I Had an Epiphany! So Why Did My Level Drop?!
I had an epiphany! So why did my level drop?!
I was already grinding my teeth trying to level up past 500 in this channel just so I could climb to a higher one!
If dropping and raising levels with the wheel felt like regulating the slaughter energy between my body and my Mental World, this was more like a dam springing a hole on one side and the water gushing out all at once.
I couldn't even restore it with slaughter energy. The accurate way to put it was that my maximum level had been carved out and shaved clean off.
I zipped straight over to Elder Togo and spilled the whole situation. His conclusion was crystal clear.
"Heavenly Tribulation, I see."
"Huh?"
This?
"Having ascended to the Nascent Soul, the heavens must have sent down a tribulation tailored to you as a cultivator. It seems they decided this was the most dreadful form of tribulation for you, little one."
Elder Togo's words auto-translated in my head into something like: the heavens, which work like a bunch of civil servants, had put me on their malicious blacklist and rolled out a customized countermeasure strategy just for me.
What the hell? I was planning to dump any Heavenly Tribulation on Yu I-seong and have her absorb it! The transcended Humanities all have Heavenly Tribulation resistance as a passive!
What is that Yu I-seong even doing?! When a Heavenly Tribulation hits, you're supposed to suck it up immediately!
I bet she was too busy watching dramas to even notice!
Gyaaaah, my precious levels… my precious experience…
It really is terrifying, just like a Heavenly Tribulation should be!
"Still, it has been lovely to see you training so diligently of late."
I nestled into Elder Togo's arms as he hugged me tight, taking a rare moment of rest. Hmm, had I been too obsessed with training? Lately I hadn't even been giving my friendly NPCs a [Greeting] or a [Thanks] — just training nonstop!
"Thank you always, Elder Togo!"
I raised the emotion expressions [Thanks] and [Greeting].
Karma rode upon the child's greeting.
It was the kind of karma that could lay the foundations of law needed to form a Nascent Soul — and enough, even now, to faintly restore someone who had fallen from the Deity Transformation realm all the way down to the Nascent Soul, and who could no longer properly wield the laws.
Without that, no matter how much aid the red star in the upper realms provided, the cultivators of the sect the child cherished could never have grown as quickly as she had.
If the child had been shaving away her own karma to give it away, Togo would of course have refused and sternly taught her not to. But what she passed along every day was karma that simply sprang up from somewhere.
He had wanted to look more closely, but each time the red star furrowed its brow as if to say he must not pry, and so Togo let it go without regret.
From the days when the newborn became a little one, all the way to now as she prepared to ascend to the upper realms, he had come to understand the red star bit by bit simply by staying at her side.
That it was no mere being of the upper realms; that its purpose was focused entirely on the child's growth and protection; and that it seemed to stand on a far higher plane than he had ever imagined.
His stroking paused for a moment as his thoughts wandered, and the child, as if displeased, nuzzled her cheek against his hand without the slightest hesitation. Thinking how impatient she was, Togo slowly resumed stroking her.
Energy recharged!
Full of vigor!
Alright, back to training, then?!
Not even a Heavenly Tribulation can stop me! If my level drops, I'll just go hunting later and raise it again!
Eok-kka of this caliber is not enough to stop me!
And so Yu Hee threw herself back into the training grounds, gazing down at the Sea of Slaughter from atop the tower in her Mental World alongside her Nascent Soul. High above her head, in the sky of spiritual power—
"What do we do about this?"
"It's the main body's level that the Heavenly Tribulation cut away. Experience points, basically."
"If we eat this, our levels go up too, right?"
"Probably?"
"The Status Window already told me I can't use it since I don't have a class."
"You already tried it on your own?!"
The Humanities had gathered for a meeting over a portion of the enormous experience that the Heavenly Tribulation had carved out of Yu Hee's level — experience enough to raise someone through the Nascent Soul realm.
Of course, most of the experience had been lost when the Heavenly Tribulation sliced it away, but even what remained was more than enough for the level-less Humanities to gain levels if they absorbed it.
"If our levels go up, we won't be able to transcend instead."
"The ceiling is higher if we transcend, yeah."
"But there's no telling when we'll actually be able to transcend."
"If we raise our levels at least, we'll be able to handle slaughter energy the way the main body does."
"Should we cut it up and split it?"
"Ack! It won't cut! I-seong! Help!"
Even with the full force of Yu I-seong's aurora, they barely managed to split it into two pieces. The concept of level, exposed directly into the Mental World by the Heavenly Tribulation, was already a broken fragment — and yet it was still immensely heavy and solid.
"We're going to hit the level-up cap anyway and top out at exactly twenty levels. Who wants it?"
"If I'm just going to slam into the class limit, I'm not interested. Even in Immortal Mode, all I do is turn materials into consumables, so there's basically no point."
"Same. We're sub-classes to begin with, so our class level caps are low. Even if we become cultivators, we wouldn't be combat classes."
Yorisa and Gahi declined.
Mudeomjigi and Yeondansa stepped forward. Both were classes added through Immortal Mode, so their level caps were high to begin with — and as sub-classes, raising their levels might even let them pick up cultivator as a main class.
"I'll go first."
Mudeomjigi stepped up, laid a hand on the fragment of experience, and absorbed it through the system message that floated up.
The vast experience was absorbed, fusing with the bodyless Humanity's mind and forming a spiritual foundation.
The Humanities were only fragments of Yu Hee, their souls incomplete, and this had arisen from an instinctive craving for wholeness. What was born from it was a root — a spiritual root, in other words.
The main body, Yu Hee herself, had already been reborn as a cultivator and grown through a fake spiritual root forged from slaughter energy. There was no reason a formless spiritual root forged from experience points would fail to grow.
Mudeomjigi successfully took her first step as a cultivator.
Watching that, Yeondansa promptly absorbed a portion of the experience as well and was reborn as a cultivator.
As befit the Immortal Mode exclusive sub-class of Alchemist, she already had enough sense to kindle the fire of spiritual power, and her achievement far outstripped Mudeomjigi's.
"But if we're going to train too, we need bodies."
"Now that we're cultivators, we should be able to transfer over as long as we have bodies, right? If what Elder Togo told us before is correct."
"Should we ask the main body to grab us some bodies?"
"She'd probably do something weird. What about just asking Elder Togo?"
"I'd rather have a human body than a mechanical one from SF Mode…"
"Then why don't we just assemble them? We've got tons of materials."
Body parts from monsters and neutral NPCs were piled high in the warehouse and inventory under the name of material items, so the suggestion wasn't baseless — and it sounded plausible enough that the Humanities gathered together once more.
"I'm just going to ask Elder Togo to make mine."
Yeondansa quietly slipped away, but Mudeomjigi and the rest of the Humanities were brimming with enthusiasm. They hauled every kind of material out into the Mental World and started assembling them this way and that.
"How about this! A head with six eyes!"
"Three eyes would be better!"
"Even one isn't bad!"
"Should we add horns too?"
"Wings would look cool!"
"This tail looks good — let's stick this on too!"
They were assembling a grotesque combination that endlessly provoked the uncanny valley until even a chimera would have looked cute by comparison, but the Humanities could not have cared less.
After all, it wasn't a body they were going to use themselves!
It was half a joke, but they were also trying to combine for maximum efficiency while they were at it.
The other Humanities, who would normally have stopped them, gradually crossed past the uncanny valley, through the brain-melting nonsense, and over the mountain of so-absurd-it's-hilarious — and finding it entertaining, they simply shut their mouths.
And Mudeomjigi, who would actually be using the body, was the kind of efficiency freak who pursued performance over aesthetic appearance. The result was a catastrophe in the making.
"Dyeing complete!"
"Slap a skin on it too!"
A body with three heads, ten eyeballs, four horns, six wings, eight arms, and five tails was complete.
Pushing aside the tongue that lolled from a grotesquely vertical split in the belly, dodging the teeth, Mudeomjigi climbed into the stomach and awakened her spiritual root.
Slaughter energy disguised as spiritual power spread through the material items like blood vessels.
But even if they had built it purely for efficiency, the body was made of parts from elite monsters scavenged from the Abyss, or the corpses of Golden Core cultivators who had withstood slaughter energy.
The amount of spiritual power those dead bodies demanded was so vast it completely wrecked the cost-performance ratio, and the moment they greedily sucked up spiritual power and tried to activate, the bodies froze again.
After all, even if it was disguised as spiritual power, it was still slaughter energy — an uncontrollable force that no one but Yu Hee and the Humanities who were part of her could properly handle.
Considering that one had to master slaughter-related arts and hone killing intent to the extreme just to obtain a sliver of slaughter energy, it made even more sense.
And in that moment, as one of the tails twitching with slaughter energy moved, the entire body lurched into motion at once. The arms seized the heads and the belly, the tails coiled around the torso, and the wings folded over everything, transforming it into a sphere.
"Wait, did it work?"
"Ah — that's sucking up the surrounding spiritual power! If we put in spiritual power instead of slaughter energy, Mudeomjigi will lose control!"
"Inventory! Stuff it in the inventory — there's no spiritual power in there!"
"It goes in? It actually goes in?!"
"Whew, that was close!"
"…But what about Mudeomjigi?"
"Uh… the connection cut out."
The connection between the Humanities was essentially a kind of Wi-Fi, with each one's conscience serving as a router.
Talk of capacity and speed came up because there were fixed limits to how much a conscience could accept.
The reason the constant sharing between Yu I-seong and Yu Gisa had been cut off was the same: their consciences had transformed into a spear and a gauntlet, so the connection wouldn't work unless they powered up a separate router.
Which meant that a severed connection meant either the link to Mudeomjigi's conscience had been cut, or something about it was changing.
Naturally, there was no way to know the result, so the Humanities could only pray like poor users waiting on a gacha pull.