V2C51: Challenging the Warlords, Part 2

‘Well… I didn’t expect that, but I’ll go with this. Taking out one opponent before the fight even begins- actually, the fight has begun. He called me weak and initiated the fight, so it is all fair,’ she decided within her thoughts, resting her hands casually on the pommel of the obsidian blade, “A victory for me.”

“Oh? I like that… Now, I-”

“As the victor of the duel, I decree that I will fight this warlord next!” Wei Yi interrupted the Demonic Lord once more, pointing her finger at the man with the Immortal Mortal physique.

“Hm… You strong! I strong! We fight!” he presumably attempted to use his brain for a while before agreeing with her, at which point he did show a small glimpse of intellect by instantly leaping into action instead of standing right beneath a spire of bone with which he could be crushed as easily as the Wolven Form physique.

Furthermore, he did not immediately jump at her, instead rushing around her as to be on the move by the time she attacked him with Sharen e Mo. It was a simple tactic, of course, but one that had to be admired from someone who could not string a sentence longer than two words together.

Since she knew this, she was in no rush to remove the sword from the ground.

‘To begin with, the reason that I chose to fight him second was due to his physique being the only one that I can absorb for myself. With it, my combat ability will surge in the short and long term – so long as the physical effects apply to me, and the case of the Concentrated Humanity physique does not repeat itself – making it significantly easier to face off against the other three, if they have some ability to resist or escape slashes with my sword,’ she thought to herself, standing in place while observing the constantly leaping physique cultivator via her spiritual perception, ‘I have to say, the sword – a two-handed sword, in particular – does seem to agree with me as a weapon, more so than the spear, even with the Martial Aspirant physique ability. I should have read more sword techniques while I had been in the Yi District…’

After several tense minutes of jumping around, the Immortal Mortal warlord must have realised that all he was currently doing was assisting her in recovering her energy while he was just expending his. When he landed on the ground again, he stopped in place for a few moments, standing directly behind her to see whether she was even paying attention.

When he believed the answer to be obvious, he grinned and charged directly at her, his victory already being imagined within his head.

For this reason, and due to his general inattentiveness, he did not react in time to Wei Yi suddenly turning on the spot and meeting his punch with her palm, while the latter was surrounded by some kind of green and red energy.

As his fist hit her hand, he felt as if he had just struck some kind of mirror, for all of the strength that he had invested into the attack seemed to return directly to his arm, shaking his muscles and bones and shattering something near the middle of his arm, simultaneously forcing it back from Wei Yi while she was able to remain in place without much difficulty.

Before he had the opportunity to recover, she had pulled the weapon out of the ground and thrust it directly into his stomach, piercing it with an explosion of force.

The raw power of the thrust caused his internal organs to explode, his bones to shatter and for his spine to break into more pieces than were needed to assemble an array of seven stars or above. In just one strike, he was permanently crippled, and brought straight to death’s door.

Wei Yi grabbed him by the neck before he could fall and siphoned what remained of his vitality, before simply crushing his neck with her bare hand and releasing her physique energy into his body to consume the potent energy of the Immortal Mortal physique that was wasted on someone like him. It was drained in less than a few seconds, at which point she released her grip and allowed the lifeless body to drop to the ground.

She felt her energy return to her body and spread throughout her meridians, but rather than seeing the effects of it, she glanced down at the sword in her hand and noticed that a second crack had formed upon it, with the first appearing after the battle of Automaton Point. Due to this being an otherworldly artefact that she cannot understand with her spiritual perception, she couldn’t tell whether this was intended, or caused by overwhelming the blade with whatever level she was supposedly on, but as the damage to it slowly grew, she understood that she needed to use it wisely before it broke into nothing. Depending on the behaviour of the weapon after destruction, as well as the method in which it was constructed, there was the possibility of reconstructing it, but she suspected that some parts of the otherworldly functionality would inevitably be lost.

It was also this that influenced her decision to go to the Great Bone Lake ahead of schedule. The power of the sword was absolutely incredible, and the Lake was one of the easiest locations to subdue with raw force. Once she accomplished this, she would be able to talk to the allies and enemies of the Great Bone Lake without much negativity from either one.

The allies would have little choice in the governance of the settlement, and would likely appreciate a smarter person to speak with, while the enemies would have no reason to refuse to speak to the person who singlehandedly bested their foes and now has the ability to provide them with whatever they needed from the Great Bone Lake to begin with. Furthermore, they would be significantly more open to alliance negotiations due to the phrase ‘An enemy of my enemy is a friend’ commonly applying to the prison realm.

“Now, I HAVE to be next!” the Demonic Lord warlord exclaimed, and when Wei Yi did not refute her, she almost leapt into the air with glee, “Yes, you will make for a perfect servant for me! Come, surrender and I will never consider sharing you~!”

“No. Instead, would you be interested in taking a single blow from my sword?”

The Demonic Lord shrugged, ignoring her offer but paying close attention to the position of Demon Killer, for she understood that even the various barriers that she could form with physique energy could be insufficient in the face of something that insanely powerful. Instead, she raised her hands into the air and released ten strands of energy, sprouting from her back, travelling along the back of her arms and leaving the body at her fingertips, which quickly flew to various points that formed a circle.

A different creature appeared from every single one, with all of them being connected to the Demonic Lord warlord with that same strand.

‘Based on her earlier actions, severing the strand will turn the monster into energy once more,’ Wei Yi thought, noticing that after every single spectral creature was formed and stabilised, the strands of physique energy floated up and twisted in such a manner that they would be more difficult to hit, ‘She does have a modicum of intelligence, but the otherworldly sword circumvents that…’

She looked towards the Demonic Lord warlord, who created a large and wide creature with antlers and fur to obstruct any attacks towards herself and smiled as she gathered her killing intent at her left palm. To the remaining three physique cultivators, she just seemed to be repeating her previous tactic, for they could hardly sense the flow of her energy, thus prompting her opponent to make the creatures opposite her to rush towards Wei Yi, intending to force her to turn around to deal with them before striking her during her distraction.

Before the creatures took even a single step towards her, the crimson energy around Wei Yi’s palm transformed, shifting into pure darkness that inverted every colour around it, this time radiating with obvious power that even the most careless and inattentive person could observe.

As she pushed her palm forward, the disordered and chaotic energies of the Great Bone Lake suddenly became stable around the inverted energy, projecting it forward with great speed towards the antlered monster that was standing between Wei Yi and the Demonic Lord warlord. It surrounded it in an instant, its colour transforming from violet to gold as it was suddenly filled to the brim with incredible power that its creator could only ever dream of.

However, she had no chance to get excited, for she suddenly realised that this creature was suddenly out of her control.

The thread at the back was severed, completely removing any control the Demonic Lord had over her own creation, while the enormous channel of antithesis energy that was used to convert the creature provided it with all of the power that it could ever need.

It did come at the slight cost to Wei Yi, however, as she felt her vision being split in two just as when she used the Red Phantom Flood technique, although this experience was still less uncomfortable than that, simply feeling like her mind was being forced to handle a second body rather than being split into two parts without any care for her mental cohesion with a dull, dirty and jagged knife that was used without any understanding of how to do so safely and without the knowledge of the exact parts that needed to be split, resulting in the cut being done so haphazardly that no-one in existence could possibly withstand it without crying out in pain.

‘Ahem, that thought got out of hand…’

Whoever designed the Red Phantom Flood was either an absolute masochist or someone with multiple wills, she had concluded some time ago, for there was no other explanation for how such a technique could be used. Even then, she needed to lean in favour of the latter explanation, for no degree of pleasure derived from pain could dull the torment of being torn in two.

After taking a moment to order the creature under her command to turn around and attack its master, she turned around and slashed towards the other nine beasts, which she had no wish of controlling.

With the significantly greater investiture of energy into the attack, the force from her blade instantly severed the physique energies that kept the creatures together while also continuing on, slashing through the strands that connected them to the Demonic Lord cultivator before slashing through more of the Beast’s bones and then the air behind them, severing the crimson air of the prison realm all the way into the storm clouds above.

Her slash stopped there, even the extreme power of the Demon Killer being unable to pierce the thick clouds of the prison realm, but even that much force was enough to make her slash visible to everyone within it.

She turned around immediately to see – from two perspectives at once – the Demonic Lord warlord conjuring several spears made from bright physique energy, which she launched at her former subordinate monster with a speed that rivalled Wei Yi’s slash. They pierced the spectral hide of the creature and split it into several parts, the baleful physique energy permeating into the inverted creature and preventing it from reconnecting once more.

‘This woman has quite a few abilities, doesn’t she? Fortunately, I wasn’t planning on keeping that converted guardian,’ Wei Yi thought as she raised Sharen e Mo, flooding it with her spiritual will.

With a little more experience and time to polish the techniques that she derived from the basic spiritual will techniques of the right of the prison realm, she was able to shorten the time that it took to charge up Hatred Split, significantly accelerating the process of building up power and energy without compromising its effectiveness.

Vibrant crimson gathered around the weapon, thickening and condensing with every second until it transformed into an almost solid covering of translucent energy that twisted the very concept of matter around it.

Naturally, the Demonic Lord noticed this, and she ignored everything about the last attack of the converted monster to infuse her physique energy into her legs and to her back, with the latter forming a wing-like structure without much detail to the wings themselves, and then leapt away towards the largest and thickest bone spire within reach, hoping that the additional defence provided by the bone would be sufficient for her to be able to defend from the incoming attack with the additional means of provided with her own physique abilities.

As Wei Yi brought down her blade, the sword light of the Hatred Split extended until it reached past the enormous bone spire, then it seemingly ignited out of nowhere.

The energy that was already piercing killing intent and space suddenly pulsed and ruptured it, a thin rift of pure blackness from the outer reaches of space burst into the world, following behind the slashing blade and tearing a continuous tear within existence itself.

Like that, it severed the enormous bone spire and fell upon the barrier created by the Demonic Lord warlord, stopping for only a single moment before blasting it into oblivion, piercing the warlord’s flesh and crashing upon the ground in an explosion of stone dust and crimson dirt, shooting up into the sky alongside the side of the Beast’s bone spire. The cloud of dust momentarily froze in the air and then slowly fell the ground, dispersing as it did so.

The enormous tear in space stayed there for a few moments, before it instantly recovered, as if nothing had been done to it to begin with.  Just as before, this action was obviously intentional by whatever mind was currently controlling the pocket dimension of the prison realm.

For a second, Wei Yi stood in place, doing nothing but reversing her grip on the weapon, seemingly with the intention to stab it into the ground yet again in wait of the next challenge.

All of a sudden, appearing from behind her, the Demonic Lord warlord reached out with her hands enveloped in some kind of strange technique specific to her own physique, a physique energy construct that writhed and twitched like a living creature and naturally repulsed anyone who beheld it, whispering, “I’ve got you no-”

The air was forced out of her lungs by the sudden intrusion of an obsidian blade, which was plunged even deeper when Wei Yi turned around and kicked the woman to the ground, impaling her into the ground until only the hilt and guard of the blade remained above the ground.

“Listen, I know you won’t benefit from my suggestion in this life, but if you live another one, do not warn your target that you’re behind them when you intend to avoid their detection,” Wei Yi said casually, easily crushing the bones in the warlord’s arms so that she had no chance to affect her with whichever technique she was using, “Before you go, though, tell me what you were trying to do to me, and I may accelerate the process.”

“I… I merely wanted you to experience my love…”

“Not what I was asking, nor – and I am not an expert here, admittedly – the best way to acquire anyone’s love, nor to show it to them…” she commented the moment that she slid a spiritual will thread into the woman’s head and understood that the technique was one that could inhabit a person and forcefully control their actions while their mind remained conscious of everything without the ability to resist, prompting an expression of disgust to appear on her face, “How did you even figure out how to use your energy for this purpose? Oh, and don’t answer…”

She pulled the obsidian blade out of the ground, finding another crack on its surface, and cut the warlord’s head off with one powerful chop.

During that pause, she also examined her body and found that her meridians were indeed being affected by the absorption of the Immortal Mortal physique ability, and that didn’t just include one of her meridian networks, but all five of them. However, the downside was that the meridians did not instantly change, as they would if she had awakened the Immortal Mortal physique instead of the True Ascendant physique but were instead growing from continuous usage and exertion.

In order to make the best use of the new physique ability, she would need to engage in an exhausting cultivation session within a deep pool of the Beast’s blood, but for now, she had roughly five percent more room within her meridians.

Wei Yi stood up, looking towards the remaining two. One was still split into five figures, while the fifth warlord remained silent, seemingly unbothered about the situation that had just unfolded, even when half of the enormous spire that had failed to act as a shield for the Demonic Lord cultivator fell near him and covered his clothing and hair in dust.

Despite the energy she radiated, the two managed to maintain a level of calmness that their dead peers could not, and so she and them had a few moments in which they simply glared at one another.

Whatever the fifth warlord was doing, he didn’t seem especially eager to engage in conflict with her right now. Hence, inevitably, the two that remained naturally drew the other’s attention, and resulted in a stare so prolonged that it became rather uncomfortable. Had they been in another setting, without the audience composed of hatred avatars, amalgam automatons, and various physique cultivators, then it may have been easy to misconstrue for something less hostile.

Had the last warlord to die not been the one to comment constantly on love and her general attraction to Wei Yi, then this would have almost certainly prompted an intervention from her.

‘Anyway…’