-1 epics have to go now! We can't dump any more consumables!
Just grind up the legendaries we're not using!
"Hold on a second!"
I finally stopped grinding, returned to the safe zone where I'd started, sat down on a floating cartwheel, closed my eyes, and entered the Mental World. The humanity clones' complaint that the drops were so good the inventory was overflowing and items had to be discarded made my head spin harder than it ever had before.
Every mode grew stronger the more you used it. That was probably because my innate talent — the Status Window — was linked to the modes. Watching slaughter energy drain just from opening, changing, or checking a mode made it feel inevitable.
So if I deliberately shaved off slaughter energy and poured it in like a skill, could I force a mode to strengthen?
"[Inventory Expansion Mode] — mode check."
I called the mode up, watched the slaughter energy flow in, then artificially controlled the flow and forced more and more energy into it.
Is this actually going to work?
As I kept adjusting and feeding the energy, I felt something like a water tank buckling under pressure and hastily stopped cramming. I could feel the permanent loss of slaughter energy — and when I checked, the inventory had gained two slots.
Holy shit, the efficiency is absolute garbage.
Any other options?
"Um… uhhh… Elder Togo, are you watching right now, by any chance?"
I tried a hopeful little monologue, but of course there was no resp—
A foreign weight settled on my left shoulder. I looked — and a drone I'd never seen before was clinging there.
What the hell is this.
◈ Restriction: Hwanga-gongdong
◈ On Possession: Autonomous action
— One of the Star-Eater's auxiliary drones, a convenience-maintenance model. Originally used to capture and maintain living monuments from stars marked as Star-Eater targets; now unified under the newly awakened Star-Eater. —
"Elder Togo!"
Whether the connection was bad or drones just couldn't talk, it said nothing. I plucked it off and hugged it with both hands.
Prisoner inventory — I can use this!
More than that — it had come in with me and been stuck to my shoulder the whole time? The minimap never showed it, so I had no idea.
Anyway, the prisoner inventory was a shared inventory. I dumped every item I had into it through the drone, then said:
"Elder Togo! Could you ask Cheon Nan-cho or San Gi-yeon to put everything I just loaded into the warehouse?!"
The drone bobbed its head, climbed back up my arm, reattached to my left shoulder, and vanished — either a transparency art or some cloaking device.
So that's how it had been hiding on me the whole time! Overlapped with my own position on the minimap, of course I never saw it!
But if we dump too many items into the warehouse, won't the invasion-event difficulty spike and blow the base sky-high, Main Body?
"Ah. Right."
Elder Togo could only hold the line so many times. Cheon Nan-cho couldn't sit on standby for invasion events forever. San Gi-yeon and the decorative defenses had their limits too. I'd wanted to stuff the base warehouse full of every drop — but if the warehouse exploded and ninety percent of what went in vanished no matter how much you stacked, it was a dead end either way!
In the end I emptied about half my inventory, content that I could fill the prisoner inventory once, and threw myself back into the journey toward mythic gear.
I poured in time, ground Muscle Cows into paste, and finally succeeded in filling that monstrous one hundred million experience.
The Shining Beast-Lineage Bone Helmet recovers a portion of its original power!
Setting aside the durability-recovery option unique to mythic grade, the other four options had all been massively strengthened.
On top of securing the mythic item I'd been aiming for, my inventory was packed so full of legendaries and epics that I'd even picked up six ancient-grade pieces total — counting the helmet. Two materials, two consumables, and two pieces of equipment including the helmet!
Sadly, the other ancients weren't set items.
It was a colossal greatsword easily twice my height, purpose-built for parrying, with a parry skill built right in. It jacked parry counter damage up by a full 500% in exchange for taking 25% more damage while defending — but land the parry and both HP and durability recovered. Peak ancient-grade broken nonsense.
Of course, that opinion lasted exactly as long as it took me to mindlessly grab my new ancient weapon and charge a Muscle Cow.