The Devil Called Gacha
Back in her previous life, Yu Hee had been the absolute king of losers — the kind of idiot who clung to garbage games for over eighteen hours a day (eight of which were spent managing and sorting mods).
That said, she hadn't only played garbage games.
People can't live on their favorites alone. Every so often she'd sample some critically acclaimed masterpiece or wildly popular title everyone swore was a god-tier game — then, as if possessed, she'd crawl right back to her trash heap of a game and choke it down like medicine. Still, the important point was this:
Yu Hee had hated gacha games with a burning passion since her previous life, and even after dropping into this reality-patched dumpster fire of a game, she still screamed at the randomness of events hard enough to make her throat raw.
There was a reason her main build in her past life had been a beginner-friendly turtle strategy — stacking every defensive skill and resistance she could find, surviving a flood of events, then using the guaranteed event rewards to stage a comeback.
Of course, the fact that she was playing an event-dependent RNG garbage game in the first place already made her a certified idiot. But to a Korean gamer — the living embodiment of double standards — that didn't matter. Any game she'd sunk time into was automatically her favorite, a god-tier masterpiece, and every other game was garbage. End of discussion.
She couldn't say that out loud, though. Even past-life Yu Hee had a conscience that twisted into painful little triangles at the thought, and she couldn't quite bring herself to call this absolute dumpster fire a masterpiece.
When a big-name game launched and some half-assed raft got floated as a "rescue ship" to recruit newbies, those newbies would barely take a nibble before the mountain of required mods made them cough up blood and die. After watching that dozens of times, you start to feel a certain way about things.
Anyway — the fact that Yu Hee grabbed the back of her neck and collapsed the moment she learned quest rewards were random gacha wasn't exactly a major crisis.
"Urgh… uh…"
"Did a heart demon get you again? You came back and just keeled over — you nearly gave me a heart attack."
Was this really a heart demon? Strictly speaking, it was more like an actual devil.
The devil of gacha… just thinking about it was terrifying.
For the record, the intermediate mission reward package had spat out one rare-grade weapon and a handful of spirit stones.
"Still… at least I can start stacking lucky events now. Let's look on the bright side…"
Even with Cheon Nan-cho nursing her, she'd been laid out groaning for over a month. When the mental shock was severe enough to shake your cultivation realm and leave you a wreck like this, you were supposed to steel your heart — but this time she hadn't even had a chance to brace herself.
"Is the heart demon any better?"
"I told you, it's not a heart demon. My realm got shaken by the psychological shock."
And when her realm shook, that meant the entire ocean of Slaughter Tribulation — not spiritual energy, but slaughter itself — had heaved. And when a sea heaves, what you get is a tsunami.
Slaughter Tribulation, by its nature, attacked living things. So the tsunami of slaughter surging up from inside her had slammed into her and knocked her flat — which was what Cheon Nan-cho kept calling a heart demon.
"I can't fall into demonic possession in the first place."
A few times, demonic possession had come knocking. Every single time, it drowned in the Slaughter Tribulation ocean or got crushed to death. Seriously, how weak could it be?
According to Cheon Nan-cho, demonic possession was a kind of tribulation that burrowed into a cultivator's wicked thoughts or weak points. But Yu Hee had no means of expressing emotion beyond the bare emotion indicators themselves.
Unless a heart demon put on a diving suit, plunged into that Slaughter Tribulation ocean three times over, and started mashing the [Rage] emotion indicator at the very bottom, it wasn't getting anywhere.
Heart demons and demonic possessions usually carried power roughly equal to the cultivator's own realm. But thanks to the joint collab between her innate ability and a pile of bugs, her slaughter capacity had long since blown past her realm — stacked into a three-layered ocean of Slaughter Tribulation. No heart demon was punching through that.
In theory, hoarding that much Slaughter Tribulation should have been the perfect breeding ground for demons — enough for them to spontaneously spawn, raise their heads, and form dozens of idol clubs.
But all three layers of that Slaughter Tribulation ocean had been built by Yu Hee herself, grinding tens of thousands of hours on Double Speed Mod in the Training Ground.
Every time she cheerfully dumped neutral NPCs and monsters into the slaughter sea, any demon that tried to be born got crushed under the sheer vastness of it and sank straight to the deeper layers — dead on arrival.
"Keep talking like that and Heavenly Tribulation will smite you."
"Huh? Doesn't Heavenly Tribulation only show up when you break through a realm?"
"It also drops when your lifespan runs out. Heaven goes, 'Hey, you're supposed to be dead — why are you still alive?' and tries to kill you. Survive it, and depending on your realm, you get a few more centuries."
"Ohhh. So you can just keep living forever?"
"Heaven goes, 'Oh, you tanked that one? Fine — next time I'm hitting harder!' and drops another tribulation. If you've raised your realm in the meantime, you live. If not, you die."
"Heaven sure is busy!"
Like a civil servant working straight off a manual.
"Heavenly Tribulation isn't just lightning, either. There's burning, surging killing intent, falling into demonic possession, getting trapped in eternal illusions — every kind of tribulation you can think of."
"What, so it's basically a power-up event waiting to happen?"
"Even you, Hee-a — if your killing intent goes completely haywire or you fall into demonic possession, wouldn't that be a problem?"
Yu Hee figured that no matter how much the river of killing intent flowed, it all emptied into the Slaughter Tribulation ocean anyway — so she could just swallow it whole. She nodded absently and headed into the training grounds.
Her realm shaking had cost her a whole month of wasted time. She needed to train hard just to make up for it.
Then a thought struck her.
"Isn't Heavenly Tribulation just an unlucky event?"
Hmm.
Hmmm.
The guaranteed Heavenly Tribulation event only kicked in when she crossed the Golden Core realm anyway. She scribbled the hypothesis in a corner of her mental notepad, shoved it aside, and went back to training.
She closed her eyes and entered her mindscape. A vast ocean of Slaughter Tribulation rolled and heaved.
At the abyssal floor of that three-layered slaughter sea, bearing the impossibly immense weight of it all, was her innate ability.
The Status Window and the countless mods branching from it propped up the Slaughter Tribulation ocean from the deep seafloor. That was also why activating or deactivating even a single mod burned through slaughter energy in massive quantities.
Down on that abyssal floor, Yu Hee's tiny body moved back and forth along the slaughter pathways inside herself.
She was training her transformation skill — the Body Transformation Technique.
It was an absurdly broken skill that inflated her physical stats by a percentage just by activating it, so she focused on it heavily in the Training Ground.
Training the Body Transformation Technique while tanking the vast Slaughter Tribulation ocean with her body inside the mindscape built proficiency far more efficiently.
The intermediate spirit vein's effect also gave her a fifty percent boost to training experience, but since the Body Transformation Technique raised physical stats, it needed massive external force to temper the body.
Transforming into a giant meant the giant's body needed force strong enough to temper it — something an ordinary cultivator could never obtain.
But the three-layered Slaughter Tribulation ocean was so crushing that even the lightest first layer could squash a heart demon flat. Perfect for Body Transformation Technique training.
As a bonus, she could refine slaughter energy from the ocean along the pathways flowing through her body — drawing it in through her mouth, expelling it through her nose — dual-tasking transformation skill proficiency with slaughter ocean purification.
She trained in a state of pure self-forgetfulness.
Part of it was that training had gotten fun. The more she trained the Body Transformation Technique, the more she felt her physical stats rising permanently — not just while the skill was active, but even when it was deactivated.
No matter how much slaughter energy she converted into leftover stat points or stacked through events, the amount of slaughter needed for each conversion grew exponentially. By now, even clearing an entire map barely yielded a single leftover stat point. And events didn't just raise stats — they dropped them at random, too. So a skill that permanently raised physical stats just from training was something she had no choice but to focus on.
"Hee-a, stop that and get over here."
"What, is it class time already?"
"Quit grumbling. You're the one who asked me to teach you."
"Mumble mumble."
She hadn't expected actual one-on-one lessons, though.
"Where did we leave off last time… ah, we were talking about True Immortals."
"Real immortals!"
"That's not what it means. A True Immortal is a kind of higher bloodline and a cultivation realm."
"If it's a bloodline, doesn't that have nothing to do with other cultivators?"
"If a human keeps cultivating long enough, they undergo a racial evolution into a higher bloodline. That's why they're called True Immortals. Demonic beasts usually advance into True Dragons."
"Evolution!"
"They're rare enough that a single drop of their blood contains enough spiritual energy to create a spirit stone mine in the lower realms."
So the drop rates on their loot were garbage. Got it.
"For the record, humans can also use special techniques to steal the blood of other demonic beasts or cultivators and advance into True Dragons. Same the other way around — demonic beasts can eat humans and become True Immortals."
"Can't you do both?"
"The blood's different, so no."
Blood-type incompatibility, basically. Why was the xianxia world like this? The things that should work somehow didn't, and the things that shouldn't work somehow did.
"Cultivators are basically a kind of spiritual body made of spiritual energy, right?"
"I mean… yeah?"
"So with special blood or techniques, you can change races too. Just like you, Hee-a."
"…?"
"?"