Chapter 125: AFK Leveling
"Which squad are you from?"
That question never made it out of his mouth.
Three Hollows came at Matsushita Yusuke all at once, teeth bared, claws out.
"...Tsk."
He'd expected this, and it still produced a moment of genuine reflection.
The ones with working brains were always going to be a minority.
For the vast majority of Hollows, anything else that moved was basically food.
What a genuinely sad state of existence.
Matsushita Yusuke swung his right hand lazily. Didn't even draw his blade. The reiatsu shockwave from the motion alone shattered all three completely.
Shattered. Right.
Low-level Hollows were a genuinely terrifying presence to ordinary souls. Enormous, broad, monstrously strong, virtually a death sentence for anyone without power to speak of.
The slightly stronger ones had simple cognitive ability and a clear path to advancement.
As that ability grew, the more intelligent individuals learned to use the environment, to study their situation, to behave in ways that approached human.
But.
The ceiling was right there.
Without the Hogyoku's influence, Vasto Lorde was the peak. Combat power roughly equivalent to a captain's, nothing particularly remarkable beyond that.
And their natural production rate was disappointing at every level.
Anyway.
Yusuke looked at the scattered remains and furrowed his brow.
Half an hour and he'd found three. Literal scrubs at that. At this rate, completing the boss's task was going to take forever.
Though whether the task got completed or not was a separate question.
What Yusuke was actually focused on right now was what specific benefit he could extract from the situation in the meantime.
Thoughts moved quickly, and the answer arrived.
Right.
He raised his right hand slightly and swung it outward to the side.
Reishi surged around him in a sudden, concentrated rush, and before long a distinctly unusual figure had materialized beside him.
A pale white body. Human-shaped limbs. A mask. And stamped across that mask, a vivid red cross pattern.
It looked like a specialized form of Hollow. But Yusuke knew exactly what it was: his unique Hollow power. The other panel that had unlocked after obtaining the Hogyoku fragment.
It also had a more professional name.
His alt.
Given his particular identity and background, Yusuke hadn't had much opportunity to let it out while operating in Soul Society. But the current situation was a little different.
Hueco Mundo was basically this thing's home territory. Back in its natural environment, the sky was the limit.
Yusuke looked it over, left and right, then pressed a thoughtful hand to his forehead.
So specifically.
Another cluster of figures appeared in the distance. He sized them up quickly and knew what to do.
"Go. Give them a reminder of how things work."
The alt had no actual intelligence. What it had was something like instinctive reflexes.
It caught Yusuke's intent, shot forward, hit the group of its peers, and tore through them with complete ease.
Physical strength: solid.
Combat ability: more than decent.
All of it reflecting the various stat increases Yusuke had earned through quests recently, now expressed through this body.
[Hollow Power Level: 16]
[Sonido: 9] [Cero: 16] [Hierro: 8]
Not impressive numbers on paper, but that depended entirely on the comparison. Against captain-level opponents: no contest. Against early-stage Hollows: a noticeable edge.
Yusuke watched the panel while the alt swept through and came back, and then:
[Hollow Power Level: 17]
It actually went up.
Whatever tension had remained in him settled completely at that.
No problems here.
The alt was entirely in its element.
Everything it needed to do was basically the same as what other Hollows did. Fighting, which produced experience. Nothing about that would make it stand out or seem unusual. Yusuke just needed to make sure no significantly stronger individuals appeared in its vicinity.
Idle farming still required appropriate zone selection. Drop it in a high-level area and that was just asking for it to get wiped.
With that settled, Yusuke took a moment to explore the surrounding terrain.
He found something fairly quickly: a location that functioned, loosely, like a Hollow gathering point. "Gathering point" might not be the most accurate description. What it was, more specifically, was a geographic depression, a slight downward curve in the land forming something like a basin.
And inside that basin, Yusuke could feel a very clear and concentrated presence of reishi.
What was this?
He got closer and observed.
A reishi convergence point.
Actually, he'd puzzled over this before. Hueco Mundo was one of the three great spiritual zones in the world, and yet it was this barren. So how were the basic living conditions for Hollows being maintained?
Now he had his answer.
Reishi convergence points. By concentrating reishi at specific locations and letting it build, they formed something like desert oases. Special zones in an otherwise empty expanse.
Once a point like this existed, Hollows from every direction would instinctively gather toward it.
And once gathered, the Hollows that had absorbed the energy would immediately begin fighting each other, the competition selecting a winner who then moved on to a larger, richer oasis.
This layered progression system was genuinely surprising. Yusuke turned it over, expression thoughtful.
None of this had ever appeared in any text. He'd found it entirely through field observation.
As for the current small oasis...
He checked the spawn effect and found it was quite significant.
Inside a few minutes, more than a dozen Hollows had already arrived in rapid succession, drawn in from all directions.
Oasis wasn't just a metaphor.
It was a genuine draw for ordinary Hollows. For these creatures, reishi absorption was essentially feeding. Everyone was here to guard their food source.
Yusuke watched the alt work through the area, the panel numbers ticking upward, and couldn't help the broad, satisfied smile that crossed his face.
This trip to Hueco Mundo was absolutely not wasted.
The alt's idle farming spot: officially secured.