V5C3: Interruption on the Road

The bar that she had found lacked any significant planar materials or anything else that might greatly aid her regeneration, but with a few hours spent in the hot bath, her body had the necessary opportunity to bring itself to a more regular state, and thus jumpstart her recovery far more effectively than devouring a pig. In fact, all that she had needed was a stable, warm environment, and the rest would have been done by the incredible abilities that were contained within her bloodline power, physique energy, planar energy and her killing will.

As expected, even when she released the barrier around the stump that had once been her shoulder, she did not notice any traces of her body attempting to regenerate, so she didn’t waste too much time on that and instead prioritised getting the rest of her body into a better state.

With the warmth of the bath, she was able to bring her typical bodily functions to the state of the third realm, and all of her energies to the second realm in terms of power, save for anything that required a strong balance of the presence of a left arm. In other words, her Touch the Heavens wouldn’t work for the moment, as it had depended on her incredible power, physical stability, and the left hand, as it had been the one she had used when inspiration struck.

The rest of her body was more lucky than that. Now that her physique energy was at a better state, it was able to endure the cold sufficiently to keep her body in a good state, and that meant that her regeneration would proceed far more swiftly. If she had the chance to obtain some yang water, the opposite of the yin water she had found in the Kong District, she might even have the chance to jump straight back to the fifth realm in power just by spending an hour or two inside of it, although that would consume a large amount of it at the same time. Since this might not go down well with whoever might provide her with the water, which was not usually utilised in the way that she had intended to use it, this might be a little difficult to accomplish.

Still, the hot bath changed the previous estimate of a month to three weeks at most, which was good enough, especially when her regeneration would only accelerate as she got better.

That was one enormous positive of splitting her focus across five different forms of energy, if cultivating them at once could even be counted as that. What one couldn’t fully accomplish, one of the others could, and thus her body as a whole would balance itself out and would thus boost itself to new heights.

Once she got out of the bath, she had intended to lie down for a bit, but this was not as easy as she had expected. She had naturally wanted to put her scale armour back on, but then she recalled just how complicated it had been to fit herself into it in the first place. She was easily able to remove it with the spatial storage method, but to put it back on took nearly an hour as she desperately tried to fit herself into the thing while only making use of a single arm.

Her mental energy was able to contribute to the process, but she had concluded that any future leaps into pools would necessitate keeping the scale armour on her body if she ever intended to wear it again. It was simply that challenging.

She also took some time to inspect her scale armour and confirm the state of the Armour Forming inscriptions, since they were supposed to be able to keep themselves active through incredible degrees of stress and damage, which they didn’t really sustain as the only thing that had been lost didn’t really affect the structural integrity of the other pieces of the armour. Although she hoped that it would be something that could easily be resolved by channelling some energy into it personally, or something of the sort, she was soon able to confirm that it wouldn’t be this easy.

Just as her arm and the Crimson Robes of the Third Arrival were refusing to regenerate because her body and the regenerative cloth seemed to have lost the very concept of the left arm of her body, her scale armour appeared to have become a little confused as to what it actually was. With no regenerative properties to begin with, it was hard to say whether it could have recovered if it had them, but what was clear was that the Reality Severance looked to have removed something absolutely vital to the armour, which was easy enough to understand once the overall structure of the thing was considered in any detail.

She had made the scale armour while intending to have it function as a whole all of the time, splitting the stress on the Armour Forming inscriptions across the many scales of the armour, but when it had lost a significant portion of itself, it also lost the very concept of a complete existence.

It sounded absurd, and yet this was the best guess that she had at the moment. Even if she wasn’t able to obtain the original stability that she had achieved with some luck, the individual scales should still have been recoverable by supplying them with her own energy, and yet no matter how much of her planar energy she supplied to the scales, she wasn’t seeing any hint of their activation. With no better method to analyse or repair the armour for the moment – the Dao of Law was, for the moment, still beyond her body’s abilities – she had no choice but to let it go.

Fortunately, once she was in bed, it was pleasant enough for her to wait for the sky to slightly brighten, suggesting that either the morning had arrived, or that the storm had slightly subsided. Either way, this was good enough for her, as she didn’t need to care about the time of day no matter what she did due to her tendency to avoid sleep like a plague, so she got up, fixed her clothing, and left the room.

Downstairs, the people she had seen at the table were no longer present, and the bartender also somewhere else, so she simply exited and headed straight out of the village, ignoring the few people that had also left their homes. She didn’t know what the people that lived here did, and unlike the small tribe where people had cultivated via an unusual method, there wasn’t even anything that she might want to learn from them, so she didn’t bother sticking around. Furthermore, her brief interaction with the bartender and the people confirmed the rumours of the southerners being rather quiet and reserved, so going up and speaking with them would be likely to prompt them to distance themselves from her anyway.

It wasn’t worthwhile to stick around in such a place either, as the Qiang District would be far more likely to contain both resources to develop her own body back to a decent state, and more knowledge that she could obtain from someone willing to share it. Perhaps she would locate a library, or there would be someone from the Central Plains or Northern Desert that would be open to sharing.

Given that she was still walking through the snow, she had kept the boots she had recently obtained, and kept leaving distinct marks in the snow just in case.

Like that, she proceeded to the east, having received just a bit of instruction from the bartender in the form of a small gesture towards the east when he had mentioned the Qiang District. Whether that was accurate or not, he must have had some knowledge of the districts and wasn’t hostile towards them, so it was even more likely that she was in the land of Yi City, and thus near to a district in that vague direction. Even if it took a little longer, she would be fine with it so long as she found what she wanted.

Since the previous day, her speed had increased by a significant degree, and so the journey that the bartender had expected to take a day should have been cut down by some extent, as he should have had a decent idea of her strength at the time. He was in the third realm, and while that wouldn’t be enough for him to have any idea of her true cultivation, he wouldn’t and didn’t have any troubles with determining her weakness at the time, obviously including the lack of the left arm and the fact that she was barely walking at the speed that she had managed back then. Given his estimates at the time, she was now predicting that it would take her half the time at best.

Of course, any mathematical problem could only be applicable in the real world if nothing at all happened to interfere with the calculations. For instance, if one was to predict how quickly it was possible to travel a certain distance, that number would only be accurate if that journey happened without any interruptions at all, without encountering anyone or anything at all.

In reality, such a thing is impossible purely due to the fact that so many other forms of life and random interference existed all around the world. Whether it was at the extreme north or the extreme south, or even in the depths of the ocean that separated the West from the East, one could always find something to prevent them from proceeding with their plans and expectations as they would have wished to.

In her case, this tendency towards the failure of plans and calculations – especially ones that were loosely made without the use of her Endless Calculation method – manifested in the form of a small pack of planar wolves of some kind bursting onto the path she was using.

She didn’t bother considering the odd affinity that she seemed to have with wolves, given that she looked to have fought them the most out of all of the wild planar beasts that existed in the world, and instead needed to focus all of her attention on the beasts themselves. Her current strength was at the equivalent of her second realm, which actually meant that she was closer to the third due to her excessive strength in nearly every regard even at that low realm, but her enemies were all at the second and third realm, with two of the largest wolves being in Emergent Anchor while the other five were in Planar Pool.

They had jumped onto the road – if a random path that the Ascendant chose could even be called that – with their white fur allowing them to nearly blend in with the snow. She was able to see through it due to the different texture of fur in comparison to snow, and so she brought out her new weapon and held it out with her lone hand, quickly confirming its weight and the difference caused by her armour and the rest of what she had changed since last using the sword before any wolf attacked.

As such wild planar beats tended to do, the white wolves first warned her to back off with a series of growls, but after noticing that she wasn’t stepping back, they quickly pounced.

Perhaps due to sensing her weakness, the two stronger wolves stayed back and let the weaker ones attack first, possibly believing that they would not be needed. She wasn’t sure whether they were related to one another, with the two larger wolves being the parents of the smaller ones, but she did need some food and fur in order to fit into the southern society better, so she wouldn’t let them get away. With their first attack placing them into a vulnerable position due to their inability to easily shift their trajectory while in the air, she didn’t hesitate to jump in towards them and slash with her blade.

Even without a greater physical strength, the edge of a low-grade artefact colliding with the fur of a weak beast was highly favourable to her. These wolves seemed to be a relatively common variant of a southern planar wolf, without iron-like fur or anything of the sort, and thus the sword was able to penetrate it without issue.

While the wolf that was quickly losing its life flew past her, she took a step towards another and stabbed the weapon straight into its open mouth, barely having the time to shift her arm to the side in order to stop the jaws of a third wolf from travelling past it and biting down on her neck.

Its teeth were unable to pierce the star metal, but it sure did its best to hold onto her arm, giving her the perfect opportunity to quickly turn to the side and slam the wolf on her arm into another one, the collision throwing both of them away with a few fractured bones. The last of the second realm wolves had gone for her leg, so the moment that she threw those two away, she used the opportunity to turn back and kick the fifth wolf in the jaw, definitely breaking something there and managing to launch it several metres away, right into the snow and quite some way into it.

She hadn’t used her full current capabilities on that kick, but the fact that it had been enough to partially bury the beast confirmed that she would be better off focusing on her legs in combat while her left arm was entirely impossible to use. Once she could do something with it, even if it did not fit her previous criteria, then she could return her focus to the upper limbs like before.

With the five wolves downed in moments, she drained them of the minimal traces of internal energies that they possessed, those being bloodline power and physique energy, then turned to face the remaining two wolves. The five had been as large as regular wolves, without any planar attainment, but the other two were almost as large as she was if they stood up on their hind legs, and their strength was similarly greater than that of their fellow wolves.

Against them, the planar anchors that they possessed, and the planar constructs that they would be able to manifest, she naturally had to pay a little more attention to their actions and not act as recklessly as with their children.

This became even clearer when, the moment that they saw their children – she had just decided to assume that this was the case since it really didn’t matter to her – the larger wolves threw down their anchors and howled loudly, two pairs of jaws manifesting before them and quickly flying at Wei Yi with the obvious intent to bite down on her flesh and do some damage.

Unlike the five wolves that had jumped at her first, these planar constructs had far more mobility in the air, and so dodging them would be a little more difficult, not to mention using them against one another. The wolves might be inferior in intellect to the average human, but that didn’t mean that they would just let her do whatever they wanted once they were in control of their actions beyond the simple leap that the others had performed. For that reason, she quickly analysed the technique that they had utilised.

Planar beasts didn’t intentionally study or learn planar methods, possessing constitutions that allowed them to cultivate and obtain various techniques through growth and purely existing, but their techniques still operated in a similar manner to the methods of humans. Their techniques could be obtained and adapted, although there was a lot of disputes on whether that was the way to go.

On one hand, many believed that this was where humanity had first obtained their planar cultivation methods from, using the techniques of the beasts to create their own, but what was certain was that their techniques had a lot of potential issues ranging from the differences in physique and meridians to the completely different mental states of animals when compared to people. For that reason, applying actual bestial techniques in combat was not as common as being inspired by them to create the like of the Bull Punch or Bestial Palm, both of which weren’t directly borrowed from the techniques of any particular animal but were instead aiming to replicate their abilities.

Given the number of extremely powerful techniques she had in her Ascendant’s Library, she hardly needed to use the methods of the wolves, but it did help to understand exactly what the strengths and weaknesses of the techniques were so that she could make the best use of her limited strength.

For the moment, her mind was in a far better state than her body – even if it was slightly tinted by the killing intent that looked to be generating at ten times the speed than it had been previously – and so it was far better to use one strike to finish a battle if she could then attacking a dozen times with brute force. The latter could be used to wind down and relax once she returned to a healthy state, but not now.

In order to do this more efficiently, Endless Calculation needed to be tweaked a little.

‘To calculate something in full, I need a lot of time, even if it is far less than for the average person. For that reason, it is best to only focus on the outermost faults and the most blatant weaknesses, and target those above all else,’ she thought, her mental energy scanning the jaws that flew at her, ‘In other words, to understand what makes a man live and think, one needs a lot of knowledge and a lot of time to contemplate it. To take a man out of commission, so to speak, all one needs is to kick him in the balls, which takes a moment to understand once you’re aware of that weakness.’

One approach was far easier and far quicker than the other, and so she was going to adapt the method of the Endless Calculation to contemplate only the possible faults of the planar construct that she was facing, simultaneously allowing her to overcome any future foes that might have great weaknesses but powerful overall defences.

Trying out something like this in the middle of combat was a little risky, to put it mildly, but that was why she had chosen to do this with a beast’s planar construct. Unlike the creations of a human being, which could take steps to account for potential faults and flaws in their creation as a result of continued battles and repeated experimentation, beasts were limited to making use of what life gave them, be it incredibly successful or otherwise. There would be fewer flaws in a construct than may initially be found within the creation of a human being, given that nature would have taken some effort to reduce its innate flaws through natural selection and what not, but far more than in most modern techniques.

Indeed, only a few moments before she was hit, her vision was filled with several blazing fault lines on the surface of the planar constructs, and since she did not have the chance to debate them too greatly, she had to act right away, stabbing at one of the fault lines.

Despite the seeming stability of the planar construct, the moment that the low-grade artefact hit that spot, it instantly pierced it and stabbed right through it, the planar energy quickly breaking apart as it flew past her, with it quickly scattering into unbound energy that was absorbed by her the moment that it was possible to do so. At the same time, she slashed at the other incoming planar construct and hit another fault line.

This one did not prove to be quite as effective, as it was only able to crack the shell of the white planar construct, but it gave her enough information about the effectiveness of the newly coined Fault Perception to also dissuade her from rushing into combat and attacks in a similar manner in the future, especially when she didn’t want to be hit.

With this, she took the jaws with the armoured part of her body, allowing them to clamp down on her before she stabbed the inside of the planar construct using the new information she had learned about the technique to repeat the Fault Perception and get fewer but more accurate marks within her vision, allowing this strike to dispatch the planar construct without much more effort. The jaws clamping down on her and doing their best to bite through her didn’t lead to the most pleasant experience, but thanks to the raw power of the star metal, she was mostly able to survive everything without a trace of pain.

Both of the wolves weren’t just standing still, of course, and the moment that she was showing signs of resistance, one of the wolves took a few steps back and howled again, focusing its energy into a greater planar construct. Meanwhile, the other one charged forward and surrounded his head and feet with planar energy, using a rather simple technique for the third realm but one that remained effective against anyone who wasn’t strong against planar energy itself.

As it jumped onto her, she had just dispersed the second set of planar construct jaws, and was thus already in a lowered position with her sword held out. The wolf had leapt onto her from the right angle for her to have a good angle to stab at its throat.

Unlike its peers or children, whatever the relationship between the wolves was, it reacted swiftly by swiping at the sword with its planar energy-coated paw, stepping on it as it continued to fly towards her. However, as it did nothing to hold onto the weapon, she was able to quickly bring it back and move to the side, raising the sword high before promptly dropping it onto the neck, where the planar energy focused around the head was unable to spread out in time to block the cold silver blade with which its fur was hit.

In the distance, the other wolf had already manifested a large number of teeth from planar energy, looking like something between actual teeth and pure ice, and bit down on the air as all of them were made to fall upon her. Perhaps it hoped that this threat would dissuade her attack from succeeding, but she was sure enough that leaving behind enemies wouldn’t be a good idea.

Thus, her sword went straight through the flesh of the wolf, hit a bone that she needed but a moment longer to cut through, and severed the head of the wolf cleanly.

Most of the planar teeth were likely to hit her scale armour and thus do little damage, but she was aware enough that it wouldn’t be a good idea to take the rest of the teeth with her skin while her body was not at its best. Even if her endurance was enough to survive them, her internal organs were resembling their usual state after she overused the Dao of Law and thus caused them all to be evaporated time and time again, and she would be better off saving her regenerative energy for literally anything else.

It had to be noted that part of her immense regenerative rate came from the constant and nearly endless supply of lifeforce and vitality from all of the plants around the Kong Prison Realm. When she had a connection to it, she was able to draw upon all of those plants and constantly supply herself with more than enough lifeforce to also spread it throughout the prison realm and keep everyone inside healthy and strong, with their wounds recovering thousands of times more quickly than outside.

Now that she had only the mirage of the spatial realm within her dantian, that was cut off and both she and the people within were likely feeling the effects. In comparison to last time, when she still had a certain connection with the spatial realm even while she was in the residence of the Greats, she now had nothing but the vaguest link to it, and so she couldn’t keep her physique abilities working for everyone inside of the Kong Prison Realm. Her lifeforce was also now limited, and so, while she could draw upon it right now to bring her recovery speed up, it would also consume a great deal of the pool that she had built up. Given that she had no idea how long it would take her to come over to the Kong Prison Realm and connect with it properly, nor how many more injuries she might sustain, wasting her lifeforce was incredibly risky and stupid, to put it mildly.

Instead, she focused her killing will within the low-grade artefact she currently wielded, and then thrust it out as the planar teeth approached her.

Back in her first ever encounter with living cultivators from the Silver Side, she had managed to grab up several interesting techniques from them, one of which had brought about her current Ire Dao. Another, however, was called Strike Deflection, and its primary function was to meet force with force and thus allow less energy to be used than if one attempted to fully shield themselves.

At this moment, she utilised the mental energy stored within the blade and brought it out all at once, splitting it into tiny threads that all targeted the frost-like teeth that were heading for her body. The rest had no significance, and since their trajectory did not look to be alterable by the wolf after they were sent flying, there was little reason to block those that had no chance of hitting her. Had she had the spare energy, she could have taken all of them out at once, but then she would have already defeated the wolves long ago, if she even bothered to interact with them in the first place.

The teeth fell down and were promptly met with thin threads of silver and crimson, all of the threads hitting the exact centre of the teeth not in order to actually destroy them, but only to provide enough force to prevent them from continuing on. Judging by their overall strength, she suspected that the sheer qualitative difference would allow her to destroy the teeth with enough investment of energy, but that would naturally require more energy and be a waste overall.

Every tooth that she hit with the threads cracked upon collision, but most still continued to fly, albeit at a far slower pace. With that, she was able to draw in every loose thread and gather the energy within the sword once more, letting it gather for just a moment before she let it out a second time. This time, she made use of the Decapitating Net – another technique from the Silver Side’s arsenal – and combined it with the Pearl Barrier and Strike Deflection in order to achieve the highest chance of success as she launched that net at the teeth.

This time, the combination of methods and the greater degree of energy invested, combined with the already present damage to the teeth, meant that the collision completely crumbled the teeth that it struck into nothing but unbound planar energy, which she greedily devoured.

In the time that it took for the energy to properly return to the existing ecosystem of the world, it would be in a higher concentration than the rest of the energy around her, and thus absorbing it would bring a greater increase in the currently limited pool of her energy than simply draining the world, although she had yet to do that as she was concerned that her currently frail body would be unable to bear the cost of taking in so much energy so quickly.

‘It’s been some time since I had ever felt this way, hasn’t it? I haven’t needed to worry about the energy I can and cannot take in since… the age of sixteen, I think. How times haven’t changed…’

While the wolf in the distance was still recovering from the energy it had expended and considering what it was going to do against her, she charged forward and made use of the Eight Great Changes to lightly coat her weapon in flame. Then, she made use of the Ember Switch move to accelerate her advancement and stabbed the blade straight into the eye of the wolf, piercing its flesh significantly more easily than when she had not made use of a fire-type method. With that alone, it was safe enough to conclude that the wolves were indeed a kind of ice-type beast – a variant of the water element, although it was one that she had yet to encounter as a dual element so she presumed it to be a simple variation of the water element that was weaker to heat.

This likely applied to most of the creatures in the south, so she intended to keep making use of fire while it remained effective, and seeing as her body was not yet attempting to shatter or explode, it looked like this was something that she was able to manifest safely enough.

She grabbed the embers from the bodies of the wolves, devoured their energy, and then stored the largest two within her spatial storage method, fully aware that she had insufficient understanding when it came to the exact methods to skin and then make use of the beast’s fur. This was something that needed to be studied first, since there might be countless different rules implicit to southern society which wouldn’t be good to violate by accident.

Given the fact that fur didn’t typically generate heat, except for fire-type planar materials, there was no real benefit to her making use of it immediately, and so she did not waste her time on it.

With everything else cleared up just in case leaving behind beast corpses was somehow frowned upon in the south, she departed and continued down the road with the blade cleaned of blood and her energy returned to her body, where it was desperately needed to allow it to contribute to her currently limited pool of power and assist it in recovering more quickly. Her sword was put back into a sheath hanging from the waist by a belt obtained in the residence that she had woken up in, and she managed to fix the slight traces of teeth upon her outer leather armour from the wolf’s bite.