V5C7: The Full Number

One part of the Qiang District’s mines was cleared out of all workers, and only two figures stood within, with one still occasionally stroking his beard when he thought that he wasn’t actively being looked at. The Patriarch hadn’t gotten shy, but he knew that he couldn’t get too distracted for the moment. Later on, a time would come for him to process everything in full.

Wei Yi, meanwhile, was looking for an appropriate source of metal to test her abilities on. Given that her current realm was effectively Emergent Anchor, she didn’t think that her Silver-Leaf energy would have as much effect on higher realm materials as it did back in Paragon. As such, she wanted to pick out a material that had enough existing matter to grow out more quickly, but that wouldn’t be as useless and common as iron, copper or silver. All of those could be found in plentiful quantities as they essentially functioned as walls and floors for the mines where regular stone was unavailable.

Eventually, she located a fourth realm material that was both valuable for those from the third realm all the way to the sixth due to its versatile properties, as well as easy enough to excavate, and then approached it.

To guarantee that she would be able to keep the ore growing even after she departed from the district, which was greatly assisted in the Kong Prison Realm and Paragon by the presence of her control and energy spreading out throughout her territory, she was going to infuse more energy into the ore and take more time carefully infusing it into the material in such a way that it would be able to absorb more without affecting the material itself.

‘There is an earth vein here, but… right, I need to consider how that works, as well. It doesn’t fit my current theory of the world’s energy, but I suspect that there is- anyway, I can’t just shove it into everything and expect nothing to be affected. The ground will shift no matter what happens to everything else, and given the placement of the Qiang District, it could lead to the complete collapse of most of the district,’ she understood, dismissing the idea of shifting the earth vein up to substitute any other method of providing the necessary energy to the metal ore, ‘I just need to act carefully and precisely, and I should be able to pull this off easily.’

Her current situation was very suitable in forcing her to perfect the precise movement and flow of her own energy, especially in interactions with things other than her own body, as that was able to endure and benefit from it no matter what, especially in the case of her planar energy. With all of her previous experiences and practise, she was already at a rather high level, but there was always room for improvement, and she would obviously take advantage of the opportunity to develop her abilities further.

With a small portion of her energy brought into her right hand, she touched the ore and scanned it with her spiritual perception, using the proximity to have a greater degree of accuracy. It didn’t reveal anything significant, but it did confirm that her initial plan was indeed going to work out as she wanted it to, albeit with a little more work to account for some of the flaws in the material.

Her planar energy had an intrinsic element of refinement, especially in the cosmic state, and so she would still enhance the material that she worked with even if she didn’t really mean to do so. This was not usually a flaw, but one of the rules that she tended to stick to was that she should never reveal the full extent of her abilities to the people that weren’t directly part of her forces, which the Qiang District was not. This wasn’t a matter of wishing to simply retain her power – which she did want, regardless of the situation, as power allowed her far more freedom to do whatever she wanted or needed to – but rather that she needed it to allow her to remain as safe as possible against potential threats. To give away all of her techniques and methods in full would mean removing the advantage she had against the Greats and those that wished to go against her chosen path.

There was also the matter of certain materials changing in effectiveness and purpose when they reached their next state, although this was rare as it usually needed a complete transformation of a material that her Silver-Leaf energy did not usually result in. Still, it was best to avoid that.

“This ore vein is useful to you, correct?”

“It does make a significant number of planar shards every month that are far greater than the investment needed to obtain it,” the Qiang Patriarch responded, “Are you able to make this grow?”

“I am… you don’t happen to have some method of guaranteeing a constant energy flow throughout the mines, do you? The planar energy concentration here is a little lacking at the moment, and may not be as quick as I’d like it to be,” she explained, lightly tapping the metal ore while looking around, “After all, matter has to come from somewhere. Men and plants alike obtain their nutrients from the world around them, whereas metal and stone have no such function.”

“I can arrange something more permanent later. For now, I will handle it,” he said.

With a raised hand, he made all of the planar energy within the mine rush towards the ore vein, surrounding it to the extent that it became nearly opaque, giving her more than enough energy to work with. Hence, she quickly stepped in – not literally, given that she was already standing right next to the metal ore – and infused the entire vein with her energy, making sure to guide it so that the ore would attempt to use everything that had been gathered around it before targeting anything else, since it wouldn’t be worth it to devour the rest of the mine just to supply this one metal.

Her energy was weaker than usual, but it was supplemented with the dense mist of violet around the ore, causing it to quickly display the effects of the Silver-Leaf energy in such a way that it couldn’t be missed no matter what one did.

The surface of the metal ore was suddenly filled with numerous raised spots, from which thin strands of violet metal grew as if they were saplings planted into the ore. Each one quickly gained branches and grew leaves on those, and soon there was a miniature forest growing out of the ore. What was even better was that while the trunk of the small metal trees was still clearly filled with the impurities of ore, the branches were nearly clean, and the leaves were purely metal.

“There. That looks nice, actually. Do you want me to make an underground forest of metal?”

“… That will not be necessary. This place is not a tourist attraction, and even if it was, the income would not be sufficient in comparison to the gains from this metal. Skipping the refinement step will be incredibly beneficial,” the Qiang Patriarch noted as he plucked a leaf from the metal trees, “That being said, if this is how we will be getting our materials from now on, I suspect that there will be some differences in how our miners are trained. This is not the kind of thing that any of the old miners of the district will be used to.”

“Not much training is even needed for the safer areas. Regular people can just come in and pluck the leaves, so if you have a bunch of people in the family without any sensitivity to planar energy, you could employ them instead. The rest can be put to work in more dangerous areas, or in places where it isn’t easy to remove the metal even once it is in such a state. Something like star metal is a good example.”

“We have no star metal here, so there’s no need to consider it… Even if you use it recklessly. How much must you have to cover the majority of your body?”

“Half a sphere that is then made to grow via this same energy.”

“Is that what propelled you into the position that you are now, Ascendant? Did the Great Families get upset at your usage of their star metal, or something of the sort? I could see them holding back a great deal of it.”

“They may be, but this was something I happened to obtain on my own. It was beneficial, but hardly the deciding factor in my prior victories.”

The Qiang Patriarch nodded, without commenting or vocally pronouncing his own judgement of the situation. He took the leaf in his hand and tossed it into the air, supporting it with his energy, and applied a dense matrix of lines manifesting countless techniques that the Patriarch knew, surrounding the leaf and instantly melting the hard metal into liquid, which was quickly formed into a variety of shapes. Spheres, cubes, thin rods and more were formed from the material, and while Wei Yi was unable to verify the true nature of the experiments, she was able to notice that the material was of good quality.

Clearly, the Qiang Patriarch must have agreed, as after a little while, he stopped and returned the leaf back into its original state, or as close as he could get it without having the ability to revert time and replicate every single detail. Wei Yi was able to spot countless flaws with it, but that was hardly an issue to either one as the leaves themselves weren’t the important part.

“I can see no issues with the material, nor with the rest of the ore. It looks like there is no flaw at all.”

“As you can see, when wood and metal are united, you get leaves of metal growing out of things. I call it Silver-Leaf energy, but that was mostly based on the colour of metal-type energy rather than anything else.”

“Is it possible to replicate any of this without your particular circumstances? Having a Silver-Leaf method that everyone in the Qiang District could study… It would be far more valuable than allowing every single material in the mines to grow, as it would ensure that the district could keep every future mine developing constantly, and allow us to expand far more quickly than ever before, since no time will need to be taken excavating existing resources.”

“No, I don’t think that it’s likely. My techniques come about from literal decades of comprehension and combination, and to impart it onto any one individual would result in a literal collapse of one’s cultivation. I’m afraid that this is not a feasible path, nor one I would allow you.”

“Is it too valuable, in your eyes?”

“Of course it is. If you had all of that in your hands, then nothing at all would stop you from simply dominating the world with far more resources than any other faction could possibly possess, at which point you would be very likely to turn away from the Ascendant’s Arbiters and the rest of the world and simply take advantage of your sprawling mines to flood the Greats with ore, or something to that effect,” the Ascendant joked with a very straight face, “To put it another way, this is my ability, and it is staying this way until the world as a whole gives me a good enough reason to change that.”

The Patriarch looked at her for a few moments with a serious gaze, but dropped it quickly and returned to the same thinking expression that he had all the way down to the mines and since the moment that she had provided him with a small talk regarding the Dao. He stared into the air for a short while before he finally returned to their previous conversation.

“So long as it is possible for you to keep this up, I will provide you with any planar materials that you require, and access to certain underground battlefields can also be permitted. In fact, there is a particular place where you could be more helpful than some of the district’s own warriors, but I suspect that this will be something that you would wish to discuss once you have recovered from whatever happened in the north,” he said.

“You referring to the arm or the other thing?”

“Given that your arm has not yet returned, I can only assume that either the rumours of your regenerative abilities are very much false, or that there is a reason that it cannot return. As such, it is only your temporarily weakened cultivation that you could reasonably address.”

“Guess that couldn’t really escape the attention of a seventh realm cultivator. That divine sense of the Oblivion Halo realm is incredible given that cultivating it doesn’t take any additional time. Imagine if you bothered to cultivate your spiritual will and combined that with the innate strengthening of mental energy bestowed by the halos…” Wei Yi said idly, not intending to give him any ideas given that spiritual will cultivation essentially didn’t exist in the Planar Continents, with most cultivators still being in the vicinity of the Kong Prison Realm, “Anyway, can we get to it?”

The next day, the Ascendant received a room that was already filled with planar stones to the extent that the slight radiating energy from them was more than sufficient for the entire room to be dyed violet. It was highly indicative of the sheer quantity of stones, and of the amount that they would be able to provide to the regular cultivator.

Usually, Wei Yi would need far, far more of the same quality of energy to acquire the same stage and realm as someone else, with an appropriate degree of benefit from every stage, but in this case, she also needed to recover from the excess yin in her body. As such, her energy costs were intensified greatly, although it was also theoretically true that her overall state would actually benefit from the process. All of the energy in her body would eventually be useful to advance her physique energy, as it could devour the yin the moment that it regained a sufficient degree of its strength. It would help ensure that her physique energy remained on par with her planar cultivation.

There was a certain gap in the two right now, and in her bloodline cultivation as well, so she needed to push them ahead while she had the time to do so.

To allow her body to readjust to great quantities of energy, she began with a single planar stone and drew out the energy contained within, coursing it throughout her body and bringing it to the edge of her missing arm. She stopped it from travelling beyond the cut of Reality Severance but ensured that the meridians would not dry up or otherwise decay while she was not able to make use of them as optimally. Eventually, this would be resolved, and then it would be bad to still have a weaker side.

Even then, it did not take her long to begin exhausting the stone’s energy, albeit not without similarly rapid benefits. Her Endless Monolith regained all of its lustre quickly, and the Subterranean Shell also began to light up, while the effective state of her realm rose to the fourth realm.

The moment that it did, she felt as if the floodgates for her recovery had been opened. As soon as the shell gained some of its previous vividness, her physique energy gained just enough power to begin dissolving the yin that had built up within her, and that gave the rest of her body more strength, allowing her energy to function more quickly. That made it easier to absorb the energy of the planar stones far more quickly, as her body was more stable and capable of handling the larger quantities of planar energy within the stones.

If the first minute allowed her to regain one percent of her strength, the second contributed to two, and the third contributed to four, meaning that in moments, her aura went from barely being sufficient to be noticed by those without a cultivation of their own – a phenomenon that can occur from the third realm onwards, depending on the type of technique one cultivated – to radiating might.

Outside of the chamber, the Qiang Patriarch was sitting still and waiting for results. Given the fact that he had been permitted to look upon her at all times to ensure that she was not attempting to act against the district, he was going to take the opportunity to confirm her strength before lessening his surveillance of her. Given that it was rather odd to be watching someone who knew all too well that they would be observed, he figured that he might as well lessen his efforts.

However, before he had much of an opportunity to take his divine sense away, he noticed how the very walls of the chamber he was sitting beside suddenly quaked as powerful waves of energy surged through them.

All of the walls were naturally reinforced and supported by various arrays and inscriptions to prevent them from being affected by powerful cultivators breaking through within them, so he was able to confirm right away that the energy that she possessed was clearly different from that of other cultivators. This further confirmed certain rumours that he had heard regarding her abilities, and so he decided to take two steps to protect himself and the district. First, he removed his divine sense from the room, just in case the supposed capability of devouring other energy was true as well, and then he stood up and paid attention with just his innate senses.

He was curious to see what someone with a powerful technique and all the materials that one could ask for would be able to do in a short amount of time.

With the usual speed of cultivation for those in the fifth realm, which the Ascendant seemed to be, he expected that a new stage could be attained within an hour if the energy provided was pure and high in quality and quantity alike. Given that she was using some of the best planar stones that he had picked out, she effectively had the most ideal conditions for cultivation.

Only a moment after, however, a burst of cosmic light flashed through the walls, piercing them in the weakest regions of the wall and leaving behind faint marks on the other side of the corridor. For a second, it seemed as if that must have been an illusion, given that the energy should have simply been too bright and vibrant and caused his vision to be distorted, but as he learned after a moment, the damage had indeed been made. After a little while, he also determined that the energy had just entered the fifth realm, which just made things more confusing.

Despite this seeming to make little sense, he quickly connected more of the rumours and understood that she must indeed have had multiple forms of energy, and that one of them had just reached the fifth realm. It was only slightly surprising after the burst of energy that came next.

If it was fair to say that he struggled with the first wave of cosmic light, then the mixture of silver and crimson was even harder to identify as it made use of the cracks that formed within the walls and burst out in strangely geometric and ordered lines, further carving out the walls that he had been standing in front of only moments prior, was even harder to identify. When he noticed that this phenomenon looked to be repeating, he stepped away and made sure to not be struck by the energy, just in case.

The moment after, a blaze of twin lights, as if from the moon and sun, practically punched through the wall, illuminating the entire building with the twin lights and doing a great deal to confuse everyone that wasn’t aware of the situation, which was everyone other than the Qiang Patriarch. Each individual beam of light was incredibly radiant, and together it seemed as if the sun and moon had truly descended down to the world and revealed their magnificence to all that happened to be nearby. It wasn’t true, and everyone that did see the phenomenon instinctively knew this, but their minds couldn’t help but drift away.

Only the Patriarch was in the right place and had the right knowledge to comprehend that this was only the effect of multiple breakthroughs in stages at a time, and it was still not her planar energy, leaving him rather concerned that the preparations he had made wouldn’t be sufficient to safeguard the building from the impact of the final breakthrough that was bound to come.

‘Indeed, if this is the kind of cultivation that Silver-Leaf energy comes from, then sharing its secrets would be very threatening. A single misguided soul could obliterate a district if given enough time to prepare and grow, and an army could conquer Yi City if they were not matched with an equally powerful defensive force,’ the Qiang Patriarch noted, slightly misunderstanding the nature of her cultivation but arriving at a sound conclusion nonetheless.

Bloodline power reached the fifth stage with as little obvious change to her as she was used to, given that she had no form to be working towards other than her own. Her strength rose once more, and it was highly conducive to the breakthroughs that came after.

Her killing will reached a new stage mostly due to the energy that had accumulated over the days since her last breakthrough, as well as the significant increase in her killing intent since then. With the link between the two mental energies, her spiritual will also rose in strength, and they did so at the same time, resulting in it seeming as if she had broken through with only one type of energy at once. Whether this fooled anyone or not didn’t really matter to her, as she made use of the immense yin that had built up within her to push through a few stages of physique energy at once.

Due to certain reasons, she was unable to keep her physique energy at the same realm at her planar energy all of the time, so while she was at it, she made sure to boost her physique cultivation to the sixth stage, managing to do so with just a little bit of energy remaining. With her techniques, it was nearly impossible for her to acquire a full, flawless stage, and so it wasn’t an issue this time.

As soon as all of that was done, her strength had recovered as much as it possibly could while she had a missing arm – and was still unable to regenerate it, further confirming her theory of the nature of Reality Severance – and so she was able to focus the rest of her energy on the process of boosting her planar cultivation to the next stage and perfected stage. With the planar stones placed all around her, she was able to do that with a speed that she had hoped for since she had gotten her hands on the first bunch of planar stones back when she had been fighting the Mirror Planar Aberrations. That being said, she did not use all of them at once.

Instead, she shoved the majority of the planar stones into the House of Gold, intending to use them later on to boost the Kong Prison Realm once it was possible to do so. This wouldn’t be noticed by the divine sense of the Qiang Patriarch, as he had brought it back since the breakthroughs began to damage their surroundings, and the energy that they radiated would soon be absorbed anyway, so it wouldn’t be possible to determine where it had gone or why.

Those that remained would still be enough for her, hence why she wasn’t too concerned about this matter. Her physique energy was also able to contribute to the regeneration of her energy, and so, when she had enough to break through to the sixth stage in one go, she naturally had plenty of planar energy to work towards the same result with a different form of cultivation. The boost of her bloodline power was not as blatant, only because it directly amplified her energy in a manner that didn’t directly increase the quantity or quality of incoming energy, instead boosting what she already had, resulting in the effect being diminished.

If her bloodline power instead generated more energy that she was then able to contain within her body, that would be the most effective and direct boost to her cultivation process.

‘Actually, how does this work? How can accumulated energy differ so significantly from that which is regenerated? I understand this in the first two realms, when the first would directly increase the density of energy while the second built up a pool of energy, but the ones after seem to contradict everything yet again… Cultivation is strange. Has no-one else questioned this?’

She was sure that there had to be some that were confused by the exact progression of stages and realms, as well as why it was possible to climb through them even if one wasn’t exactly familiar with the progression, but this was yet another thing that she couldn’t really consider at the moment. It would do too much to distract her from the current task, as well as her intended observation of the process of the next breakthrough. The specific events that would occur during it would make it clear whether her previous speculation regarding the quantity of searing marks was accurate or not.

There was also a chance that the development of the perfected stage would vary depending on the actions that she took while it was occurring. In fact, this could apply in far more stages than merely this one, but…

‘I’d be getting off track again if I considered that. It is a little late to consider significant alterations to the technique I am practising, especially given that I have already changed it once and have committed to the current path of Ascendancy and Law. I would prefer to switch to following Law only, if I had to, but as I had observed before, sticking to a single path causes one to miss a lot that other paths would observe, which would not be beneficial given that I am currently a one-woman army, effectively,’ she realised that she was doing it again, and threw that off to the side of the Ascendant’s Library as well, ‘Anyway, point is, I have to take what I have and make the best of it, and do so when it is actually possible. For the moment, I am still injured, and I have limited access to expanding my repertoire of techniques.’

She shut her eyes and poured all of her attention into the boundary between the fifth and sixth stage, preparing for a moment before all of her energy was thrust into it, breaking it in a moment.

In an instant, all of it gathered at the Subterranean Shell and sank into it, fusing with the core and forming countless patterns in between the ninety-nine searing marks that were already upon it. However, rather than being something purely symbolic of a perfected stage, she understood almost immediately what the many connecting patterns resulted in, besides a Subterranean Shell that looked to be ablaze with a layer of earth flame right beneath the surface.

‘Another mark… One hundred marks! It is indeed possible! I guess nobody would have had this kind of cultivation before me, so the assumption would have been that ninety-nine was the absolute limit… Then, my guess regarding the oblivion halos is also right! With one hundred marks, all ten halos can be filled, and when they are complete, then the Imperfect Rift realm might be able to manifest something greater. The perfect rift, if such a thing even exists, would need to originate from the ninth realm no matter what – from my understanding, at least – but it is possible to attain something greater…’

With the nascent rift already in her possession, she was all the more curious about the kinds of things that the perfected marks, channels and halos could coalesce into once she reached the eighth realm. Whether she managed to get another full rift, as with the illusory crystal core she now had, or if it resulted in a vastly greater rift, it would still be an immense advantage to her against powerful foes.

At that point, the Greats would not be as much of a threat, as their cultivation looks to be as stagnant as the cultivation of the rest of the world, but the Primordial Deities and beyond would certainly be easier to beat if she had every perfected stage and realm combining into a state of cultivation unseen before in the Planar Continents. After all, even the Master of Yi City, the person who was able to use the Truth of the Universe from the beginning of his life in this world, didn’t have the final result of his years of technique generation until he was in the later years of his life, while she got to begin with it at the age of sixteen, and the very first realm.

Before that, however, she would be able to proudly proclaim to the world that the Greats were also lacking in their comprehension of cultivation, for none of them, to her knowledge, had ever even approached ninety-nine marks, not to mention the whole one hundred.