How to Capture a Friendly NPC
"GYAAAAAAAH!!!"
"Hee-ah! Hee-ah! Snap out of it and eat this!"
The moment Cheon Nan-cho forced some strange liquid down my throat, something cold began circulating through my body, devouring spiritual energy and swelling in size before surging straight up into my head — and in an instant, it chilled my entire mind to ice.
"Fuck?! Fuck?! What the fuck is going on in there?!"
"Was the awakening agent's effect not strong enough this time?"
I ignored Cheon Nan-cho tilting her head and checked the point I'd loaded from — sure enough, it was the moment right after I'd half-wrecked the map and gotten frozen in place.
Whether it was the power of the Korean patch or not, the golden characters that had erupted from the Disaster Mountain — the thing that both imprisoned Elder Togo and sealed his power — were all written in Hangul.
So I made Hangul out of slaughter energy too.
The characters I forged in crimson Hangul were, naturally, a relentless repetition of the word that best channeled the power of slaughter energy: Die. They could lock horns with the golden characters and cancel them out completely, letting me interfere — but the problem was that those golden strings of text held enough power to imprison Elder Togo, who had once stood at the peak of the Deity Transformation realm. They had drained him until his realm collapsed, and the sheer volume and force of that power was overwhelming.
I had dumped an entire layer of my Sea of Slaughter into the fight, and even then — with my overloaded Natal Dharma Treasure, the wheel, cracking under the strain and the tower in my Mental World tilting — I could only corrode a tiny fraction of those golden characters!
That was why, the moment I saw Elder Togo about to kill himself to pass on his inheritance while I was half-dead from the collision's aftermath, I immediately hit Load.
Something — there had to be some other way!
"Cheon Nan-cho, how can I take a cultivator stronger than me as a prisoner the way I did with you?"
"Why would you even want to?"
"Because if I don't take him prisoner, he's going to die."
"To you?"
"If you want to get technical about it?"
Because the sect event was forcing me to kill him! How the hell did that make any sense?! What kind of world had an event that made you kill a friendly NPC?! This was pure eok-kka!!
"How strong is he that you're asking me this?"
"He used to be Deity Transformation. Right now he's… late Nascent Soul, maybe?"
"Wouldn't it be faster to just give up?"
The help text had betrayed me!
No — there had to be another way. I fretted and fretted, turning it over and over, until I suddenly started checking through my various mods. Just opening the mod list and looking burned through a massive amount of slaughter energy, but I'd be loading anyway, so it wouldn't matter.
"Use."
A random recovery event has been triggered.
Hwanga-gongdong's Lost Technique Recovery Event has been triggered!
You have entered the domain of Deity Transformation!
Load from the last save point?
Motherfucker.
Thinking about it, of course — if I wanted to bring Elder Togo back with me, I had to trigger the Property Recovery Event first. I'd come up with one possible method, but I'd have to test it myself to know for sure.
In the end, after two more loads, I met Elder Togo again, went through the whole process one more time, and only then asked him.
"Elder Togo! Even if it's just your Nascent Soul — please come out with me!"
"Baby, your talent is outstanding and the power you carry looks fine enough, but I don't believe your Golden Core can bear the Nascent Soul of someone who once achieved Deity Transformation. I can hardly kill my little one just so this old man can cling to a scrap of life a little longer."
"If it's my Mental World, I think it can hold Elder Togo's Nascent Soul."
"Even if my baby is that confident, you can't keep me in your mindscape forever, can you? Without something to anchor it, my Nascent Soul will simply fade away."
"You don't have to worry about that! So please — Elder Togo, won't you trust me just this once?"
"But then the inheritance I pass to you with my life will be incomplete. You'll probably receive less than half of a proper transmission."
"That's still better than Elder Togo dying!"
Togo nearly said it out loud — Is this child serious? What kind of cultivator talks like that? — as he looked down at the tiny baby bouncing up and down on his palm, practically demanding he accept already.
"…Elder Togo?"
He still didn't understand why this little one was so fond of him, but just looking at her made a smile rise unbidden. And so Togo decided to grant what was, in the end, little more than a child's whim.
"I only hope you won't complain later. If your Mental World can't hold me, I'll destroy myself so my baby doesn't get hurt."
It was practically a declaration of surrender. Delighted that I finally had a way to bring a friendly NPC back to base, I spammed the [Thanks] emote over and over!
"Then, baby — receive the inheritance."
"Yes! Property Recovery!"
Title confirmed: Successor of Hwanga-gongdong.
Recover Hwanga-gongdong's lost property?
Recovering Hwanga-gongdong's lost property.
Golden characters surged upward, and the colossal mountain Elder Togo had been shouldering slowly shrank. A power governed by laws different from my own was being forcibly drawn out of him and settling into the Disaster Mountain.
This was the procedure for recovering the property.
The true nature of this sect event was to extract every last scrap of the power, realm, and even soul that Elder Togo had built up, refine it all at once into the property, and transmit it to the successor of Hwanga-gongdong.
If Elder Togo hadn't been a friendly NPC, I would have had to kill him and rip it out by force! Of course, with my current strength, clearing the sect event that way would have been impossible anyway!
And since I had zero intention of killing Elder Togo — and every intention of bringing him back to base — I watched his enormous physical body transform into golden strings of text for refining the property, then reached both hands toward the Nascent Soul that erupted from within, larger than I was.
"Elder Togo!!!"
My Natal Dharma Treasure, Tatar's Wheel, burst forth and spun, drawing out the Sea of Slaughter connected to my Mental World. The Nascent Soul, which had been circling me once as if worried, slipped straight into my Mental World.
◈ Acquired the ancient giant 'Togo' as a prisoner.
At the same time, I closed both eyes.
I could see the Nascent Soul perched atop the red clouds of my Mental World, looking out over everything.
It had been imprisoned for so long, and it had left nearly all its power behind in the physical body, so the Nascent Soul was so small and weak it was hard to believe it had once achieved Deity Transformation — and yet, by all rights, someone at a mere Golden Core level like me should never have been able to contain it.
And I was a player: the pinnacle of the abnormal.
Even with a Nascent Soul entering my Mental World, the three-layered Sea of Slaughter and the innate talent of the Status Window that supported it didn't so much as flinch.
Well — to be honest, the realm gap was so enormous that my Golden Core shook pretty hard. So I temporarily sheltered the Golden Core inside the tower, then formed a body within my inner world.
"Elder Togo!"
"Baby, what on earth is this…?"
A toxic sea of slaughter energy heaved beneath his feet. Even as a Nascent Soul, he could tell that if he carelessly made contact with it, he would be swallowed whole. He couldn't even fathom how deep it ran — not even with his divine sense could he pierce all the way through — and he instinctively understood that unless he spread his Nascent Soul's spiritual energy to suppress the Sea of Slaughter, that ocean would try to devour him at any moment.
"So that's why my baby was so confident. What a remarkable inner world, to remain unshaken even with my Nascent Soul inside."
"Ehehe… Ah, then I'll hurry and settle the inheritance and go back with you, Elder!"
She seemed deliberately hesitant to say more, so he gently steered the conversation for her — and then warmly watched the little one who could only manage an awkward, expressionless little laugh in response.
As if ducking that gaze, the tiny baby crumbled from atop the tower, dissolving into a handful of blood that fell into the sea. Togo took to the sky and flew to the top of the tower where she had just been.
Look at this tower — crude yet solid, standing precarious but unyielding amid this vast Sea of Slaughter. He could see it clearly. After all, he had once been of the same giant race.
"It shows that my baby built this all on her own."
It was a rough, instinctive tower — no one's help, nothing learned from anywhere. But considering that a cultivator of mere Golden Core had raised and transcended it, the tower was a stark demonstration of the baby's talent.
That toxic Sea of Slaughter below, though — even across all the long years of Togo, who had once touched Deity Transformation, he had never heard of or seen anything like it. It was simply incomprehensible.
And so Togo withdrew his gaze from that impossibly inscrutable Sea of Slaughter and began examining the tower from every angle — smiling anew, because a tower built from raw, clumsy talent meant there was all the more he could teach his baby.