Soul Fragment Farming

A powerful soul fragment of a legendary cultivator.

A dungeon boss that had somehow ranked up to Legendary, with a Powerful prefix jacking its attack and defense by thirty percent — strong enough that you could have mistaken it for a raid boss without anyone batting an eye.

Even with a realm gap that absurd — late Core Formation, meaning the two-eighties — I could still trade blows with it for one simple reason.

My stats were broken.

My control over spiritual energy — no, slaughter energy — was laughably crude next to a late Core Formation boss, and the only techniques I had were Chopsticks for ranged attacks and Spoon, which ate through weapons. And yet every one of my stats sat in the high six hundreds, flirting with seven hundred. That was enough to tank late Core Formation soul techniques with my body stats, resist them with my mind stats, and crack them open with my resistance stats.

Add in a regeneration ability that patched me up the instant I got hurt, and the result of a pure trade-damage slugfest was this: even a ranked-up dungeon boss didn't have raid-boss-tier HP. I buried it by sacrificing two Unique weapons, five Rare weapons, and seven Magic weapons as offerings.

"Hah… hah…"

Fuck, that was rough.

It kept spamming skills — no, techniques — I'd never even heard of. I genuinely thought I was going to die.

"Is the drop rate for real? I barely kill the thing and all I get is consumables…"

Fourteen weapons gone, plus however many pieces of armor the techniques had smashed to scrap. The eok-kka was real. I lay sprawled on the floor in pieces, twitching for a long while, until Cheon Nan-cho gathered up the drops and brought them over.

Yellow, but no purple. So a few Uniques, and then Rare- and Magic-grade consumables. That was it.

"So it's Strange Candy."

And I had four of them. My level had been stuck for ages — maybe these would finally get it moving. Wait. If these were consumables, could I register them in the crafting window?

You had to use a consumable once before it showed up in crafting, so I popped one. Level went up by one on the spot. Weird, but neat.

"Crafting window."

Oh, registered.

Unlocking the whole higher-tier crafting chain at once was great. The materials required to actually craft the consumables, though…?

Has this thing no shame? Unique materials and Rare materials, like they're a joke.

What if I just synthesized it up from lower-tier materials?

"Oh."

True to a xianxia-mode dungeon, it was just handing out broken consumables like this. And those bottom-tier materials — the ones that dribbled out of humanoid mobs in tiny amounts — turned out to be xianxia-mode crafting components all along.

So the plan was: stockpile captives, grind them down, craft Strange Candy, and level up the easy way.

Problem was, the only captive I had right now was Cheon Nan-cho, and as a field boss she didn't even count as crafting material. Some help that was.

She kept popping out of my inventory on her own to nag at me, which honestly made the "field boss" label feel earned. I should have known the moment she brute-forced every event choice with raw violence during the captive exploration.

"Wait a second."

Terrain scouting was ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠done, so I was supposed to head into the early-game crisis next — but a thought hit me, and on a hunch I spent two more days clearing the dungeon again.

No event this time. Just an Enraged Ascetic's Soul Fragment popping out. Still dropped two Unique-grade soul fragments and a handful of Rare-grade soul traces.

"If I power-level here…"

I could steamroll the early-game crisis without breaking a sweat. A warning window had already gone up, so if I dragged my feet too long the early-game crisis event might detonate across the map sooner rather than later.

But all that did was raise the map difficulty. It wasn't like entering and failing would slap me with a penalty. So I went straight into dungeon grinding.

Unlike instance dungeons, clearing it once didn't make it vanish — but park yourself in one dungeon too long and the penalties started stacking, so you couldn't just live there forever.

There were also specific events that triggered if you overstayed. You had to farm it in moderation. Moderately.

Except the dungeon boss was guaranteed to drop at least one consumable that raised your level by one. At peak luck I'd pulled six in a single clear.

A consumable this broken, and I was supposed to just walk away? What kind of gamer would I be?

In the end I ran the loop over and over until I'd killed the dungeon boss three times in a row with no consumable drops. I didn't dare touch Double Speed Mod for fear of advancing the early-game crisis, and even so I was buried in that dungeon for nearly half a year.

And the Strange Candy I walked out with? Forty-seven. Technically I'd also stockpiled around six hundred Rare-grade traces and crafted six more from those, but still.

Forty-seven levels from one dungeon in half a year. That was a cheat. That was broken.

And over those six months I'd diligently spun the slaughter-energy wheel in that single dungeon until I was converting the leftovers into residual stat points. A genuine, hard-earned gear-up.

"All right then — Status Window!"

I'd burned one candy just to unlock the recipe, so for all that half-year of grinding, the dungeon itself had only netted me three real levels.

Now the question was whether to sit on them until level 252, dump every Strange Candy at once to hit 299 and push for Golden Core — or eat them now, hit 262, and cruise through the early-game crisis.

Fail the early-game crisis and take a penalty, and I'd probably have to reload. Which meant redoing this entire dungeon grind. If that was the alternative, eating them now was the right call.

After a long stretch of second-guessing, I made my decision and started consuming the Strange Candies — no, the Spirit's Small Soul Fragments — one by one.

Absorbing residual soul shards torn from a mighty cultivator's spirit meant risking being swallowed or crushed under someone else's karma.

And what Yu Hee was absorbing now were soul fragments a cultivator with the talent to reach the Eternal Realm had carved off at the Golden Core stage. The weight of that karma was nothing like the mass-produced fragments from ordinary recipes.

But.

The slaughter energy Yu Hee had piled up in a mere century of life was genuinely monstrous. Even when Golden Core–tier soul karma pressed down and tried to stamp her flat, it couldn't touch ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠the master of that slaughter energy at all.

If anything, the soul karma only helped compress the slaughter energy further — and then the slaughter energy, denser than it had any right to be, started swallowing the karma right back.

An early Core Formation Yu Hee was devouring Golden Core karma, partial though it was. If Cheon Nan-cho — currently crashed out in the inventory, exhausted from endless dungeon runs — had seen it, she would have lost her mind.

Karma that was supposed to deepen one fragment at a time got force-fed in a single gulp of forty-seven, all for a fast level-up. With a hundred of them and the right materials you could craft a consumable that raised levels even in the Golden Core realm, so forty-seven was a brutally stupid amount of karma even for late Core Formation. But ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠Yu Hee wasn't a cultivator who'd built karma through ordinary spiritual energy. She was a cultivator who'd built slaughter karma through slaughter energy.

And that slaughter karma was overflowing in even more ridiculous quantities.

In the end, all that karma began to fuse with the slaughter karma — and the effect was that the karma of Yu Hee's soul, which until now had been pure slaughter energy, grew deeper.

The Status Window called this situation a level-up.

"Ugyagak."

As the soul's karma deepened all at once and the body activated to keep pace, a crushing pressure wrung her entire frame and forced a grotesque sound out of her throat. Yu Hee was simply happy her level had gone up.

Far above in the distant sky, a red star watched her the way it always did — unchanging, vast, like a single enormous eye looking down.