Amazing Luck — Meteor Shower
Cheon Nan-cho latched onto the decoration that had newly evolved to Epic grade, looking it over this way and that before launching into a rapid-fire explanation befitting her role as a help system.
"Hmm, its spiritual root has bloomed. This little one is a cultivator now too! Since it's a puppet cultivator, don't call it a monster — it properly belongs among the spirit beasts, okay? So quit doing pointless crap."
"Damn."
Cut down in a single stroke. How the hell did she even figure that out?
No, wait — there was another angle.
"Wouldn't calling it a monster sound stronger and cooler than just calling it a spirit beast? Hmm? A rabbit spirit beast sounds ordinary, but a rabbit monster feels insanely powerful, right?"
At my serious pitch, the rabbit crossed its arms and began pondering at length. See? You think it's persuasive too, don't you?!
"Hee, don't overthink her words. You're the one who loses either way. I get that you're excited your spiritual energy opened up, but still. What? You were just pretending to deliberate because you were worried Hee would get hurt? If you keep indulging her like that every time, there'll be no end to it."
"Fuck."
"See? She's sulking again already. You're thinking it's my fault? If I'd left her alone, she would've gotten full of herself and tried something weird on you."
"What weird thing? I just thought, since it evolved from eating a slaughter stone, what if I fed it my slaughter energy instead of a stone?!"
"That's exactly the weird thing! Unlike slaughter stones, where most of the slaughter energy materializes and crystallizes into a stable form, if your slaughter energy gets injected directly into it, the spiritual energy it just opened up would die completely!"
Watching the trembling rabbit pitifully hide behind Cheon Nan-cho — who was smaller than it — I shook my head.
Fine, then I'll experiment with other things.
I brought over a few decorations and tried pouring slaughter energy into them, blasting them with killing intent, or embedding slaughter stones — but every last one writhed and shattered into pieces.
"So it only works with slaughter stones condensed from essence blood."
"What? That top-grade spirit stone earlier was your essence blood?"
"It was something I spilled while failing at cultivation."
"Ah, damn, I should've eaten that. Looks like it just wasn't meant for me."
Leaving behind Cheon Nan-cho, who stroked the fluffy head of the rabbit she was riding even as she lamented, I got to my feet. Cultivation had failed, and I'd roughly figured out the simple principle behind experience generation.
"Alright, I'm heading out!"
"Have fun~"
The area penalty had ended, but I still couldn't go to high-level maps, so I headed for same-level ones. And by same-level maps, I mean maps within about ten levels of my own!
Go any higher or lower and the level correction gets ridiculously brutal.
Roaming the maps like this was a massacre for experience and slaughter energy, a hunt for materials and equipment, and also a bid for permanent stat boosts from events.
All stats permanently increase by 1.
Fortune mostly meant stat boosts or elite mobs popping out, while misfortune came in every flavor imaginable — so of course there were more fortune events that raised stats than misfortune events that lowered them. That was the whole structure: stats go up.
That said, the premise was that you could face-tank, block, or endure every single misfortune event that came your way!
Currently applied debuffs are randomly changed.
Hah! I don't have any debuffs on me right now. Sure, this event only triggers when you have debuffs, but the one I do have is a permanent one: Unable to gain skill proficiency from combat.
That one had dropped as a full-on Cosmic Misfortune event — way beyond anything a Small Misfortune could touch. So the Small Misfortune fizzled out without doing a damn thing.
Nice. That burned one misfortune stack.
Feeling oddly cheerful, I cheerfully hunted down monsters, spamming Auto-Battle and mowing them down, sweeping through the map at a rapid clip.
Then, without the slightest warning, that familiar eok-kka sensation came surging up — the kind that makes every hair on your head stand on end. I flinched and raised my slaughter energy on pure reflex.
Cheon Nan-cho had mentioned that some cultivators whose spiritual energy reached the heavens developed a sense that could foresee the future. Apparently I had something similar.
A kind of eok-kka event radar!
"Ah, fuck."
The fact that it said Amazing instead of Small or Grand already confirmed this was one of those ridiculously rare eok-kka events. I yanked out my Natal Dharma Treasure — the Wheel — in a hurry.
And then the eok-kka event's contents finally appeared.
An absurdly rare event that was supposed to mean nothing more than pretty, meaningless meteor showers falling from the sky. But the real nature of this piece-of-shit game was that the meteors spawned in numbers based on your computer's performance and graphics-overloaded the whole thing until the game crashed.
And now that reality had been patched in, the sky was actually cracking open like a broken game screen, and meteor showers were raining down. Aimed where? Naturally, straight at me — the player!
"Base Return! Base Return! No, is this eok-kka for real, you fucking—?!"
I tried to escape in a hurry, but of course it was blocked like it was never going to work. The result of this event was nothing. Literally nothing. Just a pretty meteor shower effect going off!
And yet whenever it triggered, the game would crash or kick you out and force a load from save.
And my current save point was—
"When I got the base, you absolute lunatic!"
Whether it was because of the reality patch or a collision between xianxia mode and the other modes, I was stuck in a completely broken situation where loading worked but saving didn't.
On top of that, with the reality patch in place, there was no guarantee that a "Load" would even happen if the game crashed!
I scrambled to think of a way out. How the hell was I supposed to deal with an event that was just meteors pouring out of the sky—
Reality was patched now, right? So if I physically cleared those meteors away or reduced them somehow and cut down the effects, wouldn't that work?
No time to hesitate, and not enough time to deliberate. I opened my mouth and shouted.
"Transform!"
The slaughter energy that had been endlessly circulating along its paths while occupying my body activated all at once. I became the core nucleus, donning a colossal body made of slaughter energy. The giant raised both short arms toward the sky, spreading them wide as if cheering.
Above the head of the giant Hee, the equally enlarged Wheel floated and rotated slowly, continuously scooping slaughter energy from the sea of slaughter energy.
Maybe because the Wheel had also been enlarged by the Transform skill, it went beyond merely scooping from the first sea and began drawing from the second sea of slaughter energy as well. The volume was like a bottomless well.
By pouring out more slaughter energy than was being consumed, Hee's body grew larger and larger — and the rate of slaughter energy consumption scaled exponentially with it.
I'd forced the Transform skill past its skill level by piling on slaughter energy, so of course my golden core was screaming under power that didn't match my realm. I forcibly ignored it and—
Using the fact that skills scaled up with the giant body, I drew out my Master skill, Chopsticks. Not the halo of needles — just two chopsticks, one in each hand, the way I'd first used them. Of course, they were absurdly enormous.
And then I swung both arms and hurled those chopsticks with everything I had straight at the falling meteor showers.
The chopsticks shot upward, propelled by slaughter energy like blood, and collided with the meteors. Even without the auto-tracking function — since these weren't living creatures — more than half the falling meteors were wiped out at once. I barely even confirmed it before the Transform skill forcibly canceled, the backlash dropping me limp and face-first onto the ground.
Of course. I hadn't just activated Transform — I'd gone giant, forced its performance even higher, and then thrown Chopsticks at full power. I didn't have the strength left to so much as twitch a fingertip.
And if the targets had been living creatures, I could at least have recovered some slaughter energy. But they were basically just effects, so they gave me nothing!
You witnessed a meteor shower and feel better!
Are you fucking kidding me.
Feel better? Who the hell are you messing with.
An event that does absolutely nothing, and even in the game it didn't raise your stats — pure garbage. And yet the effects were needlessly dazzling and over-the-top!
I didn't even have the strength to move my mouth, so I cursed inwardly — but relief at having survived the eok-kka event washed over me all the same. From the excessive slaughter energy consumption, Hee blacked out on the spot.
Above her head, beyond the cracked sky slowly mending as the meteor showers recovered—
A blood-red star was still looking down at Hee in silence.