Sir Knight!
"Sir Knight!"
At the familiar call, Yu Gisa rose in his armored body.
He had gone so far as to use a communication talisman just to teach her his name, and yet this kid still stripped off the surname and insisted on calling him Sir Knight. He looked down at the low-level cultivator who hadn't even begun to gather Qi—in other words, a scrub under level 100.
This was an experiment.
How far could this girl—a Friendly NPC, as far as he was concerned—grow? Would the NPC-related mods and content function properly? Would she register as a Friendly NPC only to him, while looking like something else entirely to the Main Body?
There was a lot to test.
The Main Body had wiped out villages and cities and grinded objects before, sure—but thanks to that infamous notoriety of hers, she'd never actually put any of it to practical use. Meaning she'd barely ever experimented with NPC-related bugs or interactions.
Well. She'd been too busy leveling up for that sort of thing, so it was understandable.
"Master still hasn't come back... Sir Knight said he was going to sell the byproducts from the monsters you killed. What do you think happened?"
Yu Gisa nodded and led the girl straight out of the waiting room. He didn't even need the minimap. The moment she'd called his name and come close, he'd felt the surrounding presence closing in to encircle them.
"Ohh. So this is the rumored Heaven Armor Puppet."
"That is correct."
Hmm. Ambiguous gray dots on the map—but Yu Gisa simply watched them through the pure white flame of his spiritual power.
Naturally. There was not a single reason for him to tense up against cultivators who had barely scraped past level 300. Absolute confidence that no matter what they tried, they could not harm him or the girl under his protection.
After all, the classification the Main Body had identified for him was none other than a Captive Equipment Item.
If an equipment item completed its equip conditions simply by swearing a Vow, then couldn't you equip it on an NPC? That was the logic. Right now, Yu Gisa was equipped on the Friendly NPC girl.
Even while slotted into the equipment window, a captive could still move independently—and because he was equipped as gear, every last equipment effect transferred wholesale onto the NPC. A glorious collab of pure nonsense.
In short: a mode collision.
Of course, it wasn't a matter that simple to gloss over.
An evolved Earthly Treasure—a treasure that had weathered a Heavenly Tribulation, gained spirituality, chose its master, and once that master was decided, bound itself soul-to-soul to protect them. From a cultivator's perspective, that was the lore. Yu Gisa knew none of it.
Under the influence of Reality Denial, he thought about things in vaguely game-like terms. And unlike the Main Body, who hardcore-grinded for growth, Yu Gisa leaned harder toward the laid-back casual-gamer temperament. Good enough was good enough, so he'd just let it slide.
He could have opened the Main Body's memories, of course—but Yu Gisa had only just achieved Transcendence Stage 1. Every time he shared memories, the durability of the armor pieces that made up his body—forged from Slaughter Tribulation—drained away in real time. Not as bad as Yu I-seong's case, maybe, but still enough to make him flinch and cut the connection short.
Maybe once he reached the next stage. For now, no.
Honestly, Yu Gisa was constantly aware that he'd cheesed his way through Transcendence.
He figured he'd just tanked a Heavenly Tribulation and suddenly transcended out of nowhere.
The truth was different. In his unconscious, he had faced the intense memories of the Slaughtered One—memories not shared with the other humanities—sworn a vow, and received enlightenment in return. That was what made Transcendence possible.
The way Yu Gisa had unconsciously parried the Heavenly Tribulation was an extension of that same vow. And it was the reason a man who, like the other humanities, had possessed zero combat talent had suddenly gained battle sense along with his name.
"I can barely sense any spiritual energy. I suppose with a master this pathetic, it can't properly display its power."
The Neutral NPCs' gazes shifted to the girl holding his hand.
Killing intent dense enough to drop a low-level cultivator with a look alone erupted from them—but the girl took no damage at all.
Well. She was currently wrapped in level-500 Ancient-grade and Legendary-grade armor, so maybe that was only natural.
Come to think of it—would this work too? Yu Gisa moved first.
With a heavy clank, the armor split open, revealing empty space inside. The small girl was swallowed whole as if vacuumed in.
The startled girl flailed, trying to thrash free—and in that instant, pure white flames of spiritual power wrapped around her.
The spiritual fire coiled carefully around the Friendly NPC without harming her, and at the same time the girl felt her spiritual senses expand dramatically.
She had no idea why. The cause was Yu Gisa pulling a peak-quality spirit stone out of his inventory, flipping open the helmet's visor, and stuffing it straight in.
Feeding a peak-quality spirit stone of level 500 to a scrub who hadn't even hit level 50. If she hadn't been equipped with Yu Gisa—who doubled as the most robust filter in this lower realm—even a Friendly NPC might have burst open and died from the idiotic stunt. Yu Gisa had no idea.
"Sir Knight?"
Do as you like. The ones who probably harmed your master are standing right in front of you.
He gave her hesitation a firm shove.
Yu Gisa was a knight, and because of the Vow, he couldn't make the first move. The classic Ambush + Defenseless combo was hard-locked for his class. He couldn't throw the first punch at a Neutral NPC.
Not that Yu Gisa particularly minded.
Even in his past life, he'd mostly run defense-and-resistance builds that only came online as event power spikes. On top of that, Sachugi's memories had given him combat sense, so he could parry just about any attack that came his way.
Land a successful parry and you forced Defenseless and Weak Point Exposed, letting you dump a counter for 1.75× damage—not quite the 2× of the Ambush/Defenseless combo, but close enough. Stack consecutive parries without countering and the counter damage compounded on itself. Not being able to throw the first punch was a minor inconvenience at best.
Until you had Neutral NPCs sneering in your face. Then the inconvenience felt a lot bigger.
After mainlining near-hydrochloric-acid levels of catharsis through the Main Body, getting a sudden faceful of pure sweet potato made you miss the soda something fierce.
So Yu Gisa used the Friendly NPC.
A Friendly NPC with the cultivator class wouldn't be bound by the same first-strike restriction he was.
"Um—excuse me... seniors!"
But Yu Gisa was about to learn that a scrub who might or might not even be level 50 simply did not have the courage to throw the first punch at level-300 cultivators.
She tried talking first. The level-300 cultivators didn't so much as pretend to listen. They launched techniques, aiming to strip the armor off her—and Yu Gisa forcibly moved the Friendly NPC's body.
A pure white gauntlet stretched toward the technique swallowing the entire field of view and shattered it on contact.
He had tanked a wide-area attack that couldn't be parried—with his bare hand, like a brute.
They had struck first.
Then the rest was simple.
Confirming that the gray dots on the minimap had flipped to red, Yu Gisa kept the Friendly NPC cradled inside him, swung the gauntlet, and smashed the empty air with a heavy thoom.
Get a grip.
"Sir Knight, I..."
If your master is alive, you have to save him.
"I have to... save Master."
To Yu Gisa's eyes they looked less like master and disciple and more like parent and child—but either way, the Friendly NPC was steeling herself for a fight. Good.
Because Yu Gisa's experiment had a truly terrifying endgame: artificially raise a Friendly NPC, and the moment she broke through a realm and a Heavenly Tribulation spawned, gulp the whole thing down.
I'll lend you my power.
"Yes, Sir Knight!"
The Friendly NPC equipped with Yu Gisa moved her body along the pure white arrow-shaped guidelines he projected in front of her.
Awkward motions of a level-50 mortal who'd only barely improved past total civilian clumsiness—but what that mortal was wearing was none other than an Earthly Treasure, a jewel fallen to the earth.
It was more than enough power for a Friendly NPC to drop a pack of level-300 monsters and rescue her master. Overflowing, even.
Of course, from Yu Gisa's perspective the plan had been to kill them outright and check whether the Friendly NPC would level up. Watching that plan go up in smoke, he grumbled a little on the inside.
Ominous, majestic music blanketed heaven and earth.
Wonpa had moved fast in search of the Demon Immortal. The moment he arrived—following the Dharma tool Mudu had given him—at the place where the Demon Immortal and Mudu had clashed, it happened.
The ominous music poured from every direction, yet Wonpa couldn't pin down its source. He was already drawing up spiritual power to cast a technique at a moment's notice when—
Pouring class bonuses, skills, and spiritual power into the performance, a humanity diligently laid down trap-card BGM with her own mouth. The song climbed toward its climax.
Gahi was just a bard-type class from Xianxia Mode. A minstrel.
Aside from being able to sing well, she'd written the whole thing off as a garbage class with no real effects left. All her skills were structured around raising morale for buffs and dropping it for debuffs—and those effects were gone.
But a class was still a class. Gahi's songs carried more than just morale.
Action correction.
Specifically, raising or lowering action speed—something like a setting where hearing the song got you worked up. With the morale raise/lower effects stripped away, the humanity stuck with the Gahi class had no choice but to cling, weeping, to the one function she had left.
A song heavy with emotion and history carried power. It rewrote a fragment of the world in the simplest possible way—broadly, wherever the song reached.
A kind of primitive, ancient restriction seal.
Even Wonpa—a mid-stage Nascent Soul cultivator, a Fighting Immortal tempered through countless battles—failed to recognize it as a restriction seal.
"This is my trap card....!"
"Detonate...!"
Staring at the clearly dangerous monster that had spawned as an eok-kka event—now locked in a Defenseless state by the Gahi-class humanity—
Yu Hee, who had blanketed the entire map in advance with Bombs disguised as spiritual energy just in case of an eok-kka event, toppled the 4,987-line Tetris stack she had carefully built, all at once.