V4C40: The Figures of the Past

Wei Yi found herself within an open area, standing atop a square region tiled with stone that was surrounded by grass in a circular shape, although the grass looked feeble and dried.

A sun shone down upon her, warm and bright, without any obstacles save for the small cloud near it, for around her was the sun, sky, and seemingly nothing else of note. In fact, it went further than that, as the grass did not stretch out forever, nor switch to sand or dirt or even stone. Rather than any of the more reasonable explanations, it instead stopped abruptly, and as her suddenly free spiritual perception was able to inform her, it did so at the edge of a cliff into nothingness.

Whether it was viewed with her eyes, spiritual perception, or the Vision of Law and that of Absolute, there appeared to be no particular differences or discoveries that she could make from mere observation.

‘This is… no, it doesn’t seem like a spatial realm, not as far as I can tell, but then where could I be?’ Wei Yi asked herself, finding to some alarm that the Mask of Yama was no longer able to keep her in a nearby plane of existence, forcing her to move it into the House of Gold so that it did not obstruct her, ‘Is there anything other than… oh.’

In her search of anything with some degree of value or purpose in this realm, whatever it was, she turned around and spread out her spiritual perception, only to find it almost immediately.

Right behind her was a large set of stairs, each one exactly identical to the two above and below it. Each step was wide enough for a foot to be confidently placed upon it, and tall enough to stop someone without abnormal height or unusually long legs from being able to step up more than a single step at once. Every individual step, despite having enough space for a dozen people to stand on it side by side, seemed to be carved from a single stone, each one placed above the other to leader into the sky, surrounded by only small clumps of dirt and dry grass growing within them.

She was able to see a total of a hundred steps, with nothing else to the left and right, but at the top was something obscured in clouds. Whatever it was, it must be large, for she could see numerous angled rooves that covered a large enough area even from her perspective to be able to fit a hundred rooms beneath them, and that was if they had been arranged in a flat plane beside one another.

What she saw there were several layers and heights, meaning that there might very well be several floors to that distant structure. With that in mind, if it was a single building and not several placed together atop some irregular hill that forced such construction and architecture, she couldn’t help but liken it to an eastern palace, the image of which she had once seen within the libraries of the Yi District. Such a palace was made of wood, with angled and tiled rooves, as well as plenty of paper sliding doors and paper windows that made it very different in appearance from the usual Western Continental residence or even manor.

‘I don’t know which one is more influenced by otherworldly entities, if either of these architectural styles even originated over here, but I have been curious to see one of those things in person,’ Wei Yi thought to herself, cautiously approaching the staircase while finding that the fog did not change based on her proximity, or with the added infusion of mental energy into her sight, which would usually help out at least a little.

Whatever this place was, it obscured much of her abilities, otherworldly or otherwise, so since it presented her with a set of stairs, she had little choice but to climb them.

The first step seemed no different from the rest, and was entirely unassuming in appearance. Had she seen it outside of this realm, she might have been convinced that there was nothing unusual about it at all, but she knew better than to presume this to be the case. If she was just brought her to climb an ordinary set of steps, that would be highly unusual.

As a result, she was not surprised in the slightest to find the world around her suddenly twist and warp, transforming into a strange scene wherein she witnessed the Yi District in flames… no, not fully. Only the parts that had burned when she had resided there, and when she had needed to witness the Great Yi Family attempting to tear everyone she had come to know down before coming after her with the same vigour.

There was an impression that she could turn around and flee from the scene, but she simply scoffed at that potential. What reason did she have to flee from the past?

Thus, she took another step, the scene instantly vanishing and the steps reappearing before her. As she saw this, she did not place her foot down right away, but instead looked around to check whether anything had changed. Nothing had, but that did make her ponder whether this was the full extent of what the stairs would throw at her. Out of all of the things that a staircase in a realm at the free disposal of someone in the seventh or eighth realm could throw at her, some simple memories from the past were hardly going to change her actions, regardless of which actions the realm wished to change, and she believed that if it had pulled in anyone with even a hint of desire to see the top of these stairs, they would also not be swayed by simple things like that.

‘The prime question here should really be whether I got pulled in here because I simply touched the door, or whether the door was a catalyst for some other reaction. Is it even connected to the Bai Ancestral Hall, or am I in some realm belonging to the Daoist Continent’s leaders?’

She naturally had many questions, but they could not be answered by thin air when she did not even risk voicing them, as that might either provoke a response from the realm, or perhaps even reveal that she was not somewhere else at all but instead trapped in some illusion which could prompt her to spill more and more of her history and life without her even realising that it was what occurring to her until it was far too late.

Even if she did know, there didn’t seem to be much that she could do to prevent such a thing.

For that reason, with her lacking knowledge of the situation and general concern about the situation, she placed her foot down on the second step.

Right away, a slight pressure fell upon her, trying to pin her to the ground and force her to descend, but it was far lighter than the one from the door, even if it did seem to penetrate her body and also affect her mind. In her eyes, the scene before her was more significant, since it once more came from her memory and tried to confront her, just as on the previous step.

This time, it was the scene from her first kill in the Kong Prison Realm, where she could see the Black Terror on the ground, her head absent and her body as yet otherwise untouched by Wei Yi’s hands.

‘Really? It is trying to make me turn around again, but it is doing a shit job, no other word to use here. To bring up an event that had prompted me to do my all without caring for the bindings of being some good person, acting to achieve something even if it will endanger others, when trying to make me back down is perhaps the worst thing that could have been done,’ she thought, only forced to think about it even for a moment as her foot appeared unable to rise from the step for a brief moment after she had set it down, as if specifically to force her to face the scenes from the past.

The moment that she was no longer restricted, she raised her foot again and moved onto the next step, finding the pressure upon her grow and the scene reform into the one from Beast’s Rest, where she had slain a number of figures that attempted to interrupt her rest.

It could obviously do nothing to stop her, so she stepped onto the next step, then the next, and carried on, taking the forced pause while merely reminding herself of what had happened, casually striding up as it went from the deaths that she had caused, to the kills committed by others in order to get at her or some group she was a part of, then changing back to the lives she had personally taken. Whatever this place was, it could freely grab things from her memory, and it did not seem reluctant to do so.

‘If this is caused by some asshole trying to look into my mind, I will be sure to remind them of the notion of privacy within one’s own mind, a concept that I am rather fond of. Then again, this should be some kind of high-grade illusory method to pull upon my own memories through my own mind rather than needing to extract and create them, so they might know nothing,’ she thought to herself.

At the twentieth step, the pressure was finally growing to be notable, but even then neither her body nor mind faltered. The scenes seemed brighter and more significant with each step, but she ignored them, for she didn’t care whether this was some test of her own consciousness, or an attempt to ward her off – she had done what she thought she needed to do, or what she wished to do, and she would not back down or undo anything unless she could obtain a greater path that did not require acting in ways that she herself might not be so fond of. There were certainly moments that she wasn’t too proud of, but she wouldn’t chastise herself for them, only learn from them to do more in the future.

Thus, regardless of the purpose of the world, she reached the fortieth step, approaching the middle of the significant events in the Kong Prison Realm as she did so, the pressure growing further to the point that it did finally require a bit of effort to ascend with each step.

Fortunately, it was still light and insignificant enough to let her keep going after a moment of reminiscence, in which she hardly learned a single thing since her Ascendant’s Library had kept track of everything she had ever done, and could be brought up even in this strange realm at any time. She had seen all of the memories the stairs showed her before, and she had already understood them then, and would not flee from them now.

‘In fact, all this seems to be doing is making me surer that I acted in the ways that I should have. I already know that I did not do everything perfectly – far from it, in fact – but I doubt that there are any in this world who could genuinely claim to have lived perfectly their entire lives. There are very few that could even approach perfection, and the person who created this is not one of them.’

The sixtieth step made the force acting upon her mind and soul even more prominent, but all that it was able to do was bring to her attention the fact that she had not yet done anything to reinforce the soul specifically. Her mind and body were enhanced, but the soul or spirit, if it was indeed a separate thing, could also benefit, prompting her to circulate her various energies in order to connect with this mystical part of herself and attempt to strengthen it. Due to the pressure on it, she was able to just barely feel it within herself, and it was this that allowed her to affect it.

Nothing that she had seemed perfect for interacting with it, but when all five forms of energy were combined in one consistent flow reminiscent of the array created by the Truth of the Universe for repelling the otherworldly azure light, an arrangement that seemed particularly effective on things that would drive people mad, she could distinctly sense a change. However, it came not just from her energy, but partly from her bones, which was not something that she expected to discover.

From them, a golden energy travelled up and out, diffusing throughout her soul, reminding her for the first time in a long time that she had consumed some kind of Golden Bone elixir a long time ago in the Kong District. It had become rather irrelevant with all of her physique cultivation but came up now.

It seemed that the elixir, whatever it had been meant for initially, could react with her energy, the pressure on the soul, and the particular flow that she had arranged with her five meridian networks, and thus release part of its effectiveness that had not yet been used into her spiritual side, fusing with it and stabilising it. The pressure quickly weakened, leaving her with little time to accomplish much with her energy, but she was able to tell that the decrease in pressure came from the fact that her soul was now much more able to resist it.

‘While I do not fully understand what I am doing, nor what good this might do for me in the future, I do know quite well that souls and spirits are relevant in this world. The Xin and Ling families have both dedicated a lot of time to studying them, and they might have even come up with some methods of enhancing their own spirits. If they are able to attack through them, having a stronger soul is clearly not a detriment to me, so I should go further. I’m sure there’s some of that golden energy left.’

Whether or not the creator of this realm could have foreseen it, rather than simply ascending the steps and becoming more assured of herself, she had also found a way to greatly benefit from them, and now had yet another motivation to ascend them.

Even if the top was an illusion and she would just be tossed out of the realm without any chance to make use of her soul for now, she would greatly benefit, and if the top would pose some risk to her soul, then she would be far more prepared for it than she would have been had she been permitted to go to the top effortlessly.

‘It does make me wonder what exactly the azure lights are,’ she thought as she stepped onto the sixty-first step, finding that the pressure grew just enough to get another drop of golden energy out of her bones, ‘They seem to have some relation to souls and spirits, at least in that the same methods can affect them, and they are not entirely outside of the control of the Planar Continents, but it is strangely difficult to identify them as anything. Just a bright, azure light, acting in semi-intelligent ways every now and then… What are they, and why are they in every otherworldly gift?’

She had plenty of other questions too, like why they could so easily be repelled by some array – the term easily here being used not to say that a ninth realm array was in some way simple to create or acquire, but that it was just one complex array rather than an incredibly complex network of them – but those could hardly be answered her. None of the memory provoking steps chose to bring them up directly, and no answers were given to any of her past memories, so she just kept going.

Each step gave her another surge of the energy from the elixir and forced her body and mind and to endure a greater force as their strengths balanced a little more than they had been prior to this.

On the seventeenth step, the pressure surged slightly, bringing out golden energy for two moments rather than one. Then, on the eightieth, it surged again, managing to remain powerful for three moments. It took significant effort to go through each step now, although certainly now due to the memories that they forcefully provoked, and it only got worse on the next series of steps, which forced even more of that golden light to pour out of her bones and flood her soul, not fusing with it as much as acting upon it and refining it.

Finally, it was on the ninetieth where the energy of the Golden Bone elixir, if it was even suitable to call it that given that it had done more for her soul than her bones, ran out and completed the process that had begun thirty steps ago. All of the energy that had mixed with the soul, now and before this, lit up alongside the array she formed with her meridian networks, temporarily pressing upon the soul for just a moment prior to the soul suddenly bouncing back.

All of that energy vanished from her body right away, leaving her only with a sensation that her soul had become stronger, a thing that she could hardly test or confirm when the pressure upon it fell also.

She took the next step, but the pressure did not return onto her soul, as if it had vanished entirely. It still pressed down her body, and still forced her to delay when she attempted to take another step right away, but when it did permit her to move on, she was still unable to sense a single thing upon her soul. That was unfortunate, given that she had intended to experiment more and see if the current flow of her energies could allow one of them to reinforce and enhance her soul directly, but it seemed that this would not be this easy. Although she still didn’t know what a stronger soul could allow her to do or to endure, nor whether there were any dangers directly targeting it out there in the world, she would hardly pass up on the chance to improve for free and without much trouble.

‘I can still sense that there is something different about me, but nothing I currently possess helps with detecting it. I’ll need to borrow Xin Fu for a bit when I get back to the Chao District and see if I can’t steal the three vision states from her,’ Wei Yi thought, getting onto the ninety-first step.

Since she was currently circulating her energy, which she did begin from the first step that tried to push her down just in case, she had also been refining her body this entire time, using both physique energy and her cosmic energy’s innate infusion of the elements to take advantage of the physical pressure as well as the spiritual. At this point, when she was nearly at the top, with the building at the peak still obscured but very much of interest to her, she felt that her body finally crossed a certain boundary.

It was not one of a physique cultivation stage, which she would have very much liked given how much that would do for her, but it was still undeniably significant to her, for it was one of the prerequisites for achieving the next realm. Within her physique meridian network, she felt one of the meridians near her neck suddenly light up with dawn and moonlight, filling her body with them for just a moment.

The light settled, condensing upon the meridian, surrounding and wrapping it in a double helix shape while continuing to flow passively, the strand of dawn light and moonlight alike permitting for energy to surge through them only to end up in the same meridian as they would have done otherwise. On its own, such a change was strange, and not entirely expected from what she had thought a physique vein would be, but she could sense the effect it had right away.

With one of the integral meridians transforming according to her physique, she experienced the physique energy within her entire body swell in power, her entire body suddenly feeling significantly stronger even though her actual strength had barely been affected by this.

What she was able to do with ease was take the next step, then the next, and then the one after that, with one more bringing her onto the ninety-ninth step of the staircase, with none of the steps managing to significantly impact upon her, just as they were now unable to affect her soul. Without those two pressures, all that the steps could do was remind her of the most recent events, of how Paragon had suffered while she had been away, but this step differed from the rest when she did not feel the ability to move on after just a moment.

She looked at the memory that it tried to present to her, but instead found that she could distinctly feel two choices, seeing them as well despite one of them being behind her. It seemed as if the staircase had been shrinking behind her, for her spiritual perception sensed solid ground behind herself at the level of the previous step alongside the word ‘Certainty’.

Meanwhile, in front of her, floating above the last step, partially obscured by a thick barrier of fog, was the word ‘Freedom’.

‘Interesting. Is this trying to test me, or is this some kind of trick where the right person would need to act differently from the common one to succeed? I care not for certainty, not if it is the certainty of something negative, so I have no reason to select anything other than freedom,’ Wei Yi thought, the most curious thing about this being the two words themselves, ‘I can see this being related to the Master of Yi City and his proposition that must have been provided to the four ancestors of the Bai family, with them being given either the certainty of their previous lives or the uncertainty of new ones, but I doubt even those most fond of Kong Shi Meng would say that he was promising freedom. Yi City is not exactly free, binding one with a different set of laws from the previous nations that had been there, but binding one nonetheless… Freedom is a restrictive thing as well, in a way… Hm.’

As she wasn’t even certain that this was the context in which she was supposed to interpret these words, she didn’t stand around and continue pondering, instead taking the next step without any further hesitation.

Just like the previous steps, this one caused the illusions around her to vanish, the two words going with them, the seeming flat ground behind her changing back to the stairs. However, she did not feel any kind of pressure fall upon her, nor did she see another illusion arise, as she was instead met with the dense layer of fog that slowly began to part.

It started at a snail’s pace, barely moving even when she tried to assist it with her breath – her lungs had developed similarly to the rest of her body, and could exert a great deal of force onto the outside world if needed – but it sped up until the fog was more akin to one of the larger waves that she had seen within the ocean between the Western and Eastern Continents. Wooden walls, paper doors and windows, and more of those slanted roof tiles were revealed to her soon, until the entire building was visible with perfect clarity.

She was able to confirm that this building did indeed resemble the palace from the books she had read, and that she currently stood at the entrance of a square courtyard. The palace was partially wrapped around it, with two sections of the house stretching out on both the left and right to envelop the courtyard, which lacked anything of particular note, being flat and empty.

However, she had little else to follow, so she proceeded into the courtyard with her energy flowing throughout her body just in case.

As she walked towards the middle of the courtyard, her ultimate target being the front doors that were at the other side of it, she saw the sun suddenly shift within the sky. It sank with great speed, practically falling beneath the horizon, as a moon rose to make up for the absence of light. Whereas the sun had been just like what one might see outside of whatever this place was, the moon was enormous, being nearly double the size of the natural moon, with the light from it being bright enough to cause the world around her to almost resemble an unusually silvery morning. It rose not in the same place as the sun, but from behind the large palace, perfectly halting just above the roof from her perspective.

In the courtyard itself, the light seemed to coalesce into a figure, whose body and face were covered by silver cloth that resembled the robes of a priest or priestess, being loose yet fitting closely around the figure’s body and hiding any trace of their skin, revealing only long white hair, and showing their red eyes. There were no recognisable characteristics of either gender, nor could Wei Yi’s spiritual perception pierce the cloth or anything else.

She hardly needed to do so to guess that this would not be a friendly encounter, for the figure reached into the air while lowering its head, resembling the figure of a servant or vassal of another lowering themselves as they prepared to receive an item from their leader. What made that comparison so much more apt was the fact that only a moment after she had assumed that position, the very moonlight shining down upon the palace courtyard thickened and grew denser in front of her hands, forming into a silver scythe that was almost unimaginably intricate, as if it was not a true weapon but a relic and purely ornamental in purpose.

A single long piece of metal was missing from the central portion of the scythe’s blade, creating a strange groove on one side of the item that was absent from another, which was what made her believe that this was not an intentional design decision by whoever had created it.

Regardless of that particular detail, it seemed that the figure looked towards Wei Yi, then pointed towards her with the end of the scythe’s shaft.

‘Really? This figure from the past, or whatever this even is, wants to fight me? Not even going to explain why? Whoever set this place up has no care whatsoever for those that might have no idea what they’re getting into, like me,’ Wei Yi thought to herself, readying herself by changing her left hand to claws while placing her gauntlet onto her right hand, then deciding to risk it by saying, “Are you sure that there won’t be any explanation of why we’re doing this?”

No reply came back from the figure, although the way that it remained static while she was speaking and preparing brought to her attention the fact that the figure seemed to resemble the specific one from the abyssal sculptures even more so than she had anticipated. Just as the figures there were lacking in precise mouths and features, so was the one before her missing a clear mouth, distinct nostrils, or anything else that one may typically find on a human being, at least as far as she was able to tell through the silver fabric.

Aside from meaning that it couldn’t realistically talk to her even if it really wanted to, it made her question just what this place was. Why were the ancestors of the Bai portrayed in this manner despite this place likely having been made at a time when they were still within the memories of the creators?

It was odd, but there was little that she was able to do when the figure didn’t bother to say anything or couldn’t do so. Perhaps it was some intentional restriction, or maybe the one or ones that had made the area she was in didn’t anticipate that anybody would be attempting to speak with the historical figures, but whatever the truth was, she would not be receiving her answer from the mouthless figure, so there was no point in waiting for it. She’d beat it, if possible, then learn the purpose later.

If the purpose was something unreasonable or unnecessary to her, which it had some chance of being since she had merely approached the Bai Ancestral Hall and hadn’t yet begun to search through some particular part of it, then she could track down the people responsible, or their descendants, and share her opinion about the realm with them, if they cared to listen.

‘Well, I won’t be asking them if all of this is to get a date with a guy, not that it would be likely,’ she thought, raising her hands to the level of her chest, her claws ready and surging with energy.