Reload, the Endless Wait, and a Collapsed Stack
After getting backstabbed by an NPC, throwing herself into Auto-Battle, having her skull cracked out of nowhere by Elder Togo, and being forcibly dragged back to base, Yu Hee thought:
Didn't I get absolutely nothing out of this trip?
She'd cleared a few missions, but that was the entire haul. Instead she'd burned through mountains of slaughter energy and gear, and even forced Elder Togo to spend lifespan driving off mid-stage Nascent Soul cultivators.
Completely ignoring the howling voices of the Humanity Clones, Yu Hee immediately stirred up slaughter energy right there in the base.
"Shut up. Reload."
The Nascent Soul that popped from her forehead puffed its cheeks out like balloons and spun the wheel hard in reverse. The instant she snapped back to the save point she'd set before leaving base, she bolted straight for Elder Togo.
"Elder Togo!"
"Didn't you just say you were heading out? I truly wonder how long our baby intends to keep acting spoiled with this old man."
Even while saying that he smiled and scooped her up. Feeling how full and restored his energy was—utterly different from the moment before the reload—she let out a quiet breath of relief.
Hmm. All the slaughter energy, equipment, and consumables I burned through are perfectly intact! Only the mission rewards and experience cleanly vanished!
Huh? That item the neutral NPCs were supposed to find for me that leads to the upper channel? I can just hunt it down myself or send Cheon Nan-cho after it! It'll drop eventually!
So my goal right now is simple.
Find the NPC who stabbed me in the back first and go kill them.
Slaughter intent and slaughter energy began to spill from Yu Hee's gleaming blood-red eyes—only to subside at once under Elder Togo's hand gently stroking her hair as if tidying it.
Hmm. For now I'll just rest a little!
After resting a while she left the base again and, for the two mid-stage Nascent Soul cultivators who would come looking for her, combined consumables with bomb skills and dug elaborate traps.
No matter how long she waited, the two cultivators never showed. Yu Hee ended up throwing away several months of time!
It was an unavoidable problem of this shitty game's structure—map layouts reshuffled every time she left base—but Yu Hee, ears sealed against the Humanity Clones' shouts and burning with pure vengeance, wasted the time anyway. Then she reloaded once more and returned to base.
"Mudu—that was the NPC's name...!"
Remembering the one who had suddenly stripped the protection of her mythic-grade helmet and jammed a dozen dharma tools into her body to tear her apart from the inside, Yu Hee's eyes glittered with dangerous light.
"Ma... Maseon!"
"An NPC who knows where the cultivator named Mudu is? Well, person? That doesn't quite fit either... cultivator?"
"Th-that's—!"
"Ah, I wasn't talking to you, the red one."
Crunch—the cultivator caught in the slaughter energy was shredded into meat chunks like something fed through a blender, then swallowed whole by the slaughter energy without leaving so much as a bloodstain. As the remaining NPCs froze solid at the horrific sight, Maseon tilted her small head as if urging them on.
"Anyone know?"
"I do! I know!"
She had no slaughter energy to waste on low-level neutral NPCs, so she roughly confirmed a direction, crossed the map, confirmed another direction through more neutral-NPC interaction, and crossed again.
After all, map-crossing Regional Transfer simply meant picking one of the four cardinal directions and moving.
This shitty game used a random structure that reshuffled every map the moment you returned to base, so unless you were hunting a fixed map or an event map, the only way to reach a desired location was to track directions like this.
There were trigger conditions that forced certain maps to appear—for example, visit a Village once, then perform Regional Transfer three times in only one direction, and one of Village, Fortress, City, or Metropolis would be guaranteed to spawn at random. In exchange, for a set period afterward no safe zones would appear no matter how many times you transferred. Triggers like that existed.
And above all, of course Mudu already knew Maseon was hunting him. He had countless informants—cultivators he had tricked into swallowing body-snatching pills (elixirs that stole bodies created by grinding self-clones and spiritual herbs) after disguising them as precious spiritual medicines. Learning of the search was only natural.
Naturally the sequence played out the same way: he revealed himself through a clone to Maseon, only for Mudu's head to be smashed by the Spoon, the penetrating damage slamming into the main body as well.
"...Something feels off."
"Cultivator Yeon?"
"I feel a sense of déjà vu, as if I've already lived through something like this. Cultivator Mu, do you truly feel nothing?"
Cultivator Yeon, whose law was the Wave, was hypersensitive to any sense of repetition—almost to the level of prophecy—and raised the question. Having approached via clone and taken damage to the main body, Cultivator Mu cooled his rage and assessed the situation with cold clarity. That was enough.
Of course, under normal circumstances a player's privilege of rewinding time through something as simple as Reload should have been undetectable. But Yeonpa had briefly belonged to the player through prisoner mode; through that tiny gap she had been able to catch just the faintest flicker of déjà vu.
Because of that, the eok-kka event was postponed indefinitely.
This time Yu Hee had sworn she would one-shot them on the very first turn. She had laboriously stacked more than seven thousand lines of Tetris and settled in to wait—only to be toyed with. No matter how long she waited and waited, the mid-stage Nascent Soul prey never arrived.
"Just when the hell are they coming...? Ah."
In the end, after enduring and enduring until she had thrown more than a month of time into the void, she spat out an irritated question—and with a sudden slip, the collapsing Tetris filled her entire field of vision.
Ah, fuck.
Even 4,987 lines of Tetris alone packed enough force to put a mid-stage Nascent Soul cultivator into critical condition. Cultivators, by job nature, carried a flat 90 % damage reduction against lower-realm targets, yet Yu Hee's penetration and critical damage were strong enough to punch straight through that reduction and kill. This time, burning with pure vengeance, she had forced the stack just past seven thousand lines and detonated it.
Worse, the map had almost no living creatures, so Yu Hee had to eat the full recoil raw. Of course neither she nor the map could withstand that apocalyptic power.
Current map has been half-destroyed.
Checking penalties...
Regional Transfer prohibited for 7 days.
Automatically relocating to base.
Save point has been updated.
"Gyaaaaaaaaaah!!!!"
"Things had been pretty quiet lately... and now she's having another fit."
My slaughter energy! My precious time!
Because it was a wide-area attack the map had been less thoroughly wrecked, so the penalty was only a week-long lockdown. But the month-plus she had spent waiting was wiped clean by the auto-updated save point, and every last drop of slaughter energy poured into that seven-thousand-line Tetris vanished wholesale with it.
"This fucking shitty game!"
I didn't even turn on Ironman Mode! When I reload, don't change the random seed values! What the hell do you take the player for?!
"Here, Yeona—this is the pill we feed Hia when she has a fit. If it doesn't seem to work, put these square ice cubes in a cup, pour water, add this amplifier until it turns black, then dissolve the pill in it and make her drink. It works great. Want to try some?"
"Ugh, this is insanely bitter. Doesn't seem to have any awakening effect either?"
"The amplifier only seems to work specially on Hia, so watch."
They poured the black drink into the mouth of the half-crazed Yu Hee who was muttering curses with a blank face. The eyes that had been half-clotted like dried blood scabs flared again with a vivid scarlet light like fresh arterial blood.
Cheon Nan-cho's handmade pill amplifier certainly helped, but the real reason the always-fitting Yu Hee snapped back so fast was that cold, bitter taste—coffee—violently shaking every past-life memory she had.
It was nothing more than a coffee-scented amplifier added by a mod and grown through Farming Mode to boost the pill's effect, yet for Yu Hee it was pure perfection.
She snatched the remaining drink from Cheon Nan-cho's hand like a thief, dumped it into her mouth, and crunched every last ice cube until she finally regained her senses.
Well, she had just drunk iced coffee; every scrap of past-life memory was being intensely rehashed inside her skull, so of course that would happen.
Of course, very naturally, the memories she was rehashing were almost entirely about this fucking shitty game.
Then, while she was properly drowning in nostalgia, question marks suddenly filled her head.
"...Come to think of it, why hasn't the mid-game crisis shown up?"
What? Is it delayed? Or a mod conflict?
It should have come and gone ages ago.
She had run the early-game crisis all the way back at Core Formation—around level 200—yet even after surpassing level 500 the mid-game crisis still hadn't arrived.
Don't tell me it's going to wait until I hit level 800?!
No matter how slapdash the mid-game crisis was—"this is supposed to be a mid-game crisis...?"—the trigger was supposed to fire at mid-progress time or mid-level range.
If level 500 still didn't count as mid, then just how many levels did you have to grind before the late-game crisis finally appeared?
The red star continued to glitter as it looked down on Yu Hee, who was trembling with dread.