V2C43: Advancing via a Diversion

When Wei Yi found something that was particularly engaging, her mind would accelerate to the same levels as during an impossible and incredibly deadly situation. A single second in reality would give her an hour, if not more, in the mental domain, and she made full use of two hours in real time before leaving her temporary residence and heading over to a different part of Automaton Point.

She lacked the information to develop her current theories further, and thus she had no choice but to step out and find someone to learn more from.

For whatever reason, she came out and saw significantly more hatred avatars walking around than before. After asking a few of them about the situation and finding someone that was both willing to talk to her and was able to talk at a speed that was greater than one word per minute – deterioration of the lungs seemed to be amongst the most common major flaws within the body, excluding such things as their reproductive organs and skin – she discovered that while they didn’t have any specific time for work, activity or the like, they still tended to emerge at similar times due to residual memories of their past lives.

This was to her benefit, allowing her to question a large number of people about certain things, prime amongst which was the topic of their customs, taboos and whether there were any killing intent cultivators amongst them.

The first two lines of inquiry did not result in much, but the third did yield a curious rumour: supposedly, there was indeed someone who had attempted to practise the ways of her kind, as they put it, and succeeded to the point of “damaging their resonance” and being “suggested” to leave the general area of Automaton Point.

‘So, them practising killing intent cultivation is a sort of taboo, unless they can do so without damaging their connection to the Beast… I will need to be careful with this when I complete the mental array…’ she considered, briefly glancing inwards towards the enormous array that she had begun to create within the sky of the mental domain with the same materials as the storm walls, ‘This one specimen ought to significantly increase my progress, though it will take far more work to actually complete my plans.’

As a result, she was heading out of Automaton Point through the same route that she used to get in far earlier than anyone could have originally predicted.

Lao Kai looked at her in slight confusion as she walked past him on the bridge, but he did not choose to obstruct her path. Whether he was pleased with her leaving or just didn’t care enough to question her, he remained silent and continued resting a hand on the amalgam automaton near him.

Once she returned into the cave tunnels, Wei Yi quickly made her way through them without even attempting to pretend that she had been confounded by the path that had been used to bring her to Automaton Point. Her inspiration had already begun to fade at this point, but every second that she wasted on meaningless wandering about was using up even more of that limited time during which her mind functioned at a significantly faster rate.

‘My thoughts do seem to become slightly faster each time this happens, though…’

For no particular reason, once she was out of reach of the resonance belonging to Fen Fang, she drew a small mark on the wall before proceeding towards the location of the hatred avatar that had been removed from Automaton Point.

The walk took a little over ten minutes, though if she had been confident in breaking down the walls of the tunnels without causing everything to collapse on her, it could have been shortened to four or five minutes at the speed of a pleasant walk. Her destination turned out to be a dead end in the tunnels, with several rotten wood walls set up to resemble the structure of a house.

Unlike the large town the avatar came from, his current residence had no sources of light, leaving it in complete darkness as it sat on the ground, legs crossed and hands pressed together by its chest, looking forwards without any motion.

‘This… appears to be… cultivation?’ Wei Yi noticed the slight movements in killing intent around this hatred avatar, though they were incredibly imprecise and unrefined, like something that could be expected from someone cultivating for the very first time. Furthermore, what little energy it did manage to absorb was carried through the body without any logic, showing a clear lack of knowledge about meridians and the structure of the human body. If not for the fact that this was not an ordinary living person, the avatar would have likely died long ago from energy deviation or madness induced by carelessly taking in killing intent.

“Excuse me, do you mind if I ask you some questions?” she said once she made sure that it wouldn’t have the chance of killing itself with the killing intent upon a distraction.

“Human. Is there a reason why you are here?”

“I was curious about your practise of killing intent cultivation, as well as the resonance of hatred avatars as a whole. I wish to study it and understand whether it is possible for another cultivator to replicate the stabilising effects of the Beast’s hatred and animate creatures via a similar method,” Wei Yi explained plainly, “If this is successful, it may be possible for you to exist outside of the prison realm without any of the disadvantages of the living nor of your current state.”

The hatred avatar stopped his cultivation, lowering his hands and turning towards her, “What does my severance of the resonance have to do with your project?”

“The fact that simple cultivation led to this makes me curious about the exact nature of it. Depending on the answer, it might either be an insignificant thing, or it might be the key to allowing all avatars to experience a number of things that they currently cannot.”

“… How do you wish to test this?”

“It’s very simple. Just sit where you currently are and let me inspect you closely with spiritual perception. Once I have something that I need to get you to do, I will inform you about it.”

“Very well. Do what you must… for now…” the avatar stated, turning back towards the wall.

Since she received his or her permission, she continued to look around their body, just like she had begun doing the very second that she came close enough to them. Already, she was able to tell that the most likely cause for the so-called ‘severance of resonance’ was the fact that, as someone that controlled a pool of their own killing intent instead of simply allowing it to enter them or pass through them, this particular hatred avatar was like a rock in a river while the majority of his kind were the water, or perhaps leaves that happened to land on it.

In simpler words, this avatar was no longer as close to their peers, prompting them to find his existence displeasing and confusing.

‘Actually, I hadn’t paid enough attention to this before, but it seems that there is indeed a certain difference between my cultivation and that of this avatar in particular – besides the sheer quantity of killing intent that I am able to wield, of course,‘ she noted, diving deeper into their body with her spiritual perception.

Her curiosity was immediately rewarded when she was able to compare the structure of the avatar’s killing intent with her own. Despite the lacking knowledge and understanding of the hatred avatar, it was somehow able to reach the second realm, and thus it chose to create the figure of a human man dressed in a farmer’s clothes and with a large scythe on his back. Even then, this was entirely dependent on the field of killing intent present throughout the left half of the prison realm and would likely weaken or outright vanish without the support of it or planar energy.

“Could you tell me who the person you based your killing intent structure on is?”

“I could not. That person was simply the most prominent memory within my mind when I began to learn, and so I used it to achieve the greatest effect in my practise.”

‘That’s not exactly what you’re meant to do, but I don’t see any reason to contradict him for the moment… It is likely, however, that this is either the avatar himself – his physiology does match that of a man, and if I was to extrapolate his current appearance, he could certainly resemble a more aged version of that same figure – or someone really close to him, perhaps a relative or a close friend,’ she thought, only choosing to say, “There’s something I wish to attempt. I will release some killing intent, and I would like you to attempt to displace it. Not destroy it, not shatter or penetrate it, but simply displace it.”

“You’re a practitioner of killing intent?”

“Naturally. Were you incapable of sensing it with your own killing intent, or did you not receive any information about this from whoever you learnt your techniques from?”

“I did, but I had seen no other killing intent cultivators since then. No explanation has sufficed to explain the truth of any particular sensation,” the hatred avatar stated, which earned a nod of agreement from Wei Yi, “What realm are you in?”

“Same one as you are. Now, let us begin the experiment,” she said, releasing a small cube of killing intent next to him.

He frowned but took the request seriously, mobilising all of the killing intent within him that he could and pushing against her energy with a clear quantity of effort. Their killing intents clashed with one another, but one won out almost immediately, with Wei Yi’s hatred remaining in place without any difficulty.

‘Thus, planar energy proves to be insanely useful once more. So far as I can tell, planar energy is the catalyst and anchor for all other forms of energy in this world, and since I have a nigh-infinite quantity of it thanks to the nascent anchor and rift, I can maintain the optimum state of all of these forms of energy. Logically, if I enhance my planar energy and keep it at a constant quantity, I will similarly strengthen the stability of my mental energies, providing a full planar anchor to hold all of them together,’ she concluded, suddenly directing all three of her available forms of energy towards the dantian.

As she had experienced several times, one of the best ways to force energy to develop and refine it was to pressure it with other types of power, and as it just so happened, she had three forms of it that was on par with her cosmic energy.

Furthermore, her planar anchor was already half-formed: all it needed was one enormous push.

“Thank you for your contributions so far. I’ll be back within a day or two, so try to leave a note if you go off somewhere,” she said, immediately turning around and departing from his residence within the tunnels. Her breakthroughs were known to be rather exaggerated and extreme in every respect imaginable, and although she knew exactly what a breakthrough to the Emergent Anchor realm entailed, she still suspected that her attempt to go against the very laws of the prison realm could not be safely conducted within the proximity of any pseudo-living things. If she had the time, she would have gone above the surface, then set up several arrays to limit the impact of her cultivation through extreme masochism, but she decided that she could endure a rock or two falling on her.

Due to this, she sat down in the middle of one of the passages she had gone through on her way to Automaton Point after placing a few inscriptions and arrays on the routes through it.

Then, while sitting down, she created a few more arrays around herself, completing them with her spiritual will to elevate simple arrangements of stones and drawings on the ground to the level of two stars. Most of these were Hatred Gathering and Will Focusing arrays, the latter of which had originally only been intended to allow people to gain a clearer mind while within its range, but with a few modifications, it was also effective at strengthening spiritual will.

‘I can’t do the same with my physique energy, but as it is all empowered True Ascendant physique energy, I don’t really need to do so. It can empower the yang of both spiritual will and killing intent and neutralise the negative yin of both, thus further aiding in my plans,’ she thought, the three unique forms of power already surrounding her dantian and just waiting to barrage her planar energy.

She took a deep breath, allowed her body to relax, then began.

Her trinity of mental and physical powers surged into her planar aperture, passing through the illusory barrier that surrounded it, and pushed the killing intent belonging to the Beast aside, wrapping the cosmic energy in sunlight, boundless crimson and feeble silver, forcefully compressing what little of her energy remained further into the centre, surrounding the planar anchor and concentrating it to an insane degree.

Within the mental domain, the array that she had been working on lit up, the few functional elements of it focusing on the dantian to stabilise her twin mental energies.

As her combined forms of power kept even the laws of the realm at bay, for an admittedly brief time as every second that she spent repelling the world cost her almost one fifth of her total pool of energies, her cosmic energy was finally able to recover, drop by drop. The 4% of her power grew to 5%, then 6%, and even further, the nascent rift somehow increasing its output in tandem with her plans.

Everything she had gathered was further focused onto the planar anchor and some of the cosmic energy even sank into the faint planar anchor, increasing its overall structural stability and overall completeness.

‘In theory, to break into the first stage of a realm from any one Half-Step stage, all I need to do is complete whatever process had been left incomplete during my previous attempt. This can easily be done without an excessive quantity of cosmic energy – not that it wouldn’t help, naturally – and all I must do is make good use of what little I do have,’ she said to herself, trying to infuse all three forms of energy into the nascent rift to make the most of the time she had, ‘For the best chance of success, I will need just a little bit more energy…’

To her surprise, there was indeed a reaction when all three energies touched the nascent rift. They spun around the small tear in existence and were further consumed, but with every hundred wisps of energy that entered the rift, it widened by an extremely small amount.

“Fuck, I had something like that and never thought to use it?” she unwittingly vocalised her thoughts, pushing as much of all available energies into the nascent rift.

Although the time she had to recover planar energy dropped, the quantity that she acquired with every second slowly rose – and, naturally, she forced every single drop that emerged from the rift into her planar anchor. Threads of cosmic light surged into the long-dormant structure, changing to flame, water, metal, earth, wood, blood, sparked with the occasional bolt of golden lightning, and, almost upon the total exhaustion of the mental and physical energies, the threads and the entire planar anchor was suddenly enveloped in pure violet. Wei Yi wanted to transform it back into cosmic energy as soon as possible, to avoid the laws of the prison realm consuming it at a greater rate than they otherwise would, but it seemed that this was the push that her cultivation required.

All of a sudden, the entire planar aperture was surrounded with cosmic light. The shadow of a planar anchor burst out of her body, forming a small barrier between her and the world around her. It was a great, five-sided monolith of a structure, glowing with five distinct colours on each side. Bolts of planar energy occasionally arced on its surface, as if they were arcs of lightning on a metal object.

Each side radiated power, and each one released an incredible force upon the world around her.

The killing intent from the Beast was pushed away as easily as if it had been the air of the Planar Continents, and when Wei Yi allowed her own killing intent to leave her body and occupy that space, she saw how, with every breath that she took, her energy grew more stable.

When that shadow returned to her body, this field of stability remained, and it only seemed to grow with every second.

‘I don’t think this will last for too long, however. The laws of the realm are simply acclimating to the increased quantity and quality of my planar energy, and thus I have more killing intent to work with. Eventually, the growth will stop, at which point I will acquire a better degree of control over the field of energy that I control,’ she deduced, seeing the growth in the radius of her energy decrease quickly after the initial burst, ‘That does make one wonder about the initial power of the Beast. If I can control this much killing intent freely, then wouldn’t it mean that the Beast had to have been within the sixth, seventh or even the eighth realm while it was still alive?’

If that was indeed the case, she understood why such an enormous prison realm would be constructed to restrict it, as it would otherwise easily be able to leave. It would also explain the significant strictness of the realm’s laws, and why it had to eliminate everything it possibly could that had ever contained planar energy.

‘Such a theory does not explain the existence of that planar anchor shard, but I can bother with it later, when I am forced to spend a dozen years sitting in place and cultivating killing intent to reach the fifth realm and earn some chance to break out. For now, I have what I need.’

She rose from the ground, dispersing the arrays around her with a simple stomp of her foot.

‘It’s a shame that as the rift has grown, the consumption rate seems to have grown as well. Now, my total supply of planar energy is higher by one or two percent, but it isn’t growing any further than that. I will need to continue working on it in the future…’

Somehow, her breakthrough destroyed nothing around her, and thus this single stomp was the full extent of the damage to her surroundings.

‘I might as well leave the other arrays in place. Might as well confuse some people, if they decide to walk through here,’ Wei Yi shrugged, exiting this part of the tunnels with ease and heading back towards Automaton Point, ‘Now, I ought to investigate how this more stable killing intent will affect the hatred automatons and avatars. If I can stabilise the thoughts of Liu Qi or recover her flesh, that would be for the best.’

At some unknown point in time, a group of people wandered into the tunnels leading up to Automaton Point. Their approach was violent and simplistic, charging straight towards their perceived target, but, all of a sudden, they found themselves getting lost within the dark caves. They considered breaking through the walls, but whenever this idea appeared in their minds or in conversation, it quickly vanished.

It did not need to be said that they did not enjoy their time.