V4C71: Encirclement, Part 3

The Chao Patriarch pried the chain from the hands of Ping Zheng, whose body now lay on the ground with barely any energy remaining within it.

He wasn’t dead yet, but that wouldn’t be the case for long, as his organs were spilling out onto the street and his energy was rapidly dispersing, while there wasn’t a single person in the vicinity that cared to assist him. All of his soldiers were already taken out by others in the Chao District’s army, and the forces that were spread out across the Ping District would also be taken care of soon enough. Since he wasn’t a woman, nor a particularly feminine man, none of the Chao soldiers had the idea of bringing him as some kind of offering to the Ascendant, so none would take the time to stop his bleeding.

Even the Patriarch of the Chao District only bothered to approach his body to remove the valuables from his body, intending to bring some of them back to benefit his district after the battle was over and time could be dedicated to the matter.

“Good chain,” was likely the last thing that Ping Zheng would hear as the Patriarch stepped away from him and stored away the chain. He headed over to one of the invading squads, but he suddenly stopped when his spiritual perception caught something passing near to him with a basic stealth method to obscure them.

It was a poor attempt, so the moment that these figures neared a wall through which it would be easy to break through without unnecessary endangering others, he punched in the wall’s direction.

He hardly needed to use any of his strength to cause the bricks to collapse inwards, falling right onto a small group that had been attempting to rush past him on the other side of the wall. As the Patriarch had shown some restraint, while the bricks did collide with some force, they only pushed a few of them back and left some minor injuries in the worst of cases, which was particularly impressive as the strongest amongst them was only in the fourth realm.

“Who are you?” the Chao Patriarch asked right away, manifesting a boundary around them to prevent their escape, “If you aren’t part of the district’s forces, why are you sneaking around so close to invaders?”

“We… we are a group that had been attempting to defeat the gangs!” one of the figures in the third realm, one with blue hair and a weak appearance, replied after a moment, “We’d been trying to make use of the momentum generated by that woman that had cut the district in half, but before we could get far, your forces appeared. We didn’t want to get involved, so…”

“That woman?” asked the Patriarch, looking to one of the others in that group.

“Someone in a black outfit, with a jade mask and brown hair, according to Lan Rongqi,” another answered, although they still pointed towards the blue-haired man that had spoken first, “She beat up Ping Waqing before running off, but she also cut through every structure and wall in the district.”

“Every wall… Ah, that must have been Wei Yi. She had been here before, after all,” the Chao Patriarch muttered to himself, addressing the small group next, “You shouldn’t be wandering around like this. You will be held here by some of my men, and once the battle is over, we may release you to go wherever you like. Throw down your weapons and we won’t even need to restrain you while you’re under watch.”

Before a figure in the seventh realm that commanded a large army, even if they had any problems with this, they had little chance to argue. All of them readily threw down what little weaponry they carried and did nothing as some of the Chao District’s warriors came over and surrounded them, primarily standing at the exits from their current position in a former alleyway.

The Chao Patriarch stood around them for a little while, making sure that none of them were going to try anything, then departed to another part of the district where his presence would be more useful, leaving the group alone with the Chao soldiers, both of whom looked towards one another with a casual degree of scrutiny. The small group that had sought to change the district were being careful with the soldiers as to be sure that they didn’t make enemies with a faction that could be worse than the ones they were replacing, while the soldiers naturally needed to confirm that these revolutionaries wouldn’t try to fight against them in the same way as they supposedly fought against the Ping District and family.

As such, they ended up staring at one another for quite some time, achieving little, but remaining somewhat tense the whole way through.

The walls of a large, dark room hidden behind a number of homes and other walls in a natural manner were broken down with a single burst of power from the planar constructs being operated by the Bai family. Inside, the gang that had been gathering there in an attempt at a tactical discussion quickly tried to scatter, but the few soldier constructs that did enter were more than sufficient to block their exits and force them to remain.

One figure that could do nothing was a man of impressively excessive weight that had sat near the front of the room, who desperately cried out to his subordinates to rescue him from this predicament that all of them were stuck in.

His people obviously had trust and faith in him and his actions, although seeing him like this made the flames of both flicker in their hearts. He might have seemed to be wise prior to this, but now that he was in a true emergency, they couldn’t help but conclude that he might be nothing more than a child that has yet to grow up mentally, having succeeded up to this point due to capable subordinates, a lack of pressure upon him, as well as some commendable luck. That would have sounded like a passing fancy some time prior, but as they thought about it more, it seemed to make more sense with every moment.

This sudden contemplation did lead to them simply standing still while the Bai captured them.

“What are you doing? Fight back, you idiots!” the overweight man cried out once again before finally being silenced by an incapacitation technique of one of the Bai family’s soldiers.

The incapability of the man to put up even the smallest degree of resistance caused the warriors to simultaneously question this figures capability, as well as his status in the faction that they had just intruded upon. By the looks of him, as well as the commands that he gave, he should have been someone with power, and yet he did not do a single thing.

“Was that supposed to be the leader?” one of the independent troops asked, with the other legions shrugging, “He was in the fourth realm, but didn’t do a single thing… Do you think he is some kind of distraction?”

“No, he’s actually their leader!” one of the cowering figures in the second realm, a woman that seemed to have been present for entertainment purposes if her scarce clothing was to be of any indication, suddenly stood up and addressed the warriors, her hands rising into the air a moment later when one of the squads raised their weapons and glared at her, “They’ve been following everything that he’d said, or, rather, everything that he agreed to after his advisors suggested it to him, thinking that he was testing them.”

The Bai District’s general turned to this woman, “Since you’re sharing this much, identify yourself.”

“I’m from a group that had been trying to lower the amount of crime in the district. We… had limited success,” she admitted while lowering her head, her shame seeming to return to her as she covered up her breasts with one arm. Her clothing was minimal and partly transparent, so with the many eyes upon her, a number of things that she might not have wanted to be exposed could have been seen. “I had blended it with this lot, but I didn’t have the time to do much.”

“I knew it! She was a… right… we can’t do anything now… I still knew it!” one of the restrained men cried out before also being knocked out.

For a few moments, the Bai general looked this woman up and down. With each moment that passed, she was both more nervous and ashamed of the state in which she had presented herself to the soldiers, causing her cheeks and ears to slowly become more and more red, with that redness spreading even to her shoulders.

After a while, she looked to be near to breaking into tears, so the general waited for just a moment longer and then, with a sigh, looked away.

“Bring her out of here and write down everything else that she knows. After that, keep her safe somewhere,” the man instructed, his troops quickly following his instructions and getting the woman out of there the moment that they found her something else to cover herself with. While some of the other similarly dressed women in the room had tried to claim a similar status, every single one of them cowed the moment that the general stared upon them for a few moments, admitting their faults and explaining that they were simply attempting to obtain some resources and power and found that the incapacitated leader was easiest to ingratiate themselves with.

They allowed themselves to be restrained and taken away to be imprisoned, although some of them weren’t treated too well when they attempted to repeat the same trick with the warriors. Obviously, none of the soldiers would tolerate such a thing, but they did restrain themselves from doing much damage. So far as they were concerned while these women weren’t the best people out there, their actions were understandable and they had likely resulted in little actual harm to the district, if any.

This was not the case for the rest of the people in that room. Unlike those that simply sought to obtain a sufficiently good life for themselves, most of the people in this gang were interested in actively committing the very crimes that had harmed and infuriated so many people in the past, including the Ascendant herself. If they were simply going to let them go after the invasion, regardless of who was then selected to lead the Ping District, then they would either be able to return to the same criminal ways that they were currently on, or disperse to other districts and make them worse as a result. Given that all three invading forces were neighbours of the Ping District, this was not something that they could accept.

Obviously, the easiest solution was to get rid of them forever.

The blue flames wielded by Luo Ru Qiu collided with the energy that was akin to water covered in fire, used by Ping Yin Wu, but while the latter had only her weapon to attempt to repel her foe, the former still had access to countless hundreds of talismans made specifically for the purpose of this invasion, as well as saved up for other emergencies. Some were made with his own energy, but others weren’t, allowing him to throw out whatever he wished to confound his foe at any time, which was especially easy with talismans of other elements.

If the muscular woman prepared to deal with fire, he could always switch to an earth-type talisman to muddy her attempt, and if she brought out the full might of the flame coating her axe, then producing a metal or water-type talisman was also incredibly easy.

The five great arts weren’t necessary the easiest path to take, and they would rarely surpass the power of a cultivator focused purely on combat techniques with nothing but their craft, but their biggest advantage was the ability to prepare. Whether one worked with talismans, arrays, inscriptions, artefacts or pills, all of them could be made in advance, then unleashed at once against a fearsome foe, sometimes without much of a cost while the enemy would need to use their own energy to resist.

Through preparation alone, someone in the first realm could, in theory, oppose those in the seventh realm even if they had the most ordinary techniques, the weakest sense of combat tactics, and the poorest planning imaginable, and even that wasn’t the full extent of a well placed array or an appropriately used talisman. No, the true power came from the unity of spontaneous methods like combat techniques and the prepared great art, or arts, of choice. On their own, they had their own strength and weaknesses, but when used together, lacking pools of planar energy could be refilled with pills, attacks could be blocked with shielding talismans, an array could transform a region into one more suitable for one of the combatants while disadvantaging the other one, one inscription could provide just the right burst of force when necessary to knock an opponent off their feet, and an artefact filled with one’s energy could be used to strike the foe down once and for all.

Aside from the sheer utility of the great arts, this was why the masters of the great arts held so much value and power in the eyes of the people of the Planar Continents. Any one great arts master could completely change the course of a war so long as they had been given the time to prepare the items that they were able to produce, and this was especially true when they were both capable in their great art and had a powerful cultivation. Throwing around six-star talismans while using sixth realm energy, for instance, made Luo Ru Qiu significantly more dangerous to Ping Yin Wu, effectively putting him up to the level of a peak sixth realm combatant even before the anchor’s empowerment was considered.

With such an advantage, every moment led to another minor defeat for the Ping District’s guardian, and after only a short battle, Ping Yin Wu was on the ground, her wounds bleeding and her breath short, while Luo Ru Qiu was standing tall and strong, with many talismans remaining and plenty of planar energy in his dantian.

“There… Matriarch, what should be done with her?” he asked after catching his breath.

“The Ascendant doesn’t need any of them alive. Kill her and put the body somewhere that she will be able to take whatever necessary from it, then move to assist the fifth group. We have much to do.”

Thinking that he might obtain some advantage by targeting the demonic woman while she had not yet reached the third realm, he had lunged at her with an immense degree of force only to be struck directly in the head with a clawed hand, the sheer force of it crushing his skull and instantly ending his life.

Just like that, a second realm figure ended the life of someone in the sixth, although Jia Rong was someone who was over a million years old, so her strength could hardly be compared to anyone else in her realm. With the strange power that came with that length of lifespan, as well as the technique that she seemed to have acquired during this time, it was even less fair to compare her to a typical Planar Pool cultivator, although the late Ping Wu hardly could have known about that and was thus entirely right to presume her to have some weakness.

He wasn’t wrong to assume this, either. The moment that his blood splashed onto Jia Rong, she froze, the violent light in her eyes vanishing as she looked upon the hot crimson that landed on her red skin.

“Ah… I killed someone else… again… Mo Zhouquan, could you help?”

The corrupted woman nodded, her eyes slightly dull as she was focusing on keeping the voices at bay. She raised her hand and brought out a small quantity of her dark energy, surrounding the demonic woman’s hand and eagerly devouring the blood that marked her body. With the innate resistance that Jia Rong had to planar energy and the things that it manifested, there was little chance of harming her in the process, so Mo Zhouquan didn’t hold back.

Just a moment after she began, she was able to withdraw her energy and reveal the pristine demonic skin of the woman of the past.

“You could have left some for me…” Long Huang muttered, her hand involuntarily reaching for the choker on her neck as she spoke. A moment later, she had realised what she had been doing, but it was too late as her partner, Mo Zhouquan, had already noticed it.

“I’m not sure why you wouldn’t be able to use the blood that’s still in him, but you hadn’t asked,” the corrupted woman replied, “You’ll be fine, right?”

The red-haired woman might have had some complaints, but she was obviously the one to blame for failing to inform a scared demoness and a woman whose mind was operating more slowly than usual due to the mutterings of something ranging from a phantom to the one and only Primordial Corruption about her needs and intentions. As such, she didn’t bother arguing and nodded, practically slapping her hand away as it seemed to reach for her choker once again. Fortunately for her, the slight blush that resulted from that action was not caught by the other two.

Great Dark walked up to the corpse and looked over it, muttering something to himself for a few breaths before he raised his head and said, “I am not as expert on distinguishing these things as either Long Huang or Wei Yi… but it seems like there is something of note for both you and her in here… Don’t damage the body unnecessarily.”

“I wasn’t going to do something like that…” Long Huang huffed, although she was glad to have something else to shift her attention to, “This man has a stronger bloodline than most, but it isn’t too noteworthy. Either way, there’s no reason to destroy it.”

Having received her confirmation, Great Dark nodded and shifted the body to the edge of the street before looking out towards the enormous anchor and the core, his gaze freezing for a moment on the latter as the second set of searing marks were stabilised and another set seemed to begin forming within the individual portions of the core. Altogether, these added up to thirty-three searing marks, matching the number of marks that some of the weaker cultivators might have by the peak of their realm. That was impressive, especially considering the fact that she was only rising to the second stage of Marked Core, but what concerned him was the fact that another powerful force appeared near her location.

He frowned but sighed a moment after. There was little that he could do in this situation, so he had to hasten to perform his part in today’s plan.

“Good day? You dare to say good day after what you have done? Do you fail to understand what your actions have led to? Those armies of yours have already torn apart so many years of work and development, and now, even if you are slain, torn apart and fed to the masses, you will have still impacted our progress!” the Ping Patriarch shouted, his voice amplified by his planar energy.

Wei Yi smiled, “Are you trying to make me feel happier? This is exactly what I was trying to achieve.”

“You truly are a bitch, aren’t you?”

“Again with the name-calling. For whatever reason, the likes of you seem rather keen to find arbitrary insults to use against me, rather than taking even a moment to figure out what I have supposedly done wrong. Go on, tell me – what did I ruin for you? Why is that something that I should have left alone? Will you really tell me that the countless wrongs you have committed have led to an overall right? You know, you’re even talking to someone that would be most likely to agree with you, considering my own stance, so you have a reasonable shot here!” the Ascendant grinned, both her and her Titanic Conqueror holding out their hands as if to invite him to give it a shot.

The reason for her smile was that she saw no way for him to justify himself, especially when he began with trying to accuse her of misdeeds rather than answering the very cause of her attack. Had he believed that he was doing good for the Ping District and Yi City as a whole, he would have attempted to persuade her that she was mistaken in her attack, and that she should turn around before it was too late.

Of course, the loss of one of his guardians might have changed his intentions slightly, but Ping Waqing was only in the first realm of Linked Channels, so assisting someone else to reach the sixth realm wouldn’t have been too difficult.

Indeed, while the Ping Patriarch huffed, he did not reply to her inquiry, “Enough of your attempts to delay. Die!”

He didn’t delay even a little bit after exclaiming, the darkness surrounding him moving a breath before he did, with both rushing at her with immense speed. They did, however, split up quickly, and soon two separate figures were flying towards her, one resembling a large cloud of darkness while the other was tightly surrounded by a thin black layer to obscure his exact appearance and identity.

As he attacked, Wei Yi did not stand still. The initial stage breakthrough had been achieved, meaning that she now had twenty-two searing marks to work with, and her perfected stage would come soon and grant her another eleven searing marks while requiring far less stability to pass it smoothly. She had far more freedom to act than when she was dealing with Ping Waqing, and so she made use of that immediately, sending the Titanic Conqueror back while she amplified her own physical strength with her cosmic energy and punched out with both hands at once, directing the force of her strikes at the twin figures. Those pulses of force shot out of her palms, amplified by the principles of the various techniques she had collected, and caused space itself to tremble just a little.

In one moment, they collided with the figures, darkness seeming to strike the light that descended through the core that currently surrounded the district. Being nothing more than force, the two pulses were easier to disperse than a solid and living human being, but that did not stop the secondary figure from being highly destabilised, the cloud of darkness turning into more of a mist as it attempted to recover.

With a roar, the Ping Patriarch himself vanished from the spot and appeared beside her, a great spike of darkness manifesting before his hand as he thrust it into her chest.

However, as it should have pierced her flesh, the Patriarch found that it had just barely reached the tip of her outstretched finger. Somehow, she stood two metres from where she should have been and had reduced the potential of that strike to doing little more than lightly injuring an index finger, an injury that could be ignored or healed in an instant.

Due to the technique he used, the Ascendant found that her skin and flesh were struggling to put themselves together even with the physique and planar cultivation realms she possessed, so she chose the former option as she directed the Titanic Conqueror to strike.

Since it had been preparing ever since the Ping Patriarch appeared, it acted immediately, placing its four hands together to unite their four spheres of Obliteration into a single mass from which a boundless force emerged, a blackened crimson beam surging out into the sky, flying all the way up to the enormous core and lingering there for a short while as her energy built up. In an instant, empowered by a searing mark, that beam surpassed any of her previous Obliteration bombardments, and yet the Patriarch was powerless to stop it as she also struck out, a large needle appearing out of her House of Gold as she stabbed at him.

Her Piercing Needle was inconspicuous enough to potentially pass as a relatively ordinary weapon in the eyes of someone with weaker spiritual perception, but before the divine sense of the seventh realm there was no chance of being fooled. The Patriarch instantly understood that evasion would be key, so he leapt up to make some distance between the two of them.

Before he could get far, the Titanic Conqueror had already returned to its typical activity and threw out a series of runes of both types onto the ground where the Ping Patriarch would have landed, with a few orbs of toxins and enormous chunks of ice being thrown around that position in order to make things even more difficult for the man and his shade, which was barely resembling a human once again after several lengthy moments of reconstruction.

“Don’t even think about it!” he exclaimed, stopping in mid-air with the power of the seventh realm, leaping further up to avoid the rune explosions, “Insolent!”

With a wave of his hand, the ground beneath the district suddenly seemed to ignite, countless lines and symbols shining through the ground and plunging the district into darkness the moment after when their light turned to darkness. Within that darkness, a large mass of smoke surged from various points, and immediately rushed to the Patriarch as soon as the darkness claimed enough of the district to allow it to reach him. Each one travelled through the air like a serpent, slithering back and forth, ignoring the few shards of ice thrown at them by the Titanic Conqueror in a blatant display of their seeming invulnerability.

Although Wei Yi attempted a number of other methods to stop the serpents of smoke while her Titanic Conqueror prepared and guided the Obliteration energy that had pooled in the sky, none proved to be able to stop them from massing around the Patriarch’s body.

He had already been obscured by his own energy, and with the smoke, it was impossible to see any of his features without something as powerful as divine sense or the Ascendant’s spiritual perception. What could be detected even more easily than before was his energy, which seemed to grow in power more and more with every serpent that latched onto his form and the smoke serpent cloud, with his effective power rising from the second stage – when unaffected by the various physique powers and Laws that Wei Yi had instituted within the Ping District in order to grant her side a great bonus and vastly raise the chances of success – to the fourth, then fifth and even sixth, climbing to what appeared to be the peak of the sixth stage’s condition before stopping at the very brink of advancement.

“I will teach you your lesson, dog!”

‘Well… at least he is consistent.’