V4C62: Oblivion Halo Attainment
With countless talismans draw in ink and blood, a number of arrays that had to be drawn out through the chains of Law as there was too little room for them to be manifested through any physical means, including planar energy, as well as a series of pills that Wei Yi managed to refine in a few moments with the herbs that happened to be brought over alongside the last set of talisman materials, Luo Na was finally approaching the seventh realm within just a few minutes.
So many different things seemed to occur that she could barely believe it when the Ascendant told her that only a minute was needed for her to reach the ninth stage, and that it then only required two to reach the point needed for the breakthrough. It seemed absolutely impossible, and yet a single glance outside with her spiritual perception confirmed that barely anybody had moved. Even if nothing else that had happened today would have convinced her that the person she had chosen to side with was capable, then the rate at which energy just seemed to flow into her without much of her own intervention.
“Before I go through this… Let me repeat my earlier promise. I will aid you, no matter what.”
“No need for that… I don’t have much more blood left, nor much bloodline power, so if you could get on with it, that would be nice…”
Wei Yi was obviously not against assisting her, but even with the method that she had discovered, the Bloodline Character Art, which allowed her to make use of her bloodline power to substitute her blood in the creation of talismans, which she could also elevate to the eight-star grade if she so wished, her current supplies of blood and bloodline power were lacking for talismans that would be sufficient to assist someone of Luo Na’s realm. For that reason, even her mental energy was rather exhausted, not to mention the internal damage that the Law arrays inflicted upon her.
In short, she wanted to get this over with as quickly as possible, and so she helped out with the gathering of energy so that she would be able to complete her own physical development. Just as with anything else that tore apart her body, she could take advantage of it to accelerate the development that her cosmic energy could yield, but there was only so much she could do with her energy.
After a certain point, she would achieve little, but the pain would only grow to be able to affect even her own ruined nerves. She would rather stay out of that territory, if possible.
Finally, the energy around Luo Na intensified to the point that the next realm was finally visible. Her anchor manifested out of her planar energy, surrounded by a gleaming core that was scarred by a number of searing marks that all flowed towards her due to the channels between the core and the anchor within. The number of searing marks, as well as the channels, was higher than Wei Yi’s current count, but it was still less than fifty, which was something that she might reach by the fifth effective stage.
‘That doesn’t change the breakthrough process itself, though, so I will focus on that… Well, I’ll focus as much as possible while literally every part of me is trying to shred itself into pieces… I think one memory of the Thunder Lord had contained him being kicked in the balls, but this is much worse…’
The mass of congealing planar energy expanded further, with more and more of it simultaneously surging towards and out of her dantian, with that pool of energy getting more immense with every single moment. It seemed to be boundless and bottomless, to the point that the slight fluctuations of the storm alone would have been sufficient to obliterate the tower they were in if not for the five remaining guardians to establish a series of defences to keep their structure standing.
There was no clear boundary that she crossed, not so far as Wei Yi was able to tell from afar, or from within her mind. It was as if something simply shifted.
All of a sudden, five illusory shapes appeared around the manifestation of her core, each one glowing with ten marks that were inscribed upon the core, connecting with the glowing channels within. Four were entirely lined with the searing marks, as one might expect, but the last only had four marks upon it, only four channels flowing to the four corners of the circular halo, causing it to look strangely feeble and incomplete even though this was the exact kind of thing that would occur unless one had a very precise number of marks.
They caused a surge of energy to collide with the barriers that had been established around it, with the defences holding but cracking slightly under the pressure. However, that was only the first pulse of power, manifested by the fifth and thus weakest oblivion halo.
Her other four halos were significantly stronger in appearance, and far more complete, even if their strength did not actually differ in practise, and so the pulse of power that they emitted crashed into the barriers again and again, with the following three nearly breaking them apart and leaving the last one to simply pass through.
Despite appearances, when the final wave of energy came, the barrier suddenly withstood it fully, even recovering by a significant degree over nothing at all.
Luo Long Meng had been like the others, looking around in an attempt to figure out who or what had been the cause of this strange phenomenon, but she was the only one to turn to the true cause of the event. She saw the Ascendant cough up another few drops of blood, then promptly meet her eyes and show a gaze of exhaustion. There might have been something that she had intended to communicate, but in the eyes of the guardian, that was all buried beneath the exhaustion.
‘Shit, I am exhausting a little too much blood and energy,’ Wei Yi also realised this, as she turned away and shut her eyes, ‘The moment that all of this is no longer necessary, I will be able to recover rather quickly, but before then… When does this end?’
Although the halos were formed in the air around Luo Na, they were not yet fully complete within, and they clearly demanded more energy as they acted upon the body just as the body acted upon them. She could see the mental energy, the spiritual perception, within the future Matriarch’s body being compressed and refined by the power of the halos, slowly turning it denser and golden, not entirely akin to the shade that she had witnessed from the previous cultivators in the seventh realm, but also not entirely dissimilar.
Quite clearly, when everything else was taken into account, it seemed that the cause of this abnormality was the mutated physique that had forced her to practise a cultivation purely based around talismans, as well as the lengthy period of time that she had spent within the effect of countless illusory talismans.
Even if she was able to see through them with ease due to the changes to her eyes, they must have continued to have some effect upon her. Perhaps they continued to affect her other senses, despite what she seemed to suggest before, and thus the slight dissonance between her perceived reality and the truth thus tempered her mental energy. It was a method that had previously helped Wei Yi to gain a slightly greater degree of stability in illusory realms, since her Third Eye was not always sufficient to remove all illusions before her, and could have easily been utilised by sheer luck by the woman before her.
Again, there was very little hint as to how or why the breakthrough proceeded, but it did so without the typical fanfare that one might expect from the development. The halos just formed, and the phenomena of the breakthrough collapsed into her body, the full oblivion halos forming and surrounding her true core, linking with her true searing marks through the true channels, and stabilised her within the seventh realm just that easily.
“… So, you done?” Wei Yi asked after there were few changes in the woman’s mind and cultivation for some time.
“I appear to be. I apologise for the delay. I-”
Luo Na must not have expected her words to result in the Ascendant instantly dropping to the ground as all of the ephemeral shapes around her formed through the power of Law dispersed with the faint sound of chains sliding past one another as they returned to their original places.
“Wei Yi, are you-”
“I’m fine…” she replied, her body already healing and rebuilding itself, with her taking the opportunity to partially reconstruct certain elements to take advantage of her latest perception of the most optimal layout and structure for the human body, including that new part that she had not had the opportunity to adapt quite yet, “My regenerative abilities are actually superior to most planar beasts, including those who specifically focus on regeneration as their hunting strategy, but when the body is being simultaneously torn apart and attempting to recover, it is difficult to actually put them to use. I’ll be able to stand in a minute or two.”
“Alright, I shall not disturb you physically,” Luo Na said, “That being said, I do wish to ask a few questions.”
“Go ahead, but don’t expect answers to all of them.”
“In that case, what was all of that? The whole thing about Law, and the way in which the talisman was floating above you with no energy input at all, or the way in which the world itself seemed to assist us as the battle began. What was that?”
“… Ever heard of Dao? Not the Great Dao, I mean, but individual Dao dedicated to specific aspects of reality.”
“I have heard some things, but not enough to understand how this… a Dao of Law?”
“Yeah, that. With my experiences, I happen to have understood a few Dao, and they can be used together to achieve certain things that I desire… Combined with some physique abilities of my own, it can be used for anything from making an assumption turn towards a particular conclusion, or outright changing the world, just like now. I won’t bother explaining it in more detail, since you really won’t comprehend it even if I spent decades clarifying all of it to you.”
“In the same way that those with a fragment of the Great Dao cannot easily pass it along to another, even if they share the same technique?”
“Exactly. You can attempt to comprehend it on your own, if you want, but I won’t be assisting you.”
As they spoke, even if it was only for a brief amount of time, Wei Yi’s voice was already recovering all of its confidence and strength, with the paleness fading from her body and her muscles seeming to pulse with energy after they had been attempting to wither only a short time ago.
The moment that she was able to rise without simply falling back down, she did so, putting herself in a slightly more comfortable position in order to adjust the rest of her body to its perfect state. In particular, as she had already begun to modify her unexpected gains from the Yin Soul Yang Root, she completed that part of the process as quickly as she could to make it less vulnerable to outside attack while optimizing the internal processes, since she really wasn’t likely to be able to make use of her original organs to ever have children.
While she was regenerating her internal organs a little earlier, she did perform a check of her own on her feminine reproductive system and was able to confirm the conclusion uttered by one of the Greats.
‘I don’t understand the condition entirely, but the combination of all of the arrays and malnourishment in my youth as well as everything I had gone through since, possibly including even the loss of the taste of food, likely interfered with the typical developmental process and… well, it’s fucked, and I do not have enough understanding of physical modification to possibly undo it,’ she had concluded, although she didn’t attempt to do something as drastic and remove that part of herself entirely to replace it with something that would be of greater use to her, like a few spare hearts so that she would be safer against most attacks.
Although it might be an efficient change, it wasn’t something that she intended to modify unless her life absolutely depended on it. It might be a silly thing to do, but she was hardly in need of those extra hearts and introducing them would just create more difficulties as she would need to alter her circulatory system.
“So, does my voice sound alright? I didn’t fuck something up, did I?”
“Not so far as I can tell. Have you already recovered?” Luo Na asked, although her attention was primarily focused on stabilising her own cultivation.
“I have recovered sufficiently. I don’t know the process for becoming a Matriarch, nor how any of that works, but I expect that it won’t be instant. Prepare for it, and I’ll be right over to congratulate you on your rise to the position. I’m afraid I have something that I need to deal with before there’s a chance that I’ll lose them.”
The future Matriarch replied with a casual nod, so, without wasting any more time, Wei Yi headed outside with a prompt usage of the Mortal World’s Echo. She didn’t know exactly where her destination was, as she had failed to keep track of the otherworldly demon when she had used the Past’s Call ability, but she was able to move around a lot more freely now that she was allied with the leader of the district. She also had enough spiritual perception range to scan through much of the district in one go, so it would only take her a little while to confirm whether her target was in the district.
Naturally, as she had effectively leapt out of the tower on the seventh floor, she made use of her Aerial Platforms to traverse the district quickly and from above, looking over everything for signs of either the otherworldly demon or those that supported Luo Yunzhen.
After the day’s work, many such individuals were gone, having been dealt with by Luo Na or those that had supported her, and so any places where they were still active might indicate that they were able to take advantage of Jian Hongchao to keep themselves in place. Whether or not any particular group of his supporters was indeed benefitting from the otherworldly demon, finding them would still help Luo Na keep the position that she was about to claim as they could be dealt with as well.
Most of the locations she passed by were not of much interest to her, leaving her only to put down a marker for them to be handled later, and it was only once she got back to the structure that she had destroyed to bury the sixth realm Blood-tinged Church member that she discovered something of interest to her.
Aside from the fact that some of the rubble had been shifted around and some had even disappeared entirely, she found that there was no particle of anchor energy residing where it would have been had the expert perished. The meaning of this was obvious, so she quickly paused her search and took a closer look at the region in order to find some traces of where he might have gone to, since he seemed to be the most likely to be connected to the otherworldly demon beside simply being in the same faction.
After all, he was capable of commanding her as a blood servant, so unless that was just an ability that everyone in the Blood-tinged Church would have – which would mean that it might be dependant on their energy, which would then imply that Wei Yi could acquire that same ability through stealing their techniques and adapting them into the Ascendant’s Path – he would need to be someone of importance in the Church.
‘With their field of expertise, it is no surprise that he hasn’t left behind any trails of blood, but… yes, there are some traces of movement away from the ruined building, and towards the outside…’
She hastened in the direction that he seemed to have travelled, quickly rushing out of the denser areas of the district and out into the outskirts, finding that his attempts to keep himself hidden became lazier as he went further out, likely due to hoping that he wouldn’t be noticed, or possibly due to the injuries that he had endured during their battle. If he was trying to escape with those still marking his body, then keeping the path clean of his blood would take a great degree of effort and energy, not to mention his attempts to hide his other traces.
That brought her to the conclusion that he would be nearby, or too far away to bother chasing him. Without any traces of Jian Hongchao’s energy or footprints, it was hard to guess whether she was present with him at this point, or if she had ended up somewhere further away, but this sixth realm figure was still her best bet.
Several minutes later, she finally found what she was looking for. In the distance, just at the edge of her spiritual perception range, a man covered in blood was feebly limping through the grass, drops of blood constantly dripping down his body and being caught moments before they touched the ground. Not far from him, Jian Hongchao was standing beside a hill, manifesting her physique energy towards in, forming the vague shape of a passageway through the ground.
It was more than enough to understand what was being intended, so she hastened forward and cleared the gap between them in less than a minute, heading towards the sixth realm expert.
She could have headed towards the otherworldly demon, but she knew that if she did so, the man would be able to forcefully command her to do anything from simply running away as quickly as possible to outright ending her own life, depending on the power of the blood servant method. This would not be ideal, to put it mildly, so she would rather see Jian Hongchao escape with a semblance of freedom than suffering as a result of an attempt to free her without the proper planning that she might have otherwise made use of.
In the eyes of the sixth realm expert, she must have looked like a storm that appeared out of nowhere, a fist heading straight for his skull the moment that he was able to detect her presence. He looked like he was about to gasp, and his eyes were widening.
With such a reaction, one might assume that she would be able to finish him off in one go.
Despite that, she found the man’s face twisting into a grin as some kind of pulse shot out his body and touched Jian Hongchao’s form, with a word appearing out of nowhere and entering her ears as if he had spoken it directly to her. Even if she hadn’t heard what it was, she would have been fearing the worst, and when she was able to understand just what it had been, that fear got even worse.
“Explode!” the projected words were vicious and with a blatant sadistic pleasure associated with the order.
A moment later, his skull was destroyed with the sheer force of her punch, but Wei Yi was hardly able to stop and appreciate this as she was forced to rush to Jian Hongchao, who had a confused look in her eyes. It seemed that the Blood-tinged Church couldn’t even be bothered to explain themselves to her.
Only when the energy within her body suddenly began to rampage throughout her meridians and expanded into the rest of her flesh did she realise what the order had done to her, but even before then, neither of them were able to do much about the process. The very first instruction had sent her dantian into disarray, and her core and anchor both trembled and broke apart nearly instantly, only adding even more energy to the rapidly accelerating collapse.
“W-What is-” the otherworldly demon managed to vocalise before that destruction spread.
“No, that fucker… Wait, Potential! How the fuck do I activate the Realm of Potentia-”
The world around her froze. Sound, light, even smell and touch alike stopped, and it was enveloped in darkness.
It was unmistakably the Realm of Potential, although it was manifesting in a strange way as Jian Hongchao, as well as the area around her, was almost stopped in time just as the world had been, but Wei Yi herself could move, think and act freely, except for affecting anything within that zone. Even if she could have an effect, it would only be inside of the Realm of Potential, whereas the outside would still proceed as it otherwise would.
“… Wei Yi? What happened? Where are we?”
“This… This is the Realm of Potential, but I am afraid that I don’t have much time. At best, the Realm of Potential will only slow us down by a massive degree, but it will still allow time to proceed. In other words, whether we have a minute or a year, you will still die. For that reason, I would ask you to explain everything you can before there is a chance of all of it being lost.”
“D-Die? I am… Just with a word?”
“No time to explain yet, since I don’t know what the rate of temporal dilation is. Please, just focus and tell me everything that has happened to you up to this point.”
Although only her eyes and parts of her face could move, and only enough for her to be able to vocalise her words, the despair was still clear in her expression. She could hardly be blamed for this, but just as both of them knew, there was only so much time that she could spend in this realm before passing unless a very extreme coincidence occurred. As such, she desperately tried to calm herself down while she attempted to recall the past.
“As I had told you, I had appeared in a lab of some kind… The kind that you’d see an evil scientist working in, with blood staining every surface, odd red and green lights lighting it up just enough to see everything. I had come out of some kind of large test tube… thing… I don’t know what it’s called, unfortunately…”
“There’s no need for most descriptions, actually, as you should be able to manifest the memories within the Realm of Potential – if that’s how this fucking thing works…”
Her muttering was overlooked as Jian Hongchao attempted to do so, shutting her eyes and audibly struggling to project her mind out into the world, not managing to succeed right away. It was only after she was about to give up and admit defeat when the image from her mind finally came out, manifesting within the darkness. While it was still much fainter and blurrier than what Yi Shi Ming’s memory fragments had been able to provide, this much was sufficient to ascertain quite a few things about the location she had apparently awoken within.
It did also give her a clue as to what an evil scientist’s lair looked like in the woman’s mind.
As she had described, the floor was covered in countless blood stains of various ages, with some still being fresh and red whereas others were as black as night. The floor was made of some kind of dull grey metal, or so it seemed to be where it wasn’t completely dyed by blood, with many grates at regular intervals so that any fluids could, presumably, flow away without lingering as much as the blood. From the current staining on the floor, it seemed that a large number of the fresher blood had actually emerged from the very shattered glass structure that Jian Hongchao had come out of. That didn’t seem to be a reasonable thing to fill any kind of container, especially not one that was meant to contain a person, but she was hardly the most familiar with producing or modifying people.
“I had suddenly appeared there after I had gone to sleep at home, and I found myself in a strange body, naked, coming out of a weird test tube… I had no clue what was happening, but when I get into strange situations, I usually just go with the flow until I can figure something out… That’s what I did here.”
The otherworldly demon got into her story, and the image thus changed according to her descriptions, the movement slowly being more and more fluid with each moment until it became entirely lifelike.
In that animated image, Wei Yi was able to see Jian Hongchao being grabbed by someone dressed in hooded black robes inscribed with a chaotic character upon their breast, done using a blood red string that conveyed little due to the broken nature of the symbol. This figure had their face obscured by the darkness of the robes, but what was not hidden was the man’s hands, which showed that they were calloused and scarred by countless small cuts.
They looked like they were caused by something akin to a small knife or scalpel.
“This strange man held me when I couldn’t stand on my own, and he… didn’t so much feel me up as he seemed to be searching for something, which he found after a while,” the otherworldly demon said, “It was on my back, a little below the shoulders and on the spine…”
As she talked, the Ascendant walked to her back, prompted by that detail, and made use of the little room that she did have to affect the frozen zone to remove the cloth that obscured the demon’s back, finding a strange series of patterns and symbols that did not appear to be any kind of language that existed within the Planar Continents. Despite that, merely looking upon them instilled a slight degree of dread within her, as if she had seen something that she was never meant to witness, and that her mind was unable to fully comprehend.
It was akin to the dread of Kong Shi Meng’s warnings inscribed within the books of the Yi District and the mirror in her possession, although it was far lesser and seemed to have a different intent, if there was an intent to it at all. Far more likely in her mind was that the dread was an unexpected or unnecessary side effect of the true purpose of those patterns, confirmed by the woman’s description of what happened after.
“He felt that mark, then did… something. I didn’t get it then, and I still don’t, but he helpfully shouted something like ‘Come alive, Jian Hongchao, and serve our Blood-tinged Church!’ I felt another odd sensation, and I figured that it was best to do something at that p-” the otherworldly demon’s words were interrupted by her form suddenly unfreezing, leading to her spitting out a mouthful of blood as it seemed to actively flood her mouth, with her entire body quaking with chaotic energy that sought to tear her asunder.
“Fuck, is this really all this place can afford… Jian Hongchao-”
“No… that’s… not… my… name… it was… what was it… what was my name? Why can’t I remember… my name?” the otherworldly demon questioned, tears appearing in her eyes as the darkness faded back to light, the wilderness returned into view, and time returned to how it had been, with her body quickly being torn apart as her consciousness was no longer able to endure the pressure, “What happened to me?!”
Wei Yi would have given her the answer, but there was no time, even if she had known the answer. She did not, with her only being able to guess that the combination of the way in which she had been brought into the world and the azure light of her otherworldly gift had done quite a bit to harm her mind.
If she did have the ability to save her, she would have done her best. However, she knew of no such way, and instead had to do what she could to minimize the damage.
“I am sorry. I hope your soul gets some rest, at least.”
V4C62: Oblivion Halo Attainment
With countless talismans draw in ink and blood, a number of arrays that had to be drawn out through the chains of Law as there was too little room for them to be manifested through any physical means, including planar energy, as well as a series of pills that Wei Yi managed to refine in a few moments with the herbs that happened to be brought over alongside the last set of talisman materials, Luo Na was finally approaching the seventh realm within just a few minutes.
So many different things seemed to occur that she could barely believe it when the Ascendant told her that only a minute was needed for her to reach the ninth stage, and that it then only required two to reach the point needed for the breakthrough. It seemed absolutely impossible, and yet a single glance outside with her spiritual perception confirmed that barely anybody had moved. Even if nothing else that had happened today would have convinced her that the person she had chosen to side with was capable, then the rate at which energy just seemed to flow into her without much of her own intervention.
“Before I go through this… Let me repeat my earlier promise. I will aid you, no matter what.”
“No need for that… I don’t have much more blood left, nor much bloodline power, so if you could get on with it, that would be nice…”
Wei Yi was obviously not against assisting her, but even with the method that she had discovered, the Bloodline Character Art, which allowed her to make use of her bloodline power to substitute her blood in the creation of talismans, which she could also elevate to the eight-star grade if she so wished, her current supplies of blood and bloodline power were lacking for talismans that would be sufficient to assist someone of Luo Na’s realm. For that reason, even her mental energy was rather exhausted, not to mention the internal damage that the Law arrays inflicted upon her.
In short, she wanted to get this over with as quickly as possible, and so she helped out with the gathering of energy so that she would be able to complete her own physical development. Just as with anything else that tore apart her body, she could take advantage of it to accelerate the development that her cosmic energy could yield, but there was only so much she could do with her energy.
After a certain point, she would achieve little, but the pain would only grow to be able to affect even her own ruined nerves. She would rather stay out of that territory, if possible.
Finally, the energy around Luo Na intensified to the point that the next realm was finally visible. Her anchor manifested out of her planar energy, surrounded by a gleaming core that was scarred by a number of searing marks that all flowed towards her due to the channels between the core and the anchor within. The number of searing marks, as well as the channels, was higher than Wei Yi’s current count, but it was still less than fifty, which was something that she might reach by the fifth effective stage.
‘That doesn’t change the breakthrough process itself, though, so I will focus on that… Well, I’ll focus as much as possible while literally every part of me is trying to shred itself into pieces… I think one memory of the Thunder Lord had contained him being kicked in the balls, but this is much worse…’
The mass of congealing planar energy expanded further, with more and more of it simultaneously surging towards and out of her dantian, with that pool of energy getting more immense with every single moment. It seemed to be boundless and bottomless, to the point that the slight fluctuations of the storm alone would have been sufficient to obliterate the tower they were in if not for the five remaining guardians to establish a series of defences to keep their structure standing.
There was no clear boundary that she crossed, not so far as Wei Yi was able to tell from afar, or from within her mind. It was as if something simply shifted.
All of a sudden, five illusory shapes appeared around the manifestation of her core, each one glowing with ten marks that were inscribed upon the core, connecting with the glowing channels within. Four were entirely lined with the searing marks, as one might expect, but the last only had four marks upon it, only four channels flowing to the four corners of the circular halo, causing it to look strangely feeble and incomplete even though this was the exact kind of thing that would occur unless one had a very precise number of marks.
They caused a surge of energy to collide with the barriers that had been established around it, with the defences holding but cracking slightly under the pressure. However, that was only the first pulse of power, manifested by the fifth and thus weakest oblivion halo.
Her other four halos were significantly stronger in appearance, and far more complete, even if their strength did not actually differ in practise, and so the pulse of power that they emitted crashed into the barriers again and again, with the following three nearly breaking them apart and leaving the last one to simply pass through.
Despite appearances, when the final wave of energy came, the barrier suddenly withstood it fully, even recovering by a significant degree over nothing at all.
Luo Long Meng had been like the others, looking around in an attempt to figure out who or what had been the cause of this strange phenomenon, but she was the only one to turn to the true cause of the event. She saw the Ascendant cough up another few drops of blood, then promptly meet her eyes and show a gaze of exhaustion. There might have been something that she had intended to communicate, but in the eyes of the guardian, that was all buried beneath the exhaustion.
‘Shit, I am exhausting a little too much blood and energy,’ Wei Yi also realised this, as she turned away and shut her eyes, ‘The moment that all of this is no longer necessary, I will be able to recover rather quickly, but before then… When does this end?’
Although the halos were formed in the air around Luo Na, they were not yet fully complete within, and they clearly demanded more energy as they acted upon the body just as the body acted upon them. She could see the mental energy, the spiritual perception, within the future Matriarch’s body being compressed and refined by the power of the halos, slowly turning it denser and golden, not entirely akin to the shade that she had witnessed from the previous cultivators in the seventh realm, but also not entirely dissimilar.
Quite clearly, when everything else was taken into account, it seemed that the cause of this abnormality was the mutated physique that had forced her to practise a cultivation purely based around talismans, as well as the lengthy period of time that she had spent within the effect of countless illusory talismans.
Even if she was able to see through them with ease due to the changes to her eyes, they must have continued to have some effect upon her. Perhaps they continued to affect her other senses, despite what she seemed to suggest before, and thus the slight dissonance between her perceived reality and the truth thus tempered her mental energy. It was a method that had previously helped Wei Yi to gain a slightly greater degree of stability in illusory realms, since her Third Eye was not always sufficient to remove all illusions before her, and could have easily been utilised by sheer luck by the woman before her.
Again, there was very little hint as to how or why the breakthrough proceeded, but it did so without the typical fanfare that one might expect from the development. The halos just formed, and the phenomena of the breakthrough collapsed into her body, the full oblivion halos forming and surrounding her true core, linking with her true searing marks through the true channels, and stabilised her within the seventh realm just that easily.
“… So, you done?” Wei Yi asked after there were few changes in the woman’s mind and cultivation for some time.
“I appear to be. I apologise for the delay. I-”
Luo Na must not have expected her words to result in the Ascendant instantly dropping to the ground as all of the ephemeral shapes around her formed through the power of Law dispersed with the faint sound of chains sliding past one another as they returned to their original places.
“Wei Yi, are you-”
“I’m fine…” she replied, her body already healing and rebuilding itself, with her taking the opportunity to partially reconstruct certain elements to take advantage of her latest perception of the most optimal layout and structure for the human body, including that new part that she had not had the opportunity to adapt quite yet, “My regenerative abilities are actually superior to most planar beasts, including those who specifically focus on regeneration as their hunting strategy, but when the body is being simultaneously torn apart and attempting to recover, it is difficult to actually put them to use. I’ll be able to stand in a minute or two.”
“Alright, I shall not disturb you physically,” Luo Na said, “That being said, I do wish to ask a few questions.”
“Go ahead, but don’t expect answers to all of them.”
“In that case, what was all of that? The whole thing about Law, and the way in which the talisman was floating above you with no energy input at all, or the way in which the world itself seemed to assist us as the battle began. What was that?”
“… Ever heard of Dao? Not the Great Dao, I mean, but individual Dao dedicated to specific aspects of reality.”
“I have heard some things, but not enough to understand how this… a Dao of Law?”
“Yeah, that. With my experiences, I happen to have understood a few Dao, and they can be used together to achieve certain things that I desire… Combined with some physique abilities of my own, it can be used for anything from making an assumption turn towards a particular conclusion, or outright changing the world, just like now. I won’t bother explaining it in more detail, since you really won’t comprehend it even if I spent decades clarifying all of it to you.”
“In the same way that those with a fragment of the Great Dao cannot easily pass it along to another, even if they share the same technique?”
“Exactly. You can attempt to comprehend it on your own, if you want, but I won’t be assisting you.”
As they spoke, even if it was only for a brief amount of time, Wei Yi’s voice was already recovering all of its confidence and strength, with the paleness fading from her body and her muscles seeming to pulse with energy after they had been attempting to wither only a short time ago.
The moment that she was able to rise without simply falling back down, she did so, putting herself in a slightly more comfortable position in order to adjust the rest of her body to its perfect state. In particular, as she had already begun to modify her unexpected gains from the Yin Soul Yang Root, she completed that part of the process as quickly as she could to make it less vulnerable to outside attack while optimizing the internal processes, since she really wasn’t likely to be able to make use of her original organs to ever have children.
While she was regenerating her internal organs a little earlier, she did perform a check of her own on her feminine reproductive system and was able to confirm the conclusion uttered by one of the Greats.
‘I don’t understand the condition entirely, but the combination of all of the arrays and malnourishment in my youth as well as everything I had gone through since, possibly including even the loss of the taste of food, likely interfered with the typical developmental process and… well, it’s fucked, and I do not have enough understanding of physical modification to possibly undo it,’ she had concluded, although she didn’t attempt to do something as drastic and remove that part of herself entirely to replace it with something that would be of greater use to her, like a few spare hearts so that she would be safer against most attacks.
Although it might be an efficient change, it wasn’t something that she intended to modify unless her life absolutely depended on it. It might be a silly thing to do, but she was hardly in need of those extra hearts and introducing them would just create more difficulties as she would need to alter her circulatory system.
“So, does my voice sound alright? I didn’t fuck something up, did I?”
“Not so far as I can tell. Have you already recovered?” Luo Na asked, although her attention was primarily focused on stabilising her own cultivation.
“I have recovered sufficiently. I don’t know the process for becoming a Matriarch, nor how any of that works, but I expect that it won’t be instant. Prepare for it, and I’ll be right over to congratulate you on your rise to the position. I’m afraid I have something that I need to deal with before there’s a chance that I’ll lose them.”
The future Matriarch replied with a casual nod, so, without wasting any more time, Wei Yi headed outside with a prompt usage of the Mortal World’s Echo. She didn’t know exactly where her destination was, as she had failed to keep track of the otherworldly demon when she had used the Past’s Call ability, but she was able to move around a lot more freely now that she was allied with the leader of the district. She also had enough spiritual perception range to scan through much of the district in one go, so it would only take her a little while to confirm whether her target was in the district.
Naturally, as she had effectively leapt out of the tower on the seventh floor, she made use of her Aerial Platforms to traverse the district quickly and from above, looking over everything for signs of either the otherworldly demon or those that supported Luo Yunzhen.
After the day’s work, many such individuals were gone, having been dealt with by Luo Na or those that had supported her, and so any places where they were still active might indicate that they were able to take advantage of Jian Hongchao to keep themselves in place. Whether or not any particular group of his supporters was indeed benefitting from the otherworldly demon, finding them would still help Luo Na keep the position that she was about to claim as they could be dealt with as well.
Most of the locations she passed by were not of much interest to her, leaving her only to put down a marker for them to be handled later, and it was only once she got back to the structure that she had destroyed to bury the sixth realm Blood-tinged Church member that she discovered something of interest to her.
Aside from the fact that some of the rubble had been shifted around and some had even disappeared entirely, she found that there was no particle of anchor energy residing where it would have been had the expert perished. The meaning of this was obvious, so she quickly paused her search and took a closer look at the region in order to find some traces of where he might have gone to, since he seemed to be the most likely to be connected to the otherworldly demon beside simply being in the same faction.
After all, he was capable of commanding her as a blood servant, so unless that was just an ability that everyone in the Blood-tinged Church would have – which would mean that it might be dependant on their energy, which would then imply that Wei Yi could acquire that same ability through stealing their techniques and adapting them into the Ascendant’s Path – he would need to be someone of importance in the Church.
‘With their field of expertise, it is no surprise that he hasn’t left behind any trails of blood, but… yes, there are some traces of movement away from the ruined building, and towards the outside…’
She hastened in the direction that he seemed to have travelled, quickly rushing out of the denser areas of the district and out into the outskirts, finding that his attempts to keep himself hidden became lazier as he went further out, likely due to hoping that he wouldn’t be noticed, or possibly due to the injuries that he had endured during their battle. If he was trying to escape with those still marking his body, then keeping the path clean of his blood would take a great degree of effort and energy, not to mention his attempts to hide his other traces.
That brought her to the conclusion that he would be nearby, or too far away to bother chasing him. Without any traces of Jian Hongchao’s energy or footprints, it was hard to guess whether she was present with him at this point, or if she had ended up somewhere further away, but this sixth realm figure was still her best bet.
Several minutes later, she finally found what she was looking for. In the distance, just at the edge of her spiritual perception range, a man covered in blood was feebly limping through the grass, drops of blood constantly dripping down his body and being caught moments before they touched the ground. Not far from him, Jian Hongchao was standing beside a hill, manifesting her physique energy towards in, forming the vague shape of a passageway through the ground.
It was more than enough to understand what was being intended, so she hastened forward and cleared the gap between them in less than a minute, heading towards the sixth realm expert.
She could have headed towards the otherworldly demon, but she knew that if she did so, the man would be able to forcefully command her to do anything from simply running away as quickly as possible to outright ending her own life, depending on the power of the blood servant method. This would not be ideal, to put it mildly, so she would rather see Jian Hongchao escape with a semblance of freedom than suffering as a result of an attempt to free her without the proper planning that she might have otherwise made use of.
In the eyes of the sixth realm expert, she must have looked like a storm that appeared out of nowhere, a fist heading straight for his skull the moment that he was able to detect her presence. He looked like he was about to gasp, and his eyes were widening.
With such a reaction, one might assume that she would be able to finish him off in one go.
Despite that, she found the man’s face twisting into a grin as some kind of pulse shot out his body and touched Jian Hongchao’s form, with a word appearing out of nowhere and entering her ears as if he had spoken it directly to her. Even if she hadn’t heard what it was, she would have been fearing the worst, and when she was able to understand just what it had been, that fear got even worse.
“Explode!” the projected words were vicious and with a blatant sadistic pleasure associated with the order.
A moment later, his skull was destroyed with the sheer force of her punch, but Wei Yi was hardly able to stop and appreciate this as she was forced to rush to Jian Hongchao, who had a confused look in her eyes. It seemed that the Blood-tinged Church couldn’t even be bothered to explain themselves to her.
Only when the energy within her body suddenly began to rampage throughout her meridians and expanded into the rest of her flesh did she realise what the order had done to her, but even before then, neither of them were able to do much about the process. The very first instruction had sent her dantian into disarray, and her core and anchor both trembled and broke apart nearly instantly, only adding even more energy to the rapidly accelerating collapse.
“W-What is-” the otherworldly demon managed to vocalise before that destruction spread.
“No, that fucker… Wait, Potential! How the fuck do I activate the Realm of Potentia-”
The world around her froze. Sound, light, even smell and touch alike stopped, and it was enveloped in darkness.
It was unmistakably the Realm of Potential, although it was manifesting in a strange way as Jian Hongchao, as well as the area around her, was almost stopped in time just as the world had been, but Wei Yi herself could move, think and act freely, except for affecting anything within that zone. Even if she could have an effect, it would only be inside of the Realm of Potential, whereas the outside would still proceed as it otherwise would.
“… Wei Yi? What happened? Where are we?”
“This… This is the Realm of Potential, but I am afraid that I don’t have much time. At best, the Realm of Potential will only slow us down by a massive degree, but it will still allow time to proceed. In other words, whether we have a minute or a year, you will still die. For that reason, I would ask you to explain everything you can before there is a chance of all of it being lost.”
“D-Die? I am… Just with a word?”
“No time to explain yet, since I don’t know what the rate of temporal dilation is. Please, just focus and tell me everything that has happened to you up to this point.”
Although only her eyes and parts of her face could move, and only enough for her to be able to vocalise her words, the despair was still clear in her expression. She could hardly be blamed for this, but just as both of them knew, there was only so much time that she could spend in this realm before passing unless a very extreme coincidence occurred. As such, she desperately tried to calm herself down while she attempted to recall the past.
“As I had told you, I had appeared in a lab of some kind… The kind that you’d see an evil scientist working in, with blood staining every surface, odd red and green lights lighting it up just enough to see everything. I had come out of some kind of large test tube… thing… I don’t know what it’s called, unfortunately…”
“There’s no need for most descriptions, actually, as you should be able to manifest the memories within the Realm of Potential – if that’s how this fucking thing works…”
Her muttering was overlooked as Jian Hongchao attempted to do so, shutting her eyes and audibly struggling to project her mind out into the world, not managing to succeed right away. It was only after she was about to give up and admit defeat when the image from her mind finally came out, manifesting within the darkness. While it was still much fainter and blurrier than what Yi Shi Ming’s memory fragments had been able to provide, this much was sufficient to ascertain quite a few things about the location she had apparently awoken within.
It did also give her a clue as to what an evil scientist’s lair looked like in the woman’s mind.
As she had described, the floor was covered in countless blood stains of various ages, with some still being fresh and red whereas others were as black as night. The floor was made of some kind of dull grey metal, or so it seemed to be where it wasn’t completely dyed by blood, with many grates at regular intervals so that any fluids could, presumably, flow away without lingering as much as the blood. From the current staining on the floor, it seemed that a large number of the fresher blood had actually emerged from the very shattered glass structure that Jian Hongchao had come out of. That didn’t seem to be a reasonable thing to fill any kind of container, especially not one that was meant to contain a person, but she was hardly the most familiar with producing or modifying people.
“I had suddenly appeared there after I had gone to sleep at home, and I found myself in a strange body, naked, coming out of a weird test tube… I had no clue what was happening, but when I get into strange situations, I usually just go with the flow until I can figure something out… That’s what I did here.”
The otherworldly demon got into her story, and the image thus changed according to her descriptions, the movement slowly being more and more fluid with each moment until it became entirely lifelike.
In that animated image, Wei Yi was able to see Jian Hongchao being grabbed by someone dressed in hooded black robes inscribed with a chaotic character upon their breast, done using a blood red string that conveyed little due to the broken nature of the symbol. This figure had their face obscured by the darkness of the robes, but what was not hidden was the man’s hands, which showed that they were calloused and scarred by countless small cuts.
They looked like they were caused by something akin to a small knife or scalpel.
“This strange man held me when I couldn’t stand on my own, and he… didn’t so much feel me up as he seemed to be searching for something, which he found after a while,” the otherworldly demon said, “It was on my back, a little below the shoulders and on the spine…”
As she talked, the Ascendant walked to her back, prompted by that detail, and made use of the little room that she did have to affect the frozen zone to remove the cloth that obscured the demon’s back, finding a strange series of patterns and symbols that did not appear to be any kind of language that existed within the Planar Continents. Despite that, merely looking upon them instilled a slight degree of dread within her, as if she had seen something that she was never meant to witness, and that her mind was unable to fully comprehend.
It was akin to the dread of Kong Shi Meng’s warnings inscribed within the books of the Yi District and the mirror in her possession, although it was far lesser and seemed to have a different intent, if there was an intent to it at all. Far more likely in her mind was that the dread was an unexpected or unnecessary side effect of the true purpose of those patterns, confirmed by the woman’s description of what happened after.
“He felt that mark, then did… something. I didn’t get it then, and I still don’t, but he helpfully shouted something like ‘Come alive, Jian Hongchao, and serve our Blood-tinged Church!’ I felt another odd sensation, and I figured that it was best to do something at that p-” the otherworldly demon’s words were interrupted by her form suddenly unfreezing, leading to her spitting out a mouthful of blood as it seemed to actively flood her mouth, with her entire body quaking with chaotic energy that sought to tear her asunder.
“Fuck, is this really all this place can afford… Jian Hongchao-”
“No… that’s… not… my… name… it was… what was it… what was my name? Why can’t I remember… my name?” the otherworldly demon questioned, tears appearing in her eyes as the darkness faded back to light, the wilderness returned into view, and time returned to how it had been, with her body quickly being torn apart as her consciousness was no longer able to endure the pressure, “What happened to me?!”
Wei Yi would have given her the answer, but there was no time, even if she had known the answer. She did not, with her only being able to guess that the combination of the way in which she had been brought into the world and the azure light of her otherworldly gift had done quite a bit to harm her mind.
If she did have the ability to save her, she would have done her best. However, she knew of no such way, and instead had to do what she could to minimize the damage.
“I am sorry. I hope your soul gets some rest, at least.”
