The Training Ground Finally Spawns

"But holy shit, reshaping the terrain one piece at a time is way too much of ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠a pain in the ass."

Trying to do it through mods burned through slaughter energy like crazy. It was almost certainly a side effect of the Reality Patch, but that didn't mean I could half-ass a kill ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠zone either.

The Tunnel Digging skill was basically useless for this.

But I had a stupidly simple method of my own.

"Transformation!"

The slaughter energy occupying and circulating through my body ballooned up like a hollow steamed bun, and in an instant my field of vision shot so high I could see the edge of the map.

I'd become a giant looking down on the entire base, but my arms and legs were still stubby, so I carefully dropped to my knees and flipped and dug at the earth with both hands like a kid playing in the dirt, carving out paths as I went.

"Gyaaaaah…"

After grinding the skill's mastery, it was nothing like the first time I'd used it, when I couldn't even last ten seconds before it wore off. Leveling the skill hadn't made me any bigger, but the duration had stretched out — I could hold it for over ten minutes now.

There was the minor side problem of accidentally stepping on or crushing the decorations, but they hadn't even properly grown in yet, so I'd just make Cheon Nan-cho build more later!

"Skill Window!"

I'd ground skill mastery so hard it was ridiculous, but looking back later, there must have been some kind of condition — nothing would go past 99 stars. And no matter how much I trained Transformation, its growth rate was painfully, seriously slower than every other skill.

Anyway, I'd stopped relying on save-loads and was roaming every corner of the map hunting for dungeons or training grounds to stockpile slaughter energy when I managed to pick up a lower-grade Dharma Treasure.

Choosing a third Dharma Treasure to sit alongside the mid-grade Powerful one I currently had equipped and the special Dharma Treasure Five Great Calamities was a pretty serious decision.

What I needed most urgently was something that could offset or ignore the effects of Five Great Calamities.

True to a Tier-1 prefix, it didn't come with broken active options like guaranteed first-hit absolute accuracy or one-time hit immunity — but the passive alone completely nullified the accuracy penalty from the trash Five Great Calamities prefix Gigantic, which was more than enough to make me light up.

And it wasn't even a hit-rate boost — it was the superior option, an accuracy boost. My accuracy, which had been cut by a flat value, shot straight up to 115% in an instant.

Up until now I'd been barely scraping by with hit-rate options on weapons and accuracy options on accessories, and it had been driving me absolutely insane!

I equipped the Dharma Treasure and swapped my gear around piece by piece.

"Nice!"

This was the real joy of games — growing step by step like this!

Even if the Reality Patch had turned it into a problem!

"I want to play this game even dirtier…"

I wasn't on the level of those rotten-souled maniacs who ran around committing every possible atrocity, but I'd poured half my youth and life into this game in my previous life, so I'd already tried just about every kind of nonsense imaginable.

Because of my innate talent that required experience to function, and the ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠slaughter-energy cultivation built on top of ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠it, I'd been forced into an extreme attack-regeneration build. My main build had originally been a defense-and-resistance setup designed to survive as many events as possible and then roll the gains from all those events into further advantage.

I'd even gone so far as to make a Korean localization mod just to pull in newbies, and when that wasn't enough I'd built a multiplayer mod on top of it — so of course my main build had gravitated toward survival. It was easy to teach, friendly for newbies starting out, and let me hang around and help them do whatever they wanted. But still.

Having mostly played that kind of style, the extreme attack-regeneration build I was stuck with now felt way too precarious, and I hated it.

If I ran into a mob that shrugged off my attacks or didn't die in one hit, it wasn't some in-game story where I just desperately prayed not to die to a single counter — thanks to the Reality Patch, I actually had to desperately dodge and defend, and that made it so much harder!

Of course, I couldn't deny that this build had grown better than expected.

"Honestly, Auto-Battle did all the work, didn't it?"

Originally, the price of stacking pure attack power should have been getting hit by every kind of event Eok-kka and exploding long ago. Instead, Auto-Battle had grabbed me by the scruff of the neck and carried me through the early game, and by now the build was properly showing its full power.

And given this shitty game's whole gimmick of getting stronger the more event Eok-kka you survive or endure, the state of my growth after Auto-Battle had carried me through all of that was, even with the mods' help, completely insane.

"Status Window."

I'd deliberately triggered events just to force my stats up, and even then stat grinding was still crawling. Wipe an entire map off the face of the earth and spin the Wheel of Slaughter, and you'd still barely squeeze out a single residual stat point.

"When the hell is a Training Ground going to show up?!"

No matter how I looked at it, this had to be a mod conflict!

There was no way my luck was this bad!!!

"GYAAAAAAAH!!!!"

The joy of finally finding a Training Ground was completely overshadowed by pure rage that it had only just now decided to spawn! If it had never shown up at all, fine — but the fact that it did appear meant I'd just been unlucky this whole time!!!

Thanks to my Dharma Treasure, the Frenzy status effect didn't send me into a damage-triggered rampage, but the hit of it all at once still left me flopping weakly across the ground in a roll.

And once my head was forcibly calmed down, the next thought was that at least a Training Ground had finally appeared so I could do some stat grinding — but the sense of injustice still won out!!!!

"Fucking shitty game! Piece-of-shit game!!!"

"I've always thought this, Hee-a, but you swear way too much."

"…Want me to show you what real swearing looks like?"

All that newbie-recruiting had cleaned up my speech so thoroughly that even now I couldn't spit out a proper curse beyond a string of "fuck"s — and having someone pick a fight about it from the side just made the irritation climb for no reason.

Anyway, I'd found a Training Ground in the end, so that was something.

Inside, an army of Level 290 scarecrows stood waiting for players to grind their skills. Of course, I'd already maxed out most of my skill grinding with the infinite save-load bug, so what I was here for wasn't simple skill work.

I activated Slaughter Extraction and Transformation at the same time.

And simultaneously, the Wheel that had sprung from the core seed seated inside my body settled naturally behind my head and began to turn, slow and steady.

I stacked the Wheel of Slaughter as high as it would go, then higher still.

Even against a Level 290 scarecrow army, the slaughter energy that accumulated was clearly meager.

But this was a Training Ground — an infinite scarecrow army respawned here, and the more the Wheel of Slaughter turned, the more the slaughter energy ballooned exponentially, like compound interest on a loan.

Of course, that was only possible because I was also running Double Speed Mod at maximum while clearing the Training Ground, and the buffs from Slaughter Extraction and Transformation were jacking up the pace on top of that.

And more than anything — in a Training Ground, using Spoon didn't drain equipment durability!

I gripped a massive long spear in my right hand, layered Spoon over it, and swung. The dual-amplified attack range from Spoon and the Gigantic prefix baked into Five Great Calamities swept away huge swaths of the scarecrow army in a single stroke, while the Chopsticks forming in my left hand poured out like a red rainstorm and punched straight through them.

Being a Training Ground, slaughter energy consumption was practically nonexistent — but while I was using the place, slaughter energy itself kept draining at a steady rate, so I couldn't fully deploy the heavily slaughter-hungry Transformation skill. Even so, I could half-check out mentally and move like a machine, stacking slaughter energy in bulk, so it hardly mattered.

No events triggered in a Training Ground.

You didn't die, you didn't get hurt — and since I'd entered using my innate talent, the Status Window, the only cost was the continuous slaughter energy drain. Nothing else.

It was a great place for a kind of closed-door cultivation, but what you got from knocking down scarecrows here wasn't combat experience — it was training experience.

It was a skill-grinding zone to begin with!

So the fun of just blankly stacking slaughter energy and grinding had its own flavor — but even with Double Speed Mod running, I'd zoned out so hard that before I knew it, the slaughter energy the Wheel was turning had swollen past anything I could handle.

I had to leave the Training Ground to convert it into residual stat points, but Training Grounds vanished once you exited. Walking out now would be the same as throwing away my entire plan to hit the stat cap and then break through it.

So I began focusing my consciousness on the Wheel.