Path of the Ascendant

Due to there not being any new threat that Shi Luo Feng could pose to the combined forces of Ding Wen and Meng Chu, the second day went significantly more smoothly than the first. Besides the few places in which Wei Yi had to meddle a little bit to adjust the odds of combat in her favour, every other combat encounter was resolved either purely using the might and limited wit of the warriors involved, or through the tactics she had suggested against the abominations.

As before, there were notably more losses on Ding Wen’s side, though it was still a lesser quantity than Wei Yi had desired. Fortunately, the fact that he was able to strengthen his forces without too much effort further reinforced the potential of him being in possession of a spatial item of some kind, as he would otherwise need to go through far too much trouble just to disguise the location of one of his treasuries. There were other possibilities and answers to how he managed to provide a number of his troops with pills that could amplify their ability for a short period of time, but one thing that she could be sure of was that he did not make them last night, as pill refinement took a long time even in the Planar Continents, where it was not an art that was barely brought back to life.

Furthermore, from what she had seen of the pills produced in the prison realm, they would not last long after being produced, so they had to have been created recently, somewhere within the last two weeks. Based on the supplies that Ding Wen’s faction must have had, they could have easily made them ahead of time and given them out to all of their soldiers on the first day, and yet not a single one of the soldiers she had quietly observed in between her bouts of assistance to her forced used even one, suggesting to her that Ding Wen had some of them prepared for himself that he then stored in a spatial item.

Depending on how such items worked, it would not be too unreasonable to assume that the time within travelled at the same speed as it would in the Planar Continents, as it would be independent of whatever was accelerating the flow of time in the prison realm, and would thus allow items to be stored for significantly longer periods of time before decaying.

It would be nonsensical to assume that someone is in possession of a power absent from the vast majority of the world above just due to this, as Ding Wen could have prepared the pills earlier and have only given them out now, as he would have needed to do if he was to remove them from whatever form of spatial storage he might possess, but if he had initially anticipated an easy time with the four-day offensive, then he would not have the time he needed to create the pills after realising that things were not going according to plan.

Still, she had already created plans for dealing with both outcomes, and the result would be absolutely irrelevant to her unless she encountered some extremely unlikely and unforeseen outcome.

What mattered more for the moment were the unplanned and unexpected disturbances, such as the strange spiritual will-like energy that she had spotted several times during the second day, the potential for superior types of pills or treasures that could be given out by Ding Wen, and the fact that the abominations could still grow much stronger so long as Shi Luo Feng allowed it. After all, they were created from fragments of the Magnanimous Leech, an incredibly powerful but flawed technique.

So long as they were fed sufficiently, their strength would grow significantly more efficiently than that of typical cultivators, as their physiques were almost literally fluid and permitted for any changes that this development and progression required.

With roughly one hundred full sacrifices to an abomination, they would reach a level equivalent to that of the Searing Torch realm, except without the physical weakness of someone in that realm of killing intent. They would be just as strong in their defence as their offence, recovery and mental strength, as they had no true minds to speak of. With five hundred, they ought to match someone in the Hatred Augur realm, though that was slightly more difficult to estimate due to how fragmented knowledge of this realm was both within the prison realm itself and the Magnanimous Leech, with the latter losing even more of its knowledge when it was desecrated into the abomination creating technique.

As a result, Wei Yi could not quite be sure how reaching such a realm would affect the abominations, for Shi Luo Feng herself wasn’t in the fifth realm yet, nor did she know whether one of the three of Beast’s Rest could ever gather up so many willing or unwilling sacrifices for even a single abomination, though it would naturally be in her best interest to prevent any attempts.

When it comes to large stores of medicines, pills and stimulants that Ding Wen likely had, she couldn’t do much to stop their usage without the knowledge of where his treasury was, so the only thing she could do was counteract their effects with creations of her own. For this reason, she requested the collection of several resources that she determined to be within the pill sold at the auction she had attended, and was now standing over a desk full of these rotting and dried leaves and herbs, all of which had very slight similarities to those in the Planar Continents, though there were far more differences.

This made it rather difficult to understand what any one of these ingredients was meant to be or what it could be used to do.

Names and appearances alone weren’t of much use, since pill refining relied on a lot of complex interactions between various resources that couldn’t immediately be predicted on the first glance. For instance, Green-Stalked Wood Flower should never be mixed with Orange-Stalked Wood Flower under all but one very specific circumstance, in which the destabilization of the refinement process is necessary for the continuation of it, even though both are of the wood element and share a lot in common, suggesting that they ought to function well alongside one another inside of a pill furnace. If not for the fact that one was slightly yin while the other was slightly yang in nature, there would be no conflict between them whatsoever.

For a yang-type physique cultivator like Wei Yi, spotting issues of that nature was easy, but many other differences within extremely similar herbs and materials could still be unnoticed even under the perceptive gaze of her spiritual will, meaning that not only did she have to examine everything carefully, but also experiment with it for a little while to see if it reacts unexpectedly to anything.

That is exactly what she was doing right now, holding two extremely similar dried leaves in either hand.

‘One of these is a Crimson Hatred Leaf, while the other is Hatred Crimson Leaf… what kind of person named everything within the prison realm? Next they’ll give me a Leaf Crimson Hatred, or-’ her spiritual will brushed past that exact label, forcing her to use all of her mental strength to stop her hands from crushing the dried leaves and then burning them all with her physique energy, instead placing them on the table carefully before standing up and grabbing someone to assist her.

Somehow, that ended up being Meng Chu himself.

After she explained some of the situation to him, he shrugged, “I understand that the naming sense of the first few individuals that had been imprisoned here is rather lacking, but there isn’t much I can do about it.”

“That’s where you’re wrong. Sit down here for a minute. Since you’ve lived in this realm for some time, you ought to have some basic familiarity with the various plants and herbs that can be found within, so you should be able to come up with slightly better names for them. List down the properties you are already aware of, and everything will progress a dozen times faster as a result,” Wei Yi replied, emptying her seat for him, “Once that’s done, I could make something useful out of them.”

“Ugh… Is there no way to just send the memories into your head?”

“Do you have any primordial jade with which to create a jade slip and some spiritual will to fill it with your knowledge? If you do, I’ll take all of them and give out my techniques to greatly increase the strength of your forces.”

“Obviously, we don’t have access to such a thing. It might be possible to recreate the effects of a jade slip using the materials of this prison realm, but this is one of the arts we have not yet recreated.”

Wei Yi nodded and left him to his work. He was able to write down the details for a number of the dried plants with ease, even mentioning their taste and how they were able to work alongside one another in food, and then came up with several names that suited the ancient plants far more than the same three words being rearranged, again and again.

The Crimson Hatred Leaf became the Flaming Core Leaf due to its nature being that of the fire element, the Hatred Crimson Leaf became Steel Sky Root, for it originally belonged to a plant that used the energy of the air to nourish an underground tree, and the Leaf Crimson Hatred was converted into the Mortal Enmity Grass, as it had been affected by killing intent significantly and had transformed into a poison that directly drained the lifeforce of those with less than twenty years of life remaining. For those with more than that, it was simply unpleasant to consume, albeit beneficial to the stomach.

This process took a lot longer when it came to things that Meng Chu was unfamiliar with, for he had no previous experiences to work from.

If someone had been standing by their side during this, one question would have naturally appeared in their heads – why didn’t Wei Yi do this herself? Surely, she, with a head full of different words, terms and meanings, could come up with some satisfactory names?

Unfortunately, Wei Yi’s own naming sense was somewhat lacking, as could be determined by the fact that the mysterious characters and the technique that they provided still carried the same name as they did the first time she had benefited from them. Furthermore, the techniques that she had created on her own, whether it was the Elysian Palm or the Dawn Slicing Beam and Flowing Light, had all but exhausted her ideas for names.

It wouldn’t have been an issue if there were only one or two herbs that needed processing naming, but there were almost a hundred different dried leaves that all shared the same meaningless names.

“Alright, this should be it. When it comes to the other herbs, just ask someone else for help. Though, could I ask you to stop grabbing random people to assist you whenever you need them? It can be very disruptive to the normal operation of the faction,” Meng Chu said, standing up from her seat.

“I could, though I don’t grab that many people. It tends to be you, Dugu Wei and Qiu Sheng, though not in that order. The majority of the time, I only have a chance to get your help because you are already walking towards me for whatever reason,” she replied, not considering the situation to be as relevant as Meng Chu made it out to be, “I don’t even do it that often.”

“Since it isn’t a concern for you, faction leader, I will go ahead with it.”

He sighed and left, clearly considering whether he had enough time to get some sleep before he next needed to appear in front of someone officially.

Wei Yi could not do the same, unfortunately, as she now had to get back to the most important part of the pill refining process – the actual refinement process. With a few more hints from Meng Chu, she was able to reorganise her view of some of the materials and better understand their purpose, and had created a rough duplicate of the Planar Condensing pill recipe, except that instead of gathering planar energy, it would affect and purify killing intent just enough to be absorbed without too much difficulty on the part of the cultivator.

‘Normally, I’d need some materials and craftsmen to create a pill furnace for me, but I have the former, and I have the physique energy for the latter process,’ she thought, although she did not immediately move to create the furnace, ‘There are a few experiments I can perform without a pill furnace, and perhaps if I reach the Searing Torch realm, I could use the pressure of fire-type killing intent to create an illusory furnace and pseudo-alchemical flame, completely bypassing the necessity for owning a high quality furnace by creating the most suitable one myself.’

In theory, she could also achieve this with either one of her other energies, but none of the three was currently at a sufficient level to achieve such a thing, nor was she aware whether anyone else in the Planar Continents or the prison realm had ever attempted to do such a thing themselves.

Regardless of what anyone else has or has not done, she absolutely had to attempt this in the future.

For now, she took the metals she managed to gather from one of the warehouses she attacked and slowly heated them with a careful application of her physique energy, removing the hammer from the back of her head to shape the metal into her desired form, that being the furnace she had used in the Timeless Grove, under Chu Ling’s tutorship.

It was not necessarily the best pill furnace, but it was simple enough and suited her purposes for now, as this Hatred Gathering pill would not be anything above the level of one star.

She worked on the main body of the furnace first, striking the metal carefully and regularly to attain the desired state of the crude iron. Normally, a blacksmith would use an anvil or some other work surface, but Wei Yi used only her hand and naked legs, for there was little else that was stronger within the entire faction. Afterwards, she worked on the lids for the fuel and material compartments of the furnace, creating those significantly more quickly due to how little effort was needed to match the shape of the furnace.

That process took her an hour before she had something sufficient for her needs. As it did not need to be an artefact in order to withstand a small flame combined with killing intent, her primary weakness in the forging process did not manifest, allowing her to create a crude but effective pill furnace.

Wei Yi collected several of the dried herbs – those that were most plentiful, for what she was about to do had a high chance of failure – and carefully released a thin strand of yang physique energy into a single herb, diluting it as much as she possibly could in order to prevent the leaf from being turned into flame instantly.

For a brief second, the tip of the leaf seemed to regain some vitality, but that same spot immediately lit on fire the very next second.

Within seconds, the flame consumed the herb and turned it to ash.

‘Huh. I must say, I hadn’t expected it to work like that at all. I was certain that it would just burn the herb, and I would then be able to proceed to trying to adapt for the lacking vitality of the materials as the next step,’ she thought, the reaction of the leaf being pleasantly surprising to her, ‘This means that if I get the right type of physique energy and gather a sufficient quantity, I could infuse a transformed version of my own physique energy and revitalise the herbs!’

She grinned, put the leaves down and filled the meridians in her legs with True Ascendant physique energy, literally vanishing from her spot the very next second, rushing through the underground passages of the faction to find the same person that had left an hour earlier.

 

“And so, we-”

CRASH!

A wall right behind Meng Chu exploded, seemingly for no good reason, for no human eye could witness an object moving at such an immense speed when they were not looking out for it.

Several chunks of stone dropped from the ceiling, piling up atop an unseen figure.

After a few seconds of stunned silence from both Meng Chu and Qiu Sheng, the latter of whom had been presenting some of the latest information gathered by certain prostitutes on the inner workings of the other two factions, as well as some of the actions of the neutral forces, the pile of stone shifted, and crimson hair atop a crimson robe revealed itself.

“Phew…” Wei Yi breathed out, spitting out a few chunks of stone before cleansing the inside of her mouth with physique energy to get rid of the remaining dust, “Meng Chu! Where is the miracle fluid being stored, and do you have a large container of fluid?”

“… What the fuck are you doing?” he couldn’t help but reply, the sight of cracks spreading through the walls and ceiling of the room being rather unnerving to perceive, “It’s in the fourth storage room, but-”

“Thanks!” she exclaimed, searing the wall with True Ascendant energy to prevent further weakening of the structure before running off, finding that storage room without too much difficulty due to being the one that selected and numbered every single room and chamber within the enormous network of underground passages.

Several litres of miracle fluid had been stored within, all of it being contained in small, individual bottles either to make it easier to give them out later or to make them more difficult to carry and steal.

She grabbed one set of the miracle fluid bottles and filled the adjacent drum with their contents.

After locating a few pieces of rope, fashioned from a particularly sturdy dried plant found within the wastes of the prison realm, she was able to attach the drum to her back and, after adjust its size to be just large enough to fit through the doorways of the underground network, she left without providing any explanation to her subordinates. For the moment, they didn’t need to understand.

 

“Eh… Boss, do you have any clue what she’s doing?”

“Well… Based on the context, I have to presume our master is going to get something for the purpose of pill refining, but… Miracle fluid? I don’t think that there’s any relation between that and the great art… Naturally, that doesn’t explain the extreme rush…”

“R-Right,” Qiu Sheng nodded, turning away to hide her red face and her action of biting her lip.

 

A great storm shot through the crimson wilderness of the prison realm, creating a great wall of dust as it travelled. The moving storm travelled north, from Beast’s Rest towards the Great Bone Lake, the place where countless physique cultivators resided and constantly strengthened themselves through the killing intent of the Beast’s bones.

It did not need to be stated that this was Wei Yi, investing her full strength into every step to travel at a speed greater than sound.

The consumption of physique energy was far lesser than when she used the Elysian or Antithesis Palm with it, but it was still exhausted swiftly after several minutes of sprinting at her greatest possible speed, forcing her to pause every now and then to sip some of the miracle fluid from the great container on her back. Luckily, the transparent water-like substance was extremely nutritious, providing her with an immense quantity of energy from just a mouthful of it.

As a result, she was able to reach the distant outskirts of the Great Bone Lake with just half of the miracle fluid, conserving the rest for prolonged battles which she intended to participate in since the beginning of the journey.

Her purpose for leaving Beast’s Rest and heading to the town of the physique cultivators was to gather some crops, so to speak, that she did not need to invest any effort into in order to grow, till or care for.

The best place to locate physique cultivators that wouldn’t be missed would be outside of their primary gathering spot, where everyone who couldn’t withstand the immense pressure of the bones would form small camps and unite into teams of bandits that would then go on to do things like occupying ancient and forgotten battlefields and raiding them for food and resources for themselves.

They would be easy to deal with, as they would not be in any realm higher than the third, and the variety of physiques that they possess have a large number of purposes, with several being bound to have something like the Restorative Spring or Vitality Siphon physiques.

Before the Great Bone Lake came into view, she was already able to find several distant camps of bandit cultivators, with the smallest camp containing only six individuals while the largest appeared to have almost two dozen physique cultivators. Although her spiritual will could not reach them while they were at the edge of the crimson fog, she was relatively certain that most of the camps had no traces of those in the third realm, meaning that they would be easy to take down with little expenditure of any one of her forms of energy.

In order to not attempt something dangerous by misperceiving the power of her enemies, she neared the smallest camp with her stealth methods active, leaving the miracle fluid container behind in an inconspicuous location, getting close enough to scan it with her spiritual will.

Within this camp, six men stood in a circle, their hands placed on one another’s shoulders, their mouths moving quickly as they were chanting something together.

No energy was shifting around them, not even according to her natural perception and the sensitivity of her dantian, so Wei Yi didn’t immediately stop it and instead drew closer, using some of the scattered items and debris around the camp to get closer to them while continuing to avoid notice. Their voices weren’t too loud, but with six people making the exact same sound at the same time, they were almost certain not to hear her footsteps, allowing her to focus on staying out of their lines of sight.

Several minutes later, she came close enough to them to hear that they were repeating a single sentence over and over, while traces of physique energy moved between them through their bodies, which had previously impeded Wei Yi’s observation.

“Endure it, gain balance. Endure it, gain balance. Endure it, gain balance…”

A dozen books from the shelves of the Augur’s Library flew out for her to glance through them until she understood what might be happening.

‘The Devil General physique. Physical features vary extremely, from no clear physical effect to looking almost like a true devil, but the most significant effect is always identical – it permits for the linking of multiple cultivators in a symbiotic connection that allows them to suffer together for greater growth, though the Devil General will not only benefit more from the connection, but that benefit will increase with every person they add to their link. Data on this physique varies, and the common version of the physique either only permits the linking of ten cultivators, or the physique grows for every stage it achieves, refining the physique from a One Hundred Man Devil General to a One Million Man Devil General,’ she read through the book and summarised it to herself, confirming that the energy appeared to be yin-type and matched the effects, ‘It’s a shame that I won’t be able to absorb this one for myself.’

She prepared herself and then leapt out, understanding from the relevant tome that a Devil General physique was at its weakest when it in the preparatory stage, before their energy could be stabilised and redirected towards combat.

Thus, she naturally didn’t give them that opportunity, invoking her Yang Elysian Palm while covering it in the energy of the Antithesis Palm to prevent its glow from alerting others.

None of the six were able to react in time, causing them to be crushed before they had any chance to consider retaliation or escape. Their strong outer shells, their skin and the rock-like carapace of one of the cultivators, were cracked and shattered into nothingness, breaking apart their physique energy connection before it could attempt to recede on its own.

Wei Yi kneeled down besides each body and drained the energy of the four that were in possession of yang-type physiques, burning up the bodies of the other two. As they all had different physiques, she didn’t activate any more abilities for her True Ascendant energy, but she did feel it becoming stronger.

It happened to recover almost the same quantity of physique energy as she had initially spent.

She caught her breath and left the camp before anyone else had the opportunity to find her and cause trouble for her, striding right towards the next nearest and emptiest camp.

The second camp turned out to contain a total of ten people, all of whom were split into pairs all around the surface. Two pairs resided within small tents, quietly talking to one another about something, two more were actively training and beating one another up in a recreational manner, while the last pair were further away, behind a ruined wall, pretending to guard the area while they were actually sleeping.

Their lacklustre behaviour made it significantly easier for her to take them all out, one by one, without any others noticing a single thing. Once again, she collected the energy from their bodies and turned them to ash before returning to the wastes and recovering some energy via the miracle fluid.

Immediately after, she left it behind once more and rushed towards another encampment.