Path of the Ascendant

Yi Wei returned to her bed, but this time, instead of attempting to absorb more planar energy, she focused on what she already had. As a result of her brief practise of the technique described by the mysterious characters, her dantian was full of purple planar energy that was far denser, purer and stronger than what she was previously able to achieve through the practise of the Seven Winds Sutra.

One of the most important things to do after discovering such a strange, new technique, was, of course, to learn exactly what it was capable of. Because of this, Yi Wei temporarily put off taking the healing pill, and instead coursed the planar energy through her body.

‘When I previously practised the Seven Winds Sutra, I could increase my speed slightly by channelling my energy into a specific part of my body. Had I had more, I could have affected the whole body, but…’ she didn’t need to finish that thought, so she focused her spiritual will on her meridians.

The planar mist poured out of her abdomen and flowed through her body. At first, there seemed to be no obvious effect, but as she looked closer, she found that everything that her planar energy touched rapidly broke down… and just as quickly, regenerated.

Her eyes narrowed, ‘Could it be some sort of healing property?’

She spread out the mist over her entire body, to heal the many internal burns from the failed talisman, before making it repeat the circulation.

Quite quickly, she understood that her assumption was wrong. When the planar energy touched the areas it had already healed, it repeated the exact same process. The longer it remained in place, the more times it was able to destroy whatever it touched and remake it.

‘If it was merely for healing, that would be a strange property for it to have. So… could it be?’

With a thought, the entire pool of planar energy burst out of her abdomen, and into her eyes. As the reconstruction effect occurred, she was only barely able to resist the immense itch that built up within them.

After several minutes, after her eyes had been entirely processed by the purple planar energy, she made it return to her dantian and opened her eyes. Everything seemed to be as it was before, until she raised her head to look at something more distant. On the other side of the road, where the remains of a ruined shack stood untouched for many years, she was able to spot a small line of ants, passing over one of the walls on their way elsewhere.

Just to be sure, she repeated the experiment – this time, it took a little longer than before – and looked out again. She found that the ants transformed from distant blobs of colour into slightly more detailed shapes. Where each ant melted into others before, she was now able to distinguish each of them clearly.

When she looked back at her shack, and herself, she realised that it affected all of her vision, not just her ability to see at a distance. Each fold, crease and detail of her robes was clearer, and the many particles of dust all over her home were now obvious without needing to look carefully.

‘Amazing. My planar energy is able to enhance my body!’ she exclaimed, a smile forming on her face, ‘Even if it offers no other benefit, I should be able to easily keep my place in the family with this. Although, I wonder how great the effect of a single circulation is.’

Yi Wei got up and turned towards the furthest wall, assuming a basic combat stance. Without using any techniques, she punched the air with all her strength. The strike caused a few small, light objects in the way to jitter slightly, but managed little else.

Just to be sure, she punched with her other hand as well before circulating the planar energy through her body once. It took a little longer than ten minutes to complete, and as soon as it did, she repeated the basic strikes. This time, her fists made a clear sound as they pierced the air, and a few small sticks, that she had once positioned upright out of boredom on the desk, in front of her collapsed.

‘To get an exact figure, I’d need to go to the training hall, but that requires one gold coin per hour, and I barely have a dozen copper coins. Still, my strength increased by at least one tenth, if not more. For ten minutes of work, that is a lot more than I expected.’

She took out the Flesh Recovery Pill and held it in her hand, pondering what to do with it.

‘Currently, I don’t need it, since my planar energy has fixed my body, but what would be the best use for it?’

As if responding to her, she heard another yell for her from outside, “Yi Wei, if you are not a coward, come out here and fight me!”

It was the voice of a teenage boy, and one she somewhat recognised – Yi Zhang. He was also the child of a family servant, and just like her, he practised a basic cultivation technique of the family, the Nurtured Sapling Sutra, a technique of the wood element, and had reached the second stage of Energy Condensation. As a result, he was able to break through her defences every time they fought, and she was rarely able to break his.

At the first stage of the first realm, that being Energy Condensation, the gap between each stage was small in the matter of raw power, but the increased density of energy that came with each stage was able to significantly influence how much one could enhance their own body with techniques.

Normally, without either a significantly stronger body or some particularly powerful methods, gaps in stages were difficult to breach, and given that Yi Wei was a malnourished teenage girl while he was a reasonably nourished boy of a similar age, there had certainly been a gap in their natural physical ability up to this point.

‘This time it’s different. Just the passive effect of the mysterious character technique has strengthened me, and the active effects may be even better.’

With that in mind, she calmly walked out of her shack, where she saw the boy waiting for her with reddened eyes.

“What happened? Did someone decide to beat you up again?”

The two of them were servants, and thus overeager and overactive lower members of the family tended to enjoy coming to them for fights. None of them would ever go overboard and try to kill any of the servants, but they did occasionally attempt to make the servants fight one another when normal beatings became boring in their eyes.

As such, since the kid was here, he was either trying to fight, or had been incited to do the same.

“No!” he shook his head instantly, “They said they would if I didn’t agree to fight you. When I agreed to it, they even gave me a Planar Gathering Pill!”

Yi Zhang reached into his pocket and took out a small, round, amber pill that glistened with a red light. From the way that the planar energy around automatically drew closer to it, it was obvious that it was indeed a Planar Gathering Pill, and one of above-average quality. The way he held it made it obvious that he wanted to show off a little.

She looked down at the pill in her own hand and smiled.

“Then, why don’t we bet on something?” Yi Wei suggested, stretching out her hand to show the Flesh Recovery Pill to him, “We’ll fight, and the winner can take both of them?”

Technically, this should have been a foolish bet from her perspective. Just yesterday, she wouldn’t stand a chance against Yi Zhang, and she would most certainly require the pill given to her by her aunt in order to heal the injuries she’d inevitably suffer as a result. However, with the mysterious characters, not only could she heal everything herself, but it would also significantly improve her own strength, so she had no use for the pill. Meanwhile, the Planar Gathering Pill would give her the opportunity to experiment with the interaction of her planar energy with the pill essence, and even if there was no difference, it would still help her reach the second stage of Energy Condensation sooner.

“W-What? Are you being serious? Are you really giving that away?” he asked, looking at her as if she had lost her mind. Concluding that she would rescind her offer soon, Yi Zhang nodded, “Right. I won’t hold back, so don’t cry about it!”

“Not even against a girl like me?” she shrugged, and stepped closer to him, “Then don’t go complaining to your parents if you lose.”

He remained silent.

Unlike her, he wasn’t an orphan, so he did have someone to complain to when he lost. He had only lost a few times, but each time, he did rush straight to them when they were younger. Luckily, his parents were more mature than he was, and might have even known Yi Wei’s parents when they were still alive – though they wouldn’t talk about them the few times she asked – so the situation was never elevated to anything unreasonable.

They raised their fists and entered combat stances, looking into each other’s eyes. Standing still, they each waited for the other to make any move, no matter how small, so that they could reply in kind with their fists.

The first to lose their patience was Yi Zhang. With a loud scream, he ran at her and directed an attack at her stomach with his right hand while gathering planar energy in his left hand.

‘A feint, but he’s planning to use the Bull Punch Skill,’ Yi Wei understood immediately, but there was one thing that she couldn’t comprehend no matter how much she tried, ‘Why is he moving so slowly?’

Usually, although he was most certainly slower than other cultivators due to his wood type cultivation technique, his advantage in cultivation meant that he was able to exceed Yi Wei’s speed by a small margin, but also that his strength and defence were vastly greater than hers.

No matter how much she looked, she couldn’t understand any reason for him to suddenly be so much slower.

‘Unless… I haven’t even begun channelling my planar energy, but it has already enhanced my perception to this point? In that case, I should be able to defeat him without using any planar energy at all!’

She ignored the feint and lunged forward, closing the distance between them in an instant. With a low posture, she executed one of the basic moves of her only combat technique – Gentle Breeze Strike.

The name wasn’t exciting, and neither was the metal technique itself. It did little to amplify her strength and had few special effects that set it apart from other techniques. The only true advantage it did have was the ability to slightly shift the direction of the strike, and even then, all it would allow for is changing the target from the upper-left part of the chest to the left shoulder.

Still, that was enough.

Before he had a chance to realise what she did, her fist already struck his chest. Something within his body cracked, and he was forced back by a couple steps.

“How-” he opened his mouth, but only managed to spit out a few drops of blood.

Not willing to give him a chance to retaliate, Yi Wei struck his stomach with another Gentle Breeze Strike, using less strength this time, and knocked him to the ground.

“Do you surrender?”

“Y-Yes! I sur-” he spat out more blood, “surrender…”

“Thank you for the Planar Gathering Pill. I shall treasure it dearly,” she pried it from his hands and placed it in her pocket beside the Flesh Recovery Pill, “Do you need me to throw you out of here?”

He replied with a grunt, so Yi Wei assumed that he didn’t need her help. She returned to her home and shut the door behind her. Although she had hit him hard and dealt more damage than expected, she knew that he would stand up within a minute or two, and be able to escape and obtain assistance from someone familiar with a recovery technique, like his parents.

For a little while, she was perfectly silent, her hands trembling from the excitement and adrenaline that had surged into her blood from that previous fight. It had been unexpected, and it did end quickly, but it was still an astounding experience.

“Yes! I did it!” she exclaimed to herself, taking a few deep breaths to calm herself.

‘So… to sum things up: my strength can be increased significantly just through circulating my planar energy, but it also affects my speed and reaction speed. Also, even though the element of my energy seems to have changed, it has no issue executing techniques of the metal element, so it might also allow me to use techniques of other elements as well,’ she theorised, before turning her attention back to the pill she had just won, ‘I’ve heard that the effects of a pill can differ based on how one uses the medicinal essence within, and that they can be amplified by certain elements.’

However, she had not had the chance to experiment with such things, as she had been told numerous times by Yi Zehao and other alchemists that her metal planar energy did not get along well with the pills she has had the opportunity to see so far.

Yi Wei placed the Planar Gathering Pill in her mouth and sent a wisp of planar energy to it to quickly dissolve it into medicinal essence. It was absorbed into her blood, and spread out over her body, causing the nearby planar energy to draw in closer. This much wasn’t unusual, since a single wisp of her energy wasn’t sufficient to trigger an effect.

‘Now, what effect will the purple planar energy have?’

She sent her energy to mix with the essence, and her eyes widened. As soon as the two touched, they suddenly merged together, the violet and the amber blurred into crystalline strands of energy and essence.

The effect was clear as day. The planar energy that was previously moving toward her lazily was suddenly roused into action, causing it to flood into her body at a pace similar to when she used the technique of the mysterious characters. Furthermore, the range of the pill also expanded greatly, going up from a few metres to almost one hundred metres.

Not willing to waste this opportunity, Yi Wei used the mysterious character technique and absorbed all of the energy that came her way, the immense effects of the technique combining with the Planar Gathering Pill to nearly overwhelm her body and planar aperture.

Unfortunately, this discovery also allowed her to find one flaw of the merged medicinal essence. While the Planar Gathering Pill would typically last half an hour, with the exact duration varying based on the exact quality and craftsmanship of the pill, the crystallised essence was exhausted in a mere minute, causing the flow of planar energy to run out just seconds before it would have allowed her to advance to the second stage.

‘Regardless of that, the effect of the crystallised pill was far greater than the regular one. Had it been any stronger, the pill could be considered some sort of heaven-defying treasure,’ she thought, her grip tightening on the other pill in her possession, ‘Still, this means that I have a life-saving pill in my hands. I shouldn’t waste it, no matter what.’

Opening her eyes, she looked around and found a needle and some thread, which she then used to sow her right pocket shut. Sowing was a necessary skill to know the basics of in her conditions.

‘Now, I won’t have to risk losing it accidentally, and the stitching should be easy enough to tear if I have need of the pill,’ Yi Wei thought, patting the pocket one more time before moving on, ‘Right, what I need now are combat techniques. In this district, it is easiest to earn money through fighting and brawling, and once I have the money, I can purchase more Planar Gathering Pills, and rapidly soar in my cultivation.’

Although her plan was simple, it was undoubtedly effective. While professions like alchemy, blacksmithing and talisman crafting were also rather lucrative, they required a lot of hard work to learn, and then a lot more effort to gain sufficient trust from potential customers to make even a coin of profit. She did not have the time that was usually required.

Meanwhile, combat was a completely different story. It was preferable for new people to enter various competitions and arenas, as seeing new faces was far more exciting than the same few faces fighting each other again and again.

It allowed for hidden geniuses to emerge, as well as the occasional obvious failure, who’s only noteworthy ability was to amuse the crowd with his futile flailing. As a result, people were paid handsomely to enter an arena or some other challenge, especially when the challenge was far above their level, and were paid even more generously if they actually succeeded. To make the situation even better, there were few to no business owners that would ever dare to withhold pay from their warriors, meaning that one would have to put in a great deal of effort to locate a swindler that would attempt to take their hard earned money from them.

For someone like Yi Wei, who suddenly found herself with a far greater degree of strength, this was the perfect direction to head in. As long as she found the right opponent and learned the right techniques, she could easily defeat someone in the first and second stages of Energy Condensation, and if she channelled her planar energy, she might even stand a chance against someone at the third or fourth stage.

“Whoever or whatever gave me this opportunity, I promise I won’t waste it!”