Chopsticks and Spoons

Back in Qi Condensation, I had used slaughter energy in place of spiritual power.

In Foundation Establishment, I had taken that slaughter energy and spun it straight into my foundation cycle.

And by Core Formation, I had gathered and compressed slaughter energy until it refined into pure essence, forming a spirit and completing the breakthrough.

"Next up… Golden Core, huh."

I sorted through what I knew about the Golden Core—knowledge I'd picked up from the help function, or rather, from Cheon Nan-cho. The Golden Core Realm was the stage of completing a Golden Core by treating the human body as a furnace and refining the spirit within.

An artificially constructed inner core, basically.

Thinking back on the jumps into Foundation Establishment and Core Formation, level barely mattered so long as I had enough slaughter energy and killing intent. Overflowing slaughter energy and killing intent didn't scatter or vanish just because they hit a level cap—my innate ability simply gathered every scrap of it and forged it into something new.

The pure essence of experience. A universal power that, once spent, could freely raise body, mind, and resistance.

In other words: Residual Stat Points.

"So Residual Stat Points are basically mini Golden Cores, aren't they?"

I dropped a level-180 scarecrow with slaughter energy. The things had the average HP and defense of a level-180 monster, and for a bunch of straw dummies they came loaded with every weapon under the sun—the so-called Scarecrow Corps.

True to the Training Ground's purpose as a place for grinding skill proficiency, the living scarecrows were swept away in a chopstick barrage so dense it might as well have been me dumping an entire cutlery drawer at them.

And so the wheel of slaughter energy kept turning.

"Hmm. No matter how used to it I get, two at a time is still the max."

I shaped chopsticks of slaughter energy in one hand. I didn't even need to throw them—they flew on their own like auto-tracking intercept missiles, seeking out living things and baring their teeth. Once I got the hang of it I could form and fire more than ten a second, but the hard limit didn't seem to be going anywhere.

They could only be generated from one hand, and only two chopsticks at a time.

At this point, calling it a skill ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠felt fair. The kid was single-handedly vacuuming up every scrap of proficiency EXP the Training Ground had to offer.

With Double Speed Mod running, the improvement was even more obvious—generation speed and self-propelled flight speed both kept climbing. Attack power had probably gone up too.

Skill proficiency grinding was possible. The skill window, however, still refused to open.

"Whether it's this bullshit Reality Patch or the fact that this is a garbage game, I don't even know anymore!"

I cast my mind back to when I'd first made the chopsticks.

Killing non-living things actually drained ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠slaughter energy, so I'd had to be thrifty about it—preserving the aggression of the energy while shaping it into the most familiar form I could. That form was chopsticks.

And the fact that they were now devouring proficiency EXP inside the Training Ground meant only one thing.

"Artificial skill creation is possible…!"

In the game, every skill outside the starter set could only be used by buying skill books from NPCs—mods included—so I'd half given up on the idea. Now Yu Hee's eyes lit with pure, unhinged passion.

The kind of passion only a lunatic who clung to a trash game until the day she died could muster.

Creating a skill was hard.

I burned a ridiculous amount of time just figuring out the baseline criteria for something to even register as a "skill." Roughly twenty thousand hours later, I finally understood the requirements: slaughter energy consumption, a standardized framework, and familiarity.

The second skill I forged after the chopsticks was a massive two-handed weapon of pure slaughter energy.

"…Gotta have a spoon to go with the chopsticks, right?"

A spoon, the natural pair to chopsticks.

It even had a nicely embossed ginseng motif, which made it feel familiar, and the two-handed grip felt decent. True to a two-hander, the attack power looked like it would be absurd.

If you ignored the part where it was a spoon.

"I wanted a movement skill, damn it."

A god-tier movement skill! After the Reality Patch hit and I felt firsthand how long it took just to cross a single map, the frustration nearly killed me. I threw everything at making a movement skill and got absolutely nothing for it. Then, at the peak of my irritation, I casually whipped up a spoon—and it started working like a skill within a dozen tries. That only pissed me off more.

I swung the spoon in a foul mood and smashed scarecrows to pieces.

As it ate proficiency EXP, the spoon grew larger and larger, but the weight never changed—still just the feel of a single Normal-grade sword.

A weapon-enhancement skill. A good one.

When every piece of gear was already a consumable, anything that reduced durability drain, maximized attack power, and widened the strike range was welcome.

The problem was that it ate slaughter energy like a bottomless pit.

Thankfully, proficiency grinding cut the cost, and the slaughter-energy wheel kept resupplying me—more than resupplying me, even—so the stockpile only grew. Without that, I would have written it off as pure garbage and scrapped it.

I kept grinding spoon proficiency for roughly another ten thousand hours.

Outwardly it was still unmistakably a spoon, but if I told myself it was aura or sword-qi, the grinding became slightly more bearable.

Even after all that, I still had under twenty thousand hours of Training Ground time left, so I spent every remaining second cycling chopsticks and spoon without rest, doing nothing but stacking slaughter energy.

And when only a few thousand hours of training time remained—

I took the slaughter-energy wheel I had spun and spun inside the Training Ground until it had grown exponentially, then fed it the slaughter energy pouring from the spirit inside my body as fuel, spinning it even faster.

The wheel that had only ever expanded began to shrink, its rotation climbing higher and higher.

Under Double Speed Mod's accelerated time, the wheel spun faster and smaller until it collapsed into a tiny red point—then it was sucked straight into my mouth and began circulating through my body.

As the slaughter-energy wheel completed its circuit inside me, it gradually became a perfect sphere. The pure slaughter spirit seated in my body swallowed that sphere whole—

and refined the wheel it had consumed into the pure essence of slaughter.

"Exit Training Ground!"

The moment I stepped out of the Training Ground, the event message chimed as if it had been waiting for me. I grinned inwardly. This was a genuine honey of a bug.

"Status Window."

Sixty-two Residual Stat Points stacked up. And with a bug that let me generate as many as I wanted just by diving into the Training Ground or spinning the wheel whenever I had enough slaughter energy, I was more than satisfied. I distributed the points evenly across every stat.

Among the endless parade of shitty negative events, plenty of them swapped stats around or slapped debuffs on whatever was lowest—so keeping every stat roughly equal was basic survival doctrine.

On top of that, when every base stat sat this high, the auto-combat power rating came out absurdly inflated, and Auto-Battle efficiency skyrocketed. That was a truth I'd learned in my bones after running Auto-Battle tens of thousands of times.

"All right, let's see."

Time to properly test the new skill's power. The Training Ground scarecrows died to a single chopstick, so they were nowhere near enough to measure the spoon's real attack power.

First things first.

"Hmm. Roughly four chopsticks to kill one."

The chopsticks I fired at a Whisperfiend—monsters of the Whispering Plains—had clearly grown far stronger through Training Ground proficiency grinding. Four hits were enough to put one down.

Next I pulled out ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠a Unique-grade one-handed axe, layered the spoon over it, and smashed a Whisperfiend into deletion in a single blow. Then I tried a Rare-grade spear. Then a Normal-grade greatsword. Finally I formed the spoon bare-handed, gripped it, and clubbed a Whisperfiend—and only then, when it failed to die in one hit, did I reach a conclusion.

The attack coefficient on this thing was weird.

Bare-handed with just the spoon, the power was roughly double a chopstick.

But the moment I layered it over anything that registered as an item weapon, even a Normal-grade piece of gear more than doubled the boost again.

"Eh, I'll take the win!"

Then the Normal-grade greatsword I'd used the spoon on ran out of durability and vanished less than a minute into the fight—and the deeply inconvenient truth finally hit me.

This wasn't a normal weapon-enhancement skill that reduced durability drain. This was a self-destruct skill that ate durability!

That was why the attack coefficient had gone completely insane.

It turned consumables you were supposed to conserve into single-use disposables in exchange for massive attack power.

"Wait. Then—"

Watching the Rare-grade spear and Unique-grade axe I'd pulled from inventory too late also crumble into dust as their durability hit zero nearly brought tears to my eyes.

It was also the moment I made a thoroughly unsurprising resolution: spoon for Normal-grade gear only, or elite mobs only.

"Auto-Battle!"

Auto-Battle was god. Auto-Battle was invincible.

Even if you lost, you still survived in prisoner mode—and against regular mobs, losing was almost impossible to begin with. More than anything, Auto-Battle's true purpose shone brightest in mindless monster slaughter like this.

Mental fatigue? Nonexistent in Auto-Battle mode. Physical fatigue? Slaughter energy healed it. Keep the near-perpetual-motion slaughter energy flowing? Spin the wheel and convert it straight into Residual Stat Points.

Wipe an entire map and you'd pick up one or two Residual Stat Points. Level-ups along the way, too. Mid-run eok-kka events, elite mobs, and bosses could thrash all they wanted—a spoon fueled by a Normal weapon still cracked their skulls open.

Yeah.

"Now this is a game!"

Considering everything I'd suffered through to get here, even this much felt like getting off light.