V4C85: The Coastal District

Having already scanned the vast majority of what the people had on them, all that remained was to take that information and consciously process it in order to fully comprehend and obtain that which could not be recovered physically. Due to most of the coastal force remaining in a recognisable state, this process applied to very few items of interest, but fewer items endured the Obliteration beam.

She found the fewest pills, inscriptions and artefacts, so the few that were present were easily able to fit into the expanding space of the House of Gold without interfering with anything else that lay inside. Most weren’t of a particularly high grade nor quality, likely being carried as general support for the forces rather than methods to save lives and win the battles that the groups got themselves into. Otherwise, they might have stood a little more of a chance against her.

The most valuable things were their techniques, as the approaching force from the ocean were specifically carrying a number of manuals that had caught the attention of the coastal force.

In particular, one of the things that made her most interested in defeating them and taking everything they owned was the small collection of brand-type techniques that they had stowed away. They were in boxes that were able to resist spiritual perception to a small degree – although it would be sufficient for most in the fourth or fifth realm to be unable to read anything within – and that were sturdy enough to sustain the damage that the rest of the items and boats had endured.

She did not find the Broken Sky Brand, which she suspected to have been unique to wherever her childhood friend had found it, but she was able to find the Charging Brand, Pulse Brand and Collapsing Brand.

The first was, as one might glean from the name, able to charge up and then expand, spreading an energy link to nearby foes, then explode the moment that their energy had built up sufficiently, or when the user forced them to explode. The second had the ability to shift around frequently and consistently, and each time it would do so, a pulse of energy would explode outwards, allowing the brands to damage large areas at once. Finally, the Collapsing Brand had a similar function to the modified Defiler’s Point Beams that she had made use of earlier, causing the brands to build up force and gravitational pull that would allow it to pull enemies into it and would likely work extremely well with the previous Pulse Brand.

Although some of the properties had already been featured in her own creations, finding techniques that had been developed prior to her own attempts was still useful in improving her own creations and figuring out various faults within her own methods that she had failed to discover or correct prior to this. What was even more useful was a new technique.

It was slightly damaged by the water, having been stored in a worse container than the brand techniques, but she had managed to scan it with her spiritual perception prior to this and was thus able to acquire in full. The tome lacked a proper title on the front, or on the inside, but from the various terms on the inside of the book, she concluded that it had to have been named the Ever-Growing Blaze, or something akin to that.

The technique had three distinct uses, which one could refer to as moves if not for the fact that little movement was required to make use of any of them. First was Incinerate, which was an attack against a single target that set them alight and kept them burning for as long as there was energy around them for the flames to burn with. Within the tome, the second move that she could find was Eradicate, which was intended to oppose armies or large forces with a wave of flame that would disperse throughout a battlefield and cause less damage to single targets but far more damage overall. Conflagrate was the third move, and it was a balance between the two previous moves in that it caused an explosion which could affect several foes at once, affecting a smaller area than Eradicate and dealing less damage than Incinerate.

This was, in her eyes, far more important simply because it was a different technique to those that she possessed, while the three brand-type methods were not. They would be unlikely to bring her to an entirely new concept, whereas this had a far larger chance of doing the same.

Of course, neither were particularly likely to cause as significant a breakthrough as the invention of the Dao of Law, as they were not fundamentally different from the techniques that she already possessed. There were some curious differences between the Ever-Growing Blaze and the majority of the techniques in her possession, so she wouldn’t’ be surprised if the original version was made by an otherworldly demon and then modified in a more natural fashion than their techniques would usually be, but it did not appear to provide any inherent benefit or danger to her.

Aside from a few more techniques that she had little interest in, there was one last manual that she obtained which was insufficient to permit her to learn the technique described within. Many of the pages were burnt or outright missing, so all that she could be entirely certain about was that it was called the Invader’s Roar.

Speaking from the name alone, she would assume that it was a technique functioning similarly to the Lion’s Roar, except that it would somehow invade the opponent. A part of a burnt page described affecting the spirit of the target, although another also mentioned something relating to the mind of the user. Most likely, this meant that the user needed to be as powerful as the opponent in terms of their spiritual energy and mental stability in order to effectively use the technique, but this was the case with most techniques that relied on the mind, so this also confirmed little about the intrinsic mechanics and structure of the method.

‘Something to be studied, then. I don’t mind that, although it would have been nicer if the base usage method had been described somewhere in the surviving bits,’ she thought, shutting the manual and throwing it into the House of Gold without looking back at the spatial rift that opened and shut.

Her quick fight with the two forces did not cause too many waves, literally or otherwise, so far as she was able to tell. The impact of the Obliteration beam into the ocean did raise and displace quite a bit of water, but the waves calmed after a while. Otherwise, the coasts of the Planar Continents would always be barraged by terrible storms from all of the incidental conflicts that occur in the waters around the continents.

It did take up some of her time, which was why she hurried and did not bother to clean up any of the damage, allowing random travellers and scavengers to acquire whatever they want from the battle.

With the rather minor changes in elevation near the coast of the Western Continent, particularly near the small coastal haven that was the Lan District and its surroundings, it was difficult not to see the tall towers of that district from far away, but she intentionally kept her attention away from them for a while as to not ruin the surprise and to be able to see them in a good light, or lack thereof.

To observe the lighthouse-like towers during the day would be doing a disservice to them, and with her extremely accurate and resilient memory, she would hardly forget about that look when she got to see the full brightness of the lighthouses shining down upon the darkness of the district that, as some claimed, intentionally limited other sources of light outside of buildings in order to ensure that the incredible display could be seen by any incoming visitors. Since the Eastern Continent was fond of visiting Yi City, this happened very frequently, and so it wasn’t really feasible to renovate the district every other day.

As with the majority of things, it was difficult to say whether the Master of Yi City had predicted something like this occurring, especially when the things that he had spoken about to Yi Shi Ming weren’t fully recoverable due to the partial decay of her memory.

Still, that hardly mattered now, as he was likely dead, and his legacy was fading. Yi City had clearly not gone quite as expected, so she would make sure to let Yi City rise once more. If she had to, it would be at least as good as Kong Shi Meng had wished it to be, but if she had the opportunity, she would ensure that it rose far beyond anything that he could have ever dreamed of. At the end, if she had the chance to speak with him and learn of his view on her achievement, that would make her life complete in that regard.

She wasn’t someone with no other ambitions, of course, and there were plenty of other things that she would like to get on with. If it was possible to get all of them done, then she would certainly seek to do so, and perhaps the easiest would be to get a girlfriend, or form a proper relationship with those that would likely bear her children.

‘No, stop thinking about that. You can’t do that yet. For all I know, the Great Families will take ten decades to defeat, or perhaps even a thousand decades. Either way, that would suck, but it will be far easier if I am not constantly yearning for something that I cannot handle just yet,’ Wei Yi mentally slapped herself, not holding back in the slightest to ensure that some of her sillier ideas did not have the chance to develop, ‘Now, the Lan District. I guess I can relax there for a little bit.’

Since she would need to remain in the coastal district for a while, she would have the opportunity to do a number of more casual things that she didn’t have much of a chance to dream of prior to this, although it would be more likely that she would relax for a little while and find some more things to busy herself with that are no different from what she had been occupying herself with prior to this. Defeating thugs, harvesting various useless techniques, and finding more people that have been affected in odd ways by odd circumstances that may prove to be of some use to her and the Arbiters in the future against the Greats, the Primordial Deities, and even the Hunger of the Beyond, if those entities are still around and still keen to consume the world.

‘I wonder why they haven’t come in yet. Has the general worldly decline led to them not being as interested, or is there some kind of condition that has to be met on either side for them to invade? How many of those things are out there?’ she wondered, but received no reply from herself or the spatial spirit in the Kong Prison Realm, as neither one were fully aware – not to mention the fact that asking herself questions would be extremely unnecessary due to the way in which a human mind supported by the Ascendant’s Library functioned.

Making a little more progress, she waited for the sun to set a little further and then, finally, raised her head and looked upon the district before her, fully aware that the guards had spotted her as well.

Just as described in the various documents of the districts that she had passed through so far, the Lan District was surrounded by tall walls with highly similar tall towers placed on regular intervals from one another. Although the elevation of the ground did change, and some of them were even placed into the ocean in order to create a small port area where ships could dock and depart from without fear of excessively strong waves, all of them remained at the exact same height, creating a curtain of light that shone down upon the district and its surroundings. The source of light in each tower was able to shine almost freely, save for the four thin support columns needed to keep the roof standing.

The walls were positioned in the middle of the towers, with each side being crenelated in such a fashion that defenders could hide from attacks on both sides at once and fire back projectile planar constructs as necessary.

It was on those walls that a number of guards stood, every other one holding a small inscription that cast a powerful directed light onto the ground, while the other half went without a light as to not dull their perception. One of the guards using the spotlight inscription had noticed her approaching an area that was not particularly near a gate, and hence turned their attention to her in order to figure out what she was up to.

Since their attention was already on her, she figured that she wouldn’t hold back and approach as one might expect with her level of power, without blatantly stating her identity.

Slightly bending her knees, she exerted a vast quantity of energy and instantly departed from the ground, rising countless metres into the air within a single breath. As soon as she reached the height that she wanted to remain on, she snapped her fingers generate a force to cancel out the excess momentum caused by a failure to take the terrain beneath her feet into account when jumping, and manifested an aerial platform beneath her feet. Landing calmly in the middle of it, she looked to the guard on the wall and waited for them to react.

“Would it be an issue for me to enter through here?” she asked.

“N-No, it shouldn’t be… Ahem, no, you should use proper methods of entry the next time you come here!” the guard had responded instinctively before correcting their words, realising that they were not far from their fellow guards, “Once you have some form of authentication, this can be excused.”

“Alright, I’ll try and find something. Thank you for your time,” Wei Yi said, leaping forward to land on a part of the wall, then jumped from it into the Luo District, “Don’t mind me.”

Naturally, before she lost her vantage point, she also committed the famous sight of the Lan District at night to memory for future review, just in case there was ever a time when she decided to settle down and start painting, or something else of the sort. With the distant shadows cast upon the land by the support pillars of the lighthouse towers, as well as the complex layout of the district wherein homes were packed tightly together, the resulting mixture of colours was worth being painted at some point.

From above, it was also clear to see that several other pieces of information that she had learnt elsewhere were accurate. There were few lights on the streets, with most barely shining out from the various homes and structures on the ground, although there were a few people carrying sources of light with them.

Most of the district was also near or directly on the ocean, with a stone foundation for the streets and homes extending out into the shallow water up to a point where smaller ships could approach without touching the ocean floor. From there, the rest of the structures were instead placed either on smaller platforms with similar foundations that were connected by bridges and small walkways, or were made out of wood to be lighter and directly floated on the water instead. Even then, the homes could only occupy a total of two thirds of the walled region of the district, and the rest was dedicated to the harbour and the docks, holding a vast number and variety of vessels.

At times, the construction of ships was compared to an art – mostly by those that did it, for reasons that should be plain to anyone – and it was clear that the designers of the various boats in the water subscribed to that notion, as all of the ships were clearly detailed and distinct from one another.

Some were plainer in smaller details but had particular shapes that were more pleasant on the eyes, with some boats of similar sizes being longer or shorter, wider and thinner, some even being far taller, allowing for several stories of lodging to be placed beneath the top of the ship (a detail that Wei Yi would need to note as to avoid her words being easily applicable to something she had little interest in). The particular designs and angles of the hulls would also differ frequently.

Just as the larger details stood out on some ships, the finer touches on others could be noticed all the way from the wall on the other side of the district, and not just due to Wei Yi’s excellent vision. A few boats were completely covered in small patterns and shapes that made even an entirely flat surface a treat for the eyes, whereas others chose to include larger decorations like unique shapes for masts and the figureheads at the front, although that particular field was dominated by nude or mostly nude figures of women with large breasts. They were, after all, pleasant to look at regardless of one’s own gender, and would have likely been nude and present on every ship if the Lan District had been at the extreme north.

On a few ships, the sales seemed to tell the owner’s entire life story, beginning from their childhood and ending, presumably, at the point where they wished to be at the end of their lives, with the move from what had been to what they wished to be being rather blatant in her eyes.

‘For now, I have no intentions on going onto any boats, unless they’re docked in the Lan District and staying there for the rest of the time that I need to remain inside, so what I should do first is find a quiet place and have a chat with Great Dark while taking a look at some of the things the district has to offer,’ she distracted her attention from the single moment that she had captured on top of the wall, and landed on the ground, making use of her standard method to break the fall and avoid damaging the ground.

She landed on a street going between the wall and a line of buildings with angled rooves lined with thin tiles made of various shades of stone, then reached out with her spiritual perception until she noticed a typical gathering spot for visitors and residents alike – a small bar. In other districts, such places contained many sources of information and plenty of people to observe and learn various bits of knowledge from, so even if she couldn’t get drunk or taste the various alcoholic drinks, she could still gain everything necessary to spend her time in the district productively. The meaning of the last term would be up to interpretation, however.

As she walked, she transformed the shade of her robes to black and that of her hair to silver, making use of her understanding of law, the elements, the natural vibrance of her hair and the killing intent strands in the Crimson Robe of the Third Arrival all just to change their colours in a manner that wouldn’t be broken with some casual disruption of planar energy in her vicinity.

In a way, this was the extension of her ancient project attempting to allow for easy physical manipulation of the body and of the clothing on it, but it had long since gone down an entirely different direction, resulting in something that could not be described as a continuation of the original. Back then, she had considered calling the technique Cloak of Colour, as it was meant to change the colour of her robes, but now it was more suitable to refer to the technique as the Visual Transformation Law. It changed the outer appearance of an object but would not change anything about the way in which it functioned, even if it technically should.

For instance, if the colour of a piece of clothing somehow empowered its effect, that piece of equipment would still see itself as being the original colour despite any changes she makes.

That did extent to properties like heat absorption from sunlight and the like, which would usually change based on colour and the texture of the material, making the Visual Transformation Law a flawed technique if anyone was to be well aware of these properties and be looking out for them, or if someone had the kind of vision that Luo Na was both blessed and cursed with, allowing them to see certain intrinsic properties of items rather than their outward appearances.

‘Fortunately, not an issue for now. Those who know about me will learn about me from the guards, or see through the technique, and a simple change of hair and robe colour wouldn’t do much against someone who already knows what I look like,’ she thought, grabbing the Mask of Yama out of the air and turning it around to look upon the mask’s flat front, ‘This would stand out, too.’

She put it away, as any modifications that she could make to the golden object wouldn’t make it any less conspicuous, and proceeded on to a more busy street to blend into the crowd, changing her eye colour at the last moment to make her look like a distant relative of the Xin family, which was supported by the three circles in both of her eyes. With all of that, she put herself in the best spot possible without going overboard to turn every part of herself into someone or something else, and continued into the gathering of people walking through the streets, unperturbed by the night.

Some of the people did look towards her, as her newly silver hair was practically glowing with even the slightest glint of light in her proximity, but with the hair and eye colours that were common in the Western Continent, most quickly turned away and returned to their own thoughts and activities, with only a few keeping their attention on her due to her beauty, as their surface thoughts implied.

Only one gaze was kept on her beyond that, and in order to deal with them before she stepped into a place where conflict wouldn’t be beneficial to her own goals, she went into an alleyway right away.

The second that she was obscured from that one gaze by the walls of the surrounding structures, her body vanished from the spot and appeared some distance behind the one that had been staring at her. Without making any sounds, she followed the bald man as he made his way through the crowd and to the same alleyway, speeding up when he realised that she would soon exit the passage between the two structures if she had continued at the same pace as before.

Needless to say, when he entered the alleyway and found no trace of her, he froze on the spot.

“Huh? Where did she…” he muttered, thawing instantly and hastening forward in the hopes of catching her, failing to realise that his foot began to slightly sink into the ground.

Once he was far enough into the alleyway, an invisible barrier was set up at both ends and Wei Yi voice appeared behind him, leaning on one of the barriers while calmly saying, “So, what is the reason that you’re chasing me? I don’t believe we know one another, so there isn’t really any good reason for you to rush after me with such eagerness.”

His head snapped back, going to the very edge of what a neck could do, and he almost growled.

“There you are, little mouse… They’re going to pay a great deal for- hm? Why can’t I… What did you do, rat?” his confident tone changed to confusion and then anger in just a few seconds, showing a great degree of emotional variance that Wei Yi would have loved to be able to display while acting.

“That’s why you should pay more attention when you do things. Tell me who you are, why you are after me, and what you wanted to do to me – not that I can’t guess, but a straightforward answer is generally better than guesswork – and I might let you go in one piece. Unlikely, but there is a certain chance of it happening,” she said, taking advantage of the angle at which he had to look at her to minimize her effort in lying and faking expressions, “Come on, you’ve been given an opportunity. Try not to waste it this obviously.”

“My name-”

“Don’t give a fuck, your identity is more important. If you’re not going to mention it, then move on.”

“I am going to be paid to deliver a silver-haired woman to a client at a particular street, but I don’t know who you are, nor who the client is! Let me go!”

He exclaimed that just as he realised that he had begun to sink into the ground, his feet being entirely consumed by the God Burial Sea. As he was only in the lower fourth realm, there was little that he could do against her fifth realm empowered by perfected stages and all of her techniques, and so there was no choice for him but to stand and sink as deep and for as long as Wei Yi wished.

“You’ve mistaken me for someone else. I had not intended to be here until a few minutes ago, and I shouldn’t have offended anyone here even if I had intended to come here a long time ago,” she corrected his seeming assumption that she was the person he sought.

“Then who are you?”

“Wei Yi, Ascendant, Conqueror and so on. I usually have crimson hair and silver eyes, so I wouldn’t be anything like the person you’re chasing after.”

“… You lie!”

“I could lie quite easily, but, since I am stating such things to you, I think that you might be able to understand that I don’t really intend to let you go. As such, I would recommend that you say every little thing you possibly can, and hope that one of those pieces of information is enough for you to be let go safely.”

The man couldn’t be sure whether she was speaking the truth, as there was only so much information that he was able to find with his own eyes and clearly underdeveloped spiritual perception, so she allowed him a little while to catch onto what the best thing to do would be. If he did not respond as she liked, then he would be killed right away, but if he did bring up something of note in his memories or through his own words, then she would let him die more quickly. After all, he was not a good person, so removing him and potentially saving the other silver-haired woman would be for the best, depending on her identity.

A minute passed, and then he finally said, “I don’t know what they want, but I have been told not to damage the woman’s appearance too greatly. They might want her body, or she might be of some use in a political matter. I don’t know anything else, I promise!”

“Don’t worry, I believe you. That being said, I will not let you live. Goodbye, random thug.”

With a swing of her hand, the sheer force that she was able to generate through that movement separated his head from his neck, ending his life in an instant but not ending her contemplation of it as quickly. She didn’t care much for the man’s life, as she neither knew him nor thought him to be particularly important, but rather for the move that she had made use of.

Transforming moves to allow them to be used by a sword when they were intended to be used by a mace was something that she had partially figured out all the way back in the pagoda of the Great Earth twins, but now that her comprehension of Law had increased, she felt that there was more to be done with that. Perhaps the limit of that method was not simply transforming one to another, although it seemed more likely to her that developing the individual paths would be more likely to yield success. It would need a long time to be developed, but there was a chance that this could be improved.

Rather than simply making use of force, she could bring across the nature of it into a different movement.

‘Something to be considered, especially since I already have the Sword Dao, Spear Dao and so on. With them as the foundation, I could improve the current transference of one technique to another by manifesting the very concept within a movement… I’ll need to work on this later, that’s for sure.’

Setting the body alight and letting it disperse into ash, she stepped out of the alleyway and proceeded to her original destination, that being the bar that was slowly being filled with more and more people, as if she had not just slain a man that might have otherwise sought to kidnap and deliver to someone else with what might be far more nefarious intentions. Her state had been calm enough prior to this, but with the potential of further technique development, she was able to be even calmer.