A Bloodstar Over Yeonwi
"Still..."
Whether it was because I'd reached Core Formation or because of the level gap, stacking experience still looked like a distant dream.
The last time I'd died in a dungeon, I'd at least been able to reclaim what I'd lost and recover. This time I'd bolted without reclaiming a thing—and unlike then, what had flown away was slaughter energy that had already formed a pure Core Formation core. Recovery was that much harder.
I'd crossed three additional maps and camped two dungeons to the absolute limit, and even then I'd only managed to claw back five percent.
By my calculations, I'd need to bounce through seven more maps and hunt five more dungeons just to barely recover the fifteen percent of slaughter energy I'd blown away and stabilize my realm.
"This is taking forever."
If it weren't for the events that kept exploding with zero downtime for boredom, I would have already dropped everything and gone to rest. That is, if I hadn't nearly died when four misfortune events had chained the second I tried to take a break.
"Oh, thank god."
The moment I saw the next map, a sigh of pure relief burst out of me on its own.
Yeonwi Village
A village!
Compared to cities, metropolises, or fortresses, the scale was the smallest and the economy was nothing to write home about—but in exchange, it was a village stocked with neutral NPCs who handed out decent quests!
And killing neutral NPCs or humanoid monsters had always stacked slaughter energy in far greater bulk than regular monsters, hadn't it?
Drawing on the conclusion I'd earned the hard way in the Samjong Sect map, I smiled to myself.
A blood-red star settled over Yeonwi Village.
Yeonwi—guardian, practitioner, and ascetic of the village that bore his name—looked up at that star like a living eye and sensed the end of the cultivation path he had walked.
He understood that the option of fleeing had vanished.
And from the start, he had never intended to flee anyway.
The cultivator who had slowly, leisurely walked the path of cultivation in his small hometown village staked everything he had ever accumulated, trying to block even a fraction of the ominous starlight bathing his home—
But at the end of the bloodstar's gaze stood a small girl.
The murderous aura exploding off her was Core Formation—power so absolute that he, at the same realm, could definitively conclude he could not win. A monster bearing terrible killing intent and immeasurable slaughter energy wore the shape of a little girl and twisted her lips.
Auto-Battle
Causality twisted.
Combat had clearly happened. He had used techniques, drawn spiritual power, poured out refined artifacts—and that small monster had tanked every attack with her body, closed the distance, and in a single move torn him open and extracted his spiritual core. But the entire process was omitted.
The process was erased. Only the result remained. Against this unheard-of, bizarre technique's forced exercise, he could not even resist.
Making his prepared resolve and desperate determination meaningless, the Slaughter Star crushed him lightly—and knowing the village he protected would be crushed along with him, Yeonwi stared at the monster to the very end as everything he was got swept into that vast slaughter energy, and cursed.
All stats permanently decrease by 5!
"Motherfucker."
I'd been happy about raking in a massive haul of slaughter energy all at once, and of course an event had to pop up just to rain on my parade. Can't stand to see me smile, can you, you bastard.
Fifteen raw stat points, just gone.
My chest, my heart, my soul hurt.
It was such a massive eok-kka event that even five fortune events couldn't make up for it, which made it even more infuriating. The second I'd barely recovered almost all the lost slaughter energy and could finally solidify my realm and level up again, a Great Misfortune event pops out like a goddamn warning shot!
"Fuck."
I glanced at the map name—now changed to Ruined Ghost Village after I'd slaughtered every neutral NPC and stripped the place of its village designation—left behind the unremarkable drops from the only elite mob and the countless NPC corpses, and moved on to the next map.
There had been a village, so the odds of a city or metropolis within three map counts were high. Wipe even one city and I might go beyond recovering slaughter energy and actually stack some surplus—that was the thought.
+1 residual stat point
"Another village?"
And what appeared on the map alongside the fortune event was neither a city nor a metropolis—just another village. So much for the count. Fuck.
Come to think of it, how many maps had I crossed by now? Other than the guaranteed city within the first five, not a single city had shown up. Did that make any sense?
Suddenly the whole world felt resentful as hell.
If it had been a city I would have recovered right away, I thought, massacring every NPC in the village and converting them into slaughter energy—then sighed all over again at the fact that I'd still need to smash two more villages just to recover, or in map terms push five more and clear two dungeons before recovery was even possible.
Just pure grinding.
Despite the interruptions from misfortune events along the way, fully recovering the slaughter energy took another week from that point. I'd completed Core Formation with slaughter energy and a splash of killing intent in the first place, so after a massive chunk got shaved off, the result of wildly burning slaughter energy trying to claw it back was this—
Even after recovering the slaughter energy, I had to pour time wildly into stabilizing the realm all over again!
And time was the most convenient resource I had.
Because I had Double Speed Mod! From using it so diligently, the multiplier was now a full twenty times! Even borrowing the power of this terrifying Double Speed Mod that let me waste twenty times more time than anyone else, stabilizing the realm still took about a week.
"Without Double Speed Mod it would have taken over four months."
No—factor in that eok-kka events would have triggered at least three times over four months, and it might have taken even longer. Or I might have just croaked and died.
Terrain scouting increases by 15%!
"Ptooey!"
Terrain scouting is already done and you're raising it, what the hell! This is a wasted event! How is this a Small Fortune in any way! Just burned the fortune stack and built up the misfortune stack!
Fuming with irritation, I finally moved to the next map. Since I'd stabilized my realm, I could finally be considered fully settled into proper Core Formation—so there was no need to bother with a Village over a metropolis or fortress. Naturally, the map I chose was the Whispering Plains.
I checked the Status Window still stuck at level 200—not a single point of experience stacked while I'd been swallowing slaughter energy to recover my realm and stabilize it—then drew out pure slaughter energy, no longer disguised as spiritual power.
An aura red as blood, dark as an abyss.
This thing that looked ominous at a glance was the slaughter energy I possessed—the foundation of my Dao, and everything I was.
A power that ran on a completely different track from ordinary spiritual power.
The source by which I, unlike ordinary NPCs, was a player—and could only stack power through experience. Through slaughter energy.
Chopsticks made of slaughter energy settled naturally into my right hand.
Maybe because my first image and training had been with chopsticks, the limitation of only being able to form two at a time in my right hand was something I could dismiss as nothing given their monstrous killing power. With a flick of a throw—
An elite monster's life was cut short.
From the moment I had enough damage to one-shot ordinary elite mobs without using Auto-Battle, the power of this shitty game's vanilla-standard supreme unique item kicked in.
On killing elite or higher enemies: Steal prefix correction (120 seconds).
On killing elite or higher enemies: Restore durability by 1.
From the moment this broken endgame item's glory was on full display—stealing for two minutes the power of prefixes that were practically the source of an elite monster's strength, and restoring one durability to all equipped gear—
In this baseless, unfindable-genre shitty game, I could suddenly start doing hack-and-slash.
Of course, only under the premise that my character's performance and build matched well enough to run maps, and that there were no event eok-kka.
A random stat temporarily decreases by 50%.
Fortunately that kind of eok-kka didn't actually trigger, so I was fine—I went on a rampage across a mere level-180 map, killing everything living and gathering experience from the slaughter energy I raised.
Originally, killing low-level mobs to refill consumed slaughter energy barely gave any experience. But after forming my Core, slaughter energy naturally regenerated inside my body equal to whatever was spent, even without deliberately stacking it. That made this possible.
In other words—
As an effect of reaching Core Formation, you could say I'd gained Increased Experience Gain and Slaughter Energy Regeneration!
"If I just had a skill window! No—even just some basic skills!"
If there had been basic skills that auto-recovered HP and mana and bumped movement speed, it would have been even more convenient!
Unfair...?
Because I'd literally swept the mobs clean, terrain scouting completed in an instant. While hunting down the treasure chests and elite mobs one by one on the revealed minimap, I spotted a familiar fence.
In the middle of the plains, a fence woven from logs that should have been quite sturdy had appeared out of nowhere, bent at a very unnatural right angle.
"Training Ground!"
You have discovered Training Ground LV180!
Excluding the tutorial Training Ground that guaranteed appeared on the first map at level 1, this was the first Training Ground to show up in the entire climb to level 200. I opened my mouth loaded with irritation and rage.
"Training Ground Skip Mode check!"
> Training Ground Skip Mode
> Current Setting: ACTIVE
> Training Ground Appearance Rate: 0.5%
> Active Limit: 1
An essential mod to prevent the bug where the game freezes because of the cutscene video that plays when you enter a Training Ground.
And this essential mod even included a QoL feature that lowered the Training Ground appearance rate so you could actually see other treasure chests, events, and elite mobs instead of Training Grounds popping up constantly on every map!
"Turning it on or off works with a mode check, but changing the mode settings mid-way doesn't... Maybe if the mod manager opened it would work."
Insufficient realm.
"Shut up!"
Entering Training Ground.