Auto-Battle
I let my guard down.
My heart had gone soft.
Ever since Yu I-seong swept that golden spear and poured out aurora, something inside me had washed clean — or so it felt.
And that was exactly how I ended up in this mess.
Since when did I get this fucking sloppy.
Inside the Mental World, the octopus that had been holding its breath rose from the Sea of Slaughter and wrapped dozens of tentacles around the tower standing at the sea's heart.
These damn NPCs.
Slaughter settled into Yu Hee's pupils, flashing an ominous blood-red.
"Are you all right, Fellow Cultivator Yeon! I'm here!"
A gray dot appeared on the minimap.
Neutral NPC? Don't you fucking dare, minimap.
Gray dot or not, I don't care — I was the one who got hit first.
Auto-Battle
A phantom sound of rattling chains swept past, and with it Yu Hee simply let go of her consciousness. Above her head, a red star rose.
This was the first time since entering the Nascent Soul realm that Yu Hee had lost consciousness to Auto-Battle, and for that reason alone the two mid-stage Nascent Soul cultivators could only sense that something was going terribly wrong.
The Slaughter Star opened its eyes and looked upon the world.
It opened its mouth and delivered its will.
A body moving like a machine under Auto-Battle Mode — still bound by the two of them and their Dharma tools — opened only its mouth, and into that shouted Command poured Slaughter Karma.
Ordinarily, a Command is a threat to Nascent Soul cultivators who can handle the Laws, but never a real problem. When you have attained enlightenment and claimed a piece of the world as your own Law to enforce, what can a temporary borrowing of the world's power possibly do?
The world screamed at the death that had come right up to its face.
Slaughter Karma itself — the very act of killing every living thing — became the force of the Command, and the vast Sea of Slaughter backed that Command. Under the spreading power, Dharma tools and clones alike, and the world centered on the Demon Immortal, were swept up in red Slaughter and lost all light, dying in an apocalyptic spectacle. Even so, Mudu clenched his teeth.
It had been a wide-area attack through a Command, not the kind of strike that followed clones back to the main body as before. He told himself he had only lost some Dharma tools and clones, and called forth his Nascent Soul.
A girl's Nascent Soul, holding a carving knife in one hand and a chisel in the other, burst from Mudu's forehead, struck the air, and opened its mouth.
"Multitude!"
Clones multiplied in an instant.
Countless clones each drew out every kind of Dharma tool imaginable. The true power of Mudu, called a one-man army, was born from the sheer violence of numbers.
The clones of mid-stage Nascent Soul Mudu held only Golden Core strength, but their numbers surpassed a hundred, then a thousand, and each was armed with every Dharma tool a mid-stage Nascent Soul cultivator could forge.
Thousands of clones raised every kind of Dharma tool at once and aimed them at the Demon Immortal, who was sluggishly, jerkily rising to her feet.
A blood-vivid red radiance burst from both her eyes, and the world centered on the Demon Immortal convulsed.
It was the assimilation of the Mental World through the activation of the Erosion skill. Clones of mere Golden Core strength, simply by being caught in that range, were exposed to Slaughter despite the protection of their Dharma tools.
The body driven by Auto-Battle Mode started to move mechanically — then locked up with a jolt.
Because a single green marker had gotten wedged inside Auto-Battle's combat range.
Prisoner Mode × Auto-Battle Mode
From the mode conflict with Prisoner Mode, Auto-Battle Mode stuttered for a moment — then, on Yu Hee's otherwise blank face, a single eyebrow twisted into a crooked frown.
"Kill? Die!"
The muttered words, like a newborn who had just established a self babbling after its parents, became Commands in their own right and, together with Slaughter, smashed the surroundings at random — aimless, purposeless, indiscriminate.
Prisoner Mode exerted its power to protect the prisoner from that indiscriminate assault by Auto-Battle Mode, but of course its strength fell short.
More precisely, Auto-Battle Mode had grown too strong.
Because the Slaughter consumed when using Auto-Battle, and the reduced experience and item drop rates on victory — all of that reduced amount was being eaten by Auto-Battle Mode itself.
So Prisoner Mode tried a strategy: fling the prisoner clear of Auto-Battle's range to keep them safe.
That the captive Yeonpa was not a field boss but an elite boss, and had already quite literally died and come back so depleted that resistance was nearly impossible, was in some sense a misfortune.
The moment the mode conflict vanished, Auto-Battle bared teeth forged of murderous intent toward the main body the minimap so clearly marked among the clones it had been targeting.
Skills activated all at once.
Except for the Wheel, her True Name Dharma Treasure, Chopsticks rose behind her back like a halo of light and spun in a circle. She drew a flail from her inventory, clad it in Spoon, and swung — parrying every Dharma tool the clones poured down — then drove in with Dig.
"You dare fight with nothing but Commands and no Law?! Do not mock me, Demon Immortal!"
With a shrill cry, even more clones than the ones already dealt with appeared, drawing fresh Dharma tools from their storage racks to replace the shattered ones, and surrounded Yu Hee.
Auto-Battle moved.
Ranged attacks it could dodge, it dodged. What it couldn't dodge, it parried. If that still wasn't enough, it simply took the hit with its body, regenerated, and smashed the binding Dharma tools with Dig.
A storm of Chopsticks met the merciless rain of Dharma tools head-on. The left hand never stopped pulling consumables from the inventory — shuriken, throwing knives, arrows, bullets — coating them in Slaughter and hurling them, while the right hand raised a serrated saw-blade and carved through the clones.
She even used Spoon, aiming penetration damage at the main body — but Mudu answered by having each clone self-destruct the instant it died, cutting the penetration damage short in the middle, then generated clones again.
And again the battle continued. And again the fighting went on.
And then.
What am I looking at right now?
The question rose in Mudu's mind.
Causality — cause and effect — twisted without end.
The intermediate processes that should have followed cause into result shrank and shrank until only fragments of memory remained, and everything began to be elided.
He had the memory of starting a desperate fight against that terrible Demon Immortal. The spent power, the lost Dharma tools, even the Laws could still be felt — and yet all that remained were shards of recollection.
He tried to draw on the force of Law to stop the forced progression, but it was useless. As if there were simply no way to block it at all, everything was elided and elided again, and at the end of that result, what Mudu's eyes saw was—
the outcome he had feared without limit: death.
"Fellow Cultivator Mu! Snap out of it!!!"
"Fellow Cultivator Yeon?!"
Yeonpa spread his body and, completely defenseless, simply put himself between Mudu and the Demon Immortal.
His spiritual power was drained to the extreme. He had no Dharma tools left, not even a True Name Dharma Treasure. His closest friend blocked the Demon Immortal with nothing but his bare body, utterly exposed.
And astonishingly, the Demon Immortal who had been mechanically hunting only death stopped moving — and the causality that had been collapsing elided to a halt with a jolt.
Prisoner Mode screamed.
Auto-Battle Mode snarled in irritation.
In the explosion that tore through the Mental World along with the mode conflict, the tentacles of Reality Denial wrapped around the tower shuddered — and through that gap, aurora bloomed inside the tower of the Mental World.
A round, cartoonish octopus with X's over both eyes, its tentacles sliced to pieces by the aurora, fled in panic into the Sea of Slaughter. At the same time, Yu I-seong, who had been sealed in the tower, collapsed weakly to the ground.
"No."
In the end, Yu I-seong and the other Humanity Clones were nothing more than fragments born from the main body's whims — scraps and remnants.
When the main body still had her wits, they could at least persuade her enough to get a grudging pass. But once her eyes had already gone like this, they had no power left to use.
Even Yu I-seong, who had transcended and gained the ability to threaten through aurora, was no exception.
She had transcended in the first place by taking up the conscience the main body still held as a mortal — and conscience was a powerless thing that could be conveniently ignored whenever necessity demanded.
With the main body's heart already gone wild, past conscience or anything else, the aurora would not bloom properly. Just breaking free of Reality Denial's grip had spent every last scrap of strength Yu I-seong had left. There was nothing she could do.
Cold reason melts helplessly before boiling rage and can exert no force at all.
The ominous red star scattered a spray of star-clusters as if it were laughing.
And at the end of the mode conflict, Auto-Battle Mode finally crushed Prisoner Mode underfoot, ignored prisoner status entirely, and began rampaging to kill the two neutral NPCs — while all she could do was watch from inside the Mental World.
"Don't give up, I-seong!"
The Humanity Clone with Gahi's vocation cried out in a clear voice.
"We are Humanity! The last barrier that holds the main body's conscience! If we fall — we can't give up! We're the proof that we, who carry our past life's memories, were human! We can't just let ourselves fade and disappear like this!"
"But—"
"Don't break! Just existing without vanishing is enough! The fact that the main body still has a heart that affirms us — us, her Humanity — is the strongest proof there is!!"
The Humanity Clones nodded.
They could vanish on a single thought from the main body, so perhaps it was only natural. Only then did Yu I-seong realize how arrogant she had been, thinking that because she had transcended she could change the main body.
In the end, Yu I-seong closed her mouth and looked past the screen, out beyond the Mental World.