V4C81: Reaching out to the Jiang

She had to resist the urge to spend a little time simply rolling around in the grass, especially when there was little practical reason not to do it. Her physique energy was able to eliminate any leaves, grass or dirt that would get onto her body, not that this would be likely due to the intrinsic capabilities of her skin, and even her long hair wouldn’t get tangled up or dirtied no matter what she did, unless she intentionally tied individual strands together in an inconvenient manner.

As such, she decided on a certain compromise and instead headed through a large patch of trees where leaves were frequently falling from the trees, with them looking to be in their autumnal state.

This was a state that most plants had where their leaves would fall and regrow after a certain time, and was apparently similar to an entire season in the world that most of the otherworldly demons came from where the vast majority of trees would experience this at the same time, but she had a hard time imagining the entire world suddenly transforming from green to yellow, red, and then the white of the south. Perhaps it was normal in the memories of the otherworldly demons, but she was certain that the laws of those worlds were greatly different from those in the Planar Continents, and that if any trees were somehow transported over, they wouldn’t endure the difference in environment.

In the Planar Continents, any plants that endured the autumnal state would typically do so according either to when they were planted, or when their seeds were produced, meaning that groves that appeared around the same time by human hands or the acts of nature would end up withering and being resuscitated around the same period of time.

The grove that she decided to pass through did exactly this, the leaves falling upon her as the trees began to become yellow, with the stronger winds removing a leaf every time that they passed through the leaf canopy.

‘Well, this feels much better than the northern deserts… A little tempted to loosen my clothes and frolic about, but, again, this is not the kind of thing that I should be doing while attempting to pursue a diplomatic relationship with the Jiang District. Once I am not rushing to achieve something, then I’m sure I can find a private grove and just take everything off for a while,’ Wei Yi thought, frowning for a moment, ‘Perhaps removing everything will not be too good due to all of the leaves flying about, though… Eh, I can just have a thin barrier around the important bits…’

She allowed herself to become immersed into the atmosphere, taking deep breaths to adjust herself to the air of the Central Plains and recover some of her memories.

In a grove with falling and slowly yellowing leaves, a man with long and loose red hair walked beside a line of trees. His silver eyes were dim, and his walking was lazy, with every step barely taking more energy than was absolutely necessary.

A particularly strong wind seemed enough to knock him over, although his body and cultivation were sufficient to prevent any regular winds from being sufficient. That did not stop him movements from slowing down each time that he was met with a notable wind, his hair flooding his vision for a while until the winds were able to settle and his hair settled down to give him just enough room to look out onto the world.

From his physique and clothing, it would be difficult to determine his age. His faded red and silver robes were old and so poorly maintained that they could be as old as a thousand years, and one of the sleeves was in such a bad state that it was more alike to a bunch of threads loosely hanging near the man’s arm, although his other sleeve was not in a significantly better condition. With his face obscured, the rest of his body suggested him to be middle-aged physically, his skin dry and his muscle definition fading like one may find in someone who began to decrease their physical activity in order to prevent their body from being overworked.

He had walked this way on quite a few days, and he did not expect to find anything different on this walk. Despite that, he did see a glimpse of something in the distance.

There was a hint of colour that simply didn’t belong in the brown, green and yellow of the woods. Red, or silver, or perhaps a shade of something different – it was difficult for him to make it out, as too much of his own red hair obscured his vision. Perhaps it was just a stray hair that had been shifted into position by the latest gust of wind.

It would have been easy to confirm this, but he found it unnecessary. Instead, he just proceeded.

The colours were on his typical route anyway, so if there was something unusual there, he would encounter it soon enough and find out the truth in a few minutes. He sighed, unintentionally blowing the hair right before him away and confirming that he was not just seeing his own red strands.

After a few minutes, he passed through a tighter region of trees and emerged into a more open area, finding a wondrous scene.

Right before him, walking calmly through the woods, the occasional leaf falling upon her crimson hair and shoulders, was a tall woman clothed in a crimson robe. Each step was short and yet oddly glamorous, instantly grabbing the man’s attention as he felt his breath catch in his throat, forcing him to stop and admire that which he saw.

The robe on the woman’s body was slightly loose, partly revealing tanned shoulders that shifted slightly as she traversed the woods, rising and falling with each slow breath. Something about that simple movement entranced him, his mind flowing back into the past, reminding him of times that had gone and events that now haunted him. He found that his steady yet lazy hands suddenly began to shake, with him being tempted to run away and avoid needing to face the situation, whatever it was that he came across, and whoever the woman was.

Before he could move away, however, the woman suddenly turned, her undeniably perfect yet stern face framing the vivid, almost gem-like silver eyes that stared directly at him.

“… Who the fuck are you?” Wei Yi questioned, speaking harshly as this man’s form reminded her of someone that wouldn’t have been caught in such a state as this, and one that really shouldn’t have had the ability to stand before her.

Clearly, the question and the particular wording of it surprised the man, as he visibly quaked while taking a step back, looking as if some unseen hand had pushed him back. He stared at her for a few moments more, then, taking a step forward to return to his previous position, he opened his mouth and released a long-held breath.

“You… are you Yi Wei?”

“If you are Yi Jiazhi, then I don’t even know what I should comment on first… Well? Are you, or are you just someone that happens to have a similar bone structure, physique, same cultivation technique, a realm that could have been achieved within the time since the collapse of the Kong Holy Grounds, and… fuck, you are him, aren’t you?” she spat out her words, her peaceful mood being entirely broken to the point of needing to restrain her left arm from transforming into the killing will state, “How are you still alive?”

“I… Ha, you’re still… oh, heavens…” he dropped to his knees, his long and messy hair landing on the ground and mixing with the fallen leaves, “it was terrible…”

His reaction did help her with restraining her killing intent, as she found the reaction and his whole appearance to be entirely different from what she might expect. Not to mention the simple fact that she met another survivor of the Kong District incident only a few days ago, he simply shouldn’t have been alive due to being stuck somewhere in the spatial realm at the time of it collapsing and forever vanishing from the world.

In addition, his state was rather miserable, to put it lightly, far more so than her own.

“Well, aside from answering my question… Do you still… no, that’s not right either…” Wei Yi’s words got more and more quiet as she remembered that she was not too proficient at handling something that appeared to be significant trauma that was not her own, especially without her own method for solving her problems being available.

She sighed, then waved her hand to manifest a barrier around them so that nobody would be able to randomly intrude and ruin her already feeble attempts to deal with this. Approaching the man, she also created a long bench behind him and shifted him onto it, sitting down a short distance away from him while tightening up her robe. As this person had been one of the reasons that she had been mostly certain about her sexual interests due to his attempts to influence her mind, she couldn’t be sure that he wouldn’t get the wrong idea in his current poor mental state, so it was better to be careful with everything that she did.

“So… Wanna tell me what happened to you in the Kong District, or should I go first?” she asked, finding no better place to begin their conversation.

“… after I was nearly killed by Yi Fenwu, I had managed to take a healing pill and recover… I saw some kind of floating chunk of land fighting with her afterward, and then the space changed… I rushed to the exit as quickly as I could, I think, but I had seen how the space behind me seemed to be torn apart… I didn’t remain near the entrance, but when I was sure that it closed down, I could find nobody… We’d gotten so far, but one archer just…”

‘So, it appears that he is facing a similar mental problem that I had been. Not surprising in the slightest. However, considering the fact that he is currently near to the Jiang District, I suspect that he had not gone in the same direction as I had, and that I hadn’t simply missed him when I had returned and was then captured by the assholes- I mean, the Great Families… The other name suits them better, frankly,’ the Ascendant’s mind drifted for a moment, although she returned to the proper topic quickly, “You didn’t return to the Yi District, did you?”

“No, I would never do that… everyone had died, and I could never face the family… I… left. I took a direction and left. Turned out, I had gone to the east… I would cultivate, hunt, eat, drink, sleep, but I was never sure why…” Yi Jiazhi admitted, his head still hanging low, “Apparently, I ended up at a Jiang District.”

“You were that out of it?”

“I still am. I don’t know what I’m doing… Look at me. Look at all of this. It’s like I’ve aged by a dozen years despite only… um… fewer years than that passing.”

“It’s been less than one, actually. You have not aged that gracefully, unfortunately. Have you been doing anything in the district, or just continuing to wander around and cultivate?” she asked, and hardly needed a reply to understand that this was indeed the case, “Alright then. Have any interest in what I got up to, or have you completely lost interest in women at this point? Not trying to suggest anything, by the way, so don’t get the wrong idea.”

“… Did it go any better for you?”

“Eh, that depends. I came back to the Yi District, found my home burning, everyone I knew either missing, dead, or dying, was then imprisoned in a spatial realm with dilated time for twenty years, then came back and have been fighting with a force that has been trying to bring down Yi City for decades. Nothing much.”

His mouth opened, but he struggled to say anything in response at the sheer extremity of the events she had just listed in such a simple and calm tone. One thing that he was able to understand right away was that their time had been spent very differently.

“Also, that technique of yours turned out to not have worked as I have zero interest in men, so it wasn’t your fault that it did not work. That being said, I hope you do not intend to use it ever again, as actions like that are horrible and you should have realised this by now, no matter what it is that you have or have not being doing in the year or so that we’ve not seen one another,” Wei Yi stated, “I would offer to help with removing it from your memory, but that would just sound hypocritical, so I will not do that. Ahem.”

“Uh… what happened to the Yi District?”

“The district should be standing and doing about as well as before. It certainly had been when I had last visited. However, if you were curious about specific people, then I cannot tell you much. I did not have the chance to speak with many of them, and certainly not those you’d be interested in.”

“Was your home the only thing burned, then?”

“Oh, that… No. No, not at all. In fact, most of the poorer region of the district was a flame, then a grove that had been formed within was also burned, then entire streets were cleared and obliterated just to get at one of the people within, and then Yi Yaling was killed when she tried to help me out… The smoke was what had alerted me to shit going down in the first place, so it was not a nice sight no matter how you look at it,” she sighed, recalling the woman that had acted much like a younger sister.

“O-Oh… oh… Yi Yaling, you said, right? Her father was Yi Fenhong, correct?” he suddenly raised his head, panic filling his eyes.

“You knew her?”

“We had been friends when we were younger, but we had ended up separating as we aged… She also died?” he looked away, although she was still easily able to tell that tears were flooding into his eyes, “Fuck… I had thought that, somehow, avoiding the district would just keep the disaster of the Kong District away, and yet…”

“That particular incident had not been your fault. In fact I had no clue you were alive, and I barely managed to report anything to the district’s forces, so they wouldn’t have been able to act due to you, whether in a positive or negative manner,” she stated, “You could blame it on me for daring to be friends with her while having the wrong mother… or you could blame it on the Great Families, the group that I had mentioned previously. They’re the bastards that are intent on keeping Yi City down for some stupid reason, and when they came across her, they waited for a slight provocation and immediately took her down. Probably wouldn’t have come back if I had known about that, and that only.”

“And if you knew everything that would happen after?”

“I would have gone straight for them and stopped them from damaging as much as they had this time,” Wei Yi said.

Yi Jiazhi nodded, his head falling down once more. However, this time he raised one of his feeble hands and shifted his hair away, revealing a dishevelled, bearded visage. Although it dropped almost immediately due to an apparent tiredness, he forced his hand to return to his head and move the other portion of his hair aside, before brushing the rest back as to force it to no longer obstruct his eyes, within which a small spark brewed.

He slowly channelled his energy throughout his body, the flaming shade of it filling his meridians and momentarily brightening his entire body as a certain vitality returned to his appearance. It did nothing to clear away the age that had somehow accumulated upon his features, nor did he have the ability or precision to clear away his messy hair and beard with it, but that energy alone was enough to change his look from that of a hopeless wreck to someone still capable of rising after a fall, and someone that would no longer lay sleeping during the storm.

“I have to do something. Anything. I want to stop those people.”

“Won’t be easy. Their third realm members are as strong as the typical fifth realm cultivator, and their seventh realm members would currently be unmatched, unless a ninth realm dragon is sleeping in some cave in the mountains near the Ju District,” the Ascendant said as she also rose from her seat, “That being said, there is a group that I’ve founded which you could join.”

“Can it do anything against them?”

“With the alliance between us and the Chao, Ping, Bai and Luo Districts, I suspect that they wouldn’t lose to a third or fifth realm member of the Great Families, even without my assistance. With it, I suspect that it might be possible to endure an attack from one of their first generation, that being the seventh realm cultivators. In addition, my Arbiters – the faction is called the Ascendant’s Arbiters, and since I am the Ascendant, they’re technically mine – have already gotten rid of a third of the Great Family numbers. Another few assaults, and I might eliminate all of their third and second generation and ensure that they will not be able to rebuild.”

He looked at her in an understandably perplexed manner, “What exactly have you been getting up to while I was rotting away?”

“Oh, you know, stuff. Perfecting realms, making black suns, stealing spatial realms from under their noses… The normal thing women my age are doing… in some other world, assuming that there is an infinite number of them with each having some small variation.”

“So, nothing common for someone in the… third realm?”

“Fifth.”

“Ah. That was fast. Then again, you have always been rather fast in your cultivation,” Yi Jiazhi recalled with a sullen look.

They looked at one another for a short while, with Wei Yi waiting for him to proceed while he looked upon her with a complicated mixture of emotions. He remembered what he had attempted to do to her, where they had gone together, and how they had interacted in the last few minutes of the existence of the Kong Holy Grounds. With the haze in his mind gone, he was able to recall those things with far greater clarity, and he needed some time to rethink the past.

When he was ready, however, his back was straight, and his arms no longer hung loosely by his sides.

“I was heading to the Jiang District, so whether you’d like to assist the Arbiters or go your own way, I think it would be a good idea to go together,” Wei Yi suggested, dispersing the barrier around them and pointing in the vague direction of the district, “If not-”

“I’ll go with you, Yi Wei.”

“Ah, that reminds me. For various reasons, I’m going by Wei Yi nowadays. I’d prefer if you called me that as well, although for different reasons, it doesn’t really matter,” she mentioned.

“You… are confusing. Wei Yi, then. Lead the way.”

She nodded, and they set off.

Before they could get far, she did find herself asking, “I heard that you had lost an arm, by the way. Was that not the case?”

“My arm… I don’t think that I had lost either of them. I did have a technique to temporarily leave a mark on other things, making it look like my energy was occupying them seamlessly, but other than that…”

“Right,” Wei Yi said, ‘It is possible that he had found someone else’s arm when he healed himself and tried to make himself look like he had died or suffered a great injury so that he wouldn’t be sought out and attacked by Yi Fenwu again. Perhaps that allowed him to bypass her while she was focusing on controlling the Kong Holy Grounds, thus leaving early but also setting him up for a disappointment when he failed to catch me or Yi Bai leaving the spatial realm.’

On the route to the Jiang District, which she was able to quickly improve and clarify the closer they got to it with her spiritual perception, they did not speak with one another much. Both of them did have things that they wished to say to the other, and Wei Yi was able to obtain a number of questions and general thoughts from the surface of his mind due to her near-obsessive intrusion upon the minds of others with her spiritual will threads, but neither of them felt that they had found the appropriate time to speak about them.

They left the autumnal grove, then proceeded on throughout a far less dense forest and headed up a steadily climbing hill, progressing on towards their destination, a large district with tall walls that were, as odd as this might seem from the outside, were supported from the outside.

To someone unaware of the district’s circumstances, this would naturally seem to be rather ineffective in a defensive setting, since that just made it easier to destroy the walls from the outside and get in, but this was exactly why the walls were designed this way. Rather than keeping invaders out or others in, the walls were holding up an enormous quantity of failed pills and refining materials that were piled up as high as the walls themselves, reaching the height of ten tall men standing atop one another. If the walls were ever to be broken down from the outside, the enormous piles of toxic substances would collapse onto the invaders, leaving them completely covered in materials that they would never be prepared to handle.

Certain refining materials were relatively harmless when they end up in the state of useless sludge caused by a failed refinement, but this was not the case for others. Some possessed extreme medicinal properties, and when they were unleashed and then not contained and suppressed by the other materials of a pill, as well as the shell of it, those who come into contact with the materials will suffer.

For that reason, any invading forces wouldn’t attempt to break down the walls unless they knew that they had every single possible medicinal effect accounted for, which was, in turn, impossible due to the sheer quantity and variety of these effects. It was theoretically possible to create a kind of universal antidote against the poisons in the failed pills essence, but that would only counter the strictly negative effects. To entirely prevent the effects of any pills affecting the body and mind, one would need a significantly different approach, and the only one that Wei Yi herself knew about was to acquire a certain absolute physique called the Medicinal Nullification physique.

This would not be an optimal way to do this, as it was a physique that did not distinguish between positive and negative effects, instead blocking every single effect upon the body. If someone still wanted to acquire any kind of medicinal effect in the future, the physique was not an option.

On the inside, this was blocked away with a secondary wall and a series of inscriptions to prevent the smells and medicinal effects from leaking out, and the inside of the Jiang District was filled with a particular type of tree to further cover up the smell of what was effectively a refuse pile bordering their territory. There were various people that claimed that the scent of the trees would change every now and then, with some of the results being less pleasant than others, but the reports on that were highly mixed and vague due to the distance that appeared between the Yi and Jiang Districts by the time that these trees became necessary.

It was hardly the most elegant solution in the world, and it was not one that Kong Shi Meng had been responsible for, but it looked to have proved effective enough against the Empire of the Dawn. Some of the essences would naturally decay and would be refilled every now and then, and there were a few methods for leaving and entering the district that could be used for that purpose, also increasing the difficulty of entering the district without permission.

Fortunately enough for them, the district wasn’t against small groups entering it, especially when they did not look to have any hostile intentions against them, so as they approached the district, they had no reason to fear being prevented from entering it freely.

“This is the district? I think I’ve seen it before,” Yi Jiazhi mentioned.

“You think? Was that when you were wandering about without really thinking about what you were doing, or prior to that?”

“I think it was after the Kong District’s incident, but I can barely recall any of it. The days just blurred together, honestly. Maybe I had lived here at some point, although I would have probably been chased out considering what I look like,” he said, glancing at his weak and tired hands, as well as the exposed arm and the remains of his robe on the other arm, “They may not be too happy to see me.”

“That’s too bad for them, really. I’m entering no matter what, and if they do not let you in, then I’ll come back out in a short while,” Wei Yi replied, looking up at the wall and at the nearest guard in sight.

She had no reason to assume that he wouldn’t be allowed in, however, as the moment that they were seen, the guard gestured towards a few of his fellow warriors and a squad of them rushed to the area where a long board for guests to ascend by was stored. It was a simple method, but it was also a safe one as it was able to ensure that no kind of mechanism or array could be the weakness for their defensive method. Sometimes, the simplest defence was the best, or at the very least a functional one, in this case.

From afar, it was difficult to hear the guards, but the simple haste to bring the board over and place it for their convenience was enough to suggest that they were very likely to be permitting their entrance to the Jiang District.

“Look, it’s the sullen sage! I didn’t think we’d see him today!” one of the guards said to another.

“There’s a woman with him… Is she human? Does the sullen sage actually speak with other people?” the other guard questioned, “Oh, this is great!”

Wei Yi looked over to the dishevelled so-called sage, finding that he lacked the ability to hear them, then waited for the guards to bring out the walkway board before saying anything. Even without his confirmation, his previous comment on recognising the district, as well as the fact that he or someone much like him was apparently well known around here, it was blatant that he had indeed made his way over to the Jiang District before. As such, he would also realise this in due time, with the only question being whether it would take him a few minutes or a few hours.

“Sullen sage, huh. Quite a name to earn.”

“… What?”

“You do certainly look the part, even now. That hair of yours needs some care, or shortening, depending on what it is that you want to do with it. I know a few people that can help you out with both, although you would need to wash it either way.”

“I… I am a sage now? I’m only… I’m only twenty-three!”