Don't Swallow a Soul
The instant spiritual energy flared from Elder Togo's true body, a shock slammed into my forehead. An ugly scream tore out of me before I could stop it, and I crumpled to the ground.
"Eekyaaak!"
Huh? What? Did Elder Togo just hit me? Why? A friendly NPC attacked me? That doesn't make any sense! Prisoner Mode! What are you doing?! Do your job! No—wait. A friendly NPC shouldn't be able to attack me in the first place?! Why? How?!
Still reeling from the mental shock, unable to form a single word, I kept rubbing the spot where the flick had landed—it burned like hell. Elder Togo sighed, pulled me into his arms, and stroked my head as he spoke in that patient, scolding tone of his.
"My little newborn, do you understand what it means to pluck out and devour a cultivator's spiritual root?"
"Isn't it a permanent consumable that raises your stats?"
"To a cultivator, the spiritual root is what draws in spiritual energy. It is also the core that forges that energy into a Golden Core—and ultimately, the foundation from which that core is refined into a Nascent Soul, so that one may achieve Deity Transformation."
"So it's like a soul?"
"You could think of it that way. If you consume such a spiritual root directly, another's soul will mingle with your own until everything turns turbid. Your realm might rise quickly—but you will never be able to break through the walls that matter."
So experience gains would still work, but breakthroughs would be locked. I understood the explanation—and yet the doubt wouldn't leave me. Because I distinctly remembered that when Auto-Battle was running, my body would sometimes yank out a cultivator's spiritual root first, convert it into slaughter qi, and eat it.
It never seemed to cause any problems, though. Maybe because I wasn't consuming them directly? Hmm—so eating them raw is catastrophic, but processing them first is fine? Is that how I should understand it?
I stole a glance at Elder Togo, not daring to ask again in case I got another flick for my trouble.
Prisoner Mode must have blocked it—there was zero actual damage—but the pain was still filthy, gut-wrenchingly real! For a split second, everything went black!
The shock hit harder because I'd never even imagined a friendly NPC could strike me. Sure, Elder Togo had only meant it as a disciplinary tap—but still, this made no damn sense!
God, this reality-patched bullshit…
While Hee seethed curses under her breath, completely off the mark, Togo was already staring up at the sky with half-lidded eyes.
He'd only given the newborn a light disciplinary flick—and yet every bit of damage short of the minor soul-shock delivered through his Nascent Soul had been nullified. Worse, the damage had reflected completely back onto his true body.
Whatever was watching over this newborn truly doted on her to an absurd degree.
Togo pulled his half-lidded gaze away from the red star looking down on him—as if to say it was always watching, so don't try anything foolish—and looked at the newborn still nestled in his arms, fussing with her forehead.
Any ordinary cultivator, attacked like that, would have reflexively struck back, defended, or fled. But the newborn simply stayed nestled in his arms, as if she trusted him completely.
Whether she trusted him or trusted the "green" the star displayed—he couldn't tell. But did he even need to distinguish between the two?
With that thought, Togo slipped through the eyes of the Nascent Soul that had once reached Deity Transformation, straight into the newborn's Mental World.
"Ah, you're here, Elder!"
The newborn's fragments—shattered emotions, other souls with their own self-awareness. Things a cultivator was supposed to cast aside. And yet the newborn clung to every last one of them with greedy determination.
A child's greed. The stubborn refusal to let go of what she had. An ordinary master would have severed or erased them to clear her path forward—but Togo had no such intention.
"Did you sneak in again?"
"Heh heh, that I did. How else am I supposed to see your faces? If the little newborn found out, she'd raise hell."
"Well, that's true!"
"Elder! Elder, pet me too!"
"Um… Elder, me too…"
Four little fragments of the newborn came running at him with all sorts of expressions, clinging and clamoring. Togo indulged them for a good while before noticing one fragment waiting with a weapon in hand. He smiled and nodded.
The fragment began swinging a massive spear far too large for her—looking for all the world like the spear was swinging the tiny newborn instead. But Togo saw at a glance that this was the result of diligently practicing the spear techniques he'd casually taught her. When she finished her forms, he pulled her into a hug and stroked her head.
"You've worked hard."
Until the newborn herself woke and entered her inner world, Togo stayed settled in her Mental World, teaching her fragments for a long, long time.
It was possible only because the Nascent Soul that had once reached Deity Transformation was what entered Hee's Mental World—and because Prisoner Mode kept them linked. Hee, of course, had no idea and was hard at work.
"Why the hell won't this work either?!"
She was training at the base.
This wasn't her usual practice of entering the Mental World to handle slaughter qi. This was the simpler kind—absorbing the primordial energy of heaven and earth through her Golden Core to accumulate spiritual power.
"Calm down a little, Hee. Take it slow."
"But—"
At Cheon Nan-cho's words, I focused again. She'd deliberately used her signature technique—burning through massive quantities of spirit stones to create a spirit land or spirit vein—and thickened the spiritual energy to an extreme density. I sat in the middle of that spirit land trying to absorb spiritual power, and it just wasn't working.
I wasn't used to handling spiritual power in the first place—only slaughter qi.
And according to Elder Togo, the Seas of Slaughter made my body especially resistant to absorbing spiritual power.
"…Maybe because I've been regenerating my body with slaughter qi for so long, it's gotten too used to nothing else."
Because slaughter qi was specialized purely for offense—no defense, no evasion—I'd leaned entirely on what amounted to a passive skill: [Restore HP on Kill]. I never expected it to come back and bite me like this.
Slaughter qi flows through my body.
Even as slaughter qi meant for killing living things courses through me, my body doesn't take damage—it regenerates. That's because my body has become one with the slaughter qi, assimilated to the point of being nearly identical.
That's why I can't take in spiritual power. My body is basically a lump of slaughter qi. The only ones who can stroke and hold a body like this are the friendly NPCs protected by the mods.
"Even trying to shove all the slaughter qi flowing through my body into the Mental World doesn't work."
The Status Window—a foundation built of slaughter qi itself—expresses and strengthens my flesh and soul as numbers. Put simply: I've stacked way too many stats.
Not a single gap left for spiritual power to settle into.
I can't force a space open either. Unlike other cultivators, I can't just dump all the slaughter qi I've built up and start over from zero.
Because the spiritual root I have is a lump of slaughter qi mimicking a spiritual root. Even though I gathered spiritual power, successfully formed a core, and completed my Golden Core—the central nucleus is still a Slaughter Spiritual Root made of slaughter qi.
Abandoning and discarding the slaughter qi would mean abandoning the cultivator class entirely—and declaring I'd just die when my lifespan ran out.
So does that mean I can't accumulate spiritual power at all?
"I'm starting to understand why the events are so full of lightning bolts…!"
Without the concentrated force of a lightning strike, spiritual power simply can't punch through the slaughter qi close enough to be absorbed. Which means the answer is simple.
"Cheon Nan-cho, you still have that spider corpse from before?"
"I've got it, yeah, but—"
"Throw it at me and blow it up."
A lightning-attribute spider corpse. Cheon Nan-cho had picked it up saying she'd turn it into a dharma treasure, but she hadn't made it yet—lucky for me. With that, I could convert this makeshift spirit vein she'd created into a lightning attribute.
"You're making me a decent dharma treasure later for this, got it?"
The spider shell, wrapped in plants like a cordyceps fungus, left Cheon Nan-cho's hand in a casual toss—and brilliant yellow lightning surged up at once.
The yellow lightning erupting from the spider shell she'd thrown into the makeshift spirit vein ate its way in, drowning every scrap of spiritual power around me in electric force.
I can't absorb ordinary spiritual power. My spiritual root is a Slaughter Root—anything that isn't slaughter qi can't even pierce through the slaughter qi to begin with, so I can't take it in at all.
To punch through the slaughter qi, it has to be lightning.
It has to be a bolt as powerful as a Heavenly Tribulation itself—only then can it break through my slaughter qi and deliver spiritual power to my Golden Core!
But unlike the lightning that falls during events, the spiritual lightning generated by consuming an already-dead spider corpse just gorged itself on the spirit vein's vast energy and lashed out wildly in every direction—scraping past my body without truly striking home.
At this rate, it was pure waste.
To focus the lightning on me—
In that instant, what flashed through my mind was the tower I'd built inside my Mental World. Half on instinct, the inspiration hit and my thoughts accelerated. The foundation of that tower in the Mental World was, of course, the Status Window itself—but—
There had been a central axis.
A large-scale area penalty that had burst out of a random misfortune event—a Minor Heavenly Tribulation that dealt fixed damage at regular intervals through vibration. When that Minor Heavenly Tribulation punched through the slaughter qi and fell into my Mental World, the clumped debris of the Seas of Slaughter had drawn it in. It had pulled the Minor Heavenly Tribulation all the way down into the Mental World!