Path of the Ascendant

Despite there being no windows nor open doors in the room, it was bright, filled with crimson to the point of all other colours seemingly fading from existence itself. All of it was focused on a single figure, forming vague shapes of battle and a desolate landscape as it revolved around the centre of the room.

The crimson slowly passed through a similarly red robe and entered the figure’s body, flooding into the third set of meridians, circulating through the entire network precisely once before it flowed into a central pool of energy, where it transformed into one of a thousand warriors, engaged in violent and ruthless combat and produced further energy, which returned to circulate through the meridians two dozen times before it also returned into the pool of hatred.

It was dangerous to rely too much on the energy of the Beast, so Wei Yi used it to produce her own killing intent to negate whatever effect the Beast’s hatred might have.

With that process and roughly eleven months of sitting in place, focusing ninety percent of her attention on absorbing and processing as much killing intent as she possibly could, she was finally nearing the edge of the second realm, at which point the hatred could be sufficiently concentrated and refined to be sent into a single direction.

‘Now, it is time. Two more revolutions of the killing intent and then the rest of the crimson light in this room can be absorbed. One more… Now!’ she exclaimed in her mind, her eyes springing open and the eternal battlefield bursting out, manifesting into the world as an illusory vision.

Once it mixed with the killing intent, the battlefield receded, taking the red light with it. It rapidly flowed into her body, mixing with the vast quantities of killing intent that was already present there, the dark red of the Beast mixing with the vibrant crimson of her hair and hatred, creating a marbled manifestation of their combined energies. Together, they collected into the central pool within her heart, flooding the great battlefield endlessly as it created more and more warriors on either side, creating further landscapes as there was insufficient space for them to fight.

More and more of the battlefield that had been purely illusory at first became real, as real as a construct of killing intent could be, and the power that the warriors within wielded grew as well, changing from simple strikes and techniques to complex phenomena that made much greater use of the energies they were permitted to wield.

That led to each strike being significantly more impactful, knocking up clouds of dust whenever they did anything as slight as breathing. The figure in the distance also shifted, moving closer and becoming smaller, but it was now linked to Wei Yi’s true figure on the battlefield rather than being a mere phantom. It was like her shadow, an incredibly mighty and terrifying shadow that seemed to portray her full power and ability.

She raised her head and looked forward, towards an empty wall, and willed her killing intent to burst out. It travelled at an immense speed, striking the wall in an instant, instantly crushing and cracking everything it touched as it did so.

When she withdrew it, it moved just as quickly, thankfully avoiding further damage to her surroundings.

As it returned, it also removed the last traces of crimson light from the room, all of it having been drained during her cultivation. She was in pitch darkness, but her bright silver eyes and the spiritual Third Eye that was now composed of equal parts spiritual will and killing intent saw through it nonetheless. For a brief, pleasant time, she saw a world untainted by red, unmarred by crimson.

It was a strangely beautiful thing, despite the simplicity of the cracked stone.

Wei Yi stood up and stretched her body, swiftly pushing out all of the built-up tension and fatigue from her prolonged cultivation session. By some miracle of her physique cultivation, although her body had clearly aged, her musculature and youth remained in place, almost making it seem as if she could live on forever via the power of the True Ascendant physique. However, she knew that it could never be so simple, as her lifespan was slowly but surely being depleted by the merciless flow of time.

Nevertheless, time was not an enemy she could oppose just yet, so once she confirmed that the physical side of her remained intact, she turned her attention inwards, towards the Augur’s Library.

The base structure and appearance of it remained unchanged, for she had not made any great improvements to it, but it was notably denser and more powerful, its power amplified by the strengthening of her killing intent. Within lay a tome with numerous pages, all of them filled to the brim with carefully written characters than analysed all possible outcomes of the alliance between her and Ding Wen’s factions, coming to a single conclusion that was naturally unable to surprise her, besides the fact that she was the one to create it.

Within, she deduced that after the initial steps of the plan to rid Beast’s Rest of Shi Luo Feng succeeded, not an unlikely thing when the nature of the Magnanimous Leech was already understood on a basic level by anyone that had any awareness of the three leaders of the town, Ding Wen would attempt to strike at both of the other factions at the same time, hoping to kill two birds with one stone and take his seat as the one and only leader of Beast’s Rest.

This plan naturally relied upon the fact that Ding Wen wanted to do as many of the safer parts of their shared plan while leaving Meng Chu and her to stand in the fire for most of the dangerous parts. That sort of behaviour would not be unusual for anyone in this world, and he undoubtedly hoped that it would not be questioned until it was too late. Then, stepping in with some powerful weapon or secret trick, he would strike down both sides in one go, but this plan also permitted for Wei Yi to turn it around on him. Since she was intimately familiar with the goings-on in Beast’s Rest and knew which tasks would be more and less dangerous, she could intentionally bow down to his demands while intentionally sending his forces to the most deceptively risky tasks where he would be guaranteed to lose as many troops as possible.

Since she knew that those particular tasks were safe from every possible perspective other than when they were actually experienced, Ding Wen would have no reason to assume anything other than poor luck, or perhaps some set up that he could never possibly prove to the absolute lack of evidence.

From there, all they would need to do is pretend to work together, perhaps fake a number of losses on their side as to not disturb Ding Wen too much, then when the final confrontation came about, they could bring out all of the troops they had saved up and utilise them as cannon-fodder in the final battle.                                                 They were unlikely to contribute much, unfortunately, as Din Wen was likely to have a secret method – whether it is a technique or an individual in the Hatred Augur realm was not something she could determine beforehand – that gave him the confidence to do something he has never attempted before.

After all, there had obviously been many different attempts by the various leaders of Beast’s Rest to eliminate one another and to narrow down the number of factions occupying it. From the archives that she had been able to access after assuming her role as the leader of Meng Chu’s faction, she learnt that there had been a total of seventy-four situations throughout ninety-six years of Ding Wen’s leadership that he could have used to attempt something similar to his current plan.

In any one of the seventy-four instances, he could have attempted to significantly weaken or outright eliminate one of the other factions that had been present, but he did not make any movements that would contribute to that until now. Naturally, there could be more reasons to it besides power and strength, but most of them would be connected.

For instance, if there was a treasure that he wanted to obtain for his Greed Congregation technique, then he would undoubtedly need to put in more effort to claim it than he would otherwise use.

‘Even if I am wrong and I have somehow imagined all of the signs that he is building up strength and preparing to go all out against me and Shi Luo Feng, then having additional forces on my side would mean that I can use his strategy of killing two-in-one instead, saving me the trouble of finding excuses to limit his power while I search for the best opportunity to finish him off at a different time. Really, there’s no reason not to prepare for the worst in these situations,’ she thought, blinking once to make the battlefield completely vanish from her eyes.

She cleansed her body with physique energy, as she always did, and left the room by wading through the dense sea of books that had formed on the other side of the room to the one she used for practise with killing intent.

After intentionally avoiding the two vice-leaders of the faction, with their intentions being completely obvious and entirely non-conducive to her plans, she located Meng Chu, who almost seemed deflated, like someone had approached him and stabbed him with a needle that led to all of the air inside of him leaking out and staying out.

“What have you been doing to drain yourself to this extent?” she asked, resisting the urge to poke him and check whether he is asleep in a more typical way than scanning someone with spiritual will.

“Dealing with certain… individuals… could already be extremely stressful, but now that I am just posing as a leader, it is somehow significantly more frustrating,” the deflated man replied, “It is extremely annoying to be dealing with someone who thinks they are significantly better than you at all times, when he thinks that the concessions you are agreeing to are only made because of your personal incapability and not some greater plan… naturally, that helps the negotiations, but he is in no way capable of obscuring the disgust he is currently feeling about me whenever I have the misfortune of speaking to him…”

“Right… Wouldn’t know what that feels like. Don’t worry, my dear subordinate, you will not need to present yourself as a fake soon enough. Whether or not we take him down, I will take my rightful place at the peak of the city afterwards.”

“I understand. How long would that be?”

She shrugged, “Roughly four days in total. The first day will be dedicated to the minor operations that stop Shi Luo Feng from getting necessary aid and discourage the populace from following her. The second will damage her current businesses and raid her various storehouses to rid her of as many tools as we could before the battle on the fourth day. On the third, minor scuffles to corner her forces in the place that we want them to be, as well as the setup for the anti-Magnanimous Leech arrays around the final battle so that she cannot drain any of us when she has no other choice. The fourth will be the battle, of course. After that, either Shi Luo Feng will be defeated and Ding Wen will remain, or both will fall, with both of us naturally agreeing that the latter is the better option.”

“I have already read your plans, and all of their revisions, so I don’t know why you explained it to me…” Meng Chu managed to raise his head and say.

“To remind you, naturally. With how all of your energy has vanished into the ether, I wouldn’t be surprised if your brain had also lost a few things, some of which could just happen to be the basic outline of the plan.”

He looked at her with a great degree of scepticism, but he found nothing to say and instead allowed his head to fall back down onto his desk.

“Say, Meng Chu, do you know if Ding Wen has any secret helpers that are among the Crimson Robes?”

His head sprung back up, “What kind of a topic change is that? Wh-What? There’s no way I’d know that, since even if he does, it would be a secret. Every one of the three leaders have such secrets, as do all of the outside faction leaders, and if they were known to the other leaders, then they would no longer matter. Besides, you’re the one that snuck around his residence for a day…”

“I didn’t find anything there, but that is what’s so strange. Despite being the one with the most treasure in this entire prison realm, he has the fewest vaults and hidden chambers out of everyone I’ve seen. He would be acting incredibly foolishly if he stores everything in one place, so there must be something about him that I do not yet understand, hence my inability to create a proper plan about the possible confrontation with him. It is either his ability, or he has someone’s aid, with both creating an unfortunate degree of uncertainty.”

“You think he may have a method of spatial storage?”

“He could do, or maybe he has a set of secret chambers somewhere far away from any areas associated with him that he has stored all of his items in. The fact that he spends most of his time in Beast’s Rest would potentially invalidate the theory, but just as we have underground passages, he might have his own network,” Wei Yi suggested, “Spatial storage is most unlikely, but most worrying, since he would be at a far greater advantage than any of us due to the freedom it offers.”

“Frankly, my head is in great pain right now, so I would appreciate fewer words being used per sentence and line…”

“He can pull shit out of the spatial storage whenever he wants, so while we walk in with spears and swords, he comes in with nothing and then takes out whatever he needs. Makes it difficult to plan around him.”

“Yeah, that’s how it works… Did I drink much blood wine last night?”

“No way, I’m sure that your alcohol consumption was perf- Yes, you’ve drunk way too much. Get some sleep before it’s too late. If you fail to play your role correctly, you will be the first person I execute.”

“Not the two active fonts of lust?”

“They would be second, but they appear to be behaving themselves for now. Furthermore, their actions are consistent with their known character, while if you are suddenly obedient to me or reveal that you are not in charge of your own decisions then it will naturally raise quite the number of… what’s the phrase… red flags? Is there any family or faction that has a red flag?”

“…”

“Anyway, maintain appearances for now. Your failure to do so could lead to our faction being destroyed if Shi Luo Feng and Ding Wen notice and ally together to oppose us, understand?”

“Understood, though, I do have one question. Even when you were resting from your cultivation, I felt the immense concentration of killing intent around you. When you’re that powerful, shouldn’t you be able to kill both Shi Luo Feng and Ding Wen without any trouble and take over just like that? It seems to me that it would save you a lot of effort and significantly reduce the number of factors you need to pay attention to.”

“True. However, do you think your men would have obeyed and liked me if I just rushed in and killed you? If, instead of making a deal with you, I had stepped in and said that I was now in charge, would you not desire to get rid of me and retake your previous position?”

“I would be inclined to do so… You want to ensure that you have a loyal following, then.”

“Rather, I would prefer to avoid any potential of betrayal. If someone views you as a tyrant and a person that should not be where they currently are, they will naturally strive to get rid of you. It’s much like how everyone here hates the Great Families that threw them here – what right did they have to do so? Why is it that they can decide our fates? Things like that are what I would like to avoid,” Wei Yi explained, “For this reason, I also intend to provide our faction with a number of techniques that I own to bring up their combat ability and general prowess. It should make the common warriors and workers feel like they are somewhat appreciated, and that following me will lead to great benefits that cannot be ignored in favour of righteousness.”

“But, in your opinion, benefits like that will not be enough for factions that you usurp control from, so you want them to be defeated entirely, leaving only individuals that can be recruited later.”

“Exactly. After all, this world is much like the Planar Continents, where people care for strength but have a certain distaste for trickery and intellect. Going against someone directly is the most logical path, but it is one that will cause everyone to engage in that very scheming behaviour they claim to dislike in order to get rid of me.”

“That… sounds complicated, and the exact thing I had hoped to avoid discussing…”

“You are welcome, Meng Chu. Now, rest, and do your ancestor proud. I know a few things about him, and I know that Meng Qi would be very proud of you running brothels. If not for the need to fight the Greats, perhaps that is what he would have done in the Continents.”

“I’ve heard similar statements from you several times, but you’ve never told me how you know that. You are only twenty years old, are you not?”

“A shadow of him was left behind in a certain establishment that was likely connected with other fighters of the War of Yin, and from him I received a certain set of skills,” Wei Yi revealed, raising the Bone of the Beast and making sparks of crimson lightning manifest upon its surface, “At the time, I was rather displeased – and I still am, to be frank – that his knowledge came with some memories that I have since managed to put to good use. These memories revealed that he had spent almost as much time in bed as he had on a battlefield, making me wonder what brought him to desire battle.”

“Oh… Your life seems to have been rather… strange…” he managed to say before his head dropped and he fell asleep, loud snoring emerging from his mouth the next second.

‘He finally fell asleep, then. With roughly seven hours and fifty-four minutes to rest, he should be in a sufficiently competent condition by the time he needs to speak with Ding Wen. Now, I have that exact same duration of time to attempt to finish off my small secret project,’ she thought, reaching into her pocket to remove the Beast’s Rib Bone, which had a certain quantity of killing intent drained from it, ‘A weapon that could end up being superior to the Bone of the Beast while using less energy…’

She left the room and went to the smithy that she had constructed in one of the empty chambers that littered the underground passages of Meng Chu’s brothels. The old blacksmith worked there every now and then, but most of the use the room saw was when she worked on her own attempts to refine her weakest great art.

For whatever reason, despite her initial most compatible element being metal, blacksmithing was something that she could not understand as well as any other great art she had ever attempted. Arrays came to her most naturally, with talismans and pill refining following that, but whenever she went to create a weapon or a piece of armour with the hammer that was still pinned to the back of her head, which she was barely able to activate and affect via her spiritual will alone, the resulting product was always far worse than it should have been. After all, she had all of the information anyone could ever possibly require on the topic of blacksmithing within her Augur’s Library, and she could even calculate how strong each strike of the hammer ought to be and where it was best to strike, but something about the process would never occur as she had intended.

In this respect, working with the bones of the Beast was beneficial, as it was not metal and required only careful carving, aligning it more with the art of inscription rather than blacksmithing.

With her new realm of killing intent, she would able to complete the last few steps of the weapon creating process and confirm whether her lacking talent for manipulating metal with heat and hammering extended to all creation of equipment, and gain another potential tool to use in the future.

In the smithy, she lit a few crimson candles, which she placed around the work surface that she would be using. Although she could see without light, whether through the use of spiritual will or her eyes, it was still beneficial to add some for additional clarity while she was working. Then, she placed the Beast’s Rib Bone into the middle and picked up a chisel with one hand while concentrating killing intent around her other hand.

Although the black piece of bone was originally advertised to be capable of bringing someone straight into the fifth realm of killing intent cultivation, Wei Yi chose not to use it for that purpose simply because it had the exact same risk as carelessly absorbing the loose energy of the Beast. Sure, she could be in the Hatred Augur realm by the end of the process, but she would either be a hatred automaton or someone without any semblance of sanity, reason, logic or self, something that she could never allow on her route to reform Yi City.

‘How can anyone who cannot understand themselves understand the necessary elements of a working nation?’ was what she had thought some time ago, and would have agreed with even before she had accepted the endless killing intent within herself, for no madman driven by another’s rage could possibly uplift the world into a millennium of prosperity, other than by accident.

One thing she could never accept was relying on an accident to forge her legacy.

A few hours of hard work passed before the inside of the bone was carved to perfection, using a combination of infusing killing intent into every one of her strikes with the chisel to slowly remove pieces of the bone within. After removing the bone dust with a small hole in the surface of the Beast’s Rib Bone, which was necessary to ensure a consistent and smooth flow of killing intent through the channels, she proceeded with the last few steps, including the last parts of shaping the item.

This was a tedious, difficult thing to do, but when it was complete, she had created a dagger to use alongside the Bone of the Beast. It was designed to resemble the weapon used by Yi Bai within the Kong Holy Grounds and was significantly nicer to look at than the Bone of the Beast, which was comparatively horrific to look at.

The internal channels of the weapon were intended to resemble those of the only high-grade artefact she had witnessed, that being the immortal gold spear wielded by Yi Fenwu. Naturally, with her lacking ability and no access to planar energy nor the proper tools of a high-grade blacksmith, she could not replicate every single one of them with the accuracy that she would have liked to have, but the overall result was almost at the level of a middle-grade weapon, a significant improvement over the hatred blades that she had previously scanned with spiritual will.

‘Still, I have time and the opportunity to improve, if I must. Although a year had passed here, only twelve days have passed in the Planar Continents. The fire burning in Luo Xiuying’s shop might still be lit, for all I am aware of,’ she imagined the scene briefly before sending her energy into the blade.

It flooded the hatred blade, filling every channel with crimson light that pulsed and fluctuated as it flowed along the intended paths. The instant that it reached the tip of the black blade, it caused the entirety of the black bone to light up, vibrant ruby energy seeping out of thin cracks throughout the surface almost like her planar energy would begin to break through a typical artefact. That crimson coagulated at the blade, forming a secondary, sharper layer atop it.

The moment that she withdrew her energy, the layer vanished, and then reappeared when she sent it back into the item.

‘Fortunately, this seems to be working as expected. Even if the other, potentially more significant aspect of the hatred blade does not activate, or performs differently to my expectations, the basic functions of the weapon will remain functional, allowing me to cut through barriers made of killing intent without needing too much of my own energy,’ she observed, deactivating the blade while she travelled to an empty room where she could practise and experiment safely. In the case of an explosion akin to the ones caused by her planar energy, or the miscalculation of the primary effects of the killing intent channels, she didn’t want to damage the smithy.

Once she was there, she held out the blade at arm’s length and carefully swung it towards the wall while she stood several metres away from it. She did not use any special technique and looked like someone who had never used a bladed weapon before, but she had good reason to act this way that was confirmed the moment that she witnessed the result.

Despite the dagger being short, with the blade itself not being significantly longer than her hand, that movement caused a small cut to appear on the wall in front of her, perfectly matching the arc that she drew with the knife.

‘Frankly, I hadn’t expected that to work,’ she thought to herself, deactivating the dagger before daring to examine its blade, ‘There’s no visual indication of the blade when it extends, but it cuts exactly like the black bone itself would. In addition to this weapon having an incredible number of uses, it should permit for assassinations of certain individuals without attracting any attention to myself. After all, how can someone standing ten metres away from the victim have struck them?’

Overall, the result of her first attempt to create a hatred blade was beyond satisfactory, and she decided to name it White Echo, in honour of Yi Bai, the original wielder of this kind of weapon. If she came across her again in the future, she could either take her dagger, or give White Echo to her, allowing her to dual-wield seemingly identical daggers. Wei Yi stored it carefully inside of her robes and was about to leave the room when she detected – through spiritual will and scent at the same time – that one of the lustful pair of vice-leaders had managed to find their way to her despite all of her attempts to avoid them.

She sighed and stepped out of the room, instantly grabbing the woman’s shoulder and pushing her against the wall.

“M-Master-”

“Shut it. I want you to tell me if there are any passages here that lead deep enough into the Beast’s corpse to reach some sort of pool of concentrated blood? It has to be large enough for a person to lie down in it without any of their features showing,” Wei Yi requested, holding Dugu Wei’s jaw shut while she spoke so that she didn’t interrupt.

“I… Yes, there’s one in the fifth section-”

“Thank you. Now, lock yourself within that room and don’t come out until you’re needed,” she forced her mouth shut once more and pushed her into the empty room, shutting the door behind her before the vice-leader could dare to bring up any semblance of a complaint.

Dugu Wei saw the door close in front of her and, although she desperately wanted to rush out, she subdued herself and looked around, finding a small cut in the wall on one side of the room.

She approached it out of curiosity, but when she stepped into some invisible field in front of it, she felt her vision being consumed by deep crimson, and when it cleared, she found herself within the middle of a great battle, with a distant figure wielding something shaped like a dagger, yet many times the size, who looked upon her and raised the weapon, red light wrapping around it, before she brought it down upon her.

“AH-”