When Zhi Qiu Ya awoke, she was surprised to find herself quietly panting like a dog despite awakening in her human state.
Before the fear of succumbing to her bestial side could appear, she realised that a set of sharp, firm but surprisingly gentle claws were scratching near her ears, and when she turned her head, she saw Wei Yi resting beside her, lying on her side with her eyes half-open. Although Zhi Qiu Ya was certain that she had slept for quite some time after her latest attempt to follow the vague advice offered by the woman before her, Wei Yi did not seem to have awoken recently.
That did not disturb her as much as the scent that flooded her nose when she breathed in upon awakening. It clearly emanated from the red-headed woman, and beside the fact that she couldn’t recall sensing anything of the sort only a short time ago, she couldn’t believe how pleasant it was.
She couldn’t suggest even a single comparison with anything that she had sensed before, as she did not believe that any single one of them would ever be able to match up to this enticing scent that had just the right combination of flavours that prevented it from being too sweet, as many other supposedly pleasant scents that she encountered before were.
It took her a moment to comprehend what this could possibly be, as she imagined this to be some kind of perfume applied by the warrior before her for whatever reason, but she soon dismissed that theory as she was very familiar with what anything unnatural would smell like. As a result, she was left with only a single conclusion – she was currently sensing the redhead’s natural scent, and she actually found it appealing while remaining human.
Zhi Qiu Ya felt blood rush to her cheeks as she turned away and muttered, “What are you doing?”
“You were sleeping in my bed, and I didn’t want to disturb you, so I decided to do something nice,” the warrior replied, removing her hand from the wolven woman’s head, “It’s also a good opportunity to practise restraint and nullification of sharp points with energy.”
“Your bed? I… My animal self must have taken a liking to you…” she guessed, although she was still blushing, even more now than at first as she continued breathing in her fragrance, causing her to speak her next words even more quietly, “A bit like me…”
Neither one spoke for a while, although Zhi Qiu Ya was almost certain that the redhead warrior had heard her and was just being polite by not responding.
“By the way, I have been able to make some progress. I can hold on to myself for longer, but I will be more tired afterwards, and I will sleep longer. That’s probably why I fell asleep for a while in my animal state…” the wolven woman said in order to try to move her mind onto another topic that she was comfortable with, not really caring whether Wei Yi would allow it, “It happened after I heard a few people speaking about my animal state, and how I seemed to have very similar behaviours to my usual self. I’m not certain why, but since then, the bestial state has been a little more cooperative.”
“Well, that’s good. Do you think that the bestial mind may have been born of your own, with most of the human intelligence and sensibilities removed, and thus possesses the same basic instincts as you would? Or, perhaps, do you think that both of your identities are actually the same, and their memories are just forcefully separated by your rejection of the wolven identity?”
“… I don’t think so…”
“You don’t think that is likely, or would you prefer it not to be true?”
She squirmed in response, as she knew and understood quite well that it was the latter answer. The possibility did exist, of course, but to think that the beast she shared her body with, the creature that so frequently seemed to be in heat as it pursued women without any appreciation for public decency, the beast that delighted in base emotions and delights while ruining any semblance of the image that she might have otherwise possessed, could possibly be a product of herself was… disgusting.
There were no other words for it in her mind, no matter what anyone said or suggested. She couldn’t allow such a thing to be true.
“Well, I could easily be wrong. Did you want to get up, or-”
“Yes, I’ll do that. Sorry for occupying and dirtying your bed so shamelessly,” Zhi Qiu Ya said, climbing down from the bed and rushing out of the room the moment that she grabbed some things from her own bed.
Once she was gone, Wei Yi sighed, ‘So, it is as I thought. My body has changed quite significantly from a single breakthrough of three stages. Good thing that I don’t have any kind of physique that might make such a thing more drastic, or else I’d be in an absolutely terrible state right now. As for the nature of her bestial form… it seems that she has considered it before, but I won’t push the idea onto her. Who knows whether or not I am even correct in the slightest, or if this conjecture based on very limited information is entirely inaccurate.’
At the moment, she still didn’t know whether giving her any kind of technique would help or hinder her process, so she would allow Zhi Qiu Ya to figure out things on her own and see where that would get her. If it worked out nicely, she would certainly keep note of every single discovery made by her for future use.
She couldn’t rush her at the moment, even if she wanted to, as she had to go and see exactly what it was that the two that slept on the lower beds wanted from her, and from whoever else they would experiment upon. They hadn’t been in the bedroom since she entered to find Zhi Qiu Ya upon her bed, so she couldn’t even be sure how long they had been preparing for the day, which also limited her ability to estimate the extent to which they would go with any of their actions.
If she was forced to point out one positive, it would be that the abomination that was once a bed that existed beneath her did not lose much of its unpleasant stench while Mo Zhouquan hadn’t been near it. Hopefully, that meant that corruption on inanimate objects could be dispelled if given enough time.
‘I would tear off a piece and steal it, if it wasn’t so noticeable or conspicuous,’ she thought, ‘Or if it wasn’t this unpleasant to touch. I’ve ripped out several hearts, seen the Mirror Plane’s monstrosities, and yet the bed of someone who regularly rests under it with perfect calmness is what manages to disgust my senses to such an extent. Perhaps that book in the Realm of Potential was right about the realms and stages of progress that are impossible to classify with the same clarity as typical cultivation often is.’
She considered her own mental development, and how it had hardly gone the best way it could have done. The fact that her most major push forward came from an insane woman showed this perfectly.
Naturally, Wei Yi did not believe that her growth and mind-set was wrong, certainly not with the way the world was now, but if one random mental step could grant her a pain free breakthrough in terms of physique and physique abilities, she fully intended to make as many such steps as possible. The only problem was that if they could be made on a whim, they would obviously not be as valuable.
She suspected that getting over this strange dislike of certain sensations and appearances would count, or perhaps her absolute refusal to ever pretend to have any interest at all in men, but neither of those could be made just because she wanted these to occur.
Much like her recollection of the start of her journey, as well as the earlier understanding that the world wasn’t one where an innocent person could succeed against a group that would do whatever it wanted and needed to succeed, these were somewhat unexpected and perhaps unprompted, meaning that it would take her a lot of time to locate the right opportunities to force her actual thoughts and her preferences to line up.
‘For now, I can just proceed through life, and hope that those opportunities arise,’ Wei Yi thought, leaving the room and locating the vice-leader through spiritual perception to be able to head straight towards her, ‘The more prepared I am, the more confident I am with myself and the reality around me, the fewer weaknesses I will possess in all regards.’
The moment that Luo Lia Kun saw her approach, she threw over a small map of the building with a cross on one of the rooms on the lowest floor, presumably marking the location where she wanted Wei Yi to go, and then immediately turned back to a figure that she was speaking to at the time.
Her being busy wasn’t anything strange, as it was the reason why she had been able to evade her and do tasks of her own for so long, but the way in which she just passed a map onto her was less ordinary, as she would usually provide the bare minimum explanation before going off to do something else. In any other situation, the reason for this would be less obvious, but since it involved the two terrors known as Long Huang and Mo Zhouquan, it was significantly clearer.
It was very likely that those two had some kind of mad idea, and that the vice-leader had learned something about it and now wanted to get Wei Yi through it as quickly as possible without giving her a chance to realise that the situation was far worse than they had anticipated. Unfortunately for her, while the Wei Yi that she had come to know would certainly fail to understand this, her true self had no difficulty whatsoever in understanding this course of action. On the other hand, she also had no intention of fleeing from this unless she was absolutely certain that this would result in something negative, so the vice-leader wouldn’t be called out on her actions just yet.
If there ever came a time that they were able to speak with one another honestly, then she would certainly be reminded of this time.
Since she didn’t know when the two would be awaiting her arrival, she decided to go straight to them, as giving them the time to set up even more experiments and plans would certainly not be helpful in avoiding anything too extreme.
Until today, she had never descended so far into the headquarters of the Brotherhood of Power, but she had viewed them enough times with spiritual perception to not be surprised at the great change in design the moment that she went beneath the initial basement floor. From typical wooden floors and simple painted walls of the first floor, everything changed to a dark stone called abyssal basalt, found only at the extreme north of the Western Continent, far beneath the Glass Wastes that were formed by the absolute heat there, preventing any human from living there regardless of the techniques, physique and other preparations that may be used.
The only entities that lived there were commonly known as glass men, since they were composed entirely of glass-like shards or were simply large masses of glass that would occasionally resemble humans, and some of them possessed sufficient intellect to communicate with people from their south, but most of the abyssal basalt was obtained through digging into the sands of the Northern Desert until reaching sufficiently dense and stable sandstone, then digging north until stumbling across the stone in question.
It contained an innate heat that meant that it was perfect for use in communities that were reluctant to use passive setups such as arrays, allowing them to heat up colder areas just by placing some of this strangely common stone all over the walls, floors and ceilings, or by placing them around rooms as decorations or furniture.
After the first basement floor, the second had all of the primary surfaces in the room made entirely from abyssal basalt, the third also used it as a material for most of the furniture, and the fourth, the one to which Wei Yi was going to, even used abyssal basalt as the primary material for all of the smallest items there, including some of the buttons and ornaments on the clothing of those that were there, and any that was stored there.
Thus, while the first floor was closer to a pleasant home in appearance, the last one was highly suitable to function as a prison or the basement of some ancient fortress.
This certainly didn’t serve to make either of the two madwomen that slept on the lower beds any less intimidating in appearance, for the moment that she entered the room where the two of them were, she saw one of them stained in blood, illuminated only by a feeble light on the ceiling, while Mo Zhouquan was heading behind a separator with a large chunk of corrupted matter within her hand.
“There you are. Come with me before the black-blooded bitch sees you,” Long Huang said she looked to the door and saw the one that entered, “Trust me, you’ll prefer dealing with me over that monstrosity any day.”
“I don’t have much of a choice, do I?”
“Nope, none in the slightest. Come on, come over here and sit down on this chair. Don’t mind the restraints – those are for those that don’t behave,” she stated, clearly intending to push her into the seat before she saw Wei Yi obeying her quickly, “Good, you know what’s good for you, unlike Zhi Qiu Ya. That mutt was even going to attempt to correct her issues with her mind rather than accepting my experiments and treatment. What a joke, am I right?”
“Define ‘treatment’.”
“No. Instead, tell me whether it is possible to pierce your skin with a low-grade artefact needle,” Long Huang asked, raising a hollow needle.
“Do you want some of my blood, or do you specifically need to use this needle in some way?”
“The latter.”
Wei Yi nodded, then raised her arm and stabbed one of her claws into her arm, holding it there for a while she presented it to Long Huang, “I regenerate quite quickly, so you’ll need to put it in before the wound heals.”
The bloodline researcher nodded with some astonishment, although that did not deter her from placing the needle into the wound the moment that the claw was removed from it. That astonishment remained when she saw the flesh recover at such an immense pace that blood did not even have the opportunity to spill from the wound before it looked to have been entirely untouched for several years, no mark of trace of a cut to be seen.
“Impressive. Out of curiosity, has this led to anything that isn’t meant to regenerate, well, regenerating?”
“Nope, nothing of the sort. I’ve never lost teeth or anything else that doesn’t usually grow back, but I’m mostly sure that it would stay gone if it did happen,” Wei Yi shrugged, quickly confirming that this was indeed the case, “Although it may be that anything since obtaining the physique will recover.”
“I’d love to investigate, but I won’t go around stabbing and cutting just yet. First, I will attempt to figure out whether or not you have any bloodlines in that wonderful body of yours.”
Wei Yi didn’t quite understand the exact process that Long Huang was following, nor the exact structure and nature of her experiments, but she was able to tell that the thin tube the woman connected to the needle would carry her blood to some complex combination of inscriptions and arrays that would then do something to her blood.
She had very limited familiarity with bloodlines, perhaps the only technique directly relating to it within her arsenal being the Disciple of Iron, which had affected her blood to a certain extent when she added it to her Mysterious Characters technique, before it had been renamed, but she was still able to deduce that the amalgamation of arrays and inscriptions was more focused on bestial rather than human bloodlines, meaning that even if she was able to uncover something of interest from the blood sample, it would be in relation to some unexpected ancestry of the Yi family, rather than her identity as a former member of the aforementioned family.
Fortunately, even that particular fact wasn’t something that she was afraid to have revealed, as most people had some connections to the major families of the world, so the strangest thing would be how pure her blood was, not that it was present there at all.
Even if that somehow raised suspicion, it would be difficult to see her as anything but some escapee from the Yi family, perhaps a servant that went out to get a better standing elsewhere, or perhaps a lower or middle member of the family – which would be more likely due to the extremely vibrant crimson of her hair or the perfect silver of her eyes – that had some conflict with the family and decided to pursue a freer life elsewhere. These things were merely uncommon, and wouldn’t point to her true identity without a lot of guesswork, conjecture and assumptions being made using information that Long Huang or Luo Lia Kun almost certainly do not possess, even if they were to speak directly to the Great Yi Family that had imprisoned her.
In essence, the very laws of reality would need to be flipped on their head for this test to be of any true and immediate danger to her, which did not seem likely.
‘Come to think of it, Luo Lia Kun had told me that she would order these two to stop if they went too far, and yet she’s conveniently busy. Did she think that I wouldn’t notice, or has something actually come up?’ she wondered, sending a thread of spiritual perception up to the vice-leader’s room to check, finding little of note or relevance occurring besides the negotiation of a new task and its reward.
When she brought her focus back to the room she was in, the needle was just being removed from her arm due to the mixture of arrays and inscriptions being full of red liquid with a tint of gold, although it was slight enough to be easily overlooked.
“Before you ask, the needle assist me in extracting a very particular form of energy from your blood, and help filter out the trash from the bloodline, although there was surprisingly little of the former,” Long Huang did notice something, but she quickly switched her attention to her device instead of the blood itself and didn’t bother to look directly at it for any longer, “You don’t need to know how any of this works, but, if there is any trace of a powerful bloodline within you, it will be amplified by as much as possible so that an echo, a mirage of sorts, can manifest above the centre of the device. It is typically faint, so if you have decent eyesight, pay attention with me.”
“I can see as far as the world allows, so I think my sight is good,” Wei Yi said, looking towards the device even more intently than before.
For a few moments, the blood rotated through the channels within the inscriptions, their power acting upon it while the arrays intensified and focused that power towards the open centre of the device, where a thin light slowly coalesced, a mixture of gold, crimson, silver and violet that mixed together and yet had a very distinct dividing line between them.
“Oh… interesting-”
All of a sudden, the gold and crimson grew a dozen times, filling the space between the inscriptions and arrays, forming into the shape of a four-legged beast with large, expansive antlers, an eastern dragon’s head, the body of a ram on powerful legs. A dense aura of pure might emanated from it, causing the arrays around it to momentarily flash and flicker in response, despite the fact that this was simply an illusory entity formulated from the response of a bloodline.
This beast turned to Wei Yi, looking right into her eyes, and stood there doing little else.
‘This… is this not one of the many descriptions of a qilin? I do recall noticing some resemblance between my blood and the blood of a Golden Qilin, I believe, but I didn’t think it would be this literal.’
“That is a far more vivid-”
The silver lights suddenly grew as well, splitting into forty large sprites that orbited around the illusion of the Golden Qilin, seemingly causing some annoyance to it as it turned away and huffed at the orbiting sprites.
“What am I seeing right now?” Long Huang asked herself in a daze.
As they grew, the arrays flickered once more, the planar energy fluctuations around them getting even more intense. For several more moments, it continued functioning in an unstable manner, almost being driven to the brink of absolute extinguishment, but it somehow stabilised just in time while only the violet light remained in a dull state.
Before she could contemplate the nature of the silver sprites for any significant period of time, even within her mental domain, the state of the last light changed as well, erupting into a large cloud of energy that consumed both the Golden Qilin and the silver sprites of light, countless nebulae and stars igniting within it, completely overpowering both of the previous mirages with its absolute radiance. In particular, several galaxies stood out amongst the rest: a crimson one, from which great might mixed with the qilin’s aura, a silver one, which was tied to the crimson and paled in comparison while still attracting a great deal of attention, a bright dawn and moonlight congregation of light, and then one nebula that seemed to encompass all of these at once while being primarily formed of an entirely different energy that even Wei Yi herself couldn’t properly identify it.
She did want to use this to her own advantage in some way, attempting to replicate the phenomena within her own body, but she wasn’t able to do much more than heat her blood slightly.
Even if Long Huang could have understood the meaning of this phenomena, she had no chance do to do as the fluctuation of planar energy around the device soared to new heights, instantly extinguishing the light of the arrays and dulling the working of the inscriptions, dispersing the three illusions with a slight delay. Any trace of them vanished, and the blood dried up in an instant, all of the gold vanishing from it and leaving behind only a dull, dark red.
“Uh… um… Your ancestors… were they the product of an ancient qilin and a bunch of strange lights fucking in space?”
“I don’t recall any such tales, nor do I think that most would appreciate you referring to any ancestors in such a manner,” Wei Yi commented, sharing that opinion if it was her ancestry that had gotten the Greats to attack her, as that would likely mean that her lineage had some redeeming features in comparison to that of the Great Families, “Did you learn anything from this?”
“That making sure that something stops rather than exploding is incredibly useful,” Long Huang muttered, still trying to comprehend the series of events, “I must say that I have no familiarity with any of what I had just seen, and I have never seen something this bright and immense…”
She continued staring on for quite some time, her mind visibly rushing to comprehend and memorise everything of note before it began to fade and erode from her memory, while Wei Yi could do little else than attempt to guess about the series of events on her own. From her minimal experimentation with her own blood, there did seem to be some connection between it and the mirages, although she wasn’t able to provoke them within herself and thus couldn’t figure out whether the nature of the illusions was somehow affected by the particular setup of the experiment.
The formation of the Golden Qilin surprised her the least, as she had previously noted some similarity between her own blood and that of the ancient planar beast, but the rest were rather ridiculous. Nothing about the silver sprites was familiar to her, and she had no idea whether their appearance was as literal as the cosmic cloud or the ancient beast or if they had decided to appear as something more metaphorical, perhaps representing a splintered bloodline or something of the sort.
Finally, the cosmic cloud was one that she was most familiar with, especially the imagery of the galaxies within – or, more precisely, visible through it, much like her planar energy looked more like a crystalline portal to the cosmos than the cosmos itself – but why it manifested within her bloodline was an entirely different matter. So far as she was aware, it was her Yin-Yang Ascendant energy that had the greatest effect on her blood, while the cosmic energy should have been making changes to her and only her, with the exception of raising her bloodline’s talent that could be passed on to future generations.
‘Perhaps it affected more than I had initially assumed. Still, it shouldn’t be that overpowering, and it really doesn’t make sense why the qilin is separate from the cosmic cloud, since the technique that had caused my blood to change was incorporated into the current Ascendant’s Path from the very beginning,’ she sighed in her mind, as everything was once more getting far too strange for her to understand as quickly as she would have liked, ‘Maybe the Golden Qilin is part of the Yi bloodline, and then the cosmic cloud is my influence… what are the silver sprites, then?’
Their number didn’t correlate to anything within her possession or in her body, either, so she couldn’t assume that they had come from the planar anchor shards that she had placed into herself, or the Truth of the Universe, which had far, far more individual pieces than that, and everything else that came to mind was also off.
The House of Gold had no connection to that number, neither did the Realm of Potential or any of the other otherworldly gifts that she had come across so far, so it would be unlikely for any of them to have induced such an effect on her bloodline.
As a result, she was far less comfortable with this test than she had anticipated, and yet she had the hope of invoking her bloodline for her own gains, eventually. The fact that the cosmic cloud overwhelmed both other factors also gave her hope that it might be usable a bit like physique energy, in order to absorb traces of bloodlines from others and gain their strengths for herself without changing her state in any significant or negative manner.
‘That’s for later, though. I need to create some semblance of bloodline power first, if I intend to go down that particular route,’ she thought, putting her line of thoughts to an end for now as she saw Long Huang also recovering from the earlier shock and regaining some of her usual demeanour.
“So… I don’t want to do any more tests on you for now. Go and talk to the black-blooded bitch and tell her to bring the mutt over. Also, do not touch anything else on my side of the room unless you want me to cut you apart. I have a high-grade artefact specifically for severing flesh, and I’ve been told by several participants that it can be rather unpleasant to be dissected while still fully conscious,” the woman said, pointing to a box near the back of her side of the room, “Most of my things lack the same safety measures, you see, so they would be irreversibly damages if a specimen like you touched them.”
“I see. I’ll not do that, then,” Wei Yi replied, ‘My internal organs aren’t quite ordinary either, especially not since the latest breakthrough, so I wouldn’t want to attract more attention.’
With that, she went to the other side of the room as to get Zhi Qiu Ya out of there as quickly as possible.
When Zhi Qiu Ya awoke, she was surprised to find herself quietly panting like a dog despite awakening in her human state.
Before the fear of succumbing to her bestial side could appear, she realised that a set of sharp, firm but surprisingly gentle claws were scratching near her ears, and when she turned her head, she saw Wei Yi resting beside her, lying on her side with her eyes half-open. Although Zhi Qiu Ya was certain that she had slept for quite some time after her latest attempt to follow the vague advice offered by the woman before her, Wei Yi did not seem to have awoken recently.
That did not disturb her as much as the scent that flooded her nose when she breathed in upon awakening. It clearly emanated from the red-headed woman, and beside the fact that she couldn’t recall sensing anything of the sort only a short time ago, she couldn’t believe how pleasant it was.
She couldn’t suggest even a single comparison with anything that she had sensed before, as she did not believe that any single one of them would ever be able to match up to this enticing scent that had just the right combination of flavours that prevented it from being too sweet, as many other supposedly pleasant scents that she encountered before were.
It took her a moment to comprehend what this could possibly be, as she imagined this to be some kind of perfume applied by the warrior before her for whatever reason, but she soon dismissed that theory as she was very familiar with what anything unnatural would smell like. As a result, she was left with only a single conclusion – she was currently sensing the redhead’s natural scent, and she actually found it appealing while remaining human.
Zhi Qiu Ya felt blood rush to her cheeks as she turned away and muttered, “What are you doing?”
“You were sleeping in my bed, and I didn’t want to disturb you, so I decided to do something nice,” the warrior replied, removing her hand from the wolven woman’s head, “It’s also a good opportunity to practise restraint and nullification of sharp points with energy.”
“Your bed? I… My animal self must have taken a liking to you…” she guessed, although she was still blushing, even more now than at first as she continued breathing in her fragrance, causing her to speak her next words even more quietly, “A bit like me…”
Neither one spoke for a while, although Zhi Qiu Ya was almost certain that the redhead warrior had heard her and was just being polite by not responding.
“By the way, I have been able to make some progress. I can hold on to myself for longer, but I will be more tired afterwards, and I will sleep longer. That’s probably why I fell asleep for a while in my animal state…” the wolven woman said in order to try to move her mind onto another topic that she was comfortable with, not really caring whether Wei Yi would allow it, “It happened after I heard a few people speaking about my animal state, and how I seemed to have very similar behaviours to my usual self. I’m not certain why, but since then, the bestial state has been a little more cooperative.”
“Well, that’s good. Do you think that the bestial mind may have been born of your own, with most of the human intelligence and sensibilities removed, and thus possesses the same basic instincts as you would? Or, perhaps, do you think that both of your identities are actually the same, and their memories are just forcefully separated by your rejection of the wolven identity?”
“… I don’t think so…”
“You don’t think that is likely, or would you prefer it not to be true?”
She squirmed in response, as she knew and understood quite well that it was the latter answer. The possibility did exist, of course, but to think that the beast she shared her body with, the creature that so frequently seemed to be in heat as it pursued women without any appreciation for public decency, the beast that delighted in base emotions and delights while ruining any semblance of the image that she might have otherwise possessed, could possibly be a product of herself was… disgusting.
There were no other words for it in her mind, no matter what anyone said or suggested. She couldn’t allow such a thing to be true.
“Well, I could easily be wrong. Did you want to get up, or-”
“Yes, I’ll do that. Sorry for occupying and dirtying your bed so shamelessly,” Zhi Qiu Ya said, climbing down from the bed and rushing out of the room the moment that she grabbed some things from her own bed.
Once she was gone, Wei Yi sighed, ‘So, it is as I thought. My body has changed quite significantly from a single breakthrough of three stages. Good thing that I don’t have any kind of physique that might make such a thing more drastic, or else I’d be in an absolutely terrible state right now. As for the nature of her bestial form… it seems that she has considered it before, but I won’t push the idea onto her. Who knows whether or not I am even correct in the slightest, or if this conjecture based on very limited information is entirely inaccurate.’
At the moment, she still didn’t know whether giving her any kind of technique would help or hinder her process, so she would allow Zhi Qiu Ya to figure out things on her own and see where that would get her. If it worked out nicely, she would certainly keep note of every single discovery made by her for future use.
She couldn’t rush her at the moment, even if she wanted to, as she had to go and see exactly what it was that the two that slept on the lower beds wanted from her, and from whoever else they would experiment upon. They hadn’t been in the bedroom since she entered to find Zhi Qiu Ya upon her bed, so she couldn’t even be sure how long they had been preparing for the day, which also limited her ability to estimate the extent to which they would go with any of their actions.
If she was forced to point out one positive, it would be that the abomination that was once a bed that existed beneath her did not lose much of its unpleasant stench while Mo Zhouquan hadn’t been near it. Hopefully, that meant that corruption on inanimate objects could be dispelled if given enough time.
‘I would tear off a piece and steal it, if it wasn’t so noticeable or conspicuous,’ she thought, ‘Or if it wasn’t this unpleasant to touch. I’ve ripped out several hearts, seen the Mirror Plane’s monstrosities, and yet the bed of someone who regularly rests under it with perfect calmness is what manages to disgust my senses to such an extent. Perhaps that book in the Realm of Potential was right about the realms and stages of progress that are impossible to classify with the same clarity as typical cultivation often is.’
She considered her own mental development, and how it had hardly gone the best way it could have done. The fact that her most major push forward came from an insane woman showed this perfectly.
Naturally, Wei Yi did not believe that her growth and mind-set was wrong, certainly not with the way the world was now, but if one random mental step could grant her a pain free breakthrough in terms of physique and physique abilities, she fully intended to make as many such steps as possible. The only problem was that if they could be made on a whim, they would obviously not be as valuable.
She suspected that getting over this strange dislike of certain sensations and appearances would count, or perhaps her absolute refusal to ever pretend to have any interest at all in men, but neither of those could be made just because she wanted these to occur.
Much like her recollection of the start of her journey, as well as the earlier understanding that the world wasn’t one where an innocent person could succeed against a group that would do whatever it wanted and needed to succeed, these were somewhat unexpected and perhaps unprompted, meaning that it would take her a lot of time to locate the right opportunities to force her actual thoughts and her preferences to line up.
‘For now, I can just proceed through life, and hope that those opportunities arise,’ Wei Yi thought, leaving the room and locating the vice-leader through spiritual perception to be able to head straight towards her, ‘The more prepared I am, the more confident I am with myself and the reality around me, the fewer weaknesses I will possess in all regards.’
The moment that Luo Lia Kun saw her approach, she threw over a small map of the building with a cross on one of the rooms on the lowest floor, presumably marking the location where she wanted Wei Yi to go, and then immediately turned back to a figure that she was speaking to at the time.
Her being busy wasn’t anything strange, as it was the reason why she had been able to evade her and do tasks of her own for so long, but the way in which she just passed a map onto her was less ordinary, as she would usually provide the bare minimum explanation before going off to do something else. In any other situation, the reason for this would be less obvious, but since it involved the two terrors known as Long Huang and Mo Zhouquan, it was significantly clearer.
It was very likely that those two had some kind of mad idea, and that the vice-leader had learned something about it and now wanted to get Wei Yi through it as quickly as possible without giving her a chance to realise that the situation was far worse than they had anticipated. Unfortunately for her, while the Wei Yi that she had come to know would certainly fail to understand this, her true self had no difficulty whatsoever in understanding this course of action. On the other hand, she also had no intention of fleeing from this unless she was absolutely certain that this would result in something negative, so the vice-leader wouldn’t be called out on her actions just yet.
If there ever came a time that they were able to speak with one another honestly, then she would certainly be reminded of this time.
Since she didn’t know when the two would be awaiting her arrival, she decided to go straight to them, as giving them the time to set up even more experiments and plans would certainly not be helpful in avoiding anything too extreme.
Until today, she had never descended so far into the headquarters of the Brotherhood of Power, but she had viewed them enough times with spiritual perception to not be surprised at the great change in design the moment that she went beneath the initial basement floor. From typical wooden floors and simple painted walls of the first floor, everything changed to a dark stone called abyssal basalt, found only at the extreme north of the Western Continent, far beneath the Glass Wastes that were formed by the absolute heat there, preventing any human from living there regardless of the techniques, physique and other preparations that may be used.
The only entities that lived there were commonly known as glass men, since they were composed entirely of glass-like shards or were simply large masses of glass that would occasionally resemble humans, and some of them possessed sufficient intellect to communicate with people from their south, but most of the abyssal basalt was obtained through digging into the sands of the Northern Desert until reaching sufficiently dense and stable sandstone, then digging north until stumbling across the stone in question.
It contained an innate heat that meant that it was perfect for use in communities that were reluctant to use passive setups such as arrays, allowing them to heat up colder areas just by placing some of this strangely common stone all over the walls, floors and ceilings, or by placing them around rooms as decorations or furniture.
After the first basement floor, the second had all of the primary surfaces in the room made entirely from abyssal basalt, the third also used it as a material for most of the furniture, and the fourth, the one to which Wei Yi was going to, even used abyssal basalt as the primary material for all of the smallest items there, including some of the buttons and ornaments on the clothing of those that were there, and any that was stored there.
Thus, while the first floor was closer to a pleasant home in appearance, the last one was highly suitable to function as a prison or the basement of some ancient fortress.
This certainly didn’t serve to make either of the two madwomen that slept on the lower beds any less intimidating in appearance, for the moment that she entered the room where the two of them were, she saw one of them stained in blood, illuminated only by a feeble light on the ceiling, while Mo Zhouquan was heading behind a separator with a large chunk of corrupted matter within her hand.
“There you are. Come with me before the black-blooded bitch sees you,” Long Huang said she looked to the door and saw the one that entered, “Trust me, you’ll prefer dealing with me over that monstrosity any day.”
“I don’t have much of a choice, do I?”
“Nope, none in the slightest. Come on, come over here and sit down on this chair. Don’t mind the restraints – those are for those that don’t behave,” she stated, clearly intending to push her into the seat before she saw Wei Yi obeying her quickly, “Good, you know what’s good for you, unlike Zhi Qiu Ya. That mutt was even going to attempt to correct her issues with her mind rather than accepting my experiments and treatment. What a joke, am I right?”
“Define ‘treatment’.”
“No. Instead, tell me whether it is possible to pierce your skin with a low-grade artefact needle,” Long Huang asked, raising a hollow needle.
“Do you want some of my blood, or do you specifically need to use this needle in some way?”
“The latter.”
Wei Yi nodded, then raised her arm and stabbed one of her claws into her arm, holding it there for a while she presented it to Long Huang, “I regenerate quite quickly, so you’ll need to put it in before the wound heals.”
The bloodline researcher nodded with some astonishment, although that did not deter her from placing the needle into the wound the moment that the claw was removed from it. That astonishment remained when she saw the flesh recover at such an immense pace that blood did not even have the opportunity to spill from the wound before it looked to have been entirely untouched for several years, no mark of trace of a cut to be seen.
“Impressive. Out of curiosity, has this led to anything that isn’t meant to regenerate, well, regenerating?”
“Nope, nothing of the sort. I’ve never lost teeth or anything else that doesn’t usually grow back, but I’m mostly sure that it would stay gone if it did happen,” Wei Yi shrugged, quickly confirming that this was indeed the case, “Although it may be that anything since obtaining the physique will recover.”
“I’d love to investigate, but I won’t go around stabbing and cutting just yet. First, I will attempt to figure out whether or not you have any bloodlines in that wonderful body of yours.”
Wei Yi didn’t quite understand the exact process that Long Huang was following, nor the exact structure and nature of her experiments, but she was able to tell that the thin tube the woman connected to the needle would carry her blood to some complex combination of inscriptions and arrays that would then do something to her blood.
She had very limited familiarity with bloodlines, perhaps the only technique directly relating to it within her arsenal being the Disciple of Iron, which had affected her blood to a certain extent when she added it to her Mysterious Characters technique, before it had been renamed, but she was still able to deduce that the amalgamation of arrays and inscriptions was more focused on bestial rather than human bloodlines, meaning that even if she was able to uncover something of interest from the blood sample, it would be in relation to some unexpected ancestry of the Yi family, rather than her identity as a former member of the aforementioned family.
Fortunately, even that particular fact wasn’t something that she was afraid to have revealed, as most people had some connections to the major families of the world, so the strangest thing would be how pure her blood was, not that it was present there at all.
Even if that somehow raised suspicion, it would be difficult to see her as anything but some escapee from the Yi family, perhaps a servant that went out to get a better standing elsewhere, or perhaps a lower or middle member of the family – which would be more likely due to the extremely vibrant crimson of her hair or the perfect silver of her eyes – that had some conflict with the family and decided to pursue a freer life elsewhere. These things were merely uncommon, and wouldn’t point to her true identity without a lot of guesswork, conjecture and assumptions being made using information that Long Huang or Luo Lia Kun almost certainly do not possess, even if they were to speak directly to the Great Yi Family that had imprisoned her.
In essence, the very laws of reality would need to be flipped on their head for this test to be of any true and immediate danger to her, which did not seem likely.
‘Come to think of it, Luo Lia Kun had told me that she would order these two to stop if they went too far, and yet she’s conveniently busy. Did she think that I wouldn’t notice, or has something actually come up?’ she wondered, sending a thread of spiritual perception up to the vice-leader’s room to check, finding little of note or relevance occurring besides the negotiation of a new task and its reward.
When she brought her focus back to the room she was in, the needle was just being removed from her arm due to the mixture of arrays and inscriptions being full of red liquid with a tint of gold, although it was slight enough to be easily overlooked.
“Before you ask, the needle assist me in extracting a very particular form of energy from your blood, and help filter out the trash from the bloodline, although there was surprisingly little of the former,” Long Huang did notice something, but she quickly switched her attention to her device instead of the blood itself and didn’t bother to look directly at it for any longer, “You don’t need to know how any of this works, but, if there is any trace of a powerful bloodline within you, it will be amplified by as much as possible so that an echo, a mirage of sorts, can manifest above the centre of the device. It is typically faint, so if you have decent eyesight, pay attention with me.”
“I can see as far as the world allows, so I think my sight is good,” Wei Yi said, looking towards the device even more intently than before.
For a few moments, the blood rotated through the channels within the inscriptions, their power acting upon it while the arrays intensified and focused that power towards the open centre of the device, where a thin light slowly coalesced, a mixture of gold, crimson, silver and violet that mixed together and yet had a very distinct dividing line between them.
“Oh… interesting-”
All of a sudden, the gold and crimson grew a dozen times, filling the space between the inscriptions and arrays, forming into the shape of a four-legged beast with large, expansive antlers, an eastern dragon’s head, the body of a ram on powerful legs. A dense aura of pure might emanated from it, causing the arrays around it to momentarily flash and flicker in response, despite the fact that this was simply an illusory entity formulated from the response of a bloodline.
This beast turned to Wei Yi, looking right into her eyes, and stood there doing little else.
‘This… is this not one of the many descriptions of a qilin? I do recall noticing some resemblance between my blood and the blood of a Golden Qilin, I believe, but I didn’t think it would be this literal.’
“That is a far more vivid-”
The silver lights suddenly grew as well, splitting into forty large sprites that orbited around the illusion of the Golden Qilin, seemingly causing some annoyance to it as it turned away and huffed at the orbiting sprites.
“What am I seeing right now?” Long Huang asked herself in a daze.
As they grew, the arrays flickered once more, the planar energy fluctuations around them getting even more intense. For several more moments, it continued functioning in an unstable manner, almost being driven to the brink of absolute extinguishment, but it somehow stabilised just in time while only the violet light remained in a dull state.
Before she could contemplate the nature of the silver sprites for any significant period of time, even within her mental domain, the state of the last light changed as well, erupting into a large cloud of energy that consumed both the Golden Qilin and the silver sprites of light, countless nebulae and stars igniting within it, completely overpowering both of the previous mirages with its absolute radiance. In particular, several galaxies stood out amongst the rest: a crimson one, from which great might mixed with the qilin’s aura, a silver one, which was tied to the crimson and paled in comparison while still attracting a great deal of attention, a bright dawn and moonlight congregation of light, and then one nebula that seemed to encompass all of these at once while being primarily formed of an entirely different energy that even Wei Yi herself couldn’t properly identify it.
She did want to use this to her own advantage in some way, attempting to replicate the phenomena within her own body, but she wasn’t able to do much more than heat her blood slightly.
Even if Long Huang could have understood the meaning of this phenomena, she had no chance do to do as the fluctuation of planar energy around the device soared to new heights, instantly extinguishing the light of the arrays and dulling the working of the inscriptions, dispersing the three illusions with a slight delay. Any trace of them vanished, and the blood dried up in an instant, all of the gold vanishing from it and leaving behind only a dull, dark red.
“Uh… um… Your ancestors… were they the product of an ancient qilin and a bunch of strange lights fucking in space?”
“I don’t recall any such tales, nor do I think that most would appreciate you referring to any ancestors in such a manner,” Wei Yi commented, sharing that opinion if it was her ancestry that had gotten the Greats to attack her, as that would likely mean that her lineage had some redeeming features in comparison to that of the Great Families, “Did you learn anything from this?”
“That making sure that something stops rather than exploding is incredibly useful,” Long Huang muttered, still trying to comprehend the series of events, “I must say that I have no familiarity with any of what I had just seen, and I have never seen something this bright and immense…”
She continued staring on for quite some time, her mind visibly rushing to comprehend and memorise everything of note before it began to fade and erode from her memory, while Wei Yi could do little else than attempt to guess about the series of events on her own. From her minimal experimentation with her own blood, there did seem to be some connection between it and the mirages, although she wasn’t able to provoke them within herself and thus couldn’t figure out whether the nature of the illusions was somehow affected by the particular setup of the experiment.
The formation of the Golden Qilin surprised her the least, as she had previously noted some similarity between her own blood and that of the ancient planar beast, but the rest were rather ridiculous. Nothing about the silver sprites was familiar to her, and she had no idea whether their appearance was as literal as the cosmic cloud or the ancient beast or if they had decided to appear as something more metaphorical, perhaps representing a splintered bloodline or something of the sort.
Finally, the cosmic cloud was one that she was most familiar with, especially the imagery of the galaxies within – or, more precisely, visible through it, much like her planar energy looked more like a crystalline portal to the cosmos than the cosmos itself – but why it manifested within her bloodline was an entirely different matter. So far as she was aware, it was her Yin-Yang Ascendant energy that had the greatest effect on her blood, while the cosmic energy should have been making changes to her and only her, with the exception of raising her bloodline’s talent that could be passed on to future generations.
‘Perhaps it affected more than I had initially assumed. Still, it shouldn’t be that overpowering, and it really doesn’t make sense why the qilin is separate from the cosmic cloud, since the technique that had caused my blood to change was incorporated into the current Ascendant’s Path from the very beginning,’ she sighed in her mind, as everything was once more getting far too strange for her to understand as quickly as she would have liked, ‘Maybe the Golden Qilin is part of the Yi bloodline, and then the cosmic cloud is my influence… what are the silver sprites, then?’
Their number didn’t correlate to anything within her possession or in her body, either, so she couldn’t assume that they had come from the planar anchor shards that she had placed into herself, or the Truth of the Universe, which had far, far more individual pieces than that, and everything else that came to mind was also off.
The House of Gold had no connection to that number, neither did the Realm of Potential or any of the other otherworldly gifts that she had come across so far, so it would be unlikely for any of them to have induced such an effect on her bloodline.
As a result, she was far less comfortable with this test than she had anticipated, and yet she had the hope of invoking her bloodline for her own gains, eventually. The fact that the cosmic cloud overwhelmed both other factors also gave her hope that it might be usable a bit like physique energy, in order to absorb traces of bloodlines from others and gain their strengths for herself without changing her state in any significant or negative manner.
‘That’s for later, though. I need to create some semblance of bloodline power first, if I intend to go down that particular route,’ she thought, putting her line of thoughts to an end for now as she saw Long Huang also recovering from the earlier shock and regaining some of her usual demeanour.
“So… I don’t want to do any more tests on you for now. Go and talk to the black-blooded bitch and tell her to bring the mutt over. Also, do not touch anything else on my side of the room unless you want me to cut you apart. I have a high-grade artefact specifically for severing flesh, and I’ve been told by several participants that it can be rather unpleasant to be dissected while still fully conscious,” the woman said, pointing to a box near the back of her side of the room, “Most of my things lack the same safety measures, you see, so they would be irreversibly damages if a specimen like you touched them.”
“I see. I’ll not do that, then,” Wei Yi replied, ‘My internal organs aren’t quite ordinary either, especially not since the latest breakthrough, so I wouldn’t want to attract more attention.’
With that, she went to the other side of the room as to get Zhi Qiu Ya out of there as quickly as possible.
