V2C40: The Caves of the Prison Realm

A day after the beginning of her journey, Wei Yi sat upon a small stone in the middle of nowhere, chewing on a piece of the dried food she had obtained from the supposed warlord of the Great Bone Lake.

The food wasn’t exactly a masterpiece in any way, with the texture being rather unpleasant to consume, and she suspected that she was extremely fortunate not to be able to taste it, since that was bound to be even worse, but it did contain a significant quantity nutrients that significantly assisted in her recovery of her physique energy.

‘I wonder exactly how my body decides what it wants to be able to taste and smell. There isn’t too much of a difference between living and dead creatures when it comes to what they’re made of, and yet I have previously been able to smell the scent of burnt flesh when her physique energy had affected the abominations, and yet the scent and taste of cooked hatred automaton flesh evades me…’ she frowned, biting off another piece of the meat finding that it was still entirely devoid of taste, ‘I’ve never attempted to consume a living creature in this prison realm, though I do know I can taste other people...’

She forced the following thoughts of her mind as to prevent them from affecting her concentration and checked her current level of physique energy, deciding to end her rest as it rose to a satisfactory level.

While she wasn’t particularly thirsty, she still decided to drink a little bit of the thick Beast’s blood from the ground and then cleanse her entire body with the True Ascendant physique energy before carrying on. This method of keeping oneself clean was efficient and incredibly effective, not to mention the fact that it could be far more thorough than any kind of ordinary method of bathing or washing oneself, but for some foolish reason, she was beginning to miss the baths of the Yi District.

Besides the various sights that they provided, they also offered an opportunity to truly relax that she had not been able to find within the prison realm so far.

‘Perhaps that’s for the best. If I start relaxing here, I may just decide that there’s no point to escaping, and then I will have absolutely ruined myself. I could attempt to partially replicate the experience once I return to Beast’s Rest by diluting the Beast’s blood sufficiently to make it nigh harmless to ordinary people and killing intent cultivators, at which point there could be yet another business for me and Meng Chu to profit from,’ she considered, ‘Wait, if all I am doing is distracting myself to make travelling a little less tedious, I should just invest this spare time into taking apart all of the tangled techniques from the right of the prison realm and turning them into something useful.’

Wei Yi forced open several of her technique tomes within her Augur’s Library and duplicated them, returning the originals to their places while shattering the second set into individual pages, before then splitting them into even smaller pieces, with some parts of paper only containing a single word.

She looked at this scattered mess for a little while, then slowly began to organise them according to some logic that even she wasn’t entirely certain about, but it seemed to be working. Several minutes in reality later, she had completed this rearrangement and pushed most collections of paper fragments back, keeping only one close to herself.

This particular set included several portions of the Sword Will Arts, Aerial Bisection, Concentrated Blade and even several segments of Demonic Ire, though she suspected that the last technique could only be used as reference for empowering the rest of her known techniques due to the immense difference between it and the rest of the spiritual will techniques within her arsenal. In addition, it was not something that she could improve on her own, as her understanding of the methods of otherworldly demons was unfortunately limited.

Instead, she was considering implementing the various aspects of Demonic Ire into the other three techniques, as there were several parts that were relatively independent of the basic skill itself.

‘For instance, this segment could work well with the Sword Will Arts, and allow them to become significantly more offensive and aggressive in nature than they currently are, or if I include the method of gathering and strengthening force, I could modify the Aerial Bisection into something significantly more powerful, albeit slower, and perhaps I could even gain the ability to split space itself…’ she thought, splitting the current category of papers further according to these ideas.

With her attention devoted mostly to this task, occasionally utilising the power of Endless Calculation infused with spiritual will to further accelerate it, not only did every step of the journey feel significantly faster, but she also came closer to getting a second proper spiritual will technique with every single step that she took.

The first alternate version of a technique was something she considered calling Frayed Blade, inspired by the combination of Concentrated Blade and the incredible destructive capabilities of Demonic Ire.

Unfortunately, as she neared its completion, she found that she lacked some understanding of both of the techniques involved, and as she did not want to waste further energy while her destination was still so uncertain, she could only turn to working on the other potential combinations while hoping to come across the necessary insights in the process. Seeing as she was already on the brink of creating a new variation of the spiritual concentration blade, she decided to work on altering the Sword Will Arts next, tentatively giving this new creation the name Terror Arts due to the similarity between Demonic Ire energy and killing intent, as well as the aesthetic that such a combination would result in.

Every now and then, she would stop to eat a little more of the supposed warlord’s food and then experiment only with the movements of the techniques to get a better grasp of what she could and could not accomplish with her own body.

Like that, time passed, though it was always difficult to tell how much. Her internal clock could have gone wrong a long time ago, and she would be none the wiser until someone with an actual clock that functioned within the prison realm appeared and proved her wrong, though she was almost certain that it was currently the sixteenth day of the second month, of the second year that she had spent within the prison realm, meaning that it has been roughly thirteen days since her imprisonment in the Planar Continents.

This was both fortunate and not for her, as it meant that if she was able to escape soon, she could be sure that most of the things she intended to investigate, like the Ancestral Hall of the Kong, would still be out there, but it also meant that she could still be fresh in the minds of the Great Family that imprisoned her – if they ever cared about her to begin with, of course.

After all, the most she had done to them was damage their clothing, and that could be corrected in a matter of seconds, if not quicker with the same strange methods that allowed them to possess their overwhelming might. Their initial hatred of her could have been a simple reaction to being touched by someone for the first time in their entire lives without some degree of reverence or respect, one that faded the very second that she was sealed.

This was significantly more likely due to the fact that there was little anger in their voices when they explained the reason behind her being targeted.

‘I am absolutely sure of one thing – no matter what the Greats do, even if they are holding up the world itself and preventing it from collapsing, the particular Great Family that decided to threaten my life and the lives of everyone connected to me will die, or else I will.’

She quickly restrained her killing intent again, before it could break the ground beneath her, but the cracks that had still appeared prompted her to randomly investigate the terrain that she stood upon. The surface of the prison realm was incredibly dull and ordinary, with the natural exception of the occasional hatred automaton that she stumbled upon, though even they were completely inert when she found them, but the only underground environment that she had seen so far contained the most valuable material in the entire prison realm.

Thus, she was curious whether there were any other caves out there that she could benefit from.

‘With my current realm in spiritual will cultivation, I can see a significant distance into the ground, meaning that if I find something near the surface, I will be able to approach it with my own abilities,’ she thought, initially finding nothing but not being discouraged in the least, ‘In combination with calculating techniques, this might actually end up being an entertaining journey…’

She continued onwards, finding nothing for several minutes before she began to notice a series of oddities within the ground, amongst which was the fact that the ground she was walking on was becoming oddly compressed, almost like someone had been digging beneath the earth and shifting the stone and dirt of the prison realm in order to form a path for themselves and strengthen the walls and ceilings of their passages so that they would not collapse during ordinary forms of activity.

For a few seconds, she mentally debated whether this phenomenon was worth her investigation and concluded that it was.

Wei Yi spent several minutes searching for the best location to attempt to break through the ground, then located one where the ground was sufficiently thin for her to be able to notice a trace of air on the other side. This was naturally the best place to attempt to enter whatever was beneath the red wastes, and thus she began to weaken the ground using the combination of the Sizzling Palm, which empowered one’s force with every repeated strike at a single point, Boulder Pushing Palm, as that would ensure that her attacks would breach all the way into the ground and not simply compact the ground further, a segment of the Touch of God, as well as the Collapsing Cavern Fist, mostly due the name being rather suitable for her current task.

Since she had four different types of energy, she was able to use all of them without stressing her body, as there was only a single meridian that required energy to flow through it in two different directions due to the requirement of Storm Blade Wreathing to link the three techniques together while allowing them to be used without the proper weapon.

‘So long as the rest of the food taken from the warlord is as nutritious, I should be able to use roughly three hundred and sixty-seven combined palm or fist strikes at full power prior to exhausting myself, meaning that I should stop roughly around the two hundred mark… Thus, the best place to target would be this exact point on the ground,’ Wei Yi calculated, drawing a cross in the dirt on that point for no real reason, ‘Although, if I find some kind of edible hatred automaton, I could easily utilise every single drop and wisp of all of my energies and then recover them by cooking their flesh with True Ascendant energy… I would need a drop or two of it for that, naturally…’

Like that, she began. Killing intent, spiritual will and physique energy wrapped around her hand, forming five particular kinds of energy that separated into individual sections around her fist, only the Storm Blade Wreathing power keeping them together and stable, with which she struck the ground and sent a shockwave through the ground, reverberating throughout the stone as if she had hit an enormous drum.

The ground weakened slightly, but it was not enough, causing her to strike again.

‘One hundred and seventy-eight…’ she kept count in her head as she attacked yet again, but after this particular punch, she sensed a crack within the stone reaching all the way through it, failing to shatter the entire slab of stone by a single inch.

Since even one more light tap would complete the process, she retreated to the nearest hill and activated one of her newest creations: Hatred Split, a technique that successfully formed within her mind after she had combined some of the ideas from Terror Arts and Frayed Blade into the Aerial Bisection technique. It was somewhat unnecessarily powerful for the situation at hand, but it made for a prime opportunity to confirm the effectiveness of this new stride in her technique creation abilities.

Wei Yi raised both hands into the air as if she was gripping an invisible weapon with both. White threads of spiritual energy rushed around both of her wrists and towards her hands, but as they moved, their very nature warped and distorted, gaining an eerie crimson light that was entirely unlike killing intent, causing it to seemingly cut through the air itself.

After every rotation around her hands on their path of ascension, the volume and brightness of the Hatred Split energy grew by a single fold, so that when it finally reached into the empty space between her hands, it was sufficient to create an enormous two-handed greatsword within her grip, stretching into the sky and actively burning it with every breath that it remained in place and gathered energy. Slowly, the space around her blurred and distorted, with even it being pulled towards the gigantic blade as the vibrant energy forming it became ever denser. Soon, it did not seem like she was holding a mere sword, but a weapon belonging to the gods, taken from their treasury or armoury and stolen by a mortal who could never be fit to carry such a magnificent item without their aid.

And yet, Wei Yi, as unimpressive as she appeared beneath the blade that rapidly gained regal detail and luminance, held on, defying not just those gods, but the world itself, withstanding all of the pressure that should have been enough to form the very prison realm itself.

Perhaps that was all an illusion, perhaps not, but the power within the spiritual blade was true.

Every muscle, every blood vessel, every piece of mortal flesh and bone within her hands cried out merely due to being close to this furious power, so she did not keep hold of it for long, but the thought itself remained – perhaps, one day, she could pierce space itself with this. Perhaps she could be free.

As the blade finally descended, it carved a larger tear in the air with every instant of movement. It could not have reached the cracked part of the ground initially, but only half-way down the swing, it was striking the precise point that she had previously marked with a random, entirely meaningless cross. When it did strike, it hit the ground with immense power.

In a single moment of reality, the ground, the dirt and sand that covered it and the stone beneath were cleaved in half, throwing up an enormous cloud of dust into the air, creating an impenetrable wall around both sides of the blade, which rapidly dispersed upon her command the second that it hit the ground, as even the single instant that she had held it while it touched the ground felt like attempting to hold the very sky itself, a privilege that not even the Master of Yi City could ever brag about.

More importantly, however, the weakened ceiling of some cave instantly collapsed upon this strike, falling in and throwing the wall of dust into disarray, scattering it into a simple cloud.

As she had no intentions to wait for the dust to clear, Wei Yi accelerated the process with a powerful punch, which created an enormous gust of wind that blew the cloud of dust far into the distance, hopefully targeting someone else who would appreciate the distraction and obstruction a little more than she did. Without this interference, she saw that the rocks fell into a large underground cave, with several passages heading away from it into various other directions, with several likely joining together in the distance while others would never meet one another again.

Most of the cave was not particularly significant, looking much like the underground path that had led her to the miracle fluid, but she spotted strange indentations in the stone that much resembled footsteps that were repeated over and over again until they had permanently changed the ground.

Based on those indentations, the occupants of the caves were not human, as their steps did not resemble the human foot in the vast majority of cases that were before her, instead matching something that one may find on a large planar beast that was shaped like an insect, though there were also footsteps that seemed to belong to wolves, cows, bears and all sorts of other creatures, with one particular set of prints matching the human hand.

‘Thus, this place is likely to belong to a set of hatred automatons. They wouldn’t require food and could just repeatedly walk through the exact same paths endlessly until these marks were made.’

So far as she was aware, things that became hatred automatons did not need to be whole at the time of creation. If several animals were somehow brought together, slain and rearranged into something new, they could still be animated by the Beast’s killing intent and turned into a supposedly living creature that would then wander around and seek people to slaughter.

‘I wonder if this lot has also decided to lie down and do nothing,’ she wondered to herself, as she was unable to hear nor see any traces of the amalgamated hatred automatons that she theorised to live within these caves, ‘Perhaps some of them could be easy to consume. I ought to investigate.’

Naturally, there were significantly more reasons for her actions that appeared within her head. For one, she was nearing the potential outskirts of Automaton Point. It was not impossible for whoever lived there to be underground most of the time, resulting in them remaining undetected the vast majority of the time. If they were all indeed hatred automatons, as some had theorised, then they would never need to go up to the surface with the exception of gathering materials for whatever tasks and activities they had chosen to spend their time on, if they were anything like the tailor of Beast’s Rest.

She carefully examined the walls of the cave before ascertaining that she would be able to climb them even without the use of physique energy, only jumping down at that point.

Landing deftly on one of the rocks that she had cleaved in two, she paused for a second to examine her swordsmanship, stepping off it while thinking, ‘I ought to improve the Hatred Split significantly before I ever consider using it combat. The expenditure of energy was acceptable, but the incredible pressure on me was- can be used for a physique cultivation method, actually. Still, unsuitable for regular battle, not to mention the incredible length of time that I had to spend on empowering it prior to use. In any real confrontation, especially with a fast opponent, I wouldn’t stand a chance.’

In total, she saw six different paths snaking away from this cave chamber. None had anything outstanding about them, with the most significant difference that she was able to spot being the fact that some were slightly larger than others.

The number of footsteps heading into any particular passage was also similar, but as she intended to locate either a trace of food or a settlement of some kind – and likely find some food in their position – she decided to go down the route with the most step-like indentations in the ground. It was not the largest tunnel, nor the one that looked the most interesting visually, as that would be the least travelled path on the opposite side of the cave, but it did look like someone had once taken the time to work on the surfaces of the passageway, either smoothing them down with some kind of tool or technique, if it wasn’t the work of the insect-like creatures that were likely to inhabit this area.

As a result, the chances of spotting something of use were notably higher than the other routes.

She trusted both her spiritual perception and memory, given that both had brought her through many challenged and tribulations, and her sense of direction was generally serviceable, so she did not feel the need to retrieve any kind of string to leave behind herself as to recognise a path back to the surface. However, she did approach the entrance to the tunnel and, applying a little pressure to the stone with her finger, draw a small circle in the wall for future reference.

‘Alright, I’ll give myself roughly ten hours to find something of note, and if I fail, I ought to return to the surface quickly. If I waste more than a day here without finding anything, the physique that I had obtained from the warlord would have been entirely wasted on the journey to Automaton Point, and could even get wasted on the way back,’ she decided, walking into the darkness.