V3C69: Descent of the Powerful

With the horizontal Eclipse Split diving the many attacking forces in two, it also broke apart the cover of killing intent, which she quickly retrieved into her own body while the weapon in her right hand broke apart.

The majority of her foes lay either dead or dying, some buildings were split in half, although that did not do much more than damage some of the items within, since the structural integrity of the structures remained intact, but that did not come without a cost. Most of her energy, regardless of the type and cultivation realm, had been drained away, some wasted by striking distant objects that were of no threat to her, but most had been expended in a useful manner.

Unlike the time that she had absorbed the storm walls, she still retained enough strength to stand and properly interpret what she could see around herself. For example, she was able to observe the enormous increase in her planar anchor points, raising them all the way to six hundred and sixty once every single bit of energy entered the characters.

In addition, she saw countless small embers glowing within the hearts of all of them, which quietly shook in unity as their number likely vastly exceeded anything that any previous user of the Soul of Cinder would have seen.

She would have readily collected them, since there was no detriment whatsoever from becoming more powerful without needing to raise her cultivation or expend any resources, if not for the fact that she could sense an immensely powerful aura approaching, one that she wouldn’t be able to contend with no matter what she did and that would be unlikely to appreciate the act of borrowing the embers of the fallen, unless he was acting against the many thieves and thugs of the district. Even then, he might not be so keen on looting the very essence of the dead.

A few moments later, she saw a figure walking in the sky that approached her slowly yet rapidly, each step seeming small yet covering countless metres with each one.

“Tyrant! Killer! You have shed the blood of countless innocents!” the man that walked on the air itself declared, doing so relatively calmly while stroking his short beard. As if his words weren’t enough to make it obvious who he would be siding with, his fingers were adorned with rings of immortal gold, which were labelled with some of the same symbols that were present on the bodies of the dead.

“I’m sure the people that I’ve killed managed to harm at least one innocent each.”

“Hmph. If you think that you can get away with what you’ve done, no matter the justification, no matter the reason, then you are terribly mistaken. The streets run red with blood! You spilled it!”

“I was here when it happened, so I’m very well aware, thank you. Explaining it to me a second time wouldn’t matter, and even if you were doing this out of the kindness of your heart and for the sake of justice, you wouldn’t let me get away no matter what I said,” Wei Yi said, “So, can’t we just get over it and move on? If you are going to kill me, go ahead and try. If you will not do that, then stop talking already.”

Unlike a few of the committed scoffers that she had spoken to in the past, this one didn’t bother.

“As the protector of the district, I will kill you. You could have gotten a way out, had you listened, but you clearly don’t want it.”

“No, I do not. How are you going to do this? Stabbing? Crushing? Burning? I’m not a wood-type cultivator, so that wouldn’t be satisfying to watch in the slightest. Perhaps you want to impale me on some spike and drain my energy for your own gains. Which one?”

“For you, I will allow nothing more than an instant death!”

True to his word, he raised a hand and conjured a great quantity of planar energy, forming it into a great planar construct within an instant. It was so quick that Wei Yi was barely able to process the way in which it formed, for the potential eventual replication of the technique for her own usage in a later realm, although she did manage to get most of the relevant major details.

Then, the enormous construct that resembled a huge fist crashed down upon her.

However, before it struck – and indeed before it had begun to descend – she observed how the countless embers around her had begun to shift slightly in her direction, unlike their usual still state.

As the fist descended, and the embers sparked, all of them suddenly converged upon her position, leaving the bodies that they had spawned within. They flew even faster than the fist, and simultaneously filled her body, all of the hundreds of burning embers of varying size, heat and intensity entering her chest and seeming to ignite an entirely new flame within her heart. It moved even more quickly than the embers had, and expanded all over her body, filling her with a heat that seemed to surpass even that of her physique energy, at least in terms of its effectiveness upon her.

Once it had filled her being, it burst out, flame exploding out of her, meeting the planar construct fist and instantly causing a vast amount of damage to it. It did not crack, nor was it eaten away, but it was instead disturbed at the structural level, the stability of the fist turning from absolute to naught.

When it did strike, it was but a shadow of its original strength, doing little more than throwing her tied ponytail about.

“What?” the Linked Channels cultivator exclaimed, the many illusory channels between him and the fist scattering just as it did upon striking the ground, “You have the Soul of Cinder physique? Why were you using lightning? How were you able to… you couldn’t have slaughtered enough for the special state?”

As the fist construct vanished, her state could be seen.

Her eyes glowed like a pair of embers, their silver colour absent entirely as the bright orange consumed them, a thin trail of energy following their every movement. Traces of flame covered her clothing, sitting on them but not doing a thing to harm them. Everything that was not covered by her clothing was marked by thin fissures of flame, as if it was burning through her skin, although no harm was done to it either.

In that moment, with the exclamations of her opponent, she was able to deduce and understand several matters. First of all, her Soul of Cinder physique ability had indeed activated, and all of the embers had merged with her, empowering her by an enormous degree similar to the gains that she earned from the death of two of the Greats. Then, she was able to confirm that she was currently in an abnormal state, the same one that she and her foe had heard rumours of in the past. It matched some of her knowledge, although it differed in other places.

So far as she was able, it was temporary, and it would only last sixty seconds from that moment, although whether that would change depending on the number of embers absorbed was entirely unknown to her. The effects appeared to be a great increase in her defensive ability, a temporary state of full meridians, no matter how much energy she used, as well as a minor increase in overall power.

Additionally, any attack that involves fire, even if it was only as one of the component elements, would be empowered significantly.

Since she only had that little while to act, no matter what she wanted to do, she had no room whatsoever to hesitate. Perhaps the man would be keen to work alongside her after seeing the special state, perhaps he wouldn’t be aware that the special state had a limited duration or that it wouldn’t make her outright invincible after the initial moment of activation, but she simply couldn’t make any assumptions. It was necessary to either do as much damage as possible or flee as far as possible.

‘This man is also one of them, so I might as well make use of what have to weaken him,’ she decided, ‘With the apparent boundless energy of the Soul of Cinder, so long as I maximise my usage of it in the last few moments, I should be able to leave the district in that time.’

She empowered herself with her bloodline power, flooding her body and skin with her cosmic light, then leapt up towards her foe, who was still in a state of absolute shock from the sudden eruption of the Soul of Cinder state, unleashing the full might of her body at that moment through the most effective manner.

With bottomless supplies of energy, no matter how such a thing could even be possible, there was no need to worry about efficiency, only scalability. It was the reason that so many techniques were typically delegated to a particular realm or set of realms, as they required far too much effort to be raised to the power of a technique designed specifically for a particular realm due to the different principles which could be accessed with every major advancement. However, it was rather difficult to create a technique that was able to be used well at every single realm without causing it to be highly costly, exactly like her Absolute Force and Rupture, which were inordinately costly for what they did.

However, that was not currently an issue, so she made sure to use exactly how much energy she could.

In other words, she utilised far more energy than a third realm cultivator should ever be able to, being forced to set down the Monolith behind herself while in mid-air just to keep it stable, more than something that a person in the fourth realm should be able to manifest, and probably more than most in the fifth realm would wield by the upper stages. With her natural regeneration, the immense absorption rate of her cultivation method, and the replenishment of the Soul of Cinder state, the power that she produced was great, but it was still not infinite, and thus it was unable to match the sheer quantity of energy that her foe in the sixth realm could manifest.

This much energy was not simply planar energy, not since she had obtained the Absolute Dao, as it had been empowered by the Minor Achievement stage of the Dao and the Fifth Stage of the technique, resulting in a combination that just barely reached the level of the sixth realm.

All of that force, shaped by little other than her will, lit aflame at the last moment, for the absolute energy would be unable to withstand the sudden introduction of the flame for longer than an instant, even with the Ascendant Dao bringing everything into a single, clear, cohesive whole, as the enormous quantity of power could hardly be set aflame without some consequences relating to the odd stability of simplicity.

Nevertheless, Wei Yi did not need to have a technique that burned the whole time. She did not need the Absolute Force to be particularly showy, either, and she most certainly did not need to give hints to her opponent, who was in the process of creating a shield for himself when her attack was in the middle of its journey to him, having finally been shaken from his amazement and surprise.

For fire to empower fire was only natural, so defence against it would be at its peak if it was clear that a flame-based attack was incoming. However, if all he saw was planar energy, albeit in a partial cosmic state, being projected in part by the technique and in part by the sheer physical force of her fist and arm, then he could at most assume that fire would make up some small part of the attack, perhaps providing the essence for the energy’s movement while the damage itself would be dealt by whatever element her energy was.

Indeed, when the Absolute energy suddenly turned to golden flame, it came as a great shock to him, nearly causing him to dispel the barrier that he had set up as to create another, more suitable one, although his mind had unfortunately realised how foolish that would be.

Rather than wasting his energy or attempting to evade, the latter action being a very risky move due to his lack of understanding of her methods, he sunk his own energy into the barrier without any restraint, empowering it as much as possible before the structure of the planar construct would accept no more without outright shattering or even popping from the excess amount of solid planar energy within it.

The two collided in silence, for there was no crowd, and neither one seemed keen to exclaim anything.

A barrier of the sixth realm, stabilised by an internal anchor and core, empowered by a mark, amplified by all of the other searing marks through the illusory channels between him and the barrier, met with power of the third realm, empowered and stabilised by an external Endless Monolith, guided by the Fist Dao and Absolute Dao, amplified by perfected stages and realm, the force of the Soul of Cinder physique ability and the embers that had contributed to the current special state that she had found herself in, all uniting into one.

It was only after that collision that any noise reached their ears, and it was from the complex structure of the barrier quivering, cracking and breaking, all in a single second, unable to withstand the sheer concentration of power.

From this alone, it was clear that he not only had few searing marks, but that his stage was low, for a single stage of the Linked Channels realm was more powerful than the entirety of the Active Core realm gains, while Wei Yi wasn’t even in that realm yet. Furthermore, the unsuitability of the barrier, the lack of sufficient preparation, and the poor tactical planning on the part of her foe all contributed to that outcome, as she made sure to repeat to herself as to not get overconfident.

Still, that did not change the fact that most of her energy did successfully pass the barrier with a bang.

All of the remaining force crashed into the sixth realm cultivator, throwing him away from his aerial position and plunging into his every bone and muscle with immense might, cracking quite a few of them in an instant, making him regret not practising a single body cultivation method in his youth. However, with the energy inside his body, and after the initial impact, he had far more power to resolve it.

He released the power of his anchor and marks, suppressing the rampant energy within him in an instant, then expunged it from his body alongside a mouthful of blood that had become caught in his throat.

“You are truly pushing it, woman!” the man exclaimed as he set down his anchor and core loudly, crushing several bodies beneath it, “You fail to understand the difference between our realms, and think to do more than minor harm to me? You are foolish, overconfident, and ignorant! Let me show you what you fail to comprehend!”

As she had leapt far into the air in order to deliver that attack, Wei Yi was now falling back down to the ground, and in the eyes of her foe, she would be most powerless then.

In any other circumstance, had he found a foe at her realm falling to the ground like that, without an obvious metal cultivation that would allow her to easily use the air to some advantage, he would act slowly, choosing to play around with his prey before finishing her off, since against any other foe in her realm, he would be outright invincible. Now, however, he did not dare to take her lightly, and so struck instantly, condensing countless fist planar constructs to barrage her body, surrounding her from every side in just a few moments.

Each one of his planar constructs was empowered by the channel to a searing mark, as he chose to not activate a single mark in favour of equally empowering every single construct, and thus each one bore the full might of his cultivation realm, as weak as he might be in comparison to others.

With such an arrangement, Wei Yi had no opportunity to use the Aerial Foothold ability to break her fall and get away, forcing her to extend her field of bloodline power to weaken the constructs as much as possible. She couldn’t break all of them that very instant, as her planar energy had been exhausted once more by the excessive Absolute Force strike, and thus needed to delay or weaken them enough to have a chance.

The first series of strikes landed upon her body, quickly showing her just how powerful the fist that she had initially evaded with her physique ability was.

In just one instant, with them weakened and her defences raised, she felt countless parts of her body break and fracture, suffering minor and major injuries to her vital and non-vital organs, the edge of her mask breaking despite the material being enhanced with her Red Shaper’s Grasp in addition to it already being a five-star material.

That much was no surprise, however, for each stage of the Linked Channels realm granted an increase in power equivalent to three stages of the previous Marked Core, meaning that against someone who was only in the third realm in terms of planar energy, fourth realm in terms of physique, and fifth realm in terms of mental energy, even with the multiplicative properties of her endless refinement of her own form and that of her bloodline power, the man possessed overwhelming might. Even the Soul of Cinder physique was insufficient to fully resolve his attack.

Perhaps the worst thing was that he had truly acted wisely this time, for he chose to attack with a set of fist constructs at once, meaning that the very moment the first set began to draw back, the second set crashed upon her injured body.

Once more, Wei Yi got to experience her body break and be barely reformed through the combination of her surging planar energy and the Soul of Cinder physique ability, and made it very clear that it was not at all a wise idea to remain for any longer than necessary. Luckily, just those two sets of strikes had given her energy enough time to recover, so she waited for the fists to begin to recede to act.

The very instant that they did, she threw out a web of tentacles formed through the Elder Eldritch Hold ability to distract her foe and his attacks, expending as little energy as was necessary to manifest them, then activated both the World’s Echo and the Lion’s Roar abilities at once. Similarly to the tentacles, the roar was merely a distraction, but the World’s Echo was targeted to the furthest point that she could displace herself to without having prepared for it in advance by warming up the physique ability, so to speak.

“Petty tricks!” her foe exclaimed, seeing the mass of noxious tentacles and hearing the roar of a beast, but he still acted with caution and struck down with every single planar construct.

They did not even need to collide with one another for him to be able to guess that something was amiss, leading him to stretch out and focus his spiritual perception while crushing the place where his foe had been for good measure, just in case he was mistaken.

When the collision did occur, causing several cracks and instabilities to form within the fists, he also detected Wei Yi’s reappearance behind the cluster of fists, where she fell to the ground quickly and did not use a single Aerial Foothold to slow herself down, for it would not be worth the risk of being caught. She felt his spiritual perception rather clearly, for he had not attempted to hide it in the slightest, and so had to react the moment that her broken feet, guarded by the boots, touched the ground.

She thrust one hand into the air, causing countless totems to emerge from the ground, then linked herself to them and hurriedly circulated her energy.

“Did you fail to hear me, woman? Whatever you think you can accomplish, you are-”

The sixth realm cultivator couldn’t finish, for he witnessed countless points appearing around the spectral figures that formed on the totems, as well as around Wei Yi herself, all igniting with boundless cosmic light that much resembled the sword strike that had silenced the Ping District. All of the points were clearly aimed at him, and after only a moment of existing, during which he had been barely able to control his fist planar constructs to soar towards Wei Yi, each one of them fired a thin, dense beam of energy at him.

Having felt the pain of her last attack, he did not dare to take this one head on, no matter how unlikely it would be for her to be able to throw out another attack of the same force and effectiveness in such a short amount of time.

With nothing better at hand, he blocked the beams with the fist constructs, forming them into a wall that perfectly covered him, and observed with his spiritual perception as beam after beam impacted them, leaving no great mark upon any one of the planar constructs. However, the barrage simply did not stop, each point repeatedly firing again and again, each time aiming slightly differently and yet managing to impact upon similar points on the constructs.

Those that fared the worst were the fists that had withstood direct collision with the strongest parts of Wei Yi’s body, then with one another, especially when certain repeated beams would target the weakened spots on their surface, several of the fist planar constructs nearly shattering after a short while. He almost had to ponder whether this would continue infinitely, and if it would be effective to attempt to dodge, for the barrage appeared to have no clear end nor any hint of cessation any time soon, as if it was something perpetual that would forever chase and haunt him no matter where he went, when it suddenly stopped.

The points flickered out, like the flame on a candle after an intense gust of wind, and the totems themselves fell apart shortly afterwards, the phantoms atop them vanishing as well.

He found it so sudden that he stood in a state of absolute shock, one that came as a surprise even to him, perhaps extending that state further. It did break just as quickly when his unfocused vision realised that his greatest foe, a woman whose name hadn’t even spread to him, was no longer within his sight, nor within his range of spiritual perception.

With control over his body back in his possession, he searched the ground for any traces of her presence, but was able to find nothing, as if she had just vanished into the air, or as if she had not even existed. The latter was not a possibility, however, not with the injuries he currently possessed.

They were nothing major, of course, only some slight internal bleeding and damage, but it necessitated the use of a medicinal pill for optimal and rapid recovery, which were not cheap when they were meant to work effectively upon the body of a sixth realm cultivator. This very fact enraged him, for if he had suffered due to the attack of someone in the same realm, or even in the fifth, It would make perfect sense due to his lacking cultivation, but that was not what had happened. Instead, it was someone that was not even at the peak at the third realm – or so it seemed, although his opponent’s energy was truly odd in numerous ways – with a peculiar anchor that had also vanished.

When he returned to the spot where he had initially confronted her, he even found that a number of the bodies had been looted when he himself went to look through them for some gains of his own. Only those that had been in the fifth realm were touched, fortunately for him, as that confirmed that his foe did not have absolute freedom to do as she liked after she escaped. It was only a small thing, but it did repair his state of mind and ego ever so slightly.

“That damned woman… What kind of monster was she?” he asked himself as he stepped through the lake of blood in search of further gains from the battle.

There was no proper time for ceremony when Wei Yi had managed to break away from the battle, so she did not even attempt it. She took valuables off every body that she could, naturally prioritising those that would be of greatest value to her and tossing them all in the House of Gold, then retrieved Ju Yazhu and just as quickly threw her into the prison realm with little explanation, leaving it up to the people on the other side to take care of her with the small amount of instructions that she was able to pass on to Yi Shi Ming before the Soul of Cinder state neared expiry.

Then, while it was still preventing her body from falling apart, she rushed out of the district with everything that she could muster, be it physique ability or technique, only taking care to not be immediately noticed by another.

That task in particular was made rather easy by the fact that the district had just experienced an enormous battle and massacre, and by the fact that it was currently night time, during which most sensible folk tended to remain in their homes or places of work in order to complete whatever they had to go and go to sleep.

The thugs and bandits of the district had also seemed to get the message when all of the major gangs and group sent out large groups to attack someone, and also hid away, deciding that the day – or, rather, night – would not be the most suitable for robbery and banditry, and instead took it as the prime opportunity to do the things that they had less time to do, like spending time with their families, partying and occupying themselves however they were able to.

As a result, none seemed to notice her departure from the Ping District.

By some stroke of fortune, she had just enough speed and energy to make it some distance from the gates before she felt her energy ebb, the endless power of the Soul of Cinder physique disappearing as the embers sank fully into her body.

She was able to sense a change to the physique ability itself, but she was unable to dedicate the proper amount of attention to it purely due to the absolutely horrible state that she had found herself in. Most of her bones were at least partially broken, her lungs had, at some point, been pierced a rib, many of her blood vessels poured blood into her own body, and even the lightest of injuries, which was to her skull, required immediate attention that she simply couldn’t provide them.

While she was still within the vicinity of the district, she would be found and caught, regardless of what she disguised herself as, since her basic figure and attire would remain, so she had only one choice.

With the little remaining power that she had, she travelled as far away as possible, heading vaguely north, the world around her blurring quickly and turning into nothing more than a blob of uncertain colour.

At some point, she just had to stop, since she wasn’t even sure whether she was actually still moving.

Her mind, which had somehow been holding all this whole time, finally lost consciousness.