Ch.7272. Primordial Psychic

The psychic power of the Pyongyang Hive Mind was displaying the full majesty of a psychic-specialized monster at the highest tier of the 0-grade classification.

No matter how many physical monsters died, the main body of the Pyongyang Hive Mind existed only as a mental entity in the psychic dimension. Whether there were 100 million or 100,000 monsters remaining, its psychic power remained equally formidable.

The psychic dimension was psychically isolated from the physical world, requiring specialized conduit monsters to connect the two dimensions for activating psychic abilities. Even with this limitation, the Pyongyang Hive Mind’s psychic power was well worth utilizing.

The blue firestorm initiated by the conduit monster—which resembled a fusion evolution of a seahorse and an alien—could reduce even a Hive Tank with high psychic resistance to ashes in mere seconds. The blue flames continued to burn, using flesh as fuel until the target was completely incinerated.

Occasionally, when it slammed the ground, higher-grade monsters could withstand it reasonably well, but lower-grade monsters were swept away, terrain collapsed, and defensive structures for encirclement were destroyed.

The Pyongyang Hive Mind even unleashed attacks with incomprehensible mechanisms. Most notably, it formed arms of pure psychic energy from the ground to grab monsters, or transformed elemental psychic powers like lightning or cold energy into psychic life forms.

These psychic life forms were particularly troublesome—being conscious psychic fire, lightning, or cold energy itself—making them invincible until their psychic energy was depleted. Their baseline firepower matched that of top-tier mid-grade elemental psychic specialized monsters at full power.

Displaying transcendent power that looked more like magic or sorcery than psychic abilities, the Pyongyang Hive Mind was thrashing about in its final desperate struggle.

In any case, while my monsters were currently suffering from the psychic attacks it was frantically unleashing, surprisingly, the encirclement itself remained firmly intact.

There were various reasons for this, but the first was that I wasn’t simply standing by watching these psychic attacks.

Though I might be outmatched in raw output by that thug born from the fusion of seven entities, I too was a transcendent 0-grade monster capable of using semi-divine powers. I could easily unleash psychic attacks on the scale of natural disasters.

Additionally, with the psychic ability I newly awakened upon becoming 0-grade—Primal Psychic—I could reduce or block about half of its overwhelming psychic attacks.

If you were to ask how I could do this against a monster with over seven times my output, the answer is simple.

It was all thanks to the power of Primal Psychic.

Primal Psychic.

While ordinary psychic abilities work by unconsciously absorbing safe, weak psychic energy emanating from the psychic dimension and then processing it for specific purposes, Primal Psychic directly draws and utilizes the psychic energy filling the psychic dimension.

Of course, directly absorbing energy from the psychic dimension is something any psychic life form living in that dimension can do. Even among humans, those called heroes—players, specifically psychic-specialized players who took certain routes in the third installment—can directly absorb and use psychic dimensional energy with mechanical assistance.

But the Primal Psychic I use doesn’t absorb psychic dimensional energy to refine and use it internally—it manipulates the pure energy itself.

More precisely, I use the environmental manipulation ability I gained upon becoming a Hive God to dominate the energy around my main body in the psychic dimension, process it externally to some extent, and then use it as psychic power.

The true nature of psychic energy—the constituent material and essence of the psychic dimension—is nothing other than the emotions of sentient beings materialized through some catalyst. So while it’s called “pure,” it’s actually just a jumbled mess.

Therefore, this Primal Psychic cannot be used in complex ways since controlling the energy that constitutes psychic power is extremely difficult. However, Primal Psychic has many advantages that make up for these drawbacks.

First, it has destructive power.

Even without special processing, simply pouring it toward an enemy provides at least 50% more destructive power than using higher psychic abilities through complex calculations. With moderate processing, the output can increase up to threefold.

Also, while opponents need to absorb psychic energy into their bodies for processing, I only need to dominate what’s already there and process it moderately. This makes Primal Psychic uniquely fast to activate.

While the Pyongyang Hive Mind refines and processes energy through complex computational formulas, I simply grab energy from the psychic dimension with my ability and fire it off—allowing me to cast psychic abilities almost simultaneously despite starting a step behind in a defensive position.

Anyway, I’m using the characteristics of Primal Psychic to counter the desperate psychic attacks of the Pyongyang Hive Mind, but naturally, perfect defense is impossible against a monster with seven times my output.

On average, I can perfectly block half of its attacks, but the other half I can only slightly weaken or can’t even attempt to block.

These unblocked psychic attacks strike my monsters densely gathered to form the encirclement, wiping out most of them without even a chance to resist.

But despite monsters continuously dying from these psychic attacks, the Pyongyang Hive Mind couldn’t break through the encirclement or even send out a single monster.

The reason was simple: no matter how many of my monsters it killed with its full-power psychic attacks, more newly produced reinforcement monsters were being deployed to the front line.

Having seized virtually all of former North Korea except Pyongyang and parts of Gangwon Province in South Korea, my monster production capacity was beyond imagination.

In just two weeks after stabilizing the front lines, I had produced and cryogenically stored 200 million monsters due to maintenance cost concerns, and the physical body of the 47th Imperial Guard—composed of “at least” 3rd-grade monsters—had just been completed underground at my base.

In other words, Pyongyang now had virtually no way to defeat us—

“Come on, come on. Why not just give up already?”

Therefore, I decided to deliberately wear it down through prolonged attrition.

※ ※ ※

‘Hmm… it’s already nearing completion.’

Time passed. On a certain day, 1 month (31 days) and 3 weeks and 2 days after Pyongyang was surrounded.

‘It was worth the expense to customize each one individually.’

I smiled contentedly as I watched the body of the final—300th—Imperial Guard monster nearly completed.

The Imperial Guard. These were the elite of elites, selected from the most senior souls among my monsters who had repeatedly died and been reborn since I first took root in the Gangwon Province cave, each given a customized high-grade monster body.

Of course, producing 300 high-grade monsters would be burdensome even for me as a 0-grade entity in the limited territory of half the Korean Peninsula, so these Imperial Guards’ specs were somewhat inferior to typical high-grade monsters.

Additionally, considering that awakening them now would exponentially increase maintenance costs (food and energy supply) and unnecessarily draw human attention, only three currently had souls inhabiting their bodies—but still, a high-grade monster is a high-grade monster.

Even without me specifically granting them skills, they possessed close-combat skills and characteristics at the A-rank level, and they were given bodies custom-designed for them from the start.

The three Imperial Guards dispatched to Manchuria were performing so admirably that they had completely annihilated one of the rulers there, the Horse King Nurhaci and his group, just the three of them.

Having killed a famous named monster that had appeared since the first installment—though of course they were all different individuals since they died in each appearance, more of a designation for horse-like 1st-grade monsters appearing in Manchuria—there’s no need to elaborate on their effectiveness.

Anyway, back to the main point.

The Imperial Guard monster shaped like a spider with scales seemingly covering its carapace was nearly complete.

The body was already finished, and only 4 of the 12 legs remained. So as I was contentedly watching the body of the final Imperial Guard being completed—

‘—???!!!!’

A vibration that seemed to shake my very soul disturbed both the material world and the psychic dimension.

‘What is… this…!’

Though I couldn’t understand what was happening, it didn’t take long for me to identify the source of this vibration.

‘…Pyongyang?’

Most ominously, the source of the vibration was Pyongyang, which I had surrounded.