Path of the Ascendant

“- so why? You promised that-”

“You said that you’d tell me every single one of the techniques you know of, and yet you’ve only given me six. Since you’re reluctant to talk, I have to force it out of you, don’t I? Don’t worry, your friends – if you’re even that familiar with them, and they aren’t just some random people that you were ordered to lead – will not be bothered unless you prove to be completely untrustworthy,” Wei Yi said, placing her fingers on the woman’s chin and raising her head so that their eyes met, “So make things easy for me, then I will be able to allow you to relax for the rest of the two years.”

“…” Hao Gang shivered as a great quantity of killing intent washed over her, emanating from Wei Yi’s silver eyes, “I promise, I told you everything!”

“Sure~, that’s totally believable. Now, tell me, what sort of method should I try first? I can do something pleasant, or something outright violent. Although I have little experience in one, I can assure you that I will not make a single mistake in the process – in the case of the painful approach, that means that you will suffer the most. Make the right choice, Hao Gang.”

“I… I don’t trust you! You’d never do something pleasant! You’re clearly lying! Again!”

The woman in white yelled as loudly as she could, thrashing about as she tried to free herself, but the restraints that bound her to the wall were far too tough to be broken by someone with no body or physique cultivation experience, and the people outside had no reason to listen to a captive of their leader, as, regardless of what they thought they were doing within this room, the people of the prison realm had seen far worse. To them, it didn’t matter what sorts of strange things someone got up to, so long as they did not result in their loss of life, possessions or anything else that was important to them. Hao Gang fit into none of those categories.

“Then, I will begin with torture. Just remember that you can stop it at any time by answering my questions…”

“W-Wait, what are you- AH! NO! STOP!”

“Are you intending to share the rest of the techniques with me?” Wei Yi gave her a few seconds to reply, but when she failed to do so, she simply formed another thread of spiritual will that she made as thin as possible to optimise its cutting ability.

 

“… and that is Demonic Ire… Please, let me go…” cried Hao Gang, her voice weak and quiet.

Dried blood covered her skin, though there were no actual wounds present on her body. Her white robes had been put aside, mostly so that the curious material they were made from was not damaged in the process, and her hair was also tied up so that it would not get in the way. Although Wei Yi was interrogating her, she didn’t see any reason to inflict any kind of permanent harm to her and negatively affect the woman’s appearance.

The wounds inflicted during the torture were easily healed with a single pill, but clothes and hair were slightly more difficult to repair, prompting Wei Yi to avoid doing so in the first place.

As it turned out, interrogating someone while they were mostly undressed and in an uncomfortable environment was a rather effective method at weakening their resistance, as Hao Gang broke down several minutes earlier than a round of Endless Calculation used before undressing her had suggested.

‘Still, amongst the Spiritual Martial Arts and Direct Movement, this Demonic Ire certainly stands out,’ Wei Yi noticed, prompting her to turn to the exhausted woman and ask directly, “Why is this technique so different from the rest? If I recall one of your earlier claims, all of these were made by the same groups of people, so to see such variation…”

“No… this one… it was taken from a powerful warrior… who impeded the construction of Sanctuary… many years ago…”

“Is that so? That person is dead, then?”

“Yes…”

“How powerful was he, exactly? Any particular achievements that he had attained through his abilities?”

“In the records… it says that his army had one tenth of the number of the Sanctuary Guard, but… with his might alone, he almost overpowered all of them… He was the most powerful warrior to ever exist on our side of the prison realm,” said Hao Gang, whimpering with every word.

‘Well, isn’t that interesting… wait a minute… wait…’ the mental tome detailing the Demonic Ire technique was duplicated within her mind so that every page could be open at once, at which point she carefully examined all of them with extreme care, for she saw something within them that once again alarmed her, just like when she first theorised that Ding Wen could be an otherworldly demon.

The feeling was incredibly similar because her hypothesis matched as well. It was unlike most techniques, which were created with the combined experience of one or many cultivators over a long period of time, with many changes and steps taken until they can reach perfection. Even Wei Yi, who experienced what could be described as one too many sudden enlightenments, needed to work on her techniques for a while before they could reach their peak and exhibit their full strength. This was not the case for the likes of the Kong Mental Arts or Gilded Library, both of which lacked a core inspiration and did not adhere to the typical five elements, using pure planar energy instead.

She couldn’t be sure why this occurred, only that the former appeared most frequently in the techniques of those from other worlds, perhaps due to some unique method within their possession.

The issue was that this Demonic Ire had the exact same style as the Kong Mental Arts and the Gilded Library, though they were clearly not written by the same person, nor did they originate from the same source, meaning that this was not a continuation of the legacy of Kong Shi Meng, but it was made by someone that was similar to him.

In other words, Demonic Ire was incredibly likely to have been created by an otherworldly demon.

‘This does not bode well, does it? It is possible that this is the fourth otherworldly demon I’ve encountered during my life, which means that there is an extremely terrifying possibility that they are extremely common, not just in the Planar Continents, but also in spatial realms like this prison realm… for fuck’s sake, are you kidding me? Just one of them tore a hole in the pocket dimension itself, so if a bunch of them gather up and decide to rally around some cause that only they are aware of, then use all of their unique abilities at once, they might shatter the entire dimension with me still in it.’

Technically, that was exactly what she was looking for – other than her being devoured by the spatial instability generated by such a phenomenon, of course – but the mental instability of the otherworldly demons made her reluctant to even consider the possibility of them doing something right.

More likely than a smooth destruction of the dimensions walls would be something akin to what happened in the Kong Holy Grounds, except with several otherworldly demons harnessing the warp energy and fighting one another with it while using absolutely insane techniques that match the Elysian Palm combined with the Touch of God and Storm Blade Wreathing in terms of their destructiveness and raw power.

“Very well. Confirm this one last time for me – do you have any other techniques to inform me about?”

“No! I… don’t… Please, I won’t go anywhere… let me go…”

‘I don’t see any hints of her lying, so I suppose there is no reason to keep her here. Furthermore, if I keep injuring her, the stench of blood will fill this room to such an extent that it will never be cleaned out by the owner, and I would prefer not to give him more work in my first few days as his master, so…’ she made her decision and released the woman in white from the restraints, “You can get a bed somewhere downstairs, with your friends if you want, or on your own. If you do not run away, then I will not imprison you in complete darkness for the rest of your stay in Beast’s Rest.”

“I understand… C-Can I wear my clothes now?”

“Sure. I just wanted to avoid damaging them, so there is no reason to take them off around me unless you intend to force me to torture you for a second time. You don’t intend to do such a thing, do you?

“N-No! I’d never!”

“Good. Feel free to go now.”

“Yes!” the woman in white exclaimed with as much strength as she was able to, getting onto her shaking legs, grabbing the white robes from the corner of the room and fleeing the moment that they covered her body in any way.

Soon after that, the owner of the establishment, a plain man dressed in ordinary clothing, with a short yet messy beard, emerged from the opposite direction that Hao Gang had headed in, glancing in that woman’s direction for a few seconds before looking back towards Wei Yi, bowing to her lightly before stepping into the room.

“Boss Wei, have you finished using this room?”

“I have.”

“Very well. Do you intend to use my business for much longer, or will you be leaving soon?”

“We will only stay for the day. While we’re here, make sure you leave a few of your guards around the rooms of the three in white robes and don’t let them just lean on the walls and sleep. Otherwise, they may be killed in their sleep and I will not claim any responsibility for it.”

“Understood, boss. I’ll do as you say. Feel free to use any room to rest.”

He bowed again and began to leave, when he stopped with his body still half-way in the doorway and hesitantly turned to face her again, asking, “Boss, you… you’re not going to do that to other women, are you?”

“If, by this, you mean violently torture them until they submit, beg for mercy and tell me everything I want to know, then unless other people, women or not, possess something that is absolutely necessary to allow for the ultimate escape from the prison realm, then I will not bother them unless they bother me. For example, if one of these other women come to me and ask to be tortured, whether physically or sexually, then I see no reason to refuse if I am not busy.”

“Right, right… Thanks, boss!”

He walked away without another random pause, prompting Wei Yi to raise an eyebrow as she tried to figure out why he bothered to ask her that.

There were a few theories that were sufficiently plausible to be considered, but none of them had any particular significance to her and so she decided not to bother with it, instead silently leaving the room and travelling away from it, expecting that the three figures in white would be a little reluctant to leave any time soon, even if they did not see her in the area.

While she had the free time, she wanted to experiment with some of the techniques she had acquired after the recent interrogations of those from the spiritual will side of the prison realm. Most of them were rather simplistic, and could be replicated or even created outright just with a little bit of experimentation, and thus the ones she was most interested in were the Sword Will Arts, Spiritual Martial Arts and Demonic Ire. There was no need to explain why the last one caught her attention, but both Sword Will and Spiritual Martial Arts included certain curious elements that she believed could be extrapolated into something as effective as the Red Phantom Flood could be…

‘Red Phantom Flood… Huh. I must attempt to use that one once more, for I recall that I felt a sort of killing intent when I had previously used it. Perhaps now that I possess some of that energy of my own, I will be able to use it properly.’

She had only attempted to use that technique a few times, and the only thing she had achieved most of those times was a series of internal and external injures that greatly assisted her in dulling her sense of pain. If it could be put to use, she would have a technique that could easily belong to the fifth realm or above of whatever cultivation system it was created within, and any offensive capability that it had would be on par with the Touch of God, Light of Divinity and Antithesis Palm.

‘However, I shouldn’t rush these things. I have two years until I will make contact with the other side of the prison realm, by which point I should reach the third realm of no fewer than one of my cultivation paths, and I highly doubt that I will be stopped from experimenting with my techniques for both years,’ Wei Yi thought, stopping by the outer walls to warn the guards that she would be performing with a few potentially destructive skills that could cause quite a lot of noise and many large dust explosions that they would otherwise investigate, ‘I’ll start with the simpler skills first, to limit disappointment.’

After her interrogation of Hao Gang, she borrowed the spiritual concentration blade from her without asking for her permission, but she first intended to attempt the Concentrated Blade technique so that she would not be bound to fragile weaponry.

When she stopped at a random dip in the ground that was barely within view of the outer walls, she raised both hands and placed them side by side, closing her eyes for a few seconds to concentrate her spiritual will in the manner necessitated by the technique, then released it from her palms, causing a thin but constant thread of spiritual will emerge from the centre of her hands.

She moved one hand up while moving the other down, causing the energy to form the blade of a sword, which she then adjusted at the bottom so that it would resemble a typical sword handle.

The shape was somewhat crude and basic, but it was unmistakably a weapon.

‘I suppose that this is good enough for the first try. It is incredibly fortunate that my blacksmithing incapability does not extend to weapons that I create via my techniques, like the Living Spear and this technique,’ she smiled to herself, swinging the weapon a few times to get a feel for it, ‘It is also very light, pleasant to use… Excellent. Now, I will be able to have a weapon other than a knife and spear.’

Wei Yi held the weapon in a basic stance, then surrounded it with a secondary layer of spiritual will as per the instructions of the Sword Will Arts. She had to split it into several threads, with a few entering the blade while others surrounding it, then stimulate the basic structure of the weapon to produce a spiritual resonance with it in order to create the sword light that was the dream of many cultivators and martial artists due to permitting great reach and extreme power from any weapon, no matter how short the actual weapon was.

It was very effective when Fen Zhi and the warriors that had appeared during the hunt for the Lock Obelisks utilised it, and when she slashed with her blade at a random hill near her, the bright white flash of light that emerged cut right through the ground and continued for several metres before fading.

The effect was satisfactory, albeit imperfect.

‘There are several things I can do to improve this, but it isn’t too bad of a creation for the overly rigid people of the spiritual will side of the prison realm,’ Wei Yi thought, dispelling the blade and the energy around it before taking a simple stance that was described within the Spiritual Martial Arts and circulating her spiritual will through her meridians according to that same description, ‘It is already clear that none of those three cultivated this technique, as I can tell that it would strengthen the body with consistent usage, as well as leaving a certain aura on the body and possibly even resulting in discoloration of the skin in certain places with prolonged usage…’

She frowned and returned to a neutral posture, looking through the Spiritual Martial Arts and the many other body cultivation techniques she had to modify the former with the insights of the latter.

For someone with a great deal of experience in creating and modifying techniques, this process only took a dozen minutes before she was able to substitute certain elements of it for superior elements from other techniques, incorporating parts of the Condensed Arts and Dawn Star Bodies as well as the simpler skills she had acquired from the Yi family’s technique library.

The flaw of the aura was mitigated by using the many aspects of the Condensed Arts Body to disperse it into nothingness while utilising the essence of her physique to either avoid the discoloration of her body, or to change it into something that was useful to her, though she wasn’t yet sure how that would function. After all, despite the fact – or perhaps due to it – that she was able to complete the modification process quickly, she was not aware of everything that her changes would cause, as that required an intense quantity of experimentation to confirm everything about them.

‘For now, however, the knowledge that I wouldn’t stand out like a sore thumb is enough for me to safely play around with it,’ she said to herself, returning to a slightly different stance to use the first move of the Spiritual Martial Arts.

This stance was simple, and all it led into was a single punch directed roughly at the stomach of the opponent. Due to the limited scope and insane rigidity of the techniques from the spiritual will side of the prison realm, that was the only strike described for this stance, and there was no mention of the basics or the idea behind it, only the attack itself, meaning that unless someone could comprehend it on their own, they would have no choice but to use that exact strike.

Perhaps it wouldn’t be surprising to anyone that the next move, a quick jab to the head, also permitted no variation, and neither did the next move, a strike to the side, nor did the next one.

‘If I was to use this in combat, any opponent with a brain would be able to figure out exactly what every single one of my attacks will lead to after they witness them once or twice, which, in the case of otherworldly demons and the Greats, is a genuine possibility and significant risk. This isn’t a technique for me, not until I modify it further…’

Nevertheless, she went through the rest of the movements of the technique to be able to better ascertain the effect it would have on the body, concluding after several repetitions that the effect was minor in comparison to absorbing physique energy or using the training that was available to her.

She then moved on to Direct Movement, a technique that involved creating a path on the ground that could then be traversed rapidly so long as one’s spiritual will was plentiful and their concentration was not broken entirely. Naturally, it was not as versatile as anything Wei Yi had in her arsenal already, but it did promise a significant degree of speed and manoeuvrability in a confined space, so long as she had the time to create the spiritual path prior to a battle.

The process of drawing it was simple, but it required a consistent quantity of energy to properly tether the cultivator to the path. This proved to not be an issue for her, as she had plenty of experience with talisman creation, which required the exact same kind of skill, just on a larger scale, and within minutes, the spiritual path was created.

All that she needed to do now was throw out a spiritual thread, latch onto a part of the path, then pull herself towards that point in order to use the technique.

She did exactly that, forming a thread of spiritual will and throwing it to the furthest end of the spiritual path, pulling on it with her mental energy to rapidly move herself to its base. After a few more attempts at this, she decided to modify the process slightly and thicken the thread so that she would be able to grab onto it reliably with her hand instead of using only the mind. Technically, she had all of the mental power she needed to use this technique proficiently, but it made no sense not to utilise the immense physical power of her body to further increase the speed at which she travels.

By creating a thread and then pulling on it with her arm instead of her mind, she was able to leap into the air and traverse the spiritual path with significantly greater speed, nearly doubling her speed at the cost of requiring the use of one arm and some movement rather than using only mental energy.

‘And now, it is time for the most significant of the techniques… Demonic Ire, a truly suitable name.’

Only after carefully examining her surroundings was she confident in attempting to use this technique, as it was not only incredibly powerful, but also significantly more destructive than any of the skills she was currently aware of, so long as she did not combine multiple techniques together to achieve even greater destruction.

To kill a few people wasn’t a particular concern for her, as she would undoubtedly need to do so many times over in order to reach her goals, but she had no intention of doing so accidentally or without any proper reason for it, and Demonic Ire had an incredibly high likelihood of achieving exactly that due to the way in which it functioned. First, the cultivator would create a sort of array around them, which would draw in great quantities of power from the air itself, as well as foes within the range of the array, then that energy would be released in two forms – a spherical burst of energy that was roughly half the diameter of the array, and an incredible beam that would be twice as powerful as the energy gathering array was during its entire duration of function.

She took several breaths to flood her lungs with the twisted air of the prison realm, focusing on the Demonic Ire mental tome to ensure that she would not make any mistakes in its execution.

All of a sudden, her feet lifted up from the ground, arcs of crimson lightning gathering around her. With no warning, a great quantity of such lightning burst out of her, striking the ground around her in a perfect circle, carving out a shape that was exactly ten metres in diameter. Further bolts of crimson lightning surged into the air, hitting the air and fading out while diverting a great quantity of invisible power from it towards her.

Her arms and hands were stretched out, red lightning arcing around them and through her flesh.

After a second, another set of bolts burst out of her body and struck the ground in a smaller circle, drawing a strange series of patterns and inscriptions into the ground that did not match any language or symbols that Wei Yi was aware of.

However, she could distinctly feel the Demonic Ire energy growing stronger with every single smaller symbol that appeared, meaning that they did indeed have a function and power, in spite of what she might have thought. A total of ten such circles were carved into the ground, crimson lightning resting within every single one of them, their symbols connecting to one another in some kind of esoteric fashion that further empowered this entire complex array.

Then, a second after the last pattern was formed within the ground, almost immediately around her, the crimson energy that was nested within the eleven rings suddenly burst out of the ground and returned into her, wrapping her entire form with a ruby light that was entirely unique from the air of the prison realm, containing far less chaotic energy and notably more power.

At that moment, she slammed her hands together and let them separate just as quickly, resulting in that energy gathering at a point in front of her and exploding outwards.

Part of the crimson light exploded outwards without any aim, scorching the ground and raising an enormous cloud of dust that completely eliminated all traces of the circles on the ground that had previously been formed by the technique.

The other half flew out in the form of a great crimson beam that roughly matched the width of Wei Yi’s outstretched arms. In just a single breath, it crossed the gap between her and the red hill she had been facing, impacting into it with force equalling someone in the fifth realm of planar cultivation. The hill was absolutely annihilated, exploding into nothingness and sending a great shockwave that flew past her and threw the cloud of dust aside, forcing Wei Yi to shut her eyes to avoid permanently losing her sight.

She landed onto the ground and was forced to take another breath in order to recover the air that had been blown out of her lungs.

‘Well… that certainly matches a few other experiences in excitement. I see no traces of negative effects on myself, meaning that if I aim correctly and balance the energy I invest into this technique, as well as how many of those circle stages I build up before releasing, I’ll be able to avoid the unpleasant part of this… maybe I shouldn’t bother getting underwear…’

That last thought was entirely random and irrelevant for the moment, so she shook it out of her head and sat down on the ground, taking advantage of the energy-draining effect of Demonic Ire to absorb the pure killing intent that remained around her and cultivate it into her own power.

‘When I come back and bring those people from the other side of the prison realm into the inner city, I will need to decide which factions of the prison realm to side with, which ones to eliminate and which ones to… integrate. Depending on how I do this, I will naturally get different rewards for my efforts, and different insights and minds with which to stride forward, and I would prefer to limit the number I kill as much as possible just to have the most troops to work with once I can organise an escape from the prison realm…’

She contemplated this as she cultivated, occasionally glancing into her mental domain to observe how the warriors wielding killing intent fought against those with physique energy, in addition to confirming that the refinement process of her killing intent was continuing smoothly, without any unexpected damage within her meridians or anywhere else in her body.

It was important to do this after testing a few new techniques, and so she made sure to be careful.

Roughly an hour into her cultivation, she stood up again and willed the Red Phantom Flood manual to appear within her mind, reading through it yet again to be certain about what she was doing.

Then, she slowly activated the technique, willing her killing intent to gather in place of whatever other energies the Red Phantom Flood usually used. She did this slowly and incredibly cautiously, for the pain that she had previously been forced to endure was not just physical, which she had gotten used to long ago, but also mental, with every instant of the technique’s usage feeling like her very soul was being torn into pieces.

Indeed, as she repeated the activation of the skill now, she felt a similar pain, as if someone had stabbed her with a thousand knives at once.

‘Shit… I will not be defeated by a single technique!’ she exclaimed to herself, forcefully pushing through the extreme discomfort and releasing a large clump of killing intent into the world, as per the technique’s instructions.

And then… then, the sensation that she felt could not be described in its entirety with words alone. Her vision, her sense of smell, her hearing – all of them felt like they were doubled and split in two, with two images simultaneously appearing within her mind of the world around her, with one being at her present location and the other being incredibly similar, originating from the clump of killing intent.

Before she was able to understand any of this, her mind suddenly returned into a single whole, the second set of sensations vanished, and the quantity of killing intent collapsed entirely, floating back into her body.

At some point during that experience, her body became entirely drenched in sweat, and her head felt as if she had stayed awake for a dozen days without food or water.