Path of the Ascendant

This time, the frozen scene depicted a small indoor area, with grey walls and a sandy floor. Two boys, both around the age of fourteen, stood opposite one another, with one being surrounded by a hint of smooth violet while the other had a corona of thin orange. Both of them appeared to be in basic combat stances, perhaps preparing to battle one another or engage in some form of practise.

The vague hint of a robed figure was present on the side, standing behind the boy enveloped in flame. No equivalent figure stood behind the other boy, but Wei Yi was able to recognise that child as Kong Shi Meng.

‘Interesting. No real choice but to see what this one shows me,’ she thought, getting up and approaching it with an outstretched hand.

She came into contact with it, and just as before, the image rapidly expanded into a sphere that consumed the majority of the room, enveloping it in a glass-like dome while the scenery within changed completely. The wall that was right behind the memory plane appeared to have moved back by half a dozen steps, and instead of it the two children and one distant figure now stood in front of her. So that she did not miss anything when the action began, she quickly looked around to take in the rest of the environment of this memory.

The figure that was previously obscured turned out to be a mature man that was physically no older than forty. He was clothed in a regal, decorative robe and had one hand on his dark moustache, which he was idly stroking in the instant that she was looking at him.

Behind this event were several rows of empty seats, with more potentially existing outside of the range of the memory plane. The only person that she could see sitting on them was Yi Shi Ming, who was looking at her son with a concerned expression. Her hands were on her thighs, tightly clutching her robes in frustration.

‘Did she follow her son around for his entire life?’ Wei Yi idly questioned, recalling how every single scene she had witnessed so far contained her sitting in the corner of Kong Shi Meng’s perception or closer, ‘On the initial assessment, it seems that these two are duelling for whatever reason. Kong Shi Meng must either be in a bad place in the battle or generally appear to be weaker than his opponent, who is also being supported by the man behind him. The man has a pleased expression, while Yi Shi Ming does not, further supporting the earlier hypothesis. Furthermore, I know that, for whatever reason, the Kong family was not fond of either Yi Shi Ming or Kong Shi Meng, meaning that this might also be an effort to inflict some emotional harm to the boy and limit his development in the future…’

She frowned, her killing intent pouring out involuntarily, ‘If so, how petty.’

The memory around her quivered due to her ever-growing aura of hatred, but she ignored it, focusing only on the events that were about to unfold in front of her.

“Thou may hath wondered for a long time, child, why we encourage the usage of elemental planar energy,” the man with the moustache said, a certain degree of overbearing smugness filling his voice, “Witness it now, unwanted child!”

‘Indeed… how very fucking petty…’

Her opinion was shared by both Yi Shi Ming and Kong Shi Meng, though both of them showed significantly more restraint in their expressions, exhibiting a surprising amount of self-control.

That was less curious for the former than the latter, seeing as she had the advantage of age and a sufficient cultivation to be able to obscure her expressions without much effort, but the latter lacked such an advantage, clearly being in the first realm and without too much of an opportunity to experience life or develop a degree of maturity.

Naturally, the exception to that would be if he was indeed an otherworldly demon, as Wei Yi had assumed, though the possibility of him having a slack or still face was also present.

The child on her right, the boy surrounded by an aura of flame, a simple hallucination caused by the presence of powerful planar energy within his meridians, also appeared to be smug as he stepped towards Kong Shi Meng, channelling his planar energy throughout his entire meridian network to empower the entirety of his body. However, a significant quantity of energy focused on his hands, split across them equally, making his intentions incredibly obvious as he lunged with his left hand.

‘Fast. There is a trace of metallic-type wind energy around him… They can’t even play fair…’

Kong Shi Meng couldn’t have noticed such a thing, for even if he had the most developed spiritual will in all of existence, which he most certainly did not possess, he was far too distracted by this sudden attack. Clearly, not only did he lack experience in battle, but he had also never dealt with someone travelling at a greater speed than he could, leading to him feebly evading that punch by ducking.

Unfortunately for him, judging by the expressions on his opponent and the man supporting him, that was exactly what they were hoping for.

The nameless boy performed an uppercut with his other fist, hitting Kong Shi Meng right in the face and then following up with a kick. All of the attacks were entirely merciless, and clearly made with the intent to significantly harm him physically, with the pain only being further exasperated by the burning energies within the boy’s body being fanned towards Kong Shi Meng’s pain points by the hidden metallic support from the figure behind him.

Before he had even the slightest chance to recover, the boy hit him two more times in the chest, then kicked him down onto the ground. Every hit was filled with power, but it allowed Wei Yi to notice traces of weakness within the flaming planar energy. It was clearly produced through the consumption of pills to artificially raise the kid’s cultivation, and not through the likes of Planar Gathering pills, either. With the right techniques, knowledge and coordination, it would be possible to strike at the weakened points of his energy, throw it into disarray and almost cripple him within a minute, but even if Kong Shi Meng knew that at the time, he clearly lacked any methods of achieving such a thing.

‘Just like how I wasn’t provided with a single thing while the superior members of the family had access to a different part of a library...’ Wei Yi’s expression became even darker, and the veil of killing intent grew even thicker, ‘And just to add to the insult, they’re cheating…’

“Child, behold the power of fire cultivation! Thee cannot even resist it!”

That comment, followed by an incoming kick to the spot between Kong Shi Meng’s legs and a similarly imminent punch to his nose, prompted Yi Shi Ming to leapt to her feet and throw out a punch that was filled to the brim with violet purple energy and caused a wave of violet power to surge in between the two children, forcing the nameless boy to retreat before he could deliver those two strikes.

“Enough!” she said, her voice raised, though not to the point of shouting, “Hath thou not made thine point? Regardless of thine thoughts, thou art beating the child of thine family!”

“Tch. Woman, art thou going beyond thine station?”

“Nay, I am merely protecting my child. If thou art interested in pretending that thou wouldn’t not do the same if thine progeny was being harmed, then I shalt allow thee such delusions, but thou still ought to leave Ah Shi Meng alone.”

“I was merely attempting to instruct thine child in his folly, to educate him on the fact that all forms of elemental energy surpass pure planar energy in every form. Cans’t thou not see the way in which he was defeated by someone of lesser age and lesser ancestry?” the man said, though there was an obvious grin on his face, “In the future, thou shouldn’t mentor him personally, so that he does not make the same mistakes as thee had done…”

He smirked and placed his hand on the boy’s shoulder, casually leading him away.

The second that he exited the scene of the memory, Yi Shi Ming rushed to her son and embraced him, feeding him a pill from some pocket within her robes.

“My child…” she said, pondering her next words for a while as her son’s body quickly recovered under the influence of the pill, soon looking only a little scuffed and dirty despite the immense amount of physical harm that he had endured earlier, “Today, coulds’t thee not fall asleep as early? There is something I wish to show thee.”

Before the child could respond, the scene changed entirely. The plain room transformed into something that resembled a well-groomed garden, or perhaps some kind of clean part of the forest. Their path was a simple one, laid out in stone alone, with each individual tile seemingly placed at random, but their combined layout made it more than obvious that this was not the case. Furthermore, although the grass could be mistaken for being naturally short – something that Wei Yi didn’t ever need to worry about – it was too unnaturally even for such an assumption to last long for anyone with spiritual perception.

They walked towards the side of a cliff, and once it came into the range of the memory, she finally recognised this place – it was where she had once gone to search for the Ancestral Library of the Kong family, finding nothing whatsoever during her time there.

Yi Shi Ming approached one particular part of the wall, then kneeled down on the ground, briefly turning to whisper to her son, who now looked to be entirely healed and clean, “Remember this.”

With no other explanation, she pressed her hand against the wall and released her planar energy into it while whispering a series of words, statements and pledges, going through every single one of them without any pauses or hesitation, making it incredibly clear that this was a well-practised speech, one that she had memories within her very core.

‘Kong Dong Ming mentioned a password when he told me about the library, so I suppose that this must be it. A set of tenets and beliefs of the Kong family recited in a specific order alongside a form of planar energy in order to trigger some opening mechanism. The door itself must be obstructed through an array or a unique material, meaning that it could not be observed during my brief exploration of this area… They certainly guarded this better than the Yi family,’ Wei Yi thought to herself, memorising both the words and the form of planar energy for her eventual return to the Kong District.

When the last word was spoken, a large rectangular section of the wall lit up in blue light, countless symbols and characters appearing on the wall and forming a complex mosaic of words that matched the words spoken by Yi Shi Ming.

Slowly, it sank into the ground, revealing an enormous chamber – one that Wei Yi could not see.

Fortunately for her, neither one of them stood by nor took in the sights, instead hastily passing through and rushing towards a certain location of this hidden area.

The second that the door to it opened, it became clear that they were looking for the technique library, as the enormous quantity of bookshelves and books was so vast that even the memory plane itself grew slightly to reveal them. They slowly approached one of the shelves, where there seemed to be no logic to the particular ordering or positioning of the books and stood in front of it.

“Kong Shi Meng, these are proper techniques of planar cultivation and combat. Thou ought not be here, but I cannot permit thee to suffer purely due to me. Please, look around and find something that is suitable to thee, and select freely. If thee desireth further guidance, I can provide it to thee.”

“Alright, mother,” Kong Shi Meng nodded, looking around before heading straight towards a shelf.

“Shi Meng, thou needeth not practise the same skills as I. Please, seek out the methods that benefit thee.”

The boy paused, his hand an inch away from a pure planar technique. He held his hand there for a few breaths, a few ambiguous expressions appearing on his face, before he turned around and looked at his mother with begging eyes, “Mother… I have a reason for this. Allow me to practise these techniques, and I… I may be able to achieve something great. I-If I do, I will tell you everything, without holding anything back. Can you trust me?”

“My son…” Yi Shi Ming’s eyes widened in surprise for a second, before a smile appeared on her face, “If I could not trust thee, I would be incapable of trust. Nonetheless, I shall remain to teach thee.”

“Thank you, mom!” he exclaimed, leaping into her embrace.

They held one another for a while, letting go once they were finally ready to return to their original purpose. Kong Shi Meng headed straight towards that same tome once more and removing it from the shelf, flipping it open and eagerly beginning to read it.

Out of random curiosity, Wei Yi took a step towards him, making sure to avoid the wall that was bound to be right in front of her in reality, and looked into his eyes.

”I am proud of you, my child…”

Despite there being no trace of it in reality, she saw a strange grey rectangle reflected in them.

‘This… This wouldn’t be yet another power of an otherworldly demon, would it? What does it-’ her thoughts were interrupted when the memory plane shattered and the scene before her disappeared, leaving her with standing right in front of the wall and the empty shelf that was attached to it, with the only gains being the memories of the technique manual that Kong Shi Meng had opened.

She stepped back to her previous location, ignoring the crunch of stone beneath her feet as she recalled the long speech for opening the Ancestral Library.

“Wei Yi! Has an enemy broken into our territory?” Meng Chu’s voice suddenly rushed into her head, making her turn to the side and find him standing in the secret doorway, which had been opened at some point without her noticing.

“Why?”

“Well… The amount of killing intent you released felt greater than it had been when you fought Ding Wen.”

‘What is he- oh,’ Wei Yi looked down and realised that the crunching sound she had heard came from a floor so filled with cracks and broken stone that she was currently standing in a small pit of sand, surrounded by stone that was on the brink of also becoming nothing more than sand and dust.

She stepped out of the broken stone and coughed.

“You can ignore this. Is your point of convergence still intact?”

“Yes, it is perfectly fine,” he replied.

“Then, leave. I’ll get everything to you in a few minutes…” Wei Yi said, calming her breathing, ‘Well then, this is the consequence of basing my cultivation on killing intent. I was able to avoid most negatives as a result of understanding and accepting my anger, but when I encounter the things that were responsible for it, I see that I am not so good at controlling myself… Still, if I had been in the place of Kong Shi Meng, I would certainly not be pleased with my family either. At that point, even if they were to call me their prodigal child and threw all kinds of praise at me, it would be obvious that they were only doing so due to desiring to use my ability…’

She remembered the occasionally irrational distrust and dislike of the Yi family that she had experienced a long time before they clearly ignored the presence of the Greats destroying their territory, ‘If that had come due to the influence of someone with a similar set of experiences, it would make perfect sense.’

To clean up after her mess, she melted the ground with her physique energy to allow the sand to reform into some semblance of its previous state, then left to her regal office.

Due to remaining deeply within her thoughts and memories, that journey was incredibly brief and devoid of interruptions, though that seemed to be more due to the aura of killing intent that had remained around her. Fortunately, most of it had dispersed in the previous room, so her footsteps did not result in further cracks forming within the ground. Even if they had, she didn’t look back, instead sitting straight down in her seat and opening the first true technique manual she was able to obtain.

‘Astral Binding. A planar cultivation technique that generates pure planar energy… The first true instance of this kind of technique. One that will hopefully not result in extreme instability, as my current attempt at replicating this form of energy does, although if I gain sufficient control over it and can stimulate it to regain some of that strength at the cost of greater volatility, it could be an outright improvement to my unstable planar energy,’ she thought, scanning through the technique tome within her mind twice, once quickly, to get a grasp of it, then slowly, as to ascertain its true depth.

Although the description of the technique claimed that this was a low-grade cultivation method, not intended for cultivators beyond the fourth realm, it still appeared to be vastly superior to the likes of the Seven Blades Sutra, which was all that Wei Yi had to begin with in the Yi family. The quantity of impurities that it would generate, for instance, were almost a third of her original technique.

She looked into herself, into the dantian, where the planar energy endlessly flowing from the nascent rift was similarly being endlessly consumed by the natural laws of the prison realm.

At will, the spatial rift-like appearance of her planar energy could freely shift into flame, water, metal, wood, earth or blood, not to mention pure but unstable planar energy. With the additional knowledge from Astral Binding, her energy also gained the ability to change into a form that was not so different from the last one, albeit lacking in the work invested into her pure planar energy, instead benefiting from the work of the Kong ancestors.

When she willed it to transform, it did so quickly, the starry sky disappearing from the crystalline mass of planar energy and seemingly being purified into pure violet. For a brief second, it expanded greatly, going from occupying only 4% of the entire dantian, utilising all of that volume to cover the planar anchor and protect it, to double of that, throwing an ember of hope into Wei Yi’s mind.

Alas, the prison realm responded in kind. Whether it had a greater affinity with consuming pure planar energy, or perhaps it had been created specifically to target such a form of power, which would make a lot of sense if it had been created by the ancient families that looked down upon the magnificent violet of pure planar energy, it greatly hastened in devouring it, eating through a significant portion of the excess power in one mere moment, forcing her to transform it back into the standard shape of cosmic energy.

‘This particular technique is not a key to escape the prison realm, then,’ she said to herself as she was forced to put the idea of experimenting on this newly acquired variation of planar energy aside for a later date, ‘Nevertheless, not only has this given me some knowledge about the prison realm itself, even if it will take some time to process it and understand its true meaning, but I can now be certain that the techniques from Kong Shi Meng’s memories are extremely worthwhile to acquire. If I was able to understand the reasons behind the formation of the memory planes, as well as the logic behind their contents, I could be able to absorb the entirety of the Kong’s Ancestral Library into my own and develop our methods into a greater path, one that can resist the various laws of this realm.’

She returned the tome for this technique into the appropriate shelf, then conjured the words requires to open the Ancestral Hall of the Kong family into the Augur’s Library on a large painting that she placed above the doorway.

‘Now, the only question would be: why were the ancient Kong so against planar energy? Were they merely trying to make things difficult for Yi Shi Ming and Kong Shi Meng, or is there some greater purpose behind this? Were the Greats already a presence in the world, perhaps using some secret of pure planar energy to achieve their immense power and trying to discourage others from cultivating it? Clearly, these families are not entirely against it, seeing as they have simple instructional and technique manuals available for children and adults to study…’ Wei Yi rested both arms on the table, using one hand to hold up her head while she was stuck in thought, ‘It is unlikely to be an entirely genuine belief, or else the man with the moustache wouldn’t feel the need to assist his child in defeating Kong Shi Meng, unless he believed that the child had the ability to defeat the nameless boy even with the so-called handicap of pure planar energy, which was clearly not the case…’

Eventually, after she had unknowingly written down the basic technique that she had promised to Meng Chu during her thought process, she rose and concluded, ‘I do not have enough information. I must gather more. The truth, whatever it is, might be part of the key of this prison realm.’