Path of the Ascendant

There was a total of twenty-eight entrances that could be accessed, and so twenty-eight lines formed in front of each entrance, with a few people standing in each one. The leaders stood at the very front of a few of the lines, while Yi Wei found a place at the back and did her best not to look directly at the openings, as they had a shape that could all too easily be likened to a certain part of the female anatomy.

She wasn’t sure whether she wasn’t comfortable with looking at it due to the memories of the Thunder Lord, or her own mind, as it was rather difficult to tell the two apart due to the strongest memories of the former still being vibrant within her thoughts, but the suggestive imagery was easy to avoid for now, so she did exactly that.

Looking to the side, a few lines away from her, she saw Yi Bai standing without a clear expression on her face, seeming to be in a daze.

The others showed a mixture of different emotions and faces, with some, Yi Fenwu included, showing a clear look of excitement and eagerness, while others were more apprehensive, amongst which Yi Wei saw a few of those who had fought in the third Lock Obelisk’s arenas.

Some displayed a mixture of feelings, cycling from one to another without any clear reason, their eyes darting back and forth as they desperately tried to see more and more of the world within.

As she glanced past the crowd, she saw a young man, younger than most members of the expedition by a couple of years, also limiting his viewing of the entrance to the hidden grounds, with slightly blushed cheeks. ‘So I’m not the only one, then… Good. This shows that I haven’t gone completely mad just yet, and that I have some hope of recovery, or achieving a reasonable degree of mental maturity where, regardless of what I feel towards certain imagery, my mind and body will not get confused as a result of it.’

Unfortunately, she couldn’t seek out such a state just yet, not while the matter of certain overwhelming memories was not yet settled, so she simply looked forward and awaited instruction from the group leaders, who waited for the elder to appear.

In total, it took three minutes before he found a suitable branch to perch upon and reveal his presence.

“What are you people doing?” was the first thing he said, his nose still red and his speech still slightly slurred, as if he had been drinking recently, “You don’t need my permission to do everything.”

He appeared to vanish, though Yi Wei was able to catch a glimpse of him entering the gateway on his own, doing his very best to conceal that action. Whether this was motivated by greed, or a desire to secretly safeguard those who will enter after him from the shadows, she couldn’t be certain, but the fact that he made sure to hide his presence with even greater care than usual suggested the former explanation more so than the latter.

“Very well then, everyone, let’s go!” the team leaders called out, and charged into the entrances of the hidden grounds.

Everyone else followed them, and the first wave of people entered the gateways together, with some of the larger individuals needing to pull the edges of the entrances apart in order to make it through them, only adding to the unfortunate imagery that Yi Wei was trying to ignore. The next in line were about to follow them, but they quickly realised that the world in front of them changed, and that there was no trace of those who had gone in front of them there. Every scene in front of them was new, and the one that Yi Wei was able to see previously, with square dark tiles arranged in a geometric fashion, had changed to a scene of a small island floating in a dark void, lit by the ever-present orange light.

Those who were next in line hesitated for a moment, but then stepped forward nonetheless, making their way through the portals with some wariness and hesitation. Once they disappeared into the shifting mass of gateways, the scenes changed once more, and continued doing so with every further entry into the hidden grounds.

In a minute, it was Yi Wei’s turn, and the scene in front of her was now a large globe of flame, floating a small distance above the flat, dark square tiles that made up the ground. Behind it, as always, was that same point of light, which appeared to not be bound to any specific physical location, instead seeming to be a law of the world, made for the creators to be able to avoid bothering with concerns regarding lighting every single area they created.

‘So far, things are as Kong Dong Ming had described. Now, I wonder how to access the true treasures of this realm. Do I just walk into those… entrances? Wait, that doesn’t sound right either…’

She shook her head and advanced by a single step, stopping a few inches from her gateway of choice. To be sure that she wasn’t missing anything, she walked around the pulsing mass and made sure that none of other doors had anything that would suggest the presence of the proper entrance for the holder of the Lock Obelisk keys, and returned to the first entrance she stood in front of.

After breathing in deeply, breathing out and then shutting her eyes, she leapt into the portal.

For a moment, there was a sensation of great warmth, but it vanished immediately, being replaced with a state of neither cold nor warmth, more like the total absence of temperature and humidity. Her feet landed onto a hard surface, after which she reopened her eyes and took a look around.

What she saw before and after jumping into the hidden grounds did not match. Where there previously was a ball of flame, she now saw four doors, with two to her left, one to her right, and one directly in front of her. Above each door, floating freely in the void, there was a portion of a symbol that Yi Wei recognised quickly – the round key markings, matching those on her wrist. The first door on the left had a quarter of it, the one on the right had one half, the second on the left had three quarters, and the one in front contained the full symbol.

These doorways were completely dark and showed nothing even with the usage of the Third Eye.

‘This is the true treasure of the Kong Holy Grounds? I assume I can go into any of the doors at any time, considering the fact that I have all four keys, but as of late, I’ve been feeling a certain degree of dread… As a cultivator blessed by the heavens with spiritual will, I should put trust into such feelings, though I don’t quite know what that dread means. Am I in danger, is the expedition in danger, and how should I be dealing with it?’ she asked herself, looking around at the doors in no particular order.

Before she had a chance to consider some of the sillier ideas, like tossing a stone into the air and seeing where it rolls towards, the natural realisation came to her that the most valuable objects, no matter what they may be, would be contained within the last door. It was, after all, the only one that would require the cooperation of all four key fragments to access.

‘However, this does raise the question of the purpose behind having four individual doors. Depending on the people that collect these keys, and their allegiances, some doors may be inaccessible, and I don’t have a clue regarding what may happen if one of the key holders dies inside or outside of the Kong Holy Grounds. Can a key be retaken by someone else? Does it get passed on to the killer, or to the nearest human? Well, whatever the answer, I can try and investigate later. I’m already worried about not being able to access one or more of the doors, so if I waste any more time, I may lose out on more treasure,’ she thought to herself, ignoring the fact that her mind had processed her every thought in under a few seconds, ‘The last door it is, then the three-key door, then the two-key and the one-key doors, assuming that the value of the items within is in ascending order, and does not follow some other form of logic, like sorting them according to the importance placed upon them by the Kong family…’

Yi Wei readied herself for combat, as to prepare for any traps or obstacles that may still be in her way, and approached the furthest doorway, touching its surface with her hand.

Although it appeared to completely impassable, the moment she tried to pierce the darkness, her hand went straight through, to whatever was on the other side, and when she pulled it back, there was nothing stopping it.

It felt strange, but ultimately harmless, so she took a cautious step into the darkness.

Blood.

An enormous wall covered in blood.

It stood right in front of her, with a single sentence standing out amidst the endless scrawling on the dark, smooth surface.

‘Help us.’

Around, there were other messages, left in the same liquid.

‘Forgive us.’

‘Please return to us.’

‘The family is doomed.’

‘We are sorry for not seeing your potential.’

‘Return to us, Shi Meng.’

‘Shi Meng? Kong Shi Meng, the prodigal child?’ Yi Wei recalled, ‘Was this written at the time that he left the family? Did they undergo some sort of terrible strife quickly after creating the replica of Kong Dong Ming? Did they hope for this Kong Shi Meng to find this wall soon after?’

Although this sight made her completely speechless, she forced herself to advance and take a closer look at the wall and the writing on it.

‘Our deeds were unfair and unjustified. We beg for your forgiveness.’

The stench of iron flooded her nose quickly upon nearing it, but it did confirm one simple fact – this pocket realm, these hidden grounds, did not have the fundamental laws that would allow for the typical drying of blood. Unfortunately, that also meant that it was impossible to date this particular wall of blood, nor figure out whether it was something left behind by the ancient Kong family, or perhaps by someone else, as a method of misleading those who came upon it.

‘We will not bring up old grievances. Please, save us.’

However, that theory could only be true if the Lock Obelisks had previously been accessed and then rose up again after the hidden grounds were exited by their previous visitors, in which case she might as well say goodbye to any possibility of acquiring things from any of the doors, since the people who could access the final door would also be able to access the other doors as well.

‘Since I can’t see anything here, I assume they would be behind this… memorial? Tombstone? What would this count as?’ she wondered to herself, while slowly making her way around it.

At the back of this chamber with invisible walls, there were five small rectangular pedestals, four of which were slightly in front of the middle one, with two on either side of it. All five held a single tome, with the two on the right reading ‘Ancestral Call’ and ‘Ancestral Eyes’, while the two on the left read ‘Light of Divinity’ and ‘Touch of God’. It took her a second to recall where she had heard these names before, but when she did, she was far more eager to see the title of the last book, as she could, with enough time, replicate all four of them, but she had not witnessed the echo of Kong Dong Ming using a fifth skill.

In a way, the title of this manual was far simpler than the rest, with no allusions to divinity or to the ancestors, instead reading as follows, ‘The Gilded Library’.

‘To be frank, this doesn’t sound so much like a technique as it does a blueprint of an architect,’ Yi Wei remarked to herself, thinking back to the Ancestral Hall of the Yi District, which was covered in immortal gold, ‘Is this a cultivation technique to work alongside the combat arts around it, or could this be a mental art?’

She did not reach for it immediately, but instead checked all around it for any signs of traps, arrays and inscriptions, finding none. Even then, she reached out to the book carefully, and touched as little of it as possible while she flipped it open.

Immediately, the characters began to dance around in her vision, blurring to the point that she was barely able to understand a single one of them.

‘This is akin to the effect that skills close to the Dao to have, just… different. I wonder-’

A strange jingle, like that of a small bell, interrupted her thoughts, and forced her spiritual will into her dantian. There, she witnessed the mysterious characters changing shape into something utterly unknown and unrecognisable to her. Perhaps it was the likeness of a beast, or some humanoid creature, or perhaps it had no similarity to a living thing at all. Regardless of that, she felt the veil over the words of the Gilded Library skill being lifted, allowing her to read them effortlessly.

‘Thou that readeth this tome, if thou art worthy of carrying our legacy, thine eyes shalt be clear and thine mind shalt be ready. To mould thine mind without proper preparation is the utmost folly, so shalt thee know.’

It started much like the Kong Mental Arts, albeit the language used was older and a bit of a chore to read as a result. Nonetheless, she pressed on, and after the introduction, it switched right into the simplest language available at the time of creation, losing all superfluity and focusing purely on the essence of the technique.

‘That is the mark of someone who had truly understood the technique they are teaching. In comparison to some of the manuals that can be found in the Yi family’s technique library, this is much better,’ Yi Wei thought, flipping through the manual quickly and committing every single page to mind. There was still no way of telling if there was some limit to the time she had to read, so instead of carefully comprehend this technique now, she would do so later. ‘As it turns out, this is a mental technique. Besides strengthening the mind, this also allows one to store all knowledge and memories in a sort of library, where they can be accessed at any time, and at any level of immersion. If practised correctly and to a high standard, I should be able to finally get rid of the influence of the Thunder Lord and, if it turns out I have certain inclinations, I can access the appropriate memories to recall the so-called skills and techniques that he possessed in bed, or wherever else.’

As the book was not particularly thick, she finished it in a minute, and moved onto the other four.

By that point, the mysterious characters had reset to their previous position, displaying the technique for breaking into the eight stage of Planar Pool, and even though those four techniques also had a similar sort of blur over all of their words, she found them much easier to read.

Whether this was due to them being on a lower level than the Gilded Library, or due to her having gained similar knowledge, she took advantage of that fact and also finished them in a matter of minutes, realising in the process that she had been overthinking all four of the techniques used by the echo of Kong Dong Ming, as well as a number of other skills that she had encountered in the past. For instance, the golden lightning that had formed within Yi Yaling had previously seemed too complex to replicate, but now she had a little more to work with.

If she had a few days of access to Yi Yaling’s planar energy, she would currently have more than 50% certainty of compiling a suitable technique for her, whereas previously she wouldn’t have given herself anything above ten percent or lower in terms of her chances. In other words, five ancient techniques allowed her to greatly improve her knowledge, and greatly boost her abilities.

‘It does help that these are clearly not designed for someone of the second realm, but rather for the fifth realm. Just like how learning the Storm Blade Wreathing skill greatly improved my abilities, learning about something even more powerful and complex than one’s current comprehension always helps.’

Once she completed the last manual, she shut it and turned around, looking for any other treasures that have been left behind.

She looked around the great bloodied wall, touched every wall and floor tile, even attempted to leap out of the invisible chamber with what could be described as unfortunate results – mostly for her hair, as her skull was tough enough to endure a small bump into an invisible force – after which Yi Wei was able to come to a conclusion.

‘There’s nothing else. Huh…’ she sighed, ‘Whoever this was originally meant for must not have been lacking in material goods, or else none of them made it into the Kong Holy Grounds. That’s a shame, as I could have done with anything that could withstand my cosmic energy.’

Whatever the explanation for this lack of treasures was, it was out of her control, so she switched her attention to the one thing she was able to find, which was right on the back of the great memorial wall. A set of small round portals floated in the air, closely to the wall, and displayed various positions within the hidden grounds, including a few things that Yi Wei had seen through the entrances to the Kong Holy Grounds.

Some were not particularly intriguing to witness, showing a calm emptiness, as if these hidden grounds had never been touched in all of time, but others were a little less pleasant to witness.

There were scenes with stains of blood, though they were not too striking in comparison to the enormous painting of blood on the other side of the wall. However, as she kept looking, she saw more and more of the scenes and of blood, until she came across a dead body. It belonged to someone from the Yi family, and the only visible wounds numbered two – one in the abdomen, where vague planar energy was flowing out, and another in the eye, cutting right through to the brain. On an image close to that one, there was a nigh identical image, except she was able to recognise this person as an individual from Yi Jiazhi’s group.

Then, she saw another, and another, as if someone had intentionally gone through and lined up the images in the fashion of some sort of collage, perhaps in order to infuriate whoever came upon them. At first, she was not too moved, as she did not have a personal connection to these people, and lacked any clear ability to do anything about their unfortunate demise, but as the number of corpses climbed all the way to thirty-seven, she felt that it was impossible not to act.

‘Before I do anything, I should consider my own capabilities. This assassin is likely to be near the peak of the second realm, or in the lower end of the third realm, so, while I could inflict some harm on them, I could only do so if they lacked the ability to evade my observation. If that is not the case, then I need to quickly raise my strength,’ Yi Wei concluded, ‘and the best option I currently have is to create a new cultivation technique and merge it into my mysterious character technique, as it will grant me whatever properties I manage to add into it, no matter which type of planar energy I display.’

She went through the many techniques within her mind, trying to see if any of them could come together without too much effort on her part, but as she had previously learned with the Disciple of Iron technique, combining two elements was not as simple as throwing two random techniques together, not even with the aid of the characters.

Instead, her gaze was drawn back towards the Gilded Library tome, as well as the four manuals around it.

Although they all looked similar to one another, there was a second enormous difference between it and the combat techniques. While all four of them followed the element of water, the Gilded Library was exactly the same as the Kong Mental Arts, in that it had neither an image that inspired it, nor any trace of an element to influence. In other words, they were planar techniques, using the raw planar energy of the world instead of converting it into an elemental form.

‘With only those two skills – the Red Phantom Flood is too deadly to be mentioned , and who knows how that technique works – I can’t imagine making something stable, but my chances are yet again better than they would have been before, and so long as my characters accept it, I won’t need to maintain it for longer than a second.’

Yi Wei sat down on the ground and concentrated. She flipped through the pages of the Gilded Library within her mind, taking in every detail she hadn’t previously paid attention to, and then began her cultivation of it.

Her vision moved into the depths of her mind, where the endless seas of memories and knowledge floated with little reason or structure. What little logic was present originated from her attempts to seal away the thoughts of the Thunder Lord, so most of his memories now resided within a certain spot far away from the rest of them. In addition, some of the thoughts relating to the mysterious characters hovered amidst the rest in a slightly more organised fashion due to her previous meddling.

From what little she could garner from the Gilded Library manual, she had a slightly larger quantity of thoughts and memories to gather than most, though it was difficult to establish the exact difference due to the lacking descriptions within the technique regarding examples, preferring to focus on the actual instructions of the skill.

‘Now, I need to sort all of these into the mental library, and in order to do that I have to conceptualise the most potent idea of a library that I can. If I am familiar with any suitable library, I should use that one… I think the best one would be the library that had contained the various miscellaneous texts that I had spent much of my time studying back when I thought that I wouldn’t have any chances of advancing to the second stage within a reasonable time. I have a solid impression of it, so it will be easiest to recreate…’ she considered.

Before she was able to begin the construction, she felt a memory originating from the mysterious characters entering her mind.

It was the image of a grand library, covered in golden ornaments, and with such a great number of floors that it stretched into the endless void and was concealed by a golden fog. All shelves were filled to the brim with books of all sizes, sorted according to some arcane principle.

At the entrance, there was a set of characters unknown to her, but their golden contours radiated profundity, and it felt that if she was able to get her hands on a single one of those books within, she could surpass the heavens themselves. Even if all she was able to enter the library but was not permitted to read anything, the aura of knowledge seemed sufficient to grant her every insight she was currently lacking.

However, she hesitated upon witnessing this, and, with great effort, chose to turn away.

‘This… I cannot use this. It may look impressive, but I know nothing of this place, and it is far too impressive for me and my perception of myself. For me to use something that does not come from my mind would essentially mean forsaking all possibility of development in this technique, as I could never improve on something that appears to be closer to an ideal than any kind of reality,’ she decided, her thoughts returning to the small library she had often sat in four years ago, ‘That impressive library may offer me greatest advantages at the beginning, but the library that I know can be enlarged, improved, redesigned, and I will still understand it, while I have no chance of doing so with something so great from the start. However, I can make this dream the first idea to be stored in my mental library.’

She called upon her mental energy and drove it into her mind, following the instructions of the Gilded Library technique and assembling the outline of a small library in the middle of her mental landscape.

With how much time she had spent there, she was able to build it up all the way from the ground, creating every individual part of the foundations, the walls, the two floors and the many bookshelves, not all of which fit perfectly together with one another. Some were new, due to having been replaced a few years before her first arrival at the library, while others were ancient and would creak as loud as thunder whenever they were touched, whether by a human hand or by a faint breeze.

Some shelves stood taller than others, and a few had to be cut in two in order to prevent them from breaking into the floor above, and one was even laid across the floor, supposedly having come from a small passing tribe of human giants.

It did not measure up to the library offered by mysterious characters in any way, but she was as familiar with it as she was with her own home, allowing her to construct it with her mental energy in a matter of minutes. Once it was done, she immediately transformed the image of that golden library into a piece of paper, which she then placed on one of the better shelves.

Yi Wei looked outside of the library, through the lone, cloudy window, and onto the countless thoughts, memories and ideas that hovered around her mind. She reached out with her mental strength, grabbing onto the nearest floating memory, which she also converted into a book and opened it onto a random page. There, she saw one of the Thunder Lord Meng’s memories from his adulthood, where he fought with a man while using an early version of his Storm Blade Wreathing technique, which was primarily a fire technique at the time.

When she looked out onto the sea of memories, then back onto the book in her mental hand, she was able to recognise the difference between two groups of thoughts, ‘I didn’t realise that I had missed such a large number of his ideas, but now I can see that his memories are somewhat dim and flat, perhaps because they do not belong to me or his shadow, which originally passed them on to me, while mine are vibrant and three-dimensional, almost certainly due to the fact that they are mine, originally, and were experienced in their entirety by me. Let’s test this theory.’

She reached out and grabbed onto another memory, opening it up to find the sight of a large bathing pool, with vast quantities of steam failing to do anything to obscure the naked female bodies within it.

Her face turned red as she shut the book and placed it on the most hidden shelf within the library.

‘Why is that such a vibrant memory of mine, and why am I finding it now of all times? I am about to seek out a powerful assassin that has already slaughtered a great number of my family’s expedition group, but my brain just happened to pull out something stupid like this?’ Yi Wei brought that memory out of her mind, focusing on the rest of her mental landscape, ‘At the very least I should be able to get rid of the man’s influence soon. Come, archived memories of the Seventh of Meng!’

The large collection of thoughts in the far reaches of her mind shifted, and floated into the middle, where her library was placed. When they neared it, they suddenly accelerated and shrunk down to the size of an average book, passing through the door and window as they soared onto the shelves.

As they did, she suddenly recalled every detail about that particular memory, only without the feelings stored within overtaking her like they did before. She was able to witness all sorts of scenarios, but only as stories, as words on a page, instead of the vibrant memories that they had been before. Even if she looked to the various unfortunate memories of his experience in bed, they were not as striking as before.

With the Thunder Lord Meng section of the library filling up, she felt an energy slowly welling up within her brain, akin to the violet energy of the Kong Mental Arts.

‘Alright. With this and that other energy, I should be able to create something.’