V2C63: The Secret of the Shards

The casualties were greater than Wei Yi would have hoped, but lesser than half of the city. One of the central spires, coincidentally belonging to the Nobility faction, had been felled, and with it, seven hundred and forty-six people died, whether from the tower itself or from the spectres that had disappeared alongside the otherworldly azure light.

Some of the losses were significant, or were received with mourning, but this brought a certain result that one of the propagators of the conflict was incredibly happy with.

While the spiritual will cultivators struggled to withstand the spectres, as their wills could not compare to the otherworldly power that drove their foes, killing intent cultivators brought along by Wei Yi enjoyed the fact that their energy was the complete antithesis of spiritual will and were able to shred through apparitions as easily as a sharpened sword might pass through paper. When then they went to protect the spiritual will cultivators and showed no ill will towards them, even the most fervent opponents of the so-called savages were forced to put up with them, as in the case of Shi An Qi, while others quickly embraced their presence and did everything they could to assist them.

As the word that they were being led by Wei Yi spread out throughout Sanctuary, it mixed with the description of the battle between her and Chang Fang He, leading everyone to view her as an impossibly powerful force at the very least, and a great hero at most.

One thing was clear, however. The Nobility faction could not continue as it had been, as it had been founded on lies or misinterpretations by a single person that were then propagated via trauma and gullibility. Even if many had joined as they had agreed to the premise of the faction, they realised that they could hardly continue to emulate the thoughts of someone who had nearly killed all of them just a short time ago.

Quite quickly, the remaining leaders of the faction decided that it would be best to temporarily retire the factions of Sanctuary, as they had led to far more divisions and issues than good. The older form of rule was initially to be brought back, but they then remembered their saviour and hero, and the promise that she had made after she had some time to recover from the battle – that she could bring them out of the prison realm, to the Planar Continents, and show them not just the imitations of the sun and moon, but the real thing, without the obstructions of the Greats and the limits of the current, rotten and decayed Yi City. She could give them Yi City reborn, forged anew on the anvil of the Greats, where the initial glory brought by the Master of Yi City could be witnessed once more in far more magnificence than ever before.

A bold claim, of course. Bold, yet oddly believable, especially after she singlehandedly replaced the spiritual will around Sanctuary with a bubble of her own energy, doing it with as little difficulty as the prison realm itself seemed to.

It did take her some concentration and straining of the planar anchor, but she wasn’t intending to reveal that to them, not before they had all joined her side.

Not too long after everyone had the opportunity to consider this properly, and after some people from the Sanctums came to ask about the recent disturbances in almost everything near Sanctuary, it was decided that the people of the Virtuous Side – forcibly renamed the Silver Side, after Wei Yi pointed out that their most virtuous members had nearly initiated a genocide – would follow their saviour into the beyond and follow her instructions, at least until she did something similar to Chang Fang He and proved herself to be unsuitable.

With their approval, it was incredibly easy for her to get into the Knowledge Cultivation Room and observe all of its inner workings and functions, leading to her creating plans for integrating it into her own mental domain and her cultivation methods before considering the most optimal technique to advance through it.

Improving several would have been best, but apparently, only a single technique could be focused on with any visit, and it could only be used once every few years at the great cost of countless spiritual will motes that were used to assist in the derivation of techniques, as well as stress on the body and mind of the cultivator. Although Wei Yi had hoped to be able to ignore such limitations due to her cultivation, her exploration of the Knowledge Cultivation Room confirmed that the stress of overly rapid improvement without the body’s direct involvement was not one that she had been prepared to handle.

Planar techniques were out of the question, as they were not within the scope of the arrays and inscriptions used within the room, nor could they be improved through the same processes.

Physique methods fell into a similar category due to their reliance on the physical body and an energy that appeared to be nigh non-existent within the Silver Side. Only one or two physique cultivators existed, while the rest of those that owned physiques, like Shi An Qi and her Eclipsed Sun physique, simply practised spiritual will techniques of a particular kind that best suited their natural strengths and could supplement their weaknesses.

Common spiritual will techniques, like the ones that she was able to ‘borrow’ from the library before much of it was damaged – she naturally restored every book that she could and returned it to them, although she did so without allowing them to question why she knew so much about their techniques despite only appearing within the Silver Side recently – were also not suitable, as they were simply too simple and useless in the larger picture. All of the cultivation methods, going from First Light, Second Light and all the way to Fiftieth Light, were variations on the same simple principle, one that would not greatly benefit her in the battle against the Greats in the future.

The more powerful skills, like Demonic Ire, Hatred Split and the like, were a poor choice for two reasons: firstly, she had already cultivated them to the Full Success Realm due to their power, and going beyond would require more than just brute force, and secondly, they were additions to her power, not the direct sources to it. If her cultivation was to be imagined as a foundation, as per the standard similes and comparisons made by many cultivators, then these techniques were ornaments placed on the bricks laid atop it.

Thus, she only had a single option left – the Augur’s Library.

It was, technically, still a technique with roots in spiritual will cultivation, as it had originally been a mental technique designed by Kong Shi Meng. Furthermore, due to the creator’s identity, it likely contained a number of secrets beneath the surface, secrets that she could not wait to uncover and put to use.

Since she had already expanded its principles to cover the entirety of her mental domain, the improvement of the Library would directly strengthen her mental energies, deductive capabilities, general mental processes, memory and whatever else she could think of, thus leading to the strengthening of her body and the improvement of other techniques through the advantages that it would offer her. Wei Yi also had a slight feeling that she was approaching some kind of qualitative change within the technique, although she did not understand what that would bring, exactly what it would entail, nor whether this feeling was accurate in any way.

‘Still, even if it is not, I have no reason not to improve the Augur’s Library. At the very worst, I gain nothing in particular, and in the best situation, I reach beyond any level the prison realm could even imagine without even cultivating to the fifth realms,’ she thought, stepping into the room confidently.

Climbing to the top of a circular set of stairs, she sat down upon one of the primary arrays in the structure and shut her eyes, focusing all attention on the mental domain and the technique that had led to its creation. She concentrated the mental domain on her head, so that the arrays of the Knowledge Concentration Room could do their work most efficiently, blocking the rest of her body with her energies so that it would not waste its time there, where it would do nothing.

This wasn’t a requirement of the process, but something that she had decided to do on her own after comprehending the inner workings of the room. It would raise the efficiency of the cultivation process by several percent by only allowing the arrays to target a single, relevant part of the body, whereas most of the people that entered the array would experience the arrays affecting every part of them, causing some of its power to be lost while it passed through their bodies towards the correct places within them.

Once she was sure that everything was the way that she wanted it to be, she nodded quietly, signalling to those in control of the room to activate it.

For a few moments, there was little movement or action from the inscriptions and arrays, but then the spiritual will motes that had been placed inside of them previously finally dissolved and spread out across the entire room, changing and converting into a form of power that was simultaneously similar and different from its initial form, containing no will while still enhancing it.

It flowed to her, slid over the spiritual will and killing intent that surrounded everything beneath her neck, and surged into her head, spilling over into the mental domain where Wei Yi had pre-emptively lowered the storm walls as to allow this energy to come and go as it needs to.

Like water, it soaked into the structure of the library, permeating it entirely, coursing through every single part of the structure as if they were all far, far apart from one another, with plenty of space for it to flow. There, with Wei Yi’s assistance, it attempted to understand the complexities of the Augur’s Library, and to derive a continuation or progression for it. As it joined with the countless memories regarding the technique within, it linked itself to the present, the dark golden and crimson library, and with the past, of soft golden highlights.

Nothing could look into the actual future, only make accurate predictions, and this Knowledge Cultivation Room was no exception, but as it slowly did its work, Wei Yi felt her mind clear and deepen.

Certain facts and traits of her cultivation that had previously been unnoticed by some confusing miracle of nature had finally surfaces, and the stagnant shape of the Augur’s Library slowly came undone. Every piece of wood, every nugget of gold, every part of the dark columns that held it up parted, although not physically – as physical as anything can be within the mental realm.

At first, the only thing that could be improved was the simple shape of these individual parts, but as that progressed, a hidden power within the library slowly revealed itself. It contained great, untapped potential, holding the key to so many complex matters, potentially even changing the very ideas of spiritual will and killing intent as they were understood within the prison realm, but that remained out of her reach, for now. She needed to go further to uncover this mystery, to learn what she and her mind were truly capable of, and in order to achieve it, she might even need to break everything she had built up just to allow it to be rebuilt, greater than ever.

However, the world and the heavens, if the latter even knew about the prison realm or what was done within, seemed to have plans other than allowing her to handle this on her own, in her own time, as she liked doing most things.

Instead, the very structure of the Augur’s Library suddenly shook, with every shelf and wall quaking in their place before the force of the Knowledge Cultivation Room’s energy suddenly flared up, growing in power by a dozen times as the entire mental domain shook with the library, as if it had somehow experienced an earthquake despite the lack of any such forces within the structure of her mental world, as well as the prison realm, upon which it was modelled on.

‘What part of the arrays is doing this?’ Wei Yi questioned, consulting the mental books that were, thankfully, unmoved by the disruption, when she realised that while this phenomenon was caused by the influence of the room’s energy, the origin of the shaking and the damage to the library was the technique itself.

It was trying to reach some kind of greater level, exactly as she had hoped, but it could not sustain the changes that would need to take place.

‘I have a planar anchor, which puts me in a far better position than any of the people in the prison realm, but it seems that whatever it is that I’m trying to unlock is out of my reach. Somehow, I need to stabilise my power further, or else sacrifice all of this energy and rush out of the room, wasting this excellent opportunity!’ she understood quickly, glancing into the House of Gold and then into her pockets, ‘Out of everything I have, very little is actually beneficial to the empowerment or support of the planar anchor, as unfortunate as that is- wait, if the planar anchor is at fault, then-’

She shoved her hand into one of the internal pockets on the Crimson Robe of the Third Arrival and removed a handful of shards that looked rather ordinary upon first glance, but when many of them were arranged together, they almost resembled a complete planar anchor. The only exception was that they seemed to come from different anchors, meaning that they could not be put back together to even attempt the resuscitation of the anchor itself.

Fortunately, nothing should be able to prevent her from using the raw property of the shards themselves.

Wei Yi stretched out her combined physical and mental energies and surrounded the anchor shards, before she released a small quantity of her planar energy from the depths of her dantian to consume every single one of the shards and make them sufficiently malleable and fluid for her to be able to absorb them into her own body.

After using her own dantian shards twice to create an array and inscriptions within herself, she wasn’t too concerned with allowing substances and pieces of greater things to end up somewhere where they were not supposed to be, but that had not prepared her for the discomfort that this caused.

‘Ah, fucking… shit… This is almost certainly a false and completely disingenuous comparison – I seem to be one of the only few who dislikes the idea, after all – but I imagine this is what it must feel to have a man inside of you…’ she thought, and the moment that the pain faded, she felt the need to amend that statement, ‘No, that’s nonsense. With how many had gone to the brothel for their first time, I can tell that the only thing causing me to think this way is my personal bias… I suppose that I am destined to be on top…’

Once these shards entered her body and could be protected without the usage of her planar energy, she allowed the latter to return to her dantian and surround the planar anchor, bringing the shards with them. While this occurred, she also calculated the best positioning for every single shard to achieve the greatest effect, completing the first few estimates as the first few shards arrived.

‘In total, I have forty-seven shards, so I ought to put them to use as well as I can. Even a single misplaced shard will fuck my chances of success…’

There was only a single shard that she could be absolutely certain about the positioning for, so while she kept the other shards moving as to ensure that they didn’t settle in somewhere that they were not meant to – her planar anchor could only be moved while outside of her body, so she was mostly sure that the shards would also become immovable the moment that they settled – Wei Yi pushed this one into a place to the left and above the planar anchor, where she then froze it in place while the latter hummed with a hidden might.

A second after the shard had stopped moving, it suddenly seemed to firmly entrench itself within its new position, creating a permanent place for itself in that location. However, as if to contradict that very notion immediately, it began to orbit around the anchor, sticking to the same height and distance.

‘Well, thank you for throwing all of my calculations out of the window with that stunt. I guess the use of Endless Calculation is unavoidable, then,’ Wei Yi thought as she looked into the library, the roof of which had shattered into many pieces and began floating off into the sky of the mental domain during the process, and conjured a great number of books, tomes and scrolls to hold her various deductions, flooding them all with spiritual will to accelerate the process.

As the next set of shards arrived at her abdomen, Endless Calculation had yielded her the answers she had desired, prompting her to arrange all of the available shards in similar, but not overlapping positions around the anchor.

While they took the time to slot into place, she also allowed the next set of shards to settle into their rightful places, with their arrangement slowly protecting her anchor and granting it more stability.

‘Now, the next- ugh! What now?’ her mind was suddenly assaulted by waves of knowledge, not unlike the ones stored within jade slips, except this information was unfiltered, unclean and clearly distorted, putting far more strain onto her than the jade slips from Great Dark had back when she had used them without the assistance of the Gilded Library. Nevertheless, the quantity of knowledge was lesser, and so she was able to put together what little was legible within a single document in the Augur’s Library, ‘This is from the shards… It seems that they have somehow stored a small quantity of information, and my assimilation of them into my cultivation revealed it to me… Let’s see…’

From this, she learnt a few things of relevance. First of all, just as she had suspected, these shards were formed with a single cultivation technique, hence their extreme similarity to one another. Furthermore, the cultivators that had practised them also had to be alike, as the general power and consistency within each shard were similar enough to have come from brothers and sisters.

What was strange was that the few surviving memories seemed to originate from the same source, as brief and scattered as the memories themselves were. One displayed someone’s entry into the prison realm, another showed their realisation of the prison realm’s effects on planar energy, then their desperate attempts to correct it, and, finally, some kind of explosion or outburst near the end of their life.

While that would explain why these shards were all over the place, having somehow crossed the storm walls in the case of the first shard that she had found, it completely went against anything understood about the planar anchors.

One of the first rules about these wonders of cultivation was that any cultivator could only have a single anchor at a time. If they ever wanted a new one, they would need to destroy their current anchor and condense a new one, breaking through into the third realm anew, and even the wondrous cosmic energy could only circumvent this by having more sides than typical planar anchors.

‘These memories certainly come from different shards… Could they have simply encountered very similar situations?’ she guessed, as she was not sure which option was more believable or likely, ‘Either way, I might eventually be able to get something out of the shards regarding the cultivation technique used to condense them, but for now, I ought to focus on putting these in the right place and allowing them to connect to my own anchor. Would be nice if the mysterious characters could do something about them, but they seem incapable of assisting with much beyond raw planar energy cultivation and the removal of the azure stones that escape from otherworldly demons.’

The forty-seventh shard went into place without any difficulty, at which point she was finally able to allow them to resonate together in their orbits. That action finally shattered their ordinary appearances, allowing the violet shade of planar energy to emerge from within and synchronise with her anchor, developing five unique sections which contained the five primary elements of nature, with their borders displaying the cultivation techniques within her arsenal that combined two of the elements together.

As they lit up, they momentarily pressed down upon her anchor, causing it to grow denser and tighter by a significant degree as the full power of the five-sided planar anchor was unleashed upon the Augur’s Library, forcefully suppressing the movement of the upper floors in their attempts to shatter and join the roof in floating away.

The greater stability extended to the roof as well, but after it was brought lower by a certain amount, it stopped, with the pieces of the roof remaining broken apart.

‘Now, it is not the fault of the anchor, but of the technique and the mental energies at my disposal – they are not enough for whatever my library is attempting to become,’ she understood after her own attempt to shift the broken parts of the Augur’s Library failed, ‘Until then, it appears that the derivation process of the Knowledge Cultivation Room will remain half-complete, with the remaining mental power simply waiting for an opportunity to advance to whatever path it has chosen. Then, and only then, will I understand exactly what I will unleash upon the world.’

Wei Yi assumed that this would require more killing intent, thus prompting a return to the Crimson Side, but a closer look at the separated pieces showed both spiritual will and killing intent flowing within the gaps between them.

This was odd, considering how the Augur’s Library was a purely killing intent-based technique, but she trusted her own mind, even when it was combined with some other force. If spiritual will had somehow entered the mix, then even if it was somewhat counter-intuitive to mix absolute hatred and calm thought together, she would do exactly that, for her intuition and subconscious had proven to be a mostly reliable source of insight and information.

She was not sure about any good sources of both spiritual will and killing intent at the moment, and would need to investigate more before attempting anything drastic, but for now, she could do nothing else but get up and leave the Knowledge Cultivation Room, assuring those that were controlling it that everything went well and telling them that she would be keen to attempt to improve it one day.

After that, she headed back to the small residence within Sanctuary where the other known otherworldly demon resided.

Within, she found Fu Zan sitting in silence, staring at his hands while holding a needle in one hand and a large ball of thread in the other. Nothing made it immediately clear how long he had been there, but only a few moments after she entered, she saw him bring the two items together, frowning as they transformed into a simple shirt within a literal blink of an eye. Evidently, this was not what he had wanted, as he then tossed it to the ground and sighed in disappointment.

“Are you trying to observe the way in which your otherworldly power works?”

“Ah! You scared me!” he jumped when he heard her voice, nearly managing to stab himself with the needle, “You should knock next time!”

“I did, seven times. Furthermore, the door was open, meaning that I could see you sitting around, and you should have also noticed me if you had paid even a little bit of attention to your surroundings. I wasn’t even trying to hide my presence this time, either,” she replied, her killing intent and spiritual will being in a somewhat peculiar state after the library had been partially torn asunder and thus it forced her to temporarily reveal significantly more of her power than usual, “Anyway, I have given you plenty of time to consider my previous proposal. What of it?”

He nodded as his head lowered, “I will go with you. You know the most about us, and you are clearly powerful enough to deal with me if I do succumb to some kind of mental influence. Staying here would just be… irresponsible.”

“Unfortunately for you, it would be. Now, I shall be going, so you ought to go along with me. However, don’t get your hopes up, as we’re not going to be seeing the outside of the prison realm, nor the Planar Continents, if the two do not somehow overlap, today, nor tomorrow or even within the week unless a miracle occurs,” Wei Yi explained, “I need to stabilise my cultivation to have even the slightest chance of breaking out of here, and will then need to perform a great number of experiments to find the best option for the escape.”

“Oh, so you’re going to create a miniature version of the storm walls and see what will affect them?” Fu Zan became strangely excited, his eyes outright gleaming in a manner opposite to his earlier stance.

“N-No, I had no intentions of doing that. The only reason the enormous storm walls are that powerful is due to their incredible size, quantity of killing intent and spiritual will within them, and the array that is currently supporting them…” she paused when she said this and glanced out of the window, staring at the soft while of the Silver Side storm walls for a few seconds in silence, “Large quantity of energy, and I happen to need some way of handling them…”

“Are you alright?”

“Nope, not really. However, I am fine for now, so pack up your things. Before I do find a way of freeing us, you should make armour and clothing for the entirety of the army, and even with your ability, that will take some time. We can discuss the general designs and whatever else later,” Wei Yi stated, picking up his newly created shirt, “I’m sure that you’re capable of manipulating more than cloth, given how incredible every single otherworldly ability has been so far, so it is absolutely vital that we experiment until we discover everything that you’re able to do. Furthermore, it will allow me to record exactly what occurs when you use your ability, and perhaps even replicate it, or find a way to separate the ability itself from the otherworldly power that fuels it. Is everything clear?”

“Actually, can I ask something? Last time you came in here, you… eh… well…” he struggled for so long that she nearly had to step in before he finally managed to say, “Are you a lesbian?”

He said that sentence in Enian, forcing Wei Yi to confirm her memory of it, “Does the last word that you said describe a woman that is sexually interested in other women?”

“Yeah…”

“Sure, that’s right. Why?”

“Oh…” Fu Zan appeared to first be disappointed, then slightly relieved, “Is that common and accepted in this world?”

“I can’t cite any statistics for how common it is, but most don’t have any fundamental objections to the concept itself, just the problems that it may cause for succession, inheritance and the like. I can explain it on the way, so start packing up already.”

She couldn’t quite grasp the reason behind his hesitation even when she peered into his mind as he was collecting his things, so she dropped that particular matter. Either way, it was of no concern to her.

It was probably some aspect of Orbis culture she hadn't grasped from the language alone.