Amazing Misfortune!

Thanks to the Reality Patch, decorations split into two kinds.

There were the ones with spiritual power — NPC-adjacent things that thought and moved on their own — and the ones that were literally just decorative items, pure effect with nothing else going on.

What that meant in practice was this: my giant statue had been ruled a Wonder, but it still got the decoration classification. And that enormous thing moved. Because it was a Wonder built in my image, it even had a Humanity Clone riding inside it, which meant I could pilot the thing.

According to Elder Togo, it was still so newly made that its spirituality was paper-thin. Which meant that later on, that thing was going to grow its own ego, right?

The Reality Patch was terrifying.

No — the Xianxia Mode deserved some of the blame too. In the xianxia worldview, anything that spiritual power settled into and that then developed spirituality — whether it was an inanimate object, a mute beast, or something closer to a natural phenomenon — got defined as a living creature that could think and reason on its own. And the fact that this was actually true was the real problem.

Cheon Nan-cho herself had been born when spirituality took root in a plant growing on a Golden Core fragment. As you climbed channels, spiritual power got richer and higher in quality, so of course the mode was designed to spit out more and more varied cultivators and monsters the higher you went. Even with no hard level cap, the mode maker's intent was clear: if you wanted to keep leveling, you were supposed to naturally climb into the upper channels.

Then again, thinking about it — the one who split the story into Lower Realms and Upper Realms was a player, wasn't it?

Ah. So in the ancient era, it really was just a broken mode with no level restrictions at all?

Yeah. Simple enough.

I didn't know who the first player had been, but they clearly still had a working brain. If they hadn't split the level restrictions by spiritual power tier, some sub-100 scrub could have walked straight into four-digit-level eok-kka. Looking at my luck, I would have been first in line for that one hundred percent of the time.

"And the time concept's the same way."

The Double Speed Mod already made the time ratios weird enough, but according to Elder Togo and Cheon Nan-cho, the time dilation between Upper and Lower Realms was extreme. Something about the total spiritual power each realm held. I didn't need the details.

Yu Gisa had gone down to a lower channel than where I was, hit Transcendence Stage 3, opened some kind of Galaxy Age, and was solo-maxing SF Mode into an epic drama — and all I got was the summary version. Hearing that, I couldn't help thinking I needed to train harder myself.

So Yu Hee threw herself into cultivation.

Normally, the moment you hit Nascent Soul, you stabilized the realm and trained until you got used to it. Instead, the second things felt roughly stable, I'd charged straight into the Sect Gate event, run the Abyss, and wandered around hunting materials. Only now was I finally looking back at what Nascent Soul power actually was.

Nascent Soul was about establishing your own Law and forcing it on the heavens — growing the Nascent Soul itself, more than body or mind, until you reached Deity Transformation. That was the next step. Lose your body, shatter your mind — as long as the Nascent Soul was intact, resurrection was trivial. Training, accordingly, had to focus on growing the Nascent Soul.

A Nascent Soul was another pure self, born from the Golden Core. Ordinary cultivators suddenly found themselves stuck with infant-rearing duty and all the daily headaches that came with it. Yu Hee, on the other hand, had an overflow of excellent nannies in the form of her Humanity Clones.

Whether they were actually excellent was a separate question. Insulting them was just spitting in her own face, so she decided to think of them that way and leave it at that.

Lately the older sisters had been glued to a drama and wouldn't play with anyone, so the Nascent Soul had sulked itself into a full lock-in at the top of the Tower. After a lot ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠of coaxing and soothing, Yu Hee finally got it to train with her.

In the Mental World, she sat atop the Tower and drew out the Wheel. The Nascent Soul followed, producing a tiny Wheel of its own and a stick-like miniature Tower.

The Tower was the identity of a giant reborn as a Transcendent species — a bridge linking the Sky of Spiritual Power to the Sea of Slaughter, and a pillar that drew boundaries and made distinctions. The Law sealed inside it was Measure.

A Law that took the self as its axis and set the standard for size. Mostly she used it to transform into a giant, shrink opponents down to doll size, or just mess with the map settings of whatever world she could perceive.

The Wheel symbolized ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠a cultivator's entire life and the Slaughter Tribulation piled up along the way. It was also a Natal Dharma Treasure, practically a piece of the soul itself. The Law the Wheel held was Return.

The Law of coming back. Slaughter — death — always returned because life existed first.

From the beginning she'd used it instinctively to roll Slaughter Tribulation, string it together, inflate it, convert it into stats or experience. But honestly, the biggest quality-of-life jump had been unlocking Save. Escape tools like Forced Return weren't bad either, and she could fling open the Mental World's door to expand her influence over the endlessly circulating Great Sea of Slaughter and ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠move through it.

Either way, Laws were the kind of thing where creativity, application, and mastery could make almost anything work if you pushed hard enough. Fighting the way she did ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠— crushing everything under Status Window physical stats plus a mountain of Slaughter — was not the intended approach.

Apparently a proper Nascent Soul fight was Nascent Souls comparing Laws: mine fits better, no, mine fits better — a contest of cultivation. Which raised the obvious question: how was that any different from an argument?

My Law is Death. It kills you.

My Law is Victory. I win.

It wasn't like sacrificing ten pawns on a chessboard to summon a checkmate colossus. The rules felt broken.

Which was exactly why the next part existed. Laws mostly only affected other Laws, and when two Laws collided, Heaven took a very keen interest. An error-code collision message would pop up out of nowhere, and from Heaven's perspective it was, Great, where did something break this time? — and it would come look.

So if you just declared Yeah, I won and tried to force it, Heaven would go This game is trash and drop a Heavenly Tribulation on your head. A kind of admin. A referee. Pull a stunt without fooling Heaven's eyes, and you went straight into the recycle bin and got deleted.

So while the Nascent Souls fought their Law war, the cultivators dueled through cultivation itself. That was a Nascent Soul battle.

Deity Transformation? Deity Transformation was the stage where the Law was already fixed into the world around you — a permanent domain, basically. She'd learned that the hard way by dying the instant she stepped into a Deity Transformation cultivator's domain during the Sect Gate event. No doubt about it.

If you beat the opposing cultivator through cultivation but your Nascent Soul lost the Law fight, the enemy came back to life. Conversely, even if your Nascent Soul lost the Law fight, beating the cultivator through cultivation alone could let you walk away. Naturally, Nascent Soul battles tended to drag on.

Yu Hee, who had skipped all of that and simply crushed both Nascent Soul and cultivator at once under the Sea of Slaughter, thought:

So as long as the damage numbers are high enough, none of that matters, right?

Gyau?

The Nascent Soul's look said, Is that actually correct? She nodded.

Law fights, cultivation fights — she was never going to keep up the normal way. She wasn't going to sit around cultivating for a thousand or ten thousand years like the other NPCs. Better to take. Steal cultivators' lives, use the Slaughter gained to steal stronger cultivators' lives. The wheel of Slaughter kept turning: life made death, death made life.

If a bug paid off, there was no reason not to use it. If a loophole was efficient, it was the correct play. Save and load, flip worldlines, test every possibility — as long as it was fun, it was the right answer.

Somewhere in the middle the logic had gone sideways, and the Nascent Soul tilted its head. But the Humanity Clones who'd been spoiling it were Yu Hee's past lives too, and their gamer mindsets were if anything worse than the main body's. The Nascent Soul just went, Oh, okay! and accepted it.

Besides, to gain experience you had to kill same-level monsters or NPCs with spirituality anyway. Efficiency problem, right?

While teaching the Nascent Soul something deeply questionable, Yu Hee was wrapping up her "enlightenment" when she suddenly heard the rattle of chains by her ear.

What? Hallucination?

"GYAAAAAAAH?!"

Yu Hee let out a grotesque scream at the event that had just dropped out of nowhere.