V3C16: The Yin and Yang of the Vibrant Phoenix

The talent of these individuals was truly poor, in every single way imaginable. Their speed of comprehension would be insufficient for most sects and organisations to accept them, their general physical states were only slightly better than those of common villagers and farmers, and their dantians were either impure or common, meaning that their rate of energy absorption was also slow enough to prevent them from ever stepping into the third realm without outside assistance. Overall, they were effectively the worst students that one could ever have if they wished them to walk their own path and comprehend it in a way that their master never could.

It was fortunate that this was not what she desired, nor what she expected from them. Perhaps one day, they would be able to advance the things that she passed down to them, but for now, she required those that would have no choice but to rely on her and follow her for many years.

After figuring out their elemental affinities and general strengths, like whether they were better at using their legs or arms for combat, she imparted a few basic methods and techniques to them based on the absolutely immense quantity of techniques she had within her head. In comparison to what they had used to reach their present level, these techniques were roughly a dozen times more effective and a dozen times more efficient, equating to more than a hundred times more planar energy being absorbed in just a few moments.

Besides leading to a direct breakthrough for one of the artistic men from the fifth stage to the sixth, all of them experienced an immediate improvement to their overall strength, albeit not one that would allow them to defeat someone with Min Lian’s general ability through raw force, especially not if she actually put her killing intent to use.

Despite that, when they finally witnessed what that period of training brought them, they were extremely eager to learn more, only to be told that they would have to wait a little longer.

Gaining great power was all well and good, but it was difficult to adapt to great changes in a short period of time. She had gone through that experience many times, especially after she had finally left the prison realm and had to come to terms with the fact that the days were real and did not pass exactly as her internal clock had expected, so she would naturally simplify things for others so that they would not need to go through quite the same thing.

After leaving them with some other instructions, which would be enough for them to occupy themselves for at least a few weeks so long as they did their work properly. She promised to return after they were ready to grant them the opportunity to do greater things, while also bidding them not to attack their neighbours for petty gains as they would be able to do far greater things very soon.

To ensure that they heeded her words and didn’t just return to their previous petty nonsense – not to mention trying to go after some of their enemies in greater realms just because they thought that they received the blessing of someone akin to the old man of legends that would grant fortunate youngsters the abilities they required to combat the gods and possibly even the heavens themselves, as that would end incredibly poorly and would bring more attention to her than she would have preferred – Min Lian was tasked with observing these bandits every now and then to ensure that they remained safe and to intervene if they ever did the wrong thing.

While that was in motion, she returned to the Chu Alchemical Store and was informed that the Refiner’s Duel may occur next week, meaning that she could only think of two things to do.

The first was to acquire a number of pill recipes to learn and study as many of them as possible in order to be prepared for the upcoming duel, regardless of the pill she would be tasked with creating. The more that she was able to understand and study, the more complex kinds of recipes that she could comprehend and decipher, the more certain her victory would be, and the less effort she would need to invest into the duel.

Strictly speaking, the other was not entirely separate, but it would require a different kind of effort and a separate investment of time, which could coincide to progress the first goal but would only do so in the case of a coincidence.

That was to awaken her physiques, which she had delayed due to currently lacking the certainty of succeeding in a fashion that would benefit her the most in the future. If she accidentally prevented her own advancement through a mistake in the awakening process, she would have nobody to blame but herself, and would require the same kind of miracle that those youths experienced to regain her current potential in combat against the Greats. After all, with each engagement that does not end in the death of all the Great Family members present, they will learn more about her, her strengths and weaknesses, her abilities and her identity, with her former name likely not being entirely out of their reach.

All that they would need to connect her to the weak servant Yi Wei would be the fact that she had suddenly risen from the first realm and first stage to the second realm within less than a year, without receiving many official resources and without any explanation of where or how she broke through, nor why every single person witnessed her using a different form of planar energy.

With that much obvious information, they would be forced to consider whether she may have somehow escaped the prison realm, and whether it is still entirely within their control, at which point they may be able to defeat or otherwise sidestep Yi Shi Ming and either regain control over the prison realm, or destroy it and remove every single item that she had stored there and all of her forces from the equation in just one small action.

Currently, the only thing that prevented that was her potential, and the peaks that she had not yet reached. Greater variations of physiques, advancements in cultivation, the purification of the dantian and many others steps could be taken to greatly increase her power, and there was still much information for her to learn and understand, boosting her ability to make use of that power in an efficient and intelligent manner. In a way, her current state could be viewed as a field of saplings, each one of which could grow to be an eternal oak or wither and die with the wrong kind of care and attention. Every single sapling that was lost would significantly limit her overall capability, and she could not permit this to happen unless she decided to outright abandon her current plans and just give up on some farm.

Luckily, there was a physique within her collection that she had relatively high hopes of awakening using only her physique energy and the Physique Awakening pills, which was the Vibrant Phoenix physique.

She had obtained it some time ago from one of the invaders of Automaton Point, but she had been unable to complete it with the physique energy available to her at the time, receiving only the Pyromaniac’s Coat in the end. It was a useful thing to begin with as it meant that she would essentially obtain immunity to typical flames and fire-type energy, being able to recover through it, hopefully rendering the attacks of any fire-based Great Families null or significantly weakening them at the very least. Furthermore, it granted her the ability to partially transform into a phoenix, although all that truly meant was that some small part of her would light aflame and would boost all of her forms of energy by a certain extent, which was far more beneficial in her eyes that physically transforming.

How this would interact with her yin-type energy, or what this transformation would look like was not something that she could guess at with any degree of certainty, so, for now, she could only seek it out.

‘It would also be interesting to collect the Prime Dragon physique at some point in the future, and find some of the abilities that I had missed out on in the Kong Prison Realm, like the Dreadful Possession, Devil General or Spirit Mirage, as the latter especially would allow me to harmlessly split my form and hopefully decipher a method of using the Red Phantom Flood without risking complete mental collapse each time.’

Naturally, this was only something that she hoped for, and would likely not obtain due to how rare physiques were in the outside world, meaning that there would not be anyone who had entered the path of physique cultivation by accident due to the absolute abundance of planar energy to work with instead, but she had been surprised by many things before, and it made sense that there could be many surprises in the future. There were still some things that she had seen or learnt that she had not been able to investigate before the attack of the Greats, like the many illusions in the third Lock Obelisk, so it wasn’t entirely unrealistic that something of interest could be found there.

Amongst those locations, one returned to the forefront of her mind – the scene of the pitch-black cave, where a crying woman was chained to the walls, horns on her head and enormous breasts on her chest – and not due to the breasts…

‘Fine, they were quite impressive to behold, even if I had not quite understood myself at that point,’ she admitted to herself, glancing down at her own unimpressive chest without much regret for her decision to prevent their growth quite some time ago, as she had seen Min Lian fight and knew that she would be better off with a slightly smaller bosom, although it would also be true that Wei Yi would not have been harmed greatly by going one cup size higher back then.

What she recalled more was the woman’s absolute despair, and the extreme realism of the seeming illusion. If it was real, or based on some kind of past scene that was no longer present, then it was possible for it to contain remnants of whatever physique allowed the woman to look the way that she did. The possibility of it being some fever dream of the otherworldly demons was present, and one that became more and more likely with every day that she was able to browse through the designs of Fu Zan and ask Yi Shi Ming about small glimpses of Kong Shi Meng’s own reality.

‘I’m getting a little off track again, aren’t I? The key point now is to check whether I can awaken the Vibrant Phoenix physique, and if I can, whether the same can be applied to other physiques without any losses,’ she returned to her original thoughts as she left the district once more and found a quiet place for herself to hide, where she then created a dozen arrays out of spiritual will to protect herself, ‘The best place to test this is somewhere that I cannot possible be observed no matter what happens.’

And what better place was there than the Kong Prison Realm, where all power belonged to her?

With all of that protection in place, she was able to disappear into that once-crimson realm and appeared beside the towering illusory library, which was shielded by a barrier that only she could cross due to her own connection to the Kong Prison Realm.

It was partially illusory and partially real, neither solid nor fluid, and if she did walk through the barrier, she would be incapable of touching it nor interacting with it properly, although she could step into the room where Bai Hao was and talk with him if she so desired. However, it was not something that she needed or wanted to do, so she instead passed the Ascendant’s Library and headed towards the whiter side of the realm, where there were large swathes of empty lands that nobody would be hurt in if she exploded once or twice.

Hopefully, such a thing would not occur to her, but it was difficult to guess and estimate exactly what would occur during the awakening of a physique that wasn’t the one active one within her.

If the fact that certain physiques had a very impressive awakening process, sending out bursts of flames and energy as the body changed to fit the physique, was also taken into account, then there was a chance of her temporarily damaging the space of the prison realm if she accidentally awakened more than one physique of the same type at once.

Wei Yi would prefer not to obliterate the surface of the entire Kong Prison Realm, so to ensure that she did the least damage possible, she found a small dip within the Silver Side and dug it out a little further, heading to the very bottom of it so that any blast would be redirected into the air and hopefully not reach the spires of Sanctuary in the process of doing so. If it did, then it would at the very least be limited to damaging the upper portions of the spires, and not their foundations, as that would make it easier to correct the damage.

After sitting down at the centre of this indentation in the ground, she removed the many Earth Physique Awakening pills from her pocket and infused an even greater quantity of glowing cosmic energy into them, their form becoming even more star-like as all of their original shade was lost.

‘Since there’s cosmic energy, could there also be cosmic ingredients and cosmic pill recipes? I wonder what would happen if I combined all of them – how powerful would such a product be?’ she wondered for a moment, although she knew well that actually finding these things would also be entirely impossible without even greater luck than all of her previous hopes and dreams considering how immensely formidable her cosmic energy alone was, ‘Now, the Vibrant Phoenix particles…’

She looked into herself, looking through the entire length of her physique meridian network to find the few remnants of the physique energy within it, locating only a few of them after quite a lengthy search. It was a greater number than those of physiques that were taken from weaker individuals with a smaller cultivation, but it paled in comparison to the quantity of physique energy from those that she was able to actively use. Nevertheless, since it was there, it meant that it could be affected by Physique Awakening pills, which in turn meant that it should be possible to increase the quantity or quality of that energy until it was possible for her to make use of it.

Throwing one of the pills into her mouth, she melted it in an instant with her planar energy and forced the medicinal energy contained within towards that part of her physique meridians, locking off those specific particles of the Vibrant Phoenix physique away from everything else so that she wouldn’t accidentally trigger any of the other physiques and potentially destroy her body.

As she forced all of that energy to converge on that small point, it did not react with the physique energy at first, making her swallow several more pills and direct their energy to that exact same point.

Finally, after consuming more than a half of her remaining supply, she saw a different response. The medicinal essence mixed together with the few particles of physique energy, surrounding and permeating them, filling them with fantastic cosmic light that mixed with the absolute yang which made up that portion of physique energy. It glowed and spun around the centre of the meridian, where they slowly came closer and closer together, partially simulating the movement of the Cherry Revolving Blossom art, perhaps through sheer coincidence, but it was also possible that it was following the same law that the refining technique had been based on, thus giving the process more energy and more efficiency than if she controlled the energy and particles without knowing how to do so best.

They spun more and more quickly as they got closer to the centre, and the moment that the particles touched, they released flame-like sparks and brightened the physique energy within her meridians. Each collision generated more sparks, and not all of them vanished when the next set of sparks emerged, with some appearing to congeal together, seemingly forming new ethereal particles that joined the circulation and rotation, creating further sparks and energy.

When it had reached a certain quantity, it suddenly attempted to expand and burst past the barriers that she had created, so, after forcing most of the other physique particles away, she permitted it.

The particles, both real and illusory, flew into different corners of the meridian network and mysteriously chose to pause near the dawn stars of cosmic energy that still glowed within her body, getting into the same place within their own network as to best mirror the stars. There were one hundred and eight dawn stars, and after every particle that did not reach a destination decayed, there were also one hundred and eight particles of physique energy that brightly shone similarly to their matching stars.

Then, they froze in place, and formed a strange connection with one another. A thin, thread-like path appeared between them, shivering in place for a few moments, then the particles moved once more, this time using them specifically.

One precise circulation later, they reached the same place once more, pausing once more beside the dawn stars, and suddenly burst into absolute, blinding, immense flame that scorched the entirety of her being in a single instant, illuminating it with a radiance that she had rarely ever seen before, even from her own power.

Although this phenomenon was different to what she had previously experienced with gathering physique energy to awaken its ability, the outcome appeared to be the same – she had awakened the Vibrant Phoenix physique, and it was now hers to use and command whenever she desired, so long as she had sufficient energy to do so. The physique awakening energy from the pills was entirely gone, however, and all that she had to show for it was the particles of the physique potentially being slightly more powerful than they otherwise would have been.

‘Still, this was, unfortunately, within my expectations, so now I have to test exactly how it will respond to my rather unique physique… Although I would prefer to understand exactly how the Yin-Yang Ascendant functions and whether it is even the thing responsible for my ability to absorb other physiques and make use of them in the way that I currently do,’ she thought, raising her hand.

She was not simply planning to look at the physique energy, as she sometimes did, but was instead planning to observe some of the primary transformation points of the Vibrant Phoenix.

From what she was aware about that particular physique, there were several primary areas of her body that would transform upon its usage. One of the most common were hair, which would either become crimson or become a kind of living flame, although that had never truly made sense to her when she had read the descriptions about it, then hands and nails, changing partially into claws a little like her killing will form, and eyes after that, modifying them into bright embers that could illuminate the darkness, then the veins and skin around the eyes, mouth and – reportedly, although this was likely someone being unnecessarily lewd in their assumptions – around certain erogenous areas, the last of which she did not intend to examine as it was highly unnecessary.

Prompting the physique energy to activate the appropriate physique ability, she observed as her entire body filled with incredibly hot flame, mixing with her every other physique for the crimson to transform into a gold and blue shade as it became even stronger.

Intense currents of heat flowed towards her head, flooding her eyes and hair, while the majority of the remaining energy travelled towards her hands, although there was still plenty of it left over to flow through her bones, skin and flesh in nearly equal measure. Her lengthy crimson hair seemed to catch alight, each strand rapidly melting into raw energy and changing without any significance since her physique and cosmic energy had made them nigh invulnerable already. All that made up her eyes seemingly collapsed into a pair of flaming embers, shining brightly as they looked upon the world with a concentrated power hardly seen elsewhere. The bright light at her nails had a similar effect, partially dissolving them while simultaneously leaving them in place, transforming the short nails into a darker, denser flame than her hair.

‘This… feels oddly unpleasant for a physique-based transformation, as those usually don’t have any significant negative impact on their user – albinism and a whole bunch of things notwithstanding. I wonder how this interacts with a few of my other physiques, that being the killing will form, and how the frost version looks like… The latter seems more interesting. Let’s see…’

She willed the absolute yang to be replaced with the absolute yin of her physique, causing the mixed physique energy and material existence to fluctuate as the flames cooled and transformed into such dense and cold ice that it actively froze the air around it into a solid film around her fingers. The embers in her eyes transformed into a cold light, the absolute frost transforming all the way back into heat that would have burnt anyone that neared it, and her hair froze into eternal ice that took the shape of her ponytail.

When she transformed the relevant aspects of herself into the killing will form, the ice from her nails spread to cover half of her fingers, ending in a sharp point with which one could cut through metal with ease. Her hair was unaffected, as always, and the eye on her left side turned darker, a shade of crimson entering the otherwise blue light.

‘Alright. I don’t think I will allow my eyes to change frequently, considering how odd it feels to not look through a part made of physical flesh, but it is something to consider if anyone ever attempts to stab me in the eyes…’ she thought, transforming them back with some careful manipulation of her physique energy, ‘So, I ought to now witness what the results of the Vibrant Phoenix and the yang killing will form will be.’

Suddenly, ice changed to flame, blue changed to golden red, and her robes were instantly immolated by the growing flames, forcing her to put this experiment to an end.