V5C21: Growing through Weakness

Although she said that, she wasn’t going to let them take the first move. Even when she could only hold a sword and barely use the last traces of her energy to strengthen her body just that little bit, she was able to fight, and so she could fight now.

The Preservers of Eternity might not have been affected as much as she was, and perhaps they weren’t sharing the same effects as she was, but they were clearly unable to unwilling to attack first, and more content to simply speak at their enemies. It stood to reason that whatever the cause, she would have the chance to turn it all around so long as she took it. Whether she would attempt to or not was obvious, as the alternative meant a potentially slow and agonising death – or a fast one, not that she cared.

Wei Yi rushed past the doors that led to the sealed area of the Bottomless Archive, glancing at the Ru Patriarch as she did so. He was clearly able to stand and listen, but it seemed difficult for him to act.

Since that was the case, she was just going to need to make it a little easier for him, and there was no way better than to rush at the enemy and prove that her earlier exchange was not merely their trick. So long as she could strike and the enemy could not slay her in one go, then it would be sufficient proof to any mind that there was a chance.

As she passed the boundary where the barrier had been, she felt the air and land around her fill with a strange feeling that she had sensed only once before, at the mountains where Jia Rong had been imprisoned. It seemed to be the effect of stagnant time, although the intensity of the sensation here was far lesser than in the depths of the cave where the demonic-looking woman had been chained to the stone walls. This made sense, as not only was the barrier here imperfect from the start and broken now, but the stagnation of time on Jia Rong remained even now, with time having bestowed a great deal of strength onto her.

It was very likely that the flow of time could influence the so-called regeneration of planar energy within a space, albeit not in ways that are commonly imagined by those unaware of the nature of planar energy. Perhaps once time was sufficiently stagnated, or if it was continued without imperfections for long enough, it could twist flesh from a typical rosy tone to an alarming crimson, prompt the development of unusual features like horns and claws, and vastly increase the sheer strength of the person being influenced to the point that they suddenly rival powerful cultivators without any training.

‘No, not this time. I can’t just let myself get distracted to this extent while I don’t even know what capabilities they will be able to showcase,’ Wei Yi reprimanded herself for going off-track in her thoughts yet again, and focused on the closest figure to her, that being one of the fifth realm Preservers of Eternity, ‘His abilities should be the weakest, and he should be enough to demonstrate the limitations that they have imposed upon themselves.’

If they were sufficient, she would run straight for the leader, and if not, she would thin out the crowd first.

Her weapon was partly illusory, conjured from the same past that was attempting to weaken her now, but in truth it was manifested from planar energy, and thus it was as solid, tangible and stable as anything in this world, so she didn’t hesitate to thrust it at the enemy Preserver.

The robed and hooded figure didn’t move until she had nearly thrust the tip of her weapon into the depths of his hood and learned what was inside, perhaps hoping that she would be unable to complete the strike. At the last moment, he thrust out his hand and summoned the vague phantom of a pack of wolves that quickly pounced at her and attempted to bite down upon her arm, their visage clearly matching that of the wolves she had fought near the Qiang District.

‘They can also summon things from the past? These should be limited in the way they act and what they can do, so the same method for dealing with them should be sufficient,’ the Ascendant concluded, continuing her advance while slightly turning her body.

All of the wolven phantoms bit down upon her arm and right side of the body, but their semi-stable forms cracked the moment that their teeth couldn’t get past the star metal covering her skin. With a simple burst of physique energy from her body, a burst that was barely able to go past her star metal scale armour and robes, it affected the phantoms and scattered them into naught, giving her the free room to continue the stab exactly as she had intended to from the beginning of the attack, thus reaching its intended target.

Just before this occurred, however, she attempted two of her experiments within this current state, with the first being the active circulation of energy and the second being reinforcing her weapon. The first proceeded easily enough, confirming her earlier understanding that planar energy was merely being suppressed, not truly removed, but the latter was more of a risky endeavour.

On one hand, the weapon in her hand was not truly a weapon, only a clump of planar energy that was permitted stability in the current state by the History’s Truth of the Preservers of Eternity. On the other, it was still a weapon, an artefact, and those were affected by the Artefact Combinator.

Furthermore, she still had plenty of energy and plenty of artefacts to shove into the planar energy blade, no matter how greatly she was weakened and how significantly she was affected by whatever the technique of the Preservers of Eternity was. Hence, within her mind, she saw the blade made of planar energy crossed with a true metal blade being fused with the energy of a few miscellaneous artefacts that she had picked up and stored within the House of Gold over the years of accumulation, the process completing quickly and allowing her to shift her attention back outside, where the blade was about to touch her foe.

In that instant, it blazed with a dull blue flame that was barely visible over the metallic outer surface.

“History’s errors are to be purged, so that only success may take their place!” the Preserver of Eternity’s voice interrupted, the distance between her and her foe suddenly growing by a hundred steps, causing her blade to miss completely.

“Fuck off, you annoying piece of- ah!” Wei Yi stopped herself, not to avoid swearing at that annoying piece of shit, but because she realised that there was something that was still on her side, even now.

“Preservers of Eternity, cleanse the slate of history from those imperfections!” he said, ignoring her exclamation and waving in the direction of those that were still in a daze, whose numbers fortunately fell by one as the Preserver Commander and Patriarch stood together and faced their foes, “The echoes of the past shall be used to purify our history once more!”

Meanwhile, the Endless Calculation tomes that had been shoved to the side were shoved further out into the unstable manifestation of the world that she had made to extend her spiritual perception further. Instead of all of that, she pulled out one of the first killing intent techniques that she had collected, and then attempted to figure out a reasonable way to transform that into something that didn’t tear her mind apart the moment that she attempted to use it. One could say that it wasn’t the best time for it, but there was hardly any other opportunity to do this after.

Before it finished, all she could do was hold out her weapon and support the process with her conscious mind as well, hoping that they would be sufficiently afraid to come too close as to give her just enough time.

‘Killing intent and the Red Phantom Flood… controlling entire separate entities is outright impossible for me, but what if I separate it all into separate actions? I can conceptualise millions of actions in an instant, but how do I…’ the Ascendant focused to the point that she blocked out everything around her completely, something that wasn’t dangerous in that very moment but would get more and more risky each instant that she allowed to slip past her.

“That reminds me, despite you picking that up quite early on, isn’t that ability close to our level?”

Countless flaming eyes looked back in reply, “She’s more creative than we were, I will agree with that. We didn’t quite get around to this until the third or fourth time, really.”

“Not the question I had, but… What do you think she’ll make of it?”

This time, the only response was endless laughter that echoed endlessly throughout the darkness the two were in.

When she opened her eyes, there were hundreds of blades that were heading straight for her, and they were all the same as the one that she held onto, at least visually and superficially. Without planar energy, blocking all of the blows at once would be nearly impossible without having at least two arms, whereas she only had one.

Despite that, she was even more confident in dealing with this than with the wolves.

Before a single further moment could proceed, her pupils ignited with crimson while the white of her eyes was consumed by shadow, and then she completed the brief calculations of the best methods to block the attacks that were heading for her.

As soon as she gave the mental command, countless phantoms made of crimson hatred and robed in pouring smoke burst out of her body, each one wielding the same sword as she was. Each one shifted from her body to the position of the incoming blades, then moved their blades all at once in such a way that none of their weapons collided, although their bodies were partly inside of one another simply due to the lack of space available for them.

Their every blow and parry was perfect, and the moment that the phantoms they attacked began to crack and fail, they also broke apart into smoke that flew back into the Ascendant.

“You will not get past me, false Preservers! I may have only a single hand with which to block you right now, but that does not stop me from using a million more to do so for me,” she exclaimed, taking the opportunity to infuse a number of additional artefacts into her weapon, “Now, stand and face me, if you dare!”

In an arc around her, the fifth realm Preservers of Eternity had gathered, originally intending to rush past but now forced to face her steady sword. Behind them, the sixth realm members were still standing beside their leader, but they had taken a few steps away and were clearly also attempting something.

Whatever it was, she was sure that she could take it, as it had been proven by their behaviour so far that they were unable to make use of their full strength while she was kept down. If she prompted them to undo History’s Truth, it would be as much of a success as if she defeated them without it, as her own strength with the improvement of the Red Phantom Flood was more than sufficient to fight them all at once, or so it seemed based on their currently displayed capabilities.

Thus, she lowered her weapon as to give her arm a chance to relax a little and put her in a better position to respond to attacks that might come from the sides, then began to walk forward.

A few steps were permitted to her without any interruption or interference before several fifth realm opponents suddenly raised their right hands into the air, keeping them open with the palms facing upwards, with words and characters flowing out of them and downwards, pouring over their bodies. It lasted only for a moment before their leader also became involved.

“Slayers, arise from the past!”

A column of light fell down upon all those that had raised their hands, shrouding them from the world for a moment. The light faded quickly, but the figures that it had obstructed had changed dramatically. In place of the ordinary robes and empty hands was a dense layer of armour that was gleaming in the light of a sword that appeared in the raised hands. Their other hand was occupied by a variety of equipment, although all were offensive in nature, with no shields to be seen amongst all forty of those that had been affected.

Every single one of them looked towards her, then lowered their weapons to the levels of their chest and released a great quantity of word-like energy, which then manifested into a figure that mirrored their own, save that its actions did not match theirs.

The Preservers of Eternity themselves held back while their replicas rushed forward, each one moving at a different speed and clearly acting in accordance with their weaponry, so that they could make the most of it. Furthermore, all forty of the true figures that held back were still gathering more word-like energy, meaning that they were very likely to be able to conjure more of these figures, or that they would be ready to conjure them if those that were already out were destroyed.

Wei Yi should have raised her sword once more, as it would have been difficult to block any strikes with it at her side, but she instead simply kept moving forward.

As one of the figures got closer, one of her own red phantoms burst out and stuck a blade inside the approaching manifestation of the past, vanishing quickly just in time for the next crimson phantom with a greatbow to fire a spear-like arrow into the foe. The sword had done little, but the arrow pierced it entirely and continued on to the Preserver behind the historical apparition.

The robed figure raised their weapon in an attempt to block the arrow, meanwhile the other historical apparitions also began their advance, undeterred by the shattering of one of their own. Presumably, they were just like the other historical apparitions and like the planar projections that had been summoned by warriors like those that were primarily in the Bai District, their group methods summoning similar entities under their control without any of the pain that a normal man might suffer being transmitted back.

Even then, she did not raise her weapon, simply continuing to stride forward confidently.

After each step, a crimson shade appeared and blocked one of the historical apparitions from advancing. With every single breath that she took, a bow-wielding phantom manifested, or sometimes just a few arrows and spear-like arrows if she figured out a way to get away with it, the smaller arrows stabbing into the enemy whereas the larger ones would shoot them back into those that created them, forcing their action and delaying the creation of more apparitions.

“Interesting. Even in the weakest moment of your life, you could manifest this much power? What a wonderful discovery.”

“I was always powerful, in one way or another. At first, I had knowledge and comprehension, which I had used to grow quickly. Of course, I have it now, and hence I could produce a technique to oppose you just now. Then, I obtained power, and I put that to full use to act and explore. Now, that power is still in me, and so I have the ability to resist your attacks with that technique,” she said, finally needing to raise her own weapon to block an incoming blow before kicking the historical apparition away and continuing, “Once my strength was insufficient, I had gained fury… and that has only ever grown since then, allowing me to stand here, empowered by it and only it, even in a time where all else fails me.”

She kept her weapon raised and pointed it at the distant leader, Shi Gong.

“Your kind are those that fuel my fury every single day. Those who seek to starve the world, to keep it back, to force it into weakness and ignorance. You, the Greats, perhaps even those in the Blood-tinged Church, despite their constant forays into the unknown and oft forbidden – all of you seek to crush the world when we attempt to develop, all while acting as if this is for our own good, as if we need to willingly crush ourselves before you. No! You will not terrorise us, Yi City, or the Planar Continents! We will be free of you all!”

Her Arm of Slaughtering Shadow manifested before her, the hand close to her right shoulder, then broke into smoke that shifted to the left, almost replicating the grandiose wave of a hand that she would have otherwise been able to perform.

With the invisible movement came a sudden wave of smoke and crimson light from her feet, spreading out quickly and occupying much of the ground around her for several metres in any direction. At certain points, where the smoke was thickest, it slowly began to rise, whereas the crimson gathered in those locations and sunk into the ascending and expanding gatherings of smoke-shaped killing intent, requiring all to take a moment to understand what they were seeing.

Books and bookshelves rose out of the ground, each one shrouded by smoke while the insides were made of crimson fury, and all of them released a thin stream of energy that crept along the ground and returned back to Wei Yi’s feet. It was unclear exactly what this was for at first, but as a book manifested in her hand and the power from the tomes around it rushed towards it instead, it became obvious.

“The technique of the False Preservers, integrated with your own techniques?” Shi Gong exclaimed.

“Your attempts to crush and suppress us all with your own methods will only result in all of us rising back up, stronger than before!” she called out in reply, “So, Preserver of Eternity, dispel this technique and have a chance of surviving, or else you will be beaten without a single chance to endure. What will you do, Shi Gong? Know that I can kill you even now, whereas your historical phantoms barely approach the power of that which they attempt to replicate. In fact, you do a rather poor job in general. Are you sure that you are the ones that had threatened the world to the point that you had to be imprisoned?”

She would have probably not spoken like this in normal circumstances, but at this point she needed them to cease their usage of History’s Truth to regain a certain physical balance. It was benefitting her planar energy to be forced to circulate around her body in these conditions, but there was a limit to it.

Surviving was better than ending one’s life and being strong a moment before that, and in this situation, if her planar energy was constantly being used and her killing intent was allowed to grow stronger by the growth of her own hatred combined with the empowerment of Knowledge Amplification, then they would grow even further apart and her Arm of Slaughtering Shadow would become unusable, while her other four meridian networks might suffer greatly.

However, to ask her foe to change their actions because she might be defeated by them would be rather foolish, to put it mildly.

“You think you can intimidate me, so-called Ascendant? Your methods are not sufficient!”

Wei Yi raised the crimson book positioned it as high as she was able to, gave him just one more chance to act, and then slammed the book down, the crimson and smoke hitting an unseen flat barrier in the air and causing an enormous surge of energy to soar forth.

It burst out in a small wave around her, but the majority flew out in a dense bolt of crimson, shrouded in smoke, with the faintest semblance of characters floating around it, some being left behind in a trail as it flew past the Preservers of Eternity in the fifth realm. Those that were in the sixth reached out in various attempts stop it, but whether they conjured spectres of the past or used more traditional cultivation methods they were unable to do a single thing to prevent it from drawing too near to their leader.

“History’s errors be purged!” he was forced to shout, the area distorting once again as the entire battlefield twisted and turned.

His position shifted, as did that of all of the other Preservers, whether they were that of Eternity or the Ru District, but it seemed that with those changes, the Learned Blast was also affected, and not in a way that benefitted the Preservers of Eternity. Rather than being destroyed, this attack was split into many parts that managed to retain their stability and strength, as well as the total empowerment of Knowledge Amplification.

Not one of these pieces flew towards their leader, but instead split up and targeting a single weaker Preserver each, arriving at their positions only moments after the supposed errors of history were purged. They had no chance to evade, nor modify their positions and battlefield yet again.

Three dozen cries rang out almost at once, with the mildest wound being a severed arm whereas eleven were outright killed or lost their dantian, and thus their cultivation, making them as good as dead in this battle. It took one simple action, yet it proved the Ascendant’s point about her abilities absolutely perfectly.

The advantage naturally had to be pressed, and so she took one moment within her mental domain to recalculate the positions of the Preserver combatants and used one stride empowered with killing intent to move just close enough to the next figure shrouded in robes. Rather that bringing down her book onto an unseen surface before her, she used this figure instead, crashing the intangible and yet extremely hard and solid surface of the book with crimson pages and smoke-flooded cover onto the figure’s neck.

Her Knowledge Slam burst forth, shredding the body of the one that had to endure the majority of its power. Everyone that stood further away only had to face half of its strength, but even that was sufficient to permanently disfigure ten and greatly injure a further fourteen.

“Release your technique, Shi Gong, or else you shall die like this, humiliated by your own methods!”

“ENOUGH! The History’s Truth be damned, you will burn, False Ascendant! You will become the fuel for our return, the victory that proves our superiority over your methods, your skills, your ideas and ideology, and this damned Yi City that you hold dear! The records of history shall forget this place forever, and only the Great Families shall be remembered as those that kept the world in check!” exclaimed the Preserver of Eternity, the effects of his method fading the moment that he began.

Her own strength surged, but so did that of everyone around her. The Ru Preservers suddenly recovered from their stunned confusion and looked towards their enemies, with their two leaders already able to bring out their planar energy and form a quick obstruction to prevent any of the strengthened Preservers of Eternity from advancing while they were recovering. After all, while both were experiencing a sudden burst of energy from the broken History’s Truth, one side had not been affected by their past negative experiences, and had only been immersed in them to prevent the technique from being broken early.

With the personal strength of the Preservers of Eternity not yet revealed to them, it was hard to estimate how much the barrier would be able to endure, but the Ascendant judged it to be sufficient in the moment of stability that she had prior to the mention of the Greats.

The moment that they were mentioned, she vanished from the spot and appeared before their leader, her fist heading straight for the darkness beneath his hood where his head should be.

Without any of the restrictions upon her own abilities, and with the growth attained by enduring History’s Truth, her speed was returned to an immense level, and the sheer force of her attack easily broke through the boundary of the fifth realm and sat comfortably at the sixth realm. Her physical power was so enormous that the Preserver of Eternity couldn’t do a single thing without making use of his own planar energy.

In part, she did wish to see what the ancient Preservers of Eternity would be making use of for the sake of cultivating their rather impressive historical-based abilities, although that was only slightly significant to her in her present state.

Indeed, just before her fist could reach him, a vast quantity of formless energy flooded out and rapidly seemed to burn the air, lining it with endless cracks like one might find on a burning mass of charcoal. It was these cracks and these flaming parts of the space before her that burned most brightly and stopped her fist from advancing. Despite their thin appearance, they contained more energy than the majority of barriers that she had needed to contend with so far, devouring the majority of her momentum and only looking to grow stronger from it.

‘Charcoal… Of course, wood and fire together form charcoal, and it fits perfectly with the techniques that I have seen them using so far. Using the wooden fuel of history, they burn it with their flames and produce phantoms of the past and thus use them against us,’ her mind quickly concluded, the hatred that powered the punch slightly fading, ‘It isn’t quite as literal, but close enough.’

As a new combination of energy was discovered, for once being brought across to her by someone else, she didn’t hesitate to comprehend it and attempt to manifest it herself.

Unlike Knowledge Amplification, which was now active whenever she used the methods of the Ru Preservers until she could improve it further, adding another dual element to her arsenal was almost effortless, especially when she was presented with such a good foundation to duplicate. The Preserver of Eternity was from a far older time, and so his technique was far more powerful than that of more modern experts, who had been worn away by the decay forced by the Great Families and thus deprived of their true potential. There was far less that she needed to improve upon in order to meet her and the Truth of the Universe’s standard to use it herself.

“Everyone, you take on the rest. I will handle him!” she exclaimed, waving her arm to spread the bookshelves further and to enforce her Conqueror’s Eye power over the entire region, empowering all of her allies in order to give them sufficient power, “Shi Gong, you will die by my hand!”

In an instant, she released her own energy to flood the flaming cracks in the air, and transformed the chained cosmic light into something akin to her foe’s energy, except that the cracks were greater in size and number, and the light that shone through was no mere orange, nor a hotter blue or even white. Instead, the same kind of celestial blaze that shone through her own searing marks and that became more and more prominent with every single stage that she attained. These flames were directly from her marks, thus consuming several of them at once just to manifest the cracks.

When flame burns, it does not discriminate between sources, and devours them equally. However, when one fuel was simply denser and longer-lasting than the other, it was inevitable that it would burn out first, which was exactly what occurred when the heat of her Mysterious Charcoal method spread to the Preserver of Eternity’s defence.

One moment, it was there, and the next it flickered into nothingness, just in time for her Arm of Slaughtering Shadow to coalesce, infused with the weapon that had been made with her own energy and remained barely stable enough to infuse into the arm, and release an Elysian Blast.

“Our history will not end this day!” the Preserver of Eternity screamed, and suddenly vanished.

Just like that, the blast hit the wall of the Bottomless Archive and shook the structure, but did not kill the one that it targeted. In fact, Wei Yi was unable to sense a single hint of where he might have disappeared to, and there was no trace of the technique that he had actually used, making it very reminiscent of yet another recent confrontation. It was so alike that she couldn’t stop a wave of killing intent from surging out from her body, striking primarily the nearby Preservers of Eternity.

“Fuck… I will fucking stab that guy the moment I come across him again…” she muttered, turning to the closest one of his subordinates with eyes surging with crimson and shrouded by smoke, “Change of plan: you will all die by my hand instead.”