V2C42: Properties of Killing Intent

Following Fen Fang’s recommendation, she looked through a few rooms that were built on the outside of the cave walls and found one that appeared to have no inhabitant, using it to quickly modify her hairstyle and appearance to more closely resemble her previous style while also dressing in the Crimson Robes of the Third Arrival.

The robes were known in the world of men, but amongst the hatred avatars who know almost nothing about the factions around them, they would be unlikely to stand out.

After that, she sat down on the cold stone ground – which was warmed quickly by her innate yang – and ate some of the meat from the amalgam automatons to recover the energy she had wasted in the earlier battle with that same kind of creature. Furthermore, she had not sat down to restore her energy since the breaking of the ground via Hatred Split, meaning that this opportunity was also prime for her to recover everything that she had expended on that move.

‘Now, I have several priorities and several things that need to be done before I can attain any hope of allying with them, which would benefit Beast’s Rest due to their ability to control hatred automatons, a natural predator for many people living in the prison realm. Although most of the truly powerful can handle them with ease, they would still prove to be beneficial in a large conflict of multiple armies clashing together,’ she considered as she chewed on the tasteless flesh and burned away the poisonous influence of the Beast via physique energy, ‘Furthermore, I highly doubt that the hatred avatars are limited to simply controlling other automatons. They ought to have the ability cultivate killing intent and to do so significantly more quickly than normal people. Perhaps their resonance might also allow for long-distance communication without need for vocalisation…

‘Then again, I have to figure out whether it is possible to replicate their current state and resonance via the killing intent of another. Strictly speaking, the Beast’s hatred is not particularly concentrated in the atmosphere, only existing in the state between the first and second realm most of the time, but it is still incredibly plentiful and constant, meaning that an ordinary cultivator in the second realm would likely struggle with maintaining anything nearing the required quantity and density of a killing intent field.’

She looked to the side in her mental realm and shifted her position to the half-built wing of the library, where she willed the map of the prison realm to appear, with the annotations made by Meng Chu. On the spots that she had personally seen, she overlaid her own experiences and increased their detail as to get a better idea of what she was working with.

Furthermore, she added her current mental map of the cave systems beneath the ground onto the map, and envisioned it splitting into several distinct layers that she could manipulate freely.

Something like this would have been impossible in reality without the use of complex arrays and constant alteration of them whenever she wanted to modify something, making her all the more pleased that she had chosen to rely primarily on the Augur’s Library for this kind of planning and scheming, as managing this on any form of physical medium would have been incredibly tedious and extremely difficult to maintain.

She was already bringing a lot of things with her wherever she went, so more wouldn’t be necessary.

Wei Yi decided to begin her work in Automaton Point by getting to know some of the practises of the locals, as well as the things they do and do not allow. If she accidentally went against some kind of immense taboo amongst the avatars, her chances of getting their uncoordinated crowd to side with her would be drastically reduced.

‘If necessary, I could attempt to use some of the mind-influencing tricks I had picked up… mostly from being targeted by them… but even assuming that I am able to use them perfectly to amplify some desire of the avatars and use it for my own purposes, I can only increase or decrease some of their feelings, not create them. After all, I do not have the powers of the memory planes to suddenly induce strange figures of speech and references to farming, amongst other things…’

Thus, she rose from the ground and headed outside, finding that the so-called streets were still incredibly empty, devoid of everything but the occasional flicker of the curious green lanterns that lit the caves.

Lao Kai remained on the other side of the bridge, one of the amalgam automatons sitting beside him.

When he noticed her looking towards him, as she made no attempts whatsoever to hide it, he simply looked back at her with dark crimson eyes, his face mostly still and unmoving, making it difficult to understand his exact emotional state. However, what was obvious was that he would be one of the many hatred avatars that would be unlikely to desire to leave the caves just to fight the battles of various humans.

‘If Fen Fang’s words are to be believed, these hatred automatons do not like disturbances. Perhaps if I can either incite a faction to attack them or fabricate enough evidence that they will do so, I could mobilise them under the premise of striking before their enemies can, preventing any further fuss for the price of a small war,’ she considered, looking away to prevent the stare from continuing for too long, ‘No matter what they say, I highly doubt that none of them have any interest in seeing the Planar Continents again, with their new eyes. Thus, once I find some willing test subjects, I need to understand what exactly causes the Beast’s power to bring so many different creatures and individuals to life, and why they and the tailor from Beast’s Rest differ so greatly from the automatons.’

Before she had descended to speak with Fen Fang, she had seen several hatred avatars walking near the green lanterns without any great haste to their movements, so she made her way to where one of them appeared to be going.

That brought her to a building that resembled a bar, with several tables off to the side and one main counter where an avatar stood with a clay cup in her hand, mechanically cleaning it with some fabric.

Wei Yi approached the counter and intended to wait for the avatar to notice her presence and acknowledge her entrance, at the very least, but after almost two minutes of her repeating the exact same movements and cleaning the exact same part of the cup without any changes to her expression, she decided to be a little more direct.

“Excuse me, are you busy right now? Do you mind if I speak with you?”

For several moments, there was no reply, but then, as if the words finally reached her, the avatar’s hands stopped and she raised her head to meet Wei Yi’s eyes, “… No?”

“Alright. What is your name?”

“…”

“… Your name?”

“Ah? Liu Qi…”

‘This one doesn’t just seem to be responding with a delay, but also completely missing certain pieces of information… I wonder why…’ Wei Yi frowned and inspected the woman with her spiritual perception, ‘Interesting. Her so-called resonance is rather… faint. Furthermore, the quantity of killing intent within her body is clearly insufficient to maintain her thoughts at all times, so whenever some new form of input gets her attention, all energy is drained and, for a while, she can do nothing else…’

She waited for a little while, allowing the woman to recover some of her energy, then spoke quickly as to not exceed the avatar’s attention span, “Do some of you possess more intelligence and faster thoughts than others?”

“We… I do… not.”

‘Yes, I noticed that. Whether or not she is the only case of such a thing occurring, I cannot imagine any of them being displeased if I find a way to grant them all a greater speed of thought,’ Wei Yi considered, not recalling any mention of an inferior kind of hatred avatars or anyone else that the majority of Automaton Point’s population disliked, “Would you like to try and gain faster thinking?”

“… What?”

“Faster thought. Yes or no?”

The hatred avatar looked at her for an incredible length of time, making Wei Yi wonder whether she had accidentally offended the very world itself, then said, “Yes.”

‘Well, this is as close to a normal agreement as I will get. If Fen Fang tries to object, he won’t have much ground to stand on – or sit on, since that seems to be his preference,’ she thought, walking around the counter and stepping up to the hatred avatar, “I’ll try a few things and look around. If you have any objections… try to get them to me in time.”

The avatar continued to be in a daze, so Wei Yi interpreted this as the permission for her to continue and thus drove more of her spiritual perception into her, encompassing every single point of her being. Her ancient flesh, her dry insides, the ash-like hair that remained on her head – all of it was recorded by Wei Yi within the Augur’s Library, creating a model of this hatred avatar there with an incredible degree of detail.

‘Very interesting… I do not have enough of these. I should collect everyone in the universe, put them in a mental museum, then… no, I don’t need to do any of that. All I need is two figures that are functioning normally, and, in my constant diligence, I have collected both Lao Kai and Fen Fang’s bodies, albeit at a significantly lower level of detail. Let’s see…’ she looked through the books she had created on those two and compared them to the woman’s physique, ‘So, the body itself appears to be functioning normally. The degree of decay is similar to Lao Kai, who only had issues speaking, not processing information, so simply providing her with vitality, even if I can do so, won’t help.’

A few other ideas popped into her head, but, unfortunately, there appeared to be nothing to the hatred avatar before her that could be rectified without the most complex solution – completely replacing the Beast’s killing intent around her with her own.

This was complicated for multiple reasons, amongst which was the fact that she needed to maintain the current resonance and activity within her mind without understanding exactly how any form of killing intent was able to stimulate and replicate the thoughts of a being entirely foreign to it. So far as she understood the natural hatred of all living things, even with the added revelations of it being something that could be cultivated as an entirely separate form of power to planar energy or the like, the phenomenon of hatred avatars or automatons was entirely impossible.

Despite all of that, she clearly saw both manifestations of killing intent before her no matter what she personally thought or understood.

‘Without some great revelation, like witnessing the Black Terror using her killing intent or Bai Hao’s description of spiritual will, I can’t imagine my understanding of either energy changing in the short term. As such, I should not attempt to modify the current killing intent keeping her moving too much, simply replacing it with my own. If that succeeds, I can attempt to modify or outright replace the structure of killing intent animating them, perhaps adding spiritual will into the equation, if it happens to be suitable,’ Wei Yi quickly decided on her plan while adding, ‘Frankly, I don’t know whether or not this will work at all, but I do know that I can replace the killing intent after that one time I decided to break through via a day’s swimming in the Beast’s blood.’

Carefully, she released her killing intent, making sure to reduce the offensive ability of it as much as she possibly could while increasing the quantity and density of it at the same time, causing a thin veil of unique crimson to appear around her, completely overpowering the Beast’s killing intent.

The ground beneath her trembled and small cracks appeared in the stone, forcing her to slow down and manipulate her energy to further reduce its power, before she made it extend further and reach towards the hatred avatar. Her deep crimson, with the shadow of a battlefield and a towering library within it, cut through the Beast’s energy, pushing it aside to replace it with her own colours. She continued gathering it around the hatred avatar, continuing only once she had been utterly surrounded.

Even before Wei Yi attempted to intrude upon her body, she noticed that by separating the avatar from the Beast’s killing intent, her activity was becoming even slower than before.

‘If I can do this, I ought to do it quickly, or else attempt this at another time, after I’ve had more practise,’ she knew, ultimately deciding to make an attempt now and immediately disperse her killing intent the moment that something strange began to happen.

That took far less time to occur than he would have hoped. The second that she intruded upon the hatred avatar’s body with her energy, she felt a conflict between the two occur, the natural power that allowed Liu Qi to move being unable to accept Wei Yi’s energy and attempting to repel her by breaking the very body that it animated.

Naturally, she revoked her killing intent before any permanent harm could come to Liu Qi and noted down her findings.

‘As far as I am aware, not a single killing intent cultivator has previously succeeded in animating any being, no matter how small or insignificant. Why is that?’ she asked the question that she needed to answer before she could possibly proceed while checking that the hatred avatar’s didn’t suffer any damage that didn’t immediately catch her eyes, ‘Before I manage that, I need to see if they have killing intent cultivators and whether simply drawing killing intent towards them will allow me to assist in their recovery.’

She tested the latter immediately, using the vast cloud of killing intent that she had accumulated around her to push away the Beast’s crimson and force it to coalesce on Liu Qi’s position.

As the quantity of killing intent within her body slowly refilled, the hatred avatar’s mental processes also recovered, slowly accelerating until her mind returned to its previous state. From there, however, the increasing concentration and quantity of the Beast’s killing intent did not seem to benefit her as significantly. Nevertheless, if her original state was to be quantified as 0.6, all of the killing intent that she was able to funnel towards her increased that to a 0.65.

“Thank you for your contribution. I will return soon to continue my experimentation.”

“My head… feels strange…”

“Whatever is causing it, it should pass within an hour or two. While your mind is operating slightly more quickly, is there anything you want to tell me?”

“… Who was I? Who… was I?” her eyes widened, an aura of distress surrounding her.

“I’m afraid I don’t know. If your identity still exists within your head, I will do my best to uncover it,” Wei Yi promised, not because she truly cared about this one woman’s mind, but due to the fact that her investigation would naturally lead to such an outcome if it is successful, “If there isn’t anything else, I will go now.”

Liu Qi said nothing in response.

‘Very well, then…’ Wei Yi departed quietly, after she had drawn as much killing intent towards the hatred avatar as she could, ‘Actually, her question is an interesting one. All of these people are likely to have been amongst the first generations of prisoners within this realm, so they would be incredibly likely to desire to fight against the Greats so long as their memories recovered… Well, that’s another thing on the list, then.’

The slowly growing list of possibilities and responsibilities was a little daunting, but it was also a little exciting for her. Not too long ago, she didn’t even know that the Great Families existed, but now she was barely out of reach of resurrecting some of their greatest enemies and bringing the war to them.

Furthermore, this was only her third year since the awakening of cosmic energy. Despite everything that she had gone through, the change in her perspective was still incredibly astounding.

Since this experiment gave her a few things to contemplate, she decided to return to her current residence and snack on another piece of amalgam automaton flesh while focusing on her mental realm and adding even more information to it. Wei Yi further expanded the detail within the statue of Liu Qi with the recently gathered data while also creating yet another mental surface on which she scattered a series of notes, pages and the like.

‘So… what causes the Beast’s killing intent to differ from that of a typical cultivator, and can I replicate it?’ she willed one of the notes to fly into the air and hover before her as her thoughts appeared on it, ‘Perhaps the most obvious would be the fact that both killing intent and spiritual will are mental energies. Upon the death of the owner, it will disperse… The Beast’s hatred has not. It seems to maintain a constant quantity, with the energy borrowed by cultivators returning to it and occasionally forming the motes of killing intent that others then use for trading, behaving similarly to planar energy that has the support of a planar anchor… Indeed, planar energy…’

A second page hovered up from the table, ‘Both forms of energy can be formed via the support of planar energy, and if planar energy as a concept was removed from existence, neither form of power would be likely to be anywhere near as powerful as they currently are. Thus, could they not be produced from planar energy? In fact, if that is true, that would explain a lot, not just about my personal excessive quantity of killing intent, but also about the constant drain of planar energy within everyone within the prison realm.’

Another page flew up to join the others.

‘It is possible that the prison realm was, at one time designed not just to trap common people, but to convert their energies into killing intent – and possibly spiritual will on the other side of the prison realm – for some unknown reason. This environment allows killing intent cultivation to flourish, but it prevents planar energy from remaining in the world for long. It also keeps the Beast’s energy stable…’

She frowned, ‘Wait, does that not suggest that the Beast once had an immense pool of planar energy?’

As that theory appeared within her head, half of the notes she had created were thrown onto the ground while another series appeared on the mental table.

‘Could it be that the prison realm was not for the imprisonment of people, but the Beast? The creature could have had some kind of unusual planar cultivation technique that made it dangerous to handle, leading the creators of the prison realm to design some method of changing planar energy to something more easily manageable… Perhaps they intended to turn it back to planar energy at a later date, or maybe they simply needed to get rid of the Beast’s harmful energy without allowing it to spread…’ she shoved an entire piece of meat into her mouth to minimise the amount of thought she needed to invest into the process, ‘Then, it is the prison realm that acts as the killing intent anchor for the Beast, and if I can understand exactly what leads to such a thing occurring, I could attempt to utilise it for myself and gain my own permanent aura of killing intent while I remain within the prison realm, then adapt it for when I leave…’

A grin grew on her face while a dangerous glint appeared within her eyes. Whether the so-called killing intent anchor was an array, inscription or some immense planar construct, she did not need to personally witness it to see how it affected the Beast’s killing intent and then replicate it on her own.

She just needed time.