V5C24: Darkness of the Earth

Wei Yi awoke with a start, instantly sitting up and leaping to her feet once the very first hints of light entered her eyes.

She knew that what had happened seemingly moments ago seemed absurd and insane, and yet the fact that she had to struggle to locate even one particle – wave, or perhaps ray? – of light was clearly indicating that the sudden darkening of the world may not have been completely false or imaginary. It didn’t help that her spiritual perception was suddenly failing to go further than a metre from her, which made it significantly more difficult for her to assess anything that wasn’t in her immediate vicinity – everything, in other words.

The only light that did enter the area was faint and of an orange, perhaps slightly red shade. It was nothing like to the yellow shade of sunlight that might be common over to the north, or the bluer colour that typically lit the south when the snow wasn’t pouring down in too great a quantity.

It was closest to the light that was produced by earth fire, and the slightest degree of warmth that she felt from the light vaguely matched that presumption.

Since there was an opening within the darkness, she approached it, wary not to do anything until she could vaguely establish what it was that she had gotten herself into – well, technically, she wasn’t the one bombarding the humanoid entity with attacks, but she was lured by her greed into the building all the same. One could say that it was well intentioned, with a noble goal, but ultimately it was desire, whether one would call it greed or not.

With the state of her spiritual perception, she had to walk slowly and carefully, as the darkness was one that neither her Third Eye nor the sheer power of her vision that had grown since the early days of a serviceable but not abnormal vision could penetrate. She was forced to feel the ground beneath her, to reach for the world around her in order to find hints of walls and obstacles that she could not see.

That took a while, but when she was out, she found the source of the light.

Within the ground, which looked to be made of stone or dirt, either with one being unusually soft or the other being particularly hard, was a large crack in length but of rather minimal width. With some effort, she could stick a finger into a crack like it, but she saw no reason to attempt this.

It was this that provided the light, for from within came a vibrant yet weak orange glow that spread out just a little, primarily spreading up. Up… into naught. Into absolute darkness that covered the entire world, so far as she could see, with the only hint of it being anything but an absolute black ceiling being a small earthen stalagmite that grew from the ground near this crack and rose up and up, until the orange light could no longer illuminate its side. Beyond it, she had no clue what did and did not exist, but it was clear that there was nothing at least for twenty metres.

She frowned as she looked upon that small stalagmite, which she had seen only incidentally at first. In fact, she had almost wanted to overlook it entirely.

For some reason, that stone rising mass simply disconcerted her in a way that she could not comprehend. Something about it, whether it was its location, size, position, perhaps the way in which half of it was obscured by the darkness, or maybe all of those combined with a million things that she hadn’t yet perceived or understood, made it seem about as bad as the humanoid entity from before.

This was such a stupid thing to even think, and yet she couldn’t stop herself at all. For some reason, she just needed to understand it. Well, no, she understood her curiosity, why she wished to learn more about the world, whether it was minor things or not, and why she just needed to comprehend the nature of the oddity that caught her attention. She needed to understand the world, and even if she found herself somewhere out if, she would just understand it far more so that she could return and do so with the knowledge that it would allow her to enhance her own behaviour once she returned to the Planar Continents.

As for why she was assuming this to be a different world, it had to do with the rather thin planar energy in the one-metre space around her. It felt almost as if there was none at all, and she was just imagining it.

Thing is, her own energy was still there, and she was able to bring it out of her body without issue, and nothing else was replacing it, so far as she was able to tell. Thus, she had to wonder where the energy had gone, if anywhere at all, and why she could not sense anything else. Even areas where planar energy was sealed away couldn’t do such a good job, and neither could the Kong Prison Realm, so she had to think of things that were beyond them.

‘Also… hm? Is that… People! There are other people here, then!’ she realised as she saw the very faint hint of a person at the edge of the crack’s light, rushing up to them right away.

She had not bothered to disguise the sound of her movement, intending not to give the wrong impression to the person if they were awake but choosing not to move to avoid detection. If she had moved quietly, then it would be rather reasonable to assume that she might have some kind of negative intentions towards the person, which might then lead to a rift forming between them before they have even had the chance to communicate and learn about one another’s experience. Then, if some valuable information could have been exchanged, it would not be, and her limited spiritual perception might mean that she wouldn’t be able to extract it.

When she was nearly next to the person, they finally stirred, and her perception allowed her to glean that she had found a man whose cultivation had to be in the fourth realm, at least based on his internal planar structures.

Oddly enough, she could only obtain this limited information, both from the man and the ground and world around her, despite the fact that her spiritual perception was usually enough to detect nearly everything that there was to know, provided that she knew what she was looking for in order to comprehend it while sorting the rest away into the shelves of her memory.

“Ah, my head… Where am I? Who are you?”

“Your head seems fine, you are near a crack in the ground and a stalagmite… two, I think, and I am Wei Yi. Were you at the banquet?”

With the darkness obscuring much of his body, it was hard for her to make out any defining features, and so her detailed memories of everyone present weren’t of much use in identifying him. How her spiritual perception was affected by the darkness wasn’t something that she understood, frankly.

There had never been any connection between light and spiritual perception, as it did not use light to obtain information. Instead, it could pierce and envelop all matter and obtain information through a scan of it, exceeding the power of the majority of the methods on the otherworldly demons’ world of origin due to the amount that spiritual perception could accomplish.

“Yeah, I was. Wait, I think I do know you! You hit my brother!”

“Your… you were friends with that idiot? I don’t mind hitting you as well, although I would first prefer to interrogate you.”

“No, you misunderstand. I am his brother – as in, we’re related. He has always given me a bad reputation that I have needed to fight against for a long time, so while I don’t like my brother being injured in any way… It’s something I’ve come to expect,” he said, “There have been four attempts to cut his dick off, actually, and I’m torn on whether that would actually make things worse.”

“I think I understand what you mean, in a way. Still, I don’t see why you let a person like that walk around.”

“He is still one of the Bao family, and we are both rich and powerful-”

“I have not had much experience with the rich and powerful themselves, but shouldn’t they be all the stricter? Especially when you, someone who supposedly doesn’t act like that, is present. If I was in their position, I would have probably told the guy to fuck off elsewhere, where he wouldn’t bother anyone.”

“Well, he… huh. Why didn’t they do that? It makes perfect sense!” the man agreed after a moment of thought, “What were they thinking…”

“We got off topic, not entirely without my involvement, but we should return onto it. Do you remember anything after the volley of attacks onto the stage, whether it is in your conscious or unconscious state?” the Ascendant asked, “I don’t care if it is rather absurd, because I am frankly used to such shit with everything I’ve gone through.”

The man shrugged, looking around awkwardly, “I was actually rather drunk after finding a whole room of liquors, so I barely noticed anything… Actually, the hangover isn’t here at all, so this has somehow helped me… where are we?”

“Somewhere. Might be another world, might be underground, might be something else entirely. Either way, planar energy here is not particularly rich, if it even exists, and I cannot even perceive anything outside of the darkness, so don’t expect any help from me in that regard,” she replied, pulling him out into the light, “This here’s all we have, so unless you are experiencing a different world to me, then we may be in a bit of trouble.”

He shook his head, looking around and finding little. Even without her spiritual perception, she could see the reflection of the world in his eyes, and it looked no different.

Such a thing could be falsified with any number of ways, including illusions as one of the easiest, but she was on guard against them from the moment she awoke and thus believed that there were none here, at least so far. Her Third Eye and spiritual perception, weak as the latter was at the moment, should have caught onto something, even if it couldn’t clear an illusion fully. With that ‘something’ she could easily comprehend just what might be being disguised and obscured, even if she couldn’t know what she wasn’t seeing as a result. The information itself would have been sufficient, if not ideal.

However, with nothing of the sort, and nothing to allow her to conclude that anything was amiss, she couldn’t just presume that everything was false, and that everyone was under the same illusion. It wouldn’t be possible to keep track of all such possibilities and act in a way that would benefit her in all of them at once, no matter how much she could personally understand and process at once.

“Fuck’s sake. Anyone know what that thing was, then? Anything you’ve seen before?”

“I’m afraid not. I could barely see it, but I have never heard anything about an entity like that… looked human from where I was standing, but only barely. Even I could tell that something about it was off, after a moment.”

“Good for you. None of this helps us, however, so we will need to locate someone else that may be able to contribute, or otherwise come across something that… hm?”

She turned as she heard something in the distance, and soon so did the man, with a speed that she wasn’t very happy with. It wasn’t that he was too slow, but rather that there seemed to be a very small gap between his reaction and her own. This was rather odd, as there shouldn’t have been any reason for her hearing to also suffer greatly due to whatever it was that was happening in this world, or perhaps in this strange realm, or in this extremely powerful illusion.

With her sight having deteriorated, her spiritual perception being practically neutralised, and now both her hearing and possibly her reaction times also being weakened, she was instantly in a significantly worse place than she might have been otherwise. Had everything been in a perfect state, then she could have attacked any threat that might have emerged and been confident that she wouldn’t suffer much as a result. Unfortunately, this was no longer something she could hope for, as it seemed that the entirety of her abilities were somehow affected by something that happened from the point that the entity made of dirt and stone arrived, up to now.

Perhaps there was a method of correcting this problem, whatever the cause of it even was, but the issue was that it would not be immediate, and thus anything that she comes across now will not be as secure as she’d like.

This was not ideal, to put it mildly. She’d prefer to say that it was rather shit, all things considered.

“Hello? Are you out there? Could you shout back if you’re, well… human? Please? I’m afraid out here…” the voice that reached out to them again was clearly feminine, as was the approaching silhouette, “Since the banquet, everything gone so dark… Hey, hey, you, you can see me, right? You’re real, right? Please, tell me-”

“We are real, or at least we think we are. Did you not see the light from the crack in the ground?” Wei Yi interrupted her once she could confirm that her appearance was also reasonably human.

“No, it’s only become visible as I got nearer… there’s some kind of fog over the area, so when I woke up, I couldn’t see a single thing. I called out-”

“Like an idiot, since nobody else would just call out to others in an unknown place, in strange darkness.”

“- to someone… hey… I… I’m just the daughter of Bao Long, I’ve never been outside of the house for longer than a few minutes… I had no idea!” the woman exclaimed, “B-Bao Kang Min, please, tell her about me!”

“I don’t think I know you… Bao Long has a daughter?”

“Yeah, he’s kept me away from the world, but I’ve heard quite a bit of you from the maids and servants at the residence,” she said.

“In that case, what is your name, supposed daughter of some guy at the Bao District?”

She looked like she had something else to remark on the topic of her wording, but she held her words back and instead curtsied, “My name is Bao Jing, second daughter of Bao Long, brother of Guardian Bao Sheng of the Bao District. I-”

“Frankly, not a single part of that has helped me in the slightest. Should I care? Does your identity benefit us in any way while we’re down here, or up here, or perhaps over to the side of wherever we had originally been? No, I didn’t think so,” the Ascendant sighed, shutting her eyes and rubbing her forehead for a little while, “Apologies, it seems that, among other things, this place has affected my self-control. In the future, just get to the point, and don’t reveal useless shit that nobody asked you for, alright?”

“A-Alright… alright…”

“I’m not sure why I’d trust you or Bao Kang Min over one another, or either of you at all, but you two are the best I’ve got for the moment. Since we do not seem to have anything around us that would be of any use, save for these off-putting stalagmites, we may need to do a little bit of experimentation and exploration. Any complaints, and you’re free to stay in the dark.”

“No, please, don’t do that! We need one another, don’t we?” Bao Jing cried out, “You just said that we need to do some experiments!”

“I had just said that if you don’t contribute to said experiments, you’re not needed. Trust me, even if I was in a completely terrible state, then I would still be able to come up with a thousand different things to try out with a single person other than myself,” she replied.

“Oh…”

“One thing that I do believe is that you have indeed not left the home for longer than an hour. You should have had some experience in negotiations given your origins, and yet you are pure as a… okay, I’m going off on some strange rant again. Ignore that,” Wei Yi waved that thought away and returned onto the original topic, “Will you, or won’t you, help with the experiments in order for us to understand the place we’ve ended up in?”

“I will, just don’t-”

“Shut up, the first part was enough. Now, go back into the darkness and let us see you do so. At the moment you lose sight of us, me to be more specific, yell something, stop, wait for a minute, then return.”

“What is the second person needed for-”

“What did I just tell you, Bao Jing? For all we know, this place is slowly killing us, and yet you are going to be constantly delaying us when you really don’t need to be? We understand that you are immature and inexperienced with everything, and that you can’t even begin to consider why I needed multiple people, but why don’t you let me take care of that? Go on, fuck off already,” she said.

With this final reminder, the woman did walk off, finally allowing Wei Yi to breathe a sigh of relief while keeping an eye on the departing figure.

“Was she that bad?”

“No. I have a bit of a problem, you see, and seeing people who aren’t very conscious of the situation they’re in doesn’t exactly help, to put it mildly,” she explained, “Just wait until you come across someone that knows nothing at all about a field that you are a master in, and the frustration might be a little more understandable. I’d pass along the feeling itself, but that’s not something I can do at the moment. Wait until we get out of here.”

“Is it fine if the person in question is just significantly less intelligent than most? My brother almost always failed to understand a single thing I have suggested to him, and even when I tried to provide some advice on the front he’d be more interested in, he still fucked it up,” Bao Kang Min said, quietening down, “Probably shouldn’t be talking about this with a woman, but-”

“Does it have something to do with sex?”

“… One of the women he did manage to bed was very dissatisfied with his performance, if I may put it that way. Apparently, he doesn’t know anything at all about applying himself.”

“An oddly common problem, considering how simple this actually is.”

“Are you, eh…”

“Just imagine that I have draconic blood and you should get it all right away. If not, I can go into a lengthy explanation of what is unique about dragons, and why all of them appeared in the forms of women and yet managed to get so many human women pregnant back in the days when they roamed the Planar Continents,” Wei Yi said, nodding over to the vague figure of Bao Jing, “First, though, I am about to lose sight of her completely. What about you?”

“Same here… judging by your expression, I am guessing that this isn’t a good thing, is it?” the man managed to figure it out.

“Yes, well done. This is a very bad thing. This means that there is no difference between the two of us, and possibly her as well, effectively removing all advantages of realm and ability. How far can your spiritual perception reach right now, by the way?”

“Around one metre.”

“Same here. Now, look, that woman will return in just a short while, and we will need to find some kind of way to make do with what we do have. Did you bring any weapons with you?”

“I did not. This was supposed to be a calm gathering, and I can defend myself fine enough with the help of some of the district’s guards… no, I didn’t,” he stopped himself after he started getting the same look as the woman had before him.

“Great. I… seem to lack them as well,” Wei Yi reached out into the air and pulled out nothing at all, although this did not catch the man’s attention, ‘The spatial storage, the House of Gold, is not functioning either. I know it is there, but I cannot see the exact contents, nor can I really remove it from there. Hence, there is something at play that is somehow superior to the otherworldly gifts, which, while far weaker without the azure lights, retain the ability to bypass nearly every known planar method, and can only be interfered with by manufacturing otherworldly influences with our own capabilities, like what the Truth of the Universe can do to repel azure lights.’

Since that was the case and could be confirmed and verified rather easily with all of the experiences that she had, there was only more reason to conclude her otherworldly theory. The methods of the Planar Continents didn’t work, but those of other worlds might well not have this issue. So far as she could tell, the people from different worlds couldn’t interact with one another perfectly, but perhaps that was simply due to their general weakness and lack of knowledge regarding otherworldly gifts.

Furthermore, she had only ever attempted to discover other otherworldly items – as did otherworldly demons – with her spiritual perception, so the method of inspection could have been letting them down all along.

With all of that said, there were still a few concerning points about this inability to access her House of Gold. While feasible, it did not make very much sense, as a simple restrictive field shouldn’t be able to target planar and otherworldly abilities at the same time while also completely blocking spatial capability at a seventh realm level or above, likely exceeding the eighth realm in terms of power.

This was an assumption made purely based on her own knowledge, which was still limited due to her never having encountered an otherworldly entity that actually knew all about how so many of them ended up in the Planar Continents. Hence, it was possible, likely, in fact, that she was very wrong about many parts of her theories so far. This was why she needed to verify every single theory she possibly could as many times as possible, with as many possible, and with as much certainty as she possibly could to avoid potential interference from whatever illusory effects she might suffer from.

In the end, after one minute of not seeing the young woman they had found most recently, she emerged from the darkness and only then could her footsteps be heard, however barely.

“S-So, did you get what you wanted?”

“In part. We couldn’t see or hear you at the moment that you lost sight of us, meaning that our limited vision is shared. Even with the light from the crack in the ground, we were unable to peer too far, which means that it was rather lucky that I woke up just close enough to it,” Wei Yi replied, “Furthermore, it means that we cannot reliably confirm anything other than that this restriction is slightly more lax vertically, as we seem to be able to see more of the stalagmites than the ground around us.”

“Does that do anything useful for us?” Bao Kang Min asked.

“It means that we know fuck all regarding where we are. We could be in a small dome that ends just out of sight, but we won’t be able to figure it out without risking never being able to return to any source of light again. We could be beneath the ground, on the surface, in the air, floating in a void, travelling between worlds with every step, but none of that can be confirmed, and we don’t seem to have any indication of native life in the area. Furthermore, the connection between here and the entity at the banquet is incredibly unclear, as only their base element matches.

“This might be a world belonging to that thing, and we could have ended up here either intentionally on its part, or by accident. We could have fallen into another world when the stage collapsed into darkness, and the presence of dirt and stone could be merely coincidental. This could be some illusion caused by the entity’s technique, and we might need to find some way of breaking out in time.”

Bao Jing waited for a moment to make sure she wasn’t interrupting, then quietly inquired, “Which one of those is more likely?”

“I would have said the illusory world, but I am beginning to have doubts. Don’t know what techniques you’ve got, but they might not be working well, if at all, and my methods against illusions might be affected in the same way. Unfortunately, if I don’t know something is an illusion, I can’t be sure whether I’m accurately seeing through it, or of it has fooled me completely and utterly. Hopefully, we are not in an illusion that I cannot break,” she explained, “Due to how limited our methods are, I am putting more of my trust in the theory of us being on another world, intentionally or not. The lack of planar energy, strange Laws of reality, the absolute darkness – all of it would make sense in that case.”

“Can we even break out of another world?” said Bao Kang Min.

“People have fallen into ours often, and we did make the journey here without harm coming to us, so there’s no reason that we can’t go back. Whatever that thing was, it shouldn’t have been able to destroy the entirety of the Planar Continents, even if it did tear space apart at the stage,” the Ascendant said, “Thus, we need to go looking. Structures, homes, people: all of these have the potential to be our way out of here. Got it? Now, let’s go.”