The Law of Play
Out of nowhere, the divine beast toppled over, and experience points rolled in.
What the fuck, is it dead...? No — for a kill, that exp is garbage. Is this subjugation exp?
"Uh, uh..!"
If they're not a prisoner, my consumables don't work on NPCs!
I rushed over to the friendly NPC who'd suddenly started laughing and trembling before collapsing. The erosion skill I wore like a passive clashed with its golden aura, sending up crackling sparks.
Ah. Is this because of me?
Called a divine beast, but looks like it's the ultimate counter to me. Makes sense — my Evil Karma and slaughter energy were high enough that they'd blocked me from even entering the region in the first place.
Watching the divine beast, wreathed in a faint golden aura, collapse and revert to its beast form, I fumbled around and pulled the golden scanner from my heart.
Beep!
The aurora pouring from the golden scanner — which dealt damage proportional to Evil Karma and healed proportional to Good Karma — washed over the divine beast. True to its nature, its Good Karma must have been high; its expression eased, and it started breathing steadily. Alive, then.
"Must've been tired!"
Better get to the mission already. This is definitely not running away!
It's an Ancient-grade mission! Rewards start at Epic minimum, and if luck's on your side, Ancient-grade items dropping wouldn't be weird at all!
Well.
"It's not like they asked me to kill just one guy — they want the whole sect wiped out!"
Exp might be whatever, but I should pick up some slaughter energy at least!
With that lighthearted thought, I followed the minimap's guidance, made two regional transfers, and arrived at the map where the mission target — the sect called Poakgwido — was located.
"Motherfucker."
The moment I entered the map, the filthy spectacle filling my eyes forced a curse from my lips before I could stop it.
Because right from the sect's entrance, a filth party was in full swing — like some experiment in the outer limits of human creativity.
"Urgh... Demon Immortal?"
Whatever technique it was using, the NPC spewing feces from its hands and mouth recognized me and voiced its confusion — and I immediately expanded my erosion skill.
Ugh. Disgusting.
Everything melted under the slaughter energy, dying equally.
It was just filth — technically nothing more than background pixels — but the reality patch had given it smell and revulsion. Still, whatever.
It was just unpleasant, really.
In the Mental World, the octopus burst from the great sea, wrapped around the tower, and blocked my senses — denying reality, covering my eyes, plugging my ears.
The Humanity Clones didn't step in. They didn't want to look at that revolting scene either.
With every restriction protecting the sect entrance shattered and the gatekeeper's throat cut, I toddled my way inside.
Then the various cultivators within the sect — the one cutting off his own fingers to feed them to living Mortals who'd been turned into furniture, the one gathering bio-puppets made from cultivators and shouting "Mommy mommy, so many mommies, I love it," the one in the corner violating a giant spider — all of them turned bizarre gazes on me.
"Why aren't you panicking?"
"Why aren't you disgusted?"
"Why? Why? Why?"
Because I didn't buy the emotion expression pack, you idiots, I thought, then opened my mouth toward the swarm of elite monsters with strong individual personalities.
"Auto-Battle."
A crimson star rose.
Behind the small girl's back, one thousand twenty-four blood-red halos unfurled, and above her head a wheel began to roll, radiating a terrible killing intent and slaughter karma — a malice of pure, boundless death that even the cultivators of Poakgwido, a heretical sect gathered for the sole purpose of frightening or startling other cultivators, felt for the first time in their lives.
Even the most emotionally restrained cultivators had likes and dislikes, purposes, reasons for living — and Poakgwido's cultivators trained by exploiting those very things, so they understood all the better.
To that thing, they were worthless.
Its purpose was death. Its reason for living was death alone. Its likes were death, and its dislikes were also death.
"Demon Immortal! It's the Demon Immortal!"
The slaughter energy rising from cultivators dying under Auto-Battle circulated through the map via the wheel. As the circulation continued, the slaughter energy spreading across the map became a foothold for the erosion skill to expand its influence — and at the same time, a barrier that kept monsters from fleeing the region.
For the rats in the jar, the only options left were to die quietly or thrash about and die anyway.
Of course, the power of a great sect that ranked first among heretical sects in Gi-gye wasn't something a single early Nascent Soul cultivator could wipe out so easily — except the matchup between the Demon Immortal and Poakgwido was catastrophically bad.
Poakgwido's core teaching was that only fear could become the ultimate ghost, so every technique and Dharma treasure drew its power from the emotion of fear. They even had bizarre techniques that planted fear in inanimate objects, making them tremble or startle — but the combination of being unable to break a default blank expression without buying emotion expressions, like a true game character, and Reality Denial blocked every last one of them.
In the Mental World, the round little octopus was happily thrashing its many legs, thrilled at a rare chance to shine — though I, still unaware of its existence, simply watched Auto-Battle cheerfully tear the cultivators apart inside the wheel.
"Eldest Senior Brother!"
"It's the Evil Feast technique! Even if it's the Demon Immortal—!"
A late Golden Core monster smashed a clearly precious multicolored statue shaped like a giant mouth, and a transparent mouth burst from the air, flicked its tongue at the monster, and swallowed it whole.
"Th-that's impossible — has it eaten more grotesque foods than Eldest Senior Brother, or does it know more of them?"
Hmm. There were tons of strange techniques and skills you wouldn't see in other sects, but my overall impression was: for an Ancient-grade mission, is this... really? That? Hard? Doesn't seem like it.
Of course, that was my misconception.
No matter how many tens of thousands of years of tradition a sect had, the bizarre acts piled up by a mere two or three hundred cultivators couldn't compare to the countless, more diverse, and far weirder acts that billions of Mortals had accumulated over decades in the ocean of information. Obviously.
To stand out in that overflowing sea of information, you needed that level of madness and eccentricity — so of course I, who'd managed communities and faced every kind of abyss, had formidable resistance.
And if you asked how you could compare something merely seen on the internet to something happening right in front of your eyes in reality — well, that would be the power of Reality Denial, diligently covering my eyes.
I understood all of Poakgwido's eccentricities and grotesqueries as mere NPCs and background, so with that cognitive filter in place, I was free to appreciate and critique them instead.
And to eyes trained on YouTube Shorts, with Reality Denial's special cognitive filter applied, Poakgwido's antics prompted thoughts like: Hmm? This is it? Do they not know what the Abyss is? Huddling together circulating this stuff among yourselves — your attention-whore game is weak!
These guys would starve to death even as YouTubers! Well, some of them might find a niche on Pornhub? Maybe? But it's just... not that entertaining.
And through all of that, my body, driven by Auto-Battle, never stopped for a second — tirelessly slaughtering cultivators.
"Ah, no — even the Elder...!"
Ah, this one was a bit more fun. He'd gathered fear and remade himself into a ghost — but a ghost is just a ghost, right?
Not some genuine ghost that survived a primordial Tyrannosaurus ghost that ignored even horizontal coordinate system jokes — just a guy doing self-serve ghost cosplay. The Humanity Clones slotted sulfur flames, mercury vapor, and holy grenades into the quickslot mod, and Auto-Battle's body immediately chucked the consumables, detonated them, and the thing died in an instant.
Hmm, weak as expected! Well, it was inevitable.
When an early Nascent Soul like me uses Auto-Battle, same-level elite monsters all die. I'd already built a spec strong enough to run Abyss runs in the Abyss itself, so wiping out a single sect wasn't going to be that hard!
The field boss shows up now, after most of the field monsters have been wiped out?! Now... of all times?
I first checked the field boss's level — similar level range — then lowered my gaze to look at it. The muscular field boss, naked save for a single pair of black chainmail underwear, flexed its muscles and opened its mouth in a coquettish tone.
"Oh my, what a cute little child?"
Faced with the field boss's combination of a sweet, feminine voice that should never come from those bulging pecs and that nightmarish appearance, Auto-Battle automatically stopped. Ambush-hit by that horrific sight, I froze for a critical instant —
The Law of Play
— and was left completely exposed to the Law.