The Giant Statue of Hwanga-gongdong
I had the lingering sense of having suffered through some thoroughly irritating dream.
Someone had been nagging me not to smash anything this time, wrapping iron chains round and round my body — that kind of dream.
Hmm. No matter how I turned it over, it had to be that. That red star up in the higher channel must have interfered with me in the form of a dream.
Now that I was a Nascent Soul cultivator who'd established a law of my own, it seemed completely wiping the memory clean was no longer possible! So who the hell was that guy? And what were the chains about — had I been wrapped in something like that?
As dreams always do, even after reaching the Nascent Soul realm the memory dissolved like foam, and Reality Denial, chains and all, promptly cinched Yu Hee's thoughts tight.
Naturally, her mind drifted somewhere else entirely.
More importantly — I can go to the higher channels now, right?
Monsters that were just the same old things with higher-level color palettes slapped on! Maps that looked new but were randomly patched together! Brand-new items whose only upgrade was a pile of inflated option numbers!
Ah, fuck.
Just thinking about it made me want to throw up.
Remembering what some of the big-name mods used to pull made me enormously worried, but I had no choice except to trust the Reality Patch and the Xianxia Mode.
Judging by how everyone from Cheon Nan-cho — who was basically a walking help manual for the upper realm — to Elder Togo kept calling it incredible, there had to be plenty of new content up there!
GYAAAAAAAH! Stop! Stop it!
Faced with the Humanities shoving the single most brutal truth I'd been desperately ignoring right in my face, I clutched my head like I didn't want to hear another word.
I never imagined that one wrong word, forced out of me by a law, would become eternal mockery material. So unfair.
But deep down I really had hoped that Song of Fantasy — the game I'd sunk decades into — was a god-tier game. You guys felt the same way, didn't you? Hmm?
Look at them, clamping their mouths shut the second it gets inconvenient. Fucking hell.
I got up and walked straight out of the bedroom.
For something left on auto-run with the friendly NPCs, the base had developed surprisingly well.
I'd packed the construction queue tight from the start for synergy bonuses, so buildings went up the moment materials hit the warehouse — but arranging non-prisoner decorations for efficiency, laying down formations with the rest of the ornaments, all of that had been entirely Cheon Nan-cho and San Gi-yeon's job.
Honestly, I'd just copy-pasted the efficient base layouts people posted on the community boards. If you told me to design something myself I could spend days making it pretty, but in that same time I could just follow a guide and tweak a few things my way, and it was good enough.
"If I put up just a few more buildings, I should be able to raise one of the Xianxia Mode Wonders…?"
There were only three Wonders in Xianxia Mode — the Castle in the Air, the Giant Statue, and the Mountain of Gold and Silver — and since you could only guess at their effects until you built them, I was a little nervous.
The Aerial Fortress would probably boost base defense, the Shining Mountain would probably boost production, but a statue modeled after me, the player? I couldn't even begin to guess.
Well, in situations like this you build the one you can't even guess at first! If it tanks, I can just reload!
Wonder construction had fixed build locations.
That was only natural — you had to construct and place a whole chain of lower buildings before the Wonder slot even unlocked.
The Giant Statue's build site was dead center in the base, right in the middle of the central building cluster.
It was only one tile, so I'd figured it would be easy — but wasn't this thing way bigger than I'd expected?
I dumped most of the leftover decorations that hadn't gone into the invasion event to speed up Wonder construction, then went in to lend a hand myself — and proceeded to smash materials to pieces before the decorations chased me right back out.
The Wonder construction progress dropping a full twenty-five percent was just the cherry on top.
How was I supposed to know a [Butterfingers] debuff would pop as an event in there?!
Anyway, until Elder Togo and Cheon Nan-cho finished building the flying platform with the Ascension Stones, I didn't have much else to do — so I holed up at the base for a while, cycling through base management, friendly NPC interactions, and training.
Cheon Nan-cho took one look at me and scolded that grinding for months or years straight was perfectly normal, but come on — how is a human training twenty-four hours a day "normal"? That's a labor law violation!
Argh, shut up!
They'd been quiet for a while — why were they all piling on at once again?!
"Why would you even— uuuuurgh."
I shared the Humanities' memories without thinking, then let out a strangled scream as buffering slammed into my skull and frantically cut the connection.
What the hell is this memory capacity status…?
What? Why are you guys watching something that fun without me?
I ignored the Humanities as they started bickering, entered the Mental World, and shot straight up toward the golden sky — only to bounce right off an aurora and get flung back down.
What the hell!
"Hey, Yu I-seong! Clear this thing!"
"If you come in, the signal goes bad. Just pull it up later yourself."
"I want to watch it live too!"
"You know you can't because of the Slaughter Tribulation."
GYAAAAAAH! This is Eok-kka! Why only you guys!
I finally gave up. Even skimming via shared memory looked like a capacity nightmare, so I hounded the Humanities until I got a simple three-line summary — on the conditions that I wouldn't cause signal interference and that spoilers were banned.
So basically.
Yu Gisa raised one of his friendly NPCs, drove out most of the other cultivators, became emperor of a mortal nation, and was busy civilizing it?
Why was that guy running a strategy simulation over there.
Using the power of [SF Mode], he'd already advanced from the medieval era all the way to the modern age in Part 1, and Part 2 was him heading out into space on an adventure? What, the time scale over there was completely different.
Dude hadn't even been gone from here for a full year.
Pulling up the status window was a spectacle.
Why was this guy alone on Easy Mode?!
"Even with the Double Speed Mod, isn't this a little ridiculous?"
"He went to a lower channel, then? So the difficulty dropped — then how did he level up… ah, right, you guys don't level up with experience points."
Tsk. Fair point.
Only then did something like passion — or competitive drive — flare up a little stronger.
Instead of browsing dramas — no, Yu Gisa's chronicle — I should put that time into my own training! Even if I could only earn experience by climbing to the upper realm, I could still gain plenty of insight right here!
Fully recharged with motivation, Yu Hee trained hard for a little over a year more before finally punching through the invasion events and assorted interruptions to complete the Xianxia Mode Wonder: the [Giant Statue].
Mm. With this much time already spent, reloading was off the table!
Listening to the Humanity with the Gahi class humming civilization BGM under her breath while I checked the options, I felt a rush of pure dopamine flooding in.
It was just the sensation of my max HP and spiritual power going up, but either way — the effects were packed to bursting, exactly what you'd expect from a Xianxia Mode Wonder!
Looking up at my own giant statue standing there with that blank expression was a little embarrassing, though!