The Forgotten Will of Hwanga-gongdong

A crooked, thick doodle that looked like a child's scribble was projected onto something as pure white as a chalkboard, and a narration poured straight into my soul.

The creation myth of Immortal-Hero Mode, which had started from the very beginning of time, only started spitting out something that actually looked interesting after the cultivators showed up in the Ancient Era and a whole lot of blah-blah-blah had already gone by.

A doodle of a person representing that True Immortal carving the world into pieces was drawn in the same scribbly style.

Honestly, I had been trying to listen somehow, but the technical terms and Chinese characters were flying around so thick I could barely keep up! If they hadn't shown me this familiar community-guide-comic art style, I probably would have just ignored the whole thing and moved on!

"..."

"...Fuck."

Multi Mode was already active, and the moment I saw the sect name Hwanga-gongdong I had already been half-suspecting the truth.

The fact that no one answered in the multi chat room meant ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠every remaining player was dead and I was the only one left.

Hell, even if I didn't know that deep, solemn voice from the story, this familiar doodle art style drawn in Paint was something I could never forget—proof that there had once been other users of this shitty game just like me.

But they were all dead.

They had all died and vanished before I was even born.

No loading, no resurrection—every last one of them had died and disappeared completely.

Otherwise there was no way the multi chat would stay completely silent, and no way I would have been able to become the successor of Hwanga-gongdong and claim the base for myself.

So then what the hell made this any different from a single-player game?

"So the whole point of showing me this story is to warn me that if the True Immortals find out I'm a player, I'll get character-deleted on the spot, right?"

Just what the hell did they do to deserve that...

In a single flash, every post from my past life's community flooded through my head—the nightmarish mash-ups of romance-obsessed weirdos and efficiency freaks, every cursed mod combination, every event-and-bug collision that produced pure idiot content.

Was it... justified?

Using bugs in Adult Mode to infinitely clone NPCs and detonate the entire map, drawing pictures with base tiles and decorations, stacking monster and NPC corpse objects into towers and blowing them up to raise drop rarity... and so on.

Hmm. From the NPCs' point of view, yeah, maybe they deserved to be hunted down and killed?

Those were just the things that came to mind in a few seconds. Once you factored in all the achievement-hunting stunts, the ironman runs full of every efficiency exploit imaginable, and the people who deliberately triggered Abyss runs and crisis events just to speedrun...

The moment I imagined all of that happening live after the reality patch, a wave of nausea rose even though I hadn't eaten anything.

Not guilt or anything like that. Just pure disgust.

This had been a shitty, broken game that players had been fucking around with using mods for a full twenty years, and of course the Abyss they created was deep—bottomless.

In the hundred-plus years I had lived as a cultivator I had seen plenty of cruel, garbage acts from monsters and neutral NPCs, but this was on a completely different level.

When you thought of it as just a game, you could laugh and scroll past the abysses that those special-interest ghosts had spent twenty years building with custom mods just because it was fun or because they wanted to show off.

But this wasn't a single-player game with only me in it. This was a multiplayer game where the advance party had already sucked every drop of juice out of the content, tanked player favorability with the NPCs into the absolute gutter, and then ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠gotten character-deleted.

They were a fucking public nuisance!!??!

Not that I was any better—I had also assumed it was single-player, never managed my reputation even once, and only ever did pure evil-alignment runs that included slaughtering neutral NPCs!

If you looked at it that way, wasn't this reality instead of a game?

That doubt vanished almost as soon as it appeared.

Because if you really went down that road, even if you blamed my Status Window and mods on an innate talent, there was still no way to explain all the events and bugs!

"End story viewing!"

So for now I just jammed the single fact—if the True Immortals find out I'm a player, I'm dead—into my head and hurried back out to finish the limit break.

My soul slipped free of the story and came to its senses inside the Mental World.

A quick check showed that Yu I-seong currently held control of the body and was deploying her own golden Mental World to digest the Heavenly Tribulations.

Since the rebirth into a Nascent Soul happened in the Golden Core rather than the flesh, I stayed right there in the Mental World, spread both hands, and heaved upward as if shoving something skyward.

A colossal tidal wave rose from the Sea of Slaughter, and I began dragging the entire massive Heavenly Tribulation that cradled the Golden Core at its center straight down into it.

The Heavenly Tribulation thrashed and tried to escape as it slowly sank into the slaughter ocean, but the more it struggled the more its power was sucked straight into the Golden Core, converted into experience, and it was dragged under helplessly.

As the weight of the Heavenly Tribulation lessened from being absorbed, the Golden Core—now packed full of the experience needed to become a Nascent Soul—grew even heavier, and I could feel the Status Window that supported the Sea of Slaughter screaming under the load. I just gritted my teeth and endured it.

The instant the Heavenly Tribulation and Golden Core were completely submerged in the Sea of Slaughter, I activated Spoon and Chopsticks at the same time and lifted the tower of the Mental World.

That tower was both the Soft-Body Cultivation Method and the conduit of laws—the proof that I, as a young giant, had achieved incomplete transcendence.

The tower that had been maintaining the balance of the fourth Sea of Slaughter—split into four fragments—was lifted free. A vortex formed at the center of the four shattered seas, and the slaughter energies slammed into one another as if trying to kill each other, annihilating and regenerating in endless cycles.

I forcibly dragged the Heavenly Tribulation and Golden Core out of it.

"Haaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah!!!!"

With that battle cry, the Golden Core and Heavenly Tribulation settled into the very heart of the Sea of Slaughter. Chopsticks and spoons formed like scales, wrapping the Heavenly Tribulation in a dense shell as they bored straight down into the depths of the slaughter ocean.

At the same time the tower I had raised to the sky came crashing back down, and a second tower began growing upward from below.

"Pour out the spiritual power!!"

"Got it!"

The Humanity Clones stationed on the tower pulled spiritual power from the Golden Core as if absorbing it into the structure, refined it, and fired it back downward.

From the bottom of the Sea of Slaughter, slaughter energy climbed the reverse tower built of chopsticks and spoons, meeting the spiritual power head-on with the Heavenly Tribulation trapped in the middle.

"Move and flow! Turn! Circulate through it!"

A golden restriction formed of crimson slaughter energy unfurled.

With the Humanity Clones and the restriction assisting, spiritual power that would normally have been nearly impossible to control began to move. The slaughter energy followed right behind it, wrapping the Heavenly Tribulation and circulating as it contracted.

Naturally the Heavenly Tribulation shrank by the same amount and began being absorbed into the Golden Core as experience. I sank into a state of pure focus inside the Mental World.

That was when the sky of the Mental World turned gold.

Yu I-seong, who had seized control of the body before I could finish swallowing the entire Heavenly Tribulation and awakening the Nascent Soul inside the Golden Core, had borrowed the power of a mythic-grade item to survive one life-or-death crisis (transcendence failure) and succeeded in transcending on only her second attempt. She opened her eyes.

Having achieved her second transcendence and grown stronger than ever before, Yu I-seong's soul realized that the slaughter energy flowing in through ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠her connection to the main body—me—no longer hurt or caused pain.

Because of that, she could vaguely infer the law waiting at the end of the enlightenment the main body was pursuing.

"Return... is it?"

If the law built up through the Soft-Body Cultivation Method was the law of a transcendent species, then this one was the true enlightenment and law the main body—me—had grasped while reaching for the Nascent Soul.

"Since we are reincarnators who still carry our past-life memories, maybe comprehending a law like this is only natural."

With that thought she closed her eyes, returned control of the body to the main body, and stepped into the Mental World to stand above the sky.

Centered on Yu I-seong, the sky began ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠to fill with golden spiritual power, forming a perfect contrast to the Sea of Slaughter below.

The main body was us, and we were the main body that still held the main body's memories.

"Well, if we're talking about the main body, this is the main body's power too."

Circulation began, linking the golden sky that bisected the Mental World with the Sea of Slaughter beneath it.