I Just Want to Rest
I'd gone half-blind chasing mythic gear in the hidden dungeon, hunting without a single break. Every time I killed the boss I got kicked out, so it turned into a game of tag on top of everything else. My inventory packed solid until I was forced to dump precious items or burn them up with Spoon.
And when I finally dragged myself back to base, a base-invasion event had blown the place half to hell.
Togo had held the central building and the training grounds, so at least the base hadn't been fully reset—but the damage was still catastrophic.
Of course, after all that grinding in the hidden dungeon I had more than enough funds to slap it back together in no time. Still!
"I want to rest now…"
I was mentally wrecked.
Especially the part where mod conflicts meant I couldn't use Auto-Battle while grinding exp into the mythic items—hours upon hours of pure manual combat had left me utterly drained.
That was how bad it got. The second those items finished evolving into mythics, I found the boss, dumped the fight on Auto-Battle, and walked out.
Drop rates and loot greed didn't stand a chance against the desperate need to just finish and collapse somewhere at base!
And then the invasion event half-wrecked the place anyway.
Thanks to Togo's protection the training grounds and the central building were fine, but my cozy little personal quarters were, of course, completely annihilated. I had to dump spirit stones and materials and pour in slaughter energy by the truckload just to run a mass restore.
So I didn't even get to rest while the repairs finished! It wasn't a one-button-and-wait situation where everything went ding and popped back into place—I had to keep shoveling slaughter energy the entire time!
For hours I fed slaughter energy into the rebuild while the ornaments, Cheon Nan-cho, and San Gi-yeon cleaned up the base, cleared rubble, and temporarily pulled warehouse goods to equip onto the ornaments just to lower their value as loot. Togo, for his part, was doing something about temporarily locking out invasion events so they wouldn't keep popping for a while.
If it weren't for the enemy-correction still clinging to him as a former foe turned ally, he probably could have ended the whole invasion with a single finger-flick!
Having lost his body and surviving as nothing but a Nascent Soul, even housed in a mythic-grade ornament, he still couldn't use his full power because of my level restrictions.
The buildings came back first. The beds and furniture inside did not. The moment I stepped into my hollowed-out quarters I face-planted straight onto the floor.
"I'm resting."
We're resting too, Main Body!
You dragged us through that dungeon on rotating shifts until we dropped, remember?! We're Mortals! We demand better working conditions!
Even while my mind was trying to rest, the idea of making the Humanity Clones keep my body moving for auto-training got sniffed out instantly, and I got an earful of their resentment.
So what.
What are you going to do about it?
Besides stabbing me with guilt, what exactly can you do?
You might want to stop before we pull a Revolution, Main Body!
I hadn't even finished thinking go ahead and try before the Humanity Clones' thoughts came pouring straight into my head. Which made me go, wait, you could do that? But by then it was a little late.
Go ahead and try?
Fine. The Main Body said to try it!
Hold on—
Inside me, the Humanity Clones hauled out their consciences, fused them together, and forged a square remote with a single golden button on it. One of them pressed it without the slightest hesitation.
The Humanity Clones each held a share of the conscience I had given them.
Conscience—the moral awareness that judges good from evil, and more specifically the benevolent heart that exists to drive out wickedness.
In short, it was a state of mind.
I was the living avatar of double standards, incapable of expressing anything except through the Humanity Clones themselves, so I'd handed that heart off to them—and of course that became a problem.
In my heart, the conscience of the Humanity Clone who had polished that heart into the transcendence called Reason had become her exclusive weapon, lending me its power. And in my hand, Yu I-seong's exclusive weapon—shaped like a barcode scanner—was likewise conscience itself. So the moment the Humanity Clones gathered, cast their vote, and clicked that remote button, my heart answered with a short little sound.
Beep.
A rainbow aurora erupted from my heart, obliterated Yu Hee's entire upper body, and vaporized even the blood. What remained was a lower half that toppled bonelessly, blood pouring out until the quarters became a crimson lake.
A moment later a great wheel spun out of empty air and opened the gate to the Mental World.
Slaughter energy cascaded from the Sea of Slaughter like a waterfall, flooding into the half-body left behind, and the flesh began regenerating at once.
"Revolution!"
Revolution my ass! More like a failed coup!
"!"
The second the body finished regenerating, the Humanity Clones seized control from inside the Mental World and shouted their revolution—only to be crushed in six seconds flat, not six weeks. One punch each from a furious Yu Hee, and they were kicked straight back into the inner world.
Before I could even get properly annoyed at the Humanity Clones bawling and stabbing me with conscience tantrums from inside, I noticed something off.
"…Huh? My body's light."
Because I'd physically blown off half of it and regrown it? No—if that were it, I wouldn't have felt anything special the times I'd lost a limb in combat and regenerated it.
How to put it. It felt closer to smashing something I'd been carrying around on my spirit this whole time.
"…Evil Karma proportional damage?"
The aurora that erased Evil Karma. Proof that Yu I-seong's heart—forged from conscience—existed. Evidence of having transcended the Mortal.
Was there a difference between taking a hit from a monster or neutral NPC and taking a hit from the aurora?
I chewed on that for a second, then my head started throbbing again, spirit still screaming exhaustion even if the body felt lighter. I flopped right back down in the wrecked quarters, shut my eyes, and sank into the Mental World.
I almost stretched out on a cloud of killing intent to rest—then remembered the last time I'd done that and gotten into a traffic accident with the Golden Core. So I dropped altitude and immersed my mind in the Sea of Slaughter instead.
The slaughter energy piled in the fourth sea was still mostly from the scarecrows and the muscle-cow herd I'd farmed this time, so the only sound was low cattle lowing. Yu Hee let her mind drift on the waves, bobbing gently, and finally rested.
The Humanity Clones had worked themselves to the bone.
The Mortals who'd rotated shifts supporting the Main Body's endless hidden-dungeon grind threw a brief fit, then the moment the Main Body went down for rest they all collapsed in unison.
The two Humanity Clones who handled spiritual power—and therefore couldn't rotate out—had already been flat for ages. The only one still functional was Yu I-seong, who'd been shut in her room training alone.
With the Main Body at rest, the toxic miasma of slaughter energy thinning to almost nothing, Yu I-seong stepped outside and found exactly what you'd expect: Humanity Clones sprawled wherever they'd dropped, drowned in fatigue.
So Yu I-seong gathered every last overworked Humanity Clone by herself, carried them to their rooms, laid them down, and even pulled the blankets over them. Only then did she look out across the Mental World from within.
Confirming the Main Body adrift with her mind surrendered to the poisonous Sea of Slaughter, she drew her golden spear.
As befit the exclusive weapon of Reason, the golden spear bloomed naturally from empty air. Yu I-seong took it and lifted her gaze to the sky of the Mental World.
A red star was peering down, trying to look even into the Mental World. Yu I-seong sneered and raised the spear.
"Don't even think about stealing our innermost thoughts. We're here too."
Spiritual power turned to light and poured into the spear, scattering dawn-rays. With every step of the dance Yu I-seong wove while holding it, the radiance swelled, intensified, condensed to a single point at the tip—and became aurora.
Fed by the massive spiritual power pouring from the Golden Core—which had swallowed every scrap of experience that could no longer go into leveling in the hidden dungeon—a blazing aurora blanketed the sky of the Mental World and cut off the star's gaze completely.
Apparently that didn't sit well. Gray chains invaded from outside the Mental World with a clatter of iron, striking at the aurora—
But the aurora dealt damage proportional to Infamy and Evil Karma. The coefficient might scale with Infamy and Evil Karma, yet its raw attack power tracked the Main Body, Yu Hee, herself.
And Yu Hee, built full glass-cannon offense, had long since left same-level attack power in the dust.
Otherwise there was no way a simplified aurora the Humanity Clones had casually remote-triggered could have erased half her body in a single hit.
The gray chains were blocked cold by the aurora. Only then did the red star seem to give up, fading from the sky it had occupied. Yu I-seong kept watching that sky for a long moment, then let out a heavy sigh, returned the golden spear to the Main Body's heart, and went back to her room.
Both arms that had held the golden spear were cracking like biscuits left unprotected in nitrogen, fine powder streaming off them. Watching it, Yu I-seong steeled herself.
Transcendence could not wait.
For the Main Body's sake—and for the Humanity Clones' and her own.