World Collision - The Eleventh
The status window for my world floated in front of me, updated with the latest figures after the previous collision.
Several new traits had appeared, but the options didn't provide immediate gains or faster growth rates. They focused instead on reinforcing what I already possessed or patching up vulnerabilities.
That meant I had to choose carefully. Since I could still pick traits after the world collision ended, it wasn't a terrible approach.
“That’s true.”
Still, looking at the world stats left me dissatisfied. Before I collided with it, the score had been thirty-one million. It had nearly doubled, sure, but until now my growth rate had consistently outpaced that kind of increase.
On top of that, the numbers themselves were still dropping continuously. Even though I’d been managing the aftermath of the collision the entire time, I still hadn’t recovered from the environmental damage caused by that idiot Dindinaron’s self-destruction. And none of the new traits addressed the problem.
“It’s unfortunate, but it can’t be helped. An extreme build naturally invites extreme countermeasures.”
She had a point. Even so, under normal circumstances I should only be at level eleven right now. Instead my world total sat at sixteen.
When I remembered the angel once telling me that level seventeen players didn’t even exist, it became clear I was among the strongest players in this entire game.
What mattered now was the opponent. Wahando had given me several choices, but I deliberately picked the strongest one—a leader of a massive faction that possessed two mythic-grade traits.
There was only one reason. Judging from the resources he exported and imported, it was obvious he ran a monster-based build, the so-called “monster build.” And since I sat at the absolute peak of monster builds, I held an overwhelming advantage in terms of matchup.
Beyond that, round eleven was a minority round. In other words, an expansion phase. I would massively expand my spiritual realm here and shoot straight into the top ranks in one decisive surge.
Sesaisa’s artificial spiritual realm? Mihun’s Yeondan-u? Wahando’s oversized crustacean? Throw them all away. If my territory became an endless Dessert Desert, any invaders would simply die of thirst before they ever reached me. At the end of the day, fights came down to weight class.
My world had grown so overwhelmingly powerful that hunting mediocre lower-ranked opponents might actually end up costing me more than I gained.
Of course the enemy was a formidable opponent who had reached at least level fifteen, so there were risks. But the fact that his civilization was built on monsters was certain. The matchup favored me, so I would win.
Come out, Umjeory. That name sounds pretty weird even by Korean standards. I’ll crush this hard-to-pronounce bastard and charge straight to the top.
The moment your forces face the Dessert Legion, that pathetic monster build of yours will make your vision swim.
Just wait. I’m coming to kill you.
Umjeory was not a monster-build player.
His build revolved around an extremely pure spiritual-realm spirit-based civilization. His entities were such radical spirits that they needed to acquire physical bodies separately. If Sesaisa saw them, he might even recognize them as kindred.
Even so, Umjeory’s home world had been far better than Sesaisa’s, where decent life forms could not even be obtained. His world still possessed abundant nature.
It had suffered from reckless development and environmental pollution, but unintelligent animals still existed. Umjeory had modeled his civilization after his own species and the creatures and societies of his homeworld.
His profession was “v veterinarian.” It might sound surprising, but it wasn’t all that different from material-plane priests who used healing magic.
Umjeory belonged to a spirit race, yet he healed living beings using the laws of the material plane—in other words, through chemical and medical methods.
In truth, he knew almost nothing about the ecology of spirits.
Just because someone belonged to a spirit race didn’t automatically make them an expert in mystery and spiritual studies like Sesaisa. Were all humans on Earth medical specialists?
Umjeory simply understood, from a spiritual perspective, how to make organisms healthier.
One might assume he would be less knowledgeable than a material-plane veterinarian, but that was not the case at all. The term “veterinarian” only applied through an Earth lens. In his own world, his job carried a very different meaning.
Umjeory’s species fed on the intense pain, terror, and despair emitted by living creatures, converting those emotions into sustenance. They could use joy and happiness to some degree, but the race as a whole had evolved to specialize in wringing out negative emotions.
From an Earth perspective, one could say that “demons” were Umjeory’s race.
Therefore, as a demon, Umjeory’s job was to treat creatures so they wouldn’t die from their suffering—because once they died, he could no longer extract more pain. He kept them alive just barely, healing them while ensuring they continued to agonize.
Only after entering the game did Umjeory realize how unique his species was on a cosmic scale.
He had thought, ‘Obviously it’s common sense to harvest pain from living beings and use it as food,’ but other races simply used intelligent life forms to build civilizations.
Once he learned that intelligent civilizations were the norm, Umjeory discovered that his biological knowledge was perfectly suited not for “food and resource production,” but for “destruction and war.”
Extreme mysteries of pain, disease, poison, curse, and madness were mercilessly driven into enemy life forms.
Once Umjeory’s species targeted a world, every living thing within it would suffer endless torment. Yet they could not die. He made sure of that by healing them.
Through that endless cycle of healing, the world itself grew stronger. The creatures lost intelligence but gained durability, disease resistance, and tolerance to pain.
So Umjeory created even stronger diseases, even harsher pain, and even more vicious creatures, then scattered them across his world.
In the process of trading with other worlds, he seemed to have been misunderstood as running a “monster build.” In reality, the monsters were raised on the surface while his demon race lived in the skies or underground, gently sipping the creatures’ pain and maintaining a powerful mystery-based civilization.
The synergy had somehow produced a formidable army of powerful monsters and outstanding demons who wielded mystery, but to Umjeory it still felt weaker than the forces he had commanded back home. He felt rather disappointed.
Riding that momentum, he had even purchased mythic-grade traits. The first was Material Overlap. A bizarre ability that let him stack materials or entities of the same type and property within the same physical space.
Applied cleverly, it allowed dozens of demons to occupy a tiny area, creating extreme density. It also enabled livestock farming at densities that defied common sense.
The second mythic trait accelerated his build even further. Life is Pain ensured that living creatures could never die from physical damage.
Instead, all physical trauma was converted into mental pain. The creatures suffered immense agony until their minds collapsed. And didn’t his own species extract pain and turn it into resources?
In other words, by densely farming creatures, inflicting infinite pain, and promptly harvesting that pain, he achieved true infinite resource duplication—an perpetual engine of power.
“Praise our god Umjeory!”
“God of abundance and love! Our parent who bestows infinite resources upon us!”
The faith of his demon race had surpassed 100 percent—closer to 150 percent. If Umjeory ordered them to die, they would do so without the slightest hesitation.
Why? Because they were too happy. The material-plane creatures suffered endlessly, but Umjeory felt almost no moral qualms. Objectively speaking, he was actually quite a benevolent person.
Yet just as humans on Earth did not criticize the dense farming and brutal slaughter of livestock, Umjeory’s mercy and love extended only to spirit beings of a similar nature.
He would feel disgusted watching Sesaisa enjoy the annihilation of souls, but at the same time he could calmly dissect the flesh-and-blood creatures from collided worlds, then torture them for decades without ever letting them die.
In short, Umjeory was a fairly ordinary and diligent individual. His build might have looked bizarre, but it was rational, and it allowed him to farm pain from living beings with an efficiency that would have been impossible in his homeworld.
As he grew stronger, so did the material-plane disease factories that writhed in sickness, poison, and every kind of affliction before spreading them to other creatures. Clinging to them were demons sucking up the pain. And in the Great Phantasm, magnificent palaces and cities were constructed using that harvested pain as raw resources.
Umjeory knew about the Meteor Cartel, but he had never imagined they would challenge him. After observing how the other members operated, he saw no world capable of defeating his own.
Wahando was famous for his hermit-crab legions. Even if Umjeory simply spread diseases among the monsters and fought head-on, he would probably win.
Mihun seemed to rely on powerful heroes, but curse mysteries were horrifically abundant in Umjeory’s world. Suppressing heroes would be child’s play.
Sesaisa… felt like kin, so he preferred not to touch him, but he could still put up a decent fight.
And finally, the Meteor Cartel’s “Biin.” Against that one, Umjeory believed defeat was impossible.
“Looks like a life build that maxed out Life points… If it collides with my world, won’t it just catch every disease and collapse on its own…?”
Still, he didn’t dare launch a preemptive strike. He quietly continued defeating and absorbing other worlds while he waited. Then, strangely, Biin was the one who declared war first.
“Huh…? Is it not a Life build? Or does it have immunity to disease? What is this? Why challenge me of all people?”
After the match began, the dimensional gate opened, and they scouted each other’s worlds.
“Uahahahahahahahahahahahahaha!!! This guy is for real—uahahahahahahaha!!!”
Umjeory exploded with roaring laughter.
“He’s practically begging to be killed. This is… Ah. I’m speechless.”
Umjeory could only be certain of his victory.
…….
“Lord Biin. This is…”
No. Wait. This can’t be right.
“I can’t even call it bad luck. After all, you were the one who issued the challenge and started the fight yourself.”
“Does this even make sense?! How is the entire world a disease farm?! Where the hell is the civilization?!”
“Every player who has faced you so far had more or less the same reaction.”
The gamchi and various scouting creatures that had crossed the Dessert Desert had all collapsed from disease shortly after arrival. And the enemy civilization did not exist in the material plane at all—it was an incorporeal spirit civilization residing inside the Great Phantasm.
In other words, I couldn’t hit the enemy even if I wanted to, while the enemy could hit me. On top of that, whatever ghosts or entities had possessed the enemy creatures were systematically crushing any powerful life forms that wandered in using disease and curse-type mysteries.
“H-how am I supposed to win this…?”
“Lord Biin. Your question is incorrect.”
“Huh?”
The angel explained with an extremely troubled expression.
“You should not ask how you can win, Lord Biin. The correct question is how Umjeory-nim can possibly lose.”
The words hit me like ice water.
A chill ran down my spine.