The Base's Sky Opens
The sky over the base opened.
It was the precursor of a Heavenly Tribulation — both a trial by which the heavens confirmed a cultivator's right to challenge Nascent Soul after climbing past Qi Condensation, Foundation Establishment, and Golden Core, and the single most common cause of death among cultivators.
This time, however, it was unfolding inside the base, and someone had been waiting for exactly that: Togo, who still held the late stage of Nascent Soul.
As the sky tore open and the dense spiritual energy of the upper realm poured through, Togo's Nascent Soul — reduced for a time to a soul without a body, forced into convalescence — drank that abundance and rose.
The metal body that had been nothing more than one of the SF-mode ornaments, now the vessel holding Togo's Nascent Soul, a Mythic-grade decoration, finally revealed its true power.
According to its description it was a terrifying decisive weapon capable of turning a star into a supernova and wiping out an entire star system. Fully unleashed, it could have annihilated not only this lower realm but the upper realm as well.
For the moment, though, there was no star on hand to detonate into a supernova. In its place, Togo used a mass of spiritual power woven from his own Laws.
That small Law-forged lump of spiritual power, driven by the Star Eater's force, triggered a localized gravitational collapse. For an instant a black hole formed at its center and vanished again; the violent force that tore the spiritual mass apart sent an invisible power streaking toward the opened sky.
An artificial gamma-ray burst — a gamma-ray explosion manufactured from Law-infused spiritual power. Weakened almost beyond recognition, it would barely harm a living creature, yet it was lethally effective against the heavens themselves. Togo did not know that much.
What he understood and manifested was the phenomenon that came after.
The final light a star leaves behind before it dies.
Togo's metal frame seized the infinitely corrupted, alien lights of spiritual power born from that tiny, localized supernova. His gaze locked onto the Heavenly Tribulation plummeting from the sky — a tribulation so monstrous it could erase even his Nascent Soul.
The heavens were not testing the newborn. They were clearly trying to kill her.
Even if he still possessed his original body, this was a Heavenly Tribulation he would have had to stake his life to stop — and it was about to pour down on the baby.
So overwhelming was that force that the sky itself, holding open the gate between upper and lower realms, was screaming as it strained to endure, the lightning falling only in slow, labored strokes.
Togo moved the metal machine-body like a hand and hurled the alien-corrupted lights of spiritual power straight into the Heavenly Tribulation.
The collision between Heavenly Tribulation and Residual Afterglow was silent. There was no explosion.
Of course there wasn't. Residual Afterglow was originally nothing more than the afterglow produced by a gamma-ray burst — mere light, a simple luminous phenomenon.
But when that phenomenon was born of spiritual power, when Law inhabited it and a cultivator's will filled it, it became force.
The name of the phenomenon as Togo understood it was Residual Afterglow — the death cry a star leaves behind.
Even the Heavenly Tribulation faltered before that death cry. At the same time, a crushing load slammed into Togo's metal body, and it began, little by little, to warp.
In practical terms he was enduring the recoil of a supernova. The Star Eater had been designed for exactly that purpose, so the force was within what it could withstand.
The heavens, however, reacted far more violently than Togo had expected.
The Heavenly Tribulation crushed the death cry underfoot.
The extended metal machine-body shattered, laying waste to everything around it.
At this rate the newborn would die.
Togo was about to force out the power of Deity Transformation when he stopped.
"Trans…form…!"
The newborn raised a giant's body — small, young, and incomplete in every way.
She was only late-stage Golden Core. There was no way she could withstand a Heavenly Tribulation of that magnitude. The instant Togo reached to draw spiritual power from his own Nascent Soul—
A crimson sea of blood revealed itself inside the base.
This was not the Mental World she had once playfully synchronized with reality through a technique. This was the manifestation of the newborn's true inner world — the one Togo himself had once entered as a Nascent Soul.
A red toxic ocean so vast that even his own Nascent Soul, which had once reached Deity Transformation, could barely endure it, crashed head-on into the Heavenly Tribulation the sky had sent down.
The Heavenly Tribulation was pushed back.
A Heavenly Tribulation dropped to kill a single person — one so monstrous that even a late-stage Nascent Soul cultivator would not have survived it — should never have been held by a sea of Slaughter Tribulation, no matter if that sea numbered in the thousands, the tens of thousands, or even the hundreds of millions.
And yet it was pushed back.
The Sea of Slaughter circulated without end, swelling the Slaughter Tribulation still further.
Ordinarily, slaughter inflated that way would have been like a hollow balloon — mass-produced and weakened, unable to properly oppose a Heavenly Tribulation.
But the circulating Sea of Slaughter carried Yu Hee's sole Law: Cheok, the Measure. For every measure the slaughter swelled, that same measure of power was copied.
Even so, though the Sea of Slaughter drove the Heavenly Tribulation back, the tribulation did not vanish. At some point the two forces found equilibrium and strained against each other in a deadlocked parallel.
Yu Hee finished gathering and organizing her enlightenment, then brought both hands of her slaughter-forged giant body together as if in prayer.
Oneness of self and object. When extremes are reached, they reverse.
In the end, the Law that becomes one and circulates.
Erosion
A restriction of crimson Hangul characters unfurled to support the technique. Reality, already laid bare by the manifested Mental World, was eroded and assimilated; the Laws rewrote themselves, and the master of the sky changed.
Here and now, within the space where this Mental World had been spread, the sky belonged wholly to Yu Hee — her sky alone.
A tower rose from the Sea of Slaughter. From within it the Golden Core burst forth in a blaze of spiritual light. For a single instant the master of the heavens became Yu Hee, and the frozen Heavenly Tribulation was seized in its entirety.
More precisely: she locked the Heavenly Tribulation inside the Mental World, released the Erosion skill, and reeled the Mental World back in all at once.
The colossal Heavenly Tribulation, trapped within the Mental World, vanished with it.
Even if the heavens tried to interfere with the tribulation again, once it had entered the Mental World there was nothing left they could do. If the sky could speak, it would have been cursing — that was how absurd the theft had been.
Of course, Yu Hee's condition was far from good.
Even if the foundation of her Mental World rested on her innate talent, the Status Window, sealing a Heavenly Tribulation powerful enough to balance a fourfold Sea of Slaughter was like doubling the weight in a single stroke.
Convenience modes and every other mod shut down one after another on their own while the innate Status Window desperately bound the Heavenly Tribulation inside the Mental World.
"This is a gamble worth taking!"
Blood spilled from her mouth in a thick stream. Spitting it out, Yu Hee kept the Transformation skill active and used her Law to shrink her bulk.
"Come on — get to work…!"
From the Golden Core that had touched the Heavenly Tribulation, a current of spiritual power began to flow.
The Heavenly Tribulation — ownerless heavenly primordial energy in all but name — started to be drawn into the Golden Core like a whirlpool.
Enlarged through repeated expansion work, the Golden Core looked ready to swallow the entire tribulation whole. But the core was already packed with refined Slaughter Tribulation disguised as spiritual power, and of course it collided with the Heavenly Tribulation.
Heavenly Tribulation and Slaughter Tribulation crashed together. Spiritual power and slaughter were permanently annihilated at the same time.
What remained was experience.
Experience of a quality far superior to anything gained from killing monsters.
Naturally so: the spiritual power being permanently erased in the collision was Heavenly Tribulation from the upper realm, and the slaughter was the equivalent of infinitely refined residual stat points.
The plan was as crude as it sounded — convert the entire Slaughter Tribulation into experience and feed it to the Golden Core so the level would rise.
And Yu Hee, completely unaware that the Humanity Clones who had heard that crude plan were screaming and cursing inside the Golden Core, tried to keep her entire consciousness locked on turning every last scrap of Heavenly Tribulation into experience within the core—
When the remaining spiritual energy from the sky that had opened under the tribulation's influence was greedily swallowed by the enormous mountain tile standing right beside her — Disaster Mountain — and the mountain blazed with light.
Incomplete Transmission complete.
Story playback initiated.
Wait — hang on — why is this happening right now — stop!
No! Don't! Stop it!
What kind of shitty game doesn't even have a skip button?! Stop the story already! Can't you see I'm busy breaking through my limits right now?!
Screaming inwardly, Yu Hee had no choice. Mid-breakthrough, the story forced its way into her mind like a direct injection. Even with her eyes squeezed shut, the scenes played out vivid and inescapable before her, and she was compelled to watch the entire thing while her realm ascended.
And of course, the moment Yu Hee's mind checked out for story-viewing and the Humanity Clones were forcibly handed control of her body, they got hit with the exact same bolt from the blue.