The Surge of Karma
The fool's terror had opened him up, allowing Han Yujin to read a portion of his memories through the Dream Illusion Mind Snatching Art.
Only a portion, though — whether it was an inherent trait of the ghost race or simply exceptional mental resistance, much of what he found was smeared over with shadow, dark as if stained with grime.
'He planted a fragment of his own mind inside a follower's soul — at the power level of the Dharma Soul Stage, no less...'
Considering the nature of ghost-kind, it wasn't exactly astonishing.
At any rate.
The reason the creature had been so terrified was this: the Eternal Goddess Cult — or the Eternal Cult, as the creature more tersely called it — had historically been plundered again and again by the *Sweepers*.
Their territories and offerings stolen, and their very own kind captured at every opportunity and...
Truly eaten.
'The Ghost Soul Divinity Pill!'
That pill was crafted from ghost-race beings of Dharma Soul Stage or higher, subjected to an appallingly merciless refinement process. Built upon the ghost race's outstanding affinity for mental-type abilities, it apparently strengthened a Sweeper's Divine Sense.
For a spiritualist, Divine Sense was the single most useful spiritual faculty, capable of replacing all five ordinary senses.
It was no accident that Divine Sense secret arts were prized as highly as the Heavens-Piercing Command — and naturally, an elixir that could grow the Divine Sense itself was considered even more precious than pills that merely accelerated ordinary cultivation.
'What if I absorbed it into the Blood Spirit Red Flower Wine Bottle?'
Han Yujin considered it for a moment, then shook his head. It would doubtless produce a different kind of pill, but it would certainly fall short of a properly refined Ghost Soul Divinity Pill that brought out that nature to its fullest.
He was able to glean several other vivid memories as well.
According to the apostle's memories, the master of the Eternal Goddess Cult — the being called the Eternal Goddess — was a Magus-rank entity. Her entire faction existed as both the stepping stone and the instrument for her own ascension to Ipsissimus.
Magus was, fortunately, on par with the Body Integration Stage. Frightening in its own right, of course — but set against the True Immortal Stage, it was little more than a fairy's dream.
Beyond that, the general characteristics of the ghost race became much clearer.
For instance: the 'eternal life' they spoke of was only possible through the steady consumption of fragments of living souls. And that they could only maintain their sense of self by drinking in the intense emotions of those same victims.
He even caught glimpses of the Eternal Goddess Cult's headquarters.
Intimidating spires that seemed to slam down from a darkened sky into the earth. Ground frozen pitch-black, utterly devoid of life. Vegetation that looked at a glance like ordinary plants but was in truth ghost-craft stitched together from fragments of souls. Massive structures piled pyramid-like in one quarter. Sculptures of inscrutable form. A stream of some unknowable, dark-crimson energy coursing through a corner of the sky.
And then, at some point as he kept sifting through the memories—
"Aaaaaaahh...!!"
The creature thrashed with a scream utterly unlike anything before it. At the same instant, Han Yujin — having glimpsed a certain special 'symbol' within that memory — felt an instinctive alarm and severed the Dream Illusion Mind Snatching Art immediately.
Fortunately, he escaped unharmed, but the apostle had already triggered something; his mind was now careening wildly out of control and collapsing in on itself. That disintegration, felt in full through the Six Paths of Reincarnation divine ability, was genuinely hideous to witness.
'An "apostle," he calls himself. He was nothing but a mook with a bomb collar even he didn't know about.'
Presumably the creature had tallied up the merit he would earn for successfully transmitting Earth's coordinates to the main sect, appointed himself "apostle" in advance — because for his kind, the fastest and surest path to growth wasn't training or predation, but receiving the Goddess's grace in exchange for accumulated merit.
'A faction with a Body Integration Stage leader really has no use for a Dharma Soul Stage "apostle," I suppose...'
However broadly the term apostle could be applied, wasn't the gap in level simply too extreme?
As he mused—
In the end, the creature whose mind had wholly collapsed degenerated into a state as grotesque as the horror he alone had imagined for himself, once he learned his captor was a Sweeper.
Outwardly nothing seemed wrong — but with his ego shattered to pieces, it could hardly be anything but horrifying.
Han Yujin watched the thing — nothing left of it but the barest instinct, reacting more feebly than an insect — weighed a few options for a moment, then extended the Blood Spirit Red Flower Wine Bottle and fired a black thread into it.
Before it could even manage a proper scream, the creature vanished entirely, leaving behind only the faintest wisp of dust. And within the Blood Spirit Red Flower Wine Bottle, a distinct liquid warmth rose.
'Maybe I'll just have a small taste, then set it aside and give it to Wonhee.'
It would surely be far more useful to Lee Won-hee — who had only just begun walking the path of immortality — than to himself, who had already reached the Golden Core Stage.
The reason he hadn't bothered to keep the creature intact in some kind of containment was simple.
He didn't really know how to suppress and store something like that, and the bomb collar the creature had worn made him uneasy.
Granted, it had surely served its purpose once the creature's mind blew apart — but if that collar had carried dangerous features like position tracking, trouble would have erupted the moment he tried anything.
Uneasy was uneasy. He simply hadn't wanted to keep it around.
And right as he was wrapping up his reflections—
Suddenly.
"Ooooh......."
So immense was the influx of Karma that even his mind and body, tempered to the Golden Core Stage, were momentarily caught off guard enough to let such an exclamation slip.
With his eyes closed, gauging the mounting volume of Karma, he couldn't help but break into a wide grin.
'That's right — I saved the world, of all things. This much had better pile up!'
It was an absolutely overwhelming quantity.
Far more than all the Karma he had ever accumulated and spent combined — no, it wasn't something that could even be measured by such a comparison. The gap was on another order entirely.
'At minimum... at minimum, a hundredfold!'
This much Karma could carry him comfortably all the way to the Nascent Soul Stage if he spent freely. Whether it would suffice for the Soul Formation Stage was another question.
And yet.
As he ran the numbers again and again in his euphoria, he suddenly realized — not out of greed, but on the basis of cold, logical reasoning — that this wasn't actually such an enormous reward after all.
'It's certainly a lot... but isn't it too little for "saving the Earth"?
One possibility rose naturally to mind.
That he hadn't actually saved the world completely — that he had merely deferred the apocalypse for a time.
The swelling elation cooled a degree.
Still, it was unquestionably a colossal reward, so the exhilaration didn't die out entirely. It felt as though the world itself were showering him with praise — well done — and he couldn't have been more pleased with himself.
'Time to clean up, then.'
He couldn't lose himself in the high forever. He moved at once to rescue the people still alive down here.
The plan was to save them all, treat them, get them out — and then bury this entire underground complex for good.
Three days.
Only three days had passed since Han Yujin had visited the place and departed like a ghost.
And in those three days, far too many unbelievable things had happened.
'No — to be precise, three days was just how long it took us to gather the information. The events themselves probably unfolded in less than a single day.'
In the front company serving as a secret safehouse of Korea's National Intelligence Service, the branch chief stared at the file on Han Yujin displayed across his monitors, his expression grave.
The Chairman of the CPPCC had been transformed into a complete raving lunatic. His symptoms were so severe that — far from any recovery — it seemed the only help anyone could offer him was a quick death.
There was no chance such a thing had happened naturally. The culprit was obvious.
The chairman of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference might have been one of the relatively weaker posts among the Standing Committee, but he was by no means someone a single S-class hunter could dispatch at will.
At the press of a single button, the S-class hunters assigned to his protection would have materialized within a minute, flanked by squadrons of A-class hunters. And the button itself was guarded around the clock by layers of electronic countermeasures and personnel, precisely so it would never need pressing.
'An ability that warps reality like a dream, was it....'
If a member of China's Standing Committee could be dealt with this way, then no one on Earth was safe. In other words, Han Yujin could well become the greatest assassin in the history of the planet.
But if it had been only that much, they wouldn't have been this stunned.
Every confidant closely tied to Li Haozi had fallen into exactly the same state — regardless of where they were or what they were doing.
Worse still, the Eternal Inscription faction of the Blood Lotus Society — a mere criminal organization, yet one with an actual S-class hunter ensconced within it — had met deaths so horrific and terrifying they defied all explanation.
Unable to stop turning it over in his mind, the branch chief found himself recalling the moment Han Yujin had come to see him a second time.
Scarcely any time had passed since his departure, yet there he was again. He'd asked whether any of their agents were covertly embedded in the Blood Lotus Society, and next, requested a rough idea of the Eternal Inscription faction's location.
That was before any report had even arrived describing what had been done to the Standing Committee member.
'His registered awakening ability was listed as nothing more than mana-related knowledge. Is any of this possible on knowledge alone?'
The reality-warping ability was astonishing enough. But seeing how the Eternal Inscription members had died was somehow more astonishing still. It could only read as a mental-type ability of terrifying potency, or an illusion-class power to match.
The branch chief cleared Han Yujin's file from his screen.
In its place he began scrolling through photographs — captured by special drones and cameras — of the Eternal Inscription members' deaths, along with various supplementary intelligence.
They had all died by self-mutilation in ways so gruesome that an ordinary person would vomit at a single glance — screaming things like "Praise the Eternal Cult!" wherever they happened to be.
The number of people who had died in that abnormal, straight-out-of-a-horror-film fashion came to no fewer than several hundred. And not confined to a single region — it had happened across every major city: Hong Kong, Tianjin, Shanghai, Beijing, Guangzhou, all of them.
'In a single day, no less.'
As a result, it had become an enormous scandal both within China and across the world, and every crackpot cult with the word "Eternal" in its name was now suffering for it.
'If he can command people to mutilate themselves, he can command them to do anything else, too.'
Distilled down to the certainties, it looked something like this:
Combat power at least on par with other S-class hunters.
Mobility enough to sweep across all of China within a single day.
Concealment undetectable by any means whatsoever.
Mental dominion capable of driving a target to suicide.
And intelligence-gathering ability, presumably by reading memories directly.
'...Is this a human being? Is this what "S-class" means?'
This could not simply be called S-class. It wouldn't have been a stretch to dub him EX-class — a rank that existed only as a joke.
Even Ethan Cross, the world's number one, couldn't pull off something like this.
Probably.
No — not "probably." Definitely.
Han Yujin was the most powerful and dangerous S-class hunter in the world today. It was frightening just to imagine what kind of chaos he could unleash, if he set his mind to it.
'If he grows even further from here....
The word Absolute — once nothing more than an idle worry — might truly be born into the world.
The branch chief was a man in no position to take any action himself, yet he felt a creeping sense of crisis all the same.
At least as far as he was concerned, this was in no way a good thing for humanity.
In the darkened branch office, the chief's face, sunk in silence before his monitors, was unmistakably grim.
With the cleanup of the Eternal Goddess Cult fully behind him, Han Yujin now had to set priorities among a wealth of options.
But the thing he most wanted to try first was already clear.
'Will there be any change in Post-Apocalyptic Earth?'
It was also a chance to probe the details of his own awakening ability — well worth the attempt.