Solo Stream (2)
Far beyond the outskirts of Falcon City lay an ancient fortress reduced to crumbling ruins: the Ghost Citadel. Situated much closer to Minox—the next settlement where dimensional travelers would eventually congregate—it remained virtually unknown to the general player base.
The player community had already begun assigning unofficial tiers to the various hunting grounds scattered across Eternal Life. Among them, the Ghost Citadel was relegated to Rank D.
Prime leveling zones like the Valley of the Dead enjoyed Rank A status, while reasonably decent grounds took Ranks B or C. From Rank D downward, locations were practically written off as wasteland. In fact, among all the hunting grounds discovered and publicly logged so far, the Ghost Citadel was universally considered the single least popular.
With an expansive world brimming with superior alternatives, an unpopular hunting ground was doomed to fall into ever-deepening obscurity. At least, that vicious cycle repeated unbroken until one pivotal game mechanic came to light.
The Karma Accumulation System. When was that first discovered again? Word trickled out so gradually through whispers and rumors that I can't pin down the exact date.
The Karma Accumulation System was an underlying rule that applied exclusively to open fields. Thanks to its existence, truly abandoned hunting grounds ceased to exist in Eternal Life. Even years later, when the bulk of the player base reached higher levels and low-tier zones cleared out, starter regions were never truly forsaken.
It's been roughly three weeks since the Ghost Citadel's coordinates went public. With that much time, the backlog of unharvested karma should be immense. A Karma Singularity has definitely formed.
What Sanghyuk sought was the Karma Singularity—a phenomenon where saturated, uncollected karma warped the local environment and its monsters.
When respawning monsters went unhunted for extended periods, karma pooled in the area like stagnant water. Once it crossed a critical threshold, it triggered an anomalous event known as a Karma Singularity. The phenomenon unfolded in stages; at this stage in the game's lifespan, enough time had passed to trigger Phase One—Bonus Field Creation—and Phase Two—Field Boss Spawn.
Wait any longer, and some passing wanderer might stumble across the prize. Now was the ideal window to crack open the honeypot.
The Ghost Citadel was structured as a descending subterranean labyrinth. Even if a Bonus Field materialized, it would manifest where no ordinary traveler dared to tread: between the seventh and eighth basements.
Sanghyuk understood the mechanics of the singularity well, but he had no way of knowing who originally cleared the Ghost Citadel's anomaly in his previous life, or precisely when. Regressor or not, he wasn't omniscient. When dealing with unknowns, swift, preemptive action was the only way to head off potential disasters.
"Begin recording. Set perspective to overhead tower view."
Sanghyuk intended to build a backlog of footage whenever an opportunity arose, configuring his capture settings before stepping across the threshold.
Schwing.
Blade drawn, the Traveler's Treasure Sword gleamed faintly as he walked through the cracked archway of the citadel.
The ruins were infested with the so-called skeletal series: Skeleton Soldiers, Skeleton Archers, Skeleton Knights, and Skeleton Mages. The deeper one ventured, the deadlier the bone-clad horrors became. Skeletons were an everyday nuisance across Planet Trinac, meaning Sanghyuk had butchered his fair share over the years. He had clashed against Dragon Tooth Warriors—the absolute pinnacle of the skeletal hierarchy—more times than he could count. While true Dragon Tooth Warriors wouldn't spawn here, the basic combat doctrine of any skeleton remained largely identical.
A rusted blade sliced downward in a vicious overhead cleave, packed with all the kinetic weight a Skeleton Soldier could muster.
Sanghyuk tilted the flat of the Traveler's Treasure Sword at a sharp angle, parrying the strike with a smooth deflection. In the distant future, parrying would become second nature to any aspiring pro gamer—and indeed, to any decent player who took EL seriously. But reaching that level of widespread mechanical literacy would take another two to three years. In the present meta, nobody even conceived that such nuanced blade deflection was possible.
Clang!
Having shed the brunt of the swing, Sanghyuk stepped in and drove his shoulder straight into the monster's chest.
Crack! Rattle!
Skeletons possessed poor physical balance by nature. Caught off-guard by the explosive tackle, the creature staggered back several paces. Having forged the distance he needed, Sanghyuk unleashed three rapid-fire swings with the Traveler's Treasure Sword.
Swish, swish, swish!
The Lower-grade Triple Slash flowed naturally from his stance. Yet the trajectory was bizarre. A Triple Slash was meant to cleave flesh with the razor edge, but Sanghyuk subtly twisted his wrist, battering the monster with the flat of the steel. He wasn't slicing—he was bludgeoning.
Thwack! Crack-crack-crack!
Against brittle bones, blunt trauma was incomparably more destructive than a clean cut. The textbook approach called for a mace or war hammer, but the Traveler's Treasure Sword boasted such an overwhelming base attack stat that swinging it far outclassed any mediocre club.
Instead of swapping weapons, Sanghyuk simply wielded his sword like a blunt instrument. It sounded simple enough in theory, but executing it required freakish finesse. Manually overriding an active sword skill labeled "Slash" to deliver blunt-force trauma mid-motion was impossible without elite physical control.
Keep pounding. Hit bone long enough, and it crumbles.
Adhering to the golden rule of skeleton hunting, Sanghyuk hammered away until the soldier's skull fractured and burst into splinters.
Crunch! Clatter!
The moment the heap of bones collapsed, Sanghyuk threw himself laterally across the stones.
Thwip—thunk!
An arrow whistled past the empty air where he had stood a heartbeat prior, biting deep into the masonry behind him. It wasn't a dodge born of visual tracking, but pure kinetic instinct. He had caught the Skeleton Archer clawing out of the flagstones from the corner of his eye right before crushing the soldier's skull, but finishing off his target prevented him from pinpointing the release. He had simply trusted his gut.
Rolling smoothly out of the dive, Sanghyuk rose to one knee and thrust his open palm toward the archer.
Card Synthesis Skill — Flame Stone
Fwoosh—boom!
A flaming stone flared to life, hurtling across the chamber before detonating squarely against the Skeleton Archer's brow.
Sanghyuk had synthesized fifty Flame Stone cards before departing for the ruins. Fifty wasn't an endless stockpile, so every cast had to count. The consignment shop only had fifty units of Black Stone Powder listed, capping his immediate production, but the ingredient was common enough to replenish easily later.
Crack—crumble!
Concussive flame was the bane of dry bones. The archer's skull detonated on impact, its ribcage instantly collapsing into a heap of charred debris. Exploiting that exact vulnerability was why Sanghyuk had prioritized Flame Stone above all other early formulas.
Soldiers were crushed in close quarters; archers were sniped clean with Flame Stone. Both monster variants were tuned to high enough levels that ordinary players would only dare engage them in coordinated duos or trios. Sanghyuk, however, carved through them alone, relying purely on his personal mechanical execution.
The respawn cadence in a Bonus Field really is relentless.
Sanghyuk stood deep within the citadel's seventh basement. The catacombs plunged eight levels down, and starting from B7, the Karma Singularity had converted the entire zone into an active Bonus Field.
Within a Bonus Field, karma yields jumped by twenty to thirty percent, while loot tables skewed significantly toward higher-tier equipment and rare drops. The field remained active until a predetermined quota of monsters was cleared, so Sanghyuk planned to grind continuously until the ambient buff ran dry.
On raw stat sheets alone, Skeleton Knights and Skeleton Mages were twice as formidable as basic soldiers and archers. Yet in practice, the operational difficulty felt virtually identical.
The reasoning was straightforward: soldiers and archers swarmed in packs of three to five, whereas knights and mages spawned in isolated pairs or solos. To Sanghyuk's calculations, the net threat remained balanced.
Viewed from the outside, his combat routine was stripped of all melodrama. Melee types were cornered and battered with the sword; ranged snipers and spellcasters were rushed down, or sniped with Flame Stone whenever terrain blocked a direct advance.
A casual observer might have called the footage dreadfully monotonous. Yet any veteran who genuinely understood Eternal Life's mechanics would have watched the screen with jaw-dropped awe.
Not a single wasted motion. Maximum speed, surgical precision, and absolute economy of force.
That was the objective reality of Sanghyuk's gameplay. It only looked boring because it lacked excess flair. Peak efficiency was, by definition, utterly unadorned.
Ducking beneath a spell trajectory, Sanghyuk jammed the Traveler's Treasure Sword between the Skeleton Mage's floating ribs and drove his right boot upward against the blade's flat.
Snap! Crack-crunch!
The leveraged blow splintered the entire ribcage, throwing the caster violently off-balance. Ripping the steel free in the same fluid motion, Sanghyuk reversed his grip and spiked the point downward through the mage's eye socket.
Crunch! Shatter!
Already compromised by the broken spine, the spellcaster collapsed under the fatal thrust. It had scrambled to weave a defensive hex as Sanghyuk breached its perimeter, but human reaction time and clean chaining far outpaced the monster's scripted cast animation.
Thud.
As the final pile of marrow rattled to the flagstones, another mixed patrol was cleanly eradicated.
"Two knights and a mage in tight quarters... that's definitely a headache."
He grumbled about the difficulty, yet his execution had been as clean as if he had rehearsed the sequence hundreds of times in a simulator. In truth, hunting down here at his current progression was absurd on paper.
An average player at Sanghyuk's level would struggle to solo a single Skeleton Soldier on the surface or B1. Yet he cast those level gates aside, venturing straight into the bowels of B7 to slaughter entire squads single-handedly.
Five brutal years of sweatshop labor had forged unyielding muscle memory; his subsequent career as an esports director had layered that foundation with flawless theoretical analysis. When those two lifetimes fused, the synergy shattered conventional boundaries.
Bridging physical execution with high-level theory had felt clunky in the beginning, but relentless conditioning had paid off. He was now operating at over ninety percent of his intended performance ceiling.
"The azure haze is thinning out."
Sweeping up a few crafting reagents dropped by the mage, Sanghyuk noticed the faint blue vapor wafting from the flagstones had visibly subsided. A fading haze meant the Bonus Field was nearing its cull quota.
At this rate, the field will collapse in under thirty minutes. Which means... it's about time to descend.
If Basement 7 was Karma Singularity: Bonus Field, then Basement 8 held Karma Singularity: Field Boss.
Field bosses were rare anomalies. Naturally, the spoils reaped from slaying one vastly eclipsed ordinary mob drops.
If the boss waiting below is the one I think it is... I can pull off another massive jackpot. But what are the odds?
Boss generation was strictly randomized by the system; there was no guarantee which creature would spawn. Within the skeletal category alone, Sanghyuk knew of seven distinct field bosses. That gave him a one-in-seven roll for the jackpot.
"Time to move."
Strike while the iron is hot. Sanghyuk stepped toward the descending stairs to B8, silently hoping the dice would roll in his favor.