Path of the Ascendant

With her attention purely devoted to Primordial Physique’s persistent strikes, she almost didn’t notice the approach of a woman robed in wondrous silk clothes that were akin to flaming feathers, with lustrous ginger hair resting on her chest. Unlike the last time, when she was rather haughty in her approach, Huang Mei appeared to be demonstrating some restraint as she approached.

“Lady Wei Yi. My apologies for my temper in the battle you had waged against Entropy. I had not heard much about you, or the activities of the other ancient beasts, so I had been unable to make a sufficiently wise judgement,” the woman bowed, “If I may ask you to forget that incident and start anew, I would be highly grateful. Are you going to be attacking this Primordial Deity once you have… prepared?”

“Precisely. I am simply doing my best to comprehend all of it, then I’ll take it down and get its power for myself. After that, I will be in the eighth realm.”

“Well, I shall congratulate you in advance. It ought to be challenging to withstand that foe’s persistent pounding…” the phoenix paused, glanced at the Ascendant, glanced back towards the Primordial Deity and then placed her fingers over her moist, soft lips, unsubtly attempting to conceal their rising corners, “Heh, pounding…”

“… You’re the same as the dragons and qilins, aren’t you?”

“We do not share their cocks, I can assure you of that.”

“That just confirms it, since that isn’t what I meant at all. None of the ancient beast species appear to have overcome their most primal of impulses, and the fact that all of you like to appear in such a proud manner just makes this w-” a flash of crimson stars briefly shot out of her right hand, which she had been pointing at the phoenix, and shocked the latter quite a bit, “Wow, it only occurred now. My body does not want to stop its growth, does it?”

“Eh… Is that supposed to happen?”

“My cultivation exceeds my physical capacity right now. That will be amended by the defeat of Primordial Physique.”

“That is- Wait, you have distracted me! Don’t think that you can ignore my wise and most reasonable words by distracting me,” Huang Mei said, “I can perceive a draconic scent from you, and I would like to get… better acquainted with it when there is time. Especially after you defeat Primordial Physique, as I expect you to be even more impressive at that time…”

She licked her lips, extremely unsubtly this time, while her hand went to rest on her voluptuous chest.

“Just fuck the dragons and leave me alone. I swear, I would have to be obsessed with nothing but sex in order to actually spend as much time with you and the dragons as you seem to desire,” Wei Yi muttered, “Now I’m starting to think about how Kong Shi Meng would have handled you lot.”

“He… we didn’t bother him as much. It was afterwards that we… well…”

“Are you unable to fix that? Can’t you have some orgy with the dragons, a few if necessary, then focus on protecting the world? How pent up can a bunch of phoenixes and dragons really be?”

“… I don’t think you want me to answer that.”

“Not if you’re going to go into a lengthy description, which is exactly what you’re going to do. Whatever the situation is, resolve it as quietly as possible – or far away from civilization, since that is unlikely to be enough – then focus. Really. Do you know about the Hunger of the Beyond? A threat from beyond our world?”

“We have some knowledge of that threat. Will they follow the Primordial Deities?”

“Most likely. The Great Leeches were first, then the Primordial Deities, then the Hunger of the Beyond, and then… perhaps it will be the source of power for the otherworldly demons.”

“I see. I am sure the others know, so, either they have understood something we phoenixes haven’t and are relaxed as a result, or they’re putting on a braver front. I doubt that any of us would be intending to frustrate you deliberately.”

Wei Yi didn’t comment, and instead rose, ignoring another flare of oblivion essence tearing out of her body. She stepped towards the dome that encompassed Primordial Physique, placing her hand upon the soft white light, then said without turning back, “I’ll handle this on my own. It might take a few hours, so try to calm down just a little by the time I return. Also, this is very likely to cause the other Primordial Deities to get rowdy, as the world’s level shall rise after this. Get into position somewhere that is poorly defended, and prepare for a fight.”

“I shall do so. I hope to see you return victorious, Ascendant.”

The phoenix was engulfed in vibrant flame and vanished from the spot, transforming into a flaming bird that soared away rapidly. Wei Yi followed her with her gaze – and the usual copious quantity of divine sense – for a short while before turning back to the dome and sighing, deliberately weakening her defence against the rampaging internal energy for a moment to let it flare up right now, and not later.

Immediately afterward, she subdued her internal energy, and then opened her mouth to speak with someone who could always be reached.

“Undo the dome. I’ll face Primordial Physique now.”

The bright light was immediately lessened, and faded out rapidly, leaving her close to the Primordial Deity of pure physical strength without anything between them. She had fought it before, so she was far more experienced in opposing it than a number of the other Primordial Deities, so despite the vicious form, she was oddly at ease.

She did not strike it with planar constructs or any of her long-range techniques and weapons, but instead raised her hands and formed them into fists. Last time they fought, she had learned from it, and now it was time to learn from it once more.

 

Previously, the strikes of the Primordial Deity representing the concept of physique could be heard from a great distance, as they collided with the bright barrier that kept it away from civilization, but now they had changed and become louder. Rather than the odd, dull thud of the barrier, each strike met flesh and bone, and there were attacks against the entity as well as from it. Some ventured to guess at the identity of this opponent, but they soon found that there was really only one person that it could possibly be.

Of course, nobody would go and witness the matter themselves, unless they found a suitable vantage point far away and positioned well enough to let them see into the distance without obstruction. The sheer might of both combatants would be sufficient to shatter the earth, destroy their hearing, and maybe kill them if a random piece of rock happened to fly their way and hit.

That was for the best, as the longer the fight went on, the stronger the strikes became. Mostly, it was the Ascendant that was growing in her ability to exert her strength, as that was the true power of Primordial Physique and the focus of her attempts to learn from it. Her body contained a vast amount of power, perhaps as much as Primordial Physique, if not more, but she had not studied its use as much as she had contemplated Law, the reality she was in, the nature of azure lights and otherworldly demons, and so on. Even with her previous period of practise against Primordial Physique, she had only grasped enough to give it a good punch or two.

She ended up delivering one, but she was sure she could have gone on a little longer if Xu Shi Meng didn’t establish the barrier.

Now, she was consistently meeting its strikes either with attacks of her own, or various defensive moves that allowed her to absorb the giant’s force without moving too greatly, and without significant injury. She even used the bouts of erupting energy to inflict some damage on Primordial Physique.

If she invested her full strength into it, she might have been able to finish it off quite quickly, but she took her time and fought for as long as her body could handle – which, given not only her regenerative abilities but also the properties of her oblivion essence, which would improve her body when it was damaged, was quite a while – until she reached the Great Stride stage of the Physique Dao on her own.

As always, ‘on her own’ did include the heavens, as the stages were not True Dao stages.

Once she could tell that there was little more to be gained within a reasonable length of time, near the end of the day that she had begun her fight upon, she had to stop and change her approach a little bit.

She brought out Moon Splitter, held it in her left hand, then channelled the power of her cultivation into the blade. Bringing out the power of Obliteration, she formed the circular array of her Eclipse Ire and Split, forming a vast lance of energy extending from her hands. The vast quantity of energy collapsed onto itself, forming a vast rift which consumed even more planar energy from around it, manifesting an ever growing black star of a sword.

Faint chains manifested around the black star, forcing it to be condensed into a more narrow shape, and then seemed to pull the blade down, right upon Primordial Physique.

It had been kept in place by the manifestation of numerous Laws and properties, all of which had been imbued via the previous series of collisions between them. It was not the fastest nor the most efficient of methods, but against a target that only used energy internally, it worked extremely well. Primordial Physique simply couldn’t remove her influence with its limitations, and so she had free reign to do as she pleased, enacting whatever Laws she wished with the prime authority over them being none other than herself.

Her blade-shaped Black Sun landed to the side of Primordial Physique’s head, landing between the neck and shoulder, slicing through the collarbone and sinking close to something that certainly resembled a heart. Even that short a distance was difficult to cut through the sheer musculature of the Primordial Deity, but reaching the heart-like muscle was not necessary.

After all, as she had learned before, a Black Sun contained a vast amount of power within itself, and if given a place to release that energy, it could rupture reality itself. With her rise in power since the last time she had used the Black Sun technique to its fullest, such a description wasn’t too excessive, so she didn’t even dare to concentrate a black sun at the same level as the one that threatened to devour the Ping District, and had done a decent job of reverting much of it to useless rubble.

With a layer of chains restricting the possible points of eruption on the black sun, the only place that power could escape through was inside of Primordial Physique’s body, straight into the heart and the rest of the musculature that formed the titanic horror.

It happened so quietly that Wei Yi realised her ears had been damaged yet again, for the sheer obliteration of an entity to the extent of turning it into a mass of inhuman flesh and bone couldn’t have gone down while failing to rival the chirping of a bird somewhere in the distance. Indeed, she quickly felt the celestial blood flowing from her ears, but she didn’t prioritise it as she instead reached out and took all of the power that remained within the body of Primordial Physique. Like Entropy before this, the process was quick, but the results were not.

All of the energy that pooled together within her dantian condensed upon the Endless Monolith, the magnificent structure that embodied her various elemental paths and comprehensions. They pressed down with great might, and the True Apertures boosted that pressure, forcing the disparate shards of the Endless Monolith to come into contact with the main obelisk.

The chains linking the Monolith and the True Apertures through the Astral Scars lit up, flashing with a vibrant heat as the force of the external halos was amplified through them, the power of Law assisting in the inevitable destruction of old and the manifestation of the new. Although an anchor had many uses in controlling energy, it could never be more effective than a great rift within the world, grabbing that which it desires and influencing things in its own way.

Despite the loss of an anchor, no cultivator had ever suffered a reduction in their precision of control of planar energy, nor the loss of anything other than the ability to place down their anchor in exchange for power. Of course, the rift could also be projected for additional benefits.

Hence, Wei Yi did not worry about this step, and instead prompted her crystalline core and the Subterranean Shell to do their part, to increase the crushing force while containing the phenomenon within her body and dantian, ensuring that none of her energy would escape and rampage throughout her body, or throughout the outside world, where it would be so much more dangerous than if she controlled it to destroy something. After all, her power was the condensation of numerous Dao and, more importantly, a foundation of Law that was far more genuine than her supposed attainment in the other Dao.

Under her gaze – that of her divine sense – the Endless Monolith cracked, and that crack touched the nascent rift within. At that moment, a far more powerful force emerged, right from the nascent rift.

It seemed like an even more potent black sun, devouring chunk after chunk of the crystalline Endless Monolith, until the entire planar structure fell into the small rift into the endless supply of energy that the world possessed. For a moment, it almost seemed as if the nascent rift would remain like that, not content even after consuming the orbiting shards obtained from one of the Great Leeches, but then it transformed, erupting outwards in a blinding light of mixed violet and crimson.

Within seconds, it grew from a tiny vertical opening to a massive tear that occupied most of her Subterranean Shell, the image of a pure violet cosmos glowing within and turning to crimson as it streamed out, dying the edges of the rift with the shade of her oblivion essence.

The channels linking her Astral Scars and True Apertures held onto the sides of this phenomenon, keeping it wide open and bathing in the light of mixed violet and crimson, causing each of the chains to look as if they were being heated on that end, the glow of white-hot metal dulling as it neared the Subterranean Shell.

All of the energy that burst out from within pushed forth the advancement of her other paths as well. Her killing will had already been in the Half-Step eighth realm, forming the nascent union of rage and calm within her mental domain, but it was pushed right through to the peak of the first stage and completed the formation of the eighth realm’s structure. For a moment, the Kong Prison Realm was once more divided into two, smoke shrouding one side and soft silver illuminating the other, both phenomena rotating and flowing into one another, centred at the newly formed rift within the centre of the realm.

This was the Mental Discord cultivation realm, though it soon faded from the spatial realm due to her will. It remained within her mind, the clashing forces forming an equilibrium that empowered them vastly, empowering the Yin-Yang Conduit of the seventh realm to an unprecedented level.

Her body had been repeatedly struck and regenerated through the battle with Primordial Physique, and then the powers of her oblivion essence, causing constant decay and regeneration to refine and strengthen her form beyond a reasonable level for any human cultivator – one might even say that she had transcended the boundaries of mortal life. She wasn’t so sure on that, but it appeared to fit the breakthrough requirements of her physique energy, so she was able to advance easily enough.

For physique energy, the eighth realm was Superior Transcendence, and its exact effects were more difficult to describe in detail. In short, her physical strength had grown yet again, experiencing a vast boost in every way, and her physiques became more powerful as well, though the presence of her Yin-Yang Ascendant physique and its empowerment of other physique abilities made it so that she did not feel this improvement quite as much. Still, she did receive the same semi-infinite quantity of energy that her oblivion essence now had, and that her killing will had possessed for a very long time, so it was enough of a benefit for her.

Final Congregation was the name of the eighth realm of bloodline power, and it would have marked the completion of her ultimate form had she been using the bloodline of another entity.

With her lacking such a thing, all it did was improve what was already there, uniting with the improvement in physique energy to change her body into something that she might genuinely label as transcending humanity, and mortality. It was the combination of a million smaller changes that might not be observable individually uniting into a major transformation of the self.

She had previously had problems with people staring at her too much, and now that she gave it a moment’s thought, it seemed clear that the lustful dragons and phoenixes – the qilins might as well not exist when it came to matters of sexuality, as far as she was concerned – were excited excessively by her appearance. Now, that had improved significantly, and she knew that she was going to be receiving more unnecessary attention from others.

Her divine sense now had a reach of more than six and a half million metres, 6,637,140 metres to be precise, and since this extended from every single spatial stabilisation point in Yi City and Paragon, it meant that there was almost nothing that escaped her grasp. With the additional empowerment of her mental energy, it meant that even fewer entities could hide from her.

Most important of all, however, was the Imperfect Rift itself, which gave the realm its name. Unlike some of the other advancements granted by the step from the fifth to the sixth stage, she didn’t have to think for very long to decipher the kind of change that would arrive upon that step – a step that would come far more quickly due to the rift perpetually releasing its energy into her dantian and filling her with power at twice the speed that the nascent rift would have been able to at its fullest state of opening.

It would only take two minutes to recover the entirety of her planar capacity, but it wasn’t this that she expected the improvement to focus upon.

Rather, she believed that the crimson light at the outside of the rift would flow inside and fill the rift, transforming it into some variant, though she wasn’t sure that it would be as major a change as any of her other transformations. To a certain extent, the eighth realm seemed to be a transitional one, a simple state after the complexity of the first seven realms, and the establishment of a foundation for the ninth realm, where the rift is opened into a proper gateway to the power it contains.

The gateway would be the thing to change the most when the time came, and she could not yet understand what her path would bring her, only that she had the intention of using her cultivation to advance in the direction of forming something similar to the azure lights, at least in concept.

Since there was no major change as far as she could foresee, she didn’t intend to give the rift any kind of special name once it changed, but once she saw the outcome, then she would happily reconsider. Most likely, she would have some free time to consider such a thing when it came around, as the number of Primordial Deities was falling and the Hunger of the Beyond had not yet emerged from the void, meaning that she might have a few days of peace when the Primordial Deities were finally finished off.

‘Of course, as I grow, so does the world. Already, the planar energy density rises, and the loose energy from my Imperfect Rift will flood the world further, and eventually the ninth realm will become accessible. Before then, the Primordial Deities will make their escape, and I will have to deal with them as quickly as possible, especially Primordial Corruption – once it begins moving out.’

Thanks to her hard work, the number of remaining Primordial Deities was easy to list, ‘Those that remain are Primordial Earth, Primordial Yin and Primordial Yang, Primordial Energy, Primordial Corruption, Primordial Blood and Primordial Invader. However, Primordial Blood is currently unseen, Primordial Yin and Yang have not properly emerged, Primordial Corruption may remain in place for a while longer, and Primordial Invader is contained by the Wu District’s Heavenly Masters in a manner that surpasses the barrier around most of the other Primordial Deities. That leaves me with only Primordial Earth and Primordial Energy as immediate dangers.’

Primordial Energy, due to its nature, was rather easy to defeat, unless it changed its traits after rising in power and prevented Wei Yi from absorbing it. This was extremely unlikely, but it had to be considered just in case.

Primordial Earth was a better first target, as it would be more difficult to take down, but it would ensure that she removed the threat before it could get much stronger, and also a foe that couldn’t be considered a free meal at a later time. With Primordial Energy, so long as it remained an entity that posed no real threat to her, she could feast on it when it grew more powerful to supplement herself when things got tough, but Primordial Earth would require her to defeat it before that was possible.

The other Primordial Deities would need to be considered depending on their state and location. For instance, if Primordial Blood suddenly burst out of the ground near the Yi District, it would be necessary to attack it quickly, but if it showed up in the southern or northern extreme regions, where no living thing could typically tread, it would be best to leave it be until it became the best target.

Right now, even if she did an assessment under the premise of geographical location alone, she would conclude that Primordial Earth was currently the biggest problem due to being located right next to the Bao District, and not far from the land where Primordial Energy resided, meaning that its escape might also provoke Primordial Energy in a way that would not benefit the world as a whole, nor Yi City. Thus, she intended to head for that entity first, take it down, and then observe the actions of the other Primordial Deities to determine the next target.

‘First, though…’

“Ascendant, are you alright?” Huang Mei’s voice reached out from the south, and soon the phoenix herself flew in, worry clear in her brilliant eyes, “With all of the chaos here, I… oh, my…”

“I’m not even naked this time, so what’s with the- hold on, are your eyes meant to have these heart shapes in them? That can’t possibly be natural,” Wei Yi commented, not needing to use any kind of special means to figure out that the phoenix’s sudden change in mood came the moment she laid eyes upon the Ascendant’s face.

Even if the bird tried to look below that, she would only see her neck, as the rest was covered up by the recently improved Crimson Robes of the Third Arrival.

“You… I wish to have your children!”

“Stop that.”

As it became immediately clear that the phoenix was not going to listen, Wei Yi raised her right hand and focused some of her spare energy around the ancient beast, enveloping it in a spherical barrier that looked almost transparent, with only the faintest crimson tint. This was due to its formation from the weakest oblivion essence that still resided within her dantian, which she had obtained in its most loose state, somehow existing in a near-gaseous state even after she had long escaped that realm.

It appeared to be the energy that would escape to the outside world and boost the density of energy world-wide, somewhat indirectly.

“No! Please, let me touch you! Let me smell y-” another layer was added to the barrier quickly, though even the first layer made it effortless to contain the overexcited bird. The second layer also didn’t stop her from attempting to shout through, though it didn’t help no matter how much she exerted herself.

Rather unfortunately, that barrier couldn’t stop her own divine sense from passively resting within the barrier and hearing everything just as clearly as if she was within the dome herself, but that was a problem with her growing range of perception. Since it extended for millions of metres, or thousands of kilometres, the mental energy within her own body could still perceive matters within six hundred metres of her, requiring either herself or someone else to actively restrain it intensely in order to limit it to sixty metres or fewer.

‘Oh well, at least the other phoenixes are distracting themselves for the moment, so I can travel freely,’ she thought, turning and vanishing from the spot with the use of Omit Movement.