Failed Training and the Max-Level Rabbit
A radiance of spiritual energy, brilliant beyond measure, slowly drifted down toward the endlessly circulating, surging Sea of Slaughter below.
It was her materialized Golden Core.
The closer the Golden Core came to the Sea of Slaughter—the same Golden Core that had been flooding the entire vast ocean with its spiritual light—the more that light scattered off the slaughter-waters in a dazzling, prismatic blaze.
And then, at her will, her Natal Dharma Treasure rose into the air: the wheel. It plunged straight down with a heavy plunk, sinking into the Sea of Slaughter and boring all the way to the abyssal depths.
A Natal Dharma Treasure.
A personal weapon bound to the soul.
Which meant that Tatar's Wheel was, for all intents and purposes, a fragment of Yu Hee's own soul.
That was why it could endure the crushing weight of a threefold Sea of Slaughter and drive itself all the way to the deep. But that was also its limit. The wheel had struggled just to scoop from the first sea; the fact that it had somehow forced its way to the abyss deserved a silent round of applause.
From the Status Window that formed the floor of the abyss, she snapped off a piece of the bottom and floated it up.
She couldn't see the system message right now—not while she was submerged in the Mental World—but she knew instinctively what it would have said: that the three base stats making up the Status Window, not merely her leftover points, had permanently dropped by a fraction.
This wasn't residual stat points. This was foundation already spent to raise her stats, the very bedrock that made up the abyssal floor of the Status Window. Converting the nature of something like that a second time was all but impossible.
So she used it as-is.
She stood the broken-off floor piece on end like a lattice, shielding the wheel from the abyssal pressure. It was only a tiny fragment, but for protecting a single wheel shrunk down to a fraction of its size, it was more than enough.
Even with that protection, though, the wheel still couldn't move an inch. If she could just get it to turn once, momentum would carry it from there—but getting that first rotation was the problem.
Above the Sea of Slaughter, the Golden Core began to turn, slow and deliberate.
Tatar's Wheel, her Natal Dharma Treasure, had been forged by refining a wheel of pure slaughter energy with the spiritual power of the Golden Core. Resonating with that Core, the wheel started to turn—sluggishly, grinding against the abyssal pressure, but unmistakably following the Golden Core's rotation.
She focused. And focused. And focused again, for a stretch of time she could no longer measure. At last, she managed a single full rotation—
"Kh—! Cough! Haaack—!"
She was violently ejected from the Mental World. She hit the floor in a sitting sprawl, toppled bonelessly onto her back, and vomited up the blood that had surged into her throat.
"Ghhrrk…!"
Even as the fragment of floor she'd torn free—her precious, hard-earned stats—rode out with the blood and splattered across the ground, she couldn't control her body well enough to finish coughing it all up. She made wet, rattling sounds for a while, then gave up and went limp.
Goddamn it. Even regeneration wouldn't touch this.
"Fuck. I really thought that was gonna work…"
The plan had been to use the wheel—capable of moving the Sea of Slaughter—as a power source, then combine the Golden Core and the Status Window, her innate talent, to construct a clearly defined self inside the Mental World.
Like building a puppet, basically.
The soul would be the Natal Dharma Treasure, the wheel. The body would be shaped from her innate talent and the Golden Core. And the inside would be filled with the Sea of Slaughter. That had been the idea. It had failed so hard it wasn't even funny.
Maybe she should've just done some other kind of training.
She took a quick look at the Sea of Slaughter still roiling from the failed attempt, the flotsam drifting lazily across its surface, and the Golden Core whose light had dimmed—then pulled straight out of the Mental World. She slammed the Rest emote as hard as she could, the way you'd mash a button, and cut her consciousness off cold.
"Revive!"
The moment the emote finished regenerating her and her awareness snapped back, she sat up and stretched long and hard.
The Sea of Slaughter had been thrashing so hard that even the nearby Golden Core had gotten caught in the turbulence and taken damage. Ordinary slaughter-based regeneration hadn't been enough; she'd had no choice but to burn the Rest emote.
What, you think she should've saved her consumables?
Sure, they were precious—and more importantly, in this shitty broken game, anything even remotely resembling a healing potion was rare as hell. The few that existed restored fixed amounts instead of percentages, too.
Besides, she'd dumped all her consumables in storage before entering the training grounds. She didn't have any on her anyway.
"…? The fuck?"
Why was she lying on a bed?
No wonder it felt so hard.
She blinked blankly up from a bed of raw wood and stone, stiff as a board—and spotted Cheon Nan-cho and the decorations off in the corner, heave-hoing away at a mineral vein with a bright green pickaxe.
Where the hell had they even found that?
"Oh, Hee-a, you're up? A huge mineral vein spawned over here, so I called the puppets and we've been mining it together! I have no idea what kind of training you did this time to make a vein this big!"
Right. She'd failed her training, the Sea of Slaughter had overflowed a little, and she'd permanently lost some stats in the process. Come to think of it, that vein had formed right where she'd coughed up her vital blood after the failure.
And if she thought about it further, the mineral veins had started appearing back when she'd been deliberately failing her cultivation techniques in a loop—exploiting the fact that she couldn't learn basic arts twice—to duplicate training experience. Peak bug abuse.
"…Huh?"
Failing training affected the surrounding environment.
This time, a catastrophic failure had made the Sea of Slaughter overflow. The sea itself had shrunk by a fraction too small to notice, she'd permanently lost a piece of her stats—and in exchange, an artificial mineral vein had formed inside the base.
So if the reason a slaughter-stone spirit-vein mine kept growing outward from wherever she sat, every time she deliberately failed training to duplicate experience, was—
"Slaughter energy was leaking every time I failed? I never felt a thing."
She scrambled into a proper posture on the bed and shut her eyes.
Heavenly Slaughter Art was built on killing intent. Forcing a completely different kind of energy—the spiritual power of a basic cultivation technique—through her body was a guaranteed failure, and the spiritual energy she'd been circulating simply got consumed.
Consumed—?
She focused on the reaction that happened when spiritual energy collided with slaughter energy inside her body, both of them burning away at once.
She had so much slaughter energy, and so little spiritual power—less than half of what a normal Golden Core cultivator would have—that she never would have noticed without deliberately concentrating and tearing the entire process apart step by step.
She could feel it: the experience points generated when slaughter energy and spiritual energy collided and annihilated each other.
She understood why failing granted experience. She understood why the mineral veins formed. Of course they did—more experience was leaking out than she was actually receiving!
"GYAAAAAAAH!!!"
"Just ignore her, it's one of her usual episodes! Come on, forget Hee-a—let's dig this vein faster! All of this turns into slaughter stone that makes you stronger!"
At Cheon Nan-cho's urging, the decorations went right back to swinging their green jewel pickaxes like dedicated little miners. Yu Hee didn't even have room to care. She was too busy despairing over experience points she could see but couldn't pick up.
Experience generated this way mostly poured away like sand. Only a tiny fraction could actually be recovered.
It felt less like she was gaining XP and more like the experience was simply too heavy for her level—too dense to collect.
"The higher I level, the more this failed-training XP is gonna tank! Goddamn shitty broken game!"
She'd been thrilled that a bug was letting percentage-based training experience duplicate infinitely. But somehow, every time she leveled up, the gaps between those experience ticks had felt longer and longer—
And now cold reality had shoved that truth in her face and told her to cut the crap. She was mid-sigh when a system message suddenly filled her vision. She rubbed her eyes.
"The fuck."
She turned her head. One of the decorations was holding a crystallized purification of pure slaughter energy in both hands, arms raised in triumph.
What it held was literally pure slaughter essence—residual stat points that could almost be called fragments of a Golden Core. Stats that had once occupied a place in her Status Window, until she'd torn them free for training.
When she'd coughed them up along with her vital blood and the overflowing Sea of Slaughter, they'd soaked into the floor and formed a spirit-vein mine. Somehow, this particular chunk had kept its shape and crystallized inside that vein.
The moment that purified essence settled into the decoration, a blinding violet radiance bloomed.
"Max-level rabbit?"