The Skill Window Was There All Along
I used the special consumable Cheon Nan-cho had brought back. For something that supposedly only dropped in Prisoner Mode, the way my Help NPC Cheon Nan-cho explained it in such detail made it feel more like a Xianxia Mode exclusive item.
Acquiring a random body cultivation technique.
A skill has been acquired through a consumable item.
The Skill Window is now open!
"...Huh?"
Skill Window, you were there?
The moment I thought of every single ridiculous stunt I had pulled just to confirm that a Skill Window didn't exist, the back of my head went hot and the world in front of me flooded red.
"Ugh—ek."
Thud.
"Hee-a? Hee-a!"
I learned for the first time that even after becoming a cultivator, if a person got pissed off hard enough, the sheer absurdity of it all could leave them unable to even swear — and that their blood pressure could spike high enough to drop them with a rage-induced collapse.
I did not want to learn that with my own body!
"First time I've seen you keel over from pain. So you really were a living cultivator after all."
"Ugh...eh..."
Even when I opened my mouth, nothing came out but pathetic little whimpers. Maybe because it was a mental injury, slaughter energy couldn't heal it either. If it had been a debuff, I would have just taken the damage and been done with it — but this wasn't even that. I had inflicted a status condition on myself.
After collapsing from pure rage, I spent several days being nursed by Cheon Nan-cho, getting my head back together, before I could finally, barely, recover. No joke — I had genuinely believed there was no Skill Window, and the mental shock that hit the second that belief shattered was no small thing.
It was also a fresh reminder that stats did not solve everything. My Mind stat was sitting at nine hundred, and getting cracked by a psychological hit only made the rebound hit that much harder.
"...Haa. Skill Window."
Reality Denial(10-Star)
Wheel(43-Star)
Burrow(12-Star)
Chopsticks(89-Star)
Spoon(29-Star)
Great Tai Giant Binding(1-Star)
And what the hell is Burrow, for fuck's sake? And stars? Not levels? And where the hell did the skill level caps go?!
No — calm down. Calm the hell down...!
"If I'd known it was going to be like this, I never would have taken 'no skill proficiency gains from combat'...!!!"
I never imagined the permanent debuff I had slammed down the second I decided there was no Skill Window would come back to bite this hard. But I had been so sure it didn't exist!
I flailed around on my back in pure indignation, kicking up nothing but dust and making myself even more irritated, until I finally settled down enough to actually look at the skills.
Whether it was fallout from the reality patch or not, the Skill Window didn't spit out clean numerical values the way a game would — but it did at least roughly describe what each skill did and what effects it had.
So of course the one I wanted to look at was the body-tempering cultivation method Cheon Nan-cho had brought back from her Prisoner Mode expedition. From her explanation alone, it sounded like a skill that raised physical stats.
Grade: Special
Type: Body Cultivation Method
A fragment of the great oath of the pillar that upholds the world. Temporarily makes the magnitude of one's mass and volume proportional to one's strength, under any circumstance or constraint. This is a law even True Immortals cannot interfere with — the more one tempers the law, the greater the power shall grow. Strive onward, for you have inherited a great oath.
"So what does it actually do."
Could you just explain it specifically? Why write it this vaguely? Were they trying to make it sound profound, or were they just trying to mess with me?
The latter felt more likely, and irritation surged up again — but I shoved it down, closed my eyes, and turned my awareness inward.
In the brief moment I had used the consumable, a strange network of pathways that could carry spiritual energy had spread evenly through the meridian channels of my entire body. I hadn't felt any pain or discomfort at the time.
Either way, instead of spiritual energy, I pushed slaughter energy through the newly formed paths and into my body. Thinking something like this thing eats a lot of slaughter energy, I spent a good while packing every meridian full — and then a buoyant, soaring sense of exaltation seemed to fill my whole body.
I didn't need the Status Window to know. My entire body had been extremely reinforced. So it was a method that strengthened you from the inside out, through meridians made of spiritual energy.
And through those meridians, I could instinctively feel the branches converging into one great axis. In other words—
It was a dual skill: activate it for a percentage-based Body stat buff, and from that state you could fire off a one-shot active skill on top.
As expected of a special skill you could only get from a mode — the performance was solid!
Thinking that, I mindlessly hit the red button in my head and triggered the active skill that seemed to dump all the slaughter energy spread through my meridians at once.
"...Huh?"
Out of nowhere, the sky filled my vision.
What? What the hell? I looked around and something was extremely wrong. The world felt massively smaller — what the fuck is this, my slaughter energy is getting drained like crazy—?!
"GYAAAAAH?!"
The instant every last drop of slaughter energy was gone, I finally understood. I had been hurled into the sky. With all my slaughter energy sucked dry, I couldn't even pull out the Wheel!
I'm going to die! Can a cultivator die from fall damage?! Wait — if I die like this, Prisoner Mode won't even activate, so I'm straight back to the save point?! I have to deal with the early-game crisis all over again?!
I flailed my short arms and legs in midair, then finally gave in to gravity, curled myself into a tight ball, put my faith in nothing but my Body stat, and squeezed my eyes shut—
"What are you doing?"
"Help!"
"It's Cheon Nan-cho!"
Cheon Nan-cho popped out of my inventory and saved me.
"So why were you suddenly freefalling out of the sky? What did you do that I can't feel a single scrap of slaughter energy on you?"
"I used the body cultivation method, and..."
"And?"
"My body got bigger."
For a moment, I had become a giant. A giant with somewhat extremely short limbs.
A transformation skill that turned you into a giant proportional to your Body stat! That was peak romance! Of course, since I scaled up while keeping my little-kid proportions, it was more ridiculous than cool — but still.
The Body reinforcement itself was fine, but transforming into a giant explosively burned through the slaughter energy packed into the meridians, so the consumption had been way too high.
Maybe grinding proficiency and raising the skill level would improve the efficiency. It was only 1-Star right now, so that was probably it.
"Is it just a simple body-enlargement thing?"
"If the Help NPC doesn't know, how am I supposed to? First off, I already hate the technique name. Skill Window! Rename skill!"
Rename skill Great Tai Giant Binding (1-Star) to Transformation (1-Star)?
I went with Transformation instead of something like Gigantification or Hypertrophy just because it was short. More than that, it had romance. Shouting "Transformation!" felt cooler than shouting "Great Tai Giant Binding!"
And two characters were shorter than four, so that had to be better, right? What, just make it one character then? Type a single character into a skill name and hit enter and the whole game crashes. What a piece of shit game, seriously.
It was reality-patched now, so it might be fine — but there was no reason to poke it on purpose just to test.
"Status Window!"
Nickname:Yu Hee
Innate Ability:Status Window (Merchant State Window)
Realm:Core Formation, Mid Stage (252)
Body:899
Mind:902
Resistance:900
Unspent Points:0
My level had dropped compared to before, but in the process of refining slaughter energy through the Wheel, training had raised every stat uniformly.
And here — if I poured recovered slaughter energy into my full-body meridians and activated the Transformation skill—
Body:899(+449)
What, did I misread that?
Even if it only applied to the Body stat, a single buff skill with a fifty-percent increase rate? Where the hell was the balance— ah, right, this was a Xianxia Mode special skill. If it was from a mode, what could you do?
Hold on, though — this was a measly level 1, no, 1-Star skill? Zero proficiency grinding and it already stacked fifty percent? Broken as hell.
Still, as if the mode creator had left behind one last scrap of conscience, packing the meridians full of slaughter energy meant it occupied a percentage of my held slaughter energy.
About half, to be exact.
In exchange for half my slaughter energy being locked down, I got a monstrous stat buff. Under normal circumstances, that should also mean Chopsticks and Spoon — both powered by slaughter energy — would take a hit to their damage.
But the Body stat buff was just that strong. If I had grown normally, stats at this level range should have been in the high three-hundreds, four hundred on a good day — but I had cheated my way through eok-kka events by converting slaughter energy into unspent points, and I was sitting on an absurd nine hundred.
"Tch."
And a stat of 1,348 was enough that a single basic attack with a magic weapon could delete a level-250 monster.
Without even using Auto-Battle!
"But emptying my brain and running Auto-Battle is still more comfortable."
Moving my body was a pain.
Even after more than ten years of training on nothing but an ominous feeling, and even after crossing into a new map, I could still clearly feel how much lower the experience from hunting had become — so aside from the very first fight, I went right back to chanting nothing but Auto-Battle.