The flood of planar energy weakened the barriers around the automatons. Physical force and physical applications of planar energy could, presumably, be used to pry apart the bodies of the robots and reveal the core inside. Since the core needed far less effort to break, it could be shattered by anyone with fingers that had been used regularly, regardless of purpose. Within was contained both the key to victory, and an answer to one of Wei Yi’s previous questions.
Not long ago, she had pondered just what could have happened to so many of the anchor energy points that had to be scattered around the world due to the inevitable death of all things.
Some had to return to the cultivators of the world, but even if the Great Families began to make use of their multiple anchor method from the very year of the Master of Yi City’s disappearance, they would only have twelve thousand and fifteen generations – more or less, depending on the exact year in which Kong Shi Meng passed from the Planar Continents – to consume anchor energy, which would mean that roughly four hundred and eighty thousand anchor energy points would have been forcefully stolen from the world by a single member of each generation and permanently tied to the world via their vile methods.
The full number of anchor energy points used per generation would be closer to twenty-two million, one hundred and eight thousand, but that was not the kind of mathematical calculation that the Ascendant wished to be occupying herself with. The exact figures didn’t matter, so even if they were inaccurate, it really wouldn’t matter, unless the key to defeating the Greats, Primordial Deities or even the Hunger of the Beyond was to possess a very specific number of anchor energy points. At that point, she would greatly regret her decision.
Considering the fact that it typically takes the usual person less than fifty years to reach the third realm and thus interact with anchor energy in any way, there should be far, far more anchor energy points than that being used, generated, or retrieved from the world, and since the average district would get fifty more such cultivators per year at the least…
The point was that there were a number of anchor energy points that should end up lying about and not being used at all, and now she knew one of the uses that had been found.
As it turned out, there were other otherworldly demons that have the ability to make use of anchor energy points, and the core of the automaton cores were these anchor energy points, somehow being converted into another form of energy that also repelled planar energy with the internal structure and the plentiful orange fluid contained within. That was worrying, as the anchor energy acted as seemingly infinite power when within these cores, but it also meant that there was a chance of victory.
Planar energy dulled the shields, and behind them, planar energy was hidden. If it could be kept up, she would essentially have all of the momentum needed to push forward for as long as she needed to. Each kill, so to speak, would allow her to release a little more energy, and that would empower the push, perpetuating until there were no more anchor energy-powered cores to be pulled out of the automatons and forced back into the world. Judging by the absolutely enormous army that was currently charging against them, by the time that they were beaten, the seventh realm might become one that was not difficult to reach for those currently in the sixth realm.
For that reason, she promptly activated that one point that she collected and then retreated quickly, as she would have liked to take an action against another automaton but was confronted with the larger approaching forces.
A number of the larger elite infantry appeared within the range of fire, and several centaurs weren’t far behind. Some of the tanks stopped and turned their cannons towards her, a few of the artillery automatons were also clearly charging up their weaponry, and a few of the railgun walkers were clearly considering firing at her, so she had no room to linger at her current position.
With the energy released and thus a few disruptions in the shields of the nearby automatons, the Ascendant retreated back to the fortress, taking advantage of the different perspective to take a look at the currently engaged army with her own eyes, just to appreciate their sheer number properly. There were thousands of the infantry and elite infantry, around a thousand centaurs, several hundred tanks, a few hundred artillery and a hundred railgun walkers, three dozen colossi and ten of the weapon platforms, although there were hints of more powerful lights at the back of the legion suggestion the presence of even more forces of some kind.
Considering the fact that the colossi might be sufficient to level a district on their own, she hoped that they weren’t any more powerful than them, but this was not guaranteed.
The moment that she was close enough to confidently transmit her ideas to the other combatants, she did so, sharing everything of immediate note to them so that they didn’t need to take time processing it and could move into battle right away.
“Anchor energy?” Luo Na still asked, proving the wisdom of not including other complex notions.
“Again, energy that is contained within anchors, which traps a significant amount of the world’s energy allowance and prevents it from being materialised. Normally, this prevents too many third realm cultivators and above existing, leading to a natural drop in energy during prosperity and allowing others to regain the realm of fallen cultivators to regain their numbers, but the Great Families and the Ju District’s otherworldly demons have figured out a way to claim that energy, although I suspect both did so unintentionally. The Greats simply wanted more anchors, while the demons wanted robots.”
“That’s an accurate way to put our thinking, I admit. Very fair,” Sarah nodded from behind the spatial barrier.
“So this energy will benefit us once we release it?”
“Directly and indirectly, or, more precisely, in both the short and long term. Right now, I’ll be able to release the energy allocated within and disrupt the shields of the energy, and once this is dealt with, the average cultivation realm will rise by at least one, possibly even two, although the eighth and ninth realms will still be difficult to obtain.”
“Well, I don’t know what most of that means… no, isn’t energy a tangible thing? What do you mean by allocation of energy?” Jia Rong noticed.
“The reason that planar energy is infinite despite constantly being absorbed, dispersed and so on is that it is allocated and unallocated by a few means. Without anchor energy, any consumption will lead to regeneration, even if it contained without room for escape. If we were to train cultivators up to the second realm only, we would be able to train an infinite amount of them with an appropriate time investment, even if the energy should be consumed a thousand times over. That is how it functions.”
“…” was the general reaction, as that not only went against every common understanding of planar energy but seemed to contradict everything that could be personally observed about it. It should have been impossible, but one thing that was clear was that Wei Yi wouldn’t be wasting their time.
That meant that there was either some kind of other meaning or intention behind her words, or that this was a genuine theory with a sufficient amount of information, and given the fact that there appeared to be little intelligence behind the approaching army, they had to presume that she wouldn’t be bothering to obscure her words.
However, it simply seemed impossible for something like that to be true.
“Yeah, yeah, I get what all of you are thinking, so instead of that, why don’t we care about the railgun walkers and the like? One of them is- literally firing right now!”
She had to establish another shield again, blocking just as much of the railgun bolt and then enduring another attack to the left arm, which was cut off yet again and forced her to regenerate it as quickly as possible to be able to contribute to the battle. Fortunately, it did meant that the left arm would be slightly more powerful as a result of the purification and amplification caused by her cosmic energy, but the cost wasn’t really worth it when she desperately needed both arms to be able to perform at her best.
It did, at least, wake up the rest of the combatants, all of whom turned to the battlefield and readied what abilities they did have to resist the tide. The primary method of attack needed to be physical in nature, as it was most effective at both bypassing the primarily energy-based shields and pulling apart the automaton shell, and so Jia Rong and the Chao Patriarch had the advantage in this regard. Luo Na and the rest did have the ability to solidify and manifest planar constructs which would also act in a physical manner, but there was a fundamental issue with the way in which the typical cultivator interacted with planar energy in the solidified state.
Energy imparted effects in the eyes of the majority, so when they would use solidified energy, they would instead attempt to impart force rather than directly apply it via the solid structure. This was completely unsuitable for the current situation, and so a few changes needed to be made in the worldviews of the people present. That, and a few techniques needed to be created.
“It doesn’t matter if you can imagine that, but instead focus on creating physical force via the energy of the technique itself, rather than by imbuing the energy with the attribute of physical force,” she exclaimed, sharing a prototype technique created with the ideas stolen from the railgun walkers and the guns of the centaurs, “Attempt this technique if you can, and provide other types of support if you cannot. Go on!”
As to lead with an example, she reached out with her freshly recovered left hand and brought out a large sphere of her crystalline cosmic energy, splitting it into three portions. One was small, the other two were equally large, but the latter portion formed into two long rails while the former grew denser and smaller while the rails were preparing themselves.
This was the design she could see on the railgun walkers, and although neither she nor the otherworldly demons fully understood the principle behind this weapon, she did know that the rails were meant to accelerate the projectile at the enemy at a great speed, so that was what she would do.
Luckily, when it came to techniques and planar energy, as it was not truly a proper solid substance in any controlled state, she could ignore some of the intricacies of the weapon and focus on the general properties.
The others followed, their energy paling in comparison to the crystalline cosmic wonder that she possessed, but they still made progress fairly quickly, two rails and a projectile appearing before them. Some chose to go with slightly different designs for both, as neither of them had the chance to properly perceive the projectile fired by the railgun walker prior to being fired, but these weren’t specified in the technique that she had shared and thus she didn’t object to their changes. In the event of one of them figuring out a far better method than her own, she would only be happy for them and the increased chances of survival that came with having the ability to fight back.
Once the rails were prepared and the projectile was placed at the back, closest to their hands, it was time to empower the rails and bestow onto them the property of acceleration. Wei Yi was one of the few to understand the technique in this way, due to the radical difference in which she viewed the world thanks to her understanding of Law and the Planar Dao, but they all grasped the more simplistic notion described in the technique.
Together, their many rails began to glow with their own lights, mimicking the only entity that had the same kind of ability. The projectile was held in place to prevent it from flying out in the wrong way, and some also chose to charge it with a degree of energy, although it would do little more than annoy the automatons that would receive it. Given that there did not seem to be sufficient intelligent thought occurring within their heads, the notion that they could feel the emotion of annoyance was even more farfetched, so it was unlikely to be a successful element of the technique to be carried forward into the future.
“In the style of some otherworldly memories… Fuck, I hate this, but… Railgun Bolt, test 1,” Wei Yi said, her crystalline rails glowing with enough energy to completely overwhelm that of all of the rest with the light alone, “Fire!”
Unlike the time that the railgun walker fired at them, they were able to tell that they had achieved some form of success from the sound first. It did not match that which they had heard from the railgun of the enemy, but it was close enough, and the flashes of light that were produced by countless bolts, spheres and even shards of planar energy flying out at immense speeds were also similar to what they had seen from the creations of the Ju District and the otherworldly demons within. They may not have understood the exact method they were using, but it was sufficient for now.
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All the colours of the rainbow crossed the rapidly shrinking gap between the fortress and the robot army, and finally collided with the automatons themselves. Most hit the basic infantry, who they expected to have the weakest defences due to their small size preventing larger shield setups from being placed within them if nothing else, but Wei Yi’s attack was specifically targeted at a distant centaur, as she wished to confirm that theory and compare the power of her method with that of the others. Even if their changes to the basic outline of the technique were better than her own, their power should still fall far behind her own due to the inherent strengths that she possesses, and so if her attack is on par with that of another cultivator, it would prove that they figured out something that she had not properly considered within her own attack.
The small bolts, shards, spheres and the like hit the hexagonal shields and instantly tore apart the nearby sand hills and small dunes, the mere power of the collision being enough to shatter the terrain entirely. This was what the combat of high realm cultivators looked like, and their current numbers looked like those that might be seen in the golden age of Yi City. In a way, since their forces were the first to join into the project to resurrect Yi City, and since Wei Yi was seeking to be the new Master of Yi City, this was akin to the first proper fight of Yi City Reborn.
Some of the infantry shields were shattered instantly, with the bolts passing through and striking their bodies. It was insufficient to breach the metal shells of their bodies, and only resulted in a light bit of damage to their structure, but it was still something impressive to take note of for the first ever attack against the automatons.
Of course, for every success, there were a number of failures, and that could be clearly seen due to the railgun bolts touching the shields and promptly dissipating, leading to an impressive impact but resulting in little true damage. That was the issue with attempting to change people’s minds and worldviews in a short amount of time, but once they saw the failure of this attempt, they should keep it in mind and change their actions accordingly. It might still take a few attempts, as they might think that something else was at fault, but they would comprehend the true reason behind their failures in time.
What was most significant was the collision of the Ascendant’s projectile against the shields of the so-called centaur automaton. Her ray of immense vibrance hit the hexagons surrounding the robot and promptly popped the particular hexagon that she hit, piercing through and heading straight for the head of the entity. With nothing else in the way, it hit that just as easily and, to her own surprise, shot right through the metal, shattering one of the centaur’s gleaming orange eyes.
On its own, this was not enough to take down the centaur, although she could see how it stumbled slightly upon the collision. The other eyes brightened, as if to compensate for the absence of the largest one, and it was likely needing to take more care with its movement so as to be able to navigate efficiently. This did give her room to manoeuvre when it came to dispatching certain foes by simply taking out their eyes, as most of the automatons did seem to rely on their glowing eyes for navigational purposes, and if all of their eyes were equally easy to damage, then even the weapon platforms would fall to her attacks.
‘This is… it needs to be changed. If I can release one of these every second, if not more quickly, I might be able to take out the shields of the automaton army on my own, leaving their shells for the others to pry apart and extract the anchor energy from within.’
She quickly split the two rails that she had created into many, fuelling them all with the same amount of energy so that they would return to the same size. With a series of projectiles prepared and more ready to be created, she duplicated the design of the weapon on one of the centaur’s arms and placed the rails in a circle, bringing them a little closer to her hand so that they would surround her open hand. So that it would be easiest to aim and hit the correct enemy each time, these rails could rotate, allowing her to place the ammunition into only the top rail every single time, simplifying the technique itself significantly for those that couldn’t handle loading each rail separately. Once this was all prepared, she activated the first rail and began to activate the others in sequence.
The others mostly didn’t risk following this idea, with only a few finding themselves comfortable enough with the technique itself to be able to create a second set of planar rails with which to attack.
With the invisible restrictions around the rails in place from the very beginning, the loaded bolt had nowhere to go but out, and thus the loud but brief noise that the railgun produced repeated itself again as the projectile shot out of the rails. She made use of the technique’s full strength for the attack, but she quickly noted that she would either need to lower her intended attack speed or decrease the power in order to be able to keep up with that speed of attacks, as the pair of rails would take several seconds to recharge to the same degree.
While her first projectile pierced the shield of one of the nearest infantry and separated the head from the torso, she quickly made adjustments to the rails, weakening them slightly while also slowing down the intended speed of rotation for the many rails. That way, she wouldn’t sacrifice much of either capability and still be able to release at least one consistent shot per second, which would mean that to hit the shields of the entire army of several thousands, she would only need eighty three minutes.
Of course, it would be more reasonable to instead torment the shields of a few automatons.
That first bolt removed the head of the infantry robot and did stop the body from moving, meaning that there was a certain reliance on the head, but since the infantry did not drop to the ground or explode, which would have been the best outcome possible, that meant that there might be a chance of them recovering. If this was the case, then removing the head would not be the most effective way of dealing with her enemies, and it might even give the enemy the opportunity to recover and improve their forces if they are able to repair and enhance their troops.
‘In fact, it might be best to instead split this into several moves. Rather than trying to make a single perfect Repeated Bolts technique, I could have the current attempt be labelled Balanced Fire, then create a Rapid Fire purely to pressure the shields of the robots, and a Burst Fire that would activate all rails at their full power to take down a stronger foe,’ she thought, quickly putting together the variants.
At the same time, the existing manifested rails were rotating and the many small spheres that she had created were loaded into them one after another, and every second they shot out of the rail on the top, slight movements of her hand allowing her to adjust her aiming sufficiently to consistently remove the head an infantry robot every single time that she attacked. However, when the speed of the attack was increased and the power needed to be decreased to compensate, the power of the shots fell greatly, leading to those that were even slightly off to be unable to sever the neck of the automatons they struck, while the well-placed shots still did a sufficient amount of damage but weren’t always able to go all the way through the metal.
Other than confirming her assumption that balance would not lead to success in this particular instance, it did show exactly how much power was necessary to breach a hexagon of the shields and pierce a thin part of the automaton’s body, so she was able to control the strength of the Burst Fire variant in order to allow her to attack more quickly with it while still guaranteeing the exact amount of damage that she wished to inflict upon her foes.
With the necessary degree of energy recorded, she was able to cease the function of the current Balanced Fire variant and introduce the changes to it, changing her current setup to the Rapid Fire in order to verify just how effective repeatedly striking the shields would be. If numerous repeated weak strikes could take them down, then it might not be necessary to invoke the railgun at all, and a simple barrage of planar energy would be sufficient to wear them down. She had seen that some of the infantry had needed to vent heat from their bodies after the third strike of the first Obliteration beam, so there was certainly a limit to how much they could withstand. The only question was what that limit was, and what was the minimum amount of strength needed to push towards that limit, as well as the most efficient way to do so.
“Alright, some of you cannot effectively use the Railgun Bolt effectively, but for those that can, I have introduced a number of changes for you to test. Meanwhile, let me perform another test,” she spoke quickly, recharging the rails floating in front of her hand, “Rapid Fire, test 1. Fire!”
This time, the attack wasn’t quite as coordinated, although it was good enough.
A number of bolts shot out from the rails floating in front of the majority of the Arbiter forces. Some were faster, others were larger, some took longer to be charged, and a few were modified greatly from even the original attempt at the railgun, but all other than Wei Yi chose not to make use of the insights on the more rapid method of firing, meaning that her own technique was the only one leading to a sudden torrent of noise rushing into their ears.
Sphere after sphere shot out, with the other rails being loaded and charged while they were waiting to be pushed into the correct place, and all of them rained down upon the army without any attempt to aim at specific enemies, colouring the army with the cosmic light of the exploding ammunition. Each shield that was struck quaked and released a noise of blatant displeasure – or so it sounded like despite the obvious lack of consciousness of either the shield or the automaton being protected – but not a single one was breached entirely in one go, with only a few being breached after a projectile struck their shields twice in a row coincidentally.
Curiously enough, even the elite infantry and the centaurs were able to endure only this much, meaning that their shields matched that of the basic infantry, which was some excellent news for her and the Arbiters.
She released a few rounds of Rapid Fire prior to stopping, only to quickly charge the rails once more and instead focus a far greater quantity of energy into them, letting them all charge in sequence. The very moment that the top one was ready to fire, she loaded the sphere of energy and, for the sake of going all out, decided to see what planar energy would do once it was propelled at a fast speed without any attempts to convert it into a suitable physical form. It clearly had an effect on the shields even when unbound, so if all energy was theoretically the same, it would work just as well.
“Burst Fire, test 1. Target: railgun walker… Fire!” she exclaimed, mostly having gotten into the mood rather than intending to convey any valuable information to her peers.
The reason that she targeted that entity of all of the approaching foes was simple. First, the railgun walker closest to them was in the middle of stopping as she spoke, meaning that it would soon fire upon them if given the opportunity to do so. Second, the automaton was perhaps the most dangerous she had experienced so far, and the one that was most likely to inconvenience them the most in the next few minutes. Third, she wished to compare the power of the defences and the structural integrity of the larger automatons to the weaker ones, and verify whether they also had blatant weaknesses such as the energy cores that were close to their surface.
Thus, she fired out eighteen spheres of pure power at the walker just as it stopped and shot back.
Her first five shots went right past the shields of the large automaton, striking the black metal hull with wondrous results. First, the crystalline stabilised energy dug into the metal, lodging itself deep in the automaton’s mechanical shell, and then all of the energy contained within those bolts – she did decide that allowing them to deform during flight would be beneficial, as it could guarantee that they would fly at the fastest possible speed through the air – exploded out, blasting the back of the shields.
Whether due to her energy simply being pure enough to act both as unbound planar energy and as a far more powerful force, or the fact that the shields were attacked from the back rather than the intended front, the other hexagons of the shield suffered greatly from the blasts alone.
The sixth shot out of her manifested rails burst out at the exact same time as the projectile from the railgun walker’s weapon, and both of them met in the air only a moment after being released, as the gap between the two forces was lessening with every moment, cutting down the flight time to a moment. Once they met, the sky was instantly covered with such an overwhelming radiance that even the sun paled in comparison. All of the blue and soft yellow of sunlight was replaced with the mixture of her cosmic light and the ubiquitous orange of the automatons, causing the entire battlefield to be shaded in these lights as if a nebula fell from the heavens and enveloped the world in its endless radiance.
Out of the two projectiles, all that seemed to remain was dust that slowly fell to the sky like dust in rays of sunlight, slowly gliding in the wind with no trace of the danger and volatility that the projectiles previously contained. In a calm moment, when there was no necessity for combat, someone could have paused and painted the scene – in fact, the presence of the battlefield and the automatons would make the image far greater, but would put the artist in significant danger. Now, unfortunately, they had no artistic talents on their side, and Wei Yi was not going to focus on the visuals.
While the sixth projectiles were spreading throughout the battlefield in the form of fine dust, the seventh and the ones after shot out of the invisible barrels formed around the centre of each pair of rails, ensuring that the sphere of energy would proceed in the correct direction when the rails were activated. The rails themselves were split into individual regions that could be activated independently, and then the moment that one of the projectiles was loaded, they would activate in sequence, with the regions at the front attracting the sphere of energy while those at the back repulsed it. Due to the nature of planar energy, it was possible to make these regions infinitely small and precise, so instead of even a million small regions, she instead had the equivalent of one attraction and repulsion segment.
‘It may not be exactly how the railgun of the other world works, and it certainly isn’t, but it is producing an incredible result so far. With the overwhelming amount of power that can be stored inside of the rails, the moment that they are activated, all of that is suddenly forced onto the loaded sphere, resulting in a great deal of forward momentum in an instant,’ she considered, watching her attacks fly out and land upon the remaining hexagons of the shield around the railgun walker.
With her long barrage, it was now in a rather poor state, and when the last of the projectiles struck the outer shell, it suddenly went a little further than the others. It clearly collided with something beneath the metal shell, as only a moment after the collision the entire automaton suddenly exploded, orange light flooding the scene and striking the barriers around the other robots, causing some visible fluctuations in the hexagonal shields. All of them held out, as the damage was spread out across the hexagons, but some of the shards from the exploding robot body did pierce the barriers that were nearest to it.
The battle continued.