Cheon Nan-cho's Expedition Report

Even as I squirmed with unease, there was no real way to look into it, so I just sat back down and tried to focus on my cultivation again—only for the message window to pop up once more within a few days. This time, Cheon Nan-cho, whom I had actually sent out on a prisoner expedition, had returned for real.

"What the hell—Cheon Nan-cho got hurt?!"

"It just wouldn't heal for some reason."

Checking Cheon Nan-cho's prisoner status, I confirmed she was stuck with a Withering injury debuff and started rummaging through my inventory. Let's see—where was that consumable that clears Withering...

I used the consumable to heal Cheon Nan-cho's injury, listened to the grand epic of everything that had happened on her prisoner expedition, and used the high-grade spirit stones she'd brought back to create a mid-grade spiritual land. I trained a little longer after that, but at my current realm, more cultivation didn't seem likely to produce any rapid gains. I was just about to leave the burrow when—

"...?"

Something came tumbling and rolling in through the burrow entrance.

It was the head of that cultivator who'd previously shown up as a green dot on the minimap. Where the hell did he leave his body, and why is just the head rolling around? Is he a Dullahan? No, wait—once you're a cultivator, can you survive as just a head? Even so, how would a low-level cultivator have a rare skill like that?

"Tsk. Doesn't match that vermin's memories. This isn't a mid-grade spiritual land—it's high-grade."

A gray dot. A neutral NPC had popped out.

"A wandering cultivator, occupying a high-grade spiritual land on this ground without anyone's permission—"

The greasy-looking neutral NPC looked down at me with that twisted little smirk, and the sight of it was so thoroughly punchable that I just flung my Chopsticks and blew one of his arms clean off before opening my mouth.

"Shut up. Auto-Battle."

What? I got the first hit on a neutral NPC that spawned in this low-level map and slapped Auto-Battle on him, and instead of an Overwhelming result, it came up as a Decisive Battle?

"You were pretty strong, huh?"

"Saying that over a corpse you just killed is honestly kind of unhinged, Hee."

"Hey, teabagging the corpse is literally the golden rule."

Cheon Nan-cho's stare was sharp. No—it was physically sharp. Actual static was crackling off her. Since when do plants use electricity?

"My cave abode? Is that right? Anyway, you barged in here, so dying to me shouldn't be a big deal."

"Calling a cultivator's training burrow or cave a cave abode is correct, yes—but I'd like to settle down and cultivate in one place for a while now, too."

"Why bother? Don't you get experience pouring in every time you come back from an expedition?"

"But still."

I had no idea what she was so unhappy about. Honestly, if I could go myself, I'd want to. Every time I settled the prisoner expedition messages, it looked incredibly fun!

Maybe it was because she was a field-boss-grade prisoner, but the way she tore through events felt on a completely different level from ordinary prisoners.

What the hell is this all of a sudden.

I tensed up briefly at a misfortune event I'd never seen before, but nothing happened. Just some kind of morale-drop event, maybe?

"I've got a feeling that sticking around here any longer is going to get annoying."

"Ah, if it's that, then fair enough. If cultivators have already found this place, more of them might show up."

"We've never had an event like this before, though."

"What kind of training were you doing?"

"I was trying to refine my Natal Dharma Treasure with a pathetic scrap of spiritual power."

"That's it, then. Normally when you train, Hee, that red slaughter energy spreads around you so thick that ordinary cultivators can't even get close."

So I'd gathered all my slaughter energy into the wheel and only pulled out spiritual power for the refining attempt—and they'd treated me like a low-level scrub based on spiritual power alone and come looking. That was the story!

"Ugh, seriously. I was so happy when I hit Core Formation and could finally use real spiritual power..."

"If there's real spiritual power, is there fake spiritual power too?"

"Come to think of it, you wouldn't know—I stopped using it once I hit Core Formation. If you disguise slaughter energy to mimic spiritual power, you can use it in roughly the same way."

For the first time in a while, I demonstrated using slaughter energy camouflaged to look more or less like spiritual power.

"How does that even work...?"

"You're the help menu. If you don't know, then I dunno either?"

"In the Heaven and Earth Primordial Qi, pure spiritual energy gathered through the spiritual root is what we call spiritual power—but ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠yours isn't even spiritual energy to begin with, and it definitely isn't pure, is it?"

"But I've been using it just fine as a spiritual power substitute."

"No, seriously, how does this work?"

Whether she'd short-circuited or not, she kept muttering even as I pinched her by the waist with both hands and stuffed her straight into my inventory.

"All right—time to head to the next map."

The ominous feeling was gone, I'd trained hard using Rest, and the prisoner expedition was done!

And so, having started out full of energy, I was immediately hit with a continuous string of terrain-scouting failures from the misfortune event—and instead of escaping the low-level map for an appropriate-level one, I ended up spinning in circles staring at the minimap the whole time, hunting for field bosses!

"Gyaaaaah...!"

And on top of that, every kind of event kept ambushing me without pause, so of course I was dying inside!

I'd gotten so used to events not triggering while I was deep in training under Rest that the contrast hit even harder.

If I could at least get out of the low-level map quickly, fine—but the moment I so much as revealed my slaughter energy, the level gap made every monster and NPC bolt or hide.

With my already-tanked movement speed, even if I could use the wheel as a ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠mobility tool, I couldn't exactly waste slaughter energy chasing down low-level trash either.

I was so frustrated I could die!

If you escape the Abyss the normal way, you get dumped into a random map of appropriate level—but I'd been kicked out for bug-style play, so fine, whatever. Still, dumping someone closing in on the late 200s into a map in the low 100s? Are you kidding me.

And that was on top of the Reality Patch event collab already massively inflating the time it took to clear a single map.

Besides, until now I'd only ever been to appropriate-level maps or slightly higher ones. This was my first time in a low-level map—and not just the monsters, even the NPCs started running or hiding.

I didn't have any enemy-detection or sensing skills to begin with, and even if slaughter energy could find living things, they still had to be reasonably close—or at least within range of the minimap.

"Why! Is! Everyone! Running!!"

"You never think it's because they're scared of you, Hee?"

"What about me is scary?! If anything, I get underestimated!"

A little girl who barely came up to four cheok tall—what was there to be scared of!

"That little girl is pouring out killing intent so terrifying even a Golden Core cultivator would turn ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠green?"

"Huh? I hid the slaughter energy, though? Ah."

I'd reversed the wheel and stashed the slaughter energy inside—but getting annoyed had let the killing intent leak out!

It was a problem born from the relationship between slaughter energy and killing intent.

If spiritual power is spiritual energy that a cultivator absorbs and makes their own, then killing intent and slaughter energy have a slightly different relationship. Killing intent, if I had to put it, is power that comes from the will to kill itself—while slaughter energy is power that only comes from actually killing something.

That's also why slaughter energy contains killing intent, but killing intent isn't contained within slaughter energy—and why, even when I devour killing intent, I go through a process of stripping out impurities, meaning other wills.

"I condensed the slaughter energy into the wheel to hide it, and the killing intent got squeezed out... Hmm... What do I do about this."

I still had to do terrain scouting, and the fact that this was a low-level map where the monsters ran away was giving me a headache. Even if I burned slaughter energy chasing them down and somehow killed them with just Chopsticks, the time and slaughter-energy waste was way too severe.

"With physical stats this high, how the fuck is this even real."

Despite physical stats so monstrous they were past 900, I could only chase something with that body once it entered the minimap. What a piece-of-shit broken game.

On top of that, my movement speed was down 30%, so even boosting it more than double by using the wheel for travel, monsters fleeing for their lives still slipped out of the minimap's range far too easily.

I had the kind of brute physical ability that could leap over mountains by kicking off the ground and launch myself by punching the empty air—but movement speed was a fixed value.

What an absolute garbage game!

"If you're going to Reality Patch things, patch this too!"

In the end I gave up, pulled out the wheel under the pretext of training it, dumped slaughter energy into it, and decided to just clear the map that way—but slaughter energy's natural recovery was abysmally low, so once I'd pushed the map, killing low-level monsters wasn't nearly enough to recover it. I was stuck limping around for days.