“Then, it is settled. I must go into the eye of the storm walls and absorb all of them.”
Wei Yi stated this to no-one in particular as she looked upon her own reflection in the ancient bronze mirror that held the cryptic warnings upon it.
Almost twenty years had passed since the city of Sanctuary had been freed from the power of the otherworldly demon that called himself Chang Fang He, but her physical appearance had changed little. Her hair, body and clothing remained mostly unchanged, with only a few minor alterations to the Crimson Robes and a single shorter hair due to an experiment with improving the Hatred Split that had gone awry, and even what was inside of her body was almost identical to before.
The Augur’s Library, lacking the force it required to advance into a new form, remained in a half-constructed state, and the mental domain around it had only gained a few new details due to similar experiments.
Her cultivation in all three of her available energies advanced to the peak of the third realm, but as she had neutrality and some degree of command over every single faction in the prison realm, she had not had the opportunity to make any significant breakthroughs in her physique ability collection, and every single technique that she had been able to obtain through more legitimate means had gone into one of her current skills, as her arsenal was slowly growing a little too large to be reasonably useful a majority of the time.
Even if she had resorted to less legitimate means, she would have faced the same problem as she did now, but perhaps a few days earlier – her cultivation, with the immense mental domain and the overly complex array constructed out of pure spiritual will, as well as the multitude of physiques that had built up within her, was becoming far too difficult to advance with the low-realm energy of the prison realm.
Naturally, the best way of resolving this would be to gather the significantly denser energy of the storm walls, which, if done to the end, would also resolve the outer storm walls and grant freedom to the entire prison realm, and the best way to do that would be to position herself in the centre of the coursing energies, where she would have unending power from the walls until they were entirely exhausted. Nevertheless, she still remembered the warning that she had been given about the centre of the internal storm walls, as well as the fact that passing through the storms would be significantly more difficult than through her existing gateway within a calmer part of the storm wall.
‘Even assuming that I can create any kind of passage through the wall, I would need to survive an incredible assault of killing intent or spiritual will, as I cannot rely on someone else to open a gap and then fill it with gateway stones…’ she sighed, putting the mirror away.
Another thing that worried her was the fact that out of the one hundred crimson robes out in the Crimson Side, she had only managed to catch a total of seven robes for her own forces, including the one she currently wore. That meant that there were still ninety-three powerful warriors out there that hadn’t appeared to her or any of her forces throughout her stay in the prison realm, and if they were unhappy with her presence, either she or her faction could be attacked the moment that she departed.
In short, there were quite a few concerns that could not be dealt with yet.
Despite all of them, every single one of them, she could not wait any longer, as the time that she had spent in this realm was slowly adding up to a total of 276 days in the Planar Continents, which would grow to over a year if she wanted to do everything in her power to protect herself and her faction from any kind of possible harm, which would simply be unreasonable.
Thus, she now found herself before the centre of the inner storm walls, where the storm walls grew almost imperceptibly thicker than usual. What was clear was that the speed at which the storm clouds moved was significantly greater, and the power contained within was even more powerful at the outer edge than at the centre of the gateway, where the storms intensified to a scary extent even for Wei Yi’s impossibly powerful body.
Now, she had to pass through, and do so without losing her consciousness or footing for even a single moment, as that would mean her slow and painful death.
‘The painful part is mostly fine, seeing as I barely feel anything after all of the dips in the Beast’s blood, but I would hardly like a slow death, as that would just be giving me the opportunity to realise exactly how many people could have benefitted from my battle against the Greats and the destruction of the storm walls, and how many were now let down…’
If she did lose her way, or stagger somewhere, even if the storm wall itself did not throw her away, she would still lose any track of her position due to the immense quantity of energy within the walls being sufficient to completely obscure any of her spiritual perception and eyesight, and would be especially true whenever she came across the more violent killing intent within the central vortex, but would still be noticeable while on the Silver Side, which is where she decided to cross into the centre of the storm wall.
She might be becoming more masochistic – in terms of her training and cultivation, at least – by the year, but she was not yet suicidal enough to make her journey harder on purpose.
‘… Alright. It is time,’ she thought to herself, removing the Demon Killer from her back before positioning it in a very specific way in front of herself with her eyes shut, ‘The culmination of my work on Hatred Split might finally break this sword, but it would be worth it…’
Breathing in and out slowly, she controlled the flow of her spiritual will very precisely, sending it through specific meridians within her body in a route that she had calculated for this moment. She guided the energy towards the sword, stacking it in three distinct layers atop the cracked and splintered obsidian blade, then arranged it into miniscule inscriptions carved out in the air itself. With three layers of complex inscriptions complete, she finally opened her eyes and tensed her muscles.
‘Three-fold Split!’
As she swung her sword, she seemed to do so three times in a single instant, when in actuality, two of the three were replicated via a burst of killing intent and spiritual will that carried the properties of her weapon without a single fragment of the weapon being brought with it. Each one had the same three layers of energy and inscriptions on it, and yet none of the three was truly real nor solid.
Nevertheless, each instance of Hatred Split burst out of her blade, one horizontal and two vertical, piercing into the storm wall in the shape of a doorway.
Sharen e Mo trembled and cracked, but she simply threw it away and rushed into the storm, as she did not have the time to collect whatever had resulted from the use of such a technique. Her slash, as powerful as it might have been, was only able to cut a small way into the storm walls, and even then, the space that she had opened was rapidly being consumed and repaired by the walls. If she did not take full advantage of the situation, she would have just wasted Demon Killer, an immense quantity of energy, and the right timing in which the storm walls were mostly calm.
Even with the benefit of the World’s Echo physique, and the countless movement techniques combined into the Storm’s Edge Dash that she had grown accustomed to, Wei Yi was only able to make four steps into the storm walls before the opening closed up, and she was left to survive the storm on her own.
Blinding white flooded her vision, mindless will assaulting every part of her body and clawing at the storm walls within her mind, though as it was simply driven by the storm, it had no ability to intelligently attack her mental defences and could thus be quickly forced out of her mind and back into the walls themselves. What she could not even begin to handle, however, was the extreme reduction to her vision and perception.
She had heard and read descriptions of people in terrible storms, and had personally been in a few of the killing intent storms within the prison realm, but this didn’t prepare her for the experience of passing through absolute, pure, concentrated spiritual will. It did not just limit her observation, as one might expect, but it seemed to force any of her senses to recede all the way into her body, reducing their range to a negative value, leading her to lose all senses in her skin and the outer inch of her body and flesh.
Every single instant of her existence within the storm wall threatened to blow her off her feet and throw her away, but she forced herself to remain on the ground with the Eldritch Hold physique ability, forcing the spectral tendrils into the ground before her to assist her in her travel. Out of all of her forces, her physique energy appeared to be the most stable under the assault of spiritual will and killing intent, and thus, even when she came across glimpses of crimson amongst the perfect white of spiritual will, she was able to hold on, even as that crimson poured into her mental domain and interchangeably bashed against the mental storm wall together with the spiritual will of the prison realm.
Step by step, she advanced, pushed forward, resisted the storms that had accumulated enough power to easily pierce the Crimson Robes and cut into her skin, albeit doing little but scratching it, for now.
According to her overly accurate internal clock, she had spent almost eight minutes treading into the white and crimson, and although her visibility had not gotten any clearer over this time, growing only more and more limited, she did feel the direction of the storm winds slowly changing from going in a straight line to spinning around something, orbiting much like a tornado would, suggesting that she was approaching her destination.
With this much force acting upon her, she did not have the opportunity to spend too much time on random and irrelevant thoughts, although some gratitude to herself did make it through when she noticed that her hair was still tightly bound together with the hair that she had cut from her head.
Wei Yi was prepared to deal with another few minutes of walking, when the storms suddenly changed. The immense obscuring force cleared, and she found herself within an extremely small pocket of space where crimson and white whirled around her but did not touch her body. Thus, she instantly opened her eyes – which had been shut to avoid lacerations being caused by the twin energies – and looked up.
In place of the standard pale white or crimson that anyone in the prison realm would have assumed to be the natural colour of the sky, was darkness, filled with stars. White, orange, red and blue all shone down upon her, with the hint of a beautiful nebula passing by her at the pace of a snail. It was… beautiful, and yet something that reminded her of the cosmic energy within her own dantian, suggesting that there might indeed be some truth to the writings that claimed that the many spatial realms floated within a separate space, a kind of planar realm, which also appeared to be viewable through the cosmic energy.
“Hah… I can breathe peacefully… at least for a little bit…”
She sat down on the ground and caught her breath, before resting her hands on her crossed legs and shutting her eyes once more as she stabilised her state as much as she possibly could before she had to begin her cultivation.
Once her spiritual will array structure was stable, her physique energies flowed through her smoothly, and her Augur’s Library had stopped trying to break itself apart further, she breathed in and began to take in energy through every single part of her body. With the support of her powerful techniques and the natural properties of her body, the pull was immense, and thus the storm clouds around her warped almost instantly.
Writhing clouds of crimson and white poured towards her, twisting and circulating as the enormous tornado shrunk down to focus entirely on her lithe body.
In Beast’s Rest, Meng Chu stood atop one of the walls and stared into the distance, watching for any potential threats to approach. Wei Yi had specifically instructed him that her attempt to break through the boundaries she had faced might attract some attention either to her or the settlements that would no longer be guarded by her, but so far, he wasn’t sure what she had meant.
At the time, she had been rather vague, but only because she had no idea what her plan would actually do. For all she knew, the storm walls would have plenty of energy within them, or perhaps they would simply thin, or have something else happened to them.
So that he didn’t get bogged down with waiting for all of these signs at once, she simply said that once the storm walls change, it would likely to be connected to her.
‘I still don’t see anything particular, however… What exactly does a change of a storm wall look like?’
The world deemed that moment to be the most opportune one to explain this to him. All of a sudden, the enormous flat wall in the distance quaked and contracted, pressing into itself before fluctuating and expanding even further than ever before. The violent storms thrashed against the gateway stones, denting the otherwise smooth and calm passageway, but it fortunately maintained its stability as the storm walls slowly began to recede.
Now, however, he could see how something was rapidly draining them, and that something was in the very middle of the inner storm wall, where it was said to be entirely impossible to survive for even a moment.
‘That’s her…’
Crimson and white continuously barraged her flesh, flooded into her body, were circulated and refined by the endless battlefield and transformed into her own forms of energy, all while ten times more power forcefully occupied her than she should have ever been able to handle. She was sure that she had heard her flesh and muscles tear apart on numerous occasions, with every part of her being constantly suffering more damage than any one of the Beast’s blood pool could ever accomplish and yet she also felt perfectly fine, without even a single drop of blood seeming to pour from any of her perceived wounds.
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It was a peculiar experience, and extremely unpleasant, but somehow devoid of all pain that she should have felt. If she could have, Wei Yi would have looked down upon her body to gain a better understanding of the situation, but her eyes already appeared to be besieged by crimson and white even while closed, so she was not keen to make the situation worse.
Fortunately, she did not hear anything or anyone approaching her, nor did she sense anything of the sort, so at the very least she would not need to rise to battle just to fall due to shattered legs.
‘And since I’ve allowed all of this stuff into me, I cannot even sense my cultivation properly…’ she thought, focusing more of her attention on the cultivation process itself rather than any wayward thoughts, ‘Maybe my boobs will gro- No! Focus!’
As much as she would have liked to devote all of her attention to various tasks, when even her mental clock was beginning to lose accuracy – or so it seemed, at the very least, since there was nothing at all for her to compare her time-keeping abilities to – there was very little that she could actually do beside simply sitting on the ground and waiting for things to conclude. She wasn’t even certain that she would be able to tell when she achieves any kind of breakthrough, or when the situation within the storm walls becomes too much for her to handle.
Despite the immense brightness everywhere, she was somehow less informed about herself and her surrounding than when she had seen that pitch-black illusory cave in the Kong Holy Grounds.
That changed without any warning when she suddenly felt her surroundings change. After an uncertain time of feeling almost nothing, she was suddenly able to tell that the storms were clearing. Not thinning, nor shifting or dispersing elsewhere, but outright clearing, disappearing from her surroundings, being entirely absorbed into her body.
Without any control over it, she felt her mind being forcefully drawn into the mental domain, which shook as an endless flow of energy raged towards the Augur’s Library, enveloping it and entering ever single gap that had been created within the Knowledge Cultivation Room. All of it almost melted under the pressure, but through instinct alone, she was able to tell that this was a change – the change that she had been looking for.
As spiritual will and killing intent flowed together within a vortex similar to the one at the centre of the storm walls, she understood that her path did indeed involve the merging of these two unique powers, and so, alongside an image of a new, greater library, a name came to her mind.
‘I am not someone that would coat myself in gold, nor am I one to augur of things in the future. I have no need to do either, for I am the very change that I would prophesize, and since wealth alone is no concern to me. No, since I first learnt of my physique, since I broke through the seeming limits of humanity time and time again, since I had cultivated planar energy in a world so utterly devoid of it, I should have known that there would only be a single name or title I could associate with myself, if I am to break the foundation of the Greats and rebuild Yi City anew,’ she thought to herself as an enormous structure slowly built itself within her mental domain, incorporating the separate towers that she had previously created, merging with the enormous array in the sky and slowly seeking to stabilise itself into a single form.
‘Ascendant’s Library!’
Those two words preceded the structure’s sudden impact into the mental domain, firmly planting itself within it as the contours finally became clear. The number of floors, and their height, had grown, and the library was split into six distinct wings: the planar, killing intent, spiritual will, physique, general knowledge and a spare section, one dedicated to whatever energy could fill the fifth meridian network within her.
Rather than opulent gold or grim crimson, this library contained both, with dark gold ornamentation covering basalt and crimson wood, all of which were to be illuminated by the bright light of her physique energy, the sunlight that was uniquely hers.
Her insides also became clear to her spiritual perception, where she was able to observe several vital changes. First and perhaps most significant to her was the shift in the position of her spiritual will and killing intent meridians, which had initially been as far away from one another as any of the other sets. Now, however, they were practically entwined around one another, with both colours flowing past one another and yet remaining separate in a most unique display. Despite the latter fact, it somehow felt inappropriate to call them two separate energies, for it now seemed to require more effort to move one without the other than to mobilise the two together.
‘Spiritual will and killing intent… Spiritual intent? No… Killing will? Yes, that will have to do for now. If so, then what exactly is my realm right now?’ she finally opened her eyes, unsure of what she would find, ‘I will need to quickly experiment with what I have, then return and stabilise my condition, so that no-one is able to take advantage of whatever state I am currently in.’
And yet, what she saw was confusing in far too many ways.
After witnessing the sky, or lack thereof, in the centre of the prison realm, she was prepared to see more of it, but she had not expected that the powerful fog of the realm would finally fade and that this sky would be all around it, countless shining nebulae, galaxies and stars illuminating the world almost as brightly as the previous storm walls and ceilings were able to. Not a single trace of those remained, no matter where she looked.
Then, she also noticed that she was somehow sitting in a large crater that she had not noticed upon entry, with a mixture of white, red and regular-looking sand covering the ground.
Before her, only a few steps away, was a skeleton without any traces of his previous attire or equipment. It appeared to have belonged to a male human, but other than that, there was nothing that she could understand without using her spiritual perception.
In any other situation, scanning the bones more closely would have been the first thing that she had done, but now, as she happened to glance down during her review of her surroundings, she saw something particularly exceptional, if such a word was even appropriate. It was certainly surprising, and more than a little unsettling.
Her robes were all torn, exactly as expected, but beneath them, she did not see the same tanned skin that she had gotten used to over the years. Instead, her left side was covered in deep crimson, almost black in shade, with the tips of her fingers having changed to claws made of pitch-black bone. With her tongue, she could feel something resembling a fang in her mouth, but only on her left side, for on her right, her flesh had turned into an unnatural whiteness, one wholly distinct from the skin of someone like Shi An Qi or the pale inhabitants of the prison realm.
On that side, her every feature was exceptionally smooth and delicate, although every one of her muscles still contained just as much force as they previously had.
‘It also looks like this has finally broken the training equipment provided to me by Great Dark and Great Light… Am I going to be stuck like this from now on? And… what in the heavens is this?’ she took a closer look at her physique meridians and observed a kind of spiral or double helix of energy within them that was similar to the killing will meridians near them.
Therein flowed bright sunlight, matching that of purest yang, but also a cold moonlight, clearly encompassing absolute yin. Both seemed to be made of True Ascendant energy, and yet she found it all too difficult to recognise it.
Fortunately, before too many questions could be asked, the unlikely combination reached the mysterious characters, which rearranged themselves in a manner similar to the first time that she had awakened her physique, although their current floating was far less smooth and constant, likely due to the constant drain on the planar energy around them limiting the supply of power that they had for themselves.
‘Yin-Yang Ascendant… Huh? I can’t say that I’ve heard of this particular physique, but the very structure of this energy, and the power that it contains – beside the fact that I appear to have broken through to whatever the fourth realm is, somehow – all seems to be superior to the True Ascendant. Then, is this the actual limit of the physique?’ she questioned, raising her clawed hand and willing a clump of energy to come from it, ‘Interesting… There isn’t much of an obstruction within my meridians, but it seems easier for the yin element of the energy to travel in the left of my body, whereas it is easier for the yang to pass through the right. I guess that answers the old question regarding the yin and yang nature of spiritual will and killing intent.’
She wished to explore all of this further, but before she could, she heard footsteps, and not just one set of them, approaching her.
Quickly, she reached out with her spiritual perception and was instantly stunned by the strain on her mind when an absolutely enormous area suddenly became known to her, showing over four dozen people all clad in crimson robes approaching her from the crimson side of the world, while numerous strange creatures approached from the white.
As she attempted to stand up, she found that while her body was still as comfortable as ever, she was simply unable to control her movements beyond simple motions of her hands and the elementary things like breathing or blinking. In other words, she was utterly defenceless.
These two forces found their way to the top of the crater, then looked down into it and found her sitting on the ground. Her distinct crimson hair remained untransformed by the immense quantities of spiritual will and killing intent that had passed through her body, and so they must have been able to recognise her, for their movements suddenly accelerated and weapons were produced.
‘Fuck, it’s as I had suspected. Those bastards are the crimson robe wearers, whereas the things from the spiritual will side might be the spiritual automatons that would have wondered the lands on the right of the prison realm, except for something restraining them. Now that the storms walls are down, whatever had been stopping them is also out of the picture, allowing them to head straight towards their nearest target…’ she understood, gritting her teeth and fangs.
Even while she struggled to move, there was still much she could do-
Any thoughts of action were extinguished completely when she saw a woman dressed in a simple grey robe appear before her without any trace of techniques, arrays or even forceful spatial tears. With her red hair calmly flowing in the wind, she raised her hand with the second and third finger pressed together and slashed the air in a smooth motion.
There was no planar energy, nor killing intent, spiritual will or even physique energy. Despite that, the space in the middle of both approaching forces suddenly broke, splitting their bodies in half with one continuing to charge forward for a little while as their upper halves lost momentum and crumbled down.
As if she had done nothing unusual at all, the woman turned to Wei Yi, revealing her grey eyes and a melancholy expression.
‘No… fucking… way…’
“Greetings, unfortunate victim of circumstance. Coulds’t I receive thine name?”
“W-Wei Yi… and you are…”
“My name is Yi Shi Ming, proud mother of Kong Shi Meng. However, as I last recall my child’s countenance and feats, a different title became more common…” the woman nodded to herself, “He was also known as the Master of Yi City.”
END OF VOLUME 2