Never Abyss Mode Deactivated

To run the Abyss, I first had to turn off the mode that disabled every Abyss-related random event and fixed event.

Sure, I couldn't use the old Capybara-bug speedrun Abyss route anymore — but a plain max-level Abyss run would do just fine.

By vanilla standards the Abyss was the endgame map, packed wall-to-wall with elites at level 450 minimum. Brutal composition. Except I'd already hit Nascent Soul.

Level five hundred, baby.

I'd even farmed the hidden dungeon and put together every gear set an Abyss run required — everything except the Mythic helmet slot, which was locked. Always locked.

Originally you had to gear the weapon too, and the requirements were filthy, but I'd gone full glass-cannon and the Spoon meant weapons barely mattered. Lucky break. I didn't even have a weapon-related passive skill to begin with.

The gear sets for an Abyss run were built specifically to counter Tier-1-prefix elites. Take the Dazzling prefix, which hard-locks both accuracy and evasion at fifty percent — if you didn't have a wide-area DoT skill to punch through it, you needed a full Dark prefix set ready. Then there was Enraged, which raw-boosted crit rate and crit damage by fifty percent with zero penalty, and Powerful, which inflated final damage or attack power by anywhere from thirty to seventy percent. To not get one-shot by those, you needed an Immortal prefix set or a Sturdy one.

The other Tier-1 prefixes — Swift and Immortal — weren't a problem for me. Immortal was a nightmare of a prefix, stacked with defense up, crit resistance, damage reduction, and damage immunity all hanging off it like Christmas ornaments. But I didn't need gear to crack it. Spoon made everything fixed damage anyway.

Swift raised movement speed and attack speed. Unlike the other Tier-1s, it had taken the Reality Patch square in the face — still Tier-1 on paper for gear, but for monsters it felt like it had been knocked down to Tier-2. Manageable.

Either way, it was time to call the Abyss.

So what was the easiest fixed-event condition for an Abyss run again…

Pull monsters onto a [Road], kill them, and at a certain probability a [Corpse Object] would spawn. As long as there was no city or village on the surrounding map, smashing that object triggered the easiest fixed event in the game.

Problem: when I killed things with Slaughter energy, no corpses dropped.

"Let's switch, Seong-ah."

"Well. Guess there's no choice."

Yu I-seong stepped out of the rented house standing under the golden sky that split the Mental World in two, took control of the body, checked the minimap, and drew a golden spear from her heart as her wings unfurled.

Having transcended twice on a Mortal soul, Yu I-seong only had to grip the spear for aurora light to gather at its tip.

"Monsters, let's see… heave-ho!"

The golden spear transformed in an instant into a harpoon, trailing aurora as it shot out like a beam of light. One after another the red dots on the minimap winked out as if deleted. When the harpoon returned to Yu I-seong's hand, twisted, grotesque monsters hung from it as corpses.

"What the hell? How'd you do that?"

"Just feels like auto-tracking high Evil Karma targets, or evil-aligned ones?"

"Ahh."

Same as me hitting Nascent Soul — she'd transcended one more time and gotten stronger, and with it a new function. Auto-tracking basic attacks. I was jealous. I was pure skill-damage only, while Yu I-seong — between her aurora finisher and this auto-track — was basically a pure basic-attack dealer, the complete opposite of me.

"Seong-ah, want me to register an attack-speed gear set for you too?"

"How much more work are you trying to dump on me."

She shuddered, switched back, and returned to the Mental World. I roughly piled the corpses together until they registered as a Corpse Object.

Now I just had to crank the event-probability mode and wait. With good luck, the Abyss event might pop in a single day.

It took four days for the Abyss event to show. Luck was a little off this time, I thought, as I lay down among the reeking Corpse Objects and let myself be swept into the Abyss's maw.

Every time you entered the Abyss, it auto-saved. Heh heh.

The Abyss: a place where level-450-plus elites spawned endlessly. One of the max-level contents in vanilla mode — hit the level cap, farm gear, mess around. And I was level five hundred. Vanilla max level.

I swapped the gear loaded into my equipment slots with a quick tap of Quick Slot Mode. Not that the appearance changed from the default Xianxia-mode robes anyway. Unless it was a Mythic piece or a costume item cooked up with mods, you couldn't change the look. Nothing to be done about it.

Smashing the Corpse Object that had come in with me guaranteed a fortune event. I picked up a sword carved from a monster's spine and started deploying skills one after another.

Erosion. Transformation. Heavenly Slaughter Art. Chopsticks. Spoon.

The ground at my feet turned into a sea of Slaughter, malicious slaughter-energy surging and writhing, cursing every living thing and trying to drag it down and kill it. Transformation and Heavenly Slaughter Art activated, and my physical stats ballooned. Chopsticks formed a halo of light at my back. I felt Slaughter energy ripple ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠across the Spoon-buffed sword, and I watched the red dots flooding in on the minimap with lazy interest.

"Auto-Battle."

The wheel of Slaughter began to turn.

The Abyss — a name the players had coined, but it was max-level content. Used as a speedrun exploit, and also as a dedicated eok-kka delivery system. It wasn't just farming, either. The place had special gimmicks.

For example: kill the Abyss's fixed boss monster and there was a low chance it would drop a consumable called a Horn. Blow it and you woke the Abyss. Four raid-boss-tier monsters would spawn at once, and instead of Abyss mobs endlessly pouring into your minimap, they'd clump into armies around each raid boss.

Carve through the armies, kill every raid boss, and a special event triggered: a fight against an Abyss equal to the player's own level. The reward was a guaranteed Mythic item — a pretty ornament with zero options. Couldn't even drop it from inventory. And once you ran the event, both the Abyss map and the event itself vanished entirely, so nobody bothered. Just turning on the mode that stopped the Abyss from spawning was easier.

"No need to bother with that!"

The Abyss was still here even though other players existed, which meant nobody had ever seen the end of the Abyss event. That was all the proof I needed.

I watched my body go completely berserk under Auto-Battle.

Reaching Nascent Soul had massively empowered every mod under my innate Status Window talent, and Auto-Battle — the one I'd used the most — had gotten a horrifying upgrade. Against Abyss elites, it was nothing but [Overwhelming Victory] pop-ups.

"Having two endgame items really makes this easy!"

The synergy between my unique belt — which stole an elite-or-higher enemy's prefix as a buff for about two minutes on kill — and the ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠Mythic helmet's one-shot protection was absurd. It made the set-bonus stats you got from matching gear look like a joke. Overwhelming performance. The unique belt especially was basically an Abyss-run exclusive. Once ten or more of those two-minute prefixes stacked up, killing same-level elites took a handful of hits at most.

Normally, leveling too high in the Abyss got ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠you kicked out — but that was a low-level problem, the kind you hit when you were bug-abusing Abyss runs early on. And more importantly, at Nascent Soul I didn't level with experience anymore. I could convert it into Slaughter energy or spiritual power instead.

Feed experience to the Nascent Soul, and it handled the conversion — dump it into the Sea of Slaughter and it became Slaughter energy; dump it into the Sky of Spiritual Power and it became spiritual power. Leveling up was for investing in the Status Window that propped up the Mental World, widening the foundation.

I could feel the Humanity Clones bribing my Nascent Soul with snacks and cute antics whenever it whined about the work, and I just kept hunting in the Abyss without rest.

Yu Hee's new Law was Return — . A Law of coming back, of saving. It was the crystallization of every insight she'd gained living as a cultivator, and so it could cycle not only Slaughter energy but spiritual power and experience as well.

As if to prove it, the wheel spinning endlessly above her head no longer turned on Slaughter alone. It began turning ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠experience through the Law. A newly acquired golden restraint that assisted growth fed power into the wheel, and experience ballooned in an instant.

The Abyss never noticed.

Of course it didn't. While Yu Hee's Nascent-Soul-empowered Auto-Battle Mode was working overtime, Double Speed Mod had naturally started doing its own job. Even Yu Hee herself, under Double Speed, had her sense of time completely fried — the Abyss catching on was a distant fantasy.

The Abyss run continued.