The Ascension Platform Is Complete

Mudeomjigi stared at her Status Window.

Yu I-seong and Yu Gisa had filled in their incomplete souls upon achieving Transcendence and earned themselves proper names. She, on the other hand, had simply become a cultivator through raw experience points, her body assembled from clumped material items and refined through the slaughter qi her main body had produced. Filling in a soul had never been on the table.

Of course she was nothing more than a Humanity Clone. Calling herself Gravekeeper was just a job title for the sake of distinction. Having no name was only natural.

"Why is the race field throwing an error?"

Her Body stat climbed a clean five points with every level, like shedding some invisible restraint, and she couldn't even allocate free points into it — so everything went into Mind. Resistance stats were nowhere to be found. The whole thing felt like a half-finished build with half the screws missing. She awkwardly preened her wings.

Being stuck in a body that wasn't human left this particular Humanity Clone with a constant, low-grade sense of wrongness and revulsion. During the whole burning-at-the-stake ordeal, she had worked hard to tear off or crush every part that kept rejecting her, and by the ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠end the extra heads and the surplus arms and legs she had bolted on seemed to have vanished for good.

Her palm split open with a wet crack. An eyeball bulged out from the gash, rolling wetly as it reflected her own face.

"Only two horns left, too."

She had mounted four of them. They had twisted together in pairs and fused into one each. Eight arms were tucked away inside the mouth in her belly. The two extra heads were gone, but she could still casually pull any of her ten eyeballs out of her body whenever she wanted. Of six wings, only two remained. Of the five distinctive tails she had attached, only one had survived.

Would they grow back if she leveled up and raised her realm?

With that idle thought, Mudeomjigi curled her small body atop the corpse object she had laid out on the road. This was, of course, preparatory work for entering the Abyss — a method that would get her there within a month for certain, even without the help of Event Probability Mode.

The goal wasn't to farm gear from the corpse objects generated by running Abyss loops off the Capybara event. The goal was to swallow the corpse objects whole.

As a Humanity Clone, Mudeomjigi had no sense of crisis. She carried the same past-life game knowledge as the main body, their inventories were fully shared so consumables were plentiful, and unlike the main body she couldn't get hit with a mode-based Eok-kka.

What she had failed to account for was this:

"A beast I've never seen before."

Out of nowhere, a cultivator at the mid stage of Core Formation — over a hundred levels above her. A Neutral NPC.

The Neutral NPC reached for her without a second thought. It was the same casual gesture a passerby might use to pick up a roadside ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠animal like an object, the kind of motion only possible when you were certain the creature couldn't hurt you.

And that certainty was justified. Cultivators had a baseline class effect that reduced all damage taken from cultivators of a lower realm by up to ninety percent. It only felt trivial because the main body, Yu Hee, kept detonating fixed damage, piercing damage, and critical hits that ignored the whole thing.

Even if slaughter qi could punch damage through spiritual power and ignore realm differences, it couldn't ignore a level gap that wide — and Mudeomjigi didn't have Auto-Battle either.

Even so, she flicked her small tail at the Neutral NPC's outstretched hand with pure irritation.

The cultivator, who had been smiling with open disdain at her clear rejection, finally sensed something wrong and looked down at his hand.

It was wet.

The beast's tail had pierced his spiritual power and touched his skin. Not blood — a sticky, mucus-like fluid, some kind of beast secretion or saliva. Only then did the Neutral NPC register that the creature in front of him might be more dangerous than expected.

But rather than back off, the thought only replaced his curiosity with something uglier. The moment that shift happened, the gray dot on the minimap flushed red — and Mudeomjigi did not miss it.

Slaughter qi sank into her small frame.

She had no Resistance stat, and her Mind sat in the low hundreds because she was only a Humanity Clone. But every material item that made up her constructed body was luxury-grade, all exceeding level 450. Level restrictions throttled their performance, sure — but was there ever a bug that didn't exist to chew through something like that?

The arms thrashing inside her belly seized Slaughter Stones and consumables from her inventory and crushed them one after another. Slaughter qi poured out with each shatter, flooding into her flesh, and the Body stat ceiling on her Status Window punched straight through its limit and climbed.

That ceiling sat at a full three thousand — high enough to touch the absolute end of the Golden Core stage. A mere Core Formation-level monster had no business tanking that. Actually pushing all the way up would have meant stacking the consumable-overlap bug and burning through far too many resources, so she stopped at one thousand. Even that was more than enough to casually erase the thing.

There was a penalty — she had to keep smothering her body under slaughter qi for a long stretch to stop it from hungering after spiritual power — but for something this minor, who cared?

Acting on pure instinct, Mudeomjigi tore her belly open lengthwise, as if preparing to inter the dead cultivator's corpse inside the grave of her own flesh. Arms spilled from the gaping mouth and slapped about, stuffing the body in piece by piece before she forced the wound shut. She then picked up what remained of the cultivator and added it to the corpse object pile.

Even after all that, it took Mudeomjigi another ten full days before she finally managed to enter the Abyss.

Finally! The Ascension Platform was complete.

I'd deliberately been training nearby just so I could use it the second it finished. Worth the wait.

The moment I moved to activate it — Gahi's song laying down the entrance BGM — a cascade of system messages rolled up as if they'd been waiting for exactly this, and blocked my path.

"They hard-locked save-and-load on this thing…?"

Wasn't that a little much? I wasn't even running Ironman Mode! And a hundred-year reuse cooldown? Years? Not hours — years!

And why was the success rate some vague garbage like thirty-three percent? Disgustingly low!

Wait. Looking at it now… was the probability shifting in real time? It felt like it had dropped a little since a moment ago.

"It would be wiser to attempt the crossing when the interface pressure between the lower and upper realms is weak."

Listening to Elder Togo, this was apparently normal. So even ascending required checking the weather and timing the climb?

Maybe dump consumables into it once the rate hits around eighty percent and go up then? But how long was I supposed to sit around waiting? It was finished — I just wanted to get up there already. Wasn't there another way?

"Isn't there a faster way to go up?"

"Heh heh. Always so impatient, never able to wait — that is how my baby has grown so quickly. I knew you would ask, so I prepared something ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠in advance."

"Wait, for real?"

Elder Togo had apparently set something up ahead of time.

"We must carry this entire base into the upper realm, so the interface pressure your little body must endure is far too high. On top of that, baby, your Evil Karma is so vast that Heaven already despises you."

I hadn't expected getting blacklisted by Heaven to become a problem here of all places, but from the way Elder Togo was talking, it sounded like there was another method.

"But you have a Mental World, do you not?"

In short: if I draped my Mental World over the entire base, I could weaken the interface pressure as much as possible. Because my Mental World was a sea of slaughter qi — dense, high-pressure slaughter energy — it could tank interface pressure far more efficiently than anything else.

Water had resistance, sure, but drop a stone in and it sank. My Great Sea of Slaughter was more like starch-thickened water mixed with slaughter qi — drop a stone in and it barely sank at all, just floated there.

The catch was that every time I had pulled the Sea of Slaughter out in the Abyss or onto a map, I had only opened a mouth through the waterwheel. That worked because the Mental World had been built on top of my innate ability, the Status Window.

Left uncontrolled, the Sea of Slaughter auto-aggroed every living thing on the map — Abyss included — and started free-firing in every direction. That was the problem.

But this base was the hand of the first player, the one the story called a True Immortal. Surely it could handle something on the level of the Great Sea of Slaughter.

All right. Let's try it.

"Baby, should you not speak with the others first? If you overlay your Mental World across this entire sect, there will be those who simply die where they stand."

"Ah. Right."

I had gotten so hyped about finally being able to switch channels that I completely forgot. That almost went very badly. Then again, once we hit the upper realm, weren't most of them useless anyway? Lose a few, grab some higher-level prisoners up there, swap ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠them out. Problem solved.

What? It's not like I was going to trash the server and force a service shutdown on this channel before hopping to the next one.

Humanity Clones. Always so dramatic.