Path of the Ascendant

“- now that a total of fifteen such things were encountered, and eleven were defeated, we can be sure that there will be no more than five hundred and seventy-nine of the abominations for us to fight,” Wei Yi concluded, presenting rather negative news with a neutral expression, “For this reason, I have forcefully entered one of your vaults, removed some motes of killing intent and spent them to buy a few things for far less than they were really worth. Now, although I cannot advance my physique cultivation without a proper understanding of what I wish to improve about myself, nor the correct technique to doing so, I should be able to improve my general energy capacity.”

“Right… What the fuck is going on right now? As things are now, it seems that Shi Luo Feng has gone completely insane, while Ding Wen can’t possibly be happy with his many losses and failures.”

“Obviously, he will show up and demand that his faction handles the objectives that are neutral in terms of difficulty, as taking the hardest ones can’t be a good idea and the simplest ones appear to be rather misleading in nature. Just give him the things he wants, and I’m sure he’ll be just as happy tomorrow,” she replied, having already sorted all of the tasks according to this expectation, “As for Shi Luo Feng… I am lacking in the field of mental analysis, I’m afraid, so I cannot be sure about her mental state, though I suspect that she had been contemplating her current plans for some time.”

Meng Chu frowned, “Really? This may be the prison realm, but we consider even the hatred automatons to be disgusting things, not to mention those… abominations, you were calling them? Seems like a suitable name.”

“Hence my usage of it.”

“Does that have something to do with her Magnanimous Leech?”

“Naturally. I suspect that she had come up with the idea of tearing out pieces of the technique to pass along and create powerful leech abominations for herself long ago but intended to only use them in emergencies. After I revealed my understanding of her technique’s weakness, and after our two factions began to attack them, she realised that she needed to retaliate immediately if she wanted to keep her position. Her own forces were somewhat lacking, so out came the abominations.”

“Which she created from her own forces.”

“As effective as her technique seems to be, if it was used on someone without any loyalty to her, the leech would be completely wild and utterly useless, giving her no other choice.”

“Oh, so she wasn’t just utterly insane. That’s good,” Meng Chu said, clearly fearing the sane less.

“You say that, but insanity has a certain predictability to it. The human mind, as complex as it is, does follow certain rules and logic, even if it makes no sense to anybody else. When someone forgets this and acts on instinct, it is easy to abuse, but when they are aware of their own predictability and act around it, doing everything they can to stifle the likes of my Endless Calculation, it can be quite troubling.”

“So that’s how things are,” he nodded once he understood what she was saying, “Even if you had failed with your attempt to impress me, I would still have made you my strategist. What should be done with the abominations? Is there any method of killing them easily?”

“Physique energy is one way, though it has to be extreme yang-type for optimum efficiency. Crushing strikes are also effective, though it has to be with one’s full strength to significantly damage the abominations. Killing intent cultivation is irrelevant, so physique cultivators are the most suitable for this, regardless of their realm, and yin-type physique energy could also be used to freeze their bodies and slow them down, and the combination of yin and yang energy could permit for a faster elimination of the abomination,” she theorised, ‘It’s a shame I did not unlock one of the dual physiques, as that could have allowed me to use and absorb both yin and yang physique energy.’

Meng Chu wrote some of these things down on several separate pages that he then moved to different parts of his desk, intending to give them to different people after their meeting was complete.

“Is there anything else I need to know before Ding Wen gets here?”

“Nope. Don’t tell him what I told you, though. Just say some minor guesses, lament at how your forces had struggled immensely to deal with the abominations while he must have been having an easy time, and make sure to appear genuine for the best effect. The next day, he will take a mix of the most and least dangerous missions, hoping that some of them turn out to be in his favour, so at that point, just make sure to present them in the correct fashion yet again. The less he understands about whether you are lying or just being a lucky idiot, the more chance we have to profit from his failures.”

“What about the fourth day, then?”

“There’s only going to be one thing that is done on the fourth day, and that is a full-on siege on Shi Luo Feng’s primary base. All of our strongest forces will need to be sent, and at that point, the question of who does what will change based on what we encounter. Even if Ding Wen wanted to fuck us over, he wouldn’t be able to,” Wei Yi said, turning around and leaving calmly, ‘He will try, though.’

She returned to her room, where the meagre number of black bones around the edges of the room had grown significantly, resulting in the concentrating killing intent being visible and almost solid to the touch, forcing her to actively wade through it in order to reach her work surface.

It was so severe that she decided to undress prior to entering the field, as she was worried that the Crimson Robes of the Third Arrival, an item that had been present within the prison realm for countless years without any damage being done to it due to the natural regenerative properties of the threads it was made from, could be ripped apart by the wild pool of crimson light that fluctuated within the air, splitting it into so many random clumps and pieces that there would be no possible way for it to reform correctly.

The chances of such a thing happening were even greater due to something she had noticed within the robes not too long ago, that being a thin strand of solidified killing intent that was woven into the fabric seamlessly. If not for her spiritual will, curiosity and an interest in creating similar items in the future to mitigate the issue of her clothes constantly being damaged in battle, she might have missed it completely.

From what she was able to perceive, the thread did not appear to be dangerous, nor was it responsible for any particular property of the robes. It was just there, in the area beneath her left breast, seemingly content with having no interactions with the world around it.

What made it strange was that killing intent was never a force that just existed. All of it came from a source, be that the Beast, humans or some complex array that could transform will into killing intent, and thus it would always possess some degree of intention sealed deep within its structure. It was for this reason that White Echo was less harmful to those that Wei Yi did not perceive to be her enemies, and why its effects could be amplified immensely against anyone that she did have some personal dislike for.

If she was able to condense her own killing intent into a thread and then placed it into an article of clothing, it would certainly not just sit there forever, unless she placed it there with a very specific purpose and instructions that it would then carry out when the time was right. Even then, it wouldn’t be likely to sit by when she wanted to remove it from the robes, which she failed to do due to certain factors other than the thread.

To put it all simply, it was strange, just as strange as the wall running through what might be the middle of the prison and the fact that the Beast’s carcass appeared to stop near the ground, and was not buried deeply into the ground as one might initially assume.

‘All of this is what I can – no, what I must investigate upon the capture of Beast’s Rest, and while we expand the territory of the city to cover the prison realm. It could become my first attempt at a Yi City, and also give me the opportunity to learn all that there is to know about this world before I do the same in the Planar Continents,’ she thought, circulating her physique energy around herself.

It slowly became denser with every single second that it was exposed to the overly dense cloud of killing intent, and when it returned to her meridians, it was so dense that it strained them and forced them to get stronger to withstand the rising pressure of the physique energy. However, the instant that they finally adjusted to the greater density of the energy, that physique energy was sent out of the body once more, and it returned with even greater might and purity.

Fortunately for her struggling meridians, every single revolution brought less and less of an improvement to her energy, until, several hours after she began, her physique energy was able to smoothly withstand the killing intent gathered on her.

The rate of growth was within her expectations, and the result was also sufficient. Although she couldn’t hope to match those in the upper realms of physique cultivation if they somehow came to possess the same physique as her, it was still significantly superior to the vast majority of those in the first realm and those in the early second realm, as far as she understood the nature of physique energy.

Although this could be said to be equivalent to reaching some sort of perfected realm, it would still benefit her in the future, as every stage after this one would need more effort but result in far more power in the long run, which was exactly what she needed. No half-measures could ever contend with the Great Families, not unless she was able to collect every single half-measure in the world and put them all together. This was far more easily said than done, however, as she was still limited to three of her five sets of meridians, and there was no guarantee whatsoever that there weren’t a thousand other forms of energy that she had simply been unaware of when creating the Condensed Formation Body.

Since she needed to develop everything as much as she possibly could, once her physique energy was as powerful as it would become under the current bone formation, she swapped it to her killing intent, which was far less resilient against the built-up mass of killing intent.

That did mean that it would be forced to develop far more quickly, and so it had grown in power significantly after just two more hours.

Unlike when she reached the second realm of killing intent cultivation, the scene within her mental landscape was completely unchanged, except it became notably more solid, more real, and far more difficult to distinguish from reality. If she struck with White Echo now, the plane of killing intent would entrance anyone who stepped into it for twice as long, as do twice as much damage to their psyche. If positioned correctly, with several planes intersecting one another, or if it was used against a weak-willed individual, it could even directly lead to their death.

Whether for better or for worse, she would not need to use White Echo on the second day, as the slight change in plans that came in the form of the abominations means that they would be the main threat, not the primary forces of either of the three factions. Against them, planes of killing intent would be useless, and would simply arouse suspicion in Ding Wen’s men when they came across the same sort of obstacle for the second day in a row.

This wasn’t an issue for her, as her original plans never relied on the planes of killing intent to begin with. Even if White Echo itself shattered right in front of her, it would be a disappointment, nothing more.

‘Well, that’s what I’d like to think, but I’m not some unfeeling machine, and I don’t think that becoming one will be necessarily beneficial. As a result, I will naturally be disappointed if one year of my work vanishes without any good reason, in the same way that I was distraught at the undue death of Yi Yaling despite the fact that our relations were tenuous as best,’ Wei Yi thought, her expression still darkening when she recalled what happened on the streets of the Yi District, where the two Greats were able to do whatever they liked without any repercussions.

She could not determine what her perfect world looked like with only nineteen years of experience, but she knew that she could never allow a group of people to act like the Great Families under her rule.

If there had to be someone on top, someone to restrain such actions, then it would be her!

“A book holds a house of gold.”

Ding Wen sat in his chair, the book hovering in front of him, a thousand different things idly floating inside of the pages of the book, which acted like a portal to another realm.

He was not particularly knowledgeable when it came to storage artefacts, spatial items or anything of the sort, but his intuition – and a strange azure light within his mental landscape that he could not see with his own mind or eyes – told him that the book was incredibly powerful amongst all spatial items. Perhaps it had a quality of nine stars, or perhaps it even went above that level to become something completely different.

After looking carefully at the items within, he had to remove several, which caused the bright shimmer of the book to dim slightly, and for his own killing intent to weaken, albeit insignificantly compared to the gains he had made in the past year.

“Things aren’t going as they should. To make my forces stronger for a brief while is necessary.”

“How could eleven of them be defeated like that? Eleven! That’s ridiculous!” Shi Luo Feng cried out, her killing intent bursting out of her body and incapacitating numerous innocent warriors with a single touch, “How does she know? How can there be a woman with such a physique in the world?”

She received no reply from the heavens nor the earth, even if they could hear her in this dreary prison realm. As she had not expected anything of the sort, she instead reached into a hidden compartment in the wall and removed a thick scroll, which she unfurled and looked upon with blood-shot eyes, something that not even the constant draining of energy via the Magnanimous Leech could heal. On the scroll were detailed a series of physiques and unique physical states, and at the top, amongst the most precious of human, beast, demon, spirit and devil-type physiques, a truly unique thing was described.

‘The will of the heavens, the truth of the world. Pure yang, absolute yin, absorbing all, holding no weaknesses. Ascendant Physique, purity incarnate.’

It was not necessary to possess such a physique to destroy the abominations, but to do so with such efficiency, Shi Luo Feng could not imagine the enemy having any physique other than this one. After all, the Yang Ascendant physique also characteristically resembled sunlight, and that was the exact thing that had been reported to her on the scene of combat.

‘One redhead that has incredibly powerful killing intent, and another with physique ener- Two redheads? It can’t be just one person, can it?’ her eyes suddenly widened as the possibility presented itself, ‘Fuck-’

“I suppose that if I had to affect my body in some way, I could grow certain assets ever so slightly, though any larger than that would lead to a deterioration of my combat ability. My current height is perfectly suitable for most things, and changing it would cause me to be unused to my size and lead to many mistakes within the short term, so modifying it would be completely pointless,” Wei Yi muttered to herself, touching, feeling and kneading parts of her body to confirm that her perception of her physique was correct, “My legs are pretty good, though. No changes are needed there, to be sure.”

After two years of constantly using a technique of the fourth realm through the leg movements alone, combined with a year of trudging through the prison realm, her legs were strong and muscular, appearing to have been chiselled out of stone for a statue of a perfect human rather than being made out of flesh and blood.

Furthermore, she had long legs, which happened to fit the typical preferences of the Planar Continents, meaning that her lower half required little adjustment no matter how she looked at it.

Above that, the only external thing that could be addressed had already been considered by her. Her skin was smooth, it’s colour wasn’t something that she cared to change nor had an issue with – it wasn’t something completely unnatural like red or blue that would stand out within a crowd, and it would be difficult to deem a change caused by the True Ascendant physique to be an imperfection without fully understanding the reason behind it – and every other feature on her body could only be assessed subjectively, meaning that it would be worthless to change them in any way.

Thus, all that was left was the inside of her body: the muscles, the organs, the many blood vessels and even the meridians. None of those things were perfect, and even if the countless impurities that the typical human built up within were cleansed, there were still many fundamental flaws within them.

Luckily, as far as she understood the realms of physique cultivation, getting rid of such issues was the exact purpose of the Greater Shape realm.

‘Furthermore, I have a decent understanding of the human body thanks to all of the books I’ve read in the Yi District libraries, as well as my personal investigations into the matter via frequently scanning myself with spiritual will and killing a number of people, so I should be able to eliminate all of the major flaws in human physiology so long as I possess something powerful enough to stimulate such a change,’ she thought, rising from her seat and dressing the moment that she felt someone approach.

That person turned out to be Dugu Wei, who no longer looked as haggard as she had on the equivalent of the morning of the first day of the offensive, though there was still a hint of fear in her eyes that had previously been absent from the warrior.

“Master, I have found what you requested earlier,” she said, seemingly having learnt her lesson as she did not immediately attempt to leap onto Wei Yi the second she saw her, “There is a pool of the Beast’s blood within the underground passages, and it is large enough for five people to lie in simultaneously! It’s also extremely pure and dense!”

“Perfect. Tell me where it is, then prepare for my usage of it. Ensure that none of the Beast’s blood flows away before I can get to it,” Wei Yi ordered, forming a book within her mental landscape.