The Premonition of Terrible Evil
When you install only the bare-minimum bug-fix mods, quality-of-life mods, rebalance mods, and user patches needed to even run this dogshit game—
This garbage of a game, by default, forces you through three crises.
They're called the Early Crisis, Mid Crisis, and Late Crisis: random calamities that drop on your head, and the usual approach is to grind the absolute minimum specs required to clear them.
Deliberately poking every event that summons a crisis early, walking the tightrope all the way through, clearing the final crisis in ten years, and watching the event cutscene—that, I suppose, is what counts as a speedrun of this dumpster fire.
Ordinarily, if you leave the event triggers and mods alone, the Early Crisis pops at year fifty, the Mid Crisis at year one hundred, and the Late Crisis at year one hundred fifty.
The reason I'm suddenly dumping all this lore is simple.
It had been, roughly speaking, well over a hundred years since I'd been born into this fucked-up, reality-patched xianxia-mode world of a game.
Maybe because I'd burned so much time on Double Speed Mod, I'd climbed to Core Formation and my total lifespan had stretched to about a thousand years—yet the time I had left was under five hundred. A miraculous exchange rate. And only after five hundred years of system time—my subjective time with Double Speed Mod factored in—did a system warning window finally pop up, heralding the Early Crisis.
A premonition of the revival of a Terrible Great Evil can be felt.
So. An Early Crisis tied to an evil-attribute raid boss with the prefix Terrible slapped on it. I frowned at the system warning window delivering that little piece of intel.
Once this warning appeared, I would be force-moved into a map—either the next one or the one after—that was guaranteed to contain the Early Crisis.
Clear the crisis and you get a reward. Skip it and the difficulty spikes. Fail it and you eat a penalty and the difficulty spikes. One way or another, you either clear it or you skip it. No other options.
"…Skipping it to jack up the overall map difficulty and pull experience and gear faster isn't a bad idea, either…"
The problem was that the rewards for clearing a crisis changed completely depending on the mods you had installed. Would the crisis rewards in xianxia mode be good, or would they be trash?
"Hey, Help."
"I am not a 'Help.' I am Cheon Nan-cho."
"Whatever. Star-nim is telling me to go check out some bad guy who's about to revive, and I'm going no matter what. Question is—do I let him revive, or do I interfere?"
"Is there even anyone worse than you? Just let him revive and kill him. That's what you're best at."
"But what if he revives stronger than me?"
"You'll figure that out when you get there, won't you?"
…Fair enough?
True to form for an early-game Help NPC, Cheon Nan-cho's advice wasn't massively useful—but it was a little useful. By way of thanks, I offered today's daily dose of grateful greetings, then went back to filling out Terrain Scouting by hunting mobs on Auto-Battle.
The Void's 'Harvester Father' appears!
"Hello, Chopsticks! And— Auto-Battle!"
Whenever an elite mob spawned, I opened with a volley of Chopsticks, then grabbed a Spoon powered by a Magic-grade weapon as sacrifice and slammed Auto-Battle. The elite was deleted in literally an instant.
You have won the Auto-Battle!
Chopsticks had definitely reached full mastery—enough attack power to punch holes through same-level elites in a single hit. And my inflated attack power from Spoon fed straight into Auto-Battle, reliably popping Overwhelming or even Legendary victories.
A random stat permanently decreases by 1.
Of course, the Misfortune events designed to inject tension into a game that had gotten too loose meant I could never fully let my guard down.
You never knew when or where an Eok-kka event would detonate!
That said, I had insurance now.
The Save Point created by the auto-save that came bundled with the roulette Eok-kka event—that was it. I had no idea how it would actually function now that the reality patch was in effect, but among a gamer's sacred privileges—Pause, Save & Load, and Log Out—Save & Load had become available!
Even if an Eok-kka event went off, as long as it didn't come packaged with an auto-save, I had a safety net that could reliably dodge it at least once. Practically speaking, that was huge.
Terrain Scouting decreases by 25%!
"GYAAAAAAAH!"
Not this kind of Eok-kka!
I'd nearly wiped the map's regular mobs and filled Terrain Scouting to ninety-seven percent—and it plummeted to seventy-two in an instant. Now I'd have to spend time running a dungeon or cracking a field boss's skull just to move to the next map!
"What the—! Why are you screaming again?"
"Help! The world is Eok-kka-ing me!"
"Yes, yes. Another one of your little episodes."
"This is real, though."
Yelling at Cheon Nan-cho—sorry, Help—wasn't going to change anything. One way or another, I still needed to fill Terrain Scouting to reach the next map.
"Minimap!"
I opened the minimap. Terrain Scouting was incomplete, only a handful of zones had been discovered, and instance dungeons didn't fill Terrain Scouting in the first place—so I'd have to tear around the map hunting field bosses and dungeons.
I really, desperately needed a movement skill.
I had a Dharma Treasure that could teleport me to revealed spots on the minimap, but it required those spots to already be Terrain-Scouted. In situations like this, it was endlessly, maddeningly useless.
⚔ Entry Requirement: Early Core Formation (200)
It took ten full days of practically excavating every corner of the map before I found a dungeon that required level two hundred to enter.
"Took damn long enough."
"That's because you flipped out halfway through and went on a rampage, Hee-ah…"
"But that was—!"
The problem had been a Frenzy debuff from a Misfortune event. What kind of debuff lasts twenty-four hours? And once it wore off, Exhaustion kicked in and left me flat on my back for three days, unable to move a muscle.
Bigger problem: the dungeon itself.
A dungeon that endlessly spat out level-two-hundred-minimum mobs was fine. The real issue was the name—a name that practically handed you the estimate on a silver platter.
Tomb. Already screaming undead. And if they were dead, would slaughter energy even register? Non-living things tended to slash slaughter energy hard.
Imagining the nightmare future where running the dungeon actually lowered my experience, I entered anyway.
And then—
"Ghosts stack slaughter energy!"
So killing the soul instead of the body still counted as slaughter energy! The judgment was solid!
What came pouring out of the Tomb of Spirits were ghosts under the name "Spirits." Ghost-type monsters had a nasty pile of traits—defense ignore, normal-attack nullification, phasing—but so what?
They didn't have bodies, which meant their special defense was garbage!
A few hits from Chopsticks and they were already dying!
They tried to dodge, but Chopsticks were condensed from slaughter energy—brimming with the will to kill living things—and came with a homing function baked in. Even when the ghosts dodged, the chopsticks chased them down and buried themselves. Spectacular performance.
Of course they were—I'd made the skill myself! I was amazing!
I'd been way too scared just from the dungeon name.
"Just fill Terrain Scouting, kill the boss, and get out."
The Early Crisis map was locked in for either the next map or the one after, after all. Personally, I hoped it was the next one. Falling back a whole map would mean another eternity of travel.
I roughly filled Terrain Scouting to one hundred percent in two days, and when I opened the boss room to leave the dungeon—
A spirit of the past, under intense stimulus, recovers a fragment of its memory and reenacts a lost legend!
"What kind of absolute fucking Eok-kka is this?!"
An already powerful boss monster—bearing the prefix Powerful—had just gotten Legendary slapped on top, completing a full rank-up. In practical terms, that thing was no longer a dungeon boss. HP aside, it was a monster with specs rivaling a raid boss.
"The gaze of a star has awakened me. Young child, what is your name?"
Huh? Wait—was the dungeon boss not an aggressive mob…?
No, that couldn't be right. Right now the dialogue had it showing as a gray dot on the minimap—neutral NPC—but the second the conversation ended, it would switch to attack mode, wouldn't it?!
Quietly gathering slaughter energy into a condensed mass, ready to strike the moment the dialogue finished, I opened my mouth with a little backstabbing in mind.
"I am called Hee-ah, senior."
"There is no need to call me senior. I am but a remnant soul. That I have awakened so freely can only mean my true body is already dead."
What, so the setting was that they'd sliced off a piece of soul and dumped it here? Listening to him talk, this was definitely a xianxia-mode dungeon!
"And from you, the stench of blood reeks thick. Just how much Evil Karma have you… Evil Karma…?"
Ah. He glitched.
Was it because a Misfortune event had swapped my good-alignment and evil-alignment corrections with a debuff, tangling the interaction? The boss mob—late-stage Core Formation in power—tilted its head, and I kept sneaking glances at the minimap, waiting for the moment it would turn red.
"To have committed such slaughter and yet accumulated Good Karma so high… I have a request of one such as you."
What, a quest?
"For the sake of a great undertaking—give me your body."
"Fuck that, die!"
I yanked out a Unique-grade weapon, activated Spoon with the slaughter energy I'd already condensed, and swung it in a surprise strike that smashed into the boss. Being only a fragment of a soul and still reaching late-stage Core Formation must have meant something—the rebound through the Spoon left both hands stinging.
Considering my physical stats were in the high six hundreds, this was every bit the Eok-kka boss it looked like: rank-upped by an event with the Legendary modifier, plus the tier-one prefix Powerful stacked on top.
Confirming the minimap had gone fully red, I tossed aside the Unique gear that had shattered its durability in a single hit, then pulled Rare-grade weapons from my inventory once more.