V5C8: Prototypical Arm

“Was that cultivation, or an attempt to destroy the district, Ascendant?” the Qiang Patriarch asked the moment that she left the room, “And for one stage, at that?”

“Technically, quite a few stages, but only one planar stage. The next few should be easier to attain, fortunately, and I will be able to near the sixth realm soon enough. At that point, perhaps I will have a chance at deflecting the attacks of the first generation of the Greats, which would make things far easier,” she replied, “In short, your planar stones didn’t go to waste.”

“Is it possible to also make them grow like trees?”

“Not quite as easily. Planar energy does not innately have the metal element, whereas the Silver-Leaf energy best targets metal-type resources. Unless you have a mine with planar stones that are immediately found to contain metal-type energy, there’s almost no chance of success.”

“My Qiang District has very strict rules about the planar stone mines, so it is unlikely that any had been contaminated by other types of energy. Even the various intruders in the deeper areas have no access to the planar stones, as those are located within a very specific portion of the mines that are accessible by only the most loyal and honest miners of the Qiang District,” the Patriarch explained, “I would advise you to rest after this.”

She shrugged, as the presumption that he worked with was very likely to be incorrect. If he wished her to rest as to become used to her increased strength, then he was indeed simply wasting their time, as she was already familiar enough with the majority of changes after simply standing up once or twice. That being said, there was still something that she wished to do with her time, and it might occupy the rest of the day easily, so she was not going to reject the opportunity to rest and experiment. So long as it wasn’t necessary to act today, there was still some leeway.

“I can, if it is not going to risk anything on your end.”

“No, it should be fine. It would be best if you could control yourself as well as possible, as to minimize the damage to the mines and the underground battlefield as a whole.”

“I will need an explanation of that later, by the way. Are there places in the Qiang District that have become literal battlefields between two factions, or, as I am assuming based on your previous mentions of the places, is it that a source of danger occupies those spots and thus necessitates the intervention of combatants?”

The Qiang Patriarch nodded alongside her second explanation, “That is correct. I will provide details tomorrow, but your combat style is said to be one that uses few weapons, correct? If so, then the threat I have in mind will not have an advantage against you due to his specific nature.”

Although there were a few scraps of information that she was able to glean from his thoughts, his mind was unfortunately guarded in comparison to that of some of the otherworldly demons, from whom ideas poured as if they wished for people to look upon them. Given that their current cooperation seemed to be going well enough, she expected him to reveal everything relevant to the situation he wanted her to resolve, but obtaining more information if needed would be easier at that time, since his mind would naturally be occupied with the matter.

Still, it was very interesting to ponder on her own exactly what the threat he intended to present to her was. Most situations where combat was necessary were typically assisted by the presence of good weaponry, so the fact that he wished for her specific capabilities in not using any in most situations, due to weaponry quite literally exploding in her hands, was curious to say the least.

There were a few entities out there, including metal-type planar beasts and the like, which were able to influence metal outside of their bodies, and some that were very resistant to it, but the majority of artefacts would contain sufficient quantities of planar energy within them to resist such things. Only the kind of common blade or low-grade artefact that she had been using, and that she considered discarding now that her cultivation had returned to a more reasonable state, would have a chance of being affected by any entity beneath the seventh realm, and given that the Patriarch did not wish to address it himself, it was likely to be in the fifth realm or lower.

As such, the exact nature of the threat was currently impossible to predict, even if she was certainly going to try. She would only use a small quantity of her mental capacity on it, though.

The rest was to be used for the thing that she wished to do during the time that she was given, and that she had gotten to the moment that she returned into the room. The Qiang Patriarch stated that he would take care of the damage, so she was free to sit around and spend her time and energy on one thing without any chance of being discovered now that she could combine her killing will, bloodline power, and planar energy to manifest a powerful barrier around herself.

It was not likely to be necessary, given the fact that the Patriarch – whose name was apparently Qiang Jian, if his occasional thoughts were to be believed – had mostly revoked his divine sense, but it would protect against other observers.

‘Revealing that my arm is a little difficult to fix is inevitable, but the exact development of my technique is best to be kept away from the eyes of others, just in case. The possibility of understanding and defeating my technique increases the more knowledge one possesses of it, and I would rather not have it be scattered at a dangerous moment just because I was careful,’ she thought.

Given the rather generous opening at the top of her Crimson Robes, removing part of them and revealing what remained of her shoulder, covered in full by star metal, was easy. She had taken off the bits of armour that she had picked up on her way to the Qiang District, and within it, after being given accommodation by the Patriarch, and she had yet to put them on again due to not needing to give a false impression to him. She was not a local of the south, and she did not intend to transform into one when it was really not necessary for the moment. At a different time, with a different person, she might consider it, but she doubted that any explanations regarding her physique would satisfy anyone that wished to find fault with her no matter what.

With the robe and armour out of the way, she was able to look upon the edge of her shoulder directly, and when she began to attempt to bring her energy out like last time, the difference in the stability and strength of her energy became obvious.

The previous time she had attempted this, her energy would break down before it reached an inch away from her body, and would cause significant pain to her, albeit without much lasting damage. It was not able to go much further this time, nor did it stop harming her body, but both were improved significantly and thus allowed for her to try out significantly more variations of meridian networks, giving her the chance to use the method of brute forcing the solution.

Every time that she found that a pathway didn’t work and resulted in a collapse, she would simply attempt to make use of a slightly different direction to see whether that would prove to be more effective. For the moment, she was not attempting to condense the full technique, but was instead seeking to develop a suitable pathway for her energy that would not violate the Reality Severance damage. As such, even if the result of the day was not very effective or productive, as she had wanted it to be for the final product, she would be able to make use of the inferior structure temporarily and comprehend the limitations forced upon her through what did work in the outcome of the day’s work.

‘It is already clear that I need to use a different kind of pathway, but nothing else seems to work even remotely well… What exactly am I missing this time? Should I devote some of the anchor energy points into a Dao this time?’ she wondered, glancing at the Truth of the Universe interface while sighing about the fact that her Realm of Potential was set within the Kong Prison Realm and thus unavailable.

She still had eight hundred anchor energy points, which was great if she wanted to quickly learn a technique without caring much for its development, but she didn’t think that the prototypical and unnamed technique that had appeared at the end of the list would be benefitted by the points, whether she devoted them to the technique itself or a Dao. Just like her Dao of Law, she had to develop this on her own for best results, as doing anything else would simply lead to her being strung along by something that was not her own choice or path.

Hence, she continued to work upon her meridian pathways in silence, without any intention of making use of any method other than her own mind, body, and energy.

After several hours, she had not made as much progress as she would have liked, but, at the same time, she was able to conclude that there were several methods for stabilising planar energy outside of the body in a meridian-like arrangement that did not cause the Reality Severance to destroy it.

For example, she could entwine all of her meridians and attempt to make use of their connections with one another, and planar energy itself as a concept, to allow them to work together and result in a tighter meridian network. It would be even more important to balance her energies in that instance, however, and she would need to quickly raise the level of her bloodline power as to catch up to the rest of her cultivation pathways.

There was also the possibility of making use of one of her types of energies to coat the rest of the meridian networks, effectively allowing it to be significantly different from the typical structure without sacrificing as much of her efficiency as inferior meridian pathways. The issue with this one was that she needed a type of energy that would be nearly boundless, as it would be perpetually consumed for the sake of maintaining this balance and the stability of the remaining meridians, and the energy would need to be sufficiently powerful to keep the rest in check.

At this moment, neither one was quite perfect, and so she would need far more time to improve it to the level that she would actually be comfortable to keep it as a permanent technique, as per her original plan. Given that she did not have anything else to do for now, with there being quite a lot of time remaining until the next day, which was when she had to have something to show herself and the Qiang Patriarch if she wanted to keep looking relatively capable of solving her own problems, as that would imply that she could address the issues of others as well. If she couldn’t even display a basic attempt at recreating the arm, then the Patriarch might have some hesitation about bringing her to the underground battlefield.

As night fell upon the Qiang District, five thin strands of light emerged from the crimson flesh that was still attempting to bleed despite all of her attempts to stop it from doing so. In theory, because her very concept no longer possesses the left arm, it should have stopped acting as a wound and simply froze in a calm state, but it appeared that the damaged concept spread to her body in a slightly different way than that. It meant that the wound remained on two levels and would need to be sealed manually.

Her arm technique would do so at its peak, and possibly below, but other methods had the risk of damaging the meridians, so she was just going to keep controlling the bleeding herself.

The five strands of artificial meridians were naturally dyed by the colours of the energy contained within, two being similarly violet and cosmic in appearance, two more containing silver while her physique shined with dawn light and her killing intent radiated crimson. Together, they formed a set of pathways that was likely unseen in all of the world prior to this, and that branched and reconnected like the strands of the earth veins that travelled beneath the ground. Their arrangement was not perfect, nor did she believe that this particular method was going to be productive without rethinking the interaction between the energies completely, but it worked well enough.

Once the five strands parted into five each, forming the fingers of her hand, she was finally able to connect her phantom arm’s position and sensation with that of the energy that radiated from the meridians, forming the vague image of a full arm and hand.

All of the fingers were present, and as she remembered them being, and they were likely to be nearly as powerful as her left hand had been without the killing will state. Transforming into it might still be feasible, but it would require breaking the balance of the five energies and thus collapsing the arm instantly, which, despite the seeming stability of it at the moment, was still incredibly likely to occur no matter what.

The moment that she attempted to move it, this became more obvious than ever.

It collapsed into countless shards of crystalline energy that rapidly scattered into the air and merged with the natural planar energy allowance, while the attempt to manifest a stable arm caused half of her torso to be struck with a terrible pain that was able to overcome the immense resistance that she had built up to such things. She hardly needed to analyse why this occurred to understand it perfectly.

Yet again, she had to deal with the matter of her concept being damaged. It prevented her from forming the human network of meridians in the same way that it prevented her from regenerating her arm, as she supposedly did not possess the left arm according to the world itself. When she attempted to move her creation, she had once again trespassed on that field, creating something that acted as her left arm in defiance of this fact. It didn’t matter that the meridians were different, or that her skin and flesh were not present. Just the fact that it would act as the arm crossed the boundary.

‘This shouldn’t be impossible to address, and so my plan of having both arms once more will not be stopped here, but this is troublesome. The most I can do with the current structure is manifest it for a single instant, which will allow me to use some techniques, but most require more than an instant… Why can things never be simple? I’m a little irritated that the world even has such a notion, although there’s nothing I can do about it.’

For the moment, she was mortal and human. That might change in the ninth realm, or whatever might exist beyond, but for now, she had to go along with the laws of the world.

“Well, look at her. She’s already thinking about going that extra step.”

“No more interference then, right? The whole point is for the world to… before I go on, are you sure that we have to do skip on important details like this? I know that’s your whole thing, Lily, but it is rather annoying.”

“Trust me, eventually, just as it always happens, you will discover that this conversation is being read by some random people, and it will be essential that the plot is not revealed before the third instalment of the novel that will come about within ten years of the first one, although the second one will provide enough information for the readers to understand what the final intentions of our little group is. At that point, you will be glad that you made the reading experience as nice as possible,” the woman whose right eye was covered by her long, straight, black hair stated with extreme confidence.

“I mean, I appreciate novels and stories, but… why should I give a single fuck? I mean, really, how is that ever a good reason?”

“Imagine if your story is never released, and you end up being a random clump of energy for the rest of all eternity, just because some author didn’t produce a satisfactory result and ended up dropping their efforts?”

“… That’s not how that works.”

“I can confirm, that has never been how it worked,” a cold and emotionless voice confirmed.

“Yeah, I think that this is Lily being… herself again, I guess. She acted about as weirdly back on the Worldship, so this is nothing new…”

“Stop the spoilers. We’ve had enough of those.”

“Shouldn’t you be blaming the one that is writing this, if this is your whole thing now?”

The woman with long black hair covering her right eye shrugged. This had gone on for too long.

The next day, on the twenty-sixth, she emerged with a prototypical technique to show for her efforts. Unlike Touch the Heavens or Obliteration, which were both made after bursts of inspiration and some excellent ideas, she had nothing like that yet, but she suspected that her great understanding of the world itself in the form of all of her collected Dao would lead to a revelation soon enough. All she needed was to find the right path, and the rest would follow naturally.

Since she was going to fight in a place without scrutiny from the common people of the south, she didn’t bother to put the leather and furs back on, keeping only her Crimson Robe of the Third Arrival, and the metal scales underneath. While she still hadn’t figured out how to individually activate the scales, or how to remove their dependence on the scales that were severed, the star metal was more than sufficient to protect against low-realm attacks, and would not be broken easily unless the likes of the Great Families’ first generation decided to step in with more uses of Reality Severance.

The Qiang Patriarch wasn’t waiting at the door like the time she began to cultivate, but it was easy enough to spot his location via the powerful divine sense that only he in the entire district possessed. Even though the planar energy quantity of the world kept rising, few had managed to breach the boundary of the seventh realm, leaving only one such expert in the entire Qiang District.

The Patriarch was within the Ancestral Hall, as usual, and despite the rather large amount of space that it took up, the inner regions were rather easy to traverse. Most of the corridors were straightforward and had few confusing turns, meaning that even if she only knew the room and depth that the Qiang Patriarch was at, without any knowledge of the Ancestral Hall, she would still be able to track down the person with the capabilities of a regular person.

When she found him, he was sitting in a chamber and examining a rock that did not look particularly unusual, except that she was able to sense traces of far superior metals within it.

“Finding a new place to mine anyway?”

“Even if all of the mines were operating at their best, without any cessation, I would still seek to expand our domain. There will be more people in the world if the Greats are defeated and Yi City can grow to the previous size, if not larger, and they will all need better materials, as well as more of them.”

“Still not star metal, though. Give me and my Arbiters enough time, and I could provide everyone in the world with a weapon and piece of armour made of star metal… not that I will do that. It would be stupid to arm everyone to the teeth, and incredibly wasteful.”

“Indeed, that is likely to be the case. However, let us not talk about this too much.”

“I would not mind hearing about the underground battlefield that you wish for me to come to. It’s been some time since you told me that you’d share more information with me, and I would really appreciate to know just what kind of threat is best combated with one’s bare fists, and yet would be greatly assisted by someone with such a variety of skills as me…” she paused, “Admittedly, I don’t think that more knowledge has ever hurt anyone directly, but you know what I meant.”

“It is very simple, Ascendant. There is a figure in the underground battlefield that has been causing trouble for us all, and it has a very uncanny trait of being able to consume weapons to boost its own, somehow. Nobody has witnessed the process, but it has been reported after each encounter that the weapon it uses remains similar, while the power of it is clearly increased with every artefact lost.”

“You say ‘it’, but since this figure wields a weapon…”

“It is human, so far as we know. However, the mines are dark and the figure is usually covered in dirt, dust, and various metal pieces that vaguely act as and resemble armour, so it is difficult to identify the person.”

“Spiritual perception doesn’t work?”

“Somehow, no. I’ve not been there, so I cannot confirm whether divine sense would be of any use.”

“Tch… What do the people that have seen this person say regarding their inability to perceive him or her? Is it simply the inability to comprehend the nature of the entity they face, or does something make it seem as if the person isn’t even there?” Wei Yi asked, hoping that the answer would not be the latter option, mostly so that she wouldn’t need to figure out the problems of yet another otherworldly demon, or some person that managed to get the otherworldly gift of one and went insane.

However, before he could even say a single thing, she could already tell that she wouldn’t like the answer he would provide. It was simply obvious from his expression of slight surprise.

“You guessed correctly. The reports were consistent in that the figure looked to be absent from the world, to the point that some doubted their eyes. Fortunately, it made it seem as if there was a gap in the world, which made everyone that returned aware of the fact that something wasn’t right. None managed to defeat him so far, however.”

“This is… unfortunate, to say the least, but doesn’t explain why you’re concerned about my weapons.”

“We don’t know how the figure absorbs the properties of weaponry, and so it is always risky to allow any weapons near it just in case it will be able to steal it form your hand and empower itself. At that point, if you rely on and bring in an incredibly powerful weapon, then things will be rather terrible.”

“I had one of those… want to see the shards? Do you think the figure will be able to absorb the shards? Is it weapons specifically, or does it also include artefacts and the like? If this person can also take in other things, then I might need to come in with an ordinary robe and nothing else, just in case the scale armour is also susceptible to absorption,” she continued asking for more information, as the potential risk that he had mentioned meant that there had to be enough reason to be concerned about the figure’s strength, even when it came to her and the Qiang Patriarch.

If necessary, she would rather go in naked than wearing something that had the chance to make the figure invincible, as the otherworldly gift being used by them seemed to be affecting their entire body. As such, although the initial ability of the gift may have been to drain the power of weapons and place it into other weapons, going against all logic and reason as usual, it could be that it had expanded to affect even more aspects of the otherworldly demon. At that point, if her robes could be used in the same way as her weapons and applied to the figure’s body, they would suddenly regenerate from any attack while leaving her naked anyway.

On an unrelated note to the threat itself, she was finding that she felt a little more reluctant to reveal her naked body now that she was missing a whole arm. It wasn’t that she had ever done it to flaunt her beauty – given the amount of time she had spent trying to shift attention away from it, she was thinking that the help Chu Ling had provided before the Kong District expedition may have been unnecessary – but it felt far more like she was exposing her flaws and weaknesses than before.

“We mostly understood the figure’s capabilities through the various artefacts that the various explorers found lying about after each failed attempt to take it out. All of the weapons looked to be missing or broken, while most other items were not damaged and were simply lying about.”

“Ah, if that’s the case, then perhaps things aren’t as bad as they could be. That being said, I am still rather concerned that you decided to address this dangerous situation by simply feeding the person with more and more weapons each time instead of simply sending in someone capable and taking them out in one go,” she said, not dismissing her previous theory regarding the danger level of the otherworldly gift, while also realising that this seemed to be a far better way to label it, ‘The power comes from the gift, most of the time, and if this is a case of the gift being the primary thing responsible for the great power of the person, whether they are from this world or not, then it is the otherworldly gift that is to blame.’

“There had been some disagreements with the eastern and western nations that we needed to settle.”

“And not one person could be spared? I doubt that, but it is too late for me to do anything, so I will go over there and take the person out. That being said, if you did know something and then forgot to tell me, perhaps hoping to hurt me and the other entity in the process…” she raised her mind’s image of the left arm and manifested the prototypical arm within an instant.

The fingers were open and the palm was pointed straight at him, Obliteration energy gathering near the centre of the ethereal palm. It radiated from the point at the palm that the five strands of meridians split apart into five individual channels, and completely covered the arm in a moment.

She was only able to present that state for a little while, and the threat would ultimately be hollow either way as she did not think that she had the necessary strength to defeat the Qiang Patriarch without the assistance of the Kong Prison Realm’s vitality and planar energy, so she scattered both the blackened crimson and the five distinct sets of meridians while lowering her mental perception of the arm.

While the remains of her shoulder did move slightly, it was primarily her phantom limb that decided where the prototypical technique would create her arm. She had kept the false sense of the left limb’s presence since the moment that she awoke to the west of the Qiang District, making it very easy to keep controlling her arm and very inconvenient when the fact that her arm was missing failed to cross her mind. The absence of most of the shoulder did make it far easier to confuse people regarding the position of her arm while she didn’t have a constant replacement for it yet.

“You did work on something, then. In that case, it should be easier for you to take down the threat in the underground battlefield,” the Qiang Patriarch spoke calmly, “I have hidden nothing from you regarding the entity’s actual capabilities, but there are some things that I would rather have you not know. I’m sure you understand.”

“… Yeah. Totally.”