V5C59: Going on the Offensive
The very instant that the wave of force had calmed, she brought down the barrier and used her movement method to appear where Ning Huang had stood, finding no trace of his presence thanks to the destruction caused by the collision of two absolute powers. What concerned her was not the enormous fracture and crater formed right in front of the Luo District, which, although rather devastating for the empty land before it, had not done much to harm the district of talismans, and might even provide them with more opportunities thanks to the remnant energies.
Instead, she looked around in search of what only she could detect, and concluded, ‘No anchor energy… It shattered the core, but it seems that it was unable to break any anchors, and it might well have failed to destroy the core entirely. He might be in a state of a partial core, where he will lack much of the power of the fifth and seventh realms, but will retain his cultivation and the marks that weren’t present on that part of the core… Like some kind of cockroach, he endures even that…’
She was very irritated, but she could hardly deny the fact that this went significantly better than she had anticipated. Sure, she needed to condense her Arm of Slaughtering Shadow again, but that wasn’t too difficult in comparison to how impossible it seemed to be to ward off the Reality Severance.
Despite that, she did succeed, and she even managed to damage Ning Huang’s core with the aftershock of the collision, while she got out unharmed. This was easily the best outcome she could have wanted without going into the realm of impossibility, and it gave her plenty of information to work with in order to further her understanding of her Dao, the Great Leeches, and all kinds of other things that were produced as a result of the fine cracks and segments in reality produced by the second use of Touch the Heavens.
‘Even if I didn’t destroy his core, he will still be nearly crippled for quite some time. That should provide me some respite from him, and more combatants from the first generation shouldn’t emerge since they’re concerned about weakening some kind of seal. Whatever it is, so long as it gets them to stay down, I’m fine with it,’ Wei Yi thought, smoke reforming at her left as she turned and looked at the other part of the battlefield.
There, a number of automatons had fallen, but only one of the replicas remained, and did so without a core and barely any lifeforce remaining. Before he could die, she shifted her position to him.
His image was very close to that of Ning Chao, the male member of the second generation of the Great Ning family, but she could see that this was not who he was. In a way, his aura resembled the strange timeless aura within the mountains where she had found Jia Rong, who was within Paragon at the moment, sleeping at the time that Wei Yi had arrived.
“Were you a member of one of the previous generations? Are you now within Testament, having settled there since becoming one of the first generation of… your generations are a little difficult to talk about, you know that?” she asked, trying to keep her comments quieter as to not distract him.
However, although the mouth of the Great Leech opened and audible words should have emerged, no doubt disparaging her and trying to explain to her the error of wishing to keep the world intact, all that she could hear was a muffled mess barely resembling any kind of communication. Only by taking it and breaking all of it apart into individual pieces within her Ascendant’s Library was she able to decipher the nature of it. For some reason, these replicas spoke in jumbled words and phrases with no apparent connection to one another, resulting in a completely meaningless dialogue that she couldn’t understand.
Her only guess was that the replicas were based on past images and appearances of the Great Leeches that came before the current three generations. Thus, they would be able to display a variety of abilities based on the power that they were summoned with, or, more precisely, which realm they were summoned in, but their ability to converse and generate new ideas would naturally be negatively affected.
Since there was no clear chance of getting information from this replica, she glanced at her Arbiters to confirm that none of them had anything to say.
“Wei Yi, what do you intend to do with it?” Yi Shi Ming did have something to say, and she said it after appearing beside her, putting up an illusory barrier between herself and the replica just in case. It seemed that she had the same idea that Wei Yi had regarding these replicas.
“Normally, it is a good idea to capture enemies and interrogate them. Perhaps we could convince one of the Great Leeches that their path is wrong, and convince them to join our side, thus making things far, far more difficult for ourselves in the future when it comes to the ones that we will and will not kill. However, with these replicas, not only is interrogating them incredibly difficult, but there’s a chance that they can be used by the other Leeches to view our lands and actions from within, so it is best to get rid of the replica before it tries anything.”
“I have to concur that this is the best option until we are more aware of the nature of the replicas, as well as whether they truly hold any information that is useful to us.”
Wei Yi nodded, raised Moon Splitter, and pierced the man’s neck with a stab, bringing his life to an end soon after, “And now…”
The replica remained as a body should have for a little while, until it just collapsed inwards, as if it was something made from a glass mesh that lost whatever had been supporting it from within. It turned to a glass shard-like texture and colour, but melted more like ice, turning into a pure planar energy liquid before it then proceeded to scatter into the air, upping the energy density of the area for a brief while.
“Interesting. If I am not mistaken, these are based on some property of Testament, combined with the energy of Ning Huang or some other first generation individual. Presumably, they are limited in only being able to conjure replicas of those that had existed, as they had existed, and they must utilise more energy than they can regularly spare, or else they would have been conjuring these far before they began running out of forces to send our way. After all, after they lost one of their kind, they shouldn’t have risked losing any more if they truly cared about whatever seal they had mentioned.”
“Indeed, that is likely,” Luo Na jumped down to her position, using a talisman to accelerate her movement, “Just some false images wasted thirty talismans and plenty of those automatons.”
“You’ll remake them soon enough, and the automatons… How’s the Ju District doing?”
“About the same as before, from what I know. Their enormous factories have not been rebuilt, but I heard that they had hidden one of their large orbs somewhere before your intrusion into their lands and so they can still construct more automatons to support the rest of your districts. Those buried automatons were my idea.”
“And it was a good one… Sorry, but I have just taken a look around, and I think that we shouldn’t linger any longer.”
“Are there more of them?”
“No, but we should not let this opportunity get away from us. We can target the Greats and conquer some territories if we put effort into it, and just putting pressure on them will be ideal. Once we attack the Chu, Ning, Chen and Yi Districts and prevent them from doing anything untoward, things will be easier, and we can relax for a little bit. The Shi District may be neutral, on their side, or on our own, so we will also need to watch out for that, and the Ling, Huang and Fu Districts may also try something, so we need to discourage all four of those from acting up,” Wei Yi explained in length, “Also, you need to figure out some use for this place, since I don’t intend to attempt to undo the damage dealt to the terrain.”
“Well, we are used to that aspect of your personality, at least. Don’t think we don’t remember the last explosion of cosmic light outside of our lands.”
“That one was less intentional than this one. Also, the energy concentration there is still higher than in other areas, presumably due to the influence of my bloodline power, so it shouldn’t be surprising that there are so many people there attempting to cultivate. Shit, there are quite a few there…”
“I thought that I had disallowed them from doing that… but I suppose that they might as well keep going with it. The stronger my district, the sooner I will be able to get you away from here.”
“Me? What did I do to you?”
“You brought that suicidal moron over, and I don’t like speaking with her beyond what is necessary. As such, if you are able to prevent her from coming over when not necessary, I can forgive you, but otherwise I will be aiming to establish my own power in this city when I get a few more guardians within the upper stages of the seventh realm.”
Wei Yi sighed, “Just get along better. I’m not going to bother with this kind of nonsense.”
She turned away from the Matriarch and looked to the Arbiters that had descended from the walls, who all glanced at the remnants of Great Leech replica at the ground, if only for a moment.
“I heard something about an attack on the four districts controlled by the Greats?” Long Huang said, although it was more likely that she was simply aware of the intended strategy for the Arbiters that might have been carried out significantly further back had the Ascendant not been thrown all the way to the southern border, “I’m up for it right away, especially if it is as far away from the Luo District as it is possible to be.”
“Stop that, or else I’ll suggest something that’ll make the both of you bond very quickly.”
“Oh yeah?” Long Huang said.
“Like what?” Luo Na asked.
“I have some attainment in the Dao of Lust and memory influence. I could always arrange the two of you to find the other immensely attractive, and while I don’t know what Mo Zhouquan would say about that, I don’t expect her to be the type to adhere entirely to a monogamous relationship.”
Most of that was complete nonsense, mostly because she would not be utilising mental influence on people for something this petty and unhelpful to the goals of defeating the Great Leeches, as well as whatever stood behind them. Her Dao of Lust was also entirely useless when it came to actively affecting other people, as even with the Dao of Law she sensed that she would only be able to further ignite the feelings that were already there, providing them with a new spark that might make a fading relationship blossom once again. In that way, it was akin to fifth realm methods and below.
She still wasn’t sure why she got the Dao of Lust, when she obtained it, nor why it was something that advanced so quickly when her mind had fewer lustful thoughts than the majority of men and women whose minds she had peeked at throughout the years. If she was able to advance through the Dao of Lust with just that, then everyone around her should secretly be in the Full Success stage, or perhaps even in the true realms of Dao that she had theorised about previously. So long as she questioned those people sufficiently, she might be able to advance her Dao of Law to Full Success far more easily than she presumed, but she was more than aware that this was unlikely to be the case, albeit not due to any concrete feeling or information.
Rather, there were some strange occurrences in the past that made her almost certain that there was more to things than what met the eye, with the vagueness of ‘things’ being rather perfect in this case.
Until she got to a high enough level of power to be able to interact with the greater nature of the world at a sufficient level, she had no hope of confronting the heavens as she wished to, or whatever was causing the intrusion of otherworldly demons, the gifts on them, or the azure lights within those. However, she did not believe this to be outside of her reach, and so she was never going to ignore the possibility and the potential of such a thing.
One day, she would reach the heavens, and either beat them up, or slaughter them completely. Eventually, she would learn what brought so much chaos to the world in the form of otherworldly gifts and demons. There must be a time that she could see the truth of what lay beyond the Planar Continents, primarily in terms of the other worlds that seemed to come to the Planar Continents with odd regularly when there were so many other worlds to getting sent to. Of course, if every world was passing people along from one to the other, then she would be very interested in learning what caused such a thing, and why people that came to other worlds always seemed to get such powerful gifts.
It was obviously not something that would just happen naturally in the simplest system possible, which would be what the natural world leans towards. She knew that in a world where there was no ubiquitous and incredibly powerful energy that changed the world through its very existence, like in the worlds of the otherworldly demons she had met so far, there was a leaning in everything towards the simplest possible solution. The laws of physics over there all apparently function in relatively simple and consistent ways, although they are not yet fully understood by the people there.
Something like the otherworldly gifts just doesn’t make sense under such a premise. They were too varied in power, nature and influence, in their response to the loss of azure lights, and that was without going into detail regarding the azure lights themselves, which were just sources of infinite energy without any clear reason for existing.
There had to be a source for them, that much she knew, and it was likely to be intelligent.
Perhaps the azure lights came from one force, or many, and perhaps they were all as different as the cultivation techniques of the Planar Continents, simply seeming to be identical due to her lack of knowledge about them. Of course, it could always be that they are all the same – maybe even literally.
She did not know that, and she couldn’t know that without greatly growing in power and exploring these aspects of the world herself. As such, she was currently content with having it be within her plans to do so at a later time, and to take any opportunity that came her way to learn things more quickly than if she took no risks or chances at all. Ultimately, even if it wasn’t for the troubles caused to her by otherworldly influence, the rest of the Planar Continents had been changed innumerable times by them, and it was vital to learn of their origin and whether it would be possible to stop such unwanted intrusions in the future.
And, in the time that she went through all that within her head, she saw the eyes of both Long Huang and Luo Na widen before they glanced at one another and took a step to distance themselves from the other, “I’m guessing that the idea is not one you like.”
“I doubt your ability to do such a thing, Ascendant, but I am not going to risk it,” Luo Na said.
Long Huang put it much more simply, “Don’t you dare!”
“Then stop fighting. I don’t know what the lot of you do while I’m not around – the last explanation got interrupted by this attack – but there is no possible way for the two of you to have gotten this agitated with one another in just the three months that I was away. Furthermore, as a form of conflict, random bickering is far less effective than, say, frequent sparring and duelling, which would at least get the two of you to practise your techniques and improve your overall ability in combat.”
“Fine…” the two of them said almost at the same time, but refused to acknowledge that and instead went further away from one another.
“Luo Na, don’t go so far. Your forces will be joining the fight, so you need to be present.”
She clearly heard that right away, but delayed and only turned around once she was entirely certain that Long Huang had gotten far enough away for her to not need to be within her proximity upon returning to Wei Yi’s position.
“Very well, I shall remain for a little longer. What plans do you have?”
“Mo Zhouquan really isn’t doing well as of late, is she?” Wei Yi commented as she looked into the room where the corrupted woman lay, with Long Huang standing beside her bed, one hand placed on Mo Zhouquan’s forehead to check her temperature, “Has she been like this for a while now, or has it gotten worse?”
Long Huang nodded, “A little worse… Hey, can you hear me?”
She was naturally addressing the woman lying in the bed, and received no audible response other than the slight shift of Mo Zhouquan’s body.
A few minutes passed before she was ready to step away and let Wei Yi have a go, although she did not go much further than a seat in the corner of the room. There was a window out to Beast’s Rest there, but that did not stop her from focusing only on the corrupted woman, one hand resting near the collar on her neck almost the entire time, leaving it for moments at a time to return to touching it for reassurance.
“You can try your method,” was all that she said.
“Sure. Don’t do anything while I’m trying this, or else I may accidentally damage your mind and body.”
After the Ascendant had given instructions to all of the leaders under her command, she knew that she had to return to Paragon and the Kong Prison Realm, which was exactly what she ended up doing. There were a few things that needed to be looked at, and she would handle them right away.
It turned out that the first thing that she could address most quickly was the state of Mo Zhouquan, and since it was something that benefitted her attempts to learn more about the Primordial Deities immensely, she saw no good reason to postpone that until later. From what she was able to tell, it was indeed the influence of Primordial Corruption that played the biggest part in the corruptor woman’s current weakened state, as the elevation in the average energy density of the Planar Continents was bound to benefit those ancient things in escaping from their seals.
From her limited interaction with the influence of Primordial Corruption that remained within Mo Zhouquan’s body, she couldn’t fully assess what the best way to go about resolving the matter was, so she concluded that she first needed to speak with the one suffering from the symptoms of Primordial Deity influence first.
The woman did not appear to be in the right state to do so normally, so Wei Yi was going to make use of her greater realm in killing will to communicate in a different fashion than usual.
‘Alright, Mo Zhouquan, you are about to feel very uncomfortable, and I don’t really care. Neither should you if I figure out a way to help you,’ the Ascendant thought to herself, sitting down beside her on the bed and placing a hand on the woman’s forehead, a little like how Long Huang had done.
Obviously, she was doing so far less affectionately, and she had little interest in trying to feel up the woman’s skin due to the rather unpleasant features forced onto her by the influence of Primordial Corruption. Long Huang also claimed to dislike those features, as demonstrated very clearly by her disgust during the initial interactions that the Ascendant had seen, but that feeling had begun to fade when their new relationship blossomed, and it had completely disappeared since then.
Using her spiritual will, and that alone, she intruded into the mental domain of the corrupted woman, infusing her consciousness with hers so that they could communicate even when one side was barely breathing and surviving at the moment.
‘Do you hear me?’ the Ascendant asked mentally, uncertain if her attempt was successful.
Only a moment later, she received her answer, for her surroundings were suddenly transformed into a dark and moist pit, with a stygian sky and the faint traces of movement above her.
She stood at one side of the pit, and on the other was a feeble figure that barely breathed, just as she did in reality. From this, it was obvious enough what her identity was, and so she quickly approached the figure as quickly as she could while wading through the unpleasant liquid at the bottom of the pit, the nature of which she did not know but was immediately aware that she did not wish to get closer to it than necessary, for it would be disgusting and very much harmful to her overall condition in this odd mental state.
As soon as she got near enough, Wei Yi called out, “Mo Zhouquan, is this what you’ve been seeing for a while now?”
Her question was vague, but that did not stop the reply from coming over right away.
“Yes, I have been here for a very long time.”
“That must be unpleasant.”
“Yes.”
“Is this your mind, or that of another?”
“I don’t know… I remember hearing things from the outside, but I couldn’t recognise it… Where is this place?”
‘She’s not doing well, then. In that case, I need to figure out where this place is… because I know what it is. This place is almost certainly Primordial Corruption’s world, mental image or something of the sort, and she is in here because I haven’t managed to get rid of the seed of corruption within her…’ Wei Yi paused, recalling what the seed of corruption look like and then remembered the image of the azure lights, ‘I mean, they’re hardly similar in appearance, but their function, leech-like nature, and the rest of it… Are they perhaps identical in intrinsic nature? Is the seed of corruption something that may be able to grow into the azure light? Is the azure light-’
The entire realm quaked all of a sudden, as she remembered that she was effectively sharing the mind of another person, and through her she was influencing the entity that had created this image and forced Mo Zhouquan to endure it.
Naturally, with how much time she had spent thinking about these kinds of things, she was entirely used to all kinds of abnormal ideas that the people of the Planar Continents would be concerned about. Mo Zhouquan had interacted with her for a while, so her attitude had adjusted slightly, and her current state of mind hardly allowed her to process every bit of information that passed through to any significant extent.
All that was left was the Primordial Deity that had latched onto all of the members of the Corruptor’s Enclave, and it was clearly not used to this kind of influence, especially not in its weak state.
Whether it was only a fragment of the whole, left out in the world while the rest was sealed, or if this was the whole in a far weaker state than even Primordial Earth, it was not at all used to interacting with things beyond its own power. That it was merely theory and concepts did not change that, apparently.
If she had to guess at that very moment, then she would probably ascribe the most significant portion of damage dealt to Primordial Corruption’s influence and consciousness to the fact that her comprehension of certain truths and elements of reality was guaranteed th advance her Dao, not just due to the further contribution of the heavens, but because she slowly began to grasp the nature of reality and connect the separate pieces together. Technically, so long as one was aware of the right pieces of information, one only needed to know and comprehend the absolute minimum to get a grasp of the world as a whole.
Such a piece could hardly be appreciated by an entity that was forever stagnant and still.
Thus, the pit itself quaked, unravelling into tendrils, revealing the flat terrain around the stagnant pool within which Wei Yi and Mo Zhouquan had ended up in. The fluid poured out, slowly as a thick and unpleasant liquid would, and the corrupted woman was freed from a number of tendrils that had apparently been holding onto her this entire time.
Then, it was just quiet. Nothing seemed to be happening, and there were no traces of outside influences.
“Ow, my head hurts…”
“At least you seem more awake than before. I think I scared off Primordial Corruption.”
“You… Yeah, I can see that happening. You’re scary at times, but in a very different way, so it may be enough to scare off a Primordial Deity… How long have I been here, exactly? Where is here? Why are you here?”
“For a little while, as far as I know. This is your mental domain, or, at least, a projection of some part of it intermingled with that of Primordial Corruption, or its influence. I’m here because your pet – or did you two end up settling on calling one another girlfriends? – asked me to help you out, and I did so in whatever way I was able to think of,” Wei Yi responded to the questions one by one, “I’ll break the mental connection once you’re alright, and then you will be able to relax on your own, or with Long Huang.”
“Mhm. Probably with her. It’ll be better for me… I feel odd, though.”
“Depending on the exact nature of this odd feeling, I may or may not be able to help you, or even explain it to you.”
“The whispers… they’re not present. I can’t hear them.”
Wei Yi shrugged, “Might have scared off Primordial Corruption more than I had anticipated.”
V5C59: Going on the Offensive
The very instant that the wave of force had calmed, she brought down the barrier and used her movement method to appear where Ning Huang had stood, finding no trace of his presence thanks to the destruction caused by the collision of two absolute powers. What concerned her was not the enormous fracture and crater formed right in front of the Luo District, which, although rather devastating for the empty land before it, had not done much to harm the district of talismans, and might even provide them with more opportunities thanks to the remnant energies.
Instead, she looked around in search of what only she could detect, and concluded, ‘No anchor energy… It shattered the core, but it seems that it was unable to break any anchors, and it might well have failed to destroy the core entirely. He might be in a state of a partial core, where he will lack much of the power of the fifth and seventh realms, but will retain his cultivation and the marks that weren’t present on that part of the core… Like some kind of cockroach, he endures even that…’
She was very irritated, but she could hardly deny the fact that this went significantly better than she had anticipated. Sure, she needed to condense her Arm of Slaughtering Shadow again, but that wasn’t too difficult in comparison to how impossible it seemed to be to ward off the Reality Severance.
Despite that, she did succeed, and she even managed to damage Ning Huang’s core with the aftershock of the collision, while she got out unharmed. This was easily the best outcome she could have wanted without going into the realm of impossibility, and it gave her plenty of information to work with in order to further her understanding of her Dao, the Great Leeches, and all kinds of other things that were produced as a result of the fine cracks and segments in reality produced by the second use of Touch the Heavens.
‘Even if I didn’t destroy his core, he will still be nearly crippled for quite some time. That should provide me some respite from him, and more combatants from the first generation shouldn’t emerge since they’re concerned about weakening some kind of seal. Whatever it is, so long as it gets them to stay down, I’m fine with it,’ Wei Yi thought, smoke reforming at her left as she turned and looked at the other part of the battlefield.
There, a number of automatons had fallen, but only one of the replicas remained, and did so without a core and barely any lifeforce remaining. Before he could die, she shifted her position to him.
His image was very close to that of Ning Chao, the male member of the second generation of the Great Ning family, but she could see that this was not who he was. In a way, his aura resembled the strange timeless aura within the mountains where she had found Jia Rong, who was within Paragon at the moment, sleeping at the time that Wei Yi had arrived.
“Were you a member of one of the previous generations? Are you now within Testament, having settled there since becoming one of the first generation of… your generations are a little difficult to talk about, you know that?” she asked, trying to keep her comments quieter as to not distract him.
However, although the mouth of the Great Leech opened and audible words should have emerged, no doubt disparaging her and trying to explain to her the error of wishing to keep the world intact, all that she could hear was a muffled mess barely resembling any kind of communication. Only by taking it and breaking all of it apart into individual pieces within her Ascendant’s Library was she able to decipher the nature of it. For some reason, these replicas spoke in jumbled words and phrases with no apparent connection to one another, resulting in a completely meaningless dialogue that she couldn’t understand.
Her only guess was that the replicas were based on past images and appearances of the Great Leeches that came before the current three generations. Thus, they would be able to display a variety of abilities based on the power that they were summoned with, or, more precisely, which realm they were summoned in, but their ability to converse and generate new ideas would naturally be negatively affected.
Since there was no clear chance of getting information from this replica, she glanced at her Arbiters to confirm that none of them had anything to say.
“Wei Yi, what do you intend to do with it?” Yi Shi Ming did have something to say, and she said it after appearing beside her, putting up an illusory barrier between herself and the replica just in case. It seemed that she had the same idea that Wei Yi had regarding these replicas.
“Normally, it is a good idea to capture enemies and interrogate them. Perhaps we could convince one of the Great Leeches that their path is wrong, and convince them to join our side, thus making things far, far more difficult for ourselves in the future when it comes to the ones that we will and will not kill. However, with these replicas, not only is interrogating them incredibly difficult, but there’s a chance that they can be used by the other Leeches to view our lands and actions from within, so it is best to get rid of the replica before it tries anything.”
“I have to concur that this is the best option until we are more aware of the nature of the replicas, as well as whether they truly hold any information that is useful to us.”
Wei Yi nodded, raised Moon Splitter, and pierced the man’s neck with a stab, bringing his life to an end soon after, “And now…”
The replica remained as a body should have for a little while, until it just collapsed inwards, as if it was something made from a glass mesh that lost whatever had been supporting it from within. It turned to a glass shard-like texture and colour, but melted more like ice, turning into a pure planar energy liquid before it then proceeded to scatter into the air, upping the energy density of the area for a brief while.
“Interesting. If I am not mistaken, these are based on some property of Testament, combined with the energy of Ning Huang or some other first generation individual. Presumably, they are limited in only being able to conjure replicas of those that had existed, as they had existed, and they must utilise more energy than they can regularly spare, or else they would have been conjuring these far before they began running out of forces to send our way. After all, after they lost one of their kind, they shouldn’t have risked losing any more if they truly cared about whatever seal they had mentioned.”
“Indeed, that is likely,” Luo Na jumped down to her position, using a talisman to accelerate her movement, “Just some false images wasted thirty talismans and plenty of those automatons.”
“You’ll remake them soon enough, and the automatons… How’s the Ju District doing?”
“About the same as before, from what I know. Their enormous factories have not been rebuilt, but I heard that they had hidden one of their large orbs somewhere before your intrusion into their lands and so they can still construct more automatons to support the rest of your districts. Those buried automatons were my idea.”
“And it was a good one… Sorry, but I have just taken a look around, and I think that we shouldn’t linger any longer.”
“Are there more of them?”
“No, but we should not let this opportunity get away from us. We can target the Greats and conquer some territories if we put effort into it, and just putting pressure on them will be ideal. Once we attack the Chu, Ning, Chen and Yi Districts and prevent them from doing anything untoward, things will be easier, and we can relax for a little bit. The Shi District may be neutral, on their side, or on our own, so we will also need to watch out for that, and the Ling, Huang and Fu Districts may also try something, so we need to discourage all four of those from acting up,” Wei Yi explained in length, “Also, you need to figure out some use for this place, since I don’t intend to attempt to undo the damage dealt to the terrain.”
“Well, we are used to that aspect of your personality, at least. Don’t think we don’t remember the last explosion of cosmic light outside of our lands.”
“That one was less intentional than this one. Also, the energy concentration there is still higher than in other areas, presumably due to the influence of my bloodline power, so it shouldn’t be surprising that there are so many people there attempting to cultivate. Shit, there are quite a few there…”
“I thought that I had disallowed them from doing that… but I suppose that they might as well keep going with it. The stronger my district, the sooner I will be able to get you away from here.”
“Me? What did I do to you?”
“You brought that suicidal moron over, and I don’t like speaking with her beyond what is necessary. As such, if you are able to prevent her from coming over when not necessary, I can forgive you, but otherwise I will be aiming to establish my own power in this city when I get a few more guardians within the upper stages of the seventh realm.”
Wei Yi sighed, “Just get along better. I’m not going to bother with this kind of nonsense.”
She turned away from the Matriarch and looked to the Arbiters that had descended from the walls, who all glanced at the remnants of Great Leech replica at the ground, if only for a moment.
“I heard something about an attack on the four districts controlled by the Greats?” Long Huang said, although it was more likely that she was simply aware of the intended strategy for the Arbiters that might have been carried out significantly further back had the Ascendant not been thrown all the way to the southern border, “I’m up for it right away, especially if it is as far away from the Luo District as it is possible to be.”
“Stop that, or else I’ll suggest something that’ll make the both of you bond very quickly.”
“Oh yeah?” Long Huang said.
“Like what?” Luo Na asked.
“I have some attainment in the Dao of Lust and memory influence. I could always arrange the two of you to find the other immensely attractive, and while I don’t know what Mo Zhouquan would say about that, I don’t expect her to be the type to adhere entirely to a monogamous relationship.”
Most of that was complete nonsense, mostly because she would not be utilising mental influence on people for something this petty and unhelpful to the goals of defeating the Great Leeches, as well as whatever stood behind them. Her Dao of Lust was also entirely useless when it came to actively affecting other people, as even with the Dao of Law she sensed that she would only be able to further ignite the feelings that were already there, providing them with a new spark that might make a fading relationship blossom once again. In that way, it was akin to fifth realm methods and below.
She still wasn’t sure why she got the Dao of Lust, when she obtained it, nor why it was something that advanced so quickly when her mind had fewer lustful thoughts than the majority of men and women whose minds she had peeked at throughout the years. If she was able to advance through the Dao of Lust with just that, then everyone around her should secretly be in the Full Success stage, or perhaps even in the true realms of Dao that she had theorised about previously. So long as she questioned those people sufficiently, she might be able to advance her Dao of Law to Full Success far more easily than she presumed, but she was more than aware that this was unlikely to be the case, albeit not due to any concrete feeling or information.
Rather, there were some strange occurrences in the past that made her almost certain that there was more to things than what met the eye, with the vagueness of ‘things’ being rather perfect in this case.
Until she got to a high enough level of power to be able to interact with the greater nature of the world at a sufficient level, she had no hope of confronting the heavens as she wished to, or whatever was causing the intrusion of otherworldly demons, the gifts on them, or the azure lights within those. However, she did not believe this to be outside of her reach, and so she was never going to ignore the possibility and the potential of such a thing.
One day, she would reach the heavens, and either beat them up, or slaughter them completely. Eventually, she would learn what brought so much chaos to the world in the form of otherworldly gifts and demons. There must be a time that she could see the truth of what lay beyond the Planar Continents, primarily in terms of the other worlds that seemed to come to the Planar Continents with odd regularly when there were so many other worlds to getting sent to. Of course, if every world was passing people along from one to the other, then she would be very interested in learning what caused such a thing, and why people that came to other worlds always seemed to get such powerful gifts.
It was obviously not something that would just happen naturally in the simplest system possible, which would be what the natural world leans towards. She knew that in a world where there was no ubiquitous and incredibly powerful energy that changed the world through its very existence, like in the worlds of the otherworldly demons she had met so far, there was a leaning in everything towards the simplest possible solution. The laws of physics over there all apparently function in relatively simple and consistent ways, although they are not yet fully understood by the people there.
Something like the otherworldly gifts just doesn’t make sense under such a premise. They were too varied in power, nature and influence, in their response to the loss of azure lights, and that was without going into detail regarding the azure lights themselves, which were just sources of infinite energy without any clear reason for existing.
There had to be a source for them, that much she knew, and it was likely to be intelligent.
Perhaps the azure lights came from one force, or many, and perhaps they were all as different as the cultivation techniques of the Planar Continents, simply seeming to be identical due to her lack of knowledge about them. Of course, it could always be that they are all the same – maybe even literally.
She did not know that, and she couldn’t know that without greatly growing in power and exploring these aspects of the world herself. As such, she was currently content with having it be within her plans to do so at a later time, and to take any opportunity that came her way to learn things more quickly than if she took no risks or chances at all. Ultimately, even if it wasn’t for the troubles caused to her by otherworldly influence, the rest of the Planar Continents had been changed innumerable times by them, and it was vital to learn of their origin and whether it would be possible to stop such unwanted intrusions in the future.
And, in the time that she went through all that within her head, she saw the eyes of both Long Huang and Luo Na widen before they glanced at one another and took a step to distance themselves from the other, “I’m guessing that the idea is not one you like.”
“I doubt your ability to do such a thing, Ascendant, but I am not going to risk it,” Luo Na said.
Long Huang put it much more simply, “Don’t you dare!”
“Then stop fighting. I don’t know what the lot of you do while I’m not around – the last explanation got interrupted by this attack – but there is no possible way for the two of you to have gotten this agitated with one another in just the three months that I was away. Furthermore, as a form of conflict, random bickering is far less effective than, say, frequent sparring and duelling, which would at least get the two of you to practise your techniques and improve your overall ability in combat.”
“Fine…” the two of them said almost at the same time, but refused to acknowledge that and instead went further away from one another.
“Luo Na, don’t go so far. Your forces will be joining the fight, so you need to be present.”
She clearly heard that right away, but delayed and only turned around once she was entirely certain that Long Huang had gotten far enough away for her to not need to be within her proximity upon returning to Wei Yi’s position.
“Very well, I shall remain for a little longer. What plans do you have?”
“Mo Zhouquan really isn’t doing well as of late, is she?” Wei Yi commented as she looked into the room where the corrupted woman lay, with Long Huang standing beside her bed, one hand placed on Mo Zhouquan’s forehead to check her temperature, “Has she been like this for a while now, or has it gotten worse?”
Long Huang nodded, “A little worse… Hey, can you hear me?”
She was naturally addressing the woman lying in the bed, and received no audible response other than the slight shift of Mo Zhouquan’s body.
A few minutes passed before she was ready to step away and let Wei Yi have a go, although she did not go much further than a seat in the corner of the room. There was a window out to Beast’s Rest there, but that did not stop her from focusing only on the corrupted woman, one hand resting near the collar on her neck almost the entire time, leaving it for moments at a time to return to touching it for reassurance.
“You can try your method,” was all that she said.
“Sure. Don’t do anything while I’m trying this, or else I may accidentally damage your mind and body.”
After the Ascendant had given instructions to all of the leaders under her command, she knew that she had to return to Paragon and the Kong Prison Realm, which was exactly what she ended up doing. There were a few things that needed to be looked at, and she would handle them right away.
It turned out that the first thing that she could address most quickly was the state of Mo Zhouquan, and since it was something that benefitted her attempts to learn more about the Primordial Deities immensely, she saw no good reason to postpone that until later. From what she was able to tell, it was indeed the influence of Primordial Corruption that played the biggest part in the corruptor woman’s current weakened state, as the elevation in the average energy density of the Planar Continents was bound to benefit those ancient things in escaping from their seals.
From her limited interaction with the influence of Primordial Corruption that remained within Mo Zhouquan’s body, she couldn’t fully assess what the best way to go about resolving the matter was, so she concluded that she first needed to speak with the one suffering from the symptoms of Primordial Deity influence first.
The woman did not appear to be in the right state to do so normally, so Wei Yi was going to make use of her greater realm in killing will to communicate in a different fashion than usual.
‘Alright, Mo Zhouquan, you are about to feel very uncomfortable, and I don’t really care. Neither should you if I figure out a way to help you,’ the Ascendant thought to herself, sitting down beside her on the bed and placing a hand on the woman’s forehead, a little like how Long Huang had done.
Obviously, she was doing so far less affectionately, and she had little interest in trying to feel up the woman’s skin due to the rather unpleasant features forced onto her by the influence of Primordial Corruption. Long Huang also claimed to dislike those features, as demonstrated very clearly by her disgust during the initial interactions that the Ascendant had seen, but that feeling had begun to fade when their new relationship blossomed, and it had completely disappeared since then.
Using her spiritual will, and that alone, she intruded into the mental domain of the corrupted woman, infusing her consciousness with hers so that they could communicate even when one side was barely breathing and surviving at the moment.
‘Do you hear me?’ the Ascendant asked mentally, uncertain if her attempt was successful.
Only a moment later, she received her answer, for her surroundings were suddenly transformed into a dark and moist pit, with a stygian sky and the faint traces of movement above her.
She stood at one side of the pit, and on the other was a feeble figure that barely breathed, just as she did in reality. From this, it was obvious enough what her identity was, and so she quickly approached the figure as quickly as she could while wading through the unpleasant liquid at the bottom of the pit, the nature of which she did not know but was immediately aware that she did not wish to get closer to it than necessary, for it would be disgusting and very much harmful to her overall condition in this odd mental state.
As soon as she got near enough, Wei Yi called out, “Mo Zhouquan, is this what you’ve been seeing for a while now?”
Her question was vague, but that did not stop the reply from coming over right away.
“Yes, I have been here for a very long time.”
“That must be unpleasant.”
“Yes.”
“Is this your mind, or that of another?”
“I don’t know… I remember hearing things from the outside, but I couldn’t recognise it… Where is this place?”
‘She’s not doing well, then. In that case, I need to figure out where this place is… because I know what it is. This place is almost certainly Primordial Corruption’s world, mental image or something of the sort, and she is in here because I haven’t managed to get rid of the seed of corruption within her…’ Wei Yi paused, recalling what the seed of corruption look like and then remembered the image of the azure lights, ‘I mean, they’re hardly similar in appearance, but their function, leech-like nature, and the rest of it… Are they perhaps identical in intrinsic nature? Is the seed of corruption something that may be able to grow into the azure light? Is the azure light-’
The entire realm quaked all of a sudden, as she remembered that she was effectively sharing the mind of another person, and through her she was influencing the entity that had created this image and forced Mo Zhouquan to endure it.
Naturally, with how much time she had spent thinking about these kinds of things, she was entirely used to all kinds of abnormal ideas that the people of the Planar Continents would be concerned about. Mo Zhouquan had interacted with her for a while, so her attitude had adjusted slightly, and her current state of mind hardly allowed her to process every bit of information that passed through to any significant extent.
All that was left was the Primordial Deity that had latched onto all of the members of the Corruptor’s Enclave, and it was clearly not used to this kind of influence, especially not in its weak state.
Whether it was only a fragment of the whole, left out in the world while the rest was sealed, or if this was the whole in a far weaker state than even Primordial Earth, it was not at all used to interacting with things beyond its own power. That it was merely theory and concepts did not change that, apparently.
If she had to guess at that very moment, then she would probably ascribe the most significant portion of damage dealt to Primordial Corruption’s influence and consciousness to the fact that her comprehension of certain truths and elements of reality was guaranteed th advance her Dao, not just due to the further contribution of the heavens, but because she slowly began to grasp the nature of reality and connect the separate pieces together. Technically, so long as one was aware of the right pieces of information, one only needed to know and comprehend the absolute minimum to get a grasp of the world as a whole.
Such a piece could hardly be appreciated by an entity that was forever stagnant and still.
Thus, the pit itself quaked, unravelling into tendrils, revealing the flat terrain around the stagnant pool within which Wei Yi and Mo Zhouquan had ended up in. The fluid poured out, slowly as a thick and unpleasant liquid would, and the corrupted woman was freed from a number of tendrils that had apparently been holding onto her this entire time.
Then, it was just quiet. Nothing seemed to be happening, and there were no traces of outside influences.
“Ow, my head hurts…”
“At least you seem more awake than before. I think I scared off Primordial Corruption.”
“You… Yeah, I can see that happening. You’re scary at times, but in a very different way, so it may be enough to scare off a Primordial Deity… How long have I been here, exactly? Where is here? Why are you here?”
“For a little while, as far as I know. This is your mental domain, or, at least, a projection of some part of it intermingled with that of Primordial Corruption, or its influence. I’m here because your pet – or did you two end up settling on calling one another girlfriends? – asked me to help you out, and I did so in whatever way I was able to think of,” Wei Yi responded to the questions one by one, “I’ll break the mental connection once you’re alright, and then you will be able to relax on your own, or with Long Huang.”
“Mhm. Probably with her. It’ll be better for me… I feel odd, though.”
“Depending on the exact nature of this odd feeling, I may or may not be able to help you, or even explain it to you.”
“The whispers… they’re not present. I can’t hear them.”
Wei Yi shrugged, “Might have scared off Primordial Corruption more than I had anticipated.”
