Volume Five | Cripple

There was no mental realm that she found herself in after she fainted. In fact, she didn’t have dreams either, nor did she really experience anything at all.

All that Wei Yi was sure of was that time had passed, and that it was quite a bit of time.

During that vague time period, there wasn’t any exhaustion, pain, nor much coherent thought. She knew that she was alive, or at least she thought that she was, and she could hear the faint beat of her heart somewhere in the distance. Until she did finally wake up, she barely even knew if she was injured or if she had recovered from all of the battles that had occurred so soon after one another in the Ju District and then the Kong Prison Realm, followed by some random field.

She didn’t like the uncertainty, but even that was more of a vague emotion than a clear thought that passed through her head.

Her awakening was slow, with her eyes refusing to open themselves.

When they did, the rest of her faculties also looked to return to her. The sense of touch was vague at first, but she soon understood that she was laying on something, and that she was, at the very least, still clothed. She was able to smell meat burning somewhere near her, with the scent of various seasonings suggesting that this was likely to be the meal that someone was cooking for themselves.

Above her was a wooden roof, lit up just enough by a candle that stood on the right of the place she found herself in. In the distance, through a layer or two of wall, a conversation was occurring.

“That person looked good enough, even with that,” one voice stated, followed by metal sliding against more metal. From the situation that she had inferred, she assumed that this person must be cooking whatever meat she smelled, and that it was over a fire and thus needed to be rotated to be cooked properly and evenly. With spiritual perception, she would have known far more, but it was unfortunately taking its sweet time to emerge from her body.

“Good enough? You want to do her?”

“Do- No! There are plenty who are interested in the northern people around here. She could fetch a good price, with the flaws not denting it too greatly.”

“You’re awfully optimistic despite the many times that such defects mattered far more than you had assumed them to. Remember when we had sold a blind man to a woman that had wanted him to view her art?”

“U-Uh… that bitch was terrifying, wasn’t she?”

“The paintings were worse, trust me. I regret ever trying to spy on what they got up to, even if it did get us out of being slaughtered by her.”

There was no reason for her to continue listening to the conversation, as it was rather clear what they were doing and what they intended. Whether they had rescued her from whatever predicament she had ended up in or not, their current intention to sell her off as some kind of slave was entirely unforgivable. With the additional incentive of food with which to revitalise herself more quickly, she saw no reason to delay.

She rose out of bed and found that her body was oddly weak, as if it was lacking something vital, which was odd. Planar energy was present, even if it was less plentiful than she was used to in the Kong Prison Realm, and her energy seemed to have regenerated well enough in the time that she had spent in an unconscious state. Everything should have been operating fine, or perhaps even better than usual if her mind performed the standard quiet development that it tended to do when she lost consciousness, but if it did not happen this time, it must have had something to do with not ending up in her mental domain.

For that reason, she simply continued onward, using her more innate energy senses to perceive that the people were not any higher than the fourth realm, meaning that they would pose no threat to her even if she only had her physical body to rely upon.

When she stood up, she was able to find a door leading out of the room, with no key or obstacle in front of it to stop her from walking out. She also had everything on her that she had fainted with, meaning that the people that brought her here had not properly considered their behaviour before discussing it before the fire. Even then, she had no interest in letting them go, even if she was able to find some route that entirely avoided them.

She was a little furious from what could be described as a tie at best, and she would not mind taking it out on some people that deserved it.

With that, the Ascendant opened the door and emerged into a small corridor, with walls, floor and ceiling alike being made of a dark and thick wood and carried within it a slight warmth. Although she wasn’t sure what the situation outside was, it was certainly comfortable enough within this building. She could have walked without her heels and enjoyed the warmth if she wanted to.

For now, she did not, and instead walked in the direction that the voices were coming from, finding a door that was slightly ajar. From within, the blazing and flickering light of a fire was clearly pouring through, and the sounds of metal being turned were even more clear.

Again, she verified that their cultivation was no higher than the fourth realm, and then pushed the door open.

On the other side, three people wearing thick furs were positioned around a fire in the middle of the room, where a space specifically for this purpose had clearly been created. Atop the fire burned a large pig-like planar beast, and it was being liberally seasoned with more random herbs and spices when she entered by one of the men. Another stood by the side and rotated the pig, and a third person, a woman, sat with her back to the door and was looking upon the pig while audibly salivating.

Their breaths were slightly visible as they emerged as a soft white mist, clarifying that their current clothing was not being worn just for the sake of personal entertainment or some other silly reason. It was cold, even right next to the fire.

When she came in, the first person, the one seasoning the food, noticed her and turned, surprise blatant in his eyes.

“Were you intending to sell me as a slave?” she asked once, just to be sure.

“You… how did she wake up? Did you not say that she would be out for another week at the very least?” the man rotating the pig turned to her first, then the woman that sat before her, who promptly leapt up from her seat and retreated behind the pig and flame, staring at Wei Yi.

“S-She should have stayed unconscious, I-”

“Yes or no?”

“We… we did! So what, you crippled bitch?” the first man suddenly exclaimed, grabbing a knife and pointing it at her with a strange degree of confidence for someone that was cowering at the very notion of her waking up only a short moment ago, “You may have been strong at some point, but now you can do nothing to us, understand?”

His remark was so odd that she just had to raise both hands and reach out to the sides as to showcase her full body, “Where exactly am I crippled?”

He did not provide a vocal reply, but their three sets of eyes were clearly looking towards her left, prompting her to look there as well while bringing her left arm over to get a proper look, as to be sure that she wouldn’t miss anything. There were many things that could prompt someone to be termed as crippled in the cultivation world, so perhaps they had mistaken something for another matter that was far more severe.

Almost instantly, her eyes widened, for she saw nothing – literally.

Where she had been sure that she had felt her fingers move through the cold air, there was nothing. Where her palm should have been, ready to strike the three before her if she needed to, there was no trace of skin, flesh, or bone. At the place where her armour, the one that she clearly felt upon her body and even on this very arm, she couldn’t see a thing. There was no elbow, no upper arm, and it was only once she got to the shoulder that she saw a trace of what she should have had.

Despite that, she had felt the arm there, so she moved her right hand to where the left should be, according to her perception, but it passed right through, just as her vision would suggest.

She moved her right hand down the arm that her body somehow felt, only confirming the accuracy of her vision as she was able to place her palm against a stump found in place of a full shoulder, one that had been bandaged by someone relatively recently, judging by the moist feeling of her blood staining the cloth. It was incredibly surreal, because even then, she was able to feel her left arm with such certainty that she was forced to make use of the Third Eye at its strongest in order to be as sure of one fact over the other, and unfortunately concluded that there was no hint of her arm, and that the star metal that was supposed to wrap around most of her skin was cut off right at the edge of her shoulder, where it had been split along the line formed by the side of her torso.

That left her with only a little bit of her shoulder, and even though she attempted to accelerate the regeneration of her body by as much as she could, she found that there was no hint of any recovery occurring at the shoulder, as if her body couldn’t even understand that there was something wrong, something missing.

“S-See! You may have been some powerful martial artist, but without a limb, you will be nothing!”

The voice brought her attention back to the present, where the three had armed themselves and were staring at her to see what she was going to do. While the two men looked to be more on edge than afraid, the woman was the exact opposite, to the point that one had to ask whether she even belonged.

However, that was not the kind of thing that she could be bothered with at the moment, not when they had already said everything that mattered.

Calling upon the slowly returning strength within her body, she took a step forward and clenched her one hand into a fist, the simple action causing the air around it to visibly fluctuate due to the power contained within her muscles. Even if all of her planar energy, physique energy and killing will was to be forcefully drained from her body without caring for the damage that it caused, she would still be able to display the raw power of a body that had endured countless rounds of refinement and improvement with countless methods that were able to combine together into an impeccable physique.

At the moment, she could not see the manifestation of the killing will form upon her left arm for obvious reasons, but she was sure that if her hand had still been there, the three before her would have seen it acquire claws and a layer of black bone that would make it look far more demonic than human.

“I would be able to beat you lot up even if I lost my cultivation. Try me.”

Although she said that, she did not give them the chance to act first, instead leaping into actions and heading straight for the weakest one amongst them. The woman was afraid and would react slowly, so if she wanted to disrupt their attempt at a defensive formation, she was the most suitable target. Indeed, even when she was disappointed with the speed at which she was able to move, the woman was still slower to react.

The men attempted to get in front of her and prevent her approach, but they were a moment too slow to prevent her from grabbing onto the woman’s thick clothing. Grasping it as firmly as she could, she threw her at the man standing over at the left, before turning quickly and meeting the approaching knife with the armour on her right arm.

As she did so, she noticed just how disorienting the loss of an arm could truly be. It was not the heaviest part of the human body, but it was required for a great deal of what people typically did. The arm helped with balance, movement, all kinds of precise interaction and more, and most importantly for her at the moment, the loss of an arm did exactly what she had attempted to avoid causing with the scale armour through modifying her usage of techniques accordingly. Without an identical degree of preparation, her movements were blatantly sloppy.

Just to name one example, her Heeled Movement Art was developed with an intense focus on perfect balance, and now that it was unable to function at the same level as before, she understood just how much regular women of the various Orbises must have struggled while wearing anything with high heels. Every movement felt like it was about to throw her off balance and send her plummeting to the ground, and she had to take far more care to ensure that she wouldn’t trip up or otherwise misplace the smaller surface area of the heel in such a way that it would result with her standing on an uneven surface. Making such a mistake would promptly send her falling to the ground, and that would give the people before her enough time to run off or get a stab or two in.

With the strange state of her arm, she was unable to determine whether her regenerative abilities still functioned, so recklessly taking any hits or using the Dao of Law was out of the question.

As the knife was blocked by her armour, which did not look to possess its Armour Forming properties at the moment given that it failed to protect her Crimson Robe of the Third Arrival, she intended to strike with her left hand and hit the man’s stomach. His clothing was weaker there and would allow her to take him out of the battle with ease if the force of her punch passed through.

However, she realised after a moment that this was no longer an option.

For that reason, she failed to take advantage of the knife being in such close proximity to her arm, like attempting to knock it aside and then go in for the punch that she had originally intended for. She also had to dismiss yet another tactic that would have involved the use of her left arm, something that she knew she would need to resolve once her situation was a little calmer, and finally arrived at a reasonable course of action while her weak spiritual perception finally reached out far enough to confirm that the other two were occupied.

She lunged towards the third figure and to the left, where there would be little chance of her mistakenly believing that the left arm was still an option, then used that momentum to kick his right left. At that moment, he had begun to distance himself from her, but he had begun to do so with the other leg, making this one his only stable anchor to the ground.

Luckily, even if her heels became far more difficult to walk around in, they did not lose their durability and strength, although the latter resulted more from her legs still being in good condition rather than the material of the heels themselves – which, considering that any issues with the heels came from her own body as well, it was rather unfair to mention them in the first place. Her mind was not operating at its best at the moment, and she did not have the time to review the exact cause at the moment.

As the man’s knee was hit, the clear sound of breaking bone and damaged flesh was heard by all of those present at the scene. The man was thrown back into a wall, striking the wood hard but failing to damage it in another instance of her being extremely disappointed in the strength that her body managed to display. Nonetheless, the man was out of the fight for now, as she would not be able to do anything with one leg being completely internally shattered, she was able to turn her attention to the other two, who were finally managing to disentangle themselves form one another and thus were about to enter combat.

The woman naturally fled to the back, her cowardly behaviour being predictable enough, while the man that she used as a shield didn’t seem too bothered about it and instead gritted his teeth as energy flowed throughout his body, his every muscle slightly lighting up with a dull flame that coursed through him.

“She must be using something on her body! I told you that we should have stripped her rather than bandaging her!” the man exclaimed to the one lying against the wall, charging at her.

As he attacked, so did she, although she did not do so by trying to get closer to him. Instead, she jumped back with one foot, then used the time in the air to remove the heeled boot from her other foot and threw it right at the man, much to his surprise.

With her one functioning arm and a well-made boot, she was able to exert a little more of her usual strength than before, and thus the star metal flew at him far more quickly than he was able to react to it. It struck his chest and wasn’t able to pierce his clothing directly, but the force that she was able to transmit through the boot was more than sufficient to break something inside of his body, forcing him back by a step as all of the energy within his muscles lit up for a moment during the collision.

Since walking in just one heeled boot would be rather inconvenient, to put it mildly, so she removed that one as well, secretly making use of the House of Gold since she found that it was fully functional despite everything that didn’t want to go the way that she wanted it to. Her connection to it was strange, her sense of it was also flawed, but she had enough spare space in there to throw in a boot and free herself to do whatever she wanted against the last foe. The woman had looked incredibly terrified, and she still looked the same, but the moment that the man was taken out, she rushed in.

When she had sat in front of the door, she had been holding onto a sword that had laid by her side, one that might have been used by one of the other two, and when she had leapt up, she ended up carrying it with her to the side. Now that she was the only one that could still participate in the fight, she unsheathed the blade and held it in both hands, her fingers still leaving some space on the blade’s hilt.

She did seem to have the necessary strength and training to hold it, however, for after a moment of hesitation, followed by a breath in which she looked to let out much of her fear, she came at Wei Yi while channelling her own energy into the weapon, revealing it to be an artefact. It did not light up as brightly nor radiate as much energy as a weapon of medium grade and above should, so she presumed it to be a low-grade weapon and thus was confident that it wouldn’t be able to break past her star metal armour. With that knowledge, she was able to determine several ways to deal with her rather basic horizontal slash, and she chose to do so with a safe test of her own body’s physical endurance.

It was possible to test later, but whatever happened wouldn’t be fatal anyway, and she had plenty of bandages on her at the moment to cover up any wound. She might as well go ahead and risk it.

Thus, she waited for the woman to get just close enough, then lunged forward and grabbed onto the weapon, using the precision that she did still possess to only allow it to lightly touch her skin. With the additional stability offered by the woman’s firm grip on the bladed weapon, she kicked with her left leg, calling upon the energy that she was still able to detect within herself.

Lacking much of the direction that she might usually give it, her energy burst out as a loose wave of silver and dawn light, quickly confirming its nature to her, but that was enough to fall upon the woman and latch onto her thick clothing. Right away, the immense yang within her physique energy set the fur alight, while the yin got underneath the many items of clothing and chilled her body and blood, causing her to freeze up and for her blade to be unable to proceed much further.

While she was stuck between fleeing to put out the flames on her body and intentionally keeping them going so that they would warm her up, the Ascendant pulled the blade out of the woman’s hand and then promptly stabbed her heart, just barely managing to evade the torrent of blood that followed.

‘I might as well use a sword while I’m over… here, wherever this place is,’ she reasoned, replacing the planar energy stored within by her killing will, as her planar energy would just cause the weapon to explode, ‘Indeed, a low-grade weapon, and it also seems that the various forms of energy within my body are slowly recovering… To see a time when the energy from someone that looks to only be in the second realm contribute to my planar pool in a noticeable manner is rather unfortunate. That being said, my cultivation should return to normal when given enough time, so that’s good.’

Before confirming anything beyond that, she looked to the other two and approached the one that she had kicked to the ground by breaking his leg. He looked to be in the best condition of all of them, so he was the best target for interrogation.

“Hey, idiot, where am I?”

“… I’m not telling you anything!” he exclaimed after a moment of thought, “We were wrong to want to sell you, but-”

“Good enough for me. Thanks,” she cut him off and swung the blade in her hand, cutting through his neck and stabbing his dantian the moment after, making sure that he wouldn’t be able to make use of some planar energy to recover from the injury by some miracle of technique usage.

She naturally followed that up by ending the life of the other man, then took the seat that the woman had been using and placed the sword beside her in a similar manner. The pig before her wasn’t yet finished, and so she had the time to consider her own state for a little before she was going to need to figure out how she was going to eat that thing when she was unable to take it apart properly with only one hand available to her. In fact, there was a lot that she would need to consider.

First of all, her attention naturally went to her dantian, where she confirmed the presence of her Endless Monolith, the Subterranean Shell that was around it, and then the ninety-nine marks that had appeared upon it since her last breakthrough.

All of it was still present and stable, which was good enough for her, even if the rift at the centre of the Endless Monolith looked to be in a temporary closed state, as if it had been frozen and was slowly attempting to thaw. She was sure that it would in due time, no more than a month by her current estimations, and so that was not particularly concerning to her at the moment.

What did worry her greatly was the fact that the spatial realm that had existed beneath the Endless Monolith and within the Subterranean Shell for some time was suddenly dull and hazy, as if it did not exist as anything more than a memory. She could not feel the realm, nor the fortress where it had become anchored, and even the districts of the Yi City Web were out of her reach now. The spatial spirit did not look to hear her as she called out to it, and there were no figures present within the mirage of the Kong Prison Realm, only the basic landscape and her complete Ascendant’s Library.

‘We’d discussed a few flaws of the Yi City Web recently, but even the inability to connect the web from afar shouldn’t lead to something as extreme as this. Thus… the Reality Severance?’ she frowned, recalling everything that she could about that attack with the library’s abilities.

Unlike her planar cultivation, which would be affected to a certain extent by the loss of the Yi City Web’s empowerment and the lack of spatial realm to pull energy from, her mental cultivation and her physique looked to be in perfect condition, whereas her bloodline power was slightly decreased in quantity, just as all her other forms of energy were. Unlike her planar energy, which primarily resided in the dantian and thus didn’t care too much about the size and capacity of meridians when not in use, the other forms of energy primarily occupied the meridians, with this including the mental energies that she had primarily stored in her head in the form of the three library techniques she had ended up going through on her path of killing will cultivation.

Her physique energy had no place to go at all, and her bloodline power did have some additional quantity thanks to her heart, which could contain a little more than the rest of equivalent spaces in her body, so they were all affected by the loss of an entire arm’s worth of meridians. Since she was able to externalise all of her energies, she could project them outside of the body, but it would not be the same as storing them in meridians.

“Going from the name alone, Reality Severance should split or sever something. Initially it had gone for my central point, so it would have cut me in half… and the intention must have been not permitting me to recover,” she guessed, using her recovering killing will to turn the pig on the fire, “From the view of Laws, perhaps they had cut the very concept of what I must be as a whole, meaning that even if I was to find my lost limb, it would do nothing to help me recover it properly… I can’t verify this with them, but if I loosen the bandages…”

Doing so with one hand was a little tough, as they had been put onto her well enough, but at the very least her right hand had already fully recovered from the previous minor cut, minimising the difficulty.

That quick recovery was also why she had concluded that her regeneration was still functioning about as well as one might expect. She had many methods that allowed her to recover from the most grievous of injuries, so even if she was temporarily frozen in a state of weakness, her severed shoulder would not be bleeding after a few minutes of sitting about.

Once she removed the bandages and looked as best as she could upon the wound that remained on her body, she was able to confirm one thing. No regeneration had occurred whatsoever, not even to the point of closing the wound and leaving her with a stump covered in skin. It was all as if she had been cut only the moment prior, and so some of the blood had already begun to drip down her robes, which had also been affected by whatever effect Reality Severance had upon her.

‘Another good reason to conclude that there is something more than a powerful cut to the technique. Otherwise, either my arm or the robe should have recovered some time ago,’ she noted, finding that both were in that exact state of idleness that shouldn’t have occurred with their typical properties.

Perhaps the only positive was that her blood had been staying mostly within her body, and now that she had access both to her energies and control over her own body, she was able to attempt a few things. Healing the wound was a complete failure, further solidifying her conclusion, but she was able to place an invisible barrier at the wound and stop her blood from flowing out, meaning that the Crimson Robes wouldn’t continue to be dyed a darker red by the continued from of the partly celestial crimson that flowed through her veins.

She sighed, using her one hand to rub her aching forehead as she considered everything that she would need to adjust in order to compensate for the sudden loss of an arm.

‘I also need to figure out how to correct this issue as soon as I possibly can. My cultivation is affected, but that can be ignored due to the incredible power that I should have despite this. The issue is the lack of the meridians found in that arm – my dominant one, considering how often I used it – and the fact that I have one less limb to interact with the world,’ she thought, noticing that the pig before her had finally reached an edible state, “For instance, I now need to just bite into this thing and hope for the best… Well, physique energy is always an option, even if I may not be the biggest fan of just using it for everything.”

Reaching out for the metal spike on which the pig had been impaled, she removed it without much difficulty and found a good place to bite into.

‘Fuck… I could have recovered my sense of taste, at least…’ she sighed, and continued.