The Human-Slaying Formula

I swiped the event message out of my field of view.

Burn through the slaughter energy, recover, repeat — I'd gotten used to the cycle by now. More precisely, I'd gotten used to substituting a blend of killing intent and spiritual power in place of pure slaughter energy.

Killing a living thing dumped a massive recovery into the slaughter energy that regenerated automatically from the Slaughter Core. Killing intent, on the other hand, required me to keep the will to kill actively burning, so the mental drain should have been brutal.

"The Mental stat! Affects! Mental fortitude!"

"Ugh."

I cleanly ignored Cheon Nan-cho's long-suffering sigh and kept rolling the Wheel, using spiritual power as the engine and killing intent as the fuel.

The efficiency was garbage, but the duration and uptime on my mobility skill had more than doubled, so I wasn't complaining. I was enjoying twice the movement speed, after all.

Well — twice the movement speed of a baseline that was already cut by thirty percent thanks to a Dharma Treasure effect, so the real figure was more like a hundred and forty percent. Still.

My Mental stat sat in the high nine hundreds, an absurd number, and the mental fortitude built on top of it was enough to keep the Wheel turning steadily even while the slaughter energy recharged — efficiency be damned.

"Maybe I should train the killing intent separately…?"

"Come to think of it, I do remember hearing that there are cultivation methods that use killing intent!"

"…What? For real? Why?"

There were related skills? Killing-intent-based skills existed in Xianxia Mode? No, wait — that wasn't even the important part!

"Where the hell do you get something like that?"

"Beats me? I only remember that they exist! They're probably somewhere in the lower realms, so maybe ask other cultivators, or go looking?"

"So find a neutral NPC who hands out quests? How am I supposed to find one when I don't even know where they are?"

In the end, Cheon Nan-cho had dumped a pile of useless trivia on me about something I actually needed. If I hadn't been sitting on a mountain of spirit stones thanks to the private-trade mode keeping me out of the shop, I never would have been feeding the damn things to this brat.

"Wait a second, though…"

Cheon Nan-cho rummaged through her pockets for a long while, pulling out a battered scrap of parchment, a bamboo slip, a bell, a stone tablet, a bone fragment — stuffing each one back in turn — before finally handing me a weathered bronze plate.

"Here. A basic cultivation manual based on killing intent."

"When did you even get this?"

"It was in the luggage of some traveler who tried to attack me, and I killed him? You were already using slaughter energy, so it didn't look like you needed it. I just never brought it up."

"Ah. So that's the lore."

I belatedly registered the simple fact that I'd never gotten a skill book for anything slaughter-energy-related because no such skills existed, and pushed killing intent into the bronze plate Cheon Nan-cho had given me.

My Evil Alignment was already maxed out anywaaaaaay! Acquire!!!

Something like a mantra — the content and method of the cultivation art — seeped slowly into my head, and once I'd confirmed a new skill had appeared in the skill window, I set the killing intent in motion.

I wrapped my body in will. The will to kill.

"…Huh?"

What was this familiar feeling?

It was startlingly close to the sensation of wrapping myself in slaughter energy whenever I fought.

"Just activating the cultivation method puts me into combat state?"

Movement speed was a fixed value — but that only applied outside of combat. And a "basic cultivation method," simply by being used, counted as entering combat.

So what did that imply about these so-called basic cultivation methods?

"I was wondering where all the basic skills went — they just crammed every last one of them into the basic cultivation methods? You've got to be fucking kidding me, you absolute lunatics… ugkh… ugh-ekh…"

A spike of pure rage shattered my control. The core seed inside me wavered, and blood poured freely from my mouth and nose.

Power Strike, Auto-Recovery, Throw, Sprint, Battle Continuation — those were the shared basic skills, with a few swapped or added depending on your class.

And I was only getting them now? I was already closing in on level three hundred!

"Hee-ah! Hee-ah! Are you okay?! Is it another one of those seizures?"

Cheon Nan-cho's worried voice sounded tiny and far away. When I jabbed a finger into my ear canal, sticky blood came away on my fingertip — so it had been running from my ears too.

Still, her overblown fretting helped me calm down faster than I would have managed alone.

I confirmed it again: the common basic skills that would have been called Strike Attack, Auto Healing, Quick Cast, Sprint, and Battle Mode ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠without the Korean patch all applied at once the moment I activated the Human-Slaying Formula.

And I burned with murderous intent at this absolute bullshit of a situation.

True to a killing-intent-based method, the basic cultivation art — Human-Slaying Formula — scaled off the Mental stat, which made grinding its skill level absurdly easy. In practical terms it was like a Core Formation cultivator practicing a Qi Condensation technique, so of course it leveled fast.

The problem was that these really were just "basic skills."

Power Strike, which boosted the attack power of a single hit. Auto-Recovery, which regenerated HP by a percentage and shortened the duration of status effects by a percentage. Throw, which let you hurl your equipped weapon for a ranged attack. Sprint, which cleanly raised movement speed by fifty percent. Battle Continuation, which put you into combat state so you could use combat-only skills and consumables. Every single one of them was a skill that upgraded into a higher-tier version once you picked a class.

But Xianxia Mode had no classes.

More precisely, it felt like "cultivator" was the default stand-in for a class — but still.

"If I'd known there was a skill window, I never would have picked this…"

Combat didn't raise skill proficiency, so the only option was raw, unfiltered training!

"Skill window."

Transform's skill level crawled upward like it was allergic to progress, but the basic cultivation method had started at thirty stars the instant I learned it, and the leveling speed itself was on a completely different plane.

Part of it was that I'd been running all my skills on slaughter energy, so switching to an obviously inferior killing-intent version made training trivially easy. And where Transform inflated my physical stats by carving channels of slaughter energy through my body, the Human-Slaying Formula draped killing intent over the outside and did its work from there — much simpler to master.

It was a basic cultivation method, after all!

Of course, I'd gotten curious and tried wrapping myself in slaughter energy instead of killing intent to see if I could stack the effects, promptly wrecked my insides, and spent several days wheezing like a dying animal. But whatever. Roughly five years of burrowing underground and training later, I finally maxed out the basic skills.

The skill promoted on its own. For a second I misread the character and ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠wondered what the hell it was supposed to be, but the important part didn't change: every effect from the basic skills had taken a clear step forward.

I cloaked my body in killing intent, and slaughter energy raced along the channels inside me.

Armed with physical stats of fifteen hundred — a number you only ever saw in a modded game — I steamrolled every low-level map in under a month and finally made it to maps of an appropriate level.

Not setting foot in the Training Ground even once along the way still stung, but I'd stockpiled a decent pile of equipment to burn as consumables, so I consoled myself with that thin silver lining.

"…I can finally level up!"

Farming slaughter energy off low-level monsters had never yielded enough residual stat points — or enough experience — to actually level. If anything, my level had gone down. Eight whole levels, shaved off by a parade of misfortune events.

That was the price of dumping slaughter energy like water just to brute-force my way through the low-level maps' Eok-kka events, even if it meant tanking my level to do it.

Raising my level was simple enough in theory — generate slaughter energy on same-level maps — but every time your realm climbed a tier, the amount of slaughter energy required jumped with it. Now that I was in Core Formation, I could clear same-level maps all day and maybe, maybe, scrape ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠up a single level.

By the time I hit Golden Core, leveling through hunting would probably be borderline impossible.

Even if I abused the Training Ground bug to pump residual stats, I'd still slam into a hard ceiling without breaking through to the next realm. The Transform skill — the one that just ignored that ceiling and inflated stats by pure force — was the real freak of nature here.

"Special" meant the same category as that capybara event from before — the kind that fired with absolute certainty once you met a specific condition.

It had popped the instant I tried to change regions, so the trigger was probably maxing a basic cultivation method and then attempting a region transfer. Which meant this was an event that should have been a guaranteed early-game drop, and I was only seeing it now.

An event that let me pick a sect and join it…?

I could join a sect? Why? My Evil Alignment was ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠at a hundred percent.

Was this some hellish sect from a demon wilderness crawling with evil-aligned NPCs, or what?