V4C22: Cleaning and Escape

With a fifth-realm warrior in a full set of middle-grade artefacts by her side, who donned a helmet a moment after he made his proclamation, Wei Yi charged into the battle, putting aside most of her artefacts as they would only be a hindrance to her at that very moment.

She acted fastest and most readily when she had only her own body and energy at her side, and it was only her typical outfit of the Crimson Robe of the Third Arrival, the star metal clawed gauntlet and the boots, to which she had long gotten used to especially in combination with her Heeled Movement Art, and the weapons that she could create from her energy that did not clash with her as much. With the ability to replicate the effects of most artefacts, arrays or inscriptions using her five energies and some ingenuity, she didn’t even need the middle-grade artefact she had purchased now to accomplish the same feats.

It would only take more time, practise and discovery, and in her eyes, especially when she entered the prison realm and the Realm of Potential within it using her mind, a run as short as a minute could suddenly stretch to half an hour. However, she was not interested in the artefacts for now, but instead the technique that the Flood Kings and the Keepers of Groves intended to collaborate on.

On the topic of collaboration, she had easily figured out due to the fluency of their cooperation that they had intended to work together from the start and that this allied duo must have prepared something, which meant that their trump card would be of the water and wood elements. They were also funnelling much of their fourth realm energy towards one of their leaders, so it was clearly something to do with amplifying the power of the body.

Combining that with the way the energy flowed throughout that man’s body gave her all the individual details she needed to be mostly certain of what was occurring, and all she needed from there was the aforementioned time to put them together.

Thus, she thrust herself into the Realm of Potential and forced a duplicate of herself to appear, wielding the energies of the enemy’s technique and the cooperation of several more instances of herself. It wouldn’t let her replicate the process exactly, as any alterations she made to her own replicas would be limited in scope due to the limitations of the Realm of Potential itself, but she did not need exact results, only a sufficiently close potential outcome. After all, even if every factor was copied perfectly, the direction that this otherworldly gift would take things in would likely differ, as it did have a slightly better tendency towards perfection than the majority of mortal minds.

She allowed the many potential variations to occur time and time again, dismissing one the moment that it had any success or failure as she merely needed to figure out the best way to resolve as many of the possibilities at once in one go, rather than sorting through each individual one. All she did was toss any semi-successful results into the list of things for her Endless Calculation to go through, her mind flooding with all kinds of ideas and possibilities, the least likely and outright impossible being dismissed as greater likelihoods took their place. While she did lack the ability to properly draw upon her mental domain within the Realm of Potential, her mind on its own did still possess the full capability to sort through a few million pages of information and figure out their value.

The moment that she returned to her body, she was able to confirm that the Realm of Potential had done what it usually did and kept her in the most efficient and effective state for performing her action at the time of entry, which was running into the enemy at a similar speed to Wu Yi Tai. As a result, she found herself near him still, now close to the Flood Kings of Shi and the Keepers of Groves that seemed to be dedicating their every effort to ensuring that they would not reach their secret technique site in time.

With the time that she had spent in the Realm of Potential, not only had she gotten a few ideas on what it could be, but had also fought a few variations that turned out particularly powerful or troublesome, managing to absorb some innate understanding of the technique behind it.

Ultimately, the conclusion that she was able to make was that the power of the Flood Kings and the Keepers alike was drawn in part from the world around them. The Flood Kings had wet the sand before their appearance, and the Keepers of the Grove kept creating plants around them to attack, defend, or even move around with, and she could distinctly see roots entangling the feet of the leader that had volunteered to be the catalyst for the technique.

As such, whether he turned into a great beast or powered an immense planar construct with the shell of his body burning up as fuel, the best thing to do was limit the world’s nourishment of their plans.

“Wu Yi Tai, you possess the Hunter’s Toxin physique, do you not?”

“What is it to you, woman?” the general asked back, finally getting close enough to a foe to slash at him, cutting off an arm and plunging his blade into the side of the man’s chest, “If you are trying to gather knowledge of my weaknesses, you shall not succeed.”

“I need you to launch all of the poison and venom you can produce at that man there!” she pointed to the one whose feet were surrounded and enveloped by roots. Whether or not he would understand the reasoning behind her command, whether or not he would appreciate the tone or have any other response to her, all that was truly key was that he would poison the roots and waters of the two factions and guarantee that the final outcome of their combined ultimate technique wouldn’t be as powerful as they wished it to be, if it managed to succeed at all with the potent poisons that the Hunter’s Toxin physique could produce.

Fortunately, and as she had expected, when she gave him such a direct and plain instruction with the obvious intention of hindering enemy plans in some way, he did not refuse.

Wu Yi Tai leapt at another foe, impaled the blade into his heart and thus impaled him and it into the ground, then also set down his greatshield to obstruct several incoming attempts to strike at points in between his armour. With both his hands freed, he removed the gauntlet from his right hand, the one that held his blade, and revealed a hand absolutely covered in a vile green sludge that stuck in thick strands to the gauntlet, forcing him to violently rip the gauntlet away to have access to free movement with his hand.

He swung it in the direction of the ritual being performed on one of the leaders of the opposing forces, a simple drop of green toxin suddenly and inexplicably expanding into a great stream, a tidal wave of poison and venom that seemed to burn the very air it touched at it flew through it. As soon as possible, he placed the gauntlet back onto his hand, leading Wei Yi to doubt that the physique was acquired either naturally or entirely successfully, but she focused first on the outcome of it.

As the product of an absolute physique, in the hands of someone in the fifth realm, with whatever had occurred to it to bring it to its current state, the toxin had almost no difficulty in passing through any of the barriers and obstacles that either the Flood Kings of Shi or the Keepers of Groves attempted to set up in its way. The green mass pierced all of them resolutely, leaving what remained to burn and smoke as if it had been fire and not poison, and quickly landed upon the ritual site with a great splash that covered the focus of the technique as well as all around him.

To their credit, they did not cry out in pain nor falter, but instead managed to endure while all contributing to assisting the one in their middle in recovering as quickly as possible, causing the toxins to slowly drip down from his body to reveal nearly pristine skin beneath them.

Some smaller parts of their bodies literally melted for everyone to see the bones beneath, although they soon began to melt and break as well, and yet their focus remained on the technique they were using. It was almost commendable, but it was difficult for Wei Yi to have any positive opinions on their stalwart stance when she could see that the toxin still remained beneath them, with it bubbling more and more as some parts of the roots and water beneath the one the technique focused on were clearly directed towards him, pulling alongside them the toxin of the Hunter. He must have realised it too, given the way in which his expression changed, and he opened his mouth to speak, but at that moment, the process of the ritual completed.

“Take them down… so that our lives were not lost in vain,” one of the melting cultivators said, her lungs mysteriously surviving up that point, before her body suddenly dried up quickly.

This happened to every other participant in the ritual beside the man in the centre, who had clearly lost his ability to speak at the last moment. Roots and water from the ground, suffused with the Hunter’s Toxin, wrapping around his body and even penetrating into it as their wrapping grew denser, then larger, rapidly expanding his size.

In moments, he went from being a mere human to a small titan, towering above the rest by a dozen metres, a body made from dense roots with limbs that could crush a building using nothing but their mass alone. The moment that this was completed, the instant that the roots connecting him to the ground weakened, he charged into battle past his warriors and straight towards the foe he perceived to present the greatest threat to both the Flood Kings of Shi and the Keepers of Groves. He charged at Wei Yi.

Once she could be sure that it was her he was targeting, Wei Yi shouted, “Clear its path! Distance yourselves from it and me!”

Her Arbiters readily obeyed the instruction, with few of them being in her vicinity in the first place, while the true Hunters of the Cosmos she assisted with a simple wave of spiritual will to throw them a little further away. Wu Yi Tai proved a little bit more difficult to push aside, but he fortunately understood her instruction and obeyed it on his own, putting enough distance between the two of them so that no errant strike from what remained of a leader of the Flood Kings would strike both.

The great mass of roots and wood, with water actively flowing beneath all of it, either didn’t care much for its allies or did not retain much of a mind at all, since it ran straight through the battlefield while dealing more harm to its own side than the one he was meant to oppose.

Nothing about its charge appeared to be impeded, and judging by the speed at which it was able to move as well as the ferocity with which it did so, one might assume that its strength was also perfectly intact, causing Wu Yi Tai to glance at Wei Yi with renewed suspicion. Was her plan more complicated than what he had assumed, had it failed or was she actually just stupid?

Had she known about his thoughts, which she did not due to choosing not to peer into his mind alongside everything else she was attempting to consider, she would’ve smiled and told him to be patient, since her current behaviour of simply standing by and waiting for a colossal thing to attack her was indeed a rather strange thing to do when looking at her from the side. However, she had some confidence in her own deductions, and believed that that she had to have the will to test and rely on them at all times if she wanted to encourage her followers to do the same.

That, and the World’s Echo physique was incredibly handy at evading attacks with naught but brute force behind them.

Thus, she stood there as the wooden titan sprinted to her, its feet digging into the sand as it raised one of its great arms and swung it down upon her with the most force that such a large entity was able to muster, traces of planar energy appearing within its movements.

All of a sudden, just as it was a single breath from striking her, its fist already nearing Wei Yi’s head, it froze up, the wood in its arm and shoulder becoming dry and unresponsive. Green toxins dripped out of it, the wood making up his limb looking dry and dead, and that condition soon spread to the rest of its body, leaving naught but a gigantic wooden husk standing before them, still looking fierce but containing no force at all.

The forces of the Floods Kings of Shi and the Keepers of Groves had been putting up a resistance at that point, but when they saw this the half that was locked in combat with the false and true Hunters of the Cosmos felt all of their fighting spirit drain away from them. While they didn’t think that their final technique, their last effort to truly have some success in battle, would be able to permit them a complete victory, especially not once those fully armoured in abyss armour and wielding black blades appeared, to have their technique fail this quickly and spectacularly was extremely embarrassing for some, and entirely demotivating to most.

Some began to throw down their weapons or simply lay down onto the ground, partly drenching themselves in the waters of the Flood Kings, and the rest of that half soon followed.

Once it stopped moving fully, Wei Yi approached it and looked through it with spiritual perception for a few moments before pausing on a portion of its chest. She raised her hand and condensed several points of the Defiler’s Point Beams technique, aiming them to fire outwardly before making them spin, shamelessly copying the way in which Ping Wu had made use of this kind of technique.

The thin beams cut a circle into the colossus, causing the portion they had separated to be easily parted from the rest with a light nudge from her killing will. It fell down onto the wet sand, poisonous water dripping from it, but she ignored it and peeled apart the wood to reach into the centre of the wooden mass as to uncover that which she was looking for. Fortunately for her purposes, this part of the wooden titan had been made of several distinct layers of wooden roots forming around the target of the technique, and so they were mostly easy to remove.

Finally, beneath all of that wood and plenty more of toxin-filled water, she was able to find a hint of skin, and then the rest of the figure it belonged to.

The man from the Flood Kings of Shi, whatever his name had been, was hardly in the best of states, with his limbs having been mostly devoured by the wood while much of his face had also been pierced by smaller wooden branches, but at the very least most of his torso had survived, with only the heart and chest being pierced. Because of this, the technique itself, and the poison that flowed through his system from a prolonged period of time, he had already perished.

“What an odd technique they decided to go for,” she muttered, mostly to herself, although she did not mind others hearing her, “This would’ve been fine against a large army of non-cultivators, and yet here they tried to oppose the fourth and fifth realm with it.”

Then again, such a physical and straightforward approach was working strangely well for the Hammers, who were still going strong in their fight against a larger number of enemies that had not yet been disheartened by the failure of their allies, although they did still seem more than ready to give up thanks to their inability to inflict a single proper disabling wound to any one of their foes. They had been going for some time, and yet all that they managed to leave on most of the Hammers was a series of splash marks and the occasional leaf or branch on their bodies, despite their attacks being great planar constructs of tidal waves and trees.

What made it particularly strange was that these Hammers were not above the Flood Kings and the Keepers of Groves in terms of realm, while many were even beneath them, and yet they were not only managing to shrug off most attacks one way or another, although it was still mostly via charging into them head on and smashing them, they also managed to inflict some injuries on their foes. With no better explanation just yet, Wei Yi presumed that their brute force and mindlessness somehow twisted the natural laws of the world in their favour. That sounded dumb, but so were they.

She wasn’t judging them by their appearances or previous actions either, but by the thoughts that they had during the several times that she had chosen to look through them with a spiritual will thread. They did not appear to be faking their simplistic behaviour, weakness to drugs, or anything else of the sort.

Regardless of the cause of their strange success, they were currently benefitting the Ascendant’s Arbiters and the Hunters of the Cosmos alike immensely, for the Hunters that split off to join in that confrontation barely needed to participate in order to inflict heavy casualties on their foes. Soon enough, with the combined forces of the two groups, the other half of the Keepers and Flood Kings surrendered to them.

Without the maintenance from the northern group, the one that had initially attacked Wei Yi’s camp, the bubble around the black sun disappeared, momentarily revealing it to the Hunters and Wei Yi.

“That… Whose creation is that?” Wu Yi Tai asked after marvelling at it for a few moments.

“I made it, but they managed to lock it away, failing to consider that it grows even with planar energy. Had we taken long enough, it would have devoured their barrier as well, then made a big hole in the desert before it finally dissipates,” she replied, “I don’t know whether this fulfils anything that you require from your techniques in your typical line of work, but I could share some of the principles with you at a later point if we manage to get along well enough. For now, take a step back… or fifty, if you don’t mind.”

“This entire situation was misunderstood, but… fine, I shall not stop you. This thing still seems to be growing, and the pull is becoming difficult to endure…” the general said, “Everyone, step back and let her do the work. Prepare a barrier of the inverse variety!”

His soldiers immediately followed his instructions, forming a circle around the black sun and plunging their blades into the ground. Their energy poured from them, quickly forming into a circular shield around the black sun that had initially been as dark as their blades, but quickly brightened and transformed from a black energy with a vague white corona to the absolute inverse. Quite clearly, that was what he had been referring to, and judging by the fact that the aura it possessed had inverted in much the same way, Wei Yi presumed that this was their technique of containing threats that were in some way similar to their own methods.

They positioned their barrier around her, and only protected the sides, presumably so that they wouldn’t need to expend their own energy on defending something that wasn’t relevant, or by containing something that could otherwise be dispersed through the open top. Given that the technique appeared to have no clear physical element, it was a highly suitable approach, and one that she would gladly commend them on if she didn’t die.

‘Again, I don’t think that I’ll die, but that does not stop me from being prepared for an outcome like that,’ Wei Yi thought, getting a little closer to the black sun, then raised her left hand and clicked her fingers, willing the great sphere of darkened energy to break apart.

In most techniques, that would be enough for a cultivator in control of a technique to break their planar construct, with even the physical motions hardly being required, but this Black Sun method had not been polished particularly well before use and worked by actively draining and feeding on the things around it in order to grow in strength. As such, it had a great deal of foreign matter and energy embedded somewhere within it that now needed to either be removed or completely torn apart into fundamental energy so that the black sun would be nullified.

Something like that was likely already partially complete, given the fact that what spiritual perception she had been able to pierce the sun with could sense no physical matter on the inside, but the question was whether the energy would remain volatile or not. Judging by a random guess that she made when using this method, there would be a greater chance of it still being rather explosive, potentially.

At this point, it was equivalent to her own height doubled in height, and as it was a sphere, it was thus equivalent in width and length. Such a thing suddenly exploding in anyone’s face would be dangerous.

For this reason, she had prepared her own method of defence, which was the last item that she had purchased at the auction, the thing enigmatically titled End, Signet Ring. At the time of purchasing it, she wasn’t entirely certain how it worked, since these items seemed to have been dug up rather than being produced by a more modern great arts master and thus lacked proper descriptions as could be easily confirmed by the way in which none of the items actually matched their intended purposes whatsoever. After all this time, however, she had figured out a very small degree of its ability, and one thing that she was nearly certain of was that it would be able to freeze or slow things down to some extent.

This had a varied degree of usefulness depending on what it actually did and how it did so, since freezing something with ice-type energy – or rather water-type, given that ice was merely a subset of the water element – would only have a limited on earth or on anything with a hot enough flame to melt and evaporate that energy, whereas something more fundamental might have a greater degree of effectiveness on everything.

No matter what it was, she was fortunately able to influence it with her own energy, and could make use of any delay in order to save herself or the people around her, depending on which one was in greater danger, so it seemed like a reasonable thing to use when her own defensive methods were rather limited due to her never focusing upon them.

The strongest barrier that she had made, or perhaps the most stable one despite the consequences, was the one around her land ship in the Kong Holy Grounds, and even that only barely sufficed.

As the control that she did have over the black sun attempted to force it to collapse, she quickly felt it destabilising and fluctuating as it did finally stop consuming the energy and the sand beneath it. However, that was not followed by the shattering or outright disappearance of the black sun, which would have been the ideal scenario, but instead a momentary pause within the entity’s activity that was clearly not going to proceed onto that.

Instead, after a moment of extreme silence, the dark suddenly exploded outwards, moving at an immense speed with the majority of energy being concentrated purely vertically, into the air and directly into the ground. All of that was extremely dangerous to be struck by, so it was rather fortunate that all that burst outwards was effectively only one percent of the black sun’s overall power.

That was still enough to kill anyone standing right next to it, though.

Somewhere amidst a black void, a woman floating freely within it was looking somewhere into the distance, her lone revealed purple eye focused on something unknown.

A sudden movement brought her just out of the way of an intense beam that shot through space and passed her, momentarily illuminating the darkness to reveal a strange room filled with all kinds of unsightly things.

“Sheesh, be careful with your quasars, would you? Now I need to rebuild the dimensional wall…”

The woman brushed the hair covering her right eye aside, glancing back in the direction of the beam once it passed, “That world is far too broken. Black holes beneath half-way…”

Due to her position, Wei Yi could be said to be in close proximity of the collapse of the black sun, and so she did not hesitate to point the signet of the ring at the incoming wave of raw energy that surged at her body and flood it with her own energy, excluding all but her planar energy due to the concerns of accidentally destroying yet another valuable item. It gathered within the signet, building up and up as if it was a bottomless pool that could endlessly devour anything placed inside of it, to the point that she grew rather concerned whether this wasn’t secretly an item made for the ninth realm.

However, just as the incoming blast from the black sun was about to come into contact with her outstretched hand, and thus the symbol on the ring itself, it activated without any warning whatsoever, a great deal of strange greyish energy surging out of the signet in an incredibly odd way. It was not her own energy converted into this grey light, but instead something brand new that emerged from the signet and was instead merely called by her own power.

That was a peculiar enough phenomenon on its own, but what it caused was even more significant.

When the grey light touched the surging power of the collapsing black sun, both of the waves of energy froze in the air, and they did not do so with a layer of ice covering them. Rather, their very existence stopped in time, exactly as they were, without a single thing changing while the rest of the energy shot right past her and impacted the circular barrier of the Hunters of the Cosmos. It channelled that overwhelming energy into the air, joining the beam that had exited the black sun a moment prior, completely flooding the area around her as well, entirely covering her from sight while the rest of the greyish light also spread around, blocking most of the stray energy.

It was incredibly intense even then, succeeding in slightly fraying and disordering her hair, although that was hardly as noticeable as the tearing of her skin and robes, with only star metal enduring it fully.

Fortunately, the explosion lasted for only a little while, for it was an explosion and not some permanent form of radiation that would forever mark the continent like the outcome of her bloodline activation had back at the Luo District. That too would likely fade in time, but nowhere near as quickly as the exploding star.

The grey light that had stopped the primary burst of energy from striking her began to dissipate a little before the rest of the energy had entirely faded, and when it did so, she could distinctly see the time flow for everything trapped within resuming right before her, giving her just enough time to dodge. Although the sudden burst of power did disturb the Hunters to a small extent, she doubted that they would be able to figure out the exact cause.

‘This signet ring is certainly not a normal middle-grade artefact, no matter how you look at it. Stopping time… less complex than undoing it or changing it entirely, but that is still extremely difficult for anything in the sixth realm or lower to achieve – by which I mean impossible, really. I am able to sense it just fine, so it is unlikely to be an otherworldly gift, but that just means I will be able to study it more,’ Wei Yi thought, removing it from her finger and storing it within the House of Gold before anyone had a chance to take particular note of it, for as the energy cleared, she and her nearly recovered body could soon be seen.

Once the explosion of the black sun passed, the general must have shouted some order to prompt his soldiers to raise the barrier, but it was one that she didn’t hear due to losing some internal parts of her ears in the explosion that she had only recovered after the command. Her spiritual perception was also contained to her own body for just a short while, as the explosion appeared more than capable of harming it in some way, even if it would only be a temporary one.

“This technique of yours, woman, is extremely dangerous, it seems,” Wu Yi Tai said, approaching her, “However, the battle seems-”

“If you haven’t noticed, an enormous beacon had just risen into the air. Anyone interested might be able to find us and kill us, capture us, or do whatever else they want to do to us. I recommend leaving this very moment, and chatting literally anywhere else, although I do have a place in mind. Also, my name is Wei Yi. Different character, though,” she interrupted him again, pointing into the distance.

He was clearly getting frustrated with how often she was taking charge of the situation, but as he had been able to see from the outside, the explosion of the black sun had indeed caused quite the spectacle for them and anyone in sight to observe it. Getting away would be prudent.

“Very well. We-”

“Take all of the prisoners that you can, and run that way. I shall join you in just a moment.”