Ultimately, there was only so much that the two of them could do to track down the hooded figure. Her study of the stealth technique was useful in finding traces of the figure, but they all looked to be days old at the very least, meaning that it had somehow vanished right before them and left no traces within the borders of the Qiang District. This was concerning, but also indicated that if she did not want to give the enemy too much time to prepare, she would need to move on swiftly.
Everything that she did plan to do needed to be accelerated a little, but with a stable body and plenty more resources for cultivation, it wasn’t hard to get it all done.
She had been correct with her theory that the spatial stabilisation point would be accessible but essentially useless until she was able to connect it to the rest of the Yi City Web, but it did make it just a little easier to reach out with her energy beyond the standard range, thus allowing her to spread out all of the energy that she was able to take in through another large pile of planar stones to the many ores and resources of the Qiang District. It let her cultivate and increase the quantity of replenishing resources at the same time, and ensured that the energy she took in wouldn’t limit the intake of more energy as it was nearly instantly used.
All of the energy was also put to use manifesting powerful artefacts and artefact structures in order to fill the obsidian shards of Demon Killer, with the time she had allowing her to nearly complete her work on a single shard. It was clearly reaching a degree of saturation, and it might even function well enough as a weapon without being reconstructed, although the sheer number of properties were unlikely to make it very easy to use in the vast majority of situations.
The one thing that was quite promising was that the many channels appeared to grow stronger and more stable with each infusion of a planar construct artefact, as they were made from her extremely powerful cosmic energy. She wasn’t going to risk anything just yet, but she suspected that her energy might not shatter the final product if she continued to use her planar energy for the improvement process. That would be the ideal outcome for herself, and so she made sure that she would fill all of the other shards with her own energy only as to guarantee that this would work out.
Over the two days, she had completed more than enough of her promised efforts to allow the district to harvest most of their common resources without the previous concerns for them running out within the lifetime of the current Patriarch. She was also able to work on reaching a new stage.
Now that she had already broken through to the sixth stage of the Marked Core realm, she knew that the next stages would be all about the development of her current foundation in the direction of the next realm, as well as the improvement of the perfected stage characteristic that she had acquired. Since it was a full marked core, with all one hundred marks, there had to be something unique that this would permit, and so she was very excited to see what the next perfected stage breakthrough, which would occur by the beginning of the next realm alongside the perfected realm breakthrough, would bring to the table.
Hence, she made sure to dismiss anyone that might interrupt the moment that she reached the next stage, and then set as much of her attention onto the process as possible.
She neared that stage by the end of the first day, having benefitted from the blood that she had managed to absorb from the guardian and the vial that he had used, and then observed as her vast pool of planar energy burst out onto her Subterranean Shell, seeping into the many marks forged somewhere within the surface.
For a moment, all of them looked to burst into flame, earning their title of searing marks quickly as they reached the usual peak of vibrance. They should have remained there, burning with an orange flame, but she witnessed the blaze slowly shift in colour while it also dimmed ever so slowly. Hints of red, violet, blue and more shone through, barely appearing amidst the vibrant orange, but they were visible nonetheless.
Her first breakthrough, the one for the normal stage, finished up quickly, allowing the secondary perfected stage breakthrough to follow and instantly ignite the searing marks once more. They retained some of the shades that had appeared within the blazing light, and once the vibrance reached its peak, the colours became more pronounced, with violet growing the most and others growing far less, with the likes of green barely changing in brightness and size. These colours faded more quickly than the flame within the marks themselves, but unlike the lowest point after the first breakthrough, she was still able to see them in the edges of the one hundred searing marks.
With each stage, a cultivator gained power, and that wasn’t different in her case, even if the peak of the realm seemed to have been reached. Her planar energy still grew, and the effect of her searing marks also looked to increase ever so slightly. However, she knew that this was nowhere near the peak.
‘Given the current progression of the marks, I suspect that they will have a major transformation upon the breakthrough to the next realm, just before the linked channels manifest at the end of the breakthroughs. Usually, this happens by the first half-way point, as with the Endless Monolith and the Subterranean Shell, but I am not going to object to a second wonderful development occurring after the one hundred marks that appeared as I entered the sixth stage,’ she thought.
For the rest of that day, as well as the next, she had not been able to spend quite as much time on her cultivation, needing to do a few other things at the same time, but even if she had managed to get the whole two days to nothing but cultivation, she would still have been a little way from the eighth stage. Each stage and realm needed more and more energy to be reached, so maintaining the same intake of planar energy would not be sufficient to deliver the same kinds of results. Otherwise, everyone would be in the ninth realm and higher, if such a thing was possible.
When she did finally decide to leave, she did so with all of the artefacts that she had managed to gather in the underground battlefield, as the Patriarch managed to forget about them by the time that she had gotten around to leaving. He may have been aware of it, but given the fact that he didn’t bother mentioning them even when they discussed the terms of their agreement, it seemed unlikely.
She had naturally wanted to get the aid of the Qiang District the moment that it was linked to the Yi City Web and could come over to any battles via the Kong Prison Realm, but they could only agree to so much while the situation of the Ascendant’s Arbiters and all of the allied districts was uncertain. That was why they had not been able to discuss much during their first meeting, and even during this one, all that she could reasonably ask for was for the Qiang District’s forces to come to aid if they were called once her portion of the Yi City Web was linked to their district. After that, there would be room to negotiate and talk more calmly.
If he did remember the artefacts and the underground battlefield, she was almost sure that he would have brought it up to explain why he would limit the forces he would send if asked to do so, but nothing of the sort even passed through his mind. It was possible that he had no such ideas at all.
Obviously, such a thing would be ideal, as she did not believe that the majority of the allies that she had made so far were going to side with her no matter what. They were not fond of the Greats, and so they would side with her while they saw no superior option. Once it did appear, there might be some that would turn against her and work with that other faction instead. Something of the sort could be limited to an extent by ensuring that they are so reliant or invested into the faction that it would be far more difficult and costly for them to get out than whatever benefits they would get from doing so.
What would be far more effective would be a faction formed with tight bonds or some united cause, one that couldn’t be subverted in some way by a different cause of greater priority to the district. Such a thing wasn’t necessarily feasible, as an absolute cause was hardly common, but the more committed a person and faction was, the better it was for her.
If the Qiang Patriarch was truly focused solely on the threat of the Blood-tinged Church and the Greats, in that order, then there was a high chance of her being able to keep him in the list of allies without needing to put that much effort into it. This would allow her to invest far more time into considering the other parts of the alliance, and thus make it far easier to ensure that the alliance didn’t fall apart when she needed to do something extreme in the eyes of the others. She didn’t even know whether that was something that she would need to do just yet, but it was important to lay the foundation for such a thing if it did become necessary.
Whatever it was, and whatever happened, she sought to achieve this kind of shared cause with the next districts that she would interact with, which, in her case, would be the Ru District.
There wasn’t much to say about them, as they had a single, specific, yet very varied focus: research.
Hence, it was hard to say anything specific about their district and its practises. They valued knowledge, and they did have a certain priority and preference for combat comprehension and anything that could be put to use in combat. That led to the fame of their battle scholars, as some called them, which was also what interested her, but knowledge could take many forms and be attained in many different ways, so they had few precise focuses unlike the Qiang District, for instance.
Their knowledge was going to be immensely useful no matter how it was stored or what they wanted from others in order to be permitted to access it, as she was very likely to be able to go around such restrictions and harvest anything and everything that she wanted without permission.
That focus did mean that, in theory, they should be incredibly easy to ally with, as they would appreciate gaining more knowledge and desire to obtain that which the Greats had stolen from the world over the years. She had no issues with sharing almost everything that the people of the world, whether they were from the Ru District or any other part of Yi City, and that was something that very few would be able to do if they managed to defeat the Great Families themselves. After all, very few had techniques that far surpassed the vast majority of the world’s current methods, so they wouldn’t be happy to let that which the Greats deemed too powerful be revealed to the whole world.
It was also why she should have an easy opportunity to form a strong alliance with the Ru District, as there was so much that she could contribute aside from the techniques hidden by the Greats. If they were open to it, she was even open to helping the district develop some of their own techniques, if they were open to it. She couldn’t guarantee that she wouldn’t introduce some intentional weaknesses for her to utilise if she so wished, as that would depend purely upon the district’s actions and intentions, amongst other factors.
Before any of that, she would wish to see the battle scholars themselves, learn what they were truly like, and verify the rumours she had heard about them. Those two tasks weren’t necessarily aligned, given that the rumours and the truth didn’t always overlap in any way, but the more that she learned the better it would be.
She didn’t know exactly what influence they had over the district, and how the Ru family and leadership was connected with it, but she did want to get in touch with them and understand their practises. Supposedly, the battle scholars were able to make use of books as weapons in several ways, and actively utilise knowledge itself in combat as a way to produce or otherwise amplify their own combat potential. Perhaps they had something like the initial Gilded Library, and if so, she would benefit immensely from learning the way in which the technique functioned. The amount of knowledge she had was absolutely immense, and would be incredibly beneficial in literally every way imaginable.
When it came to planar techniques, after all, so long as the energy itself could be intensified and amplified, then it could be used for anything and anywhere. Whether she was attempting to spread her Silver-Leaf energy throughout a district or fight against the Great Families, being able to even double her power outside of her existing means and possibly go even further beyond that depending on how she implemented it into her tactic.
Frankly, so long as she could utilise the concept in some way, even if she needed to emulate it through the power of Law at an extreme inefficiency, she would benefit immensely. Her Ascendant’s Library contained enough raw information to fill a dozen regular libraries in reality, so long as the books were filled with extremely small characters that wouldn’t be readable by ordinary men and women. If all of her knowledge was instead transferred to jade slips, then a single library might have been sufficient, but it would still be rather cramped and large.
‘Essentially, knowledge being converted directly to power is one of the most powerful tools I might be able to possess,’ she concluded as she travelled, making use of her stable cultivation to rush straight through the snow and towards the north-east.
The Ru District was rather close to the Qiang District, existing only a little further north and a little further east than it, but it was still the most difficult journey to make simply due to the horrible weather conditions that couldn’t be felt while within the mining district. The only redeeming aspect was that she could almost feel the intensity of the snows reduce as she proceeded on.
In fact, the more she travelled on, the more she was convinced that one of the only reasons that she had crashed into the mountain that stopped her flight to the south was due to the snow slowing down her momentum. Without it, she might have been able to get much further, possibly crashing into the Absolute Frost and dying due to her weakened physique at that time. That place could still inflict great damage to her even now that she had grown stronger, with the absence of an arm not helping her to maintain the heat in her body, so had she ended up there with her injured state and without her consciousness to keep herself alive for longer, she would not have woken up.
Now that she was running on the ground, in a better state, and with a decent idea of the land due to a map that she had obtained in the Qiang District, the journey could be swift and easy.
While she had been at the Qiang District, she had been able to pick up a few techniques from the few libraries that she did locate, and they also benefitted in the journey. Being the southernmost district of Yi City, it had accumulated several incredibly old and refined techniques intended purely for traversing the snow, with some focusing more on the drops of solid white that fell perpetually from the skies and others instead offering solutions to the dense sheets that gathered upon the ground over the many years of falling snow.
She naturally incorporated what she could into her other techniques, with the chapters about overcoming snowfall in particular being useful in a number of combat techniques due to the way in which their principles aligned. The rest she was able to use independently of her existing arsenal, as the separate techniques by utilising their principles and meridian circulation to use the techniques without needing to cultivate them first.
Having practised this for a very long time as far back as in the Yi District, she was very familiar with the best ways to optimise the process. The majority of her methods were only at any level of cultivation due to the curious way in which the otherworldly gifts she had gathered interacted with her cosmic cultivation, with the two effectively allowing for miracles in comparison to the restricted methods of other cultivators. Thus, her movement speed and the effectiveness of the techniques was not impeded in any way by this fact, and her mastery of certain Dao and movement principles combined with the sheer power of her energy allowed her to move at speeds that were far beyond what the original technique should have allowed at Full Success.
Before she had left, the Qiang Patriarch had predicted that it might take her a day to get to the walls of the Ru District, but that failed to take into account such capabilities. She did it in a few hours.
It was not very accurate to say that she had seen the walls first, of course. Like a number of districts in Yi City, the walls were not meant to protect the people inside with their solid materials alone. Only the Ning District’s wall could be said to be genuinely effective even when only the structure itself was considered, and even that relied greatly on various supporting methods.
There was no such immense wall around the Ru District, so what she was able to see even from far away was instead an enormous structure likely placed near the middle of the district. It was dome-shaped, with several large pillars on the sides that went roughly half-way up to the top of the structure, turning sharply and merging back into the main dome, with five being visible to her from the front. She was expecting there to be three more pillars at the back, resulting in a total of eight massive protrusions positioned equal distances apart from one another around the large dome.
This structure was far taller than anything else that she was able to see, and also significantly larger in every other dimension, with the energy that looked to be lingering around it being similarly enormous.
If she had to guess – which she didn’t, but she would anyway – then she would say that this was the famed Bottomless Archive of the Ru District, a structure that had been constructed in order to contain all of the knowledge that the district had accumulated. Her latest information on the topic came from a book in the Yi District, and that had been a few hundred thousand years old as well. Back then, the Archive was rather outstanding, but not this excessively large.
Assuming that she was indeed correct, then this would present a very interesting situation. Over time, every single district had decayed or, at best, remained mostly as it was, but if the Ru District had somehow developed and expanded in every way since the Master of Yi City disappeared from the world, there were several questions to be asked. For one, she was very interested in how the Ru family had been able to overcome the Greats and prevent their books and knowledge from being taken away and destroyed by them. So long as this was actually the case, then she would be very likely to find allies with ease.
Of course, there was also the possibility that there was something else going on here, which would make the scene far less positive. The Greats could be aware of the Archive (that much was certain) and intentionally allowing it to expand, at least physically, essentially laying a trap for all that seek to grow sufficiently within the world as it currently is. That would not be ideal in the slightest.
‘I hope that this is not the case, as that would simply make things… complicated.’
She approached the low walls of the district, distinctly feeling the aura of an array surrounding the entire district and acting as the true boundary for intruders to overcome. Much like the Bottomless Archive, it was shaped like a large dome, this one standing over the district and potentially originating, in part, from the Archive, as it looked to have eight primary supporting portions that lined up with the pillars on the sides of the Archive.
This was also something that had not been mentioned in the books on the topic, hence making her more concerned and excited at the same time. Frankly, the latter was overpowering the former, for one simple reason.
So long as any knowledge at all was present, it would benefit her in the long term. In fact, it might even be that her overall gains would be far greater if the Greats were indeed present and responsible for every trouble in the Ru District, as that would bestow several incredible opportunities onto her so long as they were unable to mobilise another one of the first generation members. There would be a chance to make a whole district grateful for her intervention, obtain whatever they had sealed away without any arguments against it, and then mobilise the power of a whole district right away.
Her biggest concern was that she would end up exposing herself to the Greats even if she defeated them cleanly and quickly, which would not be ideal while her Touch the Heavens was not a viable option. So far as she understood it, the Great Families had no issue with manifesting the Reality Severance once more so long as their first generation was out on the field, so to speak.
For now, she simply approached the barrier that surrounded the district and headed directly towards the nearest guard that she was able to find, who was standing a short distance outside of the physical wall. Aside from being excellent evidence that even the people of the Ru District didn’t see those walls as anything but a symbolic indication of the district’s land, it made it very convenient to get closer to them and get their attention even amidst the perpetual snowstorm.
The weather had gotten a little better as she had moved to the north, but not significantly so.
“Hm? You… Northerner, do you want to enter the Ru District?” the guard did notice her quickly enough, recognising the darker shade of her skin and addressing her accordingly, even if she looked a little confused at the furs she wore, “Do you know the rules of our lands?”
“The rules for entry? No.”
“We do not permit northern barbarians into our lands, so you must prove that you possess a worthwhile amount of knowledge. Approach the barrier.”
She raised an eyebrow at this requirement, as the books from the Yi District had nothing on the topic while the Qiang District had mostly stayed away from the Ru District and thus knew little about their requirements, but did as requested, following the next instructions to bring her hand close to the barrier without touching it. The guard nodded, then began the explanation of the exact nature of the test that she would need to undergo.
In what was likely to be an attempt to impress her with the sheer quantity of words, all that the guard ended up explaining was that the Ru District had managed to create a partial inverse jade slip. Rather than holding and then conveying information to the future users of it, this version was instead able to read knowledge granted to it and visually fill up according to the quantity provided to it. Given that this was a rather odd method of utilising the typical structure of a jade slip, it was unable to measure all that much information, and so the only use that the district outwardly found for it was ensuring that they were not dealing with completely ignorant souls.
This was unlikely to be the full truth, however, and so Wei Yi was naturally reluctant to freely share her mind with the slip taken out by the guard as she was instructed to do. She was sure that the slip was indeed of lower capacity and quality than what she had come across, but that didn’t mean that it would retain no information whatsoever.
She believed that there was absolutely no chance of the jade slips allowing all of the precious knowledge that would be provided by those that didn’t have an excess amount of it to throw around to slip away. In other words, they wouldn’t waste valuable information.
As her mind was full of all kinds of information that was true but had no use in any but the most niche of situations, with some coming from personal experience and plenty more originating from her occasional contemplation of topics both mundane and not, she was not going to take the risk of something more valuable being revealed to the Ru District. Anything that they did need to know could be told to them directly, without the barrier and altered jade slip in between them, and everything else would be kept away no matter what.
“Go on, northerner. Prove your worth to the Ru District.”
She glanced at guard, who hopefully got the message from her gaze, then grabbed the tomes from her mental library and pushed them towards the jade slip. As she had never worked with a jade slip, she couldn’t be entirely sure that she was doing it right at first, but the confirmation quickly came once the guard’s eyes began to reflect a green light originating from the jade slip.
With every drop of information that she allowed to touch the outside world and the slip on the other side of the barrier, that light gained more vibrance and expanded to cover the entirety of the jade slip in mere moments.
She had not seen how quickly others might be able to do this same task, so the only thing she was able to guess from was the guard’s widening eyes and dropping jaw. The woman attempted to restrain her own expression, but even the natural stiffness caused by the cold couldn’t prevent her pale face from demonstrating with perfect clarity that there was something unusual about the rate at which Wei Yi had managed to fill up the jade slip.
‘Come to think of it, I’ve not seen many female guards in the south. They need a certain degree of physical strength, after all, and it seems that the typical preference is for men that have a natural advantage in that regard… She looks rather cute,’ the Ascendant noted to herself, forcing her gaze away from the guard’s face and lowering her hand once silently prompted to do so.
Even if the guard developed any interest in her, she did not have the time or will to engage in those kinds of activities, with the latter in particular being an issue caused primarily by her absent left arm. She wasn’t some kind of vain person that could only allow the perfect side of herself to be presented to the world – she had been someone that had wanted to lose some of her physical beauty, after all, even if that was mostly to avoid the attention and not because she did wish to obtain more imperfections.
There was no reason to actively worsen herself, as all that it would do was deprive her from being able to fully experience the world. Until she did have a whole, stable arm, no matter what it looked like, even if she was unable to ever make her arm resemble what it had looked like before it had been severed, there was just too much that she would be lacking.
Returning onto the original topic, however, the female guard managed to recover and lower the jade slip, stepping away and utilising a technique to open up a small gap in the barrier through which Wei Yi was able to enter the boundaries of the district. The guard followed the Ascendant with her gaze for some time but did nothing else as she proceeded towards the open gatehouse in the walls ahead of her.
When she entered and got out of sight, the guard was finally able to look down upon the glowing jade slip, which she promptly hid within an inner pocket, taking out another, blank slip to replace it in an outside pocket. The glowing green one would be taken to the one that needed to see it.
Ultimately, there was only so much that the two of them could do to track down the hooded figure. Her study of the stealth technique was useful in finding traces of the figure, but they all looked to be days old at the very least, meaning that it had somehow vanished right before them and left no traces within the borders of the Qiang District. This was concerning, but also indicated that if she did not want to give the enemy too much time to prepare, she would need to move on swiftly.
Everything that she did plan to do needed to be accelerated a little, but with a stable body and plenty more resources for cultivation, it wasn’t hard to get it all done.
She had been correct with her theory that the spatial stabilisation point would be accessible but essentially useless until she was able to connect it to the rest of the Yi City Web, but it did make it just a little easier to reach out with her energy beyond the standard range, thus allowing her to spread out all of the energy that she was able to take in through another large pile of planar stones to the many ores and resources of the Qiang District. It let her cultivate and increase the quantity of replenishing resources at the same time, and ensured that the energy she took in wouldn’t limit the intake of more energy as it was nearly instantly used.
All of the energy was also put to use manifesting powerful artefacts and artefact structures in order to fill the obsidian shards of Demon Killer, with the time she had allowing her to nearly complete her work on a single shard. It was clearly reaching a degree of saturation, and it might even function well enough as a weapon without being reconstructed, although the sheer number of properties were unlikely to make it very easy to use in the vast majority of situations.
The one thing that was quite promising was that the many channels appeared to grow stronger and more stable with each infusion of a planar construct artefact, as they were made from her extremely powerful cosmic energy. She wasn’t going to risk anything just yet, but she suspected that her energy might not shatter the final product if she continued to use her planar energy for the improvement process. That would be the ideal outcome for herself, and so she made sure that she would fill all of the other shards with her own energy only as to guarantee that this would work out.
Over the two days, she had completed more than enough of her promised efforts to allow the district to harvest most of their common resources without the previous concerns for them running out within the lifetime of the current Patriarch. She was also able to work on reaching a new stage.
Now that she had already broken through to the sixth stage of the Marked Core realm, she knew that the next stages would be all about the development of her current foundation in the direction of the next realm, as well as the improvement of the perfected stage characteristic that she had acquired. Since it was a full marked core, with all one hundred marks, there had to be something unique that this would permit, and so she was very excited to see what the next perfected stage breakthrough, which would occur by the beginning of the next realm alongside the perfected realm breakthrough, would bring to the table.
Hence, she made sure to dismiss anyone that might interrupt the moment that she reached the next stage, and then set as much of her attention onto the process as possible.
She neared that stage by the end of the first day, having benefitted from the blood that she had managed to absorb from the guardian and the vial that he had used, and then observed as her vast pool of planar energy burst out onto her Subterranean Shell, seeping into the many marks forged somewhere within the surface.
For a moment, all of them looked to burst into flame, earning their title of searing marks quickly as they reached the usual peak of vibrance. They should have remained there, burning with an orange flame, but she witnessed the blaze slowly shift in colour while it also dimmed ever so slowly. Hints of red, violet, blue and more shone through, barely appearing amidst the vibrant orange, but they were visible nonetheless.
Her first breakthrough, the one for the normal stage, finished up quickly, allowing the secondary perfected stage breakthrough to follow and instantly ignite the searing marks once more. They retained some of the shades that had appeared within the blazing light, and once the vibrance reached its peak, the colours became more pronounced, with violet growing the most and others growing far less, with the likes of green barely changing in brightness and size. These colours faded more quickly than the flame within the marks themselves, but unlike the lowest point after the first breakthrough, she was still able to see them in the edges of the one hundred searing marks.
With each stage, a cultivator gained power, and that wasn’t different in her case, even if the peak of the realm seemed to have been reached. Her planar energy still grew, and the effect of her searing marks also looked to increase ever so slightly. However, she knew that this was nowhere near the peak.
‘Given the current progression of the marks, I suspect that they will have a major transformation upon the breakthrough to the next realm, just before the linked channels manifest at the end of the breakthroughs. Usually, this happens by the first half-way point, as with the Endless Monolith and the Subterranean Shell, but I am not going to object to a second wonderful development occurring after the one hundred marks that appeared as I entered the sixth stage,’ she thought.
For the rest of that day, as well as the next, she had not been able to spend quite as much time on her cultivation, needing to do a few other things at the same time, but even if she had managed to get the whole two days to nothing but cultivation, she would still have been a little way from the eighth stage. Each stage and realm needed more and more energy to be reached, so maintaining the same intake of planar energy would not be sufficient to deliver the same kinds of results. Otherwise, everyone would be in the ninth realm and higher, if such a thing was possible.
When she did finally decide to leave, she did so with all of the artefacts that she had managed to gather in the underground battlefield, as the Patriarch managed to forget about them by the time that she had gotten around to leaving. He may have been aware of it, but given the fact that he didn’t bother mentioning them even when they discussed the terms of their agreement, it seemed unlikely.
She had naturally wanted to get the aid of the Qiang District the moment that it was linked to the Yi City Web and could come over to any battles via the Kong Prison Realm, but they could only agree to so much while the situation of the Ascendant’s Arbiters and all of the allied districts was uncertain. That was why they had not been able to discuss much during their first meeting, and even during this one, all that she could reasonably ask for was for the Qiang District’s forces to come to aid if they were called once her portion of the Yi City Web was linked to their district. After that, there would be room to negotiate and talk more calmly.
If he did remember the artefacts and the underground battlefield, she was almost sure that he would have brought it up to explain why he would limit the forces he would send if asked to do so, but nothing of the sort even passed through his mind. It was possible that he had no such ideas at all.
Obviously, such a thing would be ideal, as she did not believe that the majority of the allies that she had made so far were going to side with her no matter what. They were not fond of the Greats, and so they would side with her while they saw no superior option. Once it did appear, there might be some that would turn against her and work with that other faction instead. Something of the sort could be limited to an extent by ensuring that they are so reliant or invested into the faction that it would be far more difficult and costly for them to get out than whatever benefits they would get from doing so.
What would be far more effective would be a faction formed with tight bonds or some united cause, one that couldn’t be subverted in some way by a different cause of greater priority to the district. Such a thing wasn’t necessarily feasible, as an absolute cause was hardly common, but the more committed a person and faction was, the better it was for her.
If the Qiang Patriarch was truly focused solely on the threat of the Blood-tinged Church and the Greats, in that order, then there was a high chance of her being able to keep him in the list of allies without needing to put that much effort into it. This would allow her to invest far more time into considering the other parts of the alliance, and thus make it far easier to ensure that the alliance didn’t fall apart when she needed to do something extreme in the eyes of the others. She didn’t even know whether that was something that she would need to do just yet, but it was important to lay the foundation for such a thing if it did become necessary.
Whatever it was, and whatever happened, she sought to achieve this kind of shared cause with the next districts that she would interact with, which, in her case, would be the Ru District.
There wasn’t much to say about them, as they had a single, specific, yet very varied focus: research.
Hence, it was hard to say anything specific about their district and its practises. They valued knowledge, and they did have a certain priority and preference for combat comprehension and anything that could be put to use in combat. That led to the fame of their battle scholars, as some called them, which was also what interested her, but knowledge could take many forms and be attained in many different ways, so they had few precise focuses unlike the Qiang District, for instance.
Their knowledge was going to be immensely useful no matter how it was stored or what they wanted from others in order to be permitted to access it, as she was very likely to be able to go around such restrictions and harvest anything and everything that she wanted without permission.
That focus did mean that, in theory, they should be incredibly easy to ally with, as they would appreciate gaining more knowledge and desire to obtain that which the Greats had stolen from the world over the years. She had no issues with sharing almost everything that the people of the world, whether they were from the Ru District or any other part of Yi City, and that was something that very few would be able to do if they managed to defeat the Great Families themselves. After all, very few had techniques that far surpassed the vast majority of the world’s current methods, so they wouldn’t be happy to let that which the Greats deemed too powerful be revealed to the whole world.
It was also why she should have an easy opportunity to form a strong alliance with the Ru District, as there was so much that she could contribute aside from the techniques hidden by the Greats. If they were open to it, she was even open to helping the district develop some of their own techniques, if they were open to it. She couldn’t guarantee that she wouldn’t introduce some intentional weaknesses for her to utilise if she so wished, as that would depend purely upon the district’s actions and intentions, amongst other factors.
Before any of that, she would wish to see the battle scholars themselves, learn what they were truly like, and verify the rumours she had heard about them. Those two tasks weren’t necessarily aligned, given that the rumours and the truth didn’t always overlap in any way, but the more that she learned the better it would be.
She didn’t know exactly what influence they had over the district, and how the Ru family and leadership was connected with it, but she did want to get in touch with them and understand their practises. Supposedly, the battle scholars were able to make use of books as weapons in several ways, and actively utilise knowledge itself in combat as a way to produce or otherwise amplify their own combat potential. Perhaps they had something like the initial Gilded Library, and if so, she would benefit immensely from learning the way in which the technique functioned. The amount of knowledge she had was absolutely immense, and would be incredibly beneficial in literally every way imaginable.
When it came to planar techniques, after all, so long as the energy itself could be intensified and amplified, then it could be used for anything and anywhere. Whether she was attempting to spread her Silver-Leaf energy throughout a district or fight against the Great Families, being able to even double her power outside of her existing means and possibly go even further beyond that depending on how she implemented it into her tactic.
Frankly, so long as she could utilise the concept in some way, even if she needed to emulate it through the power of Law at an extreme inefficiency, she would benefit immensely. Her Ascendant’s Library contained enough raw information to fill a dozen regular libraries in reality, so long as the books were filled with extremely small characters that wouldn’t be readable by ordinary men and women. If all of her knowledge was instead transferred to jade slips, then a single library might have been sufficient, but it would still be rather cramped and large.
‘Essentially, knowledge being converted directly to power is one of the most powerful tools I might be able to possess,’ she concluded as she travelled, making use of her stable cultivation to rush straight through the snow and towards the north-east.
The Ru District was rather close to the Qiang District, existing only a little further north and a little further east than it, but it was still the most difficult journey to make simply due to the horrible weather conditions that couldn’t be felt while within the mining district. The only redeeming aspect was that she could almost feel the intensity of the snows reduce as she proceeded on.
In fact, the more she travelled on, the more she was convinced that one of the only reasons that she had crashed into the mountain that stopped her flight to the south was due to the snow slowing down her momentum. Without it, she might have been able to get much further, possibly crashing into the Absolute Frost and dying due to her weakened physique at that time. That place could still inflict great damage to her even now that she had grown stronger, with the absence of an arm not helping her to maintain the heat in her body, so had she ended up there with her injured state and without her consciousness to keep herself alive for longer, she would not have woken up.
Now that she was running on the ground, in a better state, and with a decent idea of the land due to a map that she had obtained in the Qiang District, the journey could be swift and easy.
While she had been at the Qiang District, she had been able to pick up a few techniques from the few libraries that she did locate, and they also benefitted in the journey. Being the southernmost district of Yi City, it had accumulated several incredibly old and refined techniques intended purely for traversing the snow, with some focusing more on the drops of solid white that fell perpetually from the skies and others instead offering solutions to the dense sheets that gathered upon the ground over the many years of falling snow.
She naturally incorporated what she could into her other techniques, with the chapters about overcoming snowfall in particular being useful in a number of combat techniques due to the way in which their principles aligned. The rest she was able to use independently of her existing arsenal, as the separate techniques by utilising their principles and meridian circulation to use the techniques without needing to cultivate them first.
Having practised this for a very long time as far back as in the Yi District, she was very familiar with the best ways to optimise the process. The majority of her methods were only at any level of cultivation due to the curious way in which the otherworldly gifts she had gathered interacted with her cosmic cultivation, with the two effectively allowing for miracles in comparison to the restricted methods of other cultivators. Thus, her movement speed and the effectiveness of the techniques was not impeded in any way by this fact, and her mastery of certain Dao and movement principles combined with the sheer power of her energy allowed her to move at speeds that were far beyond what the original technique should have allowed at Full Success.
Before she had left, the Qiang Patriarch had predicted that it might take her a day to get to the walls of the Ru District, but that failed to take into account such capabilities. She did it in a few hours.
It was not very accurate to say that she had seen the walls first, of course. Like a number of districts in Yi City, the walls were not meant to protect the people inside with their solid materials alone. Only the Ning District’s wall could be said to be genuinely effective even when only the structure itself was considered, and even that relied greatly on various supporting methods.
There was no such immense wall around the Ru District, so what she was able to see even from far away was instead an enormous structure likely placed near the middle of the district. It was dome-shaped, with several large pillars on the sides that went roughly half-way up to the top of the structure, turning sharply and merging back into the main dome, with five being visible to her from the front. She was expecting there to be three more pillars at the back, resulting in a total of eight massive protrusions positioned equal distances apart from one another around the large dome.
This structure was far taller than anything else that she was able to see, and also significantly larger in every other dimension, with the energy that looked to be lingering around it being similarly enormous.
If she had to guess – which she didn’t, but she would anyway – then she would say that this was the famed Bottomless Archive of the Ru District, a structure that had been constructed in order to contain all of the knowledge that the district had accumulated. Her latest information on the topic came from a book in the Yi District, and that had been a few hundred thousand years old as well. Back then, the Archive was rather outstanding, but not this excessively large.
Assuming that she was indeed correct, then this would present a very interesting situation. Over time, every single district had decayed or, at best, remained mostly as it was, but if the Ru District had somehow developed and expanded in every way since the Master of Yi City disappeared from the world, there were several questions to be asked. For one, she was very interested in how the Ru family had been able to overcome the Greats and prevent their books and knowledge from being taken away and destroyed by them. So long as this was actually the case, then she would be very likely to find allies with ease.
Of course, there was also the possibility that there was something else going on here, which would make the scene far less positive. The Greats could be aware of the Archive (that much was certain) and intentionally allowing it to expand, at least physically, essentially laying a trap for all that seek to grow sufficiently within the world as it currently is. That would not be ideal in the slightest.
‘I hope that this is not the case, as that would simply make things… complicated.’
She approached the low walls of the district, distinctly feeling the aura of an array surrounding the entire district and acting as the true boundary for intruders to overcome. Much like the Bottomless Archive, it was shaped like a large dome, this one standing over the district and potentially originating, in part, from the Archive, as it looked to have eight primary supporting portions that lined up with the pillars on the sides of the Archive.
This was also something that had not been mentioned in the books on the topic, hence making her more concerned and excited at the same time. Frankly, the latter was overpowering the former, for one simple reason.
So long as any knowledge at all was present, it would benefit her in the long term. In fact, it might even be that her overall gains would be far greater if the Greats were indeed present and responsible for every trouble in the Ru District, as that would bestow several incredible opportunities onto her so long as they were unable to mobilise another one of the first generation members. There would be a chance to make a whole district grateful for her intervention, obtain whatever they had sealed away without any arguments against it, and then mobilise the power of a whole district right away.
Her biggest concern was that she would end up exposing herself to the Greats even if she defeated them cleanly and quickly, which would not be ideal while her Touch the Heavens was not a viable option. So far as she understood it, the Great Families had no issue with manifesting the Reality Severance once more so long as their first generation was out on the field, so to speak.
For now, she simply approached the barrier that surrounded the district and headed directly towards the nearest guard that she was able to find, who was standing a short distance outside of the physical wall. Aside from being excellent evidence that even the people of the Ru District didn’t see those walls as anything but a symbolic indication of the district’s land, it made it very convenient to get closer to them and get their attention even amidst the perpetual snowstorm.
The weather had gotten a little better as she had moved to the north, but not significantly so.
“Hm? You… Northerner, do you want to enter the Ru District?” the guard did notice her quickly enough, recognising the darker shade of her skin and addressing her accordingly, even if she looked a little confused at the furs she wore, “Do you know the rules of our lands?”
“The rules for entry? No.”
“We do not permit northern barbarians into our lands, so you must prove that you possess a worthwhile amount of knowledge. Approach the barrier.”
She raised an eyebrow at this requirement, as the books from the Yi District had nothing on the topic while the Qiang District had mostly stayed away from the Ru District and thus knew little about their requirements, but did as requested, following the next instructions to bring her hand close to the barrier without touching it. The guard nodded, then began the explanation of the exact nature of the test that she would need to undergo.
In what was likely to be an attempt to impress her with the sheer quantity of words, all that the guard ended up explaining was that the Ru District had managed to create a partial inverse jade slip. Rather than holding and then conveying information to the future users of it, this version was instead able to read knowledge granted to it and visually fill up according to the quantity provided to it. Given that this was a rather odd method of utilising the typical structure of a jade slip, it was unable to measure all that much information, and so the only use that the district outwardly found for it was ensuring that they were not dealing with completely ignorant souls.
This was unlikely to be the full truth, however, and so Wei Yi was naturally reluctant to freely share her mind with the slip taken out by the guard as she was instructed to do. She was sure that the slip was indeed of lower capacity and quality than what she had come across, but that didn’t mean that it would retain no information whatsoever.
She believed that there was absolutely no chance of the jade slips allowing all of the precious knowledge that would be provided by those that didn’t have an excess amount of it to throw around to slip away. In other words, they wouldn’t waste valuable information.
As her mind was full of all kinds of information that was true but had no use in any but the most niche of situations, with some coming from personal experience and plenty more originating from her occasional contemplation of topics both mundane and not, she was not going to take the risk of something more valuable being revealed to the Ru District. Anything that they did need to know could be told to them directly, without the barrier and altered jade slip in between them, and everything else would be kept away no matter what.
“Go on, northerner. Prove your worth to the Ru District.”
She glanced at guard, who hopefully got the message from her gaze, then grabbed the tomes from her mental library and pushed them towards the jade slip. As she had never worked with a jade slip, she couldn’t be entirely sure that she was doing it right at first, but the confirmation quickly came once the guard’s eyes began to reflect a green light originating from the jade slip.
With every drop of information that she allowed to touch the outside world and the slip on the other side of the barrier, that light gained more vibrance and expanded to cover the entirety of the jade slip in mere moments.
She had not seen how quickly others might be able to do this same task, so the only thing she was able to guess from was the guard’s widening eyes and dropping jaw. The woman attempted to restrain her own expression, but even the natural stiffness caused by the cold couldn’t prevent her pale face from demonstrating with perfect clarity that there was something unusual about the rate at which Wei Yi had managed to fill up the jade slip.
‘Come to think of it, I’ve not seen many female guards in the south. They need a certain degree of physical strength, after all, and it seems that the typical preference is for men that have a natural advantage in that regard… She looks rather cute,’ the Ascendant noted to herself, forcing her gaze away from the guard’s face and lowering her hand once silently prompted to do so.
Even if the guard developed any interest in her, she did not have the time or will to engage in those kinds of activities, with the latter in particular being an issue caused primarily by her absent left arm. She wasn’t some kind of vain person that could only allow the perfect side of herself to be presented to the world – she had been someone that had wanted to lose some of her physical beauty, after all, even if that was mostly to avoid the attention and not because she did wish to obtain more imperfections.
There was no reason to actively worsen herself, as all that it would do was deprive her from being able to fully experience the world. Until she did have a whole, stable arm, no matter what it looked like, even if she was unable to ever make her arm resemble what it had looked like before it had been severed, there was just too much that she would be lacking.
Returning onto the original topic, however, the female guard managed to recover and lower the jade slip, stepping away and utilising a technique to open up a small gap in the barrier through which Wei Yi was able to enter the boundaries of the district. The guard followed the Ascendant with her gaze for some time but did nothing else as she proceeded towards the open gatehouse in the walls ahead of her.
When she entered and got out of sight, the guard was finally able to look down upon the glowing jade slip, which she promptly hid within an inner pocket, taking out another, blank slip to replace it in an outside pocket. The glowing green one would be taken to the one that needed to see it.
