Path of the Ascendant

Once their five minutes were up, Meng Chu’s troops began their advancement, making sure to stick to the exact path described by Wei Yi. The brighter ones amongst them soon understood why, for they observed that the tower they approached had an obstacle which would block their line from the sight of the guardian atop it. All of them quietened down even further while doing their best to accelerate their movements as much as possible, arriving at the tower after a tense but uneventful jog.

They then split up, with five going to the first tower, four going to the second, five heading to the third and four heading to each one of the other towers.

If there had been enough warriors to work with, Wei Yi would have liked to send two men for every man they had, and two women for every woman they had, which would have allowed her to use excessive force and numbers to deal with their superior physical strength, or even three men for every person the physique cultivators had, as men were superior in terms of physical strength and would be more capable of resisting their raw power without any cultivation of their body, but for better or for worse, most of Meng Chu’s troops appeared to have very similar levels of physical and mental strength, killing intent cultivation naturally being excluded.

To avoid detection, each group used a very specific path around the walls of the fortress and into them, naturally also decided beforehand by Wei Yi, and entered their respective parts of the so-called defensive structure quietly.

 

“Hurry up, Peng, it’s your turn!” said a short, burly and muscular man, slamming a stack of four thin books onto the table.

A man that sat opposite him clenched his fist and replied, “I get it, Tai, I get it!”

Peng stood up, bashing his own stack of books onto the table before removing one from the pile and putting it face-up in front of himself, “I play the Vile Crimson Eradication technique! It beats your Violent Fourth Fall and cancels the effects of the Paradise Cry!”

“Hah, you think that you can beat me? I bring out-”

“WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU LOT DOING?” a third man rushed into the room and struck the table with enough force to finally break it, “What is all this shit? Storm of Vengeance? Conundrum Maze? Who named this trash? You’re meant to be packing this fucking garbage, not sitting around and chucking this at one another!”

“We are, you dickhead!” Tai replied, “Look at all the books, Chen. Anyway, who put you in charge, you slow-ass prick?”

“You lot did! Anyway, Peng, shuffle off to the lower floor and handle the boxes there. Tai, get up top before I beat your ass!” Chen shouted, getting several hits off on both of them before they got to where he wanted them to be.

He remained in place, glancing briefly at the stacks of books before kicking them all into a corner.

In his eyes, these stacks of paper were boring and completely irrelevant, matching the opinion of most of his peers. For most of the physique cultivators of the Great Bone Lake, the best method for acquiring techniques was through battle and training and cultivating them could be done through similar means. Things that were written in such books were old and antiquated, without any benefit in the field without great adjustment on the spot, and if such great effort was required to learn the technique just to then relearn it in a manner relevant to battle, why not create something more suitable from the start, and on your own?

Unfortunately, surviving with raw strength alone was difficult, and acquiring other resources was necessary for anyone who had no ability to farm the crimson wastes – which included almost everyone who seriously cultivated either physique energy or killing intent. As a result, they would resort to pillaging and raiding, seeking various valuables to trade either for motes of killing intent or food.

For this reason, the group of physique cultivators decided to occupy this battlefield and search all of the bodies and buried remains in the area, even though they belonged to the filthy and vile killing intent cultivators of Beast’s Rest.

“Really, those fuckers waste so much time on these things…”

He went to open up another one of the sealed boxes within this room but stopped midway when he heard a strange creak from the wall to his side.

After restraining his first urge to punch the wall to damage whoever was hiding behind it, as that would likely cause significant damage to the entire structure and force them to leave early, Chen frowned instead and approached it slowly, still preparing to punch the wall if anything out of the ordinary occurred.

Step by step, he moved closer, his heart accelerating for no particular reason. He had faced much greater threats than a random noise originating from behind a wall, but, for some reason, his typically acute sense of danger told him that this was the most terrifying foe he would ever find.

“What are you, you-”

“Chen, we found weird books with pictures in them!” a yell came from behind and below him, clearly belonging to Peng, “What do we do?”

“Just fuck yourselves with them! If they look pricy, we’ll sell them, if not, we burn them! Get it?”

“Alright, sure,” came Peng’s reply, with vague sounds of boxes being opened and books being flipped through slowly following.

In the process of answering, Chen had turned around on the spot, no longer feeling that odd sensation of dread nor threat. He was almost convinced that it was just something he had made up from boredom or exhaustion, but then two objects moved rapidly in front of his eyes and sunk into them. All he could do before death was realise that they were daggers, swung at the same time by two different hands, belonging to two different people.

The daggers went in, then were pulled out the very next second so that those hands could catch his body before he fell loudly to the ground. Once his corpse was laid quietly onto the ground, the figures departed, not caring that his blood slowly seeped through the ground.

 

“Min, you can read, right? What does this thing say?”

The man known as Min stepped forward and bent down to look as closely as he could at each individual character, “It’s that odd version of the language, I think… It says, eh, S-Sar Aeh- no, Sa Rah’s Protective Talisman, I think. It’s meant to ward off bad luck, I think, and, well, I think, it might actually be able to, I think-”

“Are you sure you can think?”

“I think… no…”

“Ah, whatever, just hush already. Can we use these things?”

“Well, if you put them on… like this,” Min said, sticking one of the talisman papers onto his chest with great effort, repeating the motion several times to be absolutely sure that he had done it correctly, “Then, I think that-”

A powerful force, followed by a dark spear, shot out of the ground, piercing into Min’s body and splitting him in two with just one attack, causing blood and wooden splinters to fly everywhere.

Through the hole that formed in the ground, two figured jumped out and landed on the ground, with one wielding the spear and another using a large sword and shield, with the latter clearly being used more often than the former. However, they did not attack, nor did they retreat. They simply stood there, looking at the one man that remained with a clear intent.

“Heh… Thanks for that… You wanna fight me, don’t you? Alright then, I’ll humour you. Come on!”

The man exclaimed, but he kept his voice down, and the stance that he took in combat was also one that would ensure that each one of his moves would produce the minimal amount of noise. He could not see the response of the two due to them wearing masks, but they did not appear to disagree.

In truth, they were rather surprised by this, for they did not expect someone to be so accommodating after they had just killed his friend, even after Wei Yi had informed them of this.

The two men that were part of Meng Chu’s forces created some distance between themselves, forming a triangle with the physique cultivator. The spear-wielder raised a hand and silently counted down from three, to two, to one, before his hand shot down and returned to the shaft of the spear just as the other two also sprang into action.

 

“Hey, Ling, have you been sleeping around with someone else?”

“What are you on about? You’ve been watching me pretty much the entire time, when would I do that?”

“Hm… Fine. If you do find someone nice, don’t forget to tell me, alright?”

“Sure, Xin, sure.”

The two women separated, though Ling was still concerned. Out of nowhere, she started smelling something new in this generally stale structure, and if it wasn’t either Ling or Ye finding someone else to lay with, then it could be an intruder of some sort, though they could either be a human or a hatred automaton of some kind, as both can have all sorts of strange scents coming from their bodies based on their cultivation techniques in the case of the former, or the beast it came from in the case of the latter.

Due to this, Xin decided to search around and investigate, taking this opportunity to look around the section of the wall and search for things to borrow, eat or look at.

She found nothing at the top of the tower and walls, nor on the next floor, as she had plundered those areas long ago, and both Ling and Ye must have long figured out that leaving anything on these floors would lead to it being taken.

Descending by another floor, she entered the storage room, where countless crates, boxes and random materials were stacked up without much logic and reason. A single, snaking path lead through it, around all sorts of structures put together from those materials by Ye, who had both the patience to guard the fortress for the majority of his time and then used that unused energy to complicate the storage room further with esoteric designs.

“What a wierdo…” Xin muttered, “With how mixed the scents here are, anyone could hide with ease!”

For that reason, she slowed down and looked around herself constantly, seeking any minor trace of an intruder. By the pile that depicted Beast’s Rest… nothing. Near the structure that could, after excessive alcohol consumption, be deemed to resemble a house… nothing. Inside of the prison of boxes… also nothing.

‘If only Ye had put in effort into literally any other field…’

The woman continued walking, checking everything else she encountered and came into contact with, but she was only able to find that the scent which had sent her on this explorative bout in the first place stopped near the edge of the wall and dissipated.

Meanwhile, a figure exited the prison of boxes and stretched their bodies to recover from the extremely strange posture they had been in while within.

 

“Tai! Look!”

“Blood! Something happened to Chen?”

“Let’s go and check it out!”

They ran upstairs with great haste and found the body of their friend, lying dead on the ground, blood pouring from his eye sockets. There were no traces of any other people here, except it was obvious that Chen could not have done this to himself.

“We need to-”

“Wait, Peng, that’s what they want us to think! Whoever attacked us is expecting us to alert the others, so we must not do it!”

“Eh? That… Does that make sense?”

“Yes, it does! Come on, let us investigate!” Tai exclaimed, pointing to one side of the wall, “You go there, and I will go the other way! Make sure not to alert the guy up top, alright? He will ruin our plan with his incompetence!”

Peng wasn’t really clear what was happening, nor how that plan would ever work, but he knew that Tai was smarter than him and that if he acted on his own, he would probably just make things worse.

They split up, each one looking to his own part of the structure, while the two that were responsible for Chen’s door glanced at one another in confusion. Sure, they had been expecting this exact thing in order for the plan given to them by Wei Yi to work, but to see something like this happening right in front of them, while hearing the strange, warped logic that the man called Tai had used, was a very interesting experience.

 

“Oh, yes~! YES!” cried the woman, collapsing onto the hard wooden floor alongside her partner.

They lay in silence for a little while, doing nothing but breathing in one another’s warmth. Her breasts were pressed against his muscular chest, her messy hair lay on his neck, and although their eyes could not meet, their thoughts were focused purely on one another.

Only after many minutes passed did they reluctantly part and tidy themselves, dressing in the minimalistic rags of the Great Bone Lake.

“Right, weren’t we supposed to be doing something else?” she asked, glancing at the man’s chiselled face for several seconds longer than she probably should have.

“Something to do with packing things up, I think. Let’s… look over there.”

The man pointed towards the tower where Min, Ning and Sheng were, for he noticed that Sheng had vanished from the top of the tower, while within there were three men fighting one another. From such a distance, with the crimson light and fog obscuring the details, he could not tell who they were, but he did find it odd.

“There? Hm... It just looks like Sheng is being lazy again to me,” the woman commented, narrowing her eyes to try and peer into the distance, “You know that Min and Ning don’t always get along.”

“Hm… I suppose…” frowned the man, his gaze sticking to the woman’s ample breasts.

“Now, I know you can go at least thrice, so…”

“You’re insatiable…”

 

“When in the heavens did this hot slut come from?” one of three men asked, doing nothing to hide the rising tent within his pants, much like his compatriots.

“N-No, please, don’t do this to me!” the woman they surrounded, a youthful figure without a trace of roughness in her features, cried out, her eyes darting between all three of them in some sort of vague hope that one of them would have enough kindness or compassion to safeguard her from the rest. However, not one had anything but lust in their eyes, lust that intensified from her extremely vulnerable appearance.

“Heh… Boys, you know which part of her I want, don’t you?” he said, taking a step closer.

Before he could advance by much, both of the men by his side placed their hands upon his shoulders, stopping him from moving any further. The man on the right shook his head, “Don’t you dare. She’ll only look like that once, and I want to ruin her first.”

“Same here. I’m not gonna let you take her first time, as it belongs to me.”

“You lot…” he shook off their hands and turned around, glaring at the other two, “You wanna do this? Do you?”

“Yes!”

“Of course!”

“Fine, you bastards. The battle for her mouth, then!”

He punched the man on his left without any warning, striking his jaw and following up with a hit to his stomach. The man on his right kicked his leg and struck the back of his neck while the man on the left recovered, replying with a jab to the eyes.

 

“Alright girls, can I take off the blindfold already? What is it that you wanted to show me?”

All he received were hushes from the two people that stood around him, though they seemed to intentionally avoid touching him or coming into close proximity with him, clearly intending to tease him and build up to some extravagant reveal. He wasn’t sure what that reveal could be, since neither Ling nor Shi had expressly replied to his advances in the past, nor did he expect them to have found something worthwhile within the battlefield that would warrant such a build-up, but the culture of the Great Bone Lake dictated that one must have faith in their few close allies or partners, for there is no-one else that can be trusted in the desolate prison realm.

For that reason, he continued standing patiently in the exact spot that he had been guided to earlier, listening closely to the shuffling and moving that was going on around him.

Finally, he felt soft skin on his head and thin fingers untying the blindfold that covered his eyes.

The moment that it came off, it was stuffed into his mouth and a sharp blade was placed against his neck, the edge resting against his thick and resistant skin, which had been trained for many years to ensure that no common – or uncommon, for that matter – weapon could pierce his flesh.

Before he could consider doing anything to his unexpected assailant, however, he saw a grim image in front of himself – two women lay dead on the ground, their throats cut and their flesh pierced several more times, seemingly for good measure. On its own, such a sight would not be too disturbing to the population of the prison realm, for the vast majority had seen and committed several murders prior to their adulthood, but what he saw was not just two random bodies, but those of Ling and Shi, the same women that should have been standing next to him.

‘YOU…!’

His entire body seemed to light up like a candle in the night, his skin and hair rapidly transforming into pure gold. The hand holding the knife nearly recoiled instinctively, but it steadied itself and waited until the skin on the man’s neck began to change and sliced with the blade at that exact time. When the knife moved away from his skin, it was followed by a steady stream of blood.

He could not even question what happened, or how they knew about this weakness before he fell to the ground, his life burning away in seconds.

 

“Hah… hah…” breathed the man, taking his foot off the body of his compatriot, “Finally…”

While trying to ignore the immense pain in his entire body, he turned around on the spot and looked at the prize they had been fighting for. He was covered in bruises, several large wounds on his legs, arms and one on his back were actively bleeding even as his physique desperately attempted to recover from the beating, thick and concentrated physique energy flowing through his meridians and rushing to every damaged point.

Still, in his mind, all of this damage and the series injuries or even the deaths of allies were worthwhile, for the girl that lay on the ground, no doubt paralysed by terror during their battle, was far more difficult to find than a bunch of blood-thirsty muscle-brains.

“Don’t worry, girl, I won’t be gentle in the slightest… hehehe…”

In his lust, he missed how the woman’s expression relaxed, how her body no longer shivered, and how one of her hand went behind her back.

“No, don’t do this…” she said, but even her voice lost its enthusiasm, and yet it was still missed.

Just as he climbed atop her and wanted to tear off her clothes, he froze when a blade entered his eye, instantly ending his life.

The woman pushed the lifeless body off herself and sighed, recovering her typical stoic gaze and murderous grin, while she processed her success. When she had been told that she would be able to deceive anyone with this act, she approached the situation with a fair amount of scepticism, having never used trickery in her fights, but the results proved to be far better than she could have ever expected. Not only did the three men bring themselves down to one, but they also injured that man to the point of him losing all awareness of himself.

“It’s just as she said…” she thought, recalling the calm expression of Wei Yi when she had explained how a series of coincidences and very specific actions would allow them to kill every single physique cultivator without any effort at all, “And I’m surprisingly good at this…”

“HOW DARE YOU!”

 

The scream drew Ling’s attention at just the right time for the one fighting her to land the killing blow. It was a perfect coincidence, but it was rather concerning, for it was not the one that combatant had expected, for it should have come almost an entire minute later in the form of Ling stumbling upon an object that had been placed on the ground ahead of time.

 

Ning fell onto one knee, his teeth clenched and his arms shaking. There were several large stab wounds from the spear-wielding combatant, and over a dozen cuts that were mostly on his legs.

“So… I’m not the only one… you’re killing… heh… You’re strong, you lot…”

The two men ignored his words, standing calmly with their weapons aimed to kill him the moment that they needed to do so. From behind them, two more men entered, their weapons covered in blood. It was obvious that they had just taken out the guard that protected the top of the tower, prompting Ning to exhale a mouthful of turbid air. If there had been any chance of him being rescued previously, it was now gone.

“Go on then… finish me!”

They said nothing as they stepped forward and struck.

 

“YOU FUCKERS!” an enormous giant of a man cried out, a single one of his punches throwing one of Meng Chu’s men out of the way as easily as one might push aside a blade of grass with their feet during a casual walk in a field of grass.

This man had no interest in the rest of the invading forces as his eyes were trained on the woman that had brought three of his friends to death, and his physique energy was rapidly revolving around his body and surrounding him in an extremely vicious black light that seemed to cut the very thoughts of those who looked upon it.

He was displaying the might of the Grim Mortality physique – an offshoot of the Concentrated Humanity physique that permitted the user to release an incredibly dangerous energy that would rapidly cut through anyone with hopes, dreams or aspirations by striking them with the cold, hard truth of reality, or so it was often described. It was a yang-type physique and was considered to be rather formidable even in the Planar Continents, where most could not use physique energy. Within the prison realm, with the enhancement of a powerful physique cultivation, it became even more considerable.

“YOU DARE TO KILL MY FRIENDS?!” the giant cried out, raising both hands to prepare for an overhead smash.

A second before he was able to do so, extremely bright golden light shone upon the scene, momentarily blinding everyone present. The giant had no chance to recover from such a thing before he felt an incredible quantity of yang surging towards him, filled to the brim with killing intent. He did not dare to assume that he could withstand it due to the element matching his, so he attempted to leap out of the way towards one of his other enemies.

However, at that moment, his vision returned, and he found that instead of the exhausted man that should have been standing at his destination, there was a woman dressed in tight clothing, wielding a spear that was bursting with crimson light.

In that situation, he could not imagine himself doing anything other than striking her.

His fist approached with great speed, and yet the woman did nothing until it came to a certain distance, at which point she narrowed her silver eyes and parried his blow, performing an esoteric movement that completely deflected all of his strength and reflected it back into the giant’s arm, instantly crushing all of the bones in that arm.

Then, she stabbed that spear into the ground and called upon that infinitely bright sunlight, surrounding her hands in that infinite radiance. The woman suddenly appeared before him, moving as fast as the light that surrounded her skin and struck his skull with similar speed.

For a second – a brief second – it withstood her might, but when the physique energy grew brighter and expanded, almost becoming the sun itself, the very light that so many in the prison realm had never seen and had only heard tales of, it evaporated his flesh and blood, even the physique energy of the Grim Mortality physique that had dared near her, and brought his life to an end.

The fortress was theirs.