Unlocking the Mission Window
With a means of protecting the quest NPC already secured, I immediately pulled out the Wheel to boost my movement speed and set off, leaving the map I'd just finished scouting.
"Hmm-hmm."
I hummed a little tune to let out some of the excitement my blank face refused to show, toddling along without a care in the world. Of course it didn't matter that I had no idea where the quest objective actually was.
I'd taken a quest from a quest NPC. The fact that it was a quest and not an event was the important part—because that locked the next map as a quest map.
That was why I'd told her I could grant pretty much any wish she wanted.
Quests exist to be solved by the player, after all!
Transferring regions...
Abode of Bi Yeon-ryeong
I checked the quest map's name on the minimap and looked around. An "abode," huh? So this whole map was basically one big hermit's cave.
I'd been half-expecting to have to wipe out an entire sect or something!
If I just flattened the entire map, wouldn't that be revenge enough? Not like I had any other way to drag the bastard back. I spun the Wheel and started flinging slaughter energy everywhere at random.
"Who dares touch the seal!"
"How dare you set foot in Bi Yeon-ryeong's abode uninvited!"
One gray dot, one red dot—confirmed at a glance on the minimap. I opened my mouth.
"Auto-Battle."
My body moved on its own. A casual flick of the hand sent the Wheel flying; it punched a Wheel-sized donut hole straight through the red-dot cultivator's torso. Right behind it, Chopsticks unfurled like a halo of light and rained down on the gray-dot cultivator, turning him into a slab of holey melted cheese.
You have won the Auto-Battle.
Erasing two Core Formation cultivators who hadn't even hit level 300 was literally easier than eating cold porridge.
But for just two measly NPCs, the experience and slaughter energy pouring in felt... off.
It was more than what I'd get from beating a same-level field boss. Not a misperception—it was definitely more.
God, the balance in this thing is filthy. Xianxia mode, my ass!
"How dare you barge into my abode and run wild like this!"
Reclusive Swift Bi Yeon-ryeong has appeared!
A Golden Core cultivator.
An enemy around my own level, sure, but—
"What the fuck is wrong with your border, you bastard!"
"What nonsense is this! Die!"
The border that marked a [Boss] monster and the border that marked a [Field Boss] were stacked on top of each other, decorating the name Bi Yeon-ryeong with a frame twice as thick as normal. Boss modifiers and field-boss modifiers mostly overlapped anyway, so I could just treat it as a field boss... until the thought of the Field Boss Enhancement mod hit me.
"Mode conflict again, you piece of shit!"
The field boss Bi Yeon-ryeong's attack couldn't be dodged or blocked. Of course it couldn't—he was wearing the tier-one prefix Swift.
The field boss's strike sheared off one of my arms and still wasn't done; it punched a hole clean through my body. The pain of regenerating with slaughter energy was somehow worse than the pain of getting hit, and that just pissed me off more. I rolled the Wheel—my True Name Dharma Treasure, bound to my soul.
Rings of slaughter energy uncoiled from the Wheel and wrapped around both me and the field boss at once. That sealed off any escape. At the same time, a red cloud of slaughter energy billowed out of me and filled the ring to the brim.
Before the field boss, who was using spiritual power and Dharma energy to hold the slaughter energy at bay, could cast some weird technique, I barked the command cleanly.
"Detonate!"
I collapsed the Slaughter Tetris. More precisely: I yanked out the foundation stone of the refined slaughter energy I'd stacked up like a Tetris tower, so that the refined slaughter energy slipped free of control, turned hostile toward every living thing around it, and exploded outward in every direction. It was also a skill I'd simply renamed Bomb.
Naturally, even an uncontrolled slaughter bomb still had slaughter energy as its source, so it dealt zero damage to me—and even restored some of the slaughter energy I'd spent. A free AoE, basically.
My still-immature divine sense couldn't scan a cultivator of the same realm, so just in case I tried chanting a resurrection spell.
"Did I get him?"
"How daaaaaare you—!"
He'd survived even after I'd dumped a ton of slaughter energy into him. Either that was the field boss for you, or the resurrection spell had been a little too strong.
He looked fatally wounded, but cultivators who'd reached a real realm were the stubborn kind that would steal a body and come back as long as their head or their core dantian was intact. Remembering the tip that cleanup was the important part, I drew a rare-grade weapon.
"Shut up."
His lines had been way too cliché from the start! Barely clinging to life and the first thing out of his mouth was "How dare you?" I'd been planning to take him prisoner if he surrendered and smash him to pieces as an item-destruction performance in front of the quest NPC.
Red slaughter energy coated the weapon, shaping itself into a giant Spoon. The Spoon swung, aiming to crush the skull of the cultivator whose eyes were blazing with spiritual power as he prepared some ultimate technique.
"It's useless! Now that I've layered my body into the reverse world, your pathetic attacks can't even touch meeeee—?!"
"Yeah, this is fixed damage."
The Spoon split the field boss's half-phased body clean in two. The rare weapon at the center of it hit zero durability and vanished into light without leaving so much as a speck of dust. The field boss, bisected as if space itself had cracked, flickered between sharp and blurred, then finally rolled his eyes white with a wet flash.
"Wait, wasn't that your last resort just now? Learn when to quit."
Disgustingly tenacious, this guy.
Slaughter energy flowed along the pathways inside and outside my right arm. Once it had claimed enough, I simply extended that right arm and muttered,
"Transform."
Whether it was because of the Reality Patch or just because the Transform skill level had gone up, partial transformation had become possible at some point.
Yu Hee's tiny right hand ballooned into a giant fist, seized the field boss—cracked space and all—and slowly began to squeeze.
"Gyaaaaaah! Like this! Am I really going to die this absurdlyyyyyy!"
"God, you're loud."
No skip button. Super inconvenient. A mute option would have been nice. One-shot monsters and cultivators only got a death rattle, a short scream, or a hollow last word—but boss-tier cultivators always dragged it out and monologued forever before dying. It was genuinely annoying.
Despite his desperate thrashing, the field boss inside the fully clenched fist was crushed into paste and annihilated. The spinning Wheel dismantled the paste-like corpse object and reclaimed the experience and slaughter energy.
"Ah, I leveled up."
Cultivators really are the tastiest, aren't they.
For a xianxia mode, meeting cultivators was surprisingly hard.
Just in case there were more, I spent a little extra time hunting down and killing every NPC marked on the minimap. That should have completed the quest. I'd also beaten the field boss and finished terrain scouting in one go, so I headed straight back to the previous map via return and found the quest NPC.
Hmm. The number of background extras had dropped massively, and the old lady had turned into a middle-aged beauty, but otherwise nothing seemed wrong!
"I've taken your revenge, Granny!"
You have completed a mission for the first time.
Mission Window has been unlocked.
It had changed from Quest Window to Mission Window?!
I was so startled my eyes went round. The granny—now a middle-aged beauty—was thanking me and babbling something or other, but I barely heard a word of it.
◈ Mid-Grade Mission Reward Package acquired
◈ Minor Fortune accumulated in Mission Window
"Well, I'm off, Granny."
I lightly skipped the middle-aged beauty's sulky line about how she wasn't a granny anymore, thank you very much, senior, then immediately used Base Return to head back to the stronghold and opened the Mission Window.
"So they stripped out all the tiny luck rewards and left just three kinds?"
Whether the xianxia-mode creator had linked this on purpose or the Reality Patch had rewritten the Quest Window—sorry, Mission Window—was anyone's guess. Either way, now that I had a Mission Window, I could go looking for missions on my own.
In this dumpster-fire of a game, the more luck events the better!
"Let's see what this package is."
◈ On use, obtain a random mid-grade mission reward.
◈ — View Details —
Oh, for fuck's sake?
"It's a random gacha?!"