V5C48: The Start of Battle
For nine days, the Ascendant did not move, breathing being the only action that shifted her body even a little, her chest rising and falling at a constant pace.
From the outside, one might assume her to be some kind of calm and silent monk, her long crimson hair flowing from her head and residing just a millimetre above the floor, supported by her spiritual will while it was untied. Her robes were loose, revealing a part of her star metal scale armour covering her chest and showcasing little more than that.
On the inside, her mental domain was becoming even more full and absurd.
Her initial arrangement of sword techniques and strikes had initially covered the entirety of the sky, but now that she had shrunk them down and arranged them a little more carefully, she had been able to make those images occupy only a hundredth of the dome that should have been the sky – and instead filled the rest with even more conceptual manifestations. It was rather overwhelming to look at for the first few moments, but she got used to it and immediately began to work, putting together the images of every single movements in every single combat technique and skill that she had accumulated over the years.
Those that she had personally cultivated and used more than once or twice occupied roughly a fifth of the dome of her mental domain, and the rest was filled with… well, the rest of what she had.
From the moment that she had any memories, she had seen various fights and combatants, and since the exact level of combat techniques didn’t matter when she was attempting to figure out a whole Dao, she included every single one of those within her mental arrangement. Experts and complete novices alike were put together into the most complete image of combat and weaponry usage that she could possibly create, techniques from as far back as the age of the Master of Yi City sitting alongside those that she had invented only a few months ago.
With these images overhead, she had spent nine days in the outside world simply pondering them, and within her mental domain, she had used up what felt like an entire year simply staring at all of them and trying to find what it was that united every single one of them.
Needless to say, she had not yet arrived at a satisfactory conclusion. There was still something missing, and to vastly shorten her dilemma to a few words, she believed that she needed to see a little more practical demonstrations of everything she was trying to sum up instead of simply looking at them within her mind. This was not due to her mind being particularly unfaithful to reality, at least most of the time, but because it wasn’t reality, no matter how closely she could recreate it.
Theoretically, if someone else was to enter it and stare at what she presented, then they would be able to comprehend the same Dao that she did, and likely along the same paths. However, Dao that she did not yet understand, with or without the support of the heavens, would not be found within, no matter how hard she tried to invent them for herself.
In the outside world, all that the heavens knew, she could obtain, and all that the people figured out, she could borrow as well. Of course, there was one other alternative, and that was a spatial realm, where Laws and Dao were needed in order for them to contain life or anything. There, she would have any Dao and Laws invested into the spatial realm to learn about, and then any that might have developed as a result of the things that had existed there, living or otherwise. In theory, so long as a spatial realm contained a certain ecosystem or particular types of matter for long enough, a semblance of a Dao would need to form and be readable from it, provided that one knew where to look and what to pay attention to.
It was quite a shame that spatial realms weren’t particularly common in the modern world, and that it would take quite a while for them to be made and stabilised even once the eighth realm could be reached by the strongest, and the seventh realm was no longer out of the reach of the more ordinary.
Once she returned to the Kong Prison Realm, she would be sure to examine it in greater detail, and she had already attempted to scan through her memories of the Kong Holy Grounds without too much success, but she had little left beside that. Testament would be a good option, but she would only be able to come there once the battle against the Greats was approaching its zenith, so she could hardly expect to use it for any kind of breakthrough in a Dao before the next step of the Selection of the Heavenly Masters. Other than that, she knew of no other spatial realm she could access, or even find.
‘So, I have a whole bunch of images that aren’t helpful, a number of spatial realms I can’t do anything with, and a Dao that doesn’t want to be figured out. Grand. What would help the most is someone coming along to interrupt my contemplation, and… well, they already are, since my spiritual perception has never stopped monitoring everything around me and I can see them approaching…’
She stabilised all of the mental projections within her mental domain and exited. Her hair landed softly on the ground as she did so, although it was unable to pick up even a single particle of dust unless she put in a great deal of effort into doing so. With the aid of her physique energy, her body was perfectly clean and healthy, making it easy to rise from her seated position and brush a number of hairs back, out of her line of vision.
‘It hasn’t really stopped growing, even with my attempts to minimize that… It sure has a whole lot of vitality, doesn’t it?’ she noted, as the longest hairs still reached the ground even while she stood.
A moment later, she did not receive a knock on the door, but instead felt a rumble that shook every single contemplation chamber, forcing a large number of people out of their thoughts and meditation. Many were immediately upset at this, but then also realised that there would not be such a disturbance without some good reason, prompting them to rise and head to the door as well.
Wei Yi was still the first out, and she was the one that caused the figure, a middle-aged man dressed in armour and holding onto a guandao while a spare sword sat on his back, to begin his address to all the people present.
“I am sorry to interrupt all of you at such an important moment, but the Wu District is under attack by the Reclaimed Lands! Too many of our forces were caught away from the battlefield, and we require urgent assistance from all those that would fight for the Wu District,” the man explained, looking to all those that had emerged in that time, “Since you are here with the pursuit of becoming our Heavenly Sword, it is your duty to fight for us!”
Not all were pleased with such a statement, but it was impossible to disagree with it. Whether they wished to benefit themselves or some other group, all those that did not come here for the sake of the Wu District alone understood that if they did attempt to claim their position, then they would need to work for the position.
All the others were perfectly fine with assisting the district that they had either been born in, or one that they had moved to and lived in for a long while. The only concern was that this battle would naturally come with a far greater amount of danger to them than any of the steps of the Selection of the Heavenly Masters they knew of, and there would be far fewer chances of any of the people in the Wu District being able to protect them from outside threats while not in controlled conditions. It was only natural for them to be concerned for their lives.
Nevertheless, it was hard for anyone involved to say no.
“This may be a disruption to our intended process, but it gives us the perfect opportunity for you to display your skills in a different setting to individual duels,” the man proceeded to say, stabbing his guandao into the ground to quietly provide himself with some additional support while he recovered his energy from the rush here, “Now, please prepare as quickly as you can, and we shall depart the moment that you are able!”
Most in the Selection of the Heavenly Masters were above the second and third realms, so for them, there was relatively little to take care of and little to prepare before they were able to leave. Those few that were not were able to handle their matters quickly enough, and so all one hundred of them were ready to depart before an hour was up, a fast time from a certain perspective.
Of course, when talking about battles and assaults on the borders of a large nation like Yi City, if one was to view it in a more accurate manner than as a large city, a single minute could lead to significant changes in the situation, and a lengthy journey back and forth from the Wu District combined with a delay of an entire hour meant that a great deal would be different by the time that the man wielding the guandao returned with reinforcements. Even before arriving anywhere near the scene, the Ascendant could reach the vague area of the battle with her spiritual perception and find that most of it had already passed.
There had been several thousand soldiers on both sides, with nearly twice as many on the side of the Reclaimed Lands, while the Wu District’s troops were, on average, eight stages above their opponents.
As a result, the number disparity was effectively corrected, and so the battle could proceed relatively evenly and smoothly. Instead of ending within a few minutes, as a fight might in the case of two sides that were vastly disparate in power and could use overwhelming force to obliterate the other, this one dragged on for quite a while, slowing down after the combatants began to run out of energy and were forced to turn to defence and retreating, even while knowing that their foes were in the same position and being able to do nothing about it.
Hence, the thousands that had fought shrunk roughly to a tenth of their original number, with most of the casualties having come from the initial few minutes. All that they were waiting for now was for the reinforcements from their side to arrive and finish off the other.
When they got nearer to this scene, Wei Yi had been standing near the back, and she was able to see the approaching forces of the enemy not only with her absurd spiritual perception, but also with her own eyes, the blue mist of the skies locking away her vision far from the end of the encroaching army. Unlike the reinforcements of the Wu District, which was only so large, containing mostly elite forces from the Selection of the Heavenly Masters and a bunch of other experts, the Reclaimed Lands were relying far more on numbers to claim an advantage. There were almost as many in the second army as there were in the first, and the overall strength of the legion was also similar.
‘Throwing away lives for a lengthy battle isn’t technically ideal, no matter how you look at it, but if they are able to provide me with the right amount of inspiration, then it should be no trouble at all to finish off all of the opponents and quickly take whatever land the Reclaimed Lands have stopped protecting thanks to their attack effort. I hope the other outside nations don’t join in, or else I might need to invoke a black sun to get rid of them,’ the Ascendant thought, ‘Wouldn’t it be significantly stronger now? I would need to be extremely careful with it…’
When she had just reached the fifth realm, her black sun had devoured much of the Ping District, mostly thanks to the plentiful energy fed to it, but it was still immense even had it only had the district itself to feed upon. Once it was empowered by the constant bonus from her marks and the linked channels, as well as the general development of her cultivation, the black sun would be larger and would grow more easily, leading to a far more devastating effect that would be harder to stop.
It was fortunate, then, that she did not intend to make use of it for now, as it would be significantly better to rely on her vast array of sword techniques instead in order to make a better impression on those from the Wu District that would be paying attention to her actions.
Still, in order for her to feel confident in discarding the sheer quantity of research material that this battlefield offered, she would need to either get something from it, or she’d require the certainty that she would not be getting anything. Both of those should not require much more than ten minutes of combat at most, provided that both sides put their all into it, although that would only count once the forces from both sides arrived to reinvigorate the battlefield. Whether they showcased swordsmanship or use of other equipment, it would assist the Weapon Dao, and once that was done, the Sword Dao, Spear Dao and whatever else one might include beneath the Weapon Dao would be easier to comprehend.
Actually, this would be better than watching twice as many battles over in Yi City alone, as the kinds of combat techniques available there would be different, if only due to the extreme separation between the two nations, and the presumed absence of the Greats within them. Their overall resources weren’t at all comparable, with all of the outside nations combined being significantly poorer in almost all regards, but when left on their own to develop their own ways, unique combat methods were bound to arise and be developed to great heights.
There might be a vast number of differences between them, but one thing that ultimately connected them was the origin from the heavens, or perhaps the heavens’ comprehension of them through the people of the world. Provided that she was able to understand that which was provided to her, she would greatly expand her understanding of the Dao she was seeking to study.
In any other situation, especially after she had been reprimanded for delaying things and not getting the fight over with only nine days ago, she would be a little hesitant to stay back this time, but luckily she was not the only one who wished to do so. Out of the few that did, she was also the one with the most convincing argument, as she made the case for holding back, observing the tactics of the enemy, then using her using cultivation in conjunction with her other methods to quickly cut down the opposing army before their side had to suffer losses that were too significant for them to accept. This argument had issues, sure, but nobody was in the right state of mind to go through it in detail.
Thus, she stood with her arms folded – doing so as often as she could since she rather enjoyed the pose after all of the time that she had been unable to pull it off reasonably – and watched, focusing to an extent on Wu Chao and his rush into the fray.
Even without words or scanning his mind, it was very obvious what he intended to do by showcasing his anchors blatantly and pulling out a sword before he even got near the battlefield. He wished to make his case for why he would be the best Heavenly Sword, and, at the very least, he genuinely believed that this was the case, so he wasn’t actively deceiving anyone other than himself by doing something like this.
So long as he beat his enemies easily and showcased the skills that others might be unable to acquire, he might well become the only reasonable candidate, worming his way into the Wu District.
‘Fortunately for us all, that piece of shit is not going to have a good time. The planar energy at the battlefield is odd, and the number of dead is also off based on the capabilities currently being showcased by both sides,’ Wei Yi analysed, allowing her killing intent to surge into the air and thus limiting its damage to merely blowing on her robes as if she stood in a heavy wing, ‘There is something that they can do that is more dangerous to those in higher realms, and I want to see it before I do anything else.’
In the meanwhile, she would naturally stick to her primary goal. The moment that she was able to observe the battlefield, she did so, scanning it in great detail and paying attention to every single thing that she could spot. Every combat skill, every movements, every success and failure on both sides was seen and stored within her mental domain, adding to the dome that she had compressed yet again.
Any individual action would not lead her to the truth that she pursued, but everything was combined and she got to see every possibility, perhaps the truth would finally emerge, and she could claim some aspect of a Dao for her own, ideally without the heavens getting their greasy fingers into her head in the form of whatever supplementary knowledge was needed for a vision state to form, and for her to see reality through the lens of the Weapon Dao.
Wu Chao ran quickly and in a straight line, unconcerned that he would be hit by anything while doing so. At first, he was not noticed by his enemies, but once he got closer, roughly having a third of the initial gap to cross, there were finally some enemy soldiers that realised his potential danger.
At once, a series of arrows were fired in his direction, as most soldiers simply lacked the ability to manifest planar constructs at a sufficiently distance to affect him without a physical projectile. They were shot with little coordination, each archer drawing their bows and releasing the arrows without any outside guidance, and thus they did not so much resemble a sheet of metal points as they did a swarm of insects, heading at great speed towards their target, ready to impale it and leech the blood from within, sapping it from the body and leaving it on the ground to dry and be forgotten… The Ascendant shook her head and focused.
Depending on how one looked at this, it did indeed make them more difficult to block in one go, but they were dealing with one of the Greats, the perpetual plague upon Yi City.
Once the arrows neared him, Wu Chao did not slow down, but instead willed his anchors into action, all thirty-nine of them condensing energy before themselves. A large ball of metallic light formed in front of all of them, shooting out quickly and being replaced a moment after, with the speeding light forming itself into the shape of a lengthy sword in a swinging, arcing motion.
They swung at the arrows once they neared them, cutting through them in various placed and splitting some apart, while others were almost perfectly cut in half by the flying energy blade. Most could separate and stop as many as twelve individual arrows in a single cut, which one might presume to be insufficient when dealing with several volleys of arrows fired by several dozen archers, some of whom were even able to fire as many as five in a single go – albeit with accuracy that could only be described as poor, since guiding the arrows with planar energy could not be done from a great distance at their realm – but the speed at which the point beam lights reformed and shot out once again meant that he had a curtain of blades protecting him. To pierce it, one would either need to overpower the planar constructs, a difficult task due to the thirty-nine anchors, or they would have to prevent them from being manifested in the first place.
If one was to put aside the fact that the anchors couldn’t be retrieved into the dantian due to some flaw of the cultivation method used by the Greats, it was still possible to suppress them to the extent that they could no longer function. Wei Yi would have helped out by destroying one or two of the anchors without drawing much attention to herself, but it was almost guaranteed that she’d be found out no matter how hard she attempted to hide it.
All that would need to be considered would be the fact that she was the only one with both the ability and the significant motive to actively hinder the Great Family member from the side of Yi City and the Wu District. If the battle was significantly more heated and there were far more aggressors capable of tackling Wu Chao and repelling him – like if the equivalent of a Patriarch came in from the so-called Reclaimed Lands to attack Yi City – then she might be able to get away with it so long as she did not do the deed herself. She could provide an opening for one of the Great Family member’s opponents, let him be hit, then strike back to benefit the Wu District overall.
While she was pondering that, alongside all of her other deliberations on Dao, Wu Chao neared those that had fired arrows at him, having ceased after some time and switched to their weapons while preparing to confront him in close combat. They presumed that the planar construct swords would only be effective against small projectiles.
Perhaps it didn’t need to be stated, but they were completely wrong about that.
As soon as they got near enough for the planar point beam blades to last long enough to strike at their foes, rather than the arrows that no longer flew towards them, those blades instead shot through them, slicing them apart and shredding some into a number of chunks. Blood flew everywhere, covering the ground where it was not already crimson from the previous conflict, and adding on to the pool of blood and viscera where the wounds of battle had already torn the earth. Of course, none of the blood reached the one that was spilling it so readily.
She must have left an impression on him, for after he killed those few dozens, Wu Chao turned to her and grinned, his expression obviously proclaiming his superiority.
‘You can’t even do better, can you, Ascendant?’ he seemed to be saying.
In response, she quietly mouthed something back and did her best to prevent her killing intent from harming anyone in the Wu District’s camp.
‘Go suck a dick,’ she said in reply. Fortunately, the language of the Planar Continents meant that the individual pronunciations of the words were almost impossible to mistake, ensuring that anyone with eyes could make out what she was saying even with no experience in lip reading whatsoever.
He didn’t quite appreciate it and turned away very swiftly.
Wu Chao returned to slaughtering the foes of Yi City, and the Ascendant returned to watching her surroundings carefully, paying attention to every single technique being used in the battles so far. The opposing legions were nearing, so she was also nearing the most significant part of her observation process, meaning that she needed to dismiss the Wu District’s forces from bothering her and focused the entirety of her attention onto this merger of two forces into a battle that should have ended already.
The first wave from the Reclaimed Lands, the one that had attacked the Wu District and forced them to call for reinforcements, was mostly taken out by those who came from the Selection of the Heavenly Masters, with the Great Family member taking on two thirds of that wave on his own. Still, the extermination effort was a minute or two too slow, and so, the moment that the forces of the Reclaimed Lands were able to participate, they were able to save half a hundred of their own with a blast of planar constructs and physical projectiles that flew into the battlefield and forced the Wu District’s forces to retreat.
Much as she expected, once the powerful arrived with all of their energy still within them, the Ascendant got to witness their most unique methods in play.
The first one, and one she was interested in right away, was performed by a number of cultivators in the fourth realm. They had arrived in a small bunch, and once they found a large cluster of people to target, they paused and entwined their hands, lowering their heads and focusing their wills and energy together.
All of it was launched into the air, stabilising in the sky, and after it sat there for just a little while, it suddenly bulged and turned from a transparent mass of planar energy into a sphere of flame. From it, numerous small splinters of flame broke off, sitting beside it while the mass of flame itself gathered heat, transforming from a soft orange to a crimson, then descended into a powerful blue that burned the very air around it.
Then, as abruptly as the blue colour appeared, the mass fell from the sky, gaining speed at an extreme pace. It caught the targets of the ball off-guard, for the sudden acceleration was at odds with the seemingly slow nature of the technique, and crashed into them with an explosion of azure flame.
In one instant, the lives of twenty were gone, and the lives of thirty more were endangered as the blue fire flew outwards and scorched their flesh, melted their armour, and boiled anything that it could not affect in the previous two ways. Most of these effects couldn’t quite kill anyone above the second realm, which made up the majority of the surviving Wu District forces and the reinforcements from the Selection, but they still forced concentrated groups to disperse and focus on healing themselves rather than investing their effort into attacks.
Making things even worse for them was the following barrage of small flame particles that followed, falling a moment after the main sphere. None had anything resembling the overall power of the sphere, but those embers were still sufficient to harm and incapacitate someone so long as they landed at the right spot and damaged the right part of the body. If nothing else, it could disable one’s genitalia easily.
‘Ah, there it is. Exactly as I expected, a perfect demonstration of ineptitude and genius at the same time,’ Wei Yi thought, adding the enormous ball of flame into her arsenal with just a casual glance, ‘The ineptitude is in the fact that it took six cultivators in the fourth realm to create this, and the genius is the sheer quantity of energy that they were able to unleash, and the speed at which that ball of flame could travel. With the right preparation… yeah, I will make some kind of static defence out of that, I will most certainly do that when I get the opportunity.’
To prevent things from ending too quickly, she softly breathed out and released a vast quantity of lifeforce from her remaining pool, accumulated thanks to the constant farming she had been doing when she had access to the Kong Prison Realm. It flowed towards all those that fought for the Wu District – avoiding Wu Chao for obvious reasons – and prompted hurried regeneration of their flesh and mind, allowing them to re-enter the battle right away. They knew not who helped them, but they wouldn’t complain.
Meanwhile, the Ascendant continued to watch and ponder, occasionally disabling those attacks that would not contribute to her deliberation, but did little to change the overall course of battle.
It was not yet time.
V5C48: The Start of Battle
For nine days, the Ascendant did not move, breathing being the only action that shifted her body even a little, her chest rising and falling at a constant pace.
From the outside, one might assume her to be some kind of calm and silent monk, her long crimson hair flowing from her head and residing just a millimetre above the floor, supported by her spiritual will while it was untied. Her robes were loose, revealing a part of her star metal scale armour covering her chest and showcasing little more than that.
On the inside, her mental domain was becoming even more full and absurd.
Her initial arrangement of sword techniques and strikes had initially covered the entirety of the sky, but now that she had shrunk them down and arranged them a little more carefully, she had been able to make those images occupy only a hundredth of the dome that should have been the sky – and instead filled the rest with even more conceptual manifestations. It was rather overwhelming to look at for the first few moments, but she got used to it and immediately began to work, putting together the images of every single movements in every single combat technique and skill that she had accumulated over the years.
Those that she had personally cultivated and used more than once or twice occupied roughly a fifth of the dome of her mental domain, and the rest was filled with… well, the rest of what she had.
From the moment that she had any memories, she had seen various fights and combatants, and since the exact level of combat techniques didn’t matter when she was attempting to figure out a whole Dao, she included every single one of those within her mental arrangement. Experts and complete novices alike were put together into the most complete image of combat and weaponry usage that she could possibly create, techniques from as far back as the age of the Master of Yi City sitting alongside those that she had invented only a few months ago.
With these images overhead, she had spent nine days in the outside world simply pondering them, and within her mental domain, she had used up what felt like an entire year simply staring at all of them and trying to find what it was that united every single one of them.
Needless to say, she had not yet arrived at a satisfactory conclusion. There was still something missing, and to vastly shorten her dilemma to a few words, she believed that she needed to see a little more practical demonstrations of everything she was trying to sum up instead of simply looking at them within her mind. This was not due to her mind being particularly unfaithful to reality, at least most of the time, but because it wasn’t reality, no matter how closely she could recreate it.
Theoretically, if someone else was to enter it and stare at what she presented, then they would be able to comprehend the same Dao that she did, and likely along the same paths. However, Dao that she did not yet understand, with or without the support of the heavens, would not be found within, no matter how hard she tried to invent them for herself.
In the outside world, all that the heavens knew, she could obtain, and all that the people figured out, she could borrow as well. Of course, there was one other alternative, and that was a spatial realm, where Laws and Dao were needed in order for them to contain life or anything. There, she would have any Dao and Laws invested into the spatial realm to learn about, and then any that might have developed as a result of the things that had existed there, living or otherwise. In theory, so long as a spatial realm contained a certain ecosystem or particular types of matter for long enough, a semblance of a Dao would need to form and be readable from it, provided that one knew where to look and what to pay attention to.
It was quite a shame that spatial realms weren’t particularly common in the modern world, and that it would take quite a while for them to be made and stabilised even once the eighth realm could be reached by the strongest, and the seventh realm was no longer out of the reach of the more ordinary.
Once she returned to the Kong Prison Realm, she would be sure to examine it in greater detail, and she had already attempted to scan through her memories of the Kong Holy Grounds without too much success, but she had little left beside that. Testament would be a good option, but she would only be able to come there once the battle against the Greats was approaching its zenith, so she could hardly expect to use it for any kind of breakthrough in a Dao before the next step of the Selection of the Heavenly Masters. Other than that, she knew of no other spatial realm she could access, or even find.
‘So, I have a whole bunch of images that aren’t helpful, a number of spatial realms I can’t do anything with, and a Dao that doesn’t want to be figured out. Grand. What would help the most is someone coming along to interrupt my contemplation, and… well, they already are, since my spiritual perception has never stopped monitoring everything around me and I can see them approaching…’
She stabilised all of the mental projections within her mental domain and exited. Her hair landed softly on the ground as she did so, although it was unable to pick up even a single particle of dust unless she put in a great deal of effort into doing so. With the aid of her physique energy, her body was perfectly clean and healthy, making it easy to rise from her seated position and brush a number of hairs back, out of her line of vision.
‘It hasn’t really stopped growing, even with my attempts to minimize that… It sure has a whole lot of vitality, doesn’t it?’ she noted, as the longest hairs still reached the ground even while she stood.
A moment later, she did not receive a knock on the door, but instead felt a rumble that shook every single contemplation chamber, forcing a large number of people out of their thoughts and meditation. Many were immediately upset at this, but then also realised that there would not be such a disturbance without some good reason, prompting them to rise and head to the door as well.
Wei Yi was still the first out, and she was the one that caused the figure, a middle-aged man dressed in armour and holding onto a guandao while a spare sword sat on his back, to begin his address to all the people present.
“I am sorry to interrupt all of you at such an important moment, but the Wu District is under attack by the Reclaimed Lands! Too many of our forces were caught away from the battlefield, and we require urgent assistance from all those that would fight for the Wu District,” the man explained, looking to all those that had emerged in that time, “Since you are here with the pursuit of becoming our Heavenly Sword, it is your duty to fight for us!”
Not all were pleased with such a statement, but it was impossible to disagree with it. Whether they wished to benefit themselves or some other group, all those that did not come here for the sake of the Wu District alone understood that if they did attempt to claim their position, then they would need to work for the position.
All the others were perfectly fine with assisting the district that they had either been born in, or one that they had moved to and lived in for a long while. The only concern was that this battle would naturally come with a far greater amount of danger to them than any of the steps of the Selection of the Heavenly Masters they knew of, and there would be far fewer chances of any of the people in the Wu District being able to protect them from outside threats while not in controlled conditions. It was only natural for them to be concerned for their lives.
Nevertheless, it was hard for anyone involved to say no.
“This may be a disruption to our intended process, but it gives us the perfect opportunity for you to display your skills in a different setting to individual duels,” the man proceeded to say, stabbing his guandao into the ground to quietly provide himself with some additional support while he recovered his energy from the rush here, “Now, please prepare as quickly as you can, and we shall depart the moment that you are able!”
Most in the Selection of the Heavenly Masters were above the second and third realms, so for them, there was relatively little to take care of and little to prepare before they were able to leave. Those few that were not were able to handle their matters quickly enough, and so all one hundred of them were ready to depart before an hour was up, a fast time from a certain perspective.
Of course, when talking about battles and assaults on the borders of a large nation like Yi City, if one was to view it in a more accurate manner than as a large city, a single minute could lead to significant changes in the situation, and a lengthy journey back and forth from the Wu District combined with a delay of an entire hour meant that a great deal would be different by the time that the man wielding the guandao returned with reinforcements. Even before arriving anywhere near the scene, the Ascendant could reach the vague area of the battle with her spiritual perception and find that most of it had already passed.
There had been several thousand soldiers on both sides, with nearly twice as many on the side of the Reclaimed Lands, while the Wu District’s troops were, on average, eight stages above their opponents.
As a result, the number disparity was effectively corrected, and so the battle could proceed relatively evenly and smoothly. Instead of ending within a few minutes, as a fight might in the case of two sides that were vastly disparate in power and could use overwhelming force to obliterate the other, this one dragged on for quite a while, slowing down after the combatants began to run out of energy and were forced to turn to defence and retreating, even while knowing that their foes were in the same position and being able to do nothing about it.
Hence, the thousands that had fought shrunk roughly to a tenth of their original number, with most of the casualties having come from the initial few minutes. All that they were waiting for now was for the reinforcements from their side to arrive and finish off the other.
When they got nearer to this scene, Wei Yi had been standing near the back, and she was able to see the approaching forces of the enemy not only with her absurd spiritual perception, but also with her own eyes, the blue mist of the skies locking away her vision far from the end of the encroaching army. Unlike the reinforcements of the Wu District, which was only so large, containing mostly elite forces from the Selection of the Heavenly Masters and a bunch of other experts, the Reclaimed Lands were relying far more on numbers to claim an advantage. There were almost as many in the second army as there were in the first, and the overall strength of the legion was also similar.
‘Throwing away lives for a lengthy battle isn’t technically ideal, no matter how you look at it, but if they are able to provide me with the right amount of inspiration, then it should be no trouble at all to finish off all of the opponents and quickly take whatever land the Reclaimed Lands have stopped protecting thanks to their attack effort. I hope the other outside nations don’t join in, or else I might need to invoke a black sun to get rid of them,’ the Ascendant thought, ‘Wouldn’t it be significantly stronger now? I would need to be extremely careful with it…’
When she had just reached the fifth realm, her black sun had devoured much of the Ping District, mostly thanks to the plentiful energy fed to it, but it was still immense even had it only had the district itself to feed upon. Once it was empowered by the constant bonus from her marks and the linked channels, as well as the general development of her cultivation, the black sun would be larger and would grow more easily, leading to a far more devastating effect that would be harder to stop.
It was fortunate, then, that she did not intend to make use of it for now, as it would be significantly better to rely on her vast array of sword techniques instead in order to make a better impression on those from the Wu District that would be paying attention to her actions.
Still, in order for her to feel confident in discarding the sheer quantity of research material that this battlefield offered, she would need to either get something from it, or she’d require the certainty that she would not be getting anything. Both of those should not require much more than ten minutes of combat at most, provided that both sides put their all into it, although that would only count once the forces from both sides arrived to reinvigorate the battlefield. Whether they showcased swordsmanship or use of other equipment, it would assist the Weapon Dao, and once that was done, the Sword Dao, Spear Dao and whatever else one might include beneath the Weapon Dao would be easier to comprehend.
Actually, this would be better than watching twice as many battles over in Yi City alone, as the kinds of combat techniques available there would be different, if only due to the extreme separation between the two nations, and the presumed absence of the Greats within them. Their overall resources weren’t at all comparable, with all of the outside nations combined being significantly poorer in almost all regards, but when left on their own to develop their own ways, unique combat methods were bound to arise and be developed to great heights.
There might be a vast number of differences between them, but one thing that ultimately connected them was the origin from the heavens, or perhaps the heavens’ comprehension of them through the people of the world. Provided that she was able to understand that which was provided to her, she would greatly expand her understanding of the Dao she was seeking to study.
In any other situation, especially after she had been reprimanded for delaying things and not getting the fight over with only nine days ago, she would be a little hesitant to stay back this time, but luckily she was not the only one who wished to do so. Out of the few that did, she was also the one with the most convincing argument, as she made the case for holding back, observing the tactics of the enemy, then using her using cultivation in conjunction with her other methods to quickly cut down the opposing army before their side had to suffer losses that were too significant for them to accept. This argument had issues, sure, but nobody was in the right state of mind to go through it in detail.
Thus, she stood with her arms folded – doing so as often as she could since she rather enjoyed the pose after all of the time that she had been unable to pull it off reasonably – and watched, focusing to an extent on Wu Chao and his rush into the fray.
Even without words or scanning his mind, it was very obvious what he intended to do by showcasing his anchors blatantly and pulling out a sword before he even got near the battlefield. He wished to make his case for why he would be the best Heavenly Sword, and, at the very least, he genuinely believed that this was the case, so he wasn’t actively deceiving anyone other than himself by doing something like this.
So long as he beat his enemies easily and showcased the skills that others might be unable to acquire, he might well become the only reasonable candidate, worming his way into the Wu District.
‘Fortunately for us all, that piece of shit is not going to have a good time. The planar energy at the battlefield is odd, and the number of dead is also off based on the capabilities currently being showcased by both sides,’ Wei Yi analysed, allowing her killing intent to surge into the air and thus limiting its damage to merely blowing on her robes as if she stood in a heavy wing, ‘There is something that they can do that is more dangerous to those in higher realms, and I want to see it before I do anything else.’
In the meanwhile, she would naturally stick to her primary goal. The moment that she was able to observe the battlefield, she did so, scanning it in great detail and paying attention to every single thing that she could spot. Every combat skill, every movements, every success and failure on both sides was seen and stored within her mental domain, adding to the dome that she had compressed yet again.
Any individual action would not lead her to the truth that she pursued, but everything was combined and she got to see every possibility, perhaps the truth would finally emerge, and she could claim some aspect of a Dao for her own, ideally without the heavens getting their greasy fingers into her head in the form of whatever supplementary knowledge was needed for a vision state to form, and for her to see reality through the lens of the Weapon Dao.
Wu Chao ran quickly and in a straight line, unconcerned that he would be hit by anything while doing so. At first, he was not noticed by his enemies, but once he got closer, roughly having a third of the initial gap to cross, there were finally some enemy soldiers that realised his potential danger.
At once, a series of arrows were fired in his direction, as most soldiers simply lacked the ability to manifest planar constructs at a sufficiently distance to affect him without a physical projectile. They were shot with little coordination, each archer drawing their bows and releasing the arrows without any outside guidance, and thus they did not so much resemble a sheet of metal points as they did a swarm of insects, heading at great speed towards their target, ready to impale it and leech the blood from within, sapping it from the body and leaving it on the ground to dry and be forgotten… The Ascendant shook her head and focused.
Depending on how one looked at this, it did indeed make them more difficult to block in one go, but they were dealing with one of the Greats, the perpetual plague upon Yi City.
Once the arrows neared him, Wu Chao did not slow down, but instead willed his anchors into action, all thirty-nine of them condensing energy before themselves. A large ball of metallic light formed in front of all of them, shooting out quickly and being replaced a moment after, with the speeding light forming itself into the shape of a lengthy sword in a swinging, arcing motion.
They swung at the arrows once they neared them, cutting through them in various placed and splitting some apart, while others were almost perfectly cut in half by the flying energy blade. Most could separate and stop as many as twelve individual arrows in a single cut, which one might presume to be insufficient when dealing with several volleys of arrows fired by several dozen archers, some of whom were even able to fire as many as five in a single go – albeit with accuracy that could only be described as poor, since guiding the arrows with planar energy could not be done from a great distance at their realm – but the speed at which the point beam lights reformed and shot out once again meant that he had a curtain of blades protecting him. To pierce it, one would either need to overpower the planar constructs, a difficult task due to the thirty-nine anchors, or they would have to prevent them from being manifested in the first place.
If one was to put aside the fact that the anchors couldn’t be retrieved into the dantian due to some flaw of the cultivation method used by the Greats, it was still possible to suppress them to the extent that they could no longer function. Wei Yi would have helped out by destroying one or two of the anchors without drawing much attention to herself, but it was almost guaranteed that she’d be found out no matter how hard she attempted to hide it.
All that would need to be considered would be the fact that she was the only one with both the ability and the significant motive to actively hinder the Great Family member from the side of Yi City and the Wu District. If the battle was significantly more heated and there were far more aggressors capable of tackling Wu Chao and repelling him – like if the equivalent of a Patriarch came in from the so-called Reclaimed Lands to attack Yi City – then she might be able to get away with it so long as she did not do the deed herself. She could provide an opening for one of the Great Family member’s opponents, let him be hit, then strike back to benefit the Wu District overall.
While she was pondering that, alongside all of her other deliberations on Dao, Wu Chao neared those that had fired arrows at him, having ceased after some time and switched to their weapons while preparing to confront him in close combat. They presumed that the planar construct swords would only be effective against small projectiles.
Perhaps it didn’t need to be stated, but they were completely wrong about that.
As soon as they got near enough for the planar point beam blades to last long enough to strike at their foes, rather than the arrows that no longer flew towards them, those blades instead shot through them, slicing them apart and shredding some into a number of chunks. Blood flew everywhere, covering the ground where it was not already crimson from the previous conflict, and adding on to the pool of blood and viscera where the wounds of battle had already torn the earth. Of course, none of the blood reached the one that was spilling it so readily.
She must have left an impression on him, for after he killed those few dozens, Wu Chao turned to her and grinned, his expression obviously proclaiming his superiority.
‘You can’t even do better, can you, Ascendant?’ he seemed to be saying.
In response, she quietly mouthed something back and did her best to prevent her killing intent from harming anyone in the Wu District’s camp.
‘Go suck a dick,’ she said in reply. Fortunately, the language of the Planar Continents meant that the individual pronunciations of the words were almost impossible to mistake, ensuring that anyone with eyes could make out what she was saying even with no experience in lip reading whatsoever.
He didn’t quite appreciate it and turned away very swiftly.
Wu Chao returned to slaughtering the foes of Yi City, and the Ascendant returned to watching her surroundings carefully, paying attention to every single technique being used in the battles so far. The opposing legions were nearing, so she was also nearing the most significant part of her observation process, meaning that she needed to dismiss the Wu District’s forces from bothering her and focused the entirety of her attention onto this merger of two forces into a battle that should have ended already.
The first wave from the Reclaimed Lands, the one that had attacked the Wu District and forced them to call for reinforcements, was mostly taken out by those who came from the Selection of the Heavenly Masters, with the Great Family member taking on two thirds of that wave on his own. Still, the extermination effort was a minute or two too slow, and so, the moment that the forces of the Reclaimed Lands were able to participate, they were able to save half a hundred of their own with a blast of planar constructs and physical projectiles that flew into the battlefield and forced the Wu District’s forces to retreat.
Much as she expected, once the powerful arrived with all of their energy still within them, the Ascendant got to witness their most unique methods in play.
The first one, and one she was interested in right away, was performed by a number of cultivators in the fourth realm. They had arrived in a small bunch, and once they found a large cluster of people to target, they paused and entwined their hands, lowering their heads and focusing their wills and energy together.
All of it was launched into the air, stabilising in the sky, and after it sat there for just a little while, it suddenly bulged and turned from a transparent mass of planar energy into a sphere of flame. From it, numerous small splinters of flame broke off, sitting beside it while the mass of flame itself gathered heat, transforming from a soft orange to a crimson, then descended into a powerful blue that burned the very air around it.
Then, as abruptly as the blue colour appeared, the mass fell from the sky, gaining speed at an extreme pace. It caught the targets of the ball off-guard, for the sudden acceleration was at odds with the seemingly slow nature of the technique, and crashed into them with an explosion of azure flame.
In one instant, the lives of twenty were gone, and the lives of thirty more were endangered as the blue fire flew outwards and scorched their flesh, melted their armour, and boiled anything that it could not affect in the previous two ways. Most of these effects couldn’t quite kill anyone above the second realm, which made up the majority of the surviving Wu District forces and the reinforcements from the Selection, but they still forced concentrated groups to disperse and focus on healing themselves rather than investing their effort into attacks.
Making things even worse for them was the following barrage of small flame particles that followed, falling a moment after the main sphere. None had anything resembling the overall power of the sphere, but those embers were still sufficient to harm and incapacitate someone so long as they landed at the right spot and damaged the right part of the body. If nothing else, it could disable one’s genitalia easily.
‘Ah, there it is. Exactly as I expected, a perfect demonstration of ineptitude and genius at the same time,’ Wei Yi thought, adding the enormous ball of flame into her arsenal with just a casual glance, ‘The ineptitude is in the fact that it took six cultivators in the fourth realm to create this, and the genius is the sheer quantity of energy that they were able to unleash, and the speed at which that ball of flame could travel. With the right preparation… yeah, I will make some kind of static defence out of that, I will most certainly do that when I get the opportunity.’
To prevent things from ending too quickly, she softly breathed out and released a vast quantity of lifeforce from her remaining pool, accumulated thanks to the constant farming she had been doing when she had access to the Kong Prison Realm. It flowed towards all those that fought for the Wu District – avoiding Wu Chao for obvious reasons – and prompted hurried regeneration of their flesh and mind, allowing them to re-enter the battle right away. They knew not who helped them, but they wouldn’t complain.
Meanwhile, the Ascendant continued to watch and ponder, occasionally disabling those attacks that would not contribute to her deliberation, but did little to change the overall course of battle.
It was not yet time.
