Filling the Golden Core with Slaughter
The total haul from the Hidden Dungeon.
One Mythic-grade piece of equipment.
One Ancient-grade piece of equipment, two Ancient consumables, two Ancient material items.
Ninety-two Legendary equipment pieces in total, plus three hundred sixty-seven Legendary consumables and material items.
And roughly over a thousand Epic items, along with a massive stockpile of top-grade and special-grade spirit stones.
A Status Window bulked up beyond recognition from all the permanent stat-and-ability-boosting consumables I'd stuffed into my stomach.
Plus the enormous reserves of slaughter energy and experience points reaped from massacring boss-tier monsters that respawned like ordinary trash mobs.
For a single Hidden Dungeon, the profits were absurdly high.
Well—of course they were. The Hidden Dungeon that had spilled out of a coin event, the kind of event that only ever shows up when you're a low-level scrub, just so happened to be a mod-created Hidden Dungeon.
It was supposed to be a farming dungeon that dumped experience and items on you by the cartload. Then a mod conflict jacked the rarity and value of every single drop up to boss-tier levels. No wonder the haul was insane.
And naturally, I'd gotten a whole lot stronger because of it.
Level? Unless I could Limit Break, no amount of experience piled onto my current level was going to push me any higher.
Gear? I'd already filled out full sets of Mythic and Legendary equipment, and still had Epic-grade pieces neatly arranged in Quick Slot Mode for good measure.
Which meant the only path left for getting stronger was skill training.
Technically, I could roam the maps chasing events for permanent stat boosts and ability upgrades—and farm slaughter energy and items while I was at it. But slaughter energy and items were already overflowing. Running map circuits just for the events felt like a net loss.
Materials and consumables for Limit Breaking?
Elder Togo was out hunting those down on his prisoner explorations, so there was no rush. Even in his weakened state, he was still an estimated Level 800 captive. Every time he came back from what he insisted on calling a "walk," he brought something precious home with him.
So what I needed to do was this:
Grind all the items I'd hauled in for the Nascent Soul breakthrough into spiritual power with a millstone, stuff my Golden Core full, train my skills, and wait for enlightenment to hit.
Yeah. And here's where the problem was—the first half of that plan.
For a Golden Core to ascend into a Nascent Soul, you had to fill it to the brim with spiritual power.
Normally you'd do that through spirit stones or Heavenly Tribulation, following whatever cultivation method you'd built up over the years. Problem was, I didn't have a cultivation method to speak of. I was entirely dependent on the Humanity Clones for that.
And if I started siphoning spiritual power from the base—which was already running low on spiritual energy—I risked yanking out the roots of a base that had only just started flowing with spiritual energy again.
Cheon Nan-cho was already doing everything she could to manage the place, burying durability-wrecked gear and useless material items all over the grounds to restore its earth energy.
If I drained the base's spiritual power just to top off my Golden Core, the only future I could see was getting grabbed by a furious Cheon Nan-cho and subjected to an endless lecture.
Why was I fretting about this in the first place? Because of the Golden Core expansion project that the Humanity Clones and I had been running nonstop under the brilliant logic of bigger Golden Core equals better, right?
We'd kept at it even while I was inside the Hidden Dungeon.
Especially in there—spiritual power was abundant, and with my level capped by the Limit Break wall, leftover experience was everywhere. We expanded with spiritual power and solidified the foundation with experience points, growing the thing at breakneck speed.
It was a method that should have been impossible under normal circumstances.
Expanding a Golden Core further naturally weakens it, risks shattering it outright, and makes it harder to keep contained inside the body. But I was doing something completely unhinged: stuffing my Golden Core into my Mental World and carrying it around that way.
For any cultivator with techniques capable of infiltrating a Mental World, this was a massive vulnerability. And for cultivators advanced enough to erect their own Laws as a Mental Image and project them onto the world, the Mental World itself could be attacked through those Laws alone—a dangerous move with almost no upside.
But me? I'd packed my Mental World so full of slaughter energy via my innate Status Window ability that Laws couldn't even function on contact. They'd get crushed under the slaughter energy, if not outright obliterated. That was the only reason this ridiculous stunt was possible.
I was abnormal enough to pack Laws into my Mental World in the first place, which was what made "putting the Golden Core in the Mental World" viable at all.
And so the Golden Core, having found a home in the Mental World, was free from the limits of the physical body. Under the care of the Humanity Clones and me, it grew and expanded, floor after floor, like a building under constant construction.
And now that massively expanded Golden Core needed to be filled with spiritual power.
Not just any spiritual power—if you didn't fill it with spiritual power refined and tempered through a proper cultivation method, it would simply get absorbed raw into the Golden Core. The amount required increased exponentially.
Generally, ordinary cultivators faced two major options at this stage.
One: receive support from your sect—spirit stones, materials, spirit veins—fill the Golden Core with spiritual power, form a Nascent Soul through Heavenly Tribulation, and remain in the Lower Realm.
Two: construct an Ascension Platform, fill yourself with spiritual power via Heavenly Tribulation, and ascend to the Upper Realm.
The former was for cultivators belonging to major sects, who could form their Nascent Soul, make preparations at their leisure, and later ascend to the Upper Realm stably via an Ascension Platform.
The latter was for small sects and independent cultivators whose spines would snap just from the cost of forming a Nascent Soul—they'd use an Ascension Platform to ride the power of Heavenly Tribulation into Nascent Soul and immediately push on to the Upper Realm in one go.
Of course, there were special cases—achieving Nascent Soul through rare secret realms, or ascending that way. Some used rare Upper Realm elixirs or Dharma treasures. But most people ended up using an Ascension Platform.
Even with a body reinforced through body refinement techniques and a mind tempered by cultivation methods, forcing your way through dimensional pressure to ascend to the Upper Realm was a life-or-death gamble even for a Nascent Soul cultivator.
If all we need to do is fill it, Main Body, couldn't we just fill it with slaughter energy disguised as spiritual power?
"That sounds like a genuinely insane idea."
Slaughter energy drawn from the Sea of Slaughter couldn't be refined in the first place—the Golden Core couldn't even absorb it. Disguising it as spiritual power might fool things, sure, but the whole point of filling the Golden Core was to form an Infant inside it.
If you filled that Golden Core with slaughter energy and sprouted an Infant from it...
Well, technically, that'd just be 'us,' right?
Yeah, yeah. Just a baby version of us.
A newborn, even!
Though with a Golden Core this size, calling it a newborn felt wrong—it'd be an absurdly chubby, overfed baby, wouldn't it?!
And if we were going by that logic, wasn't the Main Body an incomplete Transcendent Being?
When I Limit Break—no, when I raise my realm—I have to fully metamorphose into a complete Transcendent Being too.
And for that, don't I need to perfectly finish constructing the Tower of Laws in the Mental World, solid enough that even the Sea of Slaughter can't shake it?
Just patch the Tower with Heavenly Tribulation, Main Body!
Flooded by the torrent of thoughts pouring out of the Humanity Clones, I mulled it over for a long while before finally nodding.
"That's my Humanity Clones for you. I heard every last one of those batshit ideas loud and clear."
My blood-red eyes sparkled clear and bright.
"Let's do it right now."
Conveniently, Elder Togo—the one person who could have stopped us—was out on a walk. Cheon Nan-cho had locked herself away for her own training. San Gi-yeon was, of course, managing the base while training alongside the decorative fixtures.
And the iron chains the Red Star had put in place as a failsafe, always watching over me out of worried caution? Those had already been smashed to pieces by the Aurora thanks to the Humanity Clones' trolling. There was absolutely nothing left that could hit the brakes.
So the Humanity Clones and I started drawing the essence of slaughter from the deepest abyssal depths of the Sea of Slaughter—using the Tower and the Wheel—disguising it as spiritual power, and stacking it carefully into the Golden Core, piece by piece.
Time to show off our Tetris skills!
The hyped-up Humanity Clones chattered noisily while, from within, I diligently stacked the slaughter energy—disguised as spiritual power—layer by careful layer.
"What are you doing?"
That's how loud we were. Yu I-seong, who'd been locked away trying to transcend, actually came out because of the racket.
Of course, the moment the Humanity Clones—who knew full well that slaughter energy caused Yu I-seong pain—realized they'd completely forgotten about her, they all started screaming Emergency! Emergency! inside my head.
Meanwhile, Yu I-seong casually picked up a chunk of the slaughter-disguised-as-spiritual-power that the Humanity Clones had been hauling along with a heave-ho.
"Already prepping to reach Nascent Soul, Main Body?"
Uh, are you okay, I-seong?
That's slaughter energy disguised as spiritual power.
No wait—I said that wrong! Spiritual power disguised as—no, slaughter energy disguised as spiritual power!
"...???"
Yu I-seong's mind, which had transcended from Mortal and been hiding away because even slaughter energy alone was agony, was now being told that the spiritual power chunks the Humanity Clones were carrying were actually slaughter energy.
Naturally, a whole swarm of question marks floated up over Yu I-seong's head.