Under the Gaze of the Mad Star
"The heavenly fate has twisted further still — yet at least it has veered somewhat aside."
"…Because of the red star, Master?"
"So long as you do not kill her with your own hands. You must never, under any circumstances, kill her directly. That thing is a Mad Star more brutish than any Heavenly Tribulation — one that cares for neither rule nor law — and Heaven itself is watching. Now that it has come this way, should you lay a hand on her beneath the Mad Star's gaze, something unspeakably catastrophic will follow."
Had his master ever been this talkative? What on earth could make a man who had always seemed so unshakable shrink back like this?
He didn't need to ask. It was because of that little girl.
Judging by her divine form, she seemed to possess some innate ability born of a twisted spiritual root — perhaps the direct blessing of the Slaughter Star itself. A girl with the heaven-defying power to extract and destroy the spiritual core of a late-stage Foundation Establishment cultivator while herself barely at early Foundation Establishment.
And yet those clear eyes that had looked at him without a shred of fear, as if he were nothing more than a pebble by the roadside — so endlessly pure, without a speck of dust, that he wanted to gouge them out—
"Tsk! Get a hold of yourself!"
"…Hah… F-forgive me, Master."
"You only faced her and forced her back, and look at the state of you… Truly, a Mad Star. How heartless of Heaven, to drop such a trial upon my own city. Go inside and train for a while. Being swept further into the heavenly fate will only put you in greater danger."
"This unworthy disciple receives Master's command."
Gang So — cultivator and lord of Gangso Castle, which bore his own name, a man who had reached the Gold Core realm — watched for a moment as his late Core Formation disciple left the garden with lifeless steps. Then he turned his gaze skyward once more.
As if to defy the red star hanging overhead, watching the whole of Gangso Castle the way one might issue a warning: Do not interfere.
He stood like that for some time. Then a cultivator came hurtling into the garden on a dharma vessel, tumbling in and dropping into a bow.
"You summoned me, Senior Gang So! I— I am—!"
"Yes. You were the only one who sold anything to that child. This is your reward."
"…Huh?!"
"Thanks to you, the heavenly fate twisted. The destruction that had been set in motion was able to pass my city by, at least. As your senior, and as the lord of this place, I ought to repay that. Here — a Foundation Establishment Pill."
The cultivator, who had just received a pill that helped Qi Condensation practitioners break through to Foundation Establishment — and made advancement far easier for those already in that realm — remained in Gangso Castle for a time. Gang So confirmed that the heavenly fate twisted once more, then turned his eyes again to the red star still hanging over the city.
"Fuck! This goddamn shit game!"
Once again, after barely scraping a win against ordinary trash mobs, I spat out a string of curses.
"XP gets chopped to pieces just because they're not living creatures?! What kind of broken ass game design is thiiiiis?!"
No slaughter energy? Fine. I get that. But the XP getting gutted? That I could not accept. And if I ran Auto-Battle on top of it, the experience got chopped even further and the drop rates tanked!
Without slaughter energy, my health and spiritual power wouldn't recover — and with experience dribbling in at a pathetic trickle, clearing a single dungeon was eating up an absurd amount of time. More precisely: my recovery time was longer than the monsters' respawn rate.
At this rate I was going to wither away mentally. And that was after already being stuck in this dungeon for over a week by pure clock time!
Like the scarecrow example, slaughter energy wasn't completely zero — it just accumulated in such microscopic amounts that the spiritual power I spent killing them cost more than I got back. I was literally practicing creative economics: a net loss on every kill.
And that fact was something I could not endure.
"I need another way. Some other method!"
It took a full week before I even thought to try something different — a realization I carefully folded up and swallowed along with the thought that I was an idiot — and then I started grinding my brain over the problem.
The root of everything I was facing came down to the efficiency of slaughter energy and spiritual power.
I'd been flinging spiritual power around like a stock price in freefall — like I'd just discovered oil and decided to set it on fire. Until now that had been fine. Kill a living thing and slaughter energy popped out like a savings deposit, covering the cost.
But the moment non-living monsters showed up, the savings account vanished and the stock crashed. Bankruptcy or the river — those were the only options left.
Which meant the remaining path was the same as showing up to work every day for a paycheck: training.
"This is so fucking stupid."
And so, right in the middle of the dungeon, I began spiritual power training.
To use it more efficiently. To cut the waste.
To drill the techniques of handling spiritual power into my body until the waste was gone.
No waste — not just here and now, but later, too. I couldn't guarantee this situation wouldn't come up again. Learning to handle spiritual power without bleeding it dry was something I needed.
I raised a thin thread of spiritual power.
Ordinary cultivators gathered the primordial energy of heaven and earth. Mine was forged from slaughter energy. The sources were completely different, so their training methods and mine tended to run on entirely separate tracks.
My spiritual power was both the means and the result of killing — of generating slaughter energy.
If I made a wall, it was a wall for killing enemies. If I made a string, it was a string for killing something. Even if I just scooped it up and threw it, it became a weapon and flew off hunting for living things.
That was why spiritual power with a purpose of killing always erupted beyond what was necessary. There was a reason the waste was so severe — which also meant, in the end, that I simply hadn't been regulating it myself.
The red spiritual power I raised became two thin streams of light, settling into my hands. I strained to keep control of the light-threads that strained to break free, as if they wanted to kill something that very second.
I crouched down and started practicing with chopsticks.
With chopsticks shaped from spiritual power, I poked and prodded the corpse of the monster I'd just killed. The energy shuddered, as if begging me to stop digging through this non-living matter and go hurt something alive instead. I crushed that impulse down, forcing it to hold the shape of chopsticks while still keeping enough strength to cut through the monster's body.
Because they weren't living creatures, their corpses stayed tough even after death — unlike ordinary monsters, whose spiritual power bled out and left their hides easy to tear.
"This is hard… tsk."
It was nothing like handing my body over to Auto-Battle, or just cramming spiritual power in and swinging it around however I felt like. Surrendering myself to slaughter energy was one thing. Carefully controlling spiritual power by my own will was still unfamiliar territory for someone who had barely even established a foundation a handful of times.
"Ah."
And only after several more days did I finally figure out why the chopstick work kept failing. The culprit was the low-grade Dharma Treasure I'd bought earlier.
A low-grade Dharma Treasure that permanently boosted attack power by thirty percent just by equipping it — of course the spiritual power would turn even more vicious!
In the end, I took the headband off for training, and even then it took months before I got reasonably comfortable with the chopsticks. After that I put the headband back on and trained with it equipped.
The result:
"Hah."
I threw the chopsticks.
It was a scene of absolute table-manners catastrophe — but they were only spiritual power shaped like chopsticks. The absurdly well-formed utensils did exactly what they were made for: they punched straight through the monster's skull in a single strike and detonated inside.
And the residual spiritual power left in the dead monster's corpse was already so thoroughly marinated in my slaughter energy that I could absorb it as-is.
Compared to the spiritual power spent forming the chopsticks and the spiritual power spent throwing them, it was a considerable amount — but it didn't convert into slaughter energy. It went straight to feeding my twisted spiritual root.
Which meant it counted as experience.
"Finally."
How many months had it been since I entered this dungeon? I had finally managed a level-up.
"What a complete piece-of-shit game."
And I'd only figured out this method because I'd gotten bored mid-training, started messing around, and poked at the unique accessory hanging around my neck out of curiosity — wondering how exactly it increased experience gain.
That didn't mean all the hard training had been useless. Still. The hollow feeling was hard to shake.
Honestly, someone might ask why I didn't just spend that time killing monsters and building slaughter energy instead. Answer: no. This place wore a xianxia skin over a complete garbage-fire of a game, and the second an event got pulled forward you could get hit with an eok-kka and die.
In fact, while training I'd already been hit by misfortune events four or five times — internal injuries, ambushes from monsters spawning out of empty air, that sort of thing.
But I had pushed through the hardship and the boredom, and now the spiritual power that used to leak like a bottomless jar could be regulated, more or less, like a faucet with a working handle.
In other words, I now had spiritual power control roughly on par with an ordinary early Foundation Establishment cultivator.
And I — who had already been beating mid-stage Foundation Establishment cultivators with spiritual control that was barely early Qi Condensation level — had just acquired combat ability that made slaughtering these monsters considerably smoother.
"Time to level up…"