The hatred avatars on the outskirts of the Great Bone Lake heard her voice and prepared. According to the simple plan that they were given, this stage might require far more of their participation, depending on the choice of the inhabitants of the city.
If they seemed her to be unworthy as their new warlord, or considered her to be a poor fit for the city in some way, and decided to reject her authority, it would be the role of the hatred avatars to control their amalgam automatons to quell the unrest by confirming the power of the army and showing the physique cultivators that they have no choice but to follow her if they want to remain in the city. They were a little empty-headed, but they did not lack brains completely – when they confirmed that their reason for denying her the position that she had just won in righteous battle was insufficient, they would naturally surrender.
Thus, the avatars had to wait for signs of unrest to occur, and deal with them as quickly as possible.
And yet…
“Moon Splitter!” a cry came from one of the structures near the outer edge of the Great Bone Lake, and after its echo died down, another followed.
“Moon Splitter!” another voice came from a different part of the city, quickly joined by another call of, “Moon Splitter! Moon Splitter!”
Soon, the title was being called out from most homes within the Lake, without a single voice proclaiming a different title. As disorganised as the beginning of the cheer was, by the end, the choice made by the physique cultivating bandits became clear.
‘They chose to accept me…’ Wei Yi thought to herself as she saw several physique cultivators emerge from their residences and homes and arrive to the outer edge of the small dip in the ground that she had used as an area with the deceased warlords, ‘I’m not so sure about the title, though. It sounds impressive, but both the sun and the moon were manifestations of the technique, nothing more than a particularly visually impressive variation of a physique or killing intent construct.’
After a little thought, she chose not to bother with it. They likely understood that she couldn’t have cut the moon of the Planar Continents, and thus they would not be too disappointed upon seeing it remain whole when they gain the opportunity to leave. Furthermore, if she was to step in and alter their chant, she might create the disarray within the crowds that she had initially hoped to avoid.
‘Moon Splitter… Could be a suitable title for the obsidian blade once I am inevitably forced to reforge it,’ she decided, returning the weapon to its place on her back.
Once a few more of the physique cultivators gathered around her, she used only the Lion’s Roar technique to address them once again.
“I am Wei Yi, the Moon Splitter warlord. I will guide you all out of the prison realm, to witness the light and darkness of the Planar Continents,” she said, attempting to connect with the most impressive yet recent things these people would have witnessed, “I will aid you in growing stronger, I will give you all techniques with which to fight, and I shall lead you to slaughter the Great Families that had imprisoned your ancestors!”
Although she spoke with a lot of energy, this was meant to be nothing more than an announcement of her future plans, so that they would not be surprised once she told them to move out of the Great Bone Lake and into Beast’s Rest to consolidate her forces.
Despite that, every single one of the barbarians suddenly erupted into deafening cheers.
“MOON SPLITTER! MOON SPLITTER!”
‘What in the heavens are they doing? Ah… I keep forgetting that not everyone has perfect memories or any memories at all of the Planar Continents. To them, the imitations of the sun and moon were the first hints of light that was not red…’ Wei Yi understood, allowing them to get the excitement out of their system for now before they found their own methods of handling it later.
They shouted for a little longer before calming down and looking back at her, awaiting her next words eagerly.
“For this reason, we shall go south! To my domain of Beast’s Rest! We will unite with them and gather at the central storm wall in two years to pierce the gap between the two sides of the prison realm! Then, in twenty years, we shall exit to the Planar Continents!”
She had increased the amount of energy in her voice, and in direct reflection of it, the cheers around her got louder as well. It was likely that they had no clue that there was a different side to the prison realm – the leaders of Beast’s Rest and most of the people living there didn’t have a single clue, after all – but that did not matter, for if she said that there was another side, what reason did they have to not believe her? If she said that she could leave the prison realm, why would they distrust her after she seemingly tore a gap in space itself?
What mattered most of all to them was that they would grow stronger, and that their leader was already sufficiently powerful to hold one of the largest settlements in the prison realm on her own.
Even if the rest of the claims were lies, they would not suffer under her rule.
“MOON SPLITTER!” they cried out once more, bowing to her without any hint of grace in their movements.
Several hours later, Wei Yi had gotten back to the outskirts of the Great Bone Lake after giving her new warriors the orders to grab every bone they could find and bring it with them on their journey, telling them that they would need to return for every single bone that they missed if they could not take them all at once.
While they got that sorted, she found Ya, Min Lian and the others, at which point she relayed her success to them, explaining some of her future plans to them as well before looking towards Ya and sharing her next destination with them.
“So, we can either do this now, or wait until Beast’s Rest. Once again, I’ll let you decide.”
“I’ve heard some of your speech through the resonance of killing intent. You appear to have a curious plan, so I am interested to know what the stronghold of the Moon Splitter looks like,” Ya replied, a slight smile gracing their face when they saw Wei Yi rolling her eyes at the name, “Per chance, is this your first experience at gaining fame?”
“Not quite, although I don’t think I’ve gotten a title before. Can’t say that it is the best one, though I have nothing better to suggest,” she said, “Whatever. Let me return to them and handle things.”
The hatred avatar had nothing to say as they connected to their resonance and communicated with the other avatars and automatons to stand down and gather in one spot so that they could stop disrupting the Great Bone Lake in their attempts to relocate the entirety of the bones that the land was named after. Meanwhile, Wei Yi returned to the inner parts of the city and continued handing out random trash from the House of Gold that could assist the physique cultivators in digging out and then carrying the larger bones.
As there were no other spatial storage methods within the otherworldly book, she could not lift the entire place in one go and move it to the outskirts of Beast’s Rest, but she was able to find a number of shovels crates, bags and various trinkets that enhanced carrying capacity, and that only.
It wasn’t clear exactly how these items accomplished this, but it was clear that when these were used by the various physique cultivators, their muscles would suddenly become stronger whenever they attempted to lift any item from the ground, though the moment that they tried to throw or otherwise misuse it – as many did, exactly as Wei Yi expected them to – their newfound strength would fail them.
‘This is another mystery of the otherworldly demons, I suppose. Fortunately, I could leave these things with them, so long as none of them get the idea to dig Beast’s Rest itself out of the ground and take it elsewhere as a joke,’ she decided, inwardly hoping that such a thing would not be possible with the combined power of all of the physique cultivators and the items that she had gifted them, for she would otherwise need to be very careful with any items of this nature that she gives out in the future lest she allows them to accumulate enough power, ‘Anyway, other than the largest spires, most things should be brought out in one go. I’ll arrange them around Beast’s Rest to get everyone used to the greater pressure, then put the rest of the bones in a specific district to strengthen the concentration of force to its limit.’
She ordered a few more of her new subordinates around before getting to work herself, deciding to drag along those spires that the others could not handle.
With her immense power, she rivalled a dozen physique cultivators at the next realm of their cultivation, and thus she could single-handedly lift the half of the spire that she had severed alongside the space within and around it during her attack on the Demonic Lord warlord.
‘Come to think of it, I am already so powerful, and yet, although I am certainly at the high end of power in my realms, I would be no match for someone in the seventh realm or above no matter how immensely I might surpass others. I can already separate space in high-grade spatial realms, so how much could someone in those realms accomplish? Wouldn’t a battle between the Master of Yi City and one of the primordial gods be sufficient to destroy the entire world?’ she casually wondered.
As interesting as the concept was, she had no chance to test it at the moment, nor in the future, and she did not expect to have the luck to stumble across some fragment of Kong Shi Meng’s memory that would display this figure at his peak, which could potentially show him at such a realm, but even if she did see it, it would only be a small glimpse of the truth.
‘Since I am already on the path of cultivation, I should strive to reach such a realm myself,’ Wei Yi thought, ‘At that point, perhaps the heavens themselves would limit the damage of my strikes…’
In a few more hours, if one was to approach the Great Bone Lake, they would be surprised at the sight.
The enormous spires that the land was known for were all but gone, with one exception that proved to be too difficult to remove from the ground. Most of the houses and residences, which were mostly loose collections of material and nothing more, were stacked onto the bones, which were themselves packed into large groups and tied together so that they could be carried more easily by large groups of people at the same time.
Due to most of the bones being lighter than solid stone, although not by much, each stack of items was larger than if it had been stone or particularly heavy wood, and that number was further increased by items that supposedly allowed for the carrying of more objects without any additional weight, or by reducing the total weight of items being carried at the same time.
None of the items made any sense, but since they appeared to work, she decided that it was important to investigate these items just in case one of them contained some secret to spatial storage.
Once this was done, she brought the physique cultivators together once again and separated them based on the type of item she had given them, making sure that all of them could carry what they were given. Some proved to be stronger than she expected, prompting her to move some of the bones from the piles of things that were too large and heavy for others to handle. In general, her estimations turned out to be rather accurate, albeit slightly pessimistic, meaning that she was able to shift some of the bones from her own pile over to the others, resulting in her only carrying one wide chunk of a bone spire with several small ones placed atop it.
Somehow, before they set out, one of the physique cultivators experienced a small breakthrough from a small brawl that broke out over an item that was found within the house of one of the combatants, and thus she was able to put the rest of her bone shards and chunks on that group’s pile.
‘Eh, I suppose this is fine. A leader typically doesn’t get involved in this kind of thing, and unless I gather far more pieces of bone for myself and don’t give the opportunity to others to exercise their own strengths, all I’d be doing is wasting my own time,’ Wei Yi considered as she headed to the front of the gathered crowd that had assembled at the sides of the bone piles and turned towards them, “Everyone, we shall march for one hour. Get ready to travel!”
“Boss, boss, there’s an enormous fuck-off wave approaching us!”
“… What?”
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Ah Qiu took a breath, “Boss, there’s a large wave of people and hatred automatons heading straight towards us!”
“What do you mean? Are they just travelling, or do they appear to have the intent to attack us?” Meng Chu asked, getting up from his seat, “What do they look like? Do they have some kind of banner or chant?”
“Eh…”
“Alright, I get it. I will have a look,” he said, walking around the desk and rushing towards the walls of Beast’s Rest, with Ah Qiu following him the moment that he caught his breath from his run here.
When both of them got to the top, Meng Chu was incredibly tempted to make a grammatically poor statement about the situation. He saw a literal wave of crimson and pale flesh, with one standing on one side while the other remained on the right. The first was significantly larger and unbroken with any other colours, clearly made up of countless insectoid automatons that were striding forward at a constant pace without any requirement for food or energy, and the second appeared to be a large crowd of physique cultivators.
They were arranged into more of a formation, with two columns around each one of some large dark objects, or perhaps large piles of them – this sight was beyond even the outer walls of the city, and so he could not see the finer details due to his limited eyesight that lacked the same improvement that Wei Yi had experienced thanks to her cosmic energy – with large people carrying them.
“…” Meng Chu could not find any words for several lengthy seconds before he finally found something to address, “Who is the person at the front, and why are they absolutely covered in moonlight? Did one of the warlords from the Great Bone Lake have a physique like that?”
“I dunno, boss…”
“Wait, bring me the magnification lens that Wei Yi had left in the storage room,” he ordered, waiting for his servant to do as he asked.
Several minutes later, when the enormous sea of things had advanced by a worrying amount, Ah Qiu finally got back to him with a large crystal lens that he grabbed out of his hand and looked through it, nearly throwing it onto the ground when he saw who it was.
“What in the heavens has she been getting up to?” he nearly shouted, passing the lens to his servant when he understood that his outburst must have seemed entirely unreasonable from his perspective, “She said that she would search for the settlement of automatons in the north west, and now she comes from the north with a sea of physique cultivators…”
Before Ah Qiu could get a word into the conversation, Meng Chu turned around ran towards the stairs so that he could descent the inner walls and rush over to the outer walls.
He had no idea what was happening right now, but it his priority to make sure that Beast’s Rest wasn’t about to be threatened by an enormous incursion of maddened warriors and mindless monsters, and that no hasty moves were made by either side in the case of them coming in peace.
“This is Beast’s Rest? It looks rather barren on this side,” Ya commented, looking at the nearly complete outer walls and the few structures that have already been established.
“It has recently been expanded, so there hasn’t been enough time to construct most of the houses yet. Do keep in mind that all of this began less than a month ago, so by the end of the two years, everything will be filled to the brim with businesses and houses,” Wei Yi answered, leading them towards the front gates as she noticed a familiar face running in their direction, “Slow down for a minute. We’ll be allowed entrance soon.”
Both of the groups behind her slowed down as she had commanded them to, pacing themselves so that they would only reach their destination at a similar time to Meng Chu and a few of the guards that were noticing their immense congregation.
For once, she had underestimated the third former leader of Beast’s Rest, for he was somehow able to climb to the top of the wall and appear atop the gates several seconds earlier than expected.
“Wei Yi! What exactly is going on?”
“Nothing much. I’ve just brought two cities worth of troops over from Automaton Point and the Great Bone Lake, as well as most of the Great Bone Lake itself,” she replied, nodding her head towards the large stacks of the Beast’s bones being carried by the physique cultivators, “In other words, nothing much. How has the city been in my absence?”
“I can’t just answer after what you’ve said,” Meng Chu said, “What do you mean by two cities? How did the Great Bone Lake get involved?”
“Are you going to make me answer you here?”
“… Fine. Get the doors open!” he stepped away from the front of the wall and shouted to the guards that had arrived after him, before descending the wall to meet with the enormous crowd of people on the ground.
The gates opened and Wei Yi guided the people through them, explaining the best order for them to follow before stepping away and walking over to Meng Chu, who was still in awe at the current situation. To be fair, it wasn’t a particularly surprising reaction, as anyone that hadn’t gotten too close to amalgam automatons and physique cultivators before would be rather shocked about the large swarms of insectoid creatures being followed into the town by bulky – and mostly nude – men and women carrying gigantic fragments of bone.
Although their chaotic placement resulted in most of their influence on the killing intent around them being dispersed and negated, it still caused the air around them to grow heavier and less pleasant.
“So, what about now?”
“I have a nice, comfy office with a bunch of those bones being placed in the exact position to put pressure on the people sitting in front of me, and you want to do this here? Fine, I can explain some of my adventures to you – just give me a moment,” Wei Yi said, subduing the moonlight around her until it was constrained only to her chest, at which point she dispersed it entirely, “Right, where should I begin?”
“For one, I would be very interested to know who the hatred automatons are,” Meng Chu said.
“Oh, them? They’re not actually automatons, but hatred avatars. They are like the mindless creatures that you know, except they have a mind and can control their mentally inferior counterparts via a killing intent resonance,” she explained, “On the other hand, their physical strength is only slightly greater than that of a normal human, so they are nigh useless in battle on their own. For this reason, when some physique cultivators happened to find their way to their domain, the Automaton Point, named by me roughly ten minutes before the invasion, they were not able to do much against the invaders and had to rely on my help. I convinced their leaders, Ya, Liu Qi and some others, to follow me to Beast’s Rest, but we happened to take a slight detour.”
“A detour that led you to the Great Bone Lake?” he questioned, pondering whether she was just making all of this up due to the absurdity of the situation, “… How?”
She smiled, “Now do you understand why I wanted to speak with you in a pleasant office? However, despite being my subordinate, you refused my kind offer time and time again to insist on receiving information that you do not strictly need to know. I am sure that if I was any of the other major leaders in the prison realm, you would not be treated as kindly.”
“That is true. However, since you have bothered to explain that much, I assume you do not mind?”
“No, not really. I just wanted to sound strict for a little bit, since I’ll need to do so much more in the future, when I’m forced to work with people that understand the situation less than you,” Wei Yi answered, “The reason that I went to the Great Bone Lake is that I wished to resolve the conflict between them and Automaton Point, which I ended up accomplishing by taking over them. In the process, I split a moon and showed sunlight to the world.”
“We saw that all the way from Beast’s Rest, and possibly beyond, actually,” he said, looking into the sky as if to see whether the moon was still in the sky, “It’s possible that the sight was visible all the way from the other edge of the prison realm.”
“Oh, was it that bright? That’s not what I intended to achieve, but it works,” in reply, she shrugged and recalled a different topic she was curious about, “Ah, by the way, what has been happening to the spiritual will cultivators that I had picked up a while ago? I’m curious whether they’ve attempted to do anything stupid.”
“Nothing of the sort. They’ve been very quiet and obedient… I suspect the cause of their actions is that they’ve entirely lost track of time, and think that it is only their third or fourth day in the underground passages of the city,” Meng Chu reported, “They rely on their spiritual will to feed themselves and keep their bodies running, so they don’t tend to pay attention to food and the like. Did you expect them to do something?”
“I wasn’t sure whether they would or not, but if they did, I would need to discipline them again.”
“Discipline? They still cry about their last time in their sleep, to the point that some of the guards have felt the need to speak nicely to them so that they don’t break down…”
“Huh. That bad?”
“It appears to be,” he said.
“I’ll handle it later, then. For now, it seems that the bones have been brought in now, so come along and help us to distribute them throughout the entirety of the inner part of Beast’s Rest, before placing the rest in the new physique cultivating district.”
“Alright- wait, no. You still haven’t told me how you took over the Great Bone Lake. Was that not supposed to take a long time?”
“I surrounded it with my new forces, intimidated them, got the warlords to fight me, then killed them. It really isn’t that interesting, you know? If you were to write it in a book, I’d imagine everyone skipping over it,” Wei Yi shrugged, intentionally downplaying her achievements so that he would stop bringing them up, “You saw the most interesting part of it, apparently, so there’s little more that I need to mention.”
He did not appear to be entirely satisfied with the answer, but he understood that he had been bothering her a little too much despite her superior position, “Very well. Should I gather some people to assist you?”
“Of course. Get people who don’t rely on their killing intent to carry and set up the bones according to my very specific instructions, or else they will likely suffer greatly if they fail to pay attention.”
“Understood… Just to get things straight, you’ve conquered two cities in a month?”
“You could put things that way, if you want to… Actually, that’s an excellent title, don’t you think?” Wei Yi said, turning away from him and slowly walking away as she muttered, “I could be the Conqueror, of the prison realm for now, but the Conqueror of Yi City could be next.”