V4C95: The Ju District, Part 1

The third day of the sixth month, 1,201,523.

Six days after the offensive push against the ever-appearing forces of the Ju District began, their wall had finally reached that of the district itself. There were still automatons pouring out of it, and it became more and more difficult to defend against their numbers as they took less time to exit wherever they were being manufactured and reach their position, not to mention the fact that they were now in their home territory, but they had finally made it.

In large part, the Ju District was covered in mountains, with the only reasonable entry point being to the east, hence why the automatons had emerged towards the Ping and Chao Districts first. There were plenty of other feasible reasons, but no matter what the Ju District wanted to conquer, they would need to go through those districts first. After that, they could proceed onto Paragon, or towards the Yi District, or even in the opposite direction and invade the Shi District, resulting in their tall mountainous walls being an obstacle for invaders and the inhabitants alike. Furthermore, these mountains contained a lot of defensive measures that made them difficult to alter and destroy, allowing them to endure the test of time far better than anything in the wild, outside of a district.

The walls at the east were also placed at a higher elevation, standing on stone with only traces of sand appearing as a result of winds. They were made of a combination of metal and stone for the highest possible durability, and on each one stood a type of automaton.

Some walls were protected by elite infantry, whereas towers were manned by railgun turrets – which were essentially identical to the railgun walkers save for the legs being replaced with a second energy core that was dedicated to the railgun itself. There were also quite a few other automatons scattered about, but not a trace of a human force at the front lines, prompting some of the forces on the side of the Arbiters to wonder whether there even was a human population remaining inside.

Wei Yi did not need to ask that, as she was able to perceive the inside of the district even from a fair distance and could sense a number of regular cultivators and residents. All of them looked to be getting up to ordinary tasks, except that they avoided straying near the path of the automatons and only ever looked on from the side.

Some of them would look on from afar and think about various things – the details of which were not available to her due to them being at the edge of her perception – but what was certain about them all was that their lives were not actively being harmed by the automatons. They did not seem to be actively participating in their construction, but the non-human forces weren’t ones that had overtaken the district to the detriment of the native population. On one hand, this meant that she had more potential foes, but on the other, the fact that they were staying behind meant that the automaton army plan wasn’t something that was expected to proceed perfectly.

Had they been certain of victory, they would have needed to send out human forces alongside their automatons in order to claim the territories taken from others and ensure that they were taken care of properly, so that the army wouldn’t destroy valuable resources or architecture. None of the automatons she could see outside or inside the walls had any purpose other than warfare, so it was impossible to fulfil those roles without proper intelligent oversight.

On one hand, this meant the possibility of some other method being used to combat them, and thus a greater degree of danger that they would need to watch out for. On the other, it suggested the possibility of the Ju family surrendering or otherwise agreeing to a truce, as they might have seen their path as being a suitable one at the time but might then reconsider it when they figure out that their enemy is far more powerful than they had anticipated. Given the isolationist tendencies of the Ju District as a whole, they might even be unaware of the War of Ascendancy as a whole.

For that reason, Wei Yi rose into the air and headed far above the wall with which they had approached, barely managing to look into the district due to the incredibly high walls that the Ju District had. She channelled her energy towards her vocal techniques and addressed the district.

“People of the Ju District, I am Wei Yi, the Ascendant and the one that is fighting to restore the concentration of energy in the world and bring us all back to the united state that we had once been in, where Yi City towered over all else and the ninth realm wasn’t impossible to attain. Recently, your district has attacked two of the districts allied with my Arbiters with an enormous army that is likely to have been produced via the abilities of otherworldly demons,” she began, quickly making the situation clear to anyone that wished to listen, “If the Ju Patriarch, or someone who can make decisions with the same degree of authority, does not wish to proceed in a meaningless conflict, I would ask you to come to the walls and speak to me. Otherwise, we will have to treat the Ju District as an enemy force and forcefully breach the walls.”

Due to the aforementioned possibilities of a proper alliance being formed without the need for continued battle, she offered the district the option to negotiate and make their position clear. If there was a good reason for their actions, or if they were open to changing their intentions, then she would be likely to accept so long as it did not force her to sacrifice anything of value to her and her cause. Otherwise, she might as well give the citizens the chance to step back before the battle begins.

She did not need to wait too long for a response. After a little while, a figure rose onto the top of the walls, walking past a few of the automatons as to stand directly in front of her, not using a single planar method in the process. If not for the aura of energy that lingered around him, he would have seemed to be an ordinary elderly man in a rather ordinary outfit, at least on the surface. Beneath the robes, he had a layer of armoured plates made from a similar material to the one the automatons were made out of, and it protected him in much the way that Wei Yi’s scale armour guarded her. There was even an Armour Forming inscription on one of the plates, although it was far weaker than star metal.

He also had a number of tokens and items in his pockets, most of which clearly denoted his identity.

“The Ascendant? I have heard a few things about you, even with my attempts to keep the district away from the world,” said the Ju Patriarch, nodding his head politely, “You think that you are a better choice for the people here, native and otherwise, than we are?”

“When it comes to strength, I don’t think that you can really argue with that. So far, your automatons, while impressive, have achieved little more than sharing their methods with us, and I have yet to see any greater foe coming to face us as we stand right before your walls, ready to invade if we must. Did you mean something else, perhaps?”

“No, it was strength, primarily. I do concede that your forces have overtaken mine, but this is not the end. I do have a few more things to challenge you with. If you endure those… perhaps it can be agreed that you are more likely to survive against the Great Families and the other threats in the Planar Continents. I will not speak for those you call otherworldly demons, nor for those of my people that disagree with my judgement at this moment. I will simply let everyone watch and see how you proceed. Would you argue with that?”

“Oh, so you just intend to let me in if I win? No long speech about how you are right or something?”

“If that is what you want, I can certainly provide it to you. I believe that our path is correct. Planar energy is not infinite, whether in quantity or potential. It is possible to exhaust both, one way or another, and it looks to have happened once already. When that time inevitably comes, we will lack the ability to protect ourselves from whatever comes after, be it another form of energy, or an absolute void where the various beasts in the wild are suddenly far superior to us in every single way,” the Ju Patriarch said, “Only by focusing on that which does not need planar energy will we be able to overcome such a time, whether it comes tomorrow or in a million years.”

“That would be a fair argument, if the automatons were not powered by anchor energy, something that is intrinsic to planar energy and would not exist without it. If you think the automatons will be your way out, you are wrong.”

“I had an idea that there might be some issue with such a bottomless source of power, but I would say that my chosen path, as well as the path of those that came before me, is not wrong. Although the energy cores themselves will not be usable in their current state, the locomotion will be. The designs will be. The railguns and plasma cannons will be. The minigun principle will be. All of it has a use, and when done without planar energy, it can even allow for us to recover the power of the golden years, before the Master of Yi City vanished from the world. You have proven that already.”

“Is this an assignment that Kong Shi Meng had given to the Ju District’s leadership, or is it something that you and your family had decided to do on their own? Out of all the districts out there, for this to be the only place to come up with such an interesting route of development is certainly unusual, to say the least.”

“… I will answer that question once one of us is victorious.”

“Fine then, I won’t push on that just yet. That being said, do you really think that the best way to display your path is to obliterate the rest of the districts and forcefully replace everything that they have sought to develop with your own creations? Personally, I would have made a case to the other leaders and encouraged the recreation of the full Yi City, although I doubt that I truly need to explain that given everything that I have already done and attempted to do with my time,” Wei Yi said.

“Why is that, I wonder?”

“Because just as you have sought to create and innovate, others have also pursued creating new and more powerful methods. To say that none of them can be applied in a world without planar energy is absolute nonsense, and I am sure that something like the mind and soul are going to be present even without our current foundation, so the work of Xin District would not be pointless in the slightest, just to name a single example,” she said, “To simply roll over the world because you are currently powerful is incredibly foolish, in my eyes, hence why I have not pursued direct conflict in most places where I could avoid it.”

“Have you? From what I have heard, most of the people that have access to your Paragon fortress have begun to practise techniques from your own library.”

“Yes, and I have never forced them to do so. In that case, it is like providing people with the means to improve, and if that is suddenly bad, then none of us shall have much of a chance to improve the world before we inevitably perish. You, on the other hand, did not come out and offer to protect territories with the automatons, but instead sieged every territory in sight. If nothing else, our methods are extremely different, and lead to vastly different outcomes as a result.”

“And yet, had you invaded every district in your path, there would be none that wish to challenge your strength. Nothing can be done without sacrifice, Ascendant, and you should realise that well enough if you have gotten this far.”

“It seems like you wish to speak down to me, Patriarch. I don’t appreciate that, since you should not be aware of the full extent of my losses, and cannot even hope to guess what I have already committed to throwing away just for the final result to be possible. Meanwhile, your notion of sacrifice seems to include only the rest of the world losing their foundations, while yours become entrenched throughout the entirety of the Western Continent,” Wei Yi said, “Unless the two of us have a very different definition of sacrifice, I would say that you are more than happy to keep everything you wish to have while letting others discard that which is not convenient to you.”

“It looks like we disagree on quite a bit, Ascendant. Without proof of one another’s abilities, I do not think that we will be able to complete our persuasion of one another, so let us return to the original premise-”

“Yeah, I know what you are doing. You have insufficient arguments for your position, so you resort to combat as a simple way to solve your problems. Don’t think that people don’t understand.”

“And you simply proclaim your own superiority due to your successes so far, whereas we had failed to achieve this so far and thus have far fewer opportunities to speak with confidence regarding our own actions. Had we been controlling several districts and making use of a spatial realm to link them all together, then we would be able to proclaim whatever we wanted with the exact same pride and confidence that you are able to display,” the Ju Patriarch said, “Let us just fight!”

With that, he promptly turned around and got off of the tall wall, leaving both the Ascendant and the people that had been able to hear the exchange on both sides rather disappointed. The forces of the Ascendant’s Arbiters had hoped for someone that would be able to justify the extreme power that the automatons held, whereas the people of the Ju District were hoping that their Patriarch would be able to put up a better argument against a force that did appear to have a rather reasonable justification for her approach to the isolated district.

The Ascendant did not linger in the air, descending to the ground right away as to prepare.

She was certain that the moment that the Ju Patriarch, whose strength and body were weaker than his creations, stepped down from the wall entirely, leaving the dangerous portion of the battlefield, the automatons would begin to fire upon them, and thus restart the battle that he had been keen to begin. At that point, something stronger would be certain to emerge.

Otherwise, even if the Ju Patriarch was highly fond of his own automaton army and unreasonably believed it to be far better than it truly was, he wouldn’t be foolish enough to assume that a more prepared and larger force would suddenly struggle against the same kind of energy that they had faced prior to this with no preparation at all. At the moment, she was unable to sense a new type of automaton or weapon anywhere, finding only the same kinds of robots being produced and emerging from the Ju District, so she wasn’t aware of which type would be upgraded this time, if any. Naturally, she kept up her guard and made sure that her spiritual perception would linger around the edge of its range so that any unusual entities would be observed as soon as possible.

From everything that she had seen of the Ju District so far, she wasn’t sure whether they had any chance of producing an automaton that would completely overcome and overwhelm all of the offensive and defensive methods available to the current Arbiter army, but making a dent was not impossible. All that they would require is a large force with enough firepower, like one may find on a colossus or two, on each one, to emerge at the same time and begin attacking.

As such, she was not going to insist that her forces did not rush in immediately, but instead silently commanded everyone via a thread of spiritual will to activate their shield generators and prepare to defend themselves in a regular manner just in case the shields did not prove to be sufficient. There were several potential threats that she had already noticed on the outer edges of the Ju District, and it would be foolish of her not to warn the others and to simply expect them to endure the sudden attacks that would be coming towards them.

Indeed, the moment that he descended from the walls and began to walk away, the many automatons standing at the top of the walls aimed their weaponry at them, while the walls themselves opened up. All of the metal panels on the front were opened inwards, using an unseen hinge at the top, and a series of railguns and plasma cannons were brought up to the openings, all of them similarly taking aim.

All at once, this immense number of weapons fired upon them.

“Cease!” Wei Yi exclaimed, a large quantity of her blood instantly evaporating alongside a few organs as all of the hail of projectiles stopped in mid-air, completely frozen and uncaring about the slight wind that was currently passing by.

The spheres of orange plasma decayed quickly, and once the effect upon the projectiles ended, while they were able to continue going, the railgun bolts simply dropped out of the air, for they were propelled solely by the rails that they had been fired from. Now that they were out of the railgun and frozen in the air, there was nothing else to force the projectiles to return to their previous speed, and thus they simply fell out of the air. A number of small pieces of metal fell upon the sand and stone near the walls, although most of them still burned with an immense degree of heat caused by their acceleration.

“Everyone, attack!” she ordered, manifesting her railgun grid and promptly accelerating the process with some Law-based trickery so that she was able to fire them all within an instant.

All of the energy bolts that were loaded into the grid of rails shot out with more energy at a faster speed than the bolts that had been launched by the enemy. They flew towards the individual openings in the wall, and the various weak points located all around it, brimming with blackened crimson light that was forced to burst out nearly instantly as they collided with numerous layers of glowing orange barriers, surging out from the wall, the entities hidden behind it, and something in the district itself.

Together, they weaved together to result in an incredibly complex net of barriers, and when one of them was struck, the force was dispersed across the rest of them almost immediately. With only a few barriers, the Obliteration energy would not have been successfully scattered this way, but once the energy was finally sent away from the smaller spherical barriers placed right at the wall that had been attacked, the major barrier that turned out to be encompassing the entire district took on the rest of the energy. It trembled and quaked quite significantly, as it had to endure an extreme degree of stress imposed by over a hundred rounds shot out with four rails each, but it ultimately managed to survive the attack and remain in place, keeping the rest of the layers of the barrier in a stable state at the same time.

‘Well, I see that they weren’t being idle while we approached, as the shield looks to have been a more recent invention compared to the hexagonal design, or perhaps they had instead compressed the barrier around the district into one that could function aboard the constructor orbs,’ Wei Yi thought, ‘Since this has not worked, might as well just continue the attack until it does.’

The barrier was a powerful one, but that did not mean that it would be there in perpetuity. Even if it was not attacked at all, it would be eventually worn away for one reason or another, and the attack that was currently being performed would simply accelerate the decay of whatever power source was being used. If it was also making use of an energy core or two – presumably of a far larger size than those placed into the automatons, or otherwise in far larger numbers – then it would be overwhelmed and exhausted, and if it employed a more traditional method of acquiring planar energy, then it would be outpaced by the damage to the shield.

Either way, the Ascendant and her many arbiters had plenty of methods to resolve a layer of protection around a district, and some of them weren’t even that destructive. It would be ideal to minimize the damage to the district as a whole, but if the Ju District made that difficult, they would naturally employ certain means that result in more destruction than is desirable, like the Black Sun and the extreme degree of damage that it could result in.

In mere seconds, the railgun grid was charged once more and the projectiles were loaded into it, with this occurring at the same time as the enemy weapons were also readied yet again. Both looked to have their own methods to accelerate the process, with Wei Yi using Law and the automatons making use of some aspect of their own structure and the anchor energy that they were making use of, and so the next shot was taken by both sides nearly at the same time, with the latter slightly delaying their shot for the very purpose of attacking at the same time.

Judging by the increase in intellect that was needed to even attempt to test the feasibility of negating the abilities of the Dao of Law via attacking at the same time, thus hoping that Wei Yi would either need to negate both attacks or let both come through, it was easy to conclude that there was likely another automaton that they would need to deal with, whether it was another constructor orb or something entirely different. It wasn’t something she was particularly excited to observe, as she was not expecting to be able to make use of these automatons personally as more than border guards for her own region, but it did mean that there was some meaning to the Ju Patriarch forcing them to fight. Had he simply wanted to throw more in her direction, she would have been tempted to breach the barrier herself and give him a piece of her mind, by which she meant kicking his ass.

She’d entertain him for so long as there was no danger to her own domain, but the moment that it was no longer the case, she would not hesitate to pass through the barrier, rush towards the nearest spatial stabilisation point, and instantly integrate it into the Yi City Web already under her control.

After all, the barrier wasn’t exactly impervious to something like her fourth realm movement method, which skipped the process of movement and simply placed her where she was supposed to be. The barrier might exist for nearly everything else, but so long as she didn’t actually need to cross it, it wouldn’t be a problem. In a way, the Dao of Law and the techniques derived from it was vastly more powerful than anything else that she knew of, but the constant drain on her own vitality was slowly becoming more and more irritating.

The matter of developing the Dao of Law was one that she most wanted to get onto, but so far, all of her attainment seemed to arrive, in part, from some outside source. As far as she was able to understand, it was the heavens, or the heaven’s will, that had allowed her to catch onto random aspects of Dao and thus obtain far more strength and knowledge than she had initially possessed, but it came at the cost of the exact reliance that she wasn’t fond of and had hoped to avoid. To obtain a new stage of the Dao of Law purely on her own, she would need to complete the same degree of work as bringing a hundred Dao to the Full Success stage from the very start, or possibly even more than that, and somehow force that understanding to manifest within the world itself.

It was that last part that had convinced her that this theory regarding the heavens had to be accurate. There were plenty of interesting points in the world that the otherworldly demons seemed to consider to be unusual or unnatural, but so far, she had no reason to presume that merely knowing something – or, to be more precise, understanding it to a certain extent – would automatically prompt an impact onto the world to the extent of manifesting physical changes like the circles in her eyes.

Since every breakthrough in the stage of a Dao tended to come with additional, auxiliary knowledge that was not quite her own, even if it did seem to follow on with her own understanding, it had to come from somewhere, and be prompted by something. Given that the Hunger of the Beyond, the Primordial Deities, and any other vile entities that might exist out there, shouldn’t be very keen to contribute anything to the people of the world, it only seemed to make sense to conclude that it would be the heavens that were lending their own knowledge… and thus limiting the possible avenues of advancement as too little is understood via one’s own experience.

‘I may not yet understand all of this fully just yet, but I can still do something as simple as differentiating direction and purpose via the Dao of Law,’ she thought, one circle in her eyes lighting up as she raised her left hand and instructed, “Advance!”

Her Command of Law still had the limit of only one word, but that did not mean that she couldn’t cheat slightly and combine meaning with the inherent property of a word. In this case, the term advance had to imply travel in a certain direction, so when she clearly pointed it out, there could be no mistaking her intention.

All of the railgun bolts fired by her side were propelled with greater speed and intensity, whereas all those that had been fired by the automatons within and atop the walls were suddenly flipped in mid-air, their momentum completely twisting round to suddenly force the bolts to fly right back at the very walls that had allowed them to be fired in the first place. It was instantly followed by half of her internal organs vaporising themselves, fortunately avoiding the sensitive parts from her relatively new body parts, but it was very much worthwhile.

When every single bolt happened to strike the barrier at the exact same time, their power looked to resonate together as the Ascendant’s Dao were applied to every single projectile, amplifying not only the power of the Railgun Obliteration bolts, but also the standard bolts that had been thrown back at the enemy. Together, they collided with the shield and quickly caused incredibly large ripples within the spherical shield, and once they came into contact with one another, they led to a terrible degree of damage. All of them clashed, and the size of the ripples became so significant that one nearly hit the wall of the Arbiters.

In one wonderful moment, the spherical layer of light shattered, exploding into a shower of energy that coloured the entirety of the battlefield in the strange orange that all of the automatons wielded, exposing the other side of the wall in perfect clarity to all observers.

“Arbiters, we shall enter, and we shall defeat whatever forces the district still has. Do not harm citizens that have nothing to do with the automatons and destroy as little as you must!”