The Netherworld Messenger's Dilemma
The Sea of Slaughter surged.
Simply overlaying my inner Mental World onto reality as a cultivation art to block the Laws carried no offensive component whatsoever. The only catch was that Yu Hee's Mental World happened to be composed of slaughter energy of extreme aggression.
And the most vicious part of the whole technique was that, by its very nature of blanketing the world and assimilating it into the Mental World, it was nearly impossible to notice unless you stepped into its area of effect.
"Erosion."
The cultivation art I'd been grinding so hard in the training grounds—already past level forty—manifested as a skill. The moment a monster charging at me within minimap range entered the technique's radius, a wave of slaughter energy crashed down on it in an instant.
Even so, a monster at the late Golden Core stage, packing the raw power of the level-480 range, did not simply melt away into the Sea of Slaughter. If I'd pulled out the real Mental World, it would have been crushed flat and dead on the spot—but this was nothing more than a Mental World assimilation built on top of a cultivation art. A kind of wide-area floor skill. One that just happened to lay down slaughter energy.
To me, slaughter energy was as good as part of my own body. With slaughter energy around, I could regenerate even if my body was carved into eight pieces, even if my head exploded. But slaughter energy fundamentally clashed with spiritual power. More precisely, I half-suspected that slaughter energy—which tried to kill anything living—treated spiritual power itself as something alive.
Either way, standing on this floor, my stamina and slaughter energy regenerated, and the cost of every slaughter-based technique dropped to absurd extremes. Kind of obvious, given that it was a Mental World packed full of the stuff.
And of course, in Xianxia Mode, most monsters and neutral NPCs ran on spiritual power—so the second they stepped onto the floor, it felt like they'd been dumped into a space with zero spiritual energy, and they bolted immediately. Which meant I couldn't hunt them. So I disguised the slaughter energy as spiritual power, and—ta-da!—the monsters and neutral NPCs greedily absorbed the slaughter energy thinking it was the real thing.
Aside from a bump in attack power, their defense tanked, they lost their minds and failed to cast techniques, and since it wasn't spiritual power at all but slaughter energy, their spiritual-power-based arts backlashed, dealt self-damage, or went berserk—debuffs plastered all over them. A wide-area floor skill optimized for pure support!
As the cultivation art leveled up, its applications seemed to multiply even further, but I didn't need to figure them all out myself. Run Auto-Battle a few thousand times with the floor on and I'd learn everything eventually.
"Auto-Battle."
So I flipped the floor on and hit Auto-Battle. Slaughter energy seized control of my body; the moment I lost agency, a single flick of my sleeve was enough for something like a squid tentacle to rise out of the waves of slaughter and crush a monster in one blow. Oh, so that was possible too?
I was still watching Auto-Battle put the floor skill to work—generating chopsticks inside the slaughter waves and raining them down, snatching fleeing monsters—when something felt off about my mindlessly auto-battling body. I scrambled to pull out my natal Dharma Treasure for manual combat, but I was a little too late.
"Ah, shit—?!"
You have been defeated in Auto-Battle!
You have become a prisoner...
After a heroic battle, the monster took me prisoner.
What the hell, Auto-Battle?! You lost to this?!
"Hwaaaaaah!"
The monster that had beaten me let out a strained roar of victory—then collapsed as if it had fainted on the spot. Fair enough, given that it had been forcibly drawing slaughter energy in place of spiritual power inside the waves of slaughter, literally burning through its own lifespan to fight.
Naturally, being a prisoner meant I couldn't do a single thing for a full week—pure wasted time—and on top of that, this bastard of a monster had burned so much lifespan that it just kept lying there without recovering any spiritual power, so I couldn't do anything either!
Why freak out over a prisoner state that would free me naturally after a week?
All ability scores temporarily increase by 3.
With Event Probability Mode cranked so high the event rates were disgusting, of course I was sweating bullets! In the prisoner state there was zero way to counter an eok-kka event!
And true to that 500% event probability I'd jacked up, the misfortune events started popping one after another like they'd been waiting for this.
If the condition for an event to appear was being in the [Prisoner] state—then sitting around on the map doing absolutely nothing, like I was right now, was the event's trigger.
The former meant events that met their conditions gained a chance to appear. The latter meant that once the trigger fired, only events inside that trigger pool could activate.
Which was exactly why I was this anxious. If I just sat here in the prisoner state without even using an [Emote], doing nothing on the map—it would come. Touch the trigger and it would arrive. An eok-kka event!
And roughly around day five, Yu Hee—half-enlightened by then—jerked awake at the bone-chilling sensation of every hair on her head standing on end. She squeezed her eyes shut under the helpless knowledge that, as a prisoner, she still couldn't do a damn thing.
The Netherworld Messenger gazes upon you.
The eok-kka event slammed down.
Among the events that triggered from sitting still and doing nothing on a single map, this was the worst eok-kka of them all. A black shadow would leap out, chop the character clean in half, and a message would pop—The Netherworld Messenger has claimed your life.—followed by a load-game screen. A pure garbage eok-kka event.
Even calling it eok-kka, the current translation dressed it up as a "Netherworld Messenger" and all that, but it was really just a Western-style reaper the devs had stuck in to tell you not to sit around on the map. If you could fight the reaper, there might have been something you could do!
The problem was that I was a prisoner!
The Netherworld Messenger examines your karma.
The Netherworld Messenger falls into deep contemplation!
What? Why the hell is it hesitating?
Was it actually going to spare me?
Of course, Yu Hee had no way of knowing—but the Messenger of the Netherworld had come out on official business. This was a kind of Heavenly Tribulation. As long as the Netherworld took job orders from Heaven as a subcontractor of sorts, a tribulation meant to inspect a cultivator's karma and claim their life was work handed down to maintain Heaven's balance.
From the Netherworld's side it wasn't a bad deal either—harvesting the soul of a cultivator loaded with spiritual power brought considerable profit—so the Messenger had arrived with that lighthearted attitude. Then it checked again and again whether what it was seeing could possibly be right, and finally looked up at the sky.
Whatever the paperwork process looked like, the usual structure by which a Netherworld Messenger could harvest a cultivator's life was simple: cultivators as a breed used spiritual power to violate the lifespan Heaven had set for them and lived disgustingly long, so the Netherworld's own rules naturally marked them for collection.
But look at the cultivator staring back at it right now—expressionless, not moving a muscle.
An unstable transcendent being who had lived a mere hundred years or so.
From the Messenger's perspective, it was like Central Administration had handed over a warrant to arrest a criminal, so it had geared up fully and gone out—only to find not a civilian, not even a juvenile offender, but a straight-up minor. No—even calling it a minor was generous. Factoring in a transcendent being's lifespan, a cultivator who hadn't even lived two hundred years was a newborn infant.
And yet the karma piled on that infant was more terrifying than anything the Messenger had ever seen on any cultivator in its entire career. Even granting that, in all its work so far, it had never dealt with anyone above the Nascent Soul level—if it still felt this abnormal, that said everything.
As far as the Messenger could tell, this had to be a being descended from the Upper Realms, or at minimum something interfered with by an Upper Realm existence that had achieved incarnation. It was not something the Messenger—or even the Netherworld itself—should be touching.
The problem was that, contrary to its own judgment, the rigid Celestial Court—that is, Heaven—handled everything with its usual civil-servant bureaucracy, so simply walking away wasn't an option either.
Stuck between options and fretting for a long while, the Netherworld Messenger finally attempted a desperate dodge: dumping the problem on its superior, even if it cost some of its own karma.
The Netherworld Messenger retreats.
The Netherworld Judge gazes upon you.
The Netherworld Judge seizes the Netherworld Messenger.
With no idea what was going on, Yu Hee watched expressionlessly as the Messenger tried to moonwalk its way into a retreat—only to get grabbed by its direct superior, the Judge, and thoroughly chewed out.
What the hell are those things even doing?
Of course, the Judge had plenty to say about it too. It had personally come all the way down to the Lower Realms because of some "major problem," only to discover that its subordinate hadn't brought a problem—it had dumped a nuclear bomb of a case on it. Of course it was pissed.