Spirit Veins and the XP Bug

As it turned out, eating corpses or remains didn't let you casually read their memories. Anything hit by my slaughter energy had its soul torn apart and converted straight into experience points, after all.

Still, Cheon Nan-cho managed—with considerable difficulty—to snatch a fragment of memory for herself. From remains that didn't even have a soul left, no less!

So she really was a help menu, huh?

"Hmm, a spirit vein is a kind of natural phenomenon born from the workings of heaven and earth—but if you recreate it, you can simulate something similar, and if you've got a medium with vast spiritual power, you can anchor that recreation in place!"

"…?"

"We can make spirit veins now by consuming supreme-grade spirit stones."

"!"

When I tilted my head, the help menu cleanly abandoned any further explanation and boiled everything down to a single line. I was impressed. You've grown, Cheon Nan-cho!

"Recreating the phenomenon needs a massive amount of energy of a single attribute. That's why the spirit vein the spider made earlier was packed exclusively with lightning-attribute spiritual energy."

"But it got wiped when I touched it?"

"More precisely, your slaughter energy fooled the world, Yu Hee. Your slaughter energy can disguise itself as spiritual power, right, Hee-a? If the spiritual energy left behind by the supreme-grade ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠spirit stone that served as the medium for that recreation gets replaced that way, the spirit vein should complete itself."

"Then do it!"

"I'm tired. I'll do it after I rest."

Cooldown, then. Nothing I could do about that!

Settling for what I had, I snapped off a lower-grade spirit vein tile, installed it in the Training Ground, and immediately dove into spiritual power training.

I'd reached Golden Core, but since I'd climbed there purely on slaughter energy, my spiritual power was basically on par with Foundation Establishment! No—my control and level were about even with a long-lived Qi Refining cultivator…

The irony was that even at that level, I'd still managed to refine a Natal Dharma Treasure—entirely because the Wheel was such an obscenely efficient skill.

A Natal Dharma Treasure was grueling from start to finish: gathering the materials, forging the thing, and then, even after it was made, putting it through a kind of cultivation process at the cultivator's spiritual ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠root, spiritual core—whatever sat at their center. Like any exclusive weapon, it had to be fully tamed and steeped in the individual so that no one else could touch it, until it became part of the body, part of the soul.

But the Wheel had been forged inside my slaughter core from the very beginning, leveled as a skill, and bound into a single whole by my innate Status Window talent. Of course I could turn it into an exclusive weapon—no, a Natal Dharma Treasure—just by dumping spiritual power into it like an idiot.

Handling pure spiritual power, though—not slaughter energy disguised as spiritual power, but the real thing—was a miserable slog.

If I treated it the way I treated slaughter energy, which was always thrashing around on its own trying to kill living things, the spiritual power felt like it would crush itself or shatter on its own.

That makes it sound weak, but that was only because I still couldn't properly control or handle Golden Core–level spiritual power. It wasn't that I lacked talent!

…Maybe it was?

No, surely not?

I'd been diligently training my spiritual power for years, but there was a problem.

My foundation art was based on killing intent—the Slaughter Art, which had long since become the Heavenly Slaughter Art—and trying to train spiritual power on top of that foundation was obviously absurd.

So? Just learn a different foundation art, right?

"Whyyyyyyyy?!"

I was trying to train spiritual power—why the hell was it blocking me?! Sure, stacking a foundation art that already fused every basic skill on top of another one would wreck the balance, so ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠locking it out made sense, but still!

Wailing over the easy path being slammed shut like a guillotine, I was left with nothing but the miserable method of clumsily imitating cultivation arts one by one to train my spiritual power.

Naturally, the efficiency was garbage, it burned through time, it barely worked, and since it wasn't a skill, I couldn't skill-craft it either—so even proficiency crawled.

"…But the experience is looking weird."

Training experience was coming in. A lot of it.

A considerable amount.

Enough that I could level up roughly every two weeks.

I scratched my head and tried to figure out what was going on.

That familiar, slapdash, creaking, half-assed structural feel was unmistakable.

"It's a fucking broken game after all."

When did training experience come in the heaviest?

When you trained a low-level skill, and when you fully mastered a skill.

And right now, I was infinitely repeating a level-0 skill that never leveled up, all in the name of spiritual power training.

Low level, low efficiency, takes forever?

Then you got that much training experience for it.

The experience was being duplicated.

And the experience coming in this way didn't even take an efficiency hit.

Training experience came in as a percentage, after all!

"What the hell is this structure even built on."

If this hadn't been a reality patch, I would have torn the mod open and gone full detective mode figuring out why this nonsense was happening. Good thing I couldn't, I told myself, and kept training hard—until a thought suddenly hit me.

"…Come to think of it, even if I train like this here, I'll still have to clear maps to break through the cap, and I need to do stat crafting too."

Training experience couldn't be converted into residual ability points the way slaughter energy could, so stat crafting was off the table. All pure leveling got me was the raw level advantage to steamroll lower-level maps.

And cultivators had this godawful class effect—or trait, whatever—that cut experience in half against anything below their level.

The residual ability points you could get from the Training Ground weren't infinite either, and thanks to the mod conflict, the Training Ground's spawn rate was already abysmal.

"Maybe I should mix map clearing and training in moderation?"

Until now, the spiritual land Cheon Nan-cho made for me had been single-use, so once I used it I just buried myself in there and never came out. But if we could produce spirit veins that registered as permanent terrain items in tile form instead of one-shots, I could clear maps, base-return home, train, and run that cycle over and over.

"Alright, then—!"

"Ah, shit."

A defense event kicked off and stopped me cold just as I was about to stride cheerfully out of the base. A monster wave had started.

They'd all get chewed up by the kill zone I'd so carefully built and the decorations Cheon Nan-cho had prettily arranged, turning into a handful of slaughter energy and a few item scraps—but the problem was that while this was going on, I couldn't leave the base!

"No! Why! The second I finally try to go out—!"

It happened during training too, but the fact that it fired the moment I decided to leave made it feel targeted, and that pissed me off for no good reason.

The wave finally ended two days later.

"Alright, let's go!"

"Are you sure it's fine to just leave like this? What about the sect's defenses?"

"Unless it's an invasion event, other NPCs can't get in anyway, right? And what would they even come all the way here to eat?"

All that was left were materials and spirit stones dropped by invasion-event monsters—the ones whose lore, according to Cheon Nan-cho, was that they were after the leftover spiritual energy in the warehouse.

Cheon Nan-cho accepted that quickly enough, nodded, and slipped into my inventory. The moment she did, I left the base.

Map clearing was always the same: a mild haze, plus that arrhythmia-like flutter of excitement—or tension—from never knowing when some godawful event would pop.

More than anything, since combat gave zero skill experience, I leaned hard on Auto-Battle for most fights—the free wins you could just coast through.

Except when I was up against boss mobs that Auto-Battle didn't work on, that is!

But even then, one pattern was enough to crush them: dump damage from range with the Chopsticks bomb combo until they died, and if they somehow tanked it or dodged close, shatter them with a Spoon transformation.

Of course, that ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠was just me copying what my body did while Auto-Battle was fighting for me!

I didn't call Auto-Battle a god or call it invincible for nothing. Watching a body move with pure mechanical purpose—existing only to kill the enemy—was creepy enough to give you chills!

Just imitating Auto-Battle mode combat was enough combat power to solo boss mobs. If only there weren't that restriction against running Auto-Battle in boss fights, it would have been even better!

One catch, though: the Wheel—my Natal Dharma Treasure, no longer a mere skill but something woven into one with my soul—apparently couldn't be used through Auto-Battle anymore.

How did I find out? By mindlessly moving the Wheel during Auto-Battle. My body was busy tearing monsters apart, but because the Wheel was bound to my soul, I could still move it independently on top of that!

Whoa! Was this because it was a xianxia mod that threw balance out the window? The exclusive weapon's performance was insane! It let you run Auto-Battle and still manually stack extra combat power on top?

"Not doing it. Fuck that."

Auto-Battle was something you ran with your brain switched off for convenience, taking hits to experience, slaughter energy, and drop rates—and now I was supposed to add manual play on top of that just to raise my combat power? If this hadn't been a reality patch, I would have been cheering. Instead—

I hated the reality patch… Why…

I caught a bolt of lightning that came screaming out of nowhere with the Wheel and waited a moment for the message.

Confirming it wasn't misfortune, I took the lightning with my body and a random stat went up by one.

Messages are slow! I couldn't exactly pray for them to outrun lightning, but still!

Consoling myself that at least it wasn't misfortune, I fired up Auto-Battle again and went back to mindlessly clearing the map.