Path of the Ascendant

Her words were not some curious form of humour, nor an exaggeration.

Within a single day, she isolated a large portion of land on the outskirts of Beast’s Rest and built an enormous array upon it, though it was not some kind of unique or unusual array that would never be seen within the prison realm.

No, it was just a simple Hatred Gathering array, except she increased its size and power to an enormous extent at the cost of a few more precious items from the House of Gold, which gave her a very fortunate excuse to empty out even more of that artefact thanks to all of the items she decided to use being useful only for gathering great quantities of killing intent in a large area, though not to the extent of permitting her to damage space via the conflict of that energy and one of her attacks.

Since there seemed to be no better use for such things – especially considering the fact that she could also benefit from the array and siphon the energy that remains after Meng Chu’s physique awakening to cultivate on her own – she threw out everything liberally, with the finished array glittering like gold.

Once that was prepared, she called Meng Chu out to this location with a series of pills and materials, including some extremely toxic poisons.

Her reasoning behind such a decision was that his body was significantly older than she had been when awakening her physique and would thus be likely to put up far more resistance than her own body had. To loosen it up a little, give the secondary set of meridians room to grow and to cleanse his body of some of the impurities that constantly consuming the blood of the Beast resulted in, something poisonous and fast-acting was best, as she could then repair it quickly by supplying her built-up vitality via the various physiques she currently possessed.

This was cheaper and easier than finding specific herbs to do that same thing properly, without initially damaging the body, and so she decided to take the exact same approach to this as she had to many other tasks after discovering the true power of Antithesis energy.

Needless to say, although Meng Chu did trust her capabilities, he was not immediately convinced with her plan after he had the opportunity to see all of the poisonous materials stacked up atop one another, resulting in a pile that was similar in size to his head, and visibly damaging the dead crimson ground that it was placed upon.

“Are you absolutely certain that this will work? Is vitality sufficient to deal with all of these?”

“To ensure that it is, I have selected the poisons that function incredibly quickly. Since their poisonous essence will dissipate almost instantly, your natural regenerative abilities supplemented by excess vitality will correct most injuries quickly.”

Before he had the opportunity to further question these things, she grabbed his clothes and tossed him into the array, making sure to control the force she invested into her throw to allow him to land on his feet and avoid damaging the complex design of the Extreme Hatred Gathering array, since that would be rather bothersome to correct, though not dangerous due to the array not yet being active nor completed.

“Now, quiet down and consume the pill and poison, then I will handle the rest. Focus on the Secondary Meridians Technique and take advantage of the creation of your physique to complete it, and then, once both forms of energy are present, make sure to use them in combination and get used to the ways in which they function to ensure that you do not suffer if you are somehow more unlucky than I was.”

With the injection of her spiritual will and killing intent, the enormous array began to stir into action, the twin energies flowing through different parts of the structure and interacting with its various components, causing a series of faint sounds to come from the treasures that had been embedded into it. Faint crimson light began to gather around it, slowly growing deeper and deeper as it went from simply being present within the air to overpowering it, removing all colours other than the ever-consuming crimson of the prison realm.

It slowly pressed down on Wei Yi, but it clearly had far more of an effect on Meng Chu, not in the least due to his position in the very middle of the array.

When combined with his weaker constitution and lack of experience in such killing intent-heavy situations, he felt as if some kind of enormous giant, perhaps even the one from Wei Yi’s killing intent illusion, had grabbed him and was attempting to crush him with all of their might.

“Don’t tell me you can’t even handle this? There is still a lot more to go, including a full storm!” Wei Yi muttered disapprovingly, “Eat the pill and poisons, or else I will just toss you right into the tornado as it forms!”

He would have replied with a similar level of disapproval directed at her, but he was not so foolish as to risk his life just because of his emotions. Following her instructions, he grabbed the Earth Physique Awakening pill with one hand and the poisonous materials with the other, clenching his teeth to avoid crying out as the toxins burned the skin on his hand and some even began to eat through his flesh, with one particular herb even reaching his bones before he was able to force it into his mouth.

That made the pain a thousand times worse.

Although it was rare for him to deal with the prolonged exposure to an extreme quantity of killing intent on the outside of his body, with him having some minor control over it due to his killing intent cultivation, he had nothing whatsoever that he could do about the extreme quantity of deadly toxins that suddenly flooded into his stomach.

‘Somehow, it is always surprising to witness how fragile almost everyone other than me is… Anyway, time to guide the poison,’ Wei Yi thought, placing her hand on the man’s back and sending a spiritual thread into his body, ‘While I’m at it, can’t I look through his memories? It seems like the perfect opportunity to do so, especially considering the fact that he won’t have much of an opportunity to resist me in this condition.’

For a few moments, she probed his body with her spiritual will, making sure that she would be able to manage her part of his physique creation process, then once she was absolutely certain that she would be able to succeed, she used the newly-learned Mental Intrusion technique.

Due to the strange nature of her mental energy, where it appeared to be thin and nigh imperceptible, even a spiritual will expert might have been incapable of noticing it, not to mention someone without any time to pay attention to the things going in within his mind and without the knowledge of spiritual will being anything more than spiritual perception, meaning that the second thread of spiritual will entered his head without any difficulty, intruding upon his mental realm after a second of searching.

Meng Chu had never developed his mental realm, and thus it was almost as chaotic as Wei Yi’s when she had first used the Kong Mental Arts to dwell into her own mind. The most distinct difference was the fact that there were significantly – incredibly significantly – fewer memory fragments, wayward thoughts and more, meaning that his mental domain looked like a barren wasteland in her eyes.

Still, there were a number of curious things for her to view.

For one, there were traces of his past and of his life as a child, allowing her to glean minor details of how people at that age exist within this twisted prison realm, though she was not too concerned with this and thus threw her recollection of these things into a corner of the Augur’s Library the second that she had the spare time to do so, moving on to more recent, brighter and bigger memories in the hopes of locating information that may reveal any negative tendencies that she would be better off addressing before they became an issue.

Before she could get to that, however, she was forced to return her focus to the outside world to manage the storm of killing intent that began to build up around them. It was exactly what she had wanted to achieve, but it required some control to maximise its potential.

Wei Yi raised her hand and used a segment of Demonic Ire that she focused on it. All of the plentiful energies around her were forced towards her hand, focusing within her palm, but before it could progress into the stage at which the eleven array circles would be carved into the ground, she shattered the structure of the technique and redirected the great quantity of power that she had gathered into Meng Chu’s body.

When that power combined with the great quantity of poisons, it broke down even more of his internal structure.

However, that energy also interacted with the Earth Physique Awakening pill, finally causing a reaction between it and the dormant structure within his body that contained the vague traces of the physique that the pill was intended to awaken.

As she noticed this, she responded by beginning the transfer of vitality into him to permit for the physique to awaken without consuming what little of his life remained to do so.

The flooding entry of vitality prompted the poison’s effects to finally die out and the many broken parts of Meng Chu’s body to slowly recover, but before they could get far, a pale white force surged from his insides, flooding out into reality and wreathing his ragger form in a thin layer of ash-like fog, prompting Wei Yi to withdrew her hand slightly.

‘Energy of extreme yin, though it does not appear to be the same kind that would result in him having a skewed balance of yin and yang within his body… regardless of the physique itself, he is fortunate in this department…’ she thought to herself, continuing to guide this force in filling his entire form.

What she noticed quickly after, however, was that this curious physique energy had a similar attribute to her spiritual will, in that it appeared to be incredibly weak and faint despite containing a greater power hidden within. It did not appear to match her True Ascendant physique energy to any degree, lacking the same empowering force, the physical enhancement and the ability to destabilise space itself at sufficient quantities, but in the place of such great abilities seemed to be an endless pool of potential, or so her instincts were telling her.

They had been reliable enough so far, and so she had no intention of disregarding them now.

‘I have stored quite an excessive amount of vitality after the recent battle with the two former leaders of Beast’s Rest – the abominations provided a bit, though I was forced to finish them quickly and thus couldn’t benefit from the energy that they had drained from much of Beast’s Rest population – so I can naturally spare it to ensure that I have someone who is capable of assisting me in genuine battles in the future,’ she thought, increasing the rate at which she supplied vitality to him.

As a direct result, the ashen mist also grew thicker, enveloping both his insides and outsides until he appeared to be made more of ash than flesh and blood.

Then, the ashes exploded, blowing away all nearby dust and dirt while simultaneously causing an implosion of killing intent, drawing it all into Meng Chu’s body. It pooled within his heart, focusing further and further until it converged with all of the returning ashes and exploded once again, this time being contained to his body.

Meanwhile, using the principles of Strike Deflection to ignore the outburst of physique energy, Wei Yi used her own power to force the ashen physique energy to stay away from Meng Chu’s first set of meridians, forcing it to flow along a secondary path beside them, where his rapidly regenerating body quickly got the idea and began forging a second set of meridians, albeit slowly and undoubtedly incredibly painfully, though it was unlikely to be as terrible as her experience had been due to the rather unguided way in which her own set of meridians were developed.

The ash explosion had thrown away the rest of the killing intent that built up around them, and the array was also thrown into disarray and deactivated as a result, leaving all focus on the two of them.

For a while, they remained in their positions in silence, with Meng Chu following her earlier instructions and getting acclimated to the new form of energy that began to flow through him, as well as the strengthened killing intent that he had achieved during the physique forging process, while Wei Yi remained near him to ensure that he didn’t accidentally explode himself with this power.

Several minutes later, he was still alive and smoothly circulating the two energies throughout his body, prompting Wei Yi to get up and begin collecting the remaining treasures from the array, since the risk of imminent death seemed to have passed.

When he finally opened his eyes, he looked around with a hint of bewilderment in his expression, “This… This is not what I expected…”

“Although I don’t know what you expected, I am also unaware of what you’re commenting on, so I cannot even tell you whether your experiences are common amongst physique cultivators- actually, never mind. I wouldn’t be able to share that with you anyway, seeing as my experiences are anything other than common.”

“There’s a strange ashen mist around everything, though it isn’t thick enough to obstruct anything. Also, there’s some kind of light pillar centred on some point near the middle of Beast’s Rest, though I have no idea what it is or what it means.”

“Pillar of light?” she raised her eyebrow and considered the options she had for a few seconds before putting down the items that she had gathered and approaching him again, “Let me try something to witness this from your perspective. Depending on what you are seeing it could be any number of things, ranging from you obtaining an eye-based physique that allows you to see the flow of spatial energy that may have been left behind from my battle with Ding Wen, or perhaps it is some kind of hallucination that you ought to disregard.”

He nodded and stood still to make things easier for her, unaware of the fact that she had already been within his mind with the exact same technique a short time ago.

Still, with him allowing her to enter his mental landscape, her spiritual thread was able to instantly locate the correct point in his mind and enter the part that displayed his current ideas and thoughts, as well as the things that he was experiencing with all of his senses.

She ignored his sense of touch, smell and the like, for she had more than enough experiences of another’s body thanks to the Thunder Lord’s intrusive memories and thus had no curiosity regarding the potential differences in the experience on the world between her and a man. Instead, she adjusted her spiritual thread so that she would be able to view his vision in almost the exact same way as he was currently experiencing it.

In his eyes, a large quantity of ash hovered in the air, slowly falling endlessly towards the ground and forming a thick mist the further away he looked, although it melded with the natural crimson fog of the prison realm and thus did not obstruct any more details than the fog itself.

What was a little more interesting was the thick beam of light in the distance, seemingly streaming down upon a certain point of Beast’s Rest. As far as she was able to tell, it had no connection to a spatial tear, nor to the memory fragments that occasionally appeared around the prison realm, but there was a certain resonance between it and the flow of Meng Chu’s physique energy.

Just as it streamed around his meridians and pulsed with his heartbeat, so did the distant light.

“We will need to return to the city. I suspect that your physique-”

Before she was able to finish her sentence, the spiritual thread that she revoked from his head was suddenly pulled towards the characters within her dantian, causing the thread to latch onto one of the many obsidian fragments that made up the text instructing her on the breakthrough to the first stage of the Emergent Anchor realm. As always, it provided her with no new information on whatever they were truly made from, nor what their purpose was, but the characters did display a reaction to her spiritual touch.

They suddenly moved, with a number of fragments from seemingly random characters breaking away from the whole and forming a new set of words a short distance in front of the rest.

“- is the Ashen Form physique?”

“Was that a suspicion or a question? I am afraid I’ve never heard of such a physique, if it was the latter.”

“No, it was a statement, or perhaps an assertion, but my method of recollection was simply rather unusual for me. Don’t pay it any more attention than you already have,” Wei Yi said, frowning as the fragments broke apart again and returned to the main technique guidance, “Help me with the rest of these remaining artefacts, and then we shall return and experiment with your new physique.”

He nodded, though she was able to tell that he wasn’t entirely trusting of such a strange reply. While his body remained mostly similar to before, the slight enhancement still allowed him to carry his fill of items alongside her, allowing them to easily return to Beast’s Rest within a single trip, though Meng Chu did end up being significantly more exhausted by the end of the journey than he would have been had he only carried a few small jewels and tokens.

After dropping those items off in the treasury, which was slowly beginning to fill due to everything that Wei Yi had thrown in there due to its seeming useless – amongst which were a number of items seemingly dedicated entirely to strange pursuits that she had no personal interest in – she followed Meng Chu towards the location in which the pillar of light met the ground, but it did not seem to be the place that they were looking for, prompting them to descend into the underground passages once again to track down the true point of convergence.

“I can feel it getting closer. It should be in the next room,” said Meng Chu, opening a secret door within the wall as he spoke.

It sank into the ground and revealed a room with two chairs, a small table and a shelf attached to one of the walls. Both of them quickly recognised it as the same kind of room that they first met in, though whether or not it was actually the same was something that Meng Chu could not determine.

Wei Yi, on the other hand, extended her spiritual perception and stumbled right across an occupied bedroom in which two men and one woman were rather busy with their own activities, prompting her to quickly revoke it as to not intrude for no good reason. In combination with the general layout of the room and some traces of previous activity, it did seem to be that exact same chamber, though the longer they stood near it, the more she felt something in the very middle of it.

“The point of convergence seems to be right there,” he said, pointing to the middle of the room.

“I could tell.”

“Can you also see it now?”

“No, but there is some kind of strange sensation in this area. I don’t understand it too well, nor can I figure out whether I can sense it due to my spiritual will, remaining planar energy, killing intent or physique energy, or whether any of those even play into the equation. All I do know is that it is in the same place that you pointed at.”

“That’s certainly… encouraging. You were previously able to identify the physique, weren’t you? Do you know anything at all about it?”

“Not much. It is classified as one of the absolute physiques of the world, though it is ranked significantly lower than the Ascendant physique and the likes of the Immortal Mortal and Perfected Form. To begin with, it wasn’t within the ranks of the absolute physiques prior to a single common figure, whose gender had never been recorded for some uncertain reason, using it to grow in power at a ridiculous pace, using previously unknown techniques and methods to climb the ranks of cultivation at an immense speed-” she paused when she realised that the description seemed rather familiar to her, “Oh, for fuck’s sake. The Planar Continents are just full of otherworldly demons, aren’t they?”

“What do you- oh. Though the circumstances are certainly similar to a number of your descriptions, I think that the moment you start believing everyone to be an otherworldly demon, you will eventually fall into complete paranoia,” Meng Chu warned.

“Do not worry, I won’t do something like that. Furthermore, regardless of that figure’s affiliations and origins, there is no way for him or her to have survived to this day, as they are said to have lived even before the birth of the Master of Yi City,” she replied, “Anyway, the confirmed abilities of the Ashen Form physique are that it is able to benefit from killing others, accelerate personal growth and potential, and, if one rumour is to be believed, it can even prevent death from unnatural causes, though unless one is capable of restoring their lifespan and vitality, it is of no benefit against natural causes.”

“How does that compare with other physiques?”

“Rather poorly, I’d say, though not in that it is too weak. Instead, their exact function and power is too different to be accurately judged. At the moment of the first awakening of the physique, anything that grants you immediate benefits will naturally be superior, but if you continually develop it, then it is bound to eventually become stronger, so long as the recorded stories about it are true.”

“Understood. Since you haven’t mentioned anything about this point of convergence, I assume that there is nothing on that topic in history?”

“Nothing that I’m aware of, at the very least. Still, since it appears to be something connected to your physique, I suggest that you try to touch it, or interact with it in some way. Perhaps it will be of use to you, or maybe it will reveal something of interest.”

The man shrugged and followed her instructions, cautiously approaching the focused point of converge in the middle of the room, slowing down with each step until his last step took him roughly the same amount of time to take as all of the previous ones combined. Nevertheless, when he saw that nothing was leaping out to attack him, he was able to stretch out his hand and touch the point of convergence.

At that point, Wei Yi could clearly feel the energy even without tapping into his perception. She practically saw how a pulse of power emerged from the centre of the point of convergence, washing over the entire room with a unique warmth before sinking into the floor and walls, seemingly vanishing from the world entirely.

“Huh…”

“That’s usually my line. Do you feel anything about this point of convergence? Wait, when did we even decide to start calling it that… Ahem. Answer the question, please.”

“I do not understand exactly what it is, but it feels like there is some kind of connection between me and it now,” Meng Chu replied, waving his hand near the invisible pillar of light several times without any reaction from it, “I can’t sense it providing anything to me, nor do I seem to be giving it anything…”

“In that case, I have two theories to offer: either this is the method of preventing death, or one of the methods of developing your strength and potential. I am not sure why there is a point of convergence here, nor whether it originated as a result of you or if it just so happened to be in this specific location, but I would suggest searching for more of these points when we end up travelling to the other factions of the prison realm. Whichever one of my assumptions is correct, if either one of them is, you ought to benefit from acquiring more of these connections,” Wei Yi said, scanning his body with her spiritual perception without making any new discoveries.

“Alright. Do you have a physique cultivation method that I ought to follow?”

“I’ll write it down for you and get it to you within a few hours, so feel free to leave for now. I’ll attempt to study this on my own for a while, and if there is anything relevant to you, I’ll inform you about it,” she said, nudging him out of the room before shutting the hidden door and confirming that he left before sitting down besides the invisible convergence point and shutting her eyes.

She sighed and surrounded the rough area with her spiritual will, then her killing intent, then her physique energy, weaving them together as tightly as she could without causing conflict between them.

‘As I am unaware of the relation between this strange point and Meng Chu, nor do I know whether anything I do will affect it, the safest thing to do was to get rid of him just in case any damage I may inflict on this point will somehow be passed onto him,’ she thought, glancing in the direction of the secret passage before releasing another layer of energies around the entire room, ‘There. That should be enough. If he still gets hurt, I will not be to blame, since I have no methods of dealing with things that can bypass space itself without the use of my planar energy.’

With great care, she slowly forced the sphere of energy to constrict upon the point of convergence.

However, even when she had pressed the field down to the size of an apple, then a small pea, she found that there was no reaction from it or from anything else within the room, prompting her to completely crush the invisible point in space.

Still, there was no reaction.

‘Well, fuck. It seems that this is truly something unique to the Ashen Form physique, and I don’t even have the opportunity of experiencing it due to it being a yin physique…I suppose that I may as well move onto my other purpose for asking him to leave – taking a proper look through all of the memories that I was forced to skip through. Since I still witnessed them, they are within my library in full,’ she revoked both of the fields of energy and absorbed them back into her body.

In the Augur’s Library, she threw open some of the tomes within the pile of memories, viewing the first set of them without paying much attention to them as she devoted most of her attention to the creation of a second wing of the library to accompany the prison tower and store the information that did not originate from her own experiences, including the Thunder Lord’s remaining ideas.

Only once the basic foundation of that new wing was created did she move onto the recent memories that could be of use to her.

‘Let’s see… not particularly physically or sexually active… never had a normal romantic relationship… his mother had been killed by a warlord of the Great Bone Lake? It isn’t common for someone who has an issue with a place to insist on it being called by its proper name,’ Wei Yi thought to herself, ignoring the more explicit scenes from his memories as a form of courtesy and politeness, though it was especially due to her possessing the thoughts of his ancestor, ‘Anyhow, what else is here… Not much. I had hoped to gather something useful from him, but all I have truly gathered is that I will need to bring him along to the Great Bone Lake and allow him to stab one of the warlords… That, and the fact that he calls himself Jade Emperor, of all things.’

She sighed, glanced at the rest of the minor thoughts and threw them into the framework of the newly created wing of the library, double-checking the fact that neither of her mental storm walls were breached before leaving her mental domain and raising her head.

A flat plane, floating in the air and showing something that couldn’t possibly be there, was the first thing she saw.

‘Well… I’m starting to think that these aren’t appearing by pure coincidence.’