V4C49: The State of the East

It took some time for things to be organised, and for people to get used to not only the existence of spatial gateways between two districts, but also the presence of an entirely unknown fortress out in the sands that was now occupied by an immensely powerful force. What was immediately obvious to the armed forces of both districts was that guards for merchants would be far less sought after now.

To cross the great gap between the two districts, all that one needed to do now was just head to the centre of their district, and use the gateway to come over to the other one. If someone was in any danger of being robbed during that action alone, then they may not be a particularly good merchant due to the high risk that anything they may be attempting to sell would be stolen from them. Unless they could somehow sell an item immediately after acquiring it, none of their haggling abilities would have any use.

Still, the vast majority of warriors had never been focused entirely on guarding traders that usually went between the two districts – none of them were present in the area, at the very least, as they were presumably out focusing on guarding those very traders as they journeyed between the Chao and Bai Districts – so it wouldn’t affect them all that much. There were still plenty of sand planar beasts out there that could be slain and harvested for some degree of profit, so it was all fine.

For most of these people, what was far more interesting and intriguing were the gateways through which they could only see faint glimpses of something.

Naturally, despite what Wei Yi had said, many had attempted to peer or outright breach the gateways, with most doing so in what they thought to be an inconspicuous way, perhaps failing to realise that even if they stood at their district and acted calmly, they would still be noticed. The gateways that were opened up within their district weren’t mere routes of transportation, but were also ways for the Ascendant to spy upon even those in the seventh realm without them having a single clue that she was doing it.

While it wasn’t as effective as the stabilisation node in Paragon, which allowed her to look over the entire fortress due to directly anchoring the Kong Prison Realm upon it, she was still able to reach out with her spiritual perception from any one of the gateways as if she was standing right inside of it, reaching out for hundreds of metres without issue.

As the nature of her spiritual perception made it nearly invisible, and since it was channelled through the gateways rather than through her own body, anybody that was able to pick up on it would likely presume it to be the consequence of the gateways rather than something that she was up to. Most people didn’t have a spatial realm within their dantian, after all, nor would they imagine that someone at the peak of the fourth realm would have a highest-grade spatial realm just sitting within their dantian as if it wasn’t some precious commodity. Furthermore, very few owners of spatial realms had gateways to work with, and so they wouldn’t know exactly how they worked.

One thing that gateways were highly effective against was blocking people from entering, especially when the power of stabilisation nodes was combined with a high-grade spatial realm, a seventh realm spatial spirit, and a powerful Endless Monolith overlooking the Kong Prison Realm.

Due to this, none of the attempts to breach the gateways succeeded, and all that they did get to witness was the gateway expand to permit the people of the Ascendant’s Arbiters through them.  The moment that one of them attempted to enter while someone else was going through, a powerful force threw them away so that they stopped meddling with things.

Eventually, they did get tired of attempting things that wouldn’t have a single chance of working at their realm and returned to the districts to which they belonged, with the Chao Patriarch and the Bai Patriarch being asked to return the next day, after sunrise. There were things that needed to be done, but they could only be worked on after all of the soldiers had a rest, and everyone had the opportunity to get used to the new state of things.

The problem with attempting to gobble up as many districts into an alliance as early as possible was that none of them would have a reason to trust that this would last, even with spatial-level abilities.

So long as there were enough districts, one could easily decide to take advantage of the situation, rob the others, then forcefully shut down the spatial gateway and either use the items acquired for their own benefit, or effectively donate them to the Greats in the hopes of earning rewards. Whether or not they would actually get anything was an entirely different matter, since all that would be needed to cause such a reaction was a loose alliance with too many members to be certain about their relations with one another.

Although Wei Yi might be able to get more of them onto her side if she rushed to as many different districts as possible in the hopes of finding amicable Patriarchs or something akin to what she found in the Bai District, it would then be far more fragile than a smaller alliance.

It was also more difficult to get groups on her side when there was little backing to her faction, which would be improved once it was known that the Bai and Chao Districts both joined her side. Then, less effort would be required to pull in those that are already predisposed against the Greats, and the districts that are of another mind about them would also have more of a reason to presume that they would be risking too much by not joining the Arbiters, rather than the other way around.

To put it another way, she essentially needed to decrease the uncertainty about her own group until it was far clearer in the eyes of the Patriarchs of the other districts, and provide the information that would make them more inclined to side with her. She was already doing that by being as straightforward and open about her intentions as she could be, and would keep making more and more about herself known the more districts she ventured into and got some allies in. With several Patriarchs and districts behind her, while her own strength wouldn’t be fully explained, it would be backed up in a way that all people of Yi City understood.

She was also looking to reduce her own uncertainty about matters, so, after she had been delayed by the Chao District’s spatial stabilisation point, she decided to take a close look at both it and the one in the Bai District, which had proved significantly easier to use than the other point.

For the guarantee of accuracy, she made sure to look over things herself, and not through the gateways, just in case the presence of her anchor, core, and physical body allowed her to uncover something of interest. Although the Bai Patriarch was cautious about her activities, as he was right to be, he settled on staying away from them as he had no use for the stabilisation point in the foreseeable future, and wouldn’t care whether it was damaged or even outright destroyed unless the Arbiters won.

In that case, they would have plenty of access to spatial materials, since the energy of the world would rise with them and repairing a mere stabilisation point would be easy.

Even then, she didn’t see much of a reason to be observed with such scrutiny, as she wasn’t even intending to take apart the spatial stabilisation point. All that she focused on was the channels inside of the stabilisation point, as well as how it connected to the arrays around it, where it supplied some degree of energy and where it was provided energy.

The points were interesting in that they were actually rather difficult to distinguish from the arrays around them without very careful scrutiny, or the knowledge of what they looked like and where they were placed. It was very likely that she had come across more of these in the previous districts that she had visited, and that there might have even been a large number of other points in the two districts that she had managed to ally the Arbiters with, but they were very difficult to spot due to their particular structure.

So far, all three points that she had gotten to interact with lacked any precious materials such as spatial metal, at least as far as she was able to tell, and were effectively part of other arrays or inscriptions. They acted upon a connection with a spatial realm and allowed a breach in space to expand and become more stable through the dual forces of the point itself as well as the array that it was connected to, with even the Chao District’s node being connected to an array which simply acted much like an inscription.

This kind of system was rather interesting to observe, but it did make the matter of understanding the exact nature of a stabilisation point rather difficult. Each one differed from the other in the exact way they acted upon space, even while achieving identical results, and had very different structures.

The stabilisation point at Paragon was obviously the most refined from her perspective, as it fused perfectly with the enormous array that the fortress was all part of and had the simplest network of channels within it. That meant that Kong Shi Meng had gotten better at the creation of these nodes by the time that he got around to making the fortress, which, considering the fact that it would have been built after the Chao and Bai Districts, only made sense. Then, the one at the Bai District was similar, implying either that they had managed to create a decent point by accident or that the point may have been rebuilt after the one at Paragon with the newfound knowledge from that time.

As she had noticed before, the Chao District’s stabilisation point was notably different from the other two, and looked to have more complex channels intertwining with one another in a web that was also quite a bit larger than the stabilisation points of the other district, as well as the fortress. It was essentially as crude as the majority of the Chao family’s creations were believed to be by those that had never encountered them. Judging from the construction of this particular stabilisation node, perhaps those stereotypes weren’t unearned or undeserved.

‘Indeed, it might be that this point has been created not by Kong Shi Meng, but by some other individual, attempting to learn from his creation and improve it without comprehending the basics of arrays or inscriptions, thus adding more instead of decreasing the overall complexity of the stabilisation point,’ she thought while looking over the node.

The Master of Yi City might have been one of the first to bring humanity to the peak of the seventh realm and beyond, but once everyone else figured out what they were doing, others could have begun to create their own spatial items and nodes to interact with them. It was likely that the latest districts would have completed the largest number of such nodes on their own, thus meaning that they wouldn’t have the same level of quality as the creations of the Master of Yi City due to their inability to make use of an incredibly powerful otherworldly gift to calculate the optimal method for arranging spatial nodes for them.

In fact, the modern Patriarchs might not even be aware of the exact number and nature of most of these nodes, so the Chao Patriarch showed her to the one that he knew, while the Bai Patriarch did the same for a different node.

Whether the node at the Bai District was one made by Kong Shi Meng or one that the Bai family had simply managed to create with a reasonable degree of quality was another matter, and not one she wished to guess at yet. At the moment, while she was able to benefit from the stabilisation nodes, she wouldn’t fully understand them until she got anywhere near to properly comprehending and sensing spatial fluctuations like someone in the seventh realm could. With her unique state, it might only require the sixth realm, but it would still not be immediate.

Until she understood such things as more than mere concepts, she wouldn’t be able to realise the true differences between the various spatial nodes around the world and couldn’t use them fully.

“So, how long are you going to be staring at this? You may not be standing in the way, but a lot of people have gathered around to observe you,” the Bai Patriarch’s voice suddenly reached her, with his figure appearing by her side as he calmly shooed away the people that had begun to gather around her, “Is there anything that you’ve obtained from it?”

“You were fine with simply sitting about and watching, so I assumed that you didn’t mind.”

“Perceiving that from such a distance… As new allies, could you not share exactly how you have managed to accomplish something like this?”

“No,” Wei Yi said, rising and promptly turning away, “I can allow everyone in the alliance, meaning everyone within the districts that have sided with the Arbiters, to obtain power through that exact same route. All I need is a bit of time to prepare a way to do this without instantly killing the vast majority of the population through the sheer pain of the process. It is not a particularly calm process if done the way I did it.”

“What an… enigmatic response,” the Bai Patriarch muttered.

“I haven’t figured things out yet, so I can’t really offer you much more than that. I could explain the basic premise, but if your spiritual perception still hasn’t managed to breach everything I’ve got, I’m doubting that you’ll understand much.”

“You are looking down upon the seventh realm. I may not be able to go through everything that you have around you, but there are a number of things that you may have no knowledge of. For instance, are you aware of the fundamental change that occurs to one’s spiritual perception upon the entry to the seventh realm?” he asked.

“Intending to trade for information, are you? Fine, I don’t mind. I do know that, although I have not had the chance to experiment with things. I noticed that your fellow Patriarch from the Chao District proved to have an oddly strong spiritual perception in comparison to what I had thought it would be, and if that extends to planar energy, it would be rather challenging to oppose the first generation of the Great Families due to the multiplicative effect of their multiple anchors – although their spiritual perception would also be insanely powerful in comparison…” Wei Yi theorised while she had actually kept her attention on the spatial node, “Now you have to tell me even more.”

She didn’t bother hiding her smile, mostly since she didn’t consider him an essential source of information. With enough experimentation, she could easily learn the same from Yi Shi Ming, even if she didn’t know much about her own realm due to her unique circumstances. The only thing that she needed from him was knowledge that only the family and the Patriarch of a district may know, and even then, only the Bai family’s information was important.

After all, she had another Patriarch to speak to already, and the more alliances she acquired and the more leader figures amongst the districts she met, the more chances she would have to learn the information that any Patriarch knew. In that case, unless there was something absolutely essential to study at this very moment, she would rather establish herself as someone that couldn’t easily be ‘fucked with’, since that would ensure that she wouldn’t be perceived as someone that could be pushed around if the Patriarchs wanted to.

The Bai Patriarch gave her a look, but proceeded nonetheless, “The texts of the Bai District mention that the spiritual perception of the seventh realm can also be called divine sense. Care to guess why?”

“It likely becomes sufficiently powerful to endure significantly more strenuous operations, a little like how spiritual perception of the first realm becomes sufficient to activate arrays and inscriptions upon entry to the second realm. Alternatively, it looks golden and thus partly divine in some sense.”

“Both. Once it is at the seventh realm, it is likely highly that it would be of use in interacting with spatial realms to a greater extent, and that it could properly perceive spatial metal… You’ve likely tried looking for it in the past, have you not? Ever wondered what that material looks like, and where it can be found?”

“I think I understand. I have some personal understanding of spiritual perception, so I can study something like that on my own, if you really don’t want to share anything else.”

“All you’re trying to make me do is tell you things that you actually want to know, aren’t you?” the Bai Patriarch said, shaking his head, “Fine, I will be cooperative with you simply because the younger generation needs to-”

“If you join in with your fellow Patriarch, I may need to ask you to stop. It would be best if our alliance could operate on more honest, informal basis, where we just say what we mean instead of acting like immature children… That is what politics are, most of the time. If we don’t need to get involved in it, I don’t see why we should. Leave that to our descendants when they become bored,” Wei Yi suggested, “We’re fighting for a world free of the Greats, after all.”

“Indeed, but they are not the only obstacle to our development. If you do not wish to study divine sense, then I can tell you of the Bai District’s neighbours instead. Do you know much about them?”

“That is one field I am less informed about. From what I know, the kingdoms and empires outside of the current borders of Yi City have grown to a large size and have mostly stabilised from the time when they had begun to spread after the Master of Yi City disappeared, although none of them have the same scale as Yi City itself,” she said, manifesting her map within the mental domain to take notes.

The Bai Patriarch nodded, then turned towards the east, looking towards it pensively.

“For us, the most prominent nation is the Empire of the Dawn, which borders both us and the Jiang District – a fact that must be remembered since the defeat of the Jiang will put us in great danger due to allowing them to surround us,” the Patriarch stated, “For that reason, we maintain a patrol around that district, ensuring that their weaker forces wouldn’t lose to any assault from the forces of the Dawn Emperor. Their leader is very militaristic and aggressive, and if he ever stopped targeting the poorly named Coastal Lord’s Kingdom and focused his attention on Yi City, he might make some significant progress.”

‘That is indeed a terrible name. A kingdom has a lord instead, which doesn’t make much sense, and describes little about the nation itself, instead talking about a ruler…’ Wei Yi thought, adding a vague border onto her mental map, “So, how much territory does the Empire of the Dawn have if it is dangerous enough to attack both the Jiang and Bai District? Is it also coastal? Actually, rather than all that, do you have a map I could consult?”

The Empire of the Dawn was a nation that stretched out from the north to the south coast of the northern portion of the Western Continent, with the southern coast being near the coast of the Lan District. It was very narrow by comparison, with it being nearly three times larger from the north to the south than from the west to the east.

With much of it existing in the Northern Savanna, the Empire of the Dawn didn’t occupy the most fertile regions, needing to rely on the district-sized territory that it had in the Central Plains to feed most of their territory. Many of their soldiers were born and lived in the savanna region, and the portion in the Northern Desert was primary occupied by the craftsmen and blacksmiths of the empire. They did need some place to craft all of their equipment and armour, and they concluded that it was best to let them work in a place that was already hot so that their furnaces and forges wouldn’t need to use up as much coal and the planar materials that they needed for higher grade items.

As a blacksmith herself, Wei Yi had a few issues with that logic, but it certainly didn’t do the blacksmiths much harm. Creating temperature control inscriptions wasn’t that difficult.

“So, their armies are primarily in the fourth realm, are they?”

“Yes, that is the case. With our legions, defending against them is not impossible, but our group combat techniques are rather costly in planar energy. To oppose large groups that the Empire of the Dawn can lead against us is rather difficult if they keep pushing,” the Bai Patriarch admitted, pointing to the map that he had within his residence near the Ancestral Hall.

The map didn’t cover the entirety of the Western Continent with much detail, leaving it to a large blob, but the relevant regions around the Bai District were incredibly details. To the north-west, it showed the Chao District, then to the south-west, the Ping District was marked with a number of crosses, and then to the south, the Luo District was labelled with a large talisman. Due to the tactical relevance of it, the Jiang District was also included, a long shape not unlike the Empire of the Dawn at a smaller scale, positioned to the north-east of the Jiang District.

So that he didn’t keep glancing at nothing, Wei Yi released some of her killing will and drew out the map more accurately, using the maps that she had seen before and putting them together into something coherent.

“There, that should be more accurate. While I’m around, get someone to trace the energy before I leave,” she said once her energy settled on the parchment, having already added all of the detail already present to her own mental map as to expand her understanding of the nations outside of Yi City, which were the least reliably tracked by old maps.

In the past, there were countless small territories outside of Yi City occupied by all kinds of interesting figures, from warlords to kings and emperors. However, after so many years, it seemed that the east of the Western Continent, at least in the region that was attached to Yi City via land and not by sea, had formed into only three individual nations, with the name of the most distant, one that was also not connected to any current Yi City territory by land, not being known due to their inability to influence the Bai District.

Only if one of the other districts fell or allied with one another in an unexpected way would anything beyond the marked and labelled districts be relevant to the Bai family, or so they had thought.

Obviously, that was now different as a result of the alliance with the Ascendant’s Arbiters and thus the Chao District, putting the nations that the district of brawn is near onto the list, as well as the Ju District. With the map provided by Wei Yi, they would obviously alter their field of attention, although they wouldn’t need to pay attention to every single district and outside nation simply due to the fact that they wouldn’t need to have much influence on a district like the Qiang District, even with gateways.

“As I thought, the two nations are within the former borders of Yi City, and even the other nation that borders both of them is still partially within our great city’s former lands,” the Bai Patriarch noted, “A shame.”

“Indeed. In the ideal situation, we’d kick them out as soon as possible and rebuild the minor districts, but unless they are aware of the situation inside of Yi City and will attack the moment that some kind of upheaval occurs, it shouldn’t be a priority for us… Actually, could you get some of your district’s people to spread rumours that we’re all suddenly becoming far more unified? If we appear to be a united group of districts, then the Empire of the Dawn may be inclined to strike at the Coastal Lord’s Kingdom with all of their strength,” Wei Yi suggested, highlighting those two regions with her energy, “From my understanding of the situation, the kingdom is primarily within the savanna, so it wouldn’t be too beneficial for the Empire of the Dawn.”

“Apparently, they are highly prosperous due to the fish that they are able to harvest from the ocean. The particular planar beasts that reside and procreate within the coastal areas of the kingdom are supposedly highly nutritious and easy to catch, so they would be highly useful for the Empire of the Dawn if they manage to capture it. That would put them in a powerful place.”

“What realm are the planar fish?”

“If I recall the information correct, they are in the fourth realm, although they have enough to harvest a dozen kilograms per person on the most bountiful days, and still obtain two kilograms per person on the worst days.”

“That’s a lot of fish… I get the feeling I know what that place smells like quite well…” she muttered, recalling how she had travelled through the sands with the perfect example, “Anyway, that is better for them than I had assumed, but I still don’t think that this is significant enough. The fourth realm is decent, but with the increases in planar energy density, and the empowerment that I can impose upon the districts allied with us, we may be able to bring our average cultivation to the fifth realm at the least. It would overpower their armies easily enough, especially once we get the Ning family on our side.”

“Would such a thing be easy for your faction?”

“Potentially. The last time I’d been there, they were affected by a faction known as the Mirror Plane Aberrations, and I did take the chance to share a few things about the world and the Great Families while I helped them out with their problem. Depending on what they did with my information, they might be in a very tense state with the Greats,” Wei Yi shared, “We will get there in time, although I suspect it won’t be easy.”

“Do you believe that the centre of Yi City will be home to the strongest of the Great Families, or is it simply due to the number of districts that are in our way?”

“Both. Due to the power that the Yi District initially had, the Great Family that resides inside is bound to be the strongest, and their Testament, the place in which their first generation sits around and seals something away, would also be incredibly powerful and wealthy. That strongest family would obviously be the Great Yi, and they even used some rather unusual techniques when I last fought them.”

“Interesting? How so?”

“Instead of point beams and the standard set of techniques, they summoned up a wolven jaw to bite me with. Unfortunately, that was essentially all that I got to see before I was thrown into the Kong Prison Realm, but it should be somehow worthy of study at a later time.”