V4C32: A Woman Lost in Time

Perhaps unsurprisingly, while that did snap her out of the contemplative state that she had been in, she still looked at her in disbelief and almost amusement, perhaps interpreting the words as a joke. Anyone else would have likely done so, and it was hardly unexpected, but in one rare instance, Wei Yi believed that there might just be a chance of her being right.

“Y-You’re joking, right? That is just… well…”

“Look, I know that very well. However, I think that it may be reasonable, so I will attempt to explain it to you. One million, two hundred and one thousand, five hundred and twenty-three years ago, more or less, the age of Yi City had begun. A man known today as the Master of Yi City had moved out of what is now known as the Yi District and quickly managed to gain control of much of the Western Continent, which is where we are now, just in case you know it by a different name,” she explained to the horned woman, noticing that the cheery attitude that momentarily appeared was quickly fading, “If there’s anything you don’t understand, or if you wish to have some time to process it, do tell me.”

“No, I… I’ve just never heard of any of these things, apart from the Western Continent. That’s what we called it as well.”

“Alright. Back then, in just a few years, the Master of Yi City spread his control over the Western Continent and created a series of twenty-four major districts, each one ruled by their own respective family, and a number of auxiliary minor districts, without a specific family to keep them under control. With them, he spread various advancements and techniques all over the Western Continent and protected it from various threats like Primordial Deities and ancient entities like hostile dragons.”

“The place where we are now… Is it near one of those districts? Did it have a name this whole time, or have those kinds of things changed in recent memory? I… I and my family didn’t get out of our area much, so maybe we just missed all of this, but we did know the name of the nearest city!”

“Where we are now should be somewhere between the Ju District to the west, and the Ping District to the east. Then, further away, the Chao District is to the north, then to the south-west is the Chu District, and to the south-east is the Ning District… Judging by your expression, you don’t know any of those, do you?” Wei Yi asked, hardly requiring the explicit nod to understand the situation, “It is for this reason that, despite the seeming impossibility of it, I am forced to assume that you have to have come from a time before then, since you would have had to know at least one of these names had you lived in the modern times.”

The horned woman’s expression sank.

Had she not already cried her heart out by this point, there might have been more tears emerging, but instead she just sat there and stared at the ground. It took her some time to comprehend just what had been explained to her, and even then, it did not seem to be sufficient for her to truly wrap her head around it.

“I… I would like to see the place where our home was, just to be sure. Please. I… I mean, you don’t have to, but… I…”

“Alright, calm down. Is it to the north of here, or wherever you entered this cave?”

“That’s right, I think…”

“In that case, I have no issues with bringing you there, since it is on the way anyway. I am intending to head north, and if you do not wish to remain at whatever remains of your home, I can bring you over to the fortress in which I live,” she said, glancing at the chains, “Before then… try to stay very still.”

Although that was blatantly a rather difficult task when Jia Rong’s arms may have been stretched to their limit for a whole million years, if not more, the woman did her best to do that very thing. As soon as she managed to stabilise her quivering arms, Wei Yi approached one of the chains and grabbed them, examining them closely and confirming that they had the same odd property as the stone within the depths of the cave. For whatever reason, despite them seemingly being made of entirely ordinary iron, these chains were far stronger than they should have been.

The horned woman, who appeared to be in the peak of the first realm, would have been able to break through them on her own with just the energy that she possessed, and Wei Yi could have snapped them with an accidental press upon the metal with just a little bit more energy than she needed, but she could not do the same here. Instead, the chain forced her to draw upon her physique energy to amplify her strength to a rather extreme degree before she was finally able to snap one chain in half.

Jia Rong’s arm immediately dropped to the floor, striking the stone with quite some force as her body had likely forgotten that it could even more those muscles, but she said nothing and slowly tried to recover while keeping her other arm still.

‘Alright, so I can already notice certain interesting matters here, besides the fact that she seems to be very keen to follow my commands and instructions, not entirely unlike Min Lian. I have obviously not done anything to her mind and have even kept my spiritual will threads out of it, so that should not be a possible cause. Instead, she is likely keen to be helpful to her imminent saviour, or so it seems, at least…’ before she came to any wrong conclusions, she quickly asked, “Hold old were you, by the way?”

“Seventeen… I’d thought I’d be eighteen or nineteen if I did ever emerge, but…”

‘Long life expectancy without food, water or energy, but that’s fair enough for a teenager like her. With her having entirely lost track of time within this cave, and without much outside stimulus to be seen, she has likely not advanced much in age… Hopefully, she won’t try and see me as her mother, since that would just be unfortunate,’ Wei Yi thought, stepping over to the other heavy chain, ‘The other fact is that she has survived here for far too long, and so has everything else. If this place has truly been here like this for a million years or more, which it would have been so long as nothing about the history of Yi City has been falsified, then all of this should have crumbled long ago… Something isn’t entirely right here, but it doesn’t seem to be an illusion or a trick… That she can speak the same language as I without any significant difference is curious enough, actually. The otherworldly demons would be surprised, of that I am sure.’

She grabbed one of the thinner links and, after applying a similar level of pressure, managed to break it apart, letting the chain fall apart and permitted Jia Rong’s arm to be freed from it, with it also falling limply onto the ground. Her other arm and hand were slowly returning to life, so she was able to support it with them and didn’t have to withstand the cold stone ground again.

The chains had been wrapped around both of the horned woman’s arms, and so they could be shaken loose without much difficulty.

“How do you feel? Do you require any degree of healing and recovery, or would you be able to get going soon?” Wei Yi asked, not just because she was rather keen to move on and get to dealing with the Greats from Paragon, but also due to finding that most of the vital elements within the entirety of the woman’s body were in a perfect condition, as if she had not been sitting in chains for a million years without any sustenance, proper rest, or anything else that’s vital to one’s survival.

“Uhm, I might… be fine, actually. It’s just that my hands and fingers…”

She showed them to Wei Yi within the darkness, although the Ascendant had already noticed it herself while she was removing her chains. Just like horns had grown atop her head for no clear reason and without obvious purpose, the woman’s fingers had also turned to claws of the same black bone that made up her horns, not unlike Wei Yi’s killing will state.

Just like the claws that the Ascendant possessed, they were not too much longer than her fingers would have been, and despite their sturdy and imposing appearance, they did little to limit the range of movement for her fingers, and they were also not sufficient to pierce her crimson skin without a degree of effort. Fortunately, these things did not extend to her feet, to which she rose after a short while, and little of her body was affected to any significant degree by whatever had caused her transformation in the first place. The only potential oddity that Wei Yi noticed was the fact that she had a head of full, ridiculously long, luscious hair, but none below, although perhaps the demonic transformation got rid of that in the same way that Wei Yi had resolved it herself.

To confirm this for herself, Jia Rong moved about her fingers, wiggling and bending them both to regain her sense within them, and to understand just what she was able to do with her changed body.

It did not take long for the issue of the aforementioned lengthy hair to arise.

“It looks a little more believable because of this, but it seems that my hair has grown way longer than the height of my body,” the horned woman stated, trying to find the end of one of the strands while she looked to Wei Yi for aid, “I’m not sure what would be in it, and I don’t think I want to carry that much hair around… um… could you… cut it, somehow?”

Disregarding the shyness with which she had asked for assistance, reached into the House of Gold, removed one of the less useful items that she had stuffed into it just in case, and quickly shaped it into a perfectly sharp blade with which to give her a quick haircut. For a moment, Jia Rong flinched when the knife came into some proximity with her, so to make things easier and give her more space to potentially change her mind in the future, Wei Yi decided that she would trim it until it was about as long as her own hair, then leave something more suitable for cutting hair for her in the fortress.

The woman had said that she wished to see her own home first, but there was no chance of something like that still standing regardless of the strange temporal properties of the area, which did seem confined only to the cave, not the area around it. As such, there would be no other place for her to go.

Fortunately, the transformation from human to whatever she could be said to be now did not impact the durability or strength of Jia Rong’s hair the same way as Wei Yi’s own cultivation changed her own, and thus it was easily severed by the regular methods of hair cutting that no longer had any effectiveness on her. With the additional development of her recent physique cultivation, it would likely require a high-grade method in order to be able to trim her hair in the future.

“There… How’s that? I shouldn’t have missed anything, but this should be enough for you to do… whatever you want with it, really, so long as you take a bath… or fifty. Out of all of the things that had stopped for you, it seems that the accumulation of dirt has not. Also, your hair is unfortunately dry, which I may be able to assist if I just…” she released a sphere of her lifeforce and then focused upon it, applying the Dao of Law onto it as much as she possibly could within the overpowering force of whatever force occupied this cave, “Alright, I have not tried this, so if something strange occurs, please don’t blame me.”

“I’d never blame you! You freed me! Even if I have to walk back all on my own, you had given me hope just when I thought that I would lose it all… or so it seemed, anyway…”

“Not going to do that. Brace yourself,” Wei Yi said, sending that sphere of lifeforce into the horned woman’s body and watching carefully to see what the result of it would be. She had already been providing a certain amount of energy to her, but this was a directed effort to repair the hair that had grown out, and it was difficult to be sure on anything when it came to matters of her and hair.

However, there seemed to be no extreme changes even after quite a while, with only the countless strands of hair upon her head slowly getting slightly more shiny and full, regaining the lustre that they must have had when she had first been placed into this cave. It was dark, causing the shine of Wei Yi’s currently glowing eyes to be particularly prominent within it, and blended well with her crimson skin in terms of the aesthetic value. Without that mass of hair behind her, and with her no longer being pinned to the wall, she looked rather beautiful, except that her mind had clearly still not aged sufficiently to match her current body.

Her certain behaviours aside, she practically radiated an aura of youth while her body was all grown up and mature, and being a forty year old herself, Wei Yi was not going to do a thing until she matured in mind just as she had in body, whether she was really a hundred, thousand, or even millions of years old at this point.

“It seems to all be fine! Look, my hair is all nice and silky again!” Jia Rong said, perfectly exemplifying Wei Yi’s earlier thoughts on her mental age.

“Indeed, it does appear to have recovered quite well. Was it black when you went in here, or has that also changed?” she asked, curious to confirm whether the crimson-skinned woman was simply unable to notice the horns and claws, or if there was something that affected her perception until recently.

“Yes, that’s always been that way.”

“Hm, a nice colour. Anyway, if you have nothing here that you would like to collect, then I would like for us to get going. Before I went in here, I was in a bit of a hurry, after all, and while I will not say that I consider this to be a waste of time in any way, anything that could be done on the move should be done on the move.”

“I should be able to go right away! Well… my legs and knees in particular are less sore than I thought they’d be after a day, not to mention years…”

“And you speak the exact same language as I, and your energy hardly appears… stale, if you will, as it does sometimes in the case of particularly old figures attempting to masquerade themselves as younger individuals,” she nodded, “This whole place is rather odd, and I would like to understand what had happened in order to bring you here, and to seal your life away for that long. As always, no need to answer if you do not wish to do so, but what had happened to seal you in this place?”

As she asked, she softly took the horned woman’s hand and led her out of the cave, step by step, allowing her to walk as slowly as she needed to. Jia Rong may not have felt any significant soreness, but as they had already seen with her hands, she could forget how to make use of something after a long period of not needing to use them. Her hands were still something that she could move around, even if there was no benefit to doing so, but due to the position that she had been forced into for however long she had spent beneath the ground, there was nothing at all that she could do with anything below the waist, which made leaving her to walk a dangerous prospect.

They continued on for some time before either one spoke, giving them some time to return to the parts of the caves where there were still traces of light, and where sound could travel, and where the air had moved within the last million years. Their features became clearer, the glow of the Superior Bright Star illuminated more, and they were clearly nearing the surface, slowly but surely.

“I… I should tell you… I, I and my family, lived in the forest, near the mountains but not in or on them. We had a house a short distance from the nearest town, and we lived there happily. My mother was able to make use of planar weaving to heal people, to create interesting things, to use… well, magic!”

“Sorry to interrupt right away, but what do you mean by planar weaving? On that matter, do you know about planar cultivation, or planar energy as a whole?”

“Hm… I don’t know anything about cultivation. We grew some things in the garden, but we had been able to purchase most things from the market… not what you meant, I guess…” Jia Rong paused when she noticed the slight frown on Wei Yi’s face, “Planar weaving was a sort of… uh… spellcasting. My mother could grab energy from the air, control it with something inside of her body, and do as she liked with it, controlling it into spells and manipulating it as she wanted.”

“Right, well, planar cultivation is very likely to be the absorption of that energy you were talking about, the processing and adaptation to it, and then the usage of it in a similar manner. For example, this sphere of energy,” she raised a hand and manifested such a sphere, “is likely to be the energy your mother was able to use. Now, however, we store it within the dantian, which is near the abdomen, inside of your body. You have one as well, and, at the moment, you appear to be at the peak of the first realm of nine in cultivation.”

The horned woman felt up her bare stomach, with the minimal quantity of cloth on her body only barely keeping her top covered, and obvious found nothing there, “I don’t really know what that means, but I was beginning to show similar abilities as well, slowly.”

“It could be interesting to see it one day, if you manage to figure it out. So, what happened?”

“Planar weaving, it… people appreciated it, but at the same time, it was seen as something unnatural. It really was, given everything that my mother could do, but I and most of the people that she had helped with it saw it as a blessing, a fortunate power to have no matter what you were up to, or who you wanted to help. Others… didn’t see it… that same way. They called it evil. Devilish. Demonic.”

‘Oh, that’s just… fucking great… I can already guess what happened just based on that. A damaged and destroyed home, death of her mother and possibly all other family…’

“One day… one day, all of the people from the town came with torches… not even because of that, but because my mother had failed to save someone when he was out of her reach, a day’s travel away. They had all gotten used to her abilities, and when they didn’t work…”

Tears were returning to her eyes as she spoke, and while Wei Yi would hardly tear up at such a thing after everything she had also been forced to endure, she understood her very well. Had she been there when her own parents were killed for a flimsy reason that the Greats had decided to come up with at the same, and if she had then been sealed away in time only to return far later, she would have likely viewed things in the same way.

For that reason, she pulled the horned woman closer and placed a hand on her shoulder, pulling her into a faint embrace while she was able to do little more than that.

“My mother… she had been committed to not hurting people… she had not wanted to do it… and they… they burnt the house, killed… everyone. My brother, sister, father… then her… and when they found me… they decided that it wasn’t enough… they didn’t just want to kill, they wanted someone to suffer… so they brought me into a cave, dragging me, hitting me… I had tried to fight back, but I had no strength at all… I was just a girl, it had never occurred to me that this kind of thing would happen,” Jia Rong said, taking a few moments to breathe, “For some reason, they had that place prepared… maybe they had wanted to put my mother there, but didn’t… so I went up instead, chained up, forced to sit there, as the lights from their torches receded… and I was left in the dark. In silence. All alone…”

At that moment, they found the first trace of light falling upon them, and emerged into the outside world. Jia Rong’s eyes were still flooding with her own tears, with her only being able to follow Wei Yi’s exact movements to get outside, but at that moment, she confidently pointed in a direction.

Perhaps it was due to her tears rather than despite of them, as she would have very likely not recognised the area outside of her cave. The ancient aura still hung around the outside, but in comparison to what it was on the inside of the cave, and on the mountain itself, it was incredibly weak, and the ground beneath their feet was only a little bit tougher than what it ordinarily should have been. In other words, the region should look entirely different from what the horned woman remembered, and thus sight would only inhibit her.

Wei Yi effectively carried the sobbing and crying woman in the direction that she had indicated, and although she knew that she wouldn’t possibly be able to figure out where to stop on her own, Jia Rong was clearly immersed in the past. Perhaps she felt that she was reversing time, and that she could end up at her old home without a single thing missing, including her family.

After a certain period of time, she did indeed tap Wei Yi’s hand on her shoulder several times, then freed herself from the embrace and walked forward on her own.

She did not go far until she stopped and wiped the tears from her eyes, straining them to see clearly within the bright sunlight, looking upon a particular spot. For a few moments, her expression was both hopeful and knowing, her eyes taking a while to adjust to exactly what they had to deal with. Nevertheless, she stood tall and steadfast, waiting patiently for her to be able to see the world in front of her.

When she did, however, she felt as if she had been stabbed in the heart a few dozen times. The area had changed, just as Wei Yi had told her, but in her eyes, it was still so painfully similar. She was almost able to recognise where her home would have stood, where a small path would have led from it, where the garden would have been, where each of the doors, walls, windows and fences would have been positioned. It felt as if she could recognise so much of this place, so long as the light hit it in the right ways to make the resemblance most obvious.

However, as the same time, everything that was different seemed positioned in just the right manner to make it clear that there was no chance for her to still be in the past. Blatant obstacles that her family couldn’t have been managing obscured the spot for their garden, the foundations of their home, the location of the footpath, the last of which had outright turned into a shallow crag.

It pained her to see such a thing. So close… It was so close!

The horned woman took a step forward, her teeth and fists clenched, her eyes dry for the moment, as if she thought that she would see something different, something to indicate that there was even the slightest trace of her family remaining.

There was nothing. How could there have been? In the past, their area was ravaged by the mob that had come to hunt them down, and they would have obliterated everything in their path, so nothing would have stood even had she emerged far earlier than this. Now that more than a million years had passed, nothing could not have possibly returned to something, not without it belonging to some other family, in some other place, without the same points that had brought her back here in the first place. Obviously, there would also be no graves, for who would take the time to bury the remains of her family and maintain them?

It had been a fool’s errand from the start, a foolish hope that she could somehow discover a miracle greater than being alive and rescued after all this time.

While she had been beneath the ground, away from the light, a sea of feelings and thoughts all gathered within her mind, expanded further and further even if she didn’t realise the full extent of it back then. Jia Rong had pondered what she might do if she was freed only a short time after, what she thought should have been done to the killers of her family, and far more than that, but all of it was now worthless, useless, and entirely pointless. It only filled her head with sorrow.

So, she let it all go. She raised her head and let out a lengthy cry that contained all of those emotions, freeing them to the outside world. All of the hopes and dreams that she had about a world which would now never come to pass.

Wei Yi barely had a moment to deliberate on whether it would be best to just let her get things out of her system or to come to her and try to make her feel better, but a great deal of energy suddenly surrounded the horned woman. It burst from her body, exploding outwards, rapidly covering the entirety of the region as it blasted past her and the few trees that stood here. The trees, being as weak and dry as they were, crumbled quickly, but what was most shocking was that Wei Yi herself felt a great deal of pressure crashing into her, the power being almost equivalent to her own physical strength as her peak.

Furthermore, as that energy surged out, she could feel the cultivation of Jia Rong push through into the second realm without any clear obstacle, bypassing any kind of breakthrough process entirely and achieving both the last perfected stage and a perfected first realm without any clear action on her end in order to achieve this.

‘Is this… what people feel like when they see me suddenly reach new heights? Wait… No proper planar pool, only a vague cloud of planar energy of the fire and pure element… She hasn’t acquired either the perfected benefits, nor the second realm benefits… What exactly is happening here?’ Wei Yi questioned, trying and failing to understand either the source of that absolute power coming from the horned woman, nor where she had suddenly gotten her cultivation from.

The fact that she was somehow in the first realm without even knowing that cultivation existed was one matter, since she could have theoretically absorbed enough energy without even knowing it within a million or more years, but to suddenly break through on the spot was an entirely different matter.

After a while, the scream died down, and the woman lowered her head, before it suddenly snapped to the side, looking directly at the Ascendant. The dark green eyes that were usually present had vanished, and in their place were eyes akin to that of a serpent, with tall and thin pupils surrounded by scorching flame and blazing light, partly enveloping her face with the light of the flames. They looked wild, filled with an immense fury that no mortal being could match, and as her lips parted and jaw lowered, slightly, her sharp fanged teeth were even more prominent than before.

Just as suddenly, the flames went out, her mouth closed, and her gaze returned to normal.

“S-Sorry, I… I’m not sure what just happened…” Jia Rong said, looking down right away as she apologised, “I didn’t mean to…”

“It’s fine. Whether you are referring to the crying or that stare… Clearly, things are difficult for you, still, so I would just like to repeat my offer from before. Unless you wish to stay here and try to make do of what you have here, I would like to invite you to Paragon, the fortress in which the Ascendant’s Arbiters attempt to free the world. You don’t need to participate, if you don’t want to,” Wei Yi added.

“I… There’s nothing here. I should have known that… I’ll go. No… I’d like to help, as well. If I even can.”

“Then welcome aboard, Jia Rong. Now, if you wouldn’t mind, we need to get to running, and we need to do so right away. Do you feel that you can?”

The horned woman didn’t say anything, and just nodded.