Forbidden Seals and a Knight's First Steps
A Forbidden Seal is the power to borrow the laws of the world.
Ordinarily, a cultivator begins to perceive or comprehend those laws from the Golden Core realm onward. Through Forbidden Seals, they try out various laws, find the ones that suit their techniques and spiritual roots, and refine them into something of their own — the proper path toward Nascent Soul.
Even after reaching Nascent Soul and obtaining a law of their own, a cultivator can still use Forbidden Seals. They can borrow laws unrelated to their own, or use them to reinforce the one they already possess.
Of course, the way Yu Hee understood it was completely different.
Isn't that just the chant that pops up when you activate a skill? Like how typing in chat boosts the skill effect.
As always, she processed Forbidden Seals through the logic of a game.
So when she looked at a consumable talisman — something that carved, engraved, or painted characters charged with spiritual power to borrow a law through a Forbidden Seal — her reaction was nothing special.
"What am I supposed to do with that?"
"You said communicating with the knight was hard, right? Here — stick this on your body."
> Let's see... can you hear me, Main Body?
"Ohh...! But it burned up after a single line? So using a consumable just gets you one chat message and that's it?"
"A Forbidden Seal is only ever a loan, after all."
With Cheon Nan-cho's help, I'd managed to get a consumable for communicating with the knight — but since he could read what I was thinking anyway, it probably didn't matter much.
What I was really curious about was this: whether the knight and I could each pick different maps and still grow independently.
Both Yu I-seong and Yu Gisa had level caps listed under their classes, but I had no idea what their actual levels were. Where a level should have been, it just said Transcendence Stage 1 or Stage 2, and I couldn't even tell what the criteria were.
"Alright then. Let's go."
My first time heading out onto a map since reaching Nascent Soul!
Yu Gisa left the base first, and I followed, moving to a different map.
Even with my Erosion skill running like a passive, the world still squeezed down on me as if rejecting a Transcendent being. I rolled my shoulders and twisted my body this way and that, working out the stiffness.
I recalled Elder Togo's advice.
Find a city with an Ascension Platform and use it — or else bring back materials meant for ascension. Specifically, materials to endure or block the pressure of rising from the lower realm to the upper one bare-bodied.
According to Elder Togo, even as a Transcendent who had achieved giant-kin transcendence, ascending without the aid of a Heavenly Tribulation or the right materials would be difficult.
The reason, of course, was my Slaughter Tribulation again. Power built by taking lives carried a matching weight of karma, and hauling the vast karma of my accumulated Slaughter Tribulation wholesale into the upper realm was beyond even my physical stats — which, with transformation skills factored in, already exceeded five thousand.
"Let's see... looks like Yu Gisa made it to another map just fine."
If things got dangerous, he'd flee back to base on his own. And besides — when you got right down to it, Yu Gisa was still me.
Cheon Nan-cho had chewed me out over that kind of thinking, warning that trusting a shared soul fragment could get you attacked by a clone, betrayed, or even swallowed whole — but still!
"Hmm, so then... tch."
I'd meant to go looking for an Ascension Platform or materials, but where was I supposed to start? It wasn't registered in the quest window, so there was no guidance at all. I had no idea what to do!
"A demon cultivator...! Oh god, oh no... we're all going to die..."
Might as well deal with the quest NPC right in front of me first and think about it later!
Yu Gisa moved carefully, step by step.
Gaining a class had given him combat sense. Recovering memories had built up combat experience. Transcendence and an armored body had clearly made him stronger.
And yet his mind was still at the level of an ordinary mortal.
Separated from the other Humanities, dropped out of nowhere by the main body with a casual go grow on your own for a bit — of course he was going to be cautious.
From a body of pure black, one pure white gauntlet stood out sharply. He clenched that gauntlet — his own conscience — tight, and advanced while stealing glances at the minimap.
What he'd figured out so far was that the event window and quest window worked normally, and that Auto-Battle was unusable.
Auto-Battle, after all, was the red star or the Slaughter Tribulation moving the body in his place. With no star watching over him and no ability to use Slaughter Tribulation, of course he couldn't use it.
"Uwoooorh...? Metal? Tastes bad..."
Hmm. There was also the advantage of not drawing aggro from certain monsters.
An armor with a human soul.
Pretty cool!
Losing the weapon and accessory slots and being locked out of most consumables was a pretty painful downside, though.
Gripping the gauntlet and throwing a punch was enough to shatter a low-level monster in the 300s in a single blow.
Every piece of gear making up his body — armor aside — was Epic-grade equipment from the level 500 range, and every last one of them came with Defense boosts as a baseline.
They were pieces the main body couldn't even use because of restrictions, but because his body itself had become armor, he could ignore those restrictions and equip them by swapping out parts of himself.
Of course, the way every piece of armor turned black the moment he put it on, warped, and color-matched itself was a little uncanny.
Is this like a default skin, the way the main body has one?
But then why was only the gauntlet pure white?
They called it conscience, but even when he equipped a gauntlet piece and then unequipped it, it stayed pure white — which made it stand out way too much.
Come to think of it, Yu I-seong had named her conscience the Spear of Reason or something. So maybe his could be the Knight's Gauntlet?
He raised pure white spiritual energy from the gauntlet.
It was drawn from the Mental World through the link of conscience, so the energy should have been golden — but even the spiritual energy itself had turned pure white.
Looking at it that way — the main body was blood-red, I-seong was gold, and he was white — maybe all of them just had different colors.
"A puppet that's lost its master? Something feels off about it for that, though."
"Master, isn't that dangerous?"
"It's fine, it's fine. Just trust your master!"
Two cultivators approached the knight.
A clearly precious metal armor wreathed in spiritual energy was walking around on its own — of course cultivators would take an interest.
The knight hesitated for a moment.
They looked like neutral NPCs rather than monsters, but without a talisman he couldn't hold a conversation. Should he just ignore them and move on?
While he was thinking that, a monster burst out.
His body moved on pure instinct.
Neutral NPCs or cultivators, they were still just one level-100 and a couple of fresh level-20s.
Yu Gisa still carried the memories of a past life spent under the mission of protecting newbies. He wasn't so numb that he could stand by and watch a level-300 Eok-kka monster zero in on low-levels the way the main body would have.
An Eok-kka monster to low-levels, maybe — but a single strike from someone wrapped in level-500 armor and already Transcended reduced the monster to scrap.
"Uh... uhh..."
Only then did the level-100 low-level confirm the monster and collapse as his legs gave out. The level-20 neutral NPC, by contrast, turned toward Yu Gisa and spoke.
"Thank you for saving us!"
Yu Gisa had been about to leave after the rescue alone — and his body locked up. He'd only stepped in because low-levels were about to die right in front of him. Nothing more, nothing less.
But the moment he heard that single word of thanks from the NPC, Yu Gisa felt his soul ring.
What is this?
If it had been Yu Hee, she would have said, Oh, I got [Emotion Expression] [Gratitude]! and moved on wondering whether NPCs could use emotion expressions too.
If it had been I-seong, she would have sensed karma settling into the soul and recognized it as a foothold toward Transcendence.
Yu Gisa, independent for fifteen hours.
His Mental World had already been noisy enough; then he'd gained a class, Transcended, and the connection had been cut one-way. Left alone with no one to talk to, he'd been bored out of his mind — and now this sudden event made his soul leap.
The thought was short. The action was fast.
He turned the steps that had been about to walk away after killing the monster, and approached the NPC who was trying to help the other one still sitting on the ground.
"Wh-what?"
With the pure white gauntlet, he patted the head of the neutral NPC — a little larger than the main body, but still not free of a girl's air.
Unlike the main body, most of the Humanities had adult female builds, so Yu Gisa's full-body armor frame was quite tall — which made the gesture possible.
Through the pure white gauntlet, cold metal though it was, its essence was his own heart and conscience. The warm feeling that flowed in through it — the moment Yu Gisa accepted it through his conscience — one of the gray dots on the minimap turned green.
He had gained a friendly NPC of his own.
Unlike Yu I-seong, who possessed an aurora that blocked all Evil Karma outright, Yu Gisa was still under the subtle influence of Reality Denial without quite realizing it — and so he thought nothing of it.
"Master! The puppet! The puppet!"
"It seems to have taken a liking to you! You've found a fated encounter."
The level-100 neutral NPC, finally steadying himself, looked Yu Gisa over this way and that, then gathered up the shattered remains of the monster and took the lead. Yu Gisa took the hand of the small neutral NPC who kept glancing helplessly between master and armor, and fell in behind them.
Unlike the main body, he didn't level up by farming experience or Slaughter Tribulation through killing — so there was no real need to hunt. Might as well check out some other content, Yu Gisa figured.