V5C50: Accelerating the Selections
After the primary commander of the army from the Reclaimed Lands fell, it was only natural that the battle could not continue for much longer. The rest of the opposing forces were taken out by those who could still fight, with the Ascendant finishing off those in her vicinity, primarily the pit that she had made for dramatic effect and experimentation. Once they were done and the battlefield was looted, with the Ascendant doing the most of that as well as she could and had the spatial storage capacity to effectively grab everything she wanted, they gathered at the far side of the battlefield.
There, some of the Reclaimed Lands were visible even for those with relatively weaker vision, with a number of towns close to one another.
Although some soldiers and guards remained there, their numbers were pitiful in comparison to the force that had just been defeated, and perhaps it was no surprise that the Wu District saw an opportunity in this. As districts go, it had a closer border with an outside nation than many, and they would be too hard-pressed to expand their territory just a little bit, claiming a region of the former lands of Yi City and finally allowing it to expand after thousands of years of decay and stagnation.
Wei Yi had no opposition, and, fortunately enough, Wu Chao did not have any significant problems either, his attention being focused on his own wellbeing. Thus, the army went enough and headed straight for the towns, surrounding them with their superior forces and quickly overwhelming every single combatant that intended to resist.
Most did not, as their priority was the safety of their land and property, but the few that did were not killed on the spot, instead being restrained and put into appropriate spaces within the towns. There, they would be interrogated and informed of their fate at a later time, with a number of soldiers from the Wu District staying behind to keep an eye on the situation. The rest would return, with many returning once they had rested and recovered from their injuries on the battlefield. If they did not do this, then they would have the numbers needed to keep a firm grip on some of the doubly Reclaimed Lands, but their actual strength would be inferior to that of a paper tiger, and they could be defeated in no time by whatever powers remained in the Reclaimed Lands.
Obviously, the people from the Selection of the Heavenly Masters, whether they were from the Wu District or not, would not be going back right away, as the Selection was still a priority for them and the district alike. In part, the reason for the attack on the Wu District was likely due to the lack of a Master.
The absence of a Patriarch was also significant, but it seemed to have been hidden better.
It was unclear how much the Reclaimed Lands knew of the Wu District’s actions and state, but the knowledge that an important and powerful figure had died would be certain to reach them one way or another. From there, the leaders of the nation would know that someone else of a similar power would rise eventually, and would thus plan the attack as quickly as possible in order to take advantage of the situation while they still could.
Such an approach could well have led to not all forces in the land agreeing. That would certainly explain why there was only one power at the level of the sixth realm attempting to move into the Wu District’s lands, when an outside nation would require at least a few at such a level in order to have a chance of remaining as one. At the time that they broke away, there were most certainly greater figures amongst them, so it would only make sense for there to still be a few at the level of the Patriarchs, since their methods and power should have passed down more efficiently than in Yi City.
Provided that those forces learned of the loss of one of their own, they might have some mixed feelings regarding the loss of a portion of their lands. On one hand, there would be one less competitor for ultimate power in the nation, and on the other, they might be a little upset at the sudden conquering of a portion of their lands without any questions asked.
It was for that reason that the Wu District limited itself to taking only a small portion of the Reclaimed Lands. There was no guarantee that it would avoid a forceful retaliation, but it would surely lessen it, and it would make it significantly easier to split the nation apart or conquer the entirety of it in the future, when the district’s state was a little better than now. When they had a Patriarch – or, as Wei Yi would have it, a temporary but incredibly powerful Matriarch – and a Heavenly Sword, they could safely go out and take more land. Once Yi City itself was in a better state, then there would be no challenge in taking on the closest outside nations as a united whole, rather than the current broken shell.
However, that was unlikely to be within the expectations of the Wu District for the moment, as that was primarily what the Ascendant was thinking about while waiting for the continuation of the Selection of the Heavenly Sword.
Luckily, not long after they had returned and had an hour to rest and recover, the five reappeared at the Master’s Square and looked at those that remained.
The conflict had claimed a few lives despite the attempts of most of Wu District’s people present at the battlefield to prevent such a thing from happening. Generally, those that perished were those that only had an advantage in one-on-one encounters, and were thus easily overwhelmed by numbers and felled without extreme effort on the part of their enemies. Two had also fled early into the battle, and that left the Selection with eighty-three candidates.
Wei Yi remained, Wu Chao remained, albeit in a terrible mood, and the man from the Wu District, the one that had a vision state, also remained. Although not everyone understood that they were the primary candidates, they were aware that at least one of them was most certainly in that list. The display that the Ascendant had provided for them at the battlefield did lead to many including her in that list, but there were some that considered it unlikely for the skills she displayed to function without planar energy.
They weren’t wrong, for the moment. While she relied on her killing intent to manifest Edge Replication without requiring any movement, or needed to invoke the Earth Dao combined with the Weapon Dao on fragments of earth infused with planar energy, she did not yet have a Weapon or Sword Dao that she could manifest without any form of planar energy – for now, at least.
“It was not intended for you to participate in a major battle with the lands outside Yi City’s borders, but since it occurred, we will proceed onto our next step earlier than originally intended,” the woman, possibly named Wu Er if the naming scheme for the five was consistent, “Tomorrow, you shall battle once more, and it shall be done in accordance with our judgement of your performance, and who would best challenge both sides. It shall begin with those we see as the weakest, and then the victors shall challenge one another once more, with the victor remaining until we have a clear and definitive conclusion.”
It was incredibly fortunate that she was not going to be the first one to fight with anyone, since that would give her the right opportunity to further her development of the Dao and then defeat Wu Chao in such a manner that he would have zero opportunity to succeed. While fighting with naught but one’s own strength, without drawing upon any form of planar energy, and while keeping her strength down so that she was still competing in swordsmanship, she did not have a significant advantage. More important than that was the fact that they would be judged by the Wu District’s people, and they would wish to see attainment in swordsmanship.
The best example of this was the Sword Dao, and that could be exhibited without releasing her energy out into the world. With Edge Replication, she could make a sword out of the air itself so long as she drew upon her power of Dao, costing her only a few internal injuries, but she needed Full Success in the Weapon Dao in order to manifest something sufficiently impressive. Otherwise, it might just look like basic cheating with her planar energy, not at all what she needed to achieve with her effort.
Those present and alive weren’t idiots, so they understood what the announcement meant. The Wu District wished to accelerate their recruitment of a Heavenly Master, for there would otherwise be a greater number of steps than just more fights to determine who would enter such a significant position.
After all, if they were fine with just some fighting finishing things, then they could have let the first set of duels repeat, taking out half of the group each time, until the strongest two fought and concluded who would end up being the victor. At that point, they would have had a Heavenly Sword when the Reclaimed Lands invaded, and they could then have provided the Heavenly Sword with whatever resources they might need to advance their realm and further their strength in every way possible. The invasion would thus have been curbed much more easily.
If they had gotten Wei Yi involved, then she might well have created some kind of immense barrier around the Wu District alongside Yi City as a whole once she challenged the remnants of the Great Family’s forces. By the time that the Reclaimed Lands did invade, she would have gotten to the Ze District, and maybe some other district if she chose to visit them on the way.
Unfortunately, the Wu District’s leaders, however many of them were even left at the moment, did not have the foresight to do such a thing, and they must have failed to comprehend that she was easily their best option. With her sights set on the whole of Yi City, she wouldn’t keep her control tight over a district even if she was some terrible tyrant, but the Greats absolutely would now that she had riled them up. This would go on for some time, since they would need to prevent a similar form of rebellion.
Back onto what was actually happening, rather than what she wished had happened, the fact that she would need to stay around for a day longer was something she had already prepared for, so it wasn’t too bothersome. Wu Chao did not appear to have sent back any information yet, so it meant that there was no ticking clock for herself and the Greats to consider. In their case, it would be her return, and it would prompt a rapid destruction of all of her forces before she has a chance to join them and reclaim all of the resources and powers that she had accumulated. They might well even seek to claim or destroy the Kong Prison Realm, while they’re at it.
For her, the equivalent clock would obviously be the time necessary to prepare such an attack, which couldn’t be much longer than a few days. They might need some time to bring out one of their first generation members, but once they were present, there was no reason for them not to rush forth and obliterate all that stands in their way. For the moment, their power was simply unparalleled.
She would change that soon enough, but if she had to rush back now, she would have a worse chance.
Due to this, she naturally didn’t bring up any complaints, and instead gladly returned to the chambers offered to them previously for meditation and contemplation. This time, the focus was more on resting than thinking, but she did not need the former and would focus all the more on the latter, since her rapid breakthrough into the Great Stride stage with both the Weapon and Sword Dao meant that she was close to the next step as well, with only a little gap remaining on the path to Full Success, or the false version thereof.
The topic of the true Dao and true Dao stages had been on her mind while she was abusing the power of Dao to obliterate the army of the Reclaimed Lands, and she had concluded that naming the stages in the same way would only lead to confusion. As such, she had been trying to figure out good alternatives to the current framework, and had come up with nothing. Just like the first time she tried it, she knew too little about the true versions and attainment in Dao to make any guesses.
This was very different to when she had predicted the names of the killing will cultivation realms. There, she had been working with the known five realms of killing intent and all nine of spiritual will, as well as her personal observations. She knew that a weapon could be produced in the fourth realm, protection in the fifth, and the sixth was likely to affect the body – as it did, in the end – so progressing from there was relatively easy. It would have been stranger if killing will had taken a completely different path from the assumed progression of spiritual will on the part of the Silver Side’s scholars and thinkers.
All that she could assume was that the first true stage of attainment in a Dao would allow her to have a vision state of her own, and that was still the only thing she had come up with up to this point.
She wasn’t too disappointed with the lack of progress, as any significant revelation would have to come with either a breakthrough in a Dao or some massive chunk of information regarding the nature of the world as a whole, both of which would take up some time to fully understand and process. If she was distracted from becoming the Heavenly Sword of the Wu District, then the Dao revelation better be incredibly powerful to make up for that. If she attained a true stage of the Dao of Law – a true realm, perhaps – and could manipulate it freely, that would be sufficient.
It would also make it significantly more difficult to observe the Great Yi Family member not far from her. He was always looking a little suspicious, and now that he had been injured, he was clearly contemplating calling in his fellow leeches- Great Family members for aid.
For her, it would naturally not be ideal to see him invoke his methods and call in the strongest members of the Great families, even with her current strength. She might not have much of a challenge when it comes to defeating the second generation, much like when she made use of all her methods to obliterate the invading army that wished to challenge her Kong Prison Realm and Paragon, but she had not yet reached the level of being able to resolve the Reality Severance of the first generation.
Until she was able to handle that, there was no point in attempting to challenge them.
Of course, she did not think that the Greats were able to use something like Reality Severance easily, and without consequence, and she most certainly didn’t think that they would use something like it recklessly even if that was not the case. Her very being had been split in two, an arm somewhere far from her likely still surviving due to the plentiful vitality within her body. It might be impossible to fix without power at the eighth realm and above, which neither she nor the Greats had, at least as far as she was aware.
Hence, if they were to randomly use Reality Severance on everything that bothered them, they would inevitably fragment the world as a whole. Each cut passed through the air, possibly splitting that permanently, and they would touch the ground and others at times, so there would slowly be more and more gaps that could not be healed by anything, save for the heavens – and it may be that they can do nothing either. There was a significant difference between breaching and cutting space, and severing the very concept of something, and since all spatial tears were usually corrected right away by spatial spirits and the like, it would be very odd if the heavens did not consider such cuts to be a significant enough threat to address right away.
At the seventh realm, she would have some confidence in being able to stop any usage of Reality Severance and prevent it from striking her, and she would then have confidence in her ability to defeat one of the first generation members. Once she could kill one of them, she could kill two, three, and eventually all forty-eight of them, and then their threat would be removed.
The Great Leeches could be cleansed from the world, and the world could have a better chance.
‘In fact, the Great Leeches is a suitable name for that filth. They would just sap the world of all it has to offer, and if they wish to be great, then let them be great. They will be known as horrible things that should have never been allowed to be, and I hope that the people of the future, with or without my presence, will realise this and not revert to the mistakes of the past,’ the Ascendant thought, making sure to note down that name in her mind so that she could announce it when she had the chance to do so.
While Wu Chao wasn’t actively doing anything annoying, she had nothing else on the outside to focus on, so she kept her spiritual perception on the world and settled down for another day of intense pondering of everything she could think of.
It was hard to be sure of the exact level of productivity achieved by this day’s worth of effort, but she wouldn’t need to debate that for much longer, for those that were still in the Selections of the Heavenly Sword were all being gathered in the Master’s Square once again. There, they would battle, and there their ultimate status would be decided. As with the day before, the favourites of most present were obvious, and the list of expected winners was just as brief, although Wu Chao and Wei Yi had been climbing it.
Before, the strongest Wu family member, the one with a vision state, was mixed into the top three without much doubt, but after a day of thought, they concluded that it was very unlikely that he would indeed be the victor. This was an opinion shared even by those from the Wu District, for a few plain and straightforward reason.
On one hand, there was Wu Chao, a member of a Great Family. Most did not know of that position well enough to judge anything based on it, but they could tell that he was significantly more powerful and capable that the vast majority of cultivators they had ever met. From their previous observation of his combat ability, they know that his swordsmanship is also noteworthy, although it was too difficult to compare it to the overall level of swordsmanship of others in the selection with the minimal degree of pure swordsmanship demonstrated up to this point. It was very unlikely for a man to be so confident in the situation if he didn’t have something up his sleeve.
Then, there was Wei Yi. There weren’t many that could truly understand the extent of her abilities, since she was easily the least conventional in terms of the techniques and types of energy that she used. Most had no clue that killing intent, spiritual will, physique energy or bloodline power even existed, so it was nearly impossible for them to understand how it was that she could obliterate so many with so little effort at the battlefield.
She did demonstrate a great mastery of basic sword techniques when she had battled the young man during the first series of duels, but mastery of the basics did not translate directly to the overall ability in a battle.
After all, one could have a perfect understanding of how to swing a sword and block attacks, but when they would be faced with something specifically intended to deal with such simple things, they would need to step up to more complex manoeuvres to resolve their problems. At that point, even the most significant mastery of the basic movements would prove to be insufficient, as the right way to connect them into a perfect flow to defeat any opposing method is what one would need to comprehend instead. Still, there was a lot going for her, even if she lacked such abilities.
The first battle began and ended after a few minutes, and then the others proceeded afterwards. To prevent the strongest ones eliminating one another right away, and thus limiting their ability to compete properly at the second stage of these duels, the Wu District didn’t hide the fact that they were doing exactly this. Wei Yi, Wu Chao and the Wu District’s representative did not meet in battle.
While the Ascendant fought with some woman, the Great Leech representative met with a stronger individual from the Wu District, and the man with a vision state encountered an outsider who might have come from the Ze District, for he had two perfected stages despite only being in the fourth realm. Ultimately, in fights that did not benefit from planar cultivation, such a thing was not very useful, as he had not cultivated his body using that energy, and so all three of the most likely victors moved through to the next stage while their opponents did not. This time, they were not given the option of remaining, and were made to step away immediately, although they were permitted to watch.
Just like that, the total number of competitors shrunk down to forty-two, with one participant lacking an opponent and thus being permitted to stick around and instead be the first in the second set of duels.
From there, everything was incredibly straightforward. One by one, the weakest two remaining would fight, one would win and the other lose, and then the next opponent of a similar strength would arrive onto the arena.
Some would win a number of times, others would not, but it was almost inevitable that both sides would lose then and now, resulting in the two opponents gradually rising in power and ability. If that did not occur, then it would mean that there was a hidden gem amongst the weaker-looking combatants, and the Wu District would certainly not reject the victory of someone like that, even if they weren’t expecting it. Of course, what everyone believed they’d see is the eventual competition between the three strongest individuals present, and the methods that they could invoke.
Given that the man from the Wu District had a vision state, and that the Great Leeches had been around for a very long time, the Ascendant was expecting the final two or three battles to involve the Sword Dao in one shape or another. Whether they were all as able to use it as she was, they could also apply the knowledge granted to them to fight more effectively.
In a way, however, she was looking forward to witnessing proper usage of a Dao, even against herself.
Up to this point, she had not seen anyone being able to apply a Dao in any way beyond a vision state, and even then, it was likely the Xin District’s awakening of the soul that came with the awakening of the three vision states for the Soul, Spirit and Ghost Dao, or something along those lines. Given that children of the Xin District were able to survive without being shocked by such a different view of the world, it was probable that the vision states were significantly inferior to those of the Great Stride stage, or of a true Dao realm, only allowing them to see spirits and not truly comprehend what they were seeing through the lens of their appropriate Dao.
Forbidden skills were a form of Dao, too, provided that she understood them correctly. They could be classed as being under the combination of the Human Dao, and a secondary Dao that they attempt to invoke from within. Back at the Yi District, Chu Ling had a forbidden skill that invoked the Wood Dao from within the Human Dao, and Jiang Sheng’s Ice Demon’s Will invoked something like the Yin Dao or the Cold Dao from within the Human Dao. Yi Henghua’s Fairy of Dust skill was, despite its otherworldly nature, also a forbidden skill, and that invoked the Dust Dao.
That was not the best way to go about it, however, and thus they came with a great cost. The human aspect would get worn away and overwhelmed by the invoked Dao, and so Chu Ling was bound to her Timeless Grove, while Jiang Sheng transformed into a cold entity that would not be called human if he had progressed in the forbidden skill further. Yi Henghua went mad from the combination of the otherworldly gift and her rapid transformation into dust as she overworked her cultivation method.
It could be seen as them having fragments of a Dao, or as them being tools of the Human Dao being used to an extreme, but the overall point was that she had little to learn from them in regard to Dao. Her perspective differed greatly, and so she would only muddle her understanding with the interpretation of others.
This was the unfortunate nature of Dao, as far as she understood it, and she would persevere with it while she had to, and expand her horizons once she had the option to do so. Presumably, this would occur with the step out of the territory of Dao and into the field of Great Dao, where it ceased to describe a concept through the world and instead explained the world through a concept. At that point, once the world as a whole could be summarised via the Dao of Law – just as an example – then it would be impossible to stick with a limited quantity of truth regarding that Dao, and it would, by definition, become greater than before.
Of course, just as the true Dao realms that she had imagined, this was speculation. She had yet to speak with the heavens, the only ones that might be aware of the nature of Great Dao, the possibility of true Dao realms, and whatever other properties of reality she hadn’t quite grasped up to this point.
Whether that was even a possibility was hard to say, since she had not yet interacted with the heavens personally, so perhaps all of her guessing about them was completely inaccurate. She could believe that, even if she would be a little disappointed to see her predictions be completely incorrect. If there was no sapient entity to hit in the face once she met with them, then it would make the experience significantly less relaxing, and perhaps it would mean that she has a far worse chance of achieving her goals of teaching it about all of the mistakes that it had made so far.
As she thought about that, and a whole bunch of other matters, the battles were progressing, and it was roughly as everyone predicted. Some managed to stay around for a few fights in a row, but they were almost always replaced after that and left the arena with the two competitors that everyone had been waiting for – Wu Chao and, as he turned out to be called, Wu Liang.
They faced one another intently and silently. Wu Liang held in a single hand a shorter, thin sword that was sharpened to an almost excessive degree, seeming ready to cut the world with it despite the impossibility of doing such a thing with only an ordinary weapon made of tougher steel than some. Wu Chao was using a more ordinary longsword, one hand ready to grip onto it when necessary, one that was polished to a great shine, but nothing else about it was abnormal. His own weapon was significantly fancier in appearance, as one might imagine from one of the Great Leeches, but he was obviously not permitted to make use of it in a fair battle like this one.
For one reason or another, Wu Chao appeared to be sufficiently respectful of his opponent, an abnormal behaviour no matter how one looked at it. It would certainly be worth paying attention to this, but the Ascendant already had an idea of how things would go.
V5C50: Accelerating the Selections
After the primary commander of the army from the Reclaimed Lands fell, it was only natural that the battle could not continue for much longer. The rest of the opposing forces were taken out by those who could still fight, with the Ascendant finishing off those in her vicinity, primarily the pit that she had made for dramatic effect and experimentation. Once they were done and the battlefield was looted, with the Ascendant doing the most of that as well as she could and had the spatial storage capacity to effectively grab everything she wanted, they gathered at the far side of the battlefield.
There, some of the Reclaimed Lands were visible even for those with relatively weaker vision, with a number of towns close to one another.
Although some soldiers and guards remained there, their numbers were pitiful in comparison to the force that had just been defeated, and perhaps it was no surprise that the Wu District saw an opportunity in this. As districts go, it had a closer border with an outside nation than many, and they would be too hard-pressed to expand their territory just a little bit, claiming a region of the former lands of Yi City and finally allowing it to expand after thousands of years of decay and stagnation.
Wei Yi had no opposition, and, fortunately enough, Wu Chao did not have any significant problems either, his attention being focused on his own wellbeing. Thus, the army went enough and headed straight for the towns, surrounding them with their superior forces and quickly overwhelming every single combatant that intended to resist.
Most did not, as their priority was the safety of their land and property, but the few that did were not killed on the spot, instead being restrained and put into appropriate spaces within the towns. There, they would be interrogated and informed of their fate at a later time, with a number of soldiers from the Wu District staying behind to keep an eye on the situation. The rest would return, with many returning once they had rested and recovered from their injuries on the battlefield. If they did not do this, then they would have the numbers needed to keep a firm grip on some of the doubly Reclaimed Lands, but their actual strength would be inferior to that of a paper tiger, and they could be defeated in no time by whatever powers remained in the Reclaimed Lands.
Obviously, the people from the Selection of the Heavenly Masters, whether they were from the Wu District or not, would not be going back right away, as the Selection was still a priority for them and the district alike. In part, the reason for the attack on the Wu District was likely due to the lack of a Master.
The absence of a Patriarch was also significant, but it seemed to have been hidden better.
It was unclear how much the Reclaimed Lands knew of the Wu District’s actions and state, but the knowledge that an important and powerful figure had died would be certain to reach them one way or another. From there, the leaders of the nation would know that someone else of a similar power would rise eventually, and would thus plan the attack as quickly as possible in order to take advantage of the situation while they still could.
Such an approach could well have led to not all forces in the land agreeing. That would certainly explain why there was only one power at the level of the sixth realm attempting to move into the Wu District’s lands, when an outside nation would require at least a few at such a level in order to have a chance of remaining as one. At the time that they broke away, there were most certainly greater figures amongst them, so it would only make sense for there to still be a few at the level of the Patriarchs, since their methods and power should have passed down more efficiently than in Yi City.
Provided that those forces learned of the loss of one of their own, they might have some mixed feelings regarding the loss of a portion of their lands. On one hand, there would be one less competitor for ultimate power in the nation, and on the other, they might be a little upset at the sudden conquering of a portion of their lands without any questions asked.
It was for that reason that the Wu District limited itself to taking only a small portion of the Reclaimed Lands. There was no guarantee that it would avoid a forceful retaliation, but it would surely lessen it, and it would make it significantly easier to split the nation apart or conquer the entirety of it in the future, when the district’s state was a little better than now. When they had a Patriarch – or, as Wei Yi would have it, a temporary but incredibly powerful Matriarch – and a Heavenly Sword, they could safely go out and take more land. Once Yi City itself was in a better state, then there would be no challenge in taking on the closest outside nations as a united whole, rather than the current broken shell.
However, that was unlikely to be within the expectations of the Wu District for the moment, as that was primarily what the Ascendant was thinking about while waiting for the continuation of the Selection of the Heavenly Sword.
Luckily, not long after they had returned and had an hour to rest and recover, the five reappeared at the Master’s Square and looked at those that remained.
The conflict had claimed a few lives despite the attempts of most of Wu District’s people present at the battlefield to prevent such a thing from happening. Generally, those that perished were those that only had an advantage in one-on-one encounters, and were thus easily overwhelmed by numbers and felled without extreme effort on the part of their enemies. Two had also fled early into the battle, and that left the Selection with eighty-three candidates.
Wei Yi remained, Wu Chao remained, albeit in a terrible mood, and the man from the Wu District, the one that had a vision state, also remained. Although not everyone understood that they were the primary candidates, they were aware that at least one of them was most certainly in that list. The display that the Ascendant had provided for them at the battlefield did lead to many including her in that list, but there were some that considered it unlikely for the skills she displayed to function without planar energy.
They weren’t wrong, for the moment. While she relied on her killing intent to manifest Edge Replication without requiring any movement, or needed to invoke the Earth Dao combined with the Weapon Dao on fragments of earth infused with planar energy, she did not yet have a Weapon or Sword Dao that she could manifest without any form of planar energy – for now, at least.
“It was not intended for you to participate in a major battle with the lands outside Yi City’s borders, but since it occurred, we will proceed onto our next step earlier than originally intended,” the woman, possibly named Wu Er if the naming scheme for the five was consistent, “Tomorrow, you shall battle once more, and it shall be done in accordance with our judgement of your performance, and who would best challenge both sides. It shall begin with those we see as the weakest, and then the victors shall challenge one another once more, with the victor remaining until we have a clear and definitive conclusion.”
It was incredibly fortunate that she was not going to be the first one to fight with anyone, since that would give her the right opportunity to further her development of the Dao and then defeat Wu Chao in such a manner that he would have zero opportunity to succeed. While fighting with naught but one’s own strength, without drawing upon any form of planar energy, and while keeping her strength down so that she was still competing in swordsmanship, she did not have a significant advantage. More important than that was the fact that they would be judged by the Wu District’s people, and they would wish to see attainment in swordsmanship.
The best example of this was the Sword Dao, and that could be exhibited without releasing her energy out into the world. With Edge Replication, she could make a sword out of the air itself so long as she drew upon her power of Dao, costing her only a few internal injuries, but she needed Full Success in the Weapon Dao in order to manifest something sufficiently impressive. Otherwise, it might just look like basic cheating with her planar energy, not at all what she needed to achieve with her effort.
Those present and alive weren’t idiots, so they understood what the announcement meant. The Wu District wished to accelerate their recruitment of a Heavenly Master, for there would otherwise be a greater number of steps than just more fights to determine who would enter such a significant position.
After all, if they were fine with just some fighting finishing things, then they could have let the first set of duels repeat, taking out half of the group each time, until the strongest two fought and concluded who would end up being the victor. At that point, they would have had a Heavenly Sword when the Reclaimed Lands invaded, and they could then have provided the Heavenly Sword with whatever resources they might need to advance their realm and further their strength in every way possible. The invasion would thus have been curbed much more easily.
If they had gotten Wei Yi involved, then she might well have created some kind of immense barrier around the Wu District alongside Yi City as a whole once she challenged the remnants of the Great Family’s forces. By the time that the Reclaimed Lands did invade, she would have gotten to the Ze District, and maybe some other district if she chose to visit them on the way.
Unfortunately, the Wu District’s leaders, however many of them were even left at the moment, did not have the foresight to do such a thing, and they must have failed to comprehend that she was easily their best option. With her sights set on the whole of Yi City, she wouldn’t keep her control tight over a district even if she was some terrible tyrant, but the Greats absolutely would now that she had riled them up. This would go on for some time, since they would need to prevent a similar form of rebellion.
Back onto what was actually happening, rather than what she wished had happened, the fact that she would need to stay around for a day longer was something she had already prepared for, so it wasn’t too bothersome. Wu Chao did not appear to have sent back any information yet, so it meant that there was no ticking clock for herself and the Greats to consider. In their case, it would be her return, and it would prompt a rapid destruction of all of her forces before she has a chance to join them and reclaim all of the resources and powers that she had accumulated. They might well even seek to claim or destroy the Kong Prison Realm, while they’re at it.
For her, the equivalent clock would obviously be the time necessary to prepare such an attack, which couldn’t be much longer than a few days. They might need some time to bring out one of their first generation members, but once they were present, there was no reason for them not to rush forth and obliterate all that stands in their way. For the moment, their power was simply unparalleled.
She would change that soon enough, but if she had to rush back now, she would have a worse chance.
Due to this, she naturally didn’t bring up any complaints, and instead gladly returned to the chambers offered to them previously for meditation and contemplation. This time, the focus was more on resting than thinking, but she did not need the former and would focus all the more on the latter, since her rapid breakthrough into the Great Stride stage with both the Weapon and Sword Dao meant that she was close to the next step as well, with only a little gap remaining on the path to Full Success, or the false version thereof.
The topic of the true Dao and true Dao stages had been on her mind while she was abusing the power of Dao to obliterate the army of the Reclaimed Lands, and she had concluded that naming the stages in the same way would only lead to confusion. As such, she had been trying to figure out good alternatives to the current framework, and had come up with nothing. Just like the first time she tried it, she knew too little about the true versions and attainment in Dao to make any guesses.
This was very different to when she had predicted the names of the killing will cultivation realms. There, she had been working with the known five realms of killing intent and all nine of spiritual will, as well as her personal observations. She knew that a weapon could be produced in the fourth realm, protection in the fifth, and the sixth was likely to affect the body – as it did, in the end – so progressing from there was relatively easy. It would have been stranger if killing will had taken a completely different path from the assumed progression of spiritual will on the part of the Silver Side’s scholars and thinkers.
All that she could assume was that the first true stage of attainment in a Dao would allow her to have a vision state of her own, and that was still the only thing she had come up with up to this point.
She wasn’t too disappointed with the lack of progress, as any significant revelation would have to come with either a breakthrough in a Dao or some massive chunk of information regarding the nature of the world as a whole, both of which would take up some time to fully understand and process. If she was distracted from becoming the Heavenly Sword of the Wu District, then the Dao revelation better be incredibly powerful to make up for that. If she attained a true stage of the Dao of Law – a true realm, perhaps – and could manipulate it freely, that would be sufficient.
It would also make it significantly more difficult to observe the Great Yi Family member not far from her. He was always looking a little suspicious, and now that he had been injured, he was clearly contemplating calling in his fellow leeches- Great Family members for aid.
For her, it would naturally not be ideal to see him invoke his methods and call in the strongest members of the Great families, even with her current strength. She might not have much of a challenge when it comes to defeating the second generation, much like when she made use of all her methods to obliterate the invading army that wished to challenge her Kong Prison Realm and Paragon, but she had not yet reached the level of being able to resolve the Reality Severance of the first generation.
Until she was able to handle that, there was no point in attempting to challenge them.
Of course, she did not think that the Greats were able to use something like Reality Severance easily, and without consequence, and she most certainly didn’t think that they would use something like it recklessly even if that was not the case. Her very being had been split in two, an arm somewhere far from her likely still surviving due to the plentiful vitality within her body. It might be impossible to fix without power at the eighth realm and above, which neither she nor the Greats had, at least as far as she was aware.
Hence, if they were to randomly use Reality Severance on everything that bothered them, they would inevitably fragment the world as a whole. Each cut passed through the air, possibly splitting that permanently, and they would touch the ground and others at times, so there would slowly be more and more gaps that could not be healed by anything, save for the heavens – and it may be that they can do nothing either. There was a significant difference between breaching and cutting space, and severing the very concept of something, and since all spatial tears were usually corrected right away by spatial spirits and the like, it would be very odd if the heavens did not consider such cuts to be a significant enough threat to address right away.
At the seventh realm, she would have some confidence in being able to stop any usage of Reality Severance and prevent it from striking her, and she would then have confidence in her ability to defeat one of the first generation members. Once she could kill one of them, she could kill two, three, and eventually all forty-eight of them, and then their threat would be removed.
The Great Leeches could be cleansed from the world, and the world could have a better chance.
‘In fact, the Great Leeches is a suitable name for that filth. They would just sap the world of all it has to offer, and if they wish to be great, then let them be great. They will be known as horrible things that should have never been allowed to be, and I hope that the people of the future, with or without my presence, will realise this and not revert to the mistakes of the past,’ the Ascendant thought, making sure to note down that name in her mind so that she could announce it when she had the chance to do so.
While Wu Chao wasn’t actively doing anything annoying, she had nothing else on the outside to focus on, so she kept her spiritual perception on the world and settled down for another day of intense pondering of everything she could think of.
It was hard to be sure of the exact level of productivity achieved by this day’s worth of effort, but she wouldn’t need to debate that for much longer, for those that were still in the Selections of the Heavenly Sword were all being gathered in the Master’s Square once again. There, they would battle, and there their ultimate status would be decided. As with the day before, the favourites of most present were obvious, and the list of expected winners was just as brief, although Wu Chao and Wei Yi had been climbing it.
Before, the strongest Wu family member, the one with a vision state, was mixed into the top three without much doubt, but after a day of thought, they concluded that it was very unlikely that he would indeed be the victor. This was an opinion shared even by those from the Wu District, for a few plain and straightforward reason.
On one hand, there was Wu Chao, a member of a Great Family. Most did not know of that position well enough to judge anything based on it, but they could tell that he was significantly more powerful and capable that the vast majority of cultivators they had ever met. From their previous observation of his combat ability, they know that his swordsmanship is also noteworthy, although it was too difficult to compare it to the overall level of swordsmanship of others in the selection with the minimal degree of pure swordsmanship demonstrated up to this point. It was very unlikely for a man to be so confident in the situation if he didn’t have something up his sleeve.
Then, there was Wei Yi. There weren’t many that could truly understand the extent of her abilities, since she was easily the least conventional in terms of the techniques and types of energy that she used. Most had no clue that killing intent, spiritual will, physique energy or bloodline power even existed, so it was nearly impossible for them to understand how it was that she could obliterate so many with so little effort at the battlefield.
She did demonstrate a great mastery of basic sword techniques when she had battled the young man during the first series of duels, but mastery of the basics did not translate directly to the overall ability in a battle.
After all, one could have a perfect understanding of how to swing a sword and block attacks, but when they would be faced with something specifically intended to deal with such simple things, they would need to step up to more complex manoeuvres to resolve their problems. At that point, even the most significant mastery of the basic movements would prove to be insufficient, as the right way to connect them into a perfect flow to defeat any opposing method is what one would need to comprehend instead. Still, there was a lot going for her, even if she lacked such abilities.
The first battle began and ended after a few minutes, and then the others proceeded afterwards. To prevent the strongest ones eliminating one another right away, and thus limiting their ability to compete properly at the second stage of these duels, the Wu District didn’t hide the fact that they were doing exactly this. Wei Yi, Wu Chao and the Wu District’s representative did not meet in battle.
While the Ascendant fought with some woman, the Great Leech representative met with a stronger individual from the Wu District, and the man with a vision state encountered an outsider who might have come from the Ze District, for he had two perfected stages despite only being in the fourth realm. Ultimately, in fights that did not benefit from planar cultivation, such a thing was not very useful, as he had not cultivated his body using that energy, and so all three of the most likely victors moved through to the next stage while their opponents did not. This time, they were not given the option of remaining, and were made to step away immediately, although they were permitted to watch.
Just like that, the total number of competitors shrunk down to forty-two, with one participant lacking an opponent and thus being permitted to stick around and instead be the first in the second set of duels.
From there, everything was incredibly straightforward. One by one, the weakest two remaining would fight, one would win and the other lose, and then the next opponent of a similar strength would arrive onto the arena.
Some would win a number of times, others would not, but it was almost inevitable that both sides would lose then and now, resulting in the two opponents gradually rising in power and ability. If that did not occur, then it would mean that there was a hidden gem amongst the weaker-looking combatants, and the Wu District would certainly not reject the victory of someone like that, even if they weren’t expecting it. Of course, what everyone believed they’d see is the eventual competition between the three strongest individuals present, and the methods that they could invoke.
Given that the man from the Wu District had a vision state, and that the Great Leeches had been around for a very long time, the Ascendant was expecting the final two or three battles to involve the Sword Dao in one shape or another. Whether they were all as able to use it as she was, they could also apply the knowledge granted to them to fight more effectively.
In a way, however, she was looking forward to witnessing proper usage of a Dao, even against herself.
Up to this point, she had not seen anyone being able to apply a Dao in any way beyond a vision state, and even then, it was likely the Xin District’s awakening of the soul that came with the awakening of the three vision states for the Soul, Spirit and Ghost Dao, or something along those lines. Given that children of the Xin District were able to survive without being shocked by such a different view of the world, it was probable that the vision states were significantly inferior to those of the Great Stride stage, or of a true Dao realm, only allowing them to see spirits and not truly comprehend what they were seeing through the lens of their appropriate Dao.
Forbidden skills were a form of Dao, too, provided that she understood them correctly. They could be classed as being under the combination of the Human Dao, and a secondary Dao that they attempt to invoke from within. Back at the Yi District, Chu Ling had a forbidden skill that invoked the Wood Dao from within the Human Dao, and Jiang Sheng’s Ice Demon’s Will invoked something like the Yin Dao or the Cold Dao from within the Human Dao. Yi Henghua’s Fairy of Dust skill was, despite its otherworldly nature, also a forbidden skill, and that invoked the Dust Dao.
That was not the best way to go about it, however, and thus they came with a great cost. The human aspect would get worn away and overwhelmed by the invoked Dao, and so Chu Ling was bound to her Timeless Grove, while Jiang Sheng transformed into a cold entity that would not be called human if he had progressed in the forbidden skill further. Yi Henghua went mad from the combination of the otherworldly gift and her rapid transformation into dust as she overworked her cultivation method.
It could be seen as them having fragments of a Dao, or as them being tools of the Human Dao being used to an extreme, but the overall point was that she had little to learn from them in regard to Dao. Her perspective differed greatly, and so she would only muddle her understanding with the interpretation of others.
This was the unfortunate nature of Dao, as far as she understood it, and she would persevere with it while she had to, and expand her horizons once she had the option to do so. Presumably, this would occur with the step out of the territory of Dao and into the field of Great Dao, where it ceased to describe a concept through the world and instead explained the world through a concept. At that point, once the world as a whole could be summarised via the Dao of Law – just as an example – then it would be impossible to stick with a limited quantity of truth regarding that Dao, and it would, by definition, become greater than before.
Of course, just as the true Dao realms that she had imagined, this was speculation. She had yet to speak with the heavens, the only ones that might be aware of the nature of Great Dao, the possibility of true Dao realms, and whatever other properties of reality she hadn’t quite grasped up to this point.
Whether that was even a possibility was hard to say, since she had not yet interacted with the heavens personally, so perhaps all of her guessing about them was completely inaccurate. She could believe that, even if she would be a little disappointed to see her predictions be completely incorrect. If there was no sapient entity to hit in the face once she met with them, then it would make the experience significantly less relaxing, and perhaps it would mean that she has a far worse chance of achieving her goals of teaching it about all of the mistakes that it had made so far.
As she thought about that, and a whole bunch of other matters, the battles were progressing, and it was roughly as everyone predicted. Some managed to stay around for a few fights in a row, but they were almost always replaced after that and left the arena with the two competitors that everyone had been waiting for – Wu Chao and, as he turned out to be called, Wu Liang.
They faced one another intently and silently. Wu Liang held in a single hand a shorter, thin sword that was sharpened to an almost excessive degree, seeming ready to cut the world with it despite the impossibility of doing such a thing with only an ordinary weapon made of tougher steel than some. Wu Chao was using a more ordinary longsword, one hand ready to grip onto it when necessary, one that was polished to a great shine, but nothing else about it was abnormal. His own weapon was significantly fancier in appearance, as one might imagine from one of the Great Leeches, but he was obviously not permitted to make use of it in a fair battle like this one.
For one reason or another, Wu Chao appeared to be sufficiently respectful of his opponent, an abnormal behaviour no matter how one looked at it. It would certainly be worth paying attention to this, but the Ascendant already had an idea of how things would go.
