V4C5: Traces of Strife

Great Dark may not have been concerned about his twin, and, frankly, neither was Wei Yi, but it seemed like a good idea to check up on him in person to confirm that he wasn’t accidentally messing anything up, or otherwise not dead or dying.

Those possibilities were unreasonable, and both of them would have known if it did happen as he likely had a link to his brother through their splintered soul whereas Wei Yi could observe everything within Paragon, but one could never be too careful when it came to entities that had split their very souls. Given how little was fully understood about souls, Wei Yi would hardly be surprised if they could somehow interfere with her spiritual perception, as it wasn’t completely infallible.

After confirming that a few other matters on the way to one of the connection points were settled, she descended down the stairs into the underground portion of the fortress and found that even before she got onto the stone floor and began to head towards the outer edges, she could already hear the sounds of something striking stone and metal ore veins. It was a distinct sound, although it lacked the rhythm that she expected from a group of able miners digging away in some mine within the rest of Yi City.

Most of the ores tended to be focused on certain points, with the highest grade of ore being found nearest to the centre of the point, as if whatever energy had led to the development of those specific materials had gathered in one place and then affected the things around it to a lesser degree. As such, even if she couldn’t have observed Paragon at all times, she still had an idea of where to go.

Despite his realm, Great Light did lack any training with the handling of ores and materials, and so he couldn’t begin his work on any of the six-star metals and minerals that were plentiful beneath the fortress. Instead, he was attempting to dig the weakest of the five-star materials.

Even then, with an obvious lack of experience and insufficient practise, he was working far more slowly than those in the fourth realm, simply due to their techniques reaching the Full Success stage and their many hours and days spent on practising things like this severely outweighing any of his. Of course, that didn’t mean that either one of them was working quickly, or that they were getting much out of the process, but it was still progress, one that could be of greater use to the Ascendant’s Arbiters than lower grade materials.

That was primarily due to Wei Yi’s presence, as she was able to process materials far above her realm at any time with the combination of her Red Shaper’s Grasp and her crafting methods, which she would need to work on a bit more in the future, meaning that each piece of high-grade material could contribute to a high-grade, high-quality item that would surpass a dozen items made from inferior materials.

At the moment that she arrived, the Great Earth twin was standing alongside a series of other miners, all of whom had dressed themselves in defensive equipment atop some of their usual clothing in order to prevent a stray falling rock from ending their lives in one quick go. There were a number of other threats that a cultivator would need to watch out for when they mine ore or stone beneath the ground, since the world tended to be rather dangerous even with proper preparation, but due to the haste with which they had assembled, the majority had not yet had the time to prepare full sets of equipment to boost the flow of their planar energy and to negate strikes or various gasses that existed beneath the earth. Some of them could kill a man in minutes without them even realising what was happening, but one fortunate thing about them was that they did not tend to appear near the surface of caves, only deep within them.

In other words, since this part of the cave had been standing for several decades at the very least, even if it wasn’t immediately obvious due to the lack of the typical signs of age or decay that one might find outside of a great superstructure that had managed to avoid detection and observation from the outside world for far longer than that, there were unlikely to be any deposits of dangerous matter beneath the very surface of the ore and stone.

“Greetings there, Great Light. How are you faring?”

“…” he opened his mouth to provide a reply but was only able to cough when a mouthful of dust flooded his lungs, giving him little choice but to get rid of it before he lost his life.

Since she couldn’t force her physique energy into his body to purge the dust, she could only glance at the miner beside him that had been responsible for the dust being thrown up into the air. To her, it was no issue, but if the figure was to continue being careless, they could damage the lungs of weaker men.

“Bleh… You could have been more careful than that, young man- fuck, woman? Are you absolutely certain that you are actually female?”

“What’s that supposed to mean? If you’re referring to my current balance of yin and yang, it is perfectly balanced, so that isn’t it… Did that splitting of your soul cause you to lose the very ability to not be constantly agitated at every single person out there?” Wei Yi asked, “Seriously though, you had scanned me with your spiritual perception, didn’t you?”

“We had avoided looking at anything private, hence why we hadn’t realised who you were…” he admitted, coughing a few more times, “What are you doing here? Has my brother stopped being entertaining to you?”

Before she had the chance to question his incredibly strange perspective on the world around him, the great mass of undug ore before them suddenly began to tremble and quake. Every miner around it hastened back, uncertain of the exact nature of these tremors, which momentarily ceased after a period of uncertainty.

Due to the vast number of potential situations and threats that they may be facing, these miners didn’t attempt to approach once more right away, not even with Wei Yi and Great Light on their side, since there was little that the two of them could do if some entity of the seventh realm suddenly appear, or if the entire cave collapsed onto them, since there was only so much that those without the ability to manipulate space were able to do.

As such, they observed as, after the third series of uncertain trembles, a sphere of the amber-coloured ore that Great Light had been mining suddenly burst out of the ore vein, with around a hundred smaller shards that were all elongated and with sharp ends on either side rising alongside it, following after the sphere with a strange series of varied delays that caused them to move in a strange manner.

It was difficult to perceive regardless of the spiritual perception that entered it, but inside of this entity was the equivalent of a planar beast’s core, glimmering with vast power.

‘Living ore, the metal version of typical planar fauna,’ Wei Yi recognised it quickly, and, judging by the expression of some of the miners, they must have done so too, ‘They must have awakened within the ore some time ago, and the lack of action upon it prevented them from ever rising. This one has the same realm as the ore that spawned it, that is, the sixth realm, but I am not so certain exactly how powerful it is if it had the ability to unconsciously cultivate while lying dormant within the metal ore. However, this does open up possibilities…’

One of the biggest troubles with handling certain metals and ores, before any cultivator could even process them, was removing them from the ground, as they tended to be in dense clusters that would need to be chipped at extremely slowly to get piece and piece after a great deal of effort.

Meanwhile, this entity rose from the wall and quickly spat out a series of the shards that it had brought out alongside with it, throwing them all at Wei Yi and Great Light, both of whom were able to evade the projectiles with ease as, while they did rush swiftly, the warning before they shot out was more than sufficient for them to evade each one of the spikes. As they flew past them, due to the angle at which they were launched, they struck the ground a few metres behind them and pierced the stone with ease, the toughness of the material being far greater than that of common stone.

“Well, look at that. It’s just mining things for us. How about we let it?”

Wei Yi’s suggestion could hardly be considered before the entity fired out even more shards at her, perhaps deciding that her suggestion was not one that it appreciated. While she evaded it yet again, she could see how the metal ore beneath the entity slowly grew up to substitute what it had used up, the newly grown chunks quickly flying up to it and replacing those spikes that could no longer orbit around the spherical entity.

“See, it’s even growing new metal pieces for us, so we really shouldn’t obliterate it before we figure out if this can be duplicated by some part of it…” she stated, glancing back at the launched shards.

With some curiosity, she had noted that the shards contained both metal and earth-type energy, and then she noted with even more interest that one of the pieces had slightly broken during the flight. Within it, surrounded by a thick layer of the impure ore, was a small radiant piece of the metal that was actually being sought out by those that had begun to mine it.

It glowed with an immense degree of energy, far greater than anything on the outer portion of it.

That was hardly unusual, given that the ore was a valuable one and would naturally produce a great deal of resonance with the world that would then provoke the glow, but it caught her eye as it caused her to consider the very nature of metal ore – as strange as that might sound to some.

In a way, it was the very concept of the merge of earth and metal united and materialised within the real world, for the metal, a sharp and powerful element, was constrained and diluted by the earth, making it inferior or sometimes even nullifying it until the metal was refined and made into appropriate alloys with other metals in order to achieve the desired outcome. The earth weakened metal in this instance, and in the case of those materials that could harm a person through mere proximity, it would suppress their power so that it would not be as deadly to those that came across it unknowingly.

Furthermore, this in itself was a law, and applied in almost any instance. If a weapon was covered in dirt, the edges would be dulled and the effectiveness that it possessed would be decreased, unless it was a blunt one, which would more frequently be made of wood rather than metal. If one was to fire an arrow into the ground in an attempt to reach someone on the other side, even a metre of earth would do far more to nullify the strength of the projectile than ten metres of air, with both the tip of the arrow and the wind being a metal-type force that did not wholly counteract nor act alongside one another, instead making it the matter of those using them. No matter how an arrow was shot at dirt, however, it would never become more powerful if not appropriately.

The earth suppressed all kinds of powers, stopping water from flowing as it wishes for many decades until erosion and so on occurs, preventing flames from spreading past where they should, permitting wood to prosper, but only to a degree depending on the energy and nutrients within the soil.

‘So that is one way to interpret the relationship of earth and metal…’ Wei Yi thought, slowly raising her hand as thoughts raced in her mind.

However, before she could fully complete them, a larger shard than usual was shot out at a greater speed, with far more of the amber metallic radiance showing through it than in most of the projectiles thrown at her so far. It flew right at her, perhaps taking her hand as a convenient target to aim at and pierced it even as she activated her killing will state at the last moment, embedding itself almost ten centimetres into her flesh and bone before stopping.

“I suppose that this is the power of the sixth realm, even in a mindless thing like that,” she muttered, pulling the shard out of her body with her other hand and letting it recover rapidly, “Not as powerful as you could be.”

She stretched out her arm once more, pointing her palm at the floating entity, and released a strange form of planar energy that appeared to cloud the air, obscuring sight through it in a manner that seemed to be less of a usual obstruction and more of a warped, blurry window. It spread out to the entity, which appeared to be capable of having no thoughts other than to fire another shard at her, this one bigger than the one before, and more radiant also.

However, the moment that it came into contact with that energy, it instantly lost half of its speed, and seemed to be rapidly covered in a dense layer of her planar energy, as if it was a metal being embedded in stone. Before it had even the slightest chance of impacting upon her arm, the additional virtual weight caused it to fall to the ground, the layer of stone vanishing after a short while.

The energy surrounded the spherical entity fully, then, with a grabbing motion, she made it press down upon the creature, rapidly embedding it within the same stone-like energy that had trapped its attack. It did attempt to escape, but it only did so after wasting several precious moments simply residing within the dense mist, and by that point it was barely able to remain in the air. As such, all that the escape attempt yielded was a quicker drop onto the ground, as it had wasted the precious last drops of its own energy in it.

“Did you… the sixth realm? How did you just do that?” Great Light immediately asked, his amazement plain within his expression.

“I quickly comprehended a new mixture of two elements. In line with my previous creation, metal ore energy seems appropriate, and the power against mindless things that follow simple laws is very effective,” she did not deign him with a proper response, instead approaching the entity and examining it closely, “It is still active, just far, far slower than it had been before. Anything that it does is also far weaker, but I would still advise evading anything it shoots.”

“You plan to just leave this thing here?” he asked again, the other miners being too shocked to speak.

“Naturally. This produces more ore than simply mining, so it would be best to keep it around. While it is within the fortress, it can be stabilised, to leave it in a place with enough ore to grow the shards from, then harvest the shards either before or after it throws them at you. Everything around it can be dug up, but a chunk of the material should remain unless the metal somehow becomes useless,” Wei Yi stated, then quickly shook her head, “Actually, leave it be no matter what, set up some walls that it cannot breach – I can call some builders for that, if none of you have the expertise – and keep harvesting it anyway. A use may be found quickly, even if any original uses are discarded.”

To say that this had cleared up anything for any of the miners wouldn’t be accurate in the slightest, but they had at the very least received clear instructions that they could follow regardless. As such, they got to work right away, and Great Light was forced to follow.

She didn’t care to explain the law-based principles of her newly invented state of her cosmic energy, seeing as it wasn’t something that she could explain properly without first going into the depths of the law of the world, which in itself was something that she had a rather specific understanding of that would be difficult to fully convey. That was one of the problems of her Dao, and the understanding that it then bestowed upon other techniques and methods – it was extremely difficult to spread.

In many ways, it relied on epiphany, on the right course of thought leading to a special understanding of reality that permitted one to manipulate it based upon them. When those same understandings were shared, no matter how much detail was dedicated to them, that key element of thought would be absent no matter how much she could ask the people she was teaching to consider the reasons behind every word she spoke, simply because her insights would be quickly accepted rather than considered. It was a handy thing about being a powerful and reliable figure when teaching techniques, but not so much when teaching intricate philosophies and views.

Furthermore, she still didn’t know whether the exact power of Dao came from their exclusivity, or from one’s specific understanding. If her views of the world did not bestow upon her the most powerful aspects of certain Dao, such as the Dao of Law, then she would rather let others come to their own conclusions and then derive their own branches of the Dao, then permitting their comprehension to be combined into techniques, methods and systems for others to follow to benefit from their insights without needing to understand them in the same way.

Achieving something like this was quite easy through a clear and finalised technique, but her Mysterious Metal Ore was hardly something that could be called that. She did not have full understanding of it just yet, and it was part of a set of techniques that only she appeared to be able to practise due to the particular circumstances of her body and mind.

As such, she would first need to extract the very principle of the technique into something more straightforward, adapt it for typical cultivators to be able to handle it as part of a cultivation technique, and then return to those who she wished to learn it with the completed manual.

Perhaps it didn’t need to be said, but something like this could take a very, very long time.

Instead of sitting around and just doing that, she leapt over to the next group of miners, and found that their primary ore vein also contained several of the living ore entities, whose existence she was able to detect after seeing how the first one came to be right in front of her. Naturally, she stirred it up with the miners’ assistance, waiting for it to emerge from the ground and attack her in the same simplistic manner as the entity from before.

Since they had chosen to mine in an area without a six-star material, she only faced a fifth realm foe, and did not need to worry nearly as much about receiving any kind of injury from it.

For that reason, she was able to calmly stand and get struck by another shard at nearly full force as she converted her relevant understanding of the new form of energy from one focused on that particular ore to ore in general, getting a better idea of the base principle she had based her sudden creation on.

With her body, a weak fifth realm attack was only able to pierce a minimal amount, and by the time that the living ore had the chance to throw another shard, her metal ore energy was already spreading out to it. The next shard was nullified even more quickly than on the amber entity, and the creature itself fell soon after, being unable to contend with energy that nearly equalled its realm through sheer power and purity. She passed along her instructions to the miners there, then moved on again.

Much as she expected, the vast majority of the ores beneath the ground of the fortress contained a number of these entities, and perhaps one of the few positives about their wild behaviour was that they would attack anyone, but only once they were awakened by force being exerted in very close proximity to them, effectively requiring a direct strike with a sufficiently powerful technique or pickaxe to even faze them. That meant that they did not all need to be restrained in one go, which would waste a great deal of energy for some time until her planar pool adjusted to the amount that she was attempting to stabilise, but it could be delayed until it became necessary.

Since she had a decent understanding of the abilities of her miners after having observed them for a little while, she was able to guess with sufficient accuracy in regard to their mining speed, and thus paced her awakening and weakening of the living ores according to it, deciding that she would need to confirm the miners’ safety every now and then just to be sure.

The majority of ores that were at a three-star grade or below did not contain a single one of the living ores, while four-star metals onward seemed more and more likely to contain at least one such consciousness. It appeared that they would spring up based on the total planar energy content of the ore, as well as its general strength and ability, so the greatest of ores were naturally those with the most of these living entities, which was fortunate considering how long it would take until they could be mined at any reasonable speed.

Besides effectively giving her even more time to resolve the danger that they posed, it did make her ponder whether any of the spatial metal that was used for the creation and enhancement of spatial items, whether storage or realms, would be found beneath the fortress. In theory, it would be a good reason for someone to dig up such a vast amount of space beneath any structure, and it would further encourage a hidden environment that couldn’t be detected by any potential foes due to the value of spatial metal even in the golden days of the Master of Yi City, not to mention the time after his disappearance and the decrease in the overall planar energy content of the atmosphere, prompting a regression of two realms in the entire populace.

‘Come to think of it, what exactly does spatial metal even look like? All I know is its name, not anything about its properties – other than it being difficult to process, just as with star metal, except the methods for the latter were rumoured about while the former had nothing of the sort – or where it can be found, how it can be found, and whether it is even a pure metal or an alloy. Hm…’ she tried to find any mention of star metal within her mental library that might contain anything of interest, but found little, ‘Well, that isn’t good for me. For all I know, all of the stone around me is spatial metal…’

When there appeared to be no one in her vicinity, she chipped off a small amount of stone and carefully examined everything she could about it just to confirm that there was no chance that it did somehow contain even a small trace of spatial metal. That did not appear to be the case, unfortunately.

If she had been able to obtain free spatial metal just from harvesting the plentiful stone beneath the ground, she would naturally be incredibly pleased with it, since she would have the chance to obtain as many spatial items as she wanted so long as there was more stone to dig. So far as she understood things, she wasn’t able to get anything of the sort from the piece of stone she had selected, and while she could still be missing something due to her low cultivation, she wouldn’t waste more time on experiments unless she did obtain some evidence that there might be a chance of obtaining her desired items from it. At that point, she would devote far more effort to it.

‘Once I have a chance to figure out something about it, I could also confirm whether spatial metal is even a metal, or if someone had just named it that without understanding it, or intending to confuse others,’ she added to the list, tossing what remained of the piece of stone away, ‘Now, there’s something on the outside, so I’ll need to take a look…’

She did not bother to ascend the steps this time, quickly appearing beside Min Lian who had been left behind at Great Dark and Great Light’s residence to bring her to the fortress’ border.

What she was heading to investigate was something that she sensed at a certain distance from the fortress, and she wanted to confirm whether or not this was something that she needed to worry about, and whether or not it would require immediate action to avoid danger.

As the two of them got onto the walls and looked into the sandy distance, even if barely anything was actually visible through the incredibly dense wave of sand. Due to the particular properties of the fortress, and the enormous array that caused the sand to be in a perpetual sandstorm, it was also nigh impossible to reach out far into it with spiritual perception, but one thing that seemed to spread incredibly well was sound.

When it came to sound, beside the constant storming sound of countless sand particles colliding with one another, there was a faint rumble somewhere far in the distance.

It was incredibly difficult to make out, and it did not immediately bring anything to mind, but it was certainly there, and it appeared to be drawing closer the longer they stood by to listen. At first, it seemed like the source might be close and soon within sight of the walls, but that was not the case, for the sound got louder and louder with no end in sight.

“Min Lian, get Luo Lia Kun, Great Dark, and… Miyu. She could prove to be of use.”

“Right away, Master,” the assassin answered, running to get those people at the greatest speed that her techniques would permit her.

Even within a large fortress such as Paragon, a third realm cultivator with high quality movement techniques was able to get all of them within a few minutes, at which point they came to the wall one by one to observe and listen to whatever was making those noises. With what appeared to be growing proximity, it seemed that the source of the sound wasn’t travelling directly towards them, but it must have been making a great deal of progress nonetheless to cause that much noise.

Great Dark arrived first, mostly due to his realm, and asked, “What is it?”

“Don’t ask me. I don’t have a clue. We might have done quite a bit less research on the place than you and your group must have done, so if this is something that we should have expected, then I had not received that information.”

“It is not something that we were aware of either…” he reported, just as Luo Lia Kun arrived.

“That is… no, that wouldn’t be possible…” the vice-leader clearly had some ideas on the matter, but before she could voice them, Miyu and the assassin returned.

Now, that would hardly stop her, but alongside them, they finally witnessed the source of the tremendous noise and the noticeable tremors in the ground that had, fortunately, been limited significantly by the sturdy structure of the fortress. It was only a shadow at the very edge of the visible radius within the sandstorm, but it was humongous.

A titanic shadow of a sandworm surged out of the ground, somewhere far in the distance, appearing to easily be a hundred metres in width if not more, and rose into the air with much of its body before plunging back into the sand, displaying its length as being even more enormous.

“The Great Worm?” Luo Lia Kun gasped, “H-How can… something like that…”