A Pet Named Yeon-yo
What the hell is this.
Was there still a system waiting to unlock, or had it always been there and just sat deactivated so I wouldn't burn through slaughter energy? No idea.
"If you're dumping this little guy in the lower realm anyway, mind handing it over to me?"
"If that is what the Sect Master wishes. Without the spirit stone you gave me, I never could have given birth in the first place."
I took the baby divine beast and started poking through the system menus.
What the fuck — there's an evolution tree too?
And why can you equip a pet onto an item? Is that even right? Because it has a job? Artifact Spirit? I understood none of it, so I asked Yeonlim.
"Yeonlim, you know what an Artifact Spirit is?"
"You mean the practice of forcibly implanting a cultivator's soul into a dharma treasure and refining it until spirituality is forcibly awakened, yes?"
So basically a reverse Emile Bell situation.
"This kid drank my blood and turned into an Artifact Spirit."
"It must have had a high aptitude for that path."
That was it?
"Then I shall take my leave and recover my body, Sect Master."
As if none of this were any big deal, Yeonlim shifted back into her true form and headed straight for the eastern wing, leaving nothing in my arms but a tiny baby deer breathing soft little snuffles.
First things first — I needed to check out the features that looked like they belonged to Immortal Mode, plus the weirdly activated mods like Pet Capture Mode, Pet Management Mode, Magnet Mode, and the rest.
Having to actually test everything because of Reality Patch interference and mode collisions before you even know what a function does is pure evil design, but—
"New content!"
—finding joy in that was just who I was.
I tore through the system functions with rapid-fire save-and-load testing and wrapped the whole thing up in no time.
So basically, you could evolve a pet into a mount type that boosted movement speed, a storage type that auto-looted gear, or go full combat type and equip it onto items for extra stats or bonus skills.
Raising a pet's grade meant dumping my own experience into it, and you could only equip it onto items of matching grade.
Did that mean I had to slap pets onto every single equipment slot? And if a disposable weapon broke, did the pet mounted on it vanish too? Testing that out revealed a hard cap of three equipped pets, and equipping one ate a consumable quick-slot.
I also tried mounting one on a weapon, wrapping it in Spoon until the durability hit zero — the pet just auto-returned to inventory, and pulling it back out slapped a cooldown on it.
I'd been ready to load a save if it died. Thank god!
After exhausting myself experimenting with the new features, I named the worn-out little deer Yeon-yo — something close to Yeonlim — and stuffed it into my inventory.
In the Mental World, the humanities pulled Yeon-yo back out, laid it on a tiny bed in a corner of the house, and started feeding it. I left them to it and stretched, nice and easy.
So from now on I had to raise pets on top of prisoners!
My to-do list was disgusting.
Still, for now, maybe I could just focus on ascending within the month.
"...Hmm."
I was switching channels in a month anyway. Before heading to the upper realm, did it really matter if I ran wild through the lower one? The leftover NPCs were all just experience and slaughter energy.
Yeah? Thinking about efficiency, it would just be a waste of time!
When I hit Nascent Soul, it would've been nice to just borrow the full force of the Heavenly Tribulation and blast straight up to the upper realm — but I'd burned through all that tribulation power just climbing to Nascent Soul and stabilizing from an incomplete Transcendent into a proper one.
For the late game, this was the right call.
Better to shore up the foundation than rush the climb!
I needed to clear out every growth system I'd been putting off before going up. Sure, people might think new growth content always shows up on higher channels so filling the old stuff is pointless—
Hilarious.
Do both and you get that much stronger!
"Skill Window!"
I'd been running Erosion like a passive, so the skill level climbing that high was nice — but without the Training Ground, grinding the rest of these was brutal.
Why?! Why won't the Training Ground show up for me!?
Just thinking about it pissed me off.
Especially the permanent debuff I'd picked back when I didn't even have a Skill Window — the one that blocked skill experience from combat. Looking back, I kind of regretted that one.
At the time it seemed like the best option for front-loading stat boosts and accelerating early growth, but still.
I had to take what comfort I could from Transform hitting max level once I fully planted the Tower in the Mental World at Nascent Soul and folded everything into one.
And Spoon — when was that thing ever going to hit max? Maxing it out would make it hit like a truck, but the regular training grounds didn't refill equipment, so skill grinding never went as well as I wanted.
I wanted to cook up new skills in the Training Ground too!
So much I wanted to do, and the Training Ground just wouldn't appear. Unbelievable.
Erosion was climbing fine since I wore it like a passive. The real problem was that one.
Heavenly Slaughter Art — the skill that wouldn't even let you rename it, and the second you used it, it auto-forced you into combat state so the proficiency gain was absolute garbage.
Bomb I barely used, so fine, whatever. But this one was a basic combat skill. I used it every single fight.
Raising it through pure training meant grinding experience on nothing but raw insight — a nightmarishly hard skill — but unlike the others, I had a reason to lock onto this one and drill it.
Because every foundational skill was crammed into it. Every skill tree that branched off those base skills — the ones that strengthened and evolved depending on your job — was all tied to this single skill.
And until the ascension platform was ready, training was basically all I had to do anyway!
Hm? Prep for ascension? That was Yeondansa and Yorisa working their asses off!
In this trash game, most problems — even the Eok-kka events — could be brute-forced by dumping enough consumables on them.
The catch was that once you burned through your stockpile to clear one, the trigger would fire and yank the second Eok-kka forward so hard the game exploded before you could restock.
I'd said it a dozen times: unless it was Mythic-grade, even most Ancient-grade gear was basically a consumable.
Especially for me — low defense meant equipment durability shattered in no time, and Spoon turned every weapon into a literal disposable. Gear consumption was brutal.
The Crafting Window let me make gear up to Rare-grade, and the Crafting trait I still used constantly gave a fifty-percent chance to refund half the materials, which was the only reason I'd been able to keep up with the burn rate at all.
Unique-grade and up needed a crafting-related sub-job, plus two or three times the material items of a Rare piece.
"If I could just pick up a Blacksmith job, life would be so much easier!"
Obviously I was talking to you humanities, not myself! I'm not taking a sub-job!
So cheap. You really think I'd work you that hard? You're part of me — technically, isn't that just me doing the work?
"No."
Yeondansa in her mechanical body and Yorisa from the Mental World both shot me down at the same time — when did they even get here? You two, go make consumables for the ascension already!
"I'm not doing it."
Who said you could just declare a strike!? Who gave you permission!
"If you want us to keep working, you need to do something for us."
Favorability? Why should I have to do that? You're me. Most of you just hang out in the Mental World playing around. Maybe as mortals that was fine, but once you got jobs and became cultivators, shouldn't you be leveling up too?
"Why are you the one getting convinced."
Yeondansa — still in her android body — sighed, rummaged through the maid uniform she was wearing, and pulled out a handful of consumables.
"For one thing, same as Yu Gisa — my body is an item, so it has durability drain. I figured since I wasn't fighting like a dog it wouldn't matter much, but every time I refine pills, the durability drops by a percentage."
"Didn't you say leveling up restores it?"
That was why I hadn't been worrying about it.
"You have to pace the workload so the cycle lines up. Durability recovery consumables have a failure rate, you know. I was only holding on because this is Ancient-grade ornamentation — but if all I do is the same grind with no experience coming in, consumables alone won't cut it, Main Body."
"Ah."
"You're not a cultivator, so you can't transfer into a body. And it's not like you can climb into that giant statue and cook in there either."
"Fine, fine, I get it."
I lost. Seriously. What a pain in the ass they all were! When a game gives you way too many things to manage, you either burn out or forget half of them — and this was exactly that!