Path of the Ascendant

“By the way, I’ve been meaning to ask this for a while, but there were a few more important topics to discuss first… Do you have some issue with speaking, or are you simply the quiet type?”

“As an assassin, I… didn’t do much speaking… so it is a little difficult…”

“Oh, I understand. Sorry if I’m prying too much into your history.”

They had been walking for some time, and Yi Wei had the opportunity to ask Fen Zhi about a number of topics while they traversed the forest. She learned about the assassin’s training, though she couldn’t get anything out of her regarding her mysterious Master, not even his or her name and gender. As it turns out, her planar anchor was of the fire element, and thus looked like a large scorched pillar, but she was able to cloak it passively via the unique property of her spiritual will. For that reason, Yi Wei couldn’t attempt to duplicate it into her personal cultivation technique, as her understanding of mental cultivation was far lesser than that of planar cultivation.

Furthermore, careless replication of Fen Zhi’s method could result in her also being susceptible to the control method of her master, which would be… undesirable at best, and equivalent to death at worst, depending on the mood of the Endless Dark Master.

One thing she was able to borrow from the assassin were her combat techniques, including the black sword light and various methods of evasion used by her. She was a little wary about asking about her combat skills so blatantly, but not only was the woman perfectly happy to give away all of her techniques, but she also insisted that, if she ever encountered any of the upper members of an assassin organisation, then she should use them to get rid of them, albeit without stirring up too much conflict.

“After all, in wars… between us, it’s… we… that are sent… to fight…” Fen Zhi explained, sighing, “Still, I want… to get rid of a few of them… at least…”

“I get that, don’t worry. If that ever happens, I’ll try to not leave any obvious traces for anyone to identify. Actually, how exactly were you able to break away from the control of the Endless Dark Assassins? If it is some universal method, then I would also like to know about it, just in case I ever get into a similar situation.”

“I had been… recruited when I was young… the binding was placed upon me… I was trained for a long time, taught to… follow the Master’s orders… even without the binding… but I was… sent out more frequently… than others… I think… I saw different people… and different lives… and I wanted to be more like them…” the assassin said, “Eventually, I just… broke free… I was able to bring Twelfth and Nineteenth with me… making them mistake my energy for the Master’s… There was no opportunity to do so for others… and I had to leave… as quickly as possible…”

‘In that case, there’s not much for me to learn from, apart from ensuring that I never forget who I am, and who I wish to be,’ Yi Wei thought, causing her to frown, ‘Now that I think about it, I haven’t considered the second question at all. What should I do after I return to the Yi District? I won’t be at risk of being thrown out – and even if I am, Yi Yaling would be silly enough to let me stay with her – so what should be my goal? To master one of the great arts? To reach for the peak of cultivation?

‘That may sound interesting to some, but I don’t care that much for the prospect of immortality, if it is even attainable. So long as I experience no more drops in my cultivation speed as I did when I broke into the second realm, then I should be able to reach the next realm with plenty of my lifespan remaining, ensuring that I won’t die for the next few hundred, if not thousand years. After all, if the documents compiled from the Master of Yi City’s theories are correct, the typical lifespan of someone in the fifth realm should be 1,800, then 6,400 for the next realm, then 51,200, then 204,800, then over one and a half million once one attains the level of the Master of Yi City. If I ever reach such a height, I can’t imagine what I’d do with all of my time…

‘That’s if that is even possible. There is a reason why the strongest figures of recent times are never above the sixth or seventh realm. Still, what sort of goal can I pursue, and what sort of relationship should I attempt to maintain with my family? More importantly, is this really the best time to think about this?’

Fen Zhi, without knowing her thoughts, answered sufficiently well nonetheless, “Yi Wei… we are getting near… the elixir…”

She escaped the depths of her mind and beheld the world around her.

They had long exited the swampland and were now standing at the edge of a forest, looking down off the edge of a cliff onto a small pool of water beneath them. It was a little more than ten metres beneath them, with no visible bottom. Beside that, there was nothing else to the pit, as if someone had randomly stabbed into the ground with a giant spear and let it fill with rain.

“Is it in there?” Yi Wei asked, tossing in a small pebble. It crashed into the water and produced a small splash that echoed within the pit.

“I believe so… but I can’t… detect the exact location… I’m afraid…”

“Well, this fall isn’t too bad, and the water doesn’t seem to be an illusion, so it should be safe to jump in,” she concluded, having also scanned the area with her spiritual will and the power of the Third Eye, “From there, we should see if there is an underwater cave which we can swim into. If not, I should be able to help with breathing down there via water-type techniques, and if we can’t find anything even with all that…”

“We… we will,” said Fen Zhi, though the lack of confidence was obvious even in her exhausted voice, “I believe that we will find it…”

Since Yi Wei didn’t want to give the poor woman any false hope, she simply nodded, and gestured forward before leaping into the water. Fen Zhi followed soon after, with both of them using a technique to significantly slow their fall before landing in the water, resulting in their landings occurring almost simultaneously.

The first thing Yi Wei noticed was that the water was incredibly cold, almost as if it had been made of absolute ice in fluid form. In just one second, she felt her skin turn to frost, and it was certain that if not for her physique energy, she would have been frozen completely.

Thankfully, she was unable to slow herself to the same degree as the assassin, mostly due to her lacking planar energy in its blood-like form, so before the other woman could suffer to the same extent, she grabbed her and threw her out of the water and onto the stone wall where she saw a number of places to hold on to.

Fen Zhi understood her quickly and silently, grasping onto a piece of protruding stone and stepping onto another with the foot that had been within the water for a shorter time.

“Are you alright?” Yi Wei asked.

“Cold… but alive… are you?”

“Mhm, I’m… I’m fine. I have a physique resistant to cold and a little heavy in yang, you see, and I also practise an interesting set of techniques,” she explained vaguely, lifting one hand out of the water before creating a large beam of warming light that she shone upon the assassin, “This one is called Dawn Flowing Light. Is it helpful?”

“Yes… I can help myself, though… Preserve yourself instead…”

Despite that, Yi Wei persisted in her efforts until she was sure that the woman was safe and well. She lowered her arm back into the freezing liquid and thought about finding a place for herself to rest outside the water before getting a better idea.

‘I have a perfect opportunity to strengthen both my body and my yang energy here, don’t I?’

She hadn’t wanted to go down the route of masochistic cultivation, but this was certainly a perfect opportunity to significantly increase her prowess in quite a number of aspects. Releasing a strand of planar energy into the liquid, she found it to be suffering in a similar manner to her own body, though just like how she had an incredible quantity of yang energy, her planar energy was guarded by the mysterious characters, the hidden flame, water and earth essences within it, as well as the influence from her physique energy.

Essentially, that meant that it might have also been possible to temper her body and energy in one go. Had it been possible, she would have done the same with her spiritual will, but it was not affected in the same way, no matter how deep she sent it into the cold liquid. To cultivate every single type of energy within one’s body at the same time would have been too nonsensical and unbelievable.

‘Besides, I’m going to be searching through the water anyway. Might as well take advantage of it,’ Yi Wei justified things to herself, before raising her head to address the assassin, “I’ll go down and search for whatever is down here. Listen out for any potential danger, and, please, don’t come down here unless you are able to keep yourself safe, alright?”

“Mhm…” Fen Zhi nodded, watching as Yi Wei sank beneath the water.

 

Her search was intentionally slow, as she kept a constant layer of planar energy around herself in order to gradually refine it. It was in a constant state of flux as a certain quantity of it would flow out of her body while the energy that had been on the outside the longest was circulated back into her body and through her meridians, warming it back up with yang physique energy before it was its turn to go outside once more.

If not for the fact that she was helping Fen Zhi to find her Third Eye Elixir, she probably would have just sat down at the very bottom of the pool and cultivated until all of the extreme yin within it was consumed, but doing so while she watched would be far too cruel. Instead, she simply slowed her progress, showing the proper amount of focus on any potential illusory barriers around her.

However, she suddenly froze – figuratively – and restrained the urge to sigh, ‘I hadn’t considered the possibility that this isn’t something created by the Kong family, or that it wasn’t protected with illusions, had I?’

Indeed, all she was relying on was the statement by the assassin that the Third Eye would assist in locating the other flask of the elixir, but that didn’t necessarily mean that every barrier to it would be an illusory one. Even if most were, it wouldn’t be too unreasonable to have the door be something physical, that cannot be circumvented through a strong enough mental skill or by the natural decay of time wearing down the array creating the false barrier.

‘To make it even worse, the method of opening this barrier might not even be down here, but somewhere above, disguised as a random rock or something similar,’ she considered.

Once that thought crawled into her mind, she knew that she would have to cut her cultivation session short, so she took another few minutes to ensure that every single wisp of her planar energy was refined equally prior to swimming out of the water.

There, she found Fen Zhi to be resting in the exact same place, having not moved a single inch.

“Yi Wei… any success?”

“Unless you happen to be aware that the first barrier to entry is an illusion, I’d recommend you to search for any potential buttons or levers hidden up here,” she said, looking around herself, “I’ve not been able to find much down there yet, though I think I’ve seen the bottom of the pool, so I should be able to check the rest of the pool the next time I dive in.”

“I’ll see what I can find… Are you sure… you’re alright? Your hair… seems to be freezing…” the assassin asked, pointing to Yi Wei’s ice-covered head.

“Hm?” she pulled over her ponytail and brushed the layer of frost off it, revealing the familiar crimson colour beneath it, albeit intensified by its wetness and the vibrance granted to it via her planar energy, “No, I think it’s fine. Even if it does freeze completely, I can just cut it off without any problems.”

Fen Zhi shrugged, or seemed to do so, at the very least, and turned her attention to the walls of this strange, round pit, extending her dark spiritual will to seek out any irregularities within the stone walls.

Seeing that she was getting on just fine on her own, Yi Wei dove back into the yin pool, deciding to sink slowly while continuing with her cultivation. Now that she was doing this for the second time, it was a somewhat calming experience, as she could be sure that she wouldn’t suddenly freeze to death, and was able to dedicate her attention purely to the refining process, with the leftovers being used to search for any further traces of illusions.

Thus, she casually descended, spinning her body slowly with the aid of planar energy.

‘In the future, I could get a pool like this for myself. If my mental state is ever at risk, I can just float down slowly, spinning round and round… Is this the eccentricity people often refer to when they speak of unusual experts?’ she asked no-one in particular, keeping herself breathing with the aid of a simple water-type technique, ‘It would be funny if I was doing this and a bunch of kids at the first realm came by and assumed that this was some sort of secret method to becoming powerful, starting a trend of lazily spinning while you descend into a deep pool in a cross-legged position…’

The corners of her lips rose as she imagined that scenario playing out. By the standards of cultivators, it was an incredibly simple fantasy, without elements of district domination or any other such nonsense, but she somehow found it to be just as appealing, if not more so.

‘Might that be my goal? To live life calmly, occasionally doing a few mischievous acts to amuse myself? It doesn’t seem sufficient to motivate someone to reach the top, but-’

Her thought was interrupted by the sound of stone rubbing against stone, as well as faint movement in her peripheral vision. Through the still wall of water in her way, she saw a large slab of stone move out of the wall, progressing for a few seconds before it stopped and simply popped out, dropping into the depths of the pool.

Despite all logic, however, there was no rush of water into the gap left by the stone. It was as if it hadn’t moved at all, still sitting in the wall like it had been before they found it.

She swam over to the hole in the wall and found that there was a thin barrier in place of the stone.

‘What an interesting barrier. Can I still walk through?’ she asked herself, placing her hand on the barrier. She wasn’t sure what to expect from it, whether in terms of strength or texture, but it turned out that it had neither, as her hand simply passed right through it, appearing on the other side completely dry. To be sure that this wasn’t limited to her hand, she moved through the barrier in her entirety, ending up in a small, dark stone corridor without a trace of water or frost on her body.

Out of a random bout of curiosity, she inspected her skin and hair once more, and found that the former was unchanged, still slightly darker than the average, but that the latter had gained a certain degree of vibrance that it had previously lacked, even with the effects of Chu Ling’s medicinal items and the reconstructive effects of her planar energy.

The change was subtle, especially when viewed using the blood-red light of her planar energy, but it was still an interesting one.

‘If only I had some sort of spatial storage, I could have absorbed a bit of this water and used it in the future… Now, I have no choice but to leave it...’ she thought to herself when a silly idea popped into her head. It wouldn’t solve the problem, but it would allow her to perform one more round of refinement internally, as long as she wasn’t opposed to drinking some of that yin water and allowing it to pulse through her veins.

‘That’s stupid, and I don’t want to be dealing with whatever this might do to my digestive system,’ Yi Wei forced that idea out of her head, dug out a small hole in the ground, and buried it there, before hopping back into the water.

Once she reached the surface, she found Fen Zhi waiting for her, one hand placed over a particular rock on the side of the pool.

“I found… something… did it do anything?”

“A stone slab near the bottom fell away and revealed some sort of passage, though I don’t know where it leads…” Yi Wei paused as she understood a minor complication in their plan, “How are you going to get down there?”

“… Ehm…” the assassin paused for a moment, “I should be able… to protect myself… for three seconds, maybe four… I’d need more than that… to dive down, though…”

“Four seconds? I could try throwing you down while parting the water with some technique.”

“Hm…”

“Actually, I have a slightly better idea – or, rather, an improved version of the same idea. Do you have any large flat objects, preferably made with metal?”

“I might do… but how large… should it be? If… it needs to be larger than… my head… then I don’t…”

“No, so long as the object, whatever it is, is equivalent in size to two standard talisman papers placed next to one another in length and width, and is thick enough to be cut into without piercing the material completely, then there shouldn’t be any issues,” Yi Wei clarified, realising that she had mistakenly used the standards of an inscription master when describing the size of her desired item. Although most famous inscriptions tended to be larger than a person, carved into enormous artefacts and items for all sorts of purposes, the primary focus of inscription was actually on smaller things, like the hammer used by Ning Guanting. Thus, when an inscription master speaks of engravings, a small engraving is no bigger than a coin, a medium inscription is thrice the size, and a large engraving is larger still. Anything beyond it is considered a great engraving, or perhaps a giant engraving.

“Then… could you use some bark?”

The idea seemed sound, so she nodded and climbed out of the pit, leaping a couple metres with each jump until she reached the top and found an appropriate tree. She severed a clean slice of bark using the Dawn Slicing Beam, and then got to work.

A few minutes later, she returned into the pit, with a flat piece of bark that was attached to several thin pieces of rope-like plants, which she placed onto the assassin’s back.

“This is?”

“A makeshift water repellent and heat condenser, both at the two-star level, with the inclusion of a basic planar energy accumulation method… basically, this thing should prevent anything from happening to you on the way down, and if it doesn’t then explode into dust after one use, it might even assist you on the way up,” Yi Wei explained, binding the bark on her back with the makeshift ropes, “It’ll activate the moment you enter the water, and you will still need to use that method you mentioned earlier, but it should last twice or thrice as long.”

“Understood… Are you still going to… throw me in?”

“Naturally. At my fastest possible speed, at least, it would take me five times the time you have in order to reach the underwater passage, so unless you have a good swimming technique, then this will be necessary.”

“Unfortunately… the place where I lived… have few opportunities to swim… I know the basics… but I’m… not too good,” Fen Zhi said, glancing longingly into the air, “I’m ready…”

Yi Wei nodded, and after calculating the best trajectory to throw her on, she found her footing on the protruding stones beneath her and grabbed the assassin, holding her as easily as a child could hold a doll. Then, she forced a great quantity of yang physique energy into her arms and, as she threw Fen Zhi into the water, she simultaneously launched that energy beside her, causing the entire pool to boil.

It wasn’t that she didn’t have any confidence in her inscription, or the other woman’s methods, but she had two reasons for her actions. The first was simply a desire to minimise risks by warming up the yin pool, ensuring that no malfunction within the inscribed plate would injure the assassin. The other was a little more selfish: she was curious to see if this water would happen to be a form of Yin Yang Spring Dew, a form of fluid that is capable of absorbing the extremes of either yin or yang without transforming into either solid or gas like most regular liquids would. If that was the case, then she would have an excellent opportunity to temper her body in the opposite manner, perhaps even rousing what little yin energy was present within her physique.

However, life didn’t always go as planned. After a second of the yang energy being in contact with the freezing water, she saw the top layer of liquid slowly turn to steam and float away, still maintaining a rather cool temperature.

Whatever this liquid was, it wasn’t Yin Yang Spring Dew.

‘Oh well, I can’t always get lucky,’ she quickly shrugged the matter off and dove in after Fen Zhi, ‘Besides, I don’t know whether my body is even capable of releasing its yin energy, so if I had leapt in carelessly, I might have just been ensuring my death, or perhaps burning myself quite badly, unless my own yang wasn’t able to injure me.’

She swam quickly this time, so she made it through the curious barrier within the minute, finding the assassin woman shivering slightly but frequently.

“I-It’s dark… in here…” Fen Zhi said, looking towards the other side of the passage, which was covered completely by such thick darkness that it was impossible to tell where it led, “Could you light… things up somehow?”

“Aren’t you a fire cultivator?”

In response, she simply raised her hand and released a wisp of deep, dull and dark flame.

“Point taken. I’ll make a small light array,” Yi Wei said, grabbing a spare piece of bark off her back and began to work, “By the way, did you not receive any training to see in the dark?”

“That’s not so easy… without a special skill or physique…” explained Fen Zhi, tapping on the side of her head, “My eyes aren’t… too appropriate for the skills… of the Endless Dark… I can give them to you as well… if you want…”

“Sure, I’ll take them. Give me a second to finish this first.”

To create an array that could generate light, one didn’t need any special materials, nor any particular secret knowledge within the great art of formation arrangement.

In fact, to create some form of a Light Array, or perhaps a Glowing Array, was a common exercise for those just starting out in the field of arrays to practise, right after they complete their first few Planar Gathering arrays. In terms of structure, it was not complicated in the slightest. All it had were a few nodes to gather energy, a few to transform it into particles of light, then another few to release it. They were so easy to create that they would be used in place of torches during any expedition into ruins or underground environments and could be purchased for just a few silver coins.

“Done. Now, let me just bind this to my front…” she said, leaving the latter part unsaid, ‘My chest is mostly flat anyway, so it won’t be uncomfortable.’

In order to activate it, all she had to do was tap the side of the bark while also sending a certain quantity of spiritual will into the array, circulating it through the appropriate nodes to activate the structure.

A small spark of light, like a weak cinder in the midst of a dying pile of kindling, appeared in front of the array plate, blooming gradually into a flower of flame and then into a bright torchlight.

When compared to the glorious illumination provided by a technique at its peak, it was dim indeed, but in this darkness, it was more than sufficient to enlighten then as to the nature of the corridor, what was at the end of it, as well as what their surroundings looked like, even if they were coloured by the orange shade of the light.

Contrary to the initial impression Yi Wei had of the passageway, it wasn’t simply cut from rough stone, or perhaps created naturally. Instead, it was put together from a great number of tiles, cut intentionally to appear like the surface of unprocessed stone, albeit with sharper and more geometrical angles than one would naturally expect. With the light shining upon them, the gaps between each square tile were obvious, as was the fact that they were not made of the same stone as the pit, meaning that someone had intentionally or unintentionally used a different material to create this corridor. Upon even further inspection, she deduced – via the secret art of randomly hitting it – that this stone was much stronger than ordinary rock, though she couldn’t quite identify it from strength and endurance alone.

What she was able to observe was that the stone slab tiles were not arranged perfectly, with some having larger gaps than others, resulting in a strangely irregular surface that persisted all the way until the other end of the passageway, where an even more curious discovery was made.

Amongst the countless stone tiles, approximately at eye level, there was a single tile that was completely flat. Upon first glance, it appeared to be made from some sort of dark glass, or perhaps a crystal, and there seemed to be something within, though any attempts at a closer examination caused the bright light from her Glowing Array to ruin all visibility with a reflection of herself.

“Do you have any idea what this is?”

Fen Zhi shook her head, “No… but since there’s no door… maybe this opens it? Maybe we should… try touching it…”

There was a certain risk of triggering a trap, or failing whatever challenge this was supposed to be, but just like she said, the passageway ended in the same stone tiles as the rest of the corridor, with no visible exit. Out of all the potential methods for progressing, the glass tile seemed most obvious.