V3C4: All that Remains

She found no guards on her path, suggesting that they either did not take any interests in exploring the lands of the Kong any longer, or that she had been rather fortunate during her travels. Either way, she had gotten away from the outer edges of her former home district without incident and paused in the forests to take a breath.

Before getting away from the district, Wei Yi had considered going back to it to dig up her mask and black robe that she had used in her persona as Da Gang, but that was not something that was in any way reasonable or necessary. To get into the district just for an outfit – even if the mask was capable of withstanding rather powerful hits without any obvious signs of inscriptions or arrays guarding it – was unnecessarily risky, especially when the Greats might still be in the city waiting for someone else to pounce on and imprison for looking at them wrong. On the other hand, it would simply make her look conspicuous, whereas stealing an outfit from the nearest settlement and reverse engineering the killing will form to be able to alter the appearance and colour of her hair was significantly easier and more effective.

It never occurred to her that it might be difficult to convert a phenomena of cultivation into a technique, not just due to her ability to surpass such things via techniques like Elysian Palm, but also because she had the idea, the understanding of roughly how her body could change, and the Truth of the Universe to accompany the Endless Deduction.

As she did so, she noticed two things; Yi Shi Ming reported something to her when she had begun to take in some of her planar energy into her body to reacclimatise herself to it.

‘The quantity of planar energy in the world appears to have decreased significantly. At the peak of my son’s power, it was not uncommon for even common townsfolk to reach the second realm with little effort, while common soldiers were in the fifth realm and most capable craftsmen reached the seventh realm and had begun to work on spatial items and realm,’ she shared, ‘It was for this reason that even the Kong, as they were falling apart, were able to complete their spatial realm during an invasion by a different faction.’

‘Is that how things happened? I was always wondering why and how cultivation appeared to be more advanced in the past… Would that mean that the techniques of the past haven’t truly been lost, and are simply less powerful now that there is less energy to work with?’

‘That is possible, although your technique appears to be working perfectly well.’

Her other discovery occurred when she had filled her meridians with planar energy that rapidly surged towards her the moment that she even considered attracting energy towards herself – the one hundred and eight dawn stars within her meridians that had been created long ago due to the Dawn Star Body and had mostly faded since the last time she had ever called upon them now lit up brightly.

Each one was filled to the brim with dormant, quiet energy, and as planar energy flowed towards it, they activated once again, absorbing all of it into themselves and growing more vibrant with every moment, with a thin strand of solidified cosmic light forming within each one, acting almost as a small anchor. Furthermore, as each one was present within her own meridians, it also caused the energy from it to connect with her dantian, bolstering her cultivation without even being connected to her primary planar aperture directly. From what she understood of planar energy and its usage, this was an incredible sight.

‘How is-’

She did not have the opportunity to ask any kind of question of herself or Yi Shi Ming when she found the Truth of the Universe shifting and changing, with several characters completely changing and moving around to describe a technique that integrated the dawn stars into it.

In just one moment, they transformed from additional sources of energy and flashy distractions to make her enemies believe that she was more powerful than they would otherwise assume, to an integral part of a technique that had, at least in part, descended from the greatest cultivator to have ever lived within the Planar Continents…

To get such a thing from an attempt to look cool had to be unprecedented, especially when she had been thinking about replicating realm abilities not too long prior.

‘Furthermore, to get such a development while sitting near the road on which I had first begun creating the Dawn series is beyond coincidental,’ Wei Yi thought to herself, but beside the simple feeling of oddity, there was very little that she could conclude besides the fact that it was indeed a coincidence caused by her deciding to absorb energy just as she had begun to head in the exact same direction as before.

Whether this was the will of the heavens, her own ability, or something entirely different, was not something discernible to her yet.

‘Then again, if heaven’s will truly has any connection to the Greats, I would be all too happy to get away from it. It clearly struggles with the concept of both justice and fairness, allowing all kinds of people to run rampant without any supervision at all. At that point, even if there is some kind of will, all it does is watch. We can survive without such a thing,’ she considered, completing her cultivation.

She stood up once more and continued through the forest, stumbling upon the first camp used by the Kong District expedition in far less time than the journey had taken last time, finding that the only traces of it that remained were some marks in the ground, although even those had been mostly removed by the steps of various planar beasts and the leaves that had fallen since their trek here. Although the Central Western Continent lacked any particular extreme weather conditions, whether that was to include snow or droughts or floods, the occasional rain further obscured the few traces that still remained.

If not for her knowledge of the expedition and exactly where everything they had placed was – not to mention her extreme spiritual perception, which now reached beyond a hundred metres – she would have only thought this place to simply be a convenient place to rest.

Instead, this area brought about certain memories of a group being slaughtered by warped space.

With a greater realm, superior movement techniques, and the lack of necessity to pace herself due to the observation of a number of members of the Yi family, she realised just how close together these camps were. Less than an hour after leaving one, she was already at the second, and then came to the third after another hour and a half. The third camp had become the nest for a weak planar beast in the first realm, which Wei Yi swiftly dispatched and harvested for food for one purpose.

She needed to know whether her sense of taste and smell would remain absent after leaving the Kong Prison Realm, and cooking planar beast meat for consumption was one of the most ordinary things she could do if someone was to observe her without knowledge of exactly who she was. Furthermore, she was now far enough away to avoid the attention of the Yi District guards, so the only people that would stumble upon her would be those without a great understanding of what had happened within the Yi District, since few travelled further than the district outskirts without the intention to remain out there for a while.

The expedition to the Kong District was actually one of the shorter ones, as they had met an untimely end brought about by her ability to utilise the Lock Obelisks. If it had gone on without her, as it would have likely done had she not suddenly brought herself into the eyes of Yi Taizhi, they would have had to hang around for up to a decade while failing to activate them.

After transforming her cosmic energy into flame and lighting a small campfire to provide herself with some light as the sun had fully set, she used a stick reinforced with her energy to pierce the flesh of the planar beast and hold it atop the flame.

‘I don’t have much experience with cooking anything more complex than this, not to mention lacking any ingredients that cannot be found in the prison realm, but if things do go the way that I expect them to, it wouldn’t really matter,’ she thought as the large chunk of flesh slowly cooked over the flame, ‘To begin with, I will only get anything useful out of miracle fruits and planar herbs, and both of those can be processed by me without the use of traditional cooking methods. If I ever have to make food for someone else… I think I read some books about cooking before. I could read through those in a hurry…’

Roughly half-way through the process, her extended spiritual perception observed the presence of a quiet figure slowly approaching the light in the trees, doing so silently enough to avoid attracting beasts but not sufficiently to avoid detection by experienced sentries or guards. He was dressed like a common hunter and appeared to have a cultivation in the first realm.

That was rather suspicious, to say the least. Even Wei Yi wasn’t confident about heading to the outskirts of the district until she had the necessary power and techniques, so for someone that likely lacked her abilities to go so far out with only a regular bow was incredibly odd.

For this reason, the moment that he made a mistake and stepped onto a dry branch, she snapped her head towards him and glared, putting her hand by a pocket as to make it appear as if she was reaching for a weapon. After the hunter checked something on his side, he looked up and accidentally met her eyes. He froze for a moment, realising that he had been spotted, and then straightened his back and decided to approach her more openly.

“Hello there! I am just a hunter travelling through, and I saw that you are camping here!” he said, pointing to his bow before intending to look at her tent only to find nothing of the sort.

“Yes, so it would appear,” she replied, keeping her hand where it was, “Is there a reason why you’re skulking through the forests, or did you just happen to stumble upon my location and then just happened to approach me cautiously and with your weapon at the ready?”

“I’m sure you’re aware of how dangerous these forests are. I had to be prepared just in case you turned out to be a planar beast!” the man declared with confidence, slowly inching towards her as he spoke, “But, since that isn’t the case, could I stay beside you? I won’t ask for your food, and I could even be on first watch for the night!”

“I don’t think that’s wise. I don’t know who you are, and you approached me, so it would be best if I was the first to observe. Don’t try to disagree with me – just leave if you aren’t happy with this.”

To his credit, he was not particularly stumped due to this, and instead agreed with her readily, “Yes, that is best! Allow me to find a place to rest and I shall be prepared to guard whenever you need me to. In fact, if there is a place you prefer to rest on, if you share it with me, I shall make sure that I am as far away as possible from you so that you can observe both me and your surroundings without needing to worry!”

‘Yeah, this guy is way too enthusiastic over this. He must have something planned… or he’s never spoken to a human before. Either one is possible, and neither one is really to my benefit, as his cultivation is clearly weak and his general physicality is insignificant as well,’ she concluded while pointing to the place beside her, and then to another flat portion of ground opposite the flame.

He understood this and settled down in the second position, putting down his things and lying down.

‘What is he doing? He can’t even use spiritual perception, as I would have noticed it if he was able to bypass realm in this regard, but he has concluded that a random woman roasting meat is somehow not intending to hurt him…’ Wei Yi looked at him with some concern, as his breathing slowly stabilised and he headed to sleep without any concern for the thirteen planar beasts that were within the range of her spiritual perception, ‘Either way, I need to get away from him. As an assassin or bandit, he seems very certain, whereas as a hunter, he is entirely incapable…’

However, she wasn’t about to throw away some food, even if she didn’t need it with the plentiful planar energy in the air and rapidly recovering within her dantian whenever she needed it, so she waited for it to cook fully and bit down.

To her, due to several rounds of dental reinforcement with cosmic energy, almost all foods were as soft as cotton, and this planar beast flesh was no exception. It still retained plenty of juices within it, and it easily appeared to be significantly better than anything within the prison realm, but as she chewed and swallowed the food, she tasted nothing.

She tried a few more pieces, but it was all the same. After cleansing her mouth with yang-type physique energy, she turned the meat into ash that she dropped onto the campfire.

After a moment of consideration, she stamped out the flame and released a few threads of her killing intent to scare away the planar beasts that were currently preparing to attack them. Whether this man was naïve or with ill intent, she would allow him to live a little longer. If he came after her again and continued to act suspiciously, she would not grant him this kindness for a second time. Once the beasts fled, she disappeared similarly.

Sleep was not a necessity for her, and so she used the additional time to make it to the fourth camp before sunrise.

Nothing of note was there, nor was she found by yet another suspicious individual, so she proceeded onto the next camp and then the next, taking another full day to arrive at the edge of the enormous basin within which the Kong District had once existed. There were no people in sight below her, nor could she see any camps or settlements down there, so she had a few ideas about what had happened.

After her report to the family, relayed by the guards, it was likely that the family had chosen to send out a second team to investigate what had happened, and they were likely more powerful than the second and third realm, meaning that they didn’t need to waste their time camping every few minutes. They would have been able to get to the Kong District quickly and find nothing of use, especially if that bright beam of light hadn’t yet faded back then. The most that the family would have been able to find would be the remnants of the spatial fluctuations from the collapse of the Kong Holy Grounds, and would have then been forced to conclude that there was little else here for them and would have retreated, as it would be too difficult for them to hold onto the land that was so far away from the Yi District.

Even if they were aware of the yin water and were able to harvest it, they would have found little else and wouldn’t have had a reason to come back before the situation in the Yi District stabilised from the brief attack by the Greats.

‘So, I should be mostly alone, although caution is still necessary. Ancestral Hall, here I come…’

Wei Yi leapt into the Kong District without the use of any techniques to slow her descent, nor to protect her, instead accelerating her fall as much as she could.

A second before she hit the ground, she released a burst of her physique energy and formed a foothold beneath herself, crashing into it with enough haste to shatter it despite the power of her physique. Hastily, she formed a secondary Aerial Foothold beneath the shattered pieces of energy, and then another one beneath it using yin-type energy, causing her to fall through the second and barely be stopped by the third foothold, although it also broke moments after.

She landed on the grass and jumped away from it as the broken physique energy fell upon it and instantly froze and then turned it to ash, although neither flame nor frost spread any further than that small spot.

After prompting the remnants of grass to grow with the abundant lifeforce still stored within her, she rushed in the rough direction of the Ancestral Hall and Library, passing by the location of two of the Lock Obelisks and finding that both were still buried deep in the ground, with almost no traces of them being present even though she knew exactly where they had been.

‘Yi Shi Ming, could you tell me whether Kong Shi Meng had been involved in the construction of the Kong Holy Grounds, somehow? These pillars reacted to the energy used in his techniques, and there was also a place within the District that appeared to be otherworldly in appearance, suggesting that he had been there as well,’ Wei Yi said to the spatial spirit as she passed the area that had contained the yin water, which had been obliterated by Yi Henghua during her rampage, ‘Something about that always seemed strange, and now that you’ve told me that both the Gilded Library and the Kong Mental Arts were made by him, I am curious whether more of the Kong foundations were made by him.’

‘I am afraid that is outside of my knowledge. It is possible, but he did not inform me if that was the case,’ she answered.

‘Oh, is that so… Fuck…’ she sighed, finally stopping at a place that she now recognised from two distinct times and memories, one where this place was at its prime, with carefully carved walls and ground and perfectly kept foliage, and the second, where everything had fallen apart and turned exactly as natural as it had been intended to be from the first place. Any traces of the path were consumed by grass, tree roots and bushes devoured the walls, and the carefully trimmed tree branches had grown out once more to obscure the sky.

Now, this place had just gotten even worse.

Fortunately, the wall remained, and that suggested that the Ancestral Library was still intact. Wei Yi approached it and searched for the correct place to open the hidden door within the mountainside. Only a few moments into her search, she located an oddly smooth side of the wall, where spiritual perception could not detect a single thing within it while the stone around it could be felt.

She brought up the document containing the memory of Yi Shi Meng opening the passageway and mimicked her movements after she had converted the cosmic energy into pure, stable planar energy, placing her hand on the wall and reciting every word spoke by the woman.

The spatial spirit had planned to say something to her, presumably to explain how to use this door, but quietened down when she confirmed that this was yet another thing that Wei Yi had been able to learn from her memories. Although she appeared to be fine with this, Wei Yi did feel a little awkward after borrowing so much from her knowledge without the spatial spirit’s awareness, especially because she understood how much she didn’t want her own memories to be viewed by anybody else. For this exact reason, she didn’t allow Yi Shi Ming into the Ascendant’s Library, despite how much she would likely be able to assist her with all of the knowledge stored within.

It was slightly hypocritical – although that was a rather light way to put it – but she wasn’t going to change her mind just because of that, even if she wasn’t exactly pleased about the situation.

A mosaic of words appeared on the wall as she finished her incantations, with most of them appearing mostly as they had in Yi Shi Ming’s memories while only a few had been damaged by the passage of time or incidental strikes that had hit them during some unrelated conflict, and the wall slowly descended into the ground. It had clearly been unmoved for a long time, and thus it moved roughly and incredibly unpleasantly.

Behind it, dilapidated furniture and a rotting décor greeted her, with any traces of opulence or value having been claimed by time long, long ago. Even that which still remained appeared weak enough to shudder from the mere contact with her spiritual perception, suggesting that it would crumble into dust the moment that she attempted to touch it herself.

A large number of roots grew through the ceiling and into the ground, with moss and random foliage of a non-planar origin covering the walls, destroying what few paintings and wall-bound decorations had been present within Yi Shi Ming’s recollection of this Ancestral Hall.

Even the occasional statue of said ancestors was either in pieces or completely missing.

‘How many years was it since the Kong fell, again?’ Wei Yi asked as she carefully passed through the roots and sought out the library.

‘I believe that the last holding of the Kong Clan, then renamed as the Kong family and the Kong District without the same support that most other districts provided, had fallen roughly fifty-seven years after the founding of Yi City, even if the family itself continued, so that would be one million, two hundred and one thousand, four hundred and sixty-six years ago.’

‘Right… This place has held up well, hasn’t it?’ she has slightly changed her assessment of the area, as the fact that there was still something standing suggested that the Ancestral Hall had been extremely resilient for a long time, then decided to let Yi Shi Ming assist her somewhat, ‘Your memories were somewhat light on the navigation, so if you could guide me to where I need to go, I would appreciate it greatly.’

‘Certainly. Now, turn right here, and…’

‘I had hoped that there would be more than fifty books remaining. So much ancient knowledge, lost forever…’ Wei Yi sighed, taking in the sight of countless ruined shelves and shreds of paper that lay on the ground, mixing with dust to the point of being no different from it.

Some still contained writing, and some could potentially be pieced together if she scanned them with spiritual perception and figured out how they connected together, but it was almost certain that much of the text had been damaged beyond recovery even for the impressive might of her Ascendant’s Library.

Fortunately, a few books yet remained, and so she scanned them into her mental domain quickly before doing the same with every single small piece and scrap of paper in the area, storing them in a small flat layer within one portion of her library. Those that had any quantity of ink upon them were stored in one place, while those without were placed a small distance away, as they were still key to the connection of the pages. Between each character, there would be several scraps of empty paper that she would still need to include.

Before getting to that, however, she looked through the books that she did have. Two of them happened to be the Light of Divinity and the Touch of God, which she had already known and had improved on her own, so that proved to be insignificant, whereas the rest were common techniques that did not significantly alter her combat ability. She was, however, able to add them to the Ascendant’s Dao quickly, enhancing its strength by a little bit.

After a few attempts to personally handle the process of reconstruction the pages within a reasonable time, she mentally lifted them into the air and used Endless Calculation to begin the work for her.

Yi Shi Meng, after she had looked onto the library through Wei Yi’s eyes, said, ‘I hath, in my possession, a few of the tomes that were stored here, but I coulds’t never store quite as many as thee. It was, at some point, an assassination technique, so it could benefit thee in battle.’

‘An assassination technique… That reminds me of something, actually,’ she did not ask her about that skill immediately and instead reached into her pocket to remove the token used by Yi Fenwu to command Yi Bai during her previous visit to the Kong District, ‘Yi Shi Ming, have you ever seen anything of the sort?’

When the spatial spirit shook her head, as she had expected her to do, she wasn’t particularly surprised and instead raised her hand to her chest and opened a connection to the House of Gold before tossing the token into it. As it had been emptied out earlier, there was enough space within that finite cubic metre of space for the token to fit, and for the otherworldly artefact to provide her with the information that she had been seeking ever since obtaining that object.

According to the text that appeared beside the black token, it was a command token of the Weavers of the Dark, and beside carrying the authority of someone or something called a Binder of the Dark, it also contained the cultivation technique for them.

‘Really? There seem to be far more things in this world that evade my spiritual perception than I had initially thought,’ Wei Yi thought, removing the token from her spatial storage and looking at it more closely, ‘Indeed, if not for the description, there would have been no chance of me ever spotting anything unusual about this, and if I hadn’t known of its function, then I might not have even been able to figure out that it had the power to command an entire assassin organisation… If I keep getting lucky, I might get control over several organisations by the end of my journey, and at that point I could be known as the Assassin Queen… wait, what?’

She realised that her thoughts had wondered, even if that didn’t cost her much time due to the speed of her mind, and immersed her spiritual perception into the one spot that was susceptible to it.

Once she guided it through a miniature maze that threatened to tear apart her spiritual perception the moment that she turned in the wrong direction, she felt a stream of knowledge flow towards her mental domain. So that it did not inflict any kind of harm upon her, she captured it inside of a book and placed it into one of the wings of the library before choosing to take a closer look.

It turned out that the technique was also called Binder of the Dark, and that through a very specific cultivation of planar energy, it would allow the user to release a certain kind of aura that would grant complete control over anyone using the Weaver of the Dark technique, with almost every minor function of their body being available to modification without any say from the assassins themselves. This same aura was released by the command token, presumably to permit those of a lower cultivation realm to maintain the same authority before they were able to sufficiently externalise their energy, and was the reason that Yi Bai could be made to surpass all of her limits without any care for her well-being or survival.

What was most interesting for her was that the cultivation technique itself would only condense roughly eleven percent of impurities, which was extremely impressive considering that common techniques would typically produce energy with a third of it being impurities, and even some of the more impressive techniques in her possession resulted in twenty percent of impurities. All of those impurities were removed by the principle of cosmic energy, but it was still incredibly impressive.

Naturally, it was added into her cosmic energy, and she was able to return to the topic that reminded her to make this discovery.

‘So, what kind of technique do you have?’

‘It is from an ancient organisation known as the Weavers of the Dark, permitting thee to cloak thine form in shadow and to use it as an offensive method if that is necessary for thee,’ Yi Shi Ming explained, ‘And… art thou alright?’

‘You know, all of these coincidences are getting a little too much for me…’