V4C94: The Approach

Given the decrease in the quantity of automaton warriors, and the increase in troops, Wei Yi no longer needed to be on the front lines at all times, and so, after making use of her armour for a while and confirming that it allowed her to block the majority of attacks sent by the ordinary automatons on the battlefield, she made use of the time to travel to some other places.

There were a lot of people that she needed to converse with, and so she naturally made use of the days that were spent – for the battle did take days, with every few hours requiring the walls to be shifted forward and reconnected to the earth vein to maintain their advantage – to seek them out and do so. One of the first that she wanted to talk to properly was Lan Mei Xing, who she had learned a little about during their initial few days together but were then interrupted as a result of the sudden invasion from the Ju District.

After she had contributed a little to the battle, the Ascendant took the blue-haired woman aside and moved them over to the Kong Prison Realm, to a quiet place where speaking would be easier.

Yi Shi Ming was unavailable at that time, and so they talked only with one another for the moment.

“Have to say, of everything I had expected to face, those automatons weren’t one of them. Where exactly does someone get the imagination for those kinds of things to be made in the first place?” Lan Mei Xing questioned when they sat down on some rocks, which had only traces of the former silver on them, “What kind of world does someone need to live in to make things like that… Even Shi Meng had never gone to such an extent with his creations.”

“I think I’ve seen a place or two made by him in the Kong District. Was he afraid to make use of blatantly unusual designs and architecture, or was there some other reason or justification that worked for him?”

“Kong Shi Meng… I think I remember what you might mean. This place with weird black surfaces everywhere, that he called screens, right?”

“Yeah, that’s it.”

“Those were certainly inspired by his otherworldly knowledge, but they were still less extreme. To those that had no clue what he was building – that being the majority of the people in the Kong District, if not all of them – the screens would just look like a very unusual design choice. If you’ve seen the Ancestral Hall in the Yi District in a state resembling what it had looked like during his reign, then you would know that odd or over the top designs were considered something to be expected from him, even if he wasn’t responsible for that one.”

In the Ascendant’s mind, that made sense. When she had first come across the screens, she had no idea that they were otherworldly in origin and design, and even when writing appeared on one of them, she had just presumed that to be some kind of unusual technique or method to display writing inside of a material.

Had she been unaware of the prevalence of otherworldly demons in the world, she could have even concluded that the automatons were made by the native people of the world, just ones that had really strange ideas regarding aesthetics and design. There were likely times when she pinned something onto the actions of an otherworldly demon when that was not at all the case, and so she understood exactly how someone could view one thing as being something entirely different, even without anyone intentionally seeking to fool them. The whole world was already influenced by the otherworldly demons, and so any further developments made some sense in the minds of both the local population and those that kept being shoved into the Planar Continents.

It was also clear that he might have wished to reach out to his fellow otherworldly demons with the design, which is why she didn’t need him to reply. In the even that someone familiar with the screens and the writing managed to pass through the pool of yin water and get into the chambers beneath the Kong District’s surface, they might have an idea of what to do even without the need for direct explanation or theorisation.

“On a slightly different topic, I would like to ask about the spatial realm itself. There are quite a few rumours about them, and I would like to verify a few if possible.”

“I don’t know as much as you might hope, but I have spent enough time around Shi Meng to pick up on a few details. He had quite a few ideas about everything he came across… Tch. I had hoped to speak with him again…”

“Right, so, is it true that the heavens are unable to observe anything occurring inside of here?”

“Straight to that, huh. As far as I know, yes, that is the case. We have never had the heavens directly respond to us, so we have no clue whether such a thing as the heaven’s will even exists, but we have been able to observe that any kind of investigation into the inside of a spatial realm is nearly impossible if it is not actively opened to the outside world. In the current state, it might not be quite as protected, but there are enough such tales for us to have concluded that there must be some degree of validity to it.”

“That’s good. I don’t think that I’ve made it clear yet, but due to the Great Families being able to claim that the heavens are on their side for so long without the heavens taking a single action against them, I have long held a rather negative view of whatever will is out there in the skies. It either doesn’t care about us, or is actively supporting the fall of the very world over which it presides,” Wei Yi pointed out, “Even worse, the will of the heavens could be so weak as to be unable to do a single thing, in which case not only is it lacking in countless ways, but is also utterly worthless as any kind of leadership figure for the world. We should not obediently follow such a thing, and we should certainly not reveal anything more than we need to so that it does not have the chance to act against us.”

“Even if the heavens suffered from the decrease in energy quantity and quality – or whatever it was that you had explained about allocated energy concentration – they should have been able to take action against the Greats, so you are likely to be right. If they aren’t happy with that, they can pop down and tell us already.”

“Didn’t expect to find you agreeing so readily.”

“When I reincarnated, I had not seen the heaven’s will, and when Shi Meng and I had spent our time developing Yi City, we had not encountered a single instance of it helping out. Disaster or miracle, it never seemed to actively interact with us.”

“Fair enough. Since this is exactly what I think and have observed so far, let’s move onto the next topic. The Yi City Web. I had mentioned it to you previously, but we did not get the opportunity to discuss it in greater detail. Are you aware of the original intention for the web, as well as the spatial realm that had originally been intended to be connected to it?”

“Not really. I knew that he was making it, but I don’t think that the Yi City Web was ever fully connected, or else it would not be down at the moment. Someone would have maintained control over the web, and they would have ensured that it was active and keeping them in power with its enormous strength. They would be passing along the spatial realm from one leader to another, allowing them to be supported by it, and you would not have a chance, even with your strength,” Lan Mei Xing said, shrugging, “I think there was something wrong with it, or he couldn’t get it completed in time, and so it ended up not being revealed to the world.”

“Hence why nobody is attempting to make use of it at the moment?”

“Yes. All of the Patriarchs have got to know where to find a spatial realm, whether it is already owned or not, and they all know about the locations of the spatial stabilisation nodes within their territory, so it would only take a little while to get access to a few links of the web if they did so quietly.”

“Are you aware of any particular things I have to watch out for? For instance, if I link too many districts together, will they explode or something?”

“I… don’t think that this should be an option, since that would mean that Kong Shi Meng had failed far too greatly. Even if he was in a hurry in his last few years here, he would have at the very least gotten rid of the primary structure of the web so that it had no chance of being used. As it still remains, it must be that the flaws are minor ones that are mostly related to the functionality of it,” she guessed, “Perhaps it cannot carry as much energy, or maybe it is less precise than it could be, or something like that.”

“Well, it has performed well enough for me so far, so even if those are present, they have yet to disadvantage me in the War of Ascendancy… What about distant and separate connections? If I was to go to the Qiang District, then link up the web to the Ru and Bao Districts, would I be able to travel from the Chao District to the Qiang District through the Yi City Web?”

“That one is something I actually do know about. I believe that the Yi City Web will be activated, but the connection between a node at one side will not form with the other side until there is a node that connects to both sides of the web without any interruptions. So, if you tried to connect the Wu, Shun and Gang Districts via the Lan District, you would find that it would not activate the web properly, but if you added the Ze District and tried to connect it alongside the Yi and Xin Districts, it would work.”

“Do you, by chance, have a proper map of the connections? I would have thought that the Yi District would connect to the Shun District, rather than forming a triangle with the Ze and Xin Districts.”

She shrugged yet again, glancing at the map that Wei Yi instantly formed within the air, “I wish I could tell you with any degree of certainty. He had been quiet about the project, so all I know is what he had muttered about his various plans. There was something about an excessive number of connections, something about the Shun District not fitting with the Yi District quite right, something about a mathematical matrix… You know me well enough by now to understand that I did not understand a single thing. If there were too many connections, only the Ze, Xin and Shun Districts would easy be separated differently, while the others would pose some issues.”

“Issues like…?”

The woman rose and walked up to the map, pointing at the circle of districts that surrounded the Yi District.

“Going clockwise, we have the Ning, Kong, Ze, Shun, Xin, Huang and Chen Districts. If you try and connect the Ning, Kong, and Ze Districts with one triangle, then the connection would flow too closely to the Yi District’s borders, disrupting the territorial power of the Yi City Web. This issue is not present at the Ze, Xin and Shun Districts, because the connections occur between those territories, thus avoiding the problem of territorial disputes, as you could call them,” Lan Mei Xing explained, drawing onto the killing will map with her finger to display where she believed the connections to be, “The same occurs if the Chen, Xing and Huang Districts were to be connected. In fact, I think that the Yi District might be the core of the Yi City Web, given that it was the centre of Shi Meng’s activities, but I have seen a number of different things be placed underground at every district, so I am not particularly sure.”

“That’s fine, since I neither have the ability nor the particular desire to go to the Yi District at the moment. So long as the Yi City Web does not rely on that district to provide the abilities that I am currently using, I have no room for complaints, nor do I have someone to give them to,” she said, dispersing the map and placing the theorised connections onto her existing map of the Western Continent.

Few of them were certain just yet, other than those she already controlled and those that she had failed to link to, but it was not too important for the moment. She knew that she would get the Ju District’s connection to the rest of the web the moment that she got her hands on the spatial stabilisation point, and with the additional knowledge regarding the connections of the Yi City Web, she suspected that the Shi and Chu Districts would need to be her next targets if she didn’t wish to expose the situation at the Jiang District.

The issue with that was that the only option after that would be the Fu District, and then the Chen District, but even if the Fu District easily fell into her hands, she would not have much of a chance to progress. She needed the Chen District to grab the Huang District – which might pose a vast number of problems on its own – and that place was too significant according to the standard classification of the families of Yi City. Since the Greats partly mirrored the normal families, this was likely the case for them as well. They would not let the Chen District come under her control.

“What realm had you reached?”

“Eh, I think I got into the ninth, but… to be honest, the last year or so of my memories from my past life is a little shaky and uncertain. I get the feeling that the method of forcing reincarnation while keeping memories was not perfected at the time, to the point that I do not remember it at all.”

“It looks to have taken you a million years to successfully reincarnate, so I am not surprised that there are some flaws. I don’t know where your memories, soul, or mind were during that process, but they likely did not end up in your new body without any incident. Maybe you accidentally touched the wrong river and dropped a few of your memories, or perhaps the length of time without a body affected you,” Wei Yi threw out some guesses, although she was not too committed to the question.

The possibility of skipping ahead a few thousand years and attempting her current pursuits again was one that had entered her mind, but it was not a suitable plan whatsoever. Putting aside the inherent risks in scattering her mind to the world and allowing the heavens to take care of it, the whole point of acting now was to prevent the total collapse of the world in the hands of the Greats. She had many things on her side at the moment, including the lack of the enemy’s awareness of her exact abilities, origin and power, the access to the Yi City Web, the lack of time that the Greats had to analyse her growth and techniques, and everything else that happened to go in her favour so far.

If she was to attempt another life, even if she was to ignore everyone she had fought with, for, and against so far, she would still lose all of those things so long as the people of the world had a year… no, even a month to study them without interruption, and without further development. At that point, whether the Greats or the rest of the world was stronger, they would learn of everything she had, and the moment that she reappeared, so long as she reused anything, she would either reveal herself or find herself opposing methods specifically created to combat her.

It was akin to suicide – a double suicide, at that, as she would first perish in the moment and then in the future – and it was not going to be her choice.

Perhaps if it was possible to distort time and somehow return to the time when she began to cultivate, she could consider it, but she felt that this would also be a trap. To go back and do everything properly seemed like the perfect scenario, but what was perfect? What was necessary for someone’s development, and what could be safely prevented without agitating things beyond the original scope of the situation?

The moment that she went back to change one thing, she would think of two more that she wished to change, and she would inevitably fail to alter one by the time she returned to her current position. Then, she would go back, again and again, trying to make everything right, to make everything happen just how she wanted it to… and she would never succeed. How could she? The world was full of people, events, systems, energies, Laws, powers and more that all affected one another all of the time. If she lifted a stone and moved it by an inch, she could accidentally inspire an entirely new technique that would forever rock the world and redefine the meaning of cultivation within the mind of someone who was thought to have no talent at all.

By saving one person, she might prevent them from realising their true potential, unleash a terrible plague, send the Greats into action a year earlier, and kill a number of others that she also wanted to preserve and safeguard. It would be endless, and hopeless.

She could always choose to be satisfied with a single route out of all of the options, and simply go along with the best path that she manages to get after a number of attempts, but that would be the same. Every pause would just be filled with the temptation to go back and try again, and nothing would ever make her satisfied. Even if she attained the position that she had thought was necessary, that being the authority above the world that could ensure that Law and justice reigned supreme, she would only ever see things in terms of missed opportunities.

It was also impossible to travel back in time, so there was no point in thinking about it.

“The Four Cardinal Beasts array isn’t going too smoothly?” the Ascendant asked the spatial spirit while she looked upon the world from above, standing atop her own Endless Monolith and looking upon the round space that was slowly looking more and more like a regular land.

“It is… rather complex, to say the least. The more I look upon it, the more confused I end up being, and I am afraid that I might be unable to complete it for another few months, at the very least.”

“That should be fine… is what I would like to say. However, I am more and more aware that there is a high chance of the Greats getting up to something while we are distracted by the automaton army, and so it would be best if the basic capabilities of the array could be activated as soon as possible. There is no need to have the four beasts appear and fight, so long as the basic repulsion function works.”

“That should be easier. A week at most, although I may have a breakthrough in my understanding and develop the initial capabilities a little earlier. At that point, the barrier of the array can be put up whenever necessary, and anyone attempting to enter the spatial realm will find it significantly more difficult to do so, raising the difficulty to breaching a seventh or eighth realm array rather than just the spatial walls,” the spatial spirit replied, bowing slightly, “I will do my best to complete it as quickly as I can.”

“There’s no need to rush if it affects your work. We have some defensive measures in the spatial realm already, and we could probably put up some railguns and plasma cannons around the outer portion of the Kong Prison Realm… or perhaps even hang them up here, then rotate them according to where the enemies attempt to invade from – if they attempt it.”

“While there may not be an earth vein present here, my abilities should allow for me to replicate the power of the railguns at the Ju District’s battlefield. That will also take a few days to set up perfectly, I’m afraid.”

“Again, that’s fine. Are you more worried than I am?”

“It isn’t that I am concerned about this, but rather that I have a certain sense that I do not believe to be from my original human self. It is akin to a cultivator’s intuition, except that I have even less of a clue what it means than you might if you felt something similar,” Yi Shi Ming explained, “I get the feeling that something will happen, but I do not know when, how, what, why or where. Whatever it is, it should be dangerous, or else I shouldn’t have that level of trepidation arising in my heart.”

“Do you still have a heart?”

“… I cannot say that this is something I have ever verified. I would also prefer not to do so, if it isn’t too much of an issue.”

In the time that she had, the Ascendant naturally spent some of it cultivating, using some of the rapidly rising levels of energy alongside a number of pills and materials to assist her own technique and guarantee progress.

As she did so, she did begin to consider how to incorporate her current understanding of planar energy into the cultivation method, as it would essentially guarantee that she could cultivate as quickly as she wanted, whenever and wherever she wanted, so long as she was able to make use of the energy that was allocated to a space rather than the particles that were present there at any one time. In fact, that was the least of what she thought to achieve with it.

There was no reason to limit herself to cultivation. By accessing essentially boundless energy, she could allow techniques of all kinds to be used under the premise that energy could be present, rather than actively requiring it. All kinds of complex arrays and other planar methods that would otherwise be unreasonable to power with a normal planar gathering method would suddenly become smaller and easier to use, as such arrays would essentially be unnecessary in powering anything that she wanted to use. Artefacts could rely on the allocation of her energy to be powered at all times, talismans might even be able to stimulate that potential energy rather than their own material, essentially becoming limitless.

Some of this sounded like fantasy, and almost certainly was, but only for now.

There were many things in the world that seemed unreasonable for a long time before they were accomplished, and this was likely to be one of those things. She was certain that her understanding of planar energy was correct, at least so far as she had delved into it so far, and that while there may be an even greater truth to it, these kinds of methods wouldn’t be invalidated, in the same way that she could still easily use old planar methods due to them applying to her greater theory of energy. In fact, any further improvement would also need to account for the world as it was, so this wasn’t an issue.

Instead, she just needed to figure out exactly how she was going to achieve everything that she needed to, and what would be the proper method for accessing the allocation layer of energy rather than the particle one. Her current methods would either require her presence to use the Dao of Law and the Planar Dao to influence the world, which would not suit her own purposes, or it would be far more difficult and less efficient than regular planar methods.

As such, she mostly dedicated her work to comprehending the basics and how to use them. This naturally extended to cultivation, and was thus her opportunity to test various theories.

By the time that she was reaching the fourth stage of the Marked Core realm, she had just managed to force the world to reproduce its energy a little more quickly, which was something that she could extend to everything within the domain of the Yi City Web and the Kong Prison Realm, but it was only touching the surface of the full power of her concept for planar energy.

Everything needed to start somewhere, so she was not worried about that, and instead took her time to accumulate all of her energy and push forward in one go, instantly causing the illusory core and anchor to manifest. On the surface of the Subterranean Shell, two pairs of eleven marks appeared after one another, staggered by the perfected stage’s delayed breakthrough, and slowly stabilised themselves within the scales of the core. So far, every stage brought her eleven marks, and so she was able to calmly conclude her final quantity of marks with absolute confidence.

Unless her technique was somehow horribly flawed, she would end up with ninety-nine marks, which was the highest amount that can possibly be attained. This was known to Lan Mei Xing and Yi Shi Ming, both of whom came from a far more prosperous past, and it was also known to the modern world, suggesting that this was not merely wisdom generated by folly or ignorance. If it was, then the maximum would be believed to be eighty at most, since few ever reached an amount that was even close to that due to the sheer difficulty of the feat. It was the absolute highest that anyone could aspire to, yet, as she was approaching it, she began to grow a little uncertain about this seemingly obvious conclusion.

She had seen how an Oblivion Halo with a number of missing marks looked, and knew that this would occur whether there were nine missing marks, or only one. With the current path, and the believed maximum, there would be no chance of attaining the seemingly perfect number – one hundred.

Was this a genuine limitation of reality, like some aspect of planar energy and cultivation that she had not yet grasped, or was there something that the people of the past and the present alike had yet to learn? Was it possible to attain one hundred marks, complete the ten oblivion halos, and manifest something incredible with their combined power? It seemed unbelievable and unlikely, not to mention excessive considering the power that ten oblivion halos could offer, and yet it was one that she couldn’t stop pondering.

There had to be something about the seeming maximum of ninety-nine that she did not yet know, and whether that was its false nature or its true nature as the manifestation of an energy limitation typically unseen by humanity, she would do her best to comprehend it. If she wished to be successful with all of her goals and plans, she had no other choice.

She was able to recall the lectures she had heard about the topic of the higher realms just as well as any other topic thanks to her Ascendant’s Library, and she was sure that it would have something to do with the next few realms: Linked Channels, Oblivion Halo, Imperfect Rift and Eternal Gate. The first two interacted with the searing marks directly, and so she was confident that they held some kind of key to the whole situation. Perhaps one hundred marks could allow for the Linked Channels realm to fully stabilise the core from the outside, allowing for Oblivion Halo to bring a far greater improvement to oneself than it otherwise would, with the Imperfect Rift and Eternal Gate being affected as a result.

‘Or, all of this could be random guesswork. I don’t think that it is, but I suppose that none will ever know the truth until I get there and do my best to find it,’ Wei Yi concluded her cultivation session, rising and departing the Kong Prison Realm.