V5C34: Test of Purity

There were several clues to the lair of the Guardians of Purity, and the first was that it was beneath the ground. She had not seen the exterior of the structure that the portal had been formed in, but from the air, flow of energy, and some of the things that she had been able to scan, she could tell that there was a large amount of earth above it, far more than would be found on a poorly maintained building in the district. That automatically discarded looking for the place from above, and instead necessitated the search for a location where the Guardians could actually create their base without interfering with any other underground installation.

After all, there was a large underground region occupied by the New Community, which would prevent anything else from being on the same level. In other words, space couldn’t overlap without a very careful usage of spatial techniques that were no longer in use in the Planar Continents.

That was rather basic knowledge, admittedly.

Hence, using everything that she had been able to scan from the underground region of the New Community, she identified that at least one third of the district couldn’t be utilised for the hideout without bending space. The space around the district was not eliminated in the slightest, but there was a limited distance from the district that could be close enough to permit spatial transportations of the sort that was used by the leader of the Guardians of Purity.

It led to quite a big area for her to look through, but she had an entire night and day to do so, and she was fully intent on doing so by first inspecting areas closest to the New Community, where she was most concerned about finding any kind of large force with which she might need to fight. Her techniques were a little destructive, to say the least, and she didn’t want to accidentally kill anyone over at the revolutionary force with excessive attacks that she could use in other areas without as much concern – not that she was fine with killing arbitrarily, but the New Community was the only faction underground that she needed to watch out for.

‘There are a lot of buried structures in this place. The ground isn’t very strong here, unlike the Bao District, and despite the seeming old age of most buildings, there have been at least three individual layers of structures above the initial foundations,’ Wei Yi noted as she looked through the district quietly, employing her stealth methods to avoid any unwanted detection.

So far, after combing through another half of the Gang District, thus having reviewed a total of eighty-three percent of the region, she had come across no Guardians of Purity, nor any cultivators that made use of pure planar energy, which would have been a basic requirement for membership in the faction. From this, she took a little while to consider why they might be so distant from the district that they were supposed to be most focused upon, and who’s Patriarch they apparently serve, and came to a reasonable conclusion.

Given that the assassin had previously appeared through a portal, and that the portal location could shift, it was possible for the Guardians to make use of them to travel around, at least before she had tampered with it. Additionally, the Guardians of Purity are an old faction, one that somehow remained undiscovered for quite some time, so they were blatantly not out in the open, nor in a place that could easily be found, like the New Community of the Gang District.

As a result, it was very likely that their hideout had to be somewhere beneath the ground, and not accessible at all from the surface, as the people of the Gang District would be very likely to find it otherwise. The obvious question brought up was how the current Patriarch of the district could have possibly encountered them and used them to support his own standing in the world, and she suspected that this could be answered by the abilities of the current Patriarch combined with the knowledge that the Gang District and family are bound to have regarding factions that exist near to their lands, or outright beneath them.

To contact a force within a short range of the district without any physical contact would be possible using the abilities possessed by the district’s leadership, and so it was likely that she should change the approach she was using just a little bit.

Providing that the order to kill Gang Xiu Ling was given at the time of her arrival, and not a long time prior, which would make things difficult, there should still be traces of their communication and some kind of stable method used to converse with the Guardians of Purity. If she located it, tracked down one side of it, and then handled matters on that side, she would have a good idea of what exactly was happening between them and the district’s leadership, and exactly what she could do with that information during the takeover attempt later in the week.

She knew where the primary structures of the Gang family were in the district, and that they were focused on a part of the district that she had not spent too much time at yet. Judging by some of the structural layers below the district, she could also guess where there would be enough room for the lair that she had seen through the small portal that she had managed to stabilise.

With everything that she had already explored, she had concluded that there were only a few regions that could possibly provide a sufficient amount of space for a lair of a once-major faction to exist and operate beneath the ground without any interruptions and challenges that would otherwise be presented by a confined space with no access to open sunlight or farming and hunting areas that are easily accessible outside. It greatly limited the places that she needed to search, and it did a great deal to inform her of where various stabilised communication channels could have been placed without interfering with other matters of the district.

To put it a little more straightforwardly, she came across the stagnant channel of energy that she had been looking for in less than ten minutes after she had begun, and did so just north of a structure owned by one of the guardians of the Gang District, which allowed her to verify its nature rather easily. There were only so many people, factions and entities that a guardian would need to converse with, and it was the only channel directed towards a point in the ground that she had been unable to scan yet.

Before she could attempt to deduce what had been transmitted through it, she recognised the faint fluctuation of space before her, and thus realised that she might not even need to do so.

‘Sure, throwing everything I can observe with my spiritual perception into the Ascendant’s Library is wise, but there are only a few things that could be happening with the Guardians of Purity – provided that there isn’t another instance of what might be a Primordial Deity rising from the earth to entrap a great number of people. I can avoid the perception of most, so I should be able to get past them easily enough if my guesses are all proven to be incorrect,’ Wei Yi thought, ultimately deciding that rushing was worthwhile in this instance.

After a minute, she was able to obtain sufficient information on the two ends of the faint spatial channel, and immediately reached out to grasp one of the chains of Law before her, vanishing the next moment.

On the other side, she manifested in the air a metre above the ground, landing onto the perfectly flat stone slab that was a perfect example of the only kind of stone tile that could be found all around her. Her destination was an empty chamber with three doorways on three of its five sides, and it was composed entirely of a dull grey stone devoid of any defining features. Had someone found it in a cave, separate from the rest of the stone, the only odd factor would be that the stone was smooth and cut. Positioned sufficiently well, there would be no difference at all, which was rather abnormal for the flooring of an ancient faction.

Old groups like the Guardians of Purity, Preservers of Eternity and the like tended to become fonder of various decorations and artistic touches as time went on. It seemed to be an extension of the unfortunate obsession with vanity that people had – the Ascendant not excluded – and something that proved to be a better use of their time rather than pursuing some of their other goals.

From the materials here, however, she could only assume that the reason behind this was the same one that made them all cultivate the same pure planar energy technique. They pursued some form of purity that only they could have really understood, and this included the chambers in which they lived. Planar energy had an intrinsic connection to the elements, hence the five sides of the room and the tiles that they had filled the floor with, and this was one of the few things that they didn’t seem intent on avoiding. Otherwise, these rooms would probably be shaped like circles, the floors would lack any obvious sign of being made from separate tiles, and there would doubtlessly be millions of other things that they would do so long as they had the opportunity to do so.

The room she was in lacked any hint of human life, impressively enough, but she could now sense more of the underground region and knew that there were more figures further in, carefully cleaning every part of the rooms that they were in only to return to the beginning and repeat their activity all over again, for as one side is cleaned, another gets too impure in their eyes. It seemed absurd to her, but this was what one might expect from a group that was absurdly obsessed with one type of planar energy cultivation over another.

Something similar was noticeable with the Greats, who disliked pure planar energy and thus did everything to stop it from being used, and also decided to bring the entire world down while they were at it.

‘No, don’t think about those bastards, or else my killing intent will be felt all over the Gang District. I’ve not had the chance to kill one of them in a long while, so all of the times they are mentioned, that killing intent just keeps building up…’ Wei Yi sighed, suppressing her killing intent by expanding the Ascendant’s Library with even more wings of deep shadows, condensed from the excess killing intent that couldn’t be used up by her Arm of Slaughtering Shadow.

She advanced into the room ahead, finding little more than a few ‘seats’ pressed against the empty walls. They were essentially blocks of stone sanded down to a reasonable height and size, nothing more.

The only thing she could really comment on here was the fact that the pentagonal chambers couldn’t have been tiled properly without excess empty space being left in between them, so instead they were placed with their bases towards one another, and with their tops occupying the space between pairs of pentagons facing the opposite way. Unlike a more ordinary representation of a pentagon, with each angle being equal, these chambers had a flat bottom the width of the entire shape, and thus needed to have the two closest sides at perfectly right angles to allow the shape to keep five sides without breaking the purity that was apparently present within a perfectly cohesive and smooth pattern, if that was what they wanted from the arrangement.

Even with all the information regarding them that she had been able to get from Yi Shi Ming’s memories, deciphering things like this was difficult without asking one of them directly, and so she did not linger in the area for too long, moving on to the next mostly empty chamber. That one contained several books on shelves on the walls, partly digging into the wall and partly jutting out as well.

It was the most complex piece of furniture in the entire underground complex, so far as she was able to understand it, but the books weren’t of much use to her. They were interesting to glance through using her spiritual perception, but most of them seemed to be focused purely on random bouts of philosophical ponderance on the nature of purity in various insignificant elements, in her eyes. As with anything else, she was going to record that for her own viewing at a time when she could spare the mental energy, but it was not going to answer the important questions.

Further on, she located several more chambers containing shelves, some with benches and some without, and only after half a dozen more rooms did she come across the first populated rooms. Due to the layout of each room, one could only see so far through the open doorways of the chambers, and so her silent footsteps permitted her to get that close before a stealth method would have even been needed.

To be safe, she had already been employing her methods, and could thus enter the next room with ease, bypassing the robed figure that was busy cleaning one of the so-called benches that stood on a side with no doorway. He had been doing that since she had appeared within the underground chambers, and he looked intent to continue on it, making her wonder whether this was actually a process of slowly sanding away the stone into a shape that is more desirable to the Guardians of Purity. As a method to create furniture, it would make absolutely no sense, nor would it be in line with the usual behaviours exhibited in other rooms and design decisions, but it would certainly be more sensible than needlessly cleaning something so extensively.

The room after also had someone obsessively cleaning part of it, as did the one after, until the fourth occupied chamber contained two busy Guardians of Purity engaging in the same activity.

As their numbers rose, so did their realm, going from the second realm that the first three were in, to the third, then fourth, and, as she finally left the honeycomb-like area that she had started out in, she ended up in a larger pentagonal chamber. This one was shaped more accurately to the elemental pentagram which was what all planar anchors were technically part of, albeit as one fifth of the whole thing, and finally had some sensible pieces of furniture that were, still, as much a part of the chamber as the shelves of the previous rooms.

This one, however, lacked the needless cleaners, and instead had a single aged figure sitting in the middle, kowtowing to nothing and no one in particular. He was the same figure that she had seen through the spatial gateway, and his energy was in the very first stage of Oblivion Halo, although it was highly stable, almost impressively so. His anchor was similar to the initial state of her own, save for the lack of other elements dancing on the surface, being a pure violet crystal akin to planar stone.

“Mind if we talk for a moment?” she said, barriers appearing all around the chamber within a single breath, “I’d rather not fight before we get the chance to do so.”

He leapt up and looked in her direction just as last time, and began to gather his planar energy in the same manner, but she had observed his energy the last time and thus came prepared. Manifesting the Arm of Slaughtering Shadow, stretched out and with her hand and fingers pointing vaguely towards the man with greying hair, and focused her will upon the figure while willing her Command of Law to consume only the spare energy that flowed into the arm made of smoke and tinged with crimson. All that she needed was a single command.

“Cease!” Wei Yi said authoritatively, and her Arm instantly disintegrated into naught.

She tentatively named this Slaughtering Replacement, for it was using the Arm of Slaughtering Shadow to substitute the price that her flesh and blood usually needed to pay for her uses of the Dao of Law beyond simply witnessing the chains of Law. It was not quite as effective as she wished it to be, but it was better than nothing with her current open wound at the left shoulder.

All of the planar energy that he had brought out from within his body stopped in place, and even his physical form was restricted a great deal. Any chance of attacking her was gone, for the moment.

“Is it that difficult to converse with me, even if you see me as being impure in some way?”

“All those that trespass the sanctuary must be punished for their misdeeds! There should be nothing odd about this, even if you are someone who is completely ignorant of the practises of the Guardians of Purity! I had warned you already, had I not? You had not done too much the first time, but the second time, I have no recourse but to use my full power against you, even if you call upon the vile filth of the elements to stop me.”

“Then, what if I was to show you this?” the Ascendant asked, reaching out to the side with one hand and releasing a wave of pure planar energy, transformed as usual from her cosmic energy into the most powerful state that her entire library of techniques could produce.

It flooded out of her body and covered the floor of the room, slowly flowing up the walls and the barrier that stood in the doorway. Everything was covered in a dense planar light that slowly coalesced into a layer of crystal, her high realm allowing her to stabilise all of the energy that she had released without any effort on her part. Furthermore, she quietly made use of the seemingly uncontrolled mass of raw power to reinforce the dissipating effect of the Command of Law, restraining his feet and flowing into the robes that he wore, ensuring that it would be very, very difficult for him to move unless she allowed him to.

“This… p-planar energy? Pure planar energy? You have pure planar energy?”

“I learned it, in part, from a technique belonging to the ancient Kong Clan, further improved by a man by the name of Kong Shi Meng. Does that mean anything to you?”

He did not reply immediately, but the lack of the previous killing intent from him made her rather certain that she did not need to be concerned about a sudden attack. The Guardians of Purity should value purity of planar energy above grudges and concerns about the desecration of their spaces, especially if such concerns are invalidated by the display of pure energy, so this was to be expected so long as they adhered to their traditions like the Gang District had managed to.

Although it took him quite a while, he did eventually provide her with an answer. Furthermore, he spoke with a highly respectful tone, although his language remained roughly the same, making it rather difficult to tell what conclusion he had reached.

“I am afraid that the name is not one we know. We have maintained purity, but not all records could be preserved, especially not during the three great collapses of a number of the Gang District’s structures, which had forced us further underground and damaged many of our archives,” the man said, occasionally testing the planar energy restraints on him.

“Hm. Still, we can talk, so let me repeat my earlier question. Gang Shu Wen – why are you supporting him?”

“The Guardians of Purity are devoted to the one with the greatest cultivation and comprehension of pure planar energy. We have been unable to exert as much influence on the world as we had wished, and pure planar energy cultivation has clearly declined, but that has not changed the one that we shall support. Your energy is impressive, I shall admit,” he nodded, his head having the most freedom in his current state, “but your realm is still inferior to the one we have pledged to support.”

She visibly raised her eyebrow in response, “He does not cultivate pure planar energy. What led you to think that he does?”

“… You must be mistaken, eh…”

“Looking for my name? Wei Yi, although I also go by the title of Ascendant.”

“Ascendant, then. We have a wisp of his energy here, which he may have shrouded on the outside to prevent those that oppose our goals from attacking him and harming his chances to succeed in his own pursuits. I can show it to you, so long as you do not destroy it. Otherwise, I shall have to act, even if you are someone who does cultivate pure planar energy.”

‘I have a feeling that it is the other way around, but if they have a wisp of his energy, I don’t need to convince them using my words alone. Much simpler, that,’ she thought, crossing her arm with a well-positioned Arm of Slaughtering Shadow, “Fine, I’ll not damage anything, but I do want to look.”

When he was released from the restraints of Law and energy, he did not say much and moved to one side of the large open space, glancing at her when he stopped by one of the walls in a silent request. She dispersed the crystalline energy there, just enough to allow him to get at a secret compartment in the stone, one that was hidden so well that made it clear that the tiles on the ground were visible deliberately, not due to a limitation of working with natural materials. Once removed from the wall, she could see that the top was indented and displayed a small planar shard.

The man removed it and held it carefully on the palm of his hand, bringing it closer to her before tapping the shard. It rang softly, as if he had carefully struck a glass, a small sphere of bright violet floating out of it and settling a few centimetres above the planar shard from which it emerged, echoing the ringing continuously.

From a simple glance – and even with a deeper look with her spiritual perception – the wisp of energy did seem to be pure, non-elemental planar energy.

“I have a method to dispel all falsehood. The Elder Watcher physique. Do you mind if I use it?”

“Elder Watcher, hm… Ah, yes, that is a physique that is known to us. So long as that is all you do, without attempting to distort the world, then you may proceed and I shall not take any action against you, Ascendant.”

His expression did not suggest that he thought this would change much.

This time, she was the one to provide no particular reply as she opened her eyes widely and looked upon the wisp of energy, activating the eldritch tendrils of her newest physique ability. All of them wrapped around the violet wisp, and grabbed onto the light as if each of the tendrils was a finger attempting to break open a constrictive shell. They pulled with enough effort to distort the space around them, doing so for several lengthy moments in which each heartbeat within their chests seemed to take a decade each.

All of a sudden, the violet light exploded and revealed beneath itself the blatant elemental light of wood-type energy, although traces of other colours were present.

“What… WHAT IS THIS? THAT MAN DARED TO TRICK US AND MAKE US STORE HIS VILE ENERGY WITHIN OUR CHAMBERS?” the leader of the Guardians of Purity suddenly erupted, grabbing the wisp of energy and scattering it into naught before taking the planar shard within which it was stored and throwing it to the side in anger, “That man dared to speak to us and tell us that he advanced the pure planar path, even while deceiving us? What a filthy thing!”

For a brief while, neither of them spoke, with one simply fuming on the spot while the other waited.

“I know, right? How about you help us take him down, and I spread pure planar methods to the entire district? Furthermore, my faction, the Ascendant’s Arbiters, is very free with sharing all cultivation methods that people can cultivate, including a number of pure planar methods that I have created, and so long as we succeed, everyone in the world will be able to choose it as their primary method,” Wei Yi told him, “You could freely address people and inform them of all the reasons why pure planar energy is superior to elemental energy, although you would need to contend with those presenting the opposite view.”

He looked at her, and then exhaled a mouthful of steaming air, “Please produce a wisp of your pure energy, if you could.”

The Ascendant produced exactly that, and the man reached out and grabbed the planar shard with his planar energy, bringing it back into his hand that he then brought closer to the wisp of energy that she had manifested. White light flashed from within the shard and grabbed onto the energy, forcing it into the planar shard with considerable effort.

‘Even if this state, it should still negatively affect the shard, so… I don’t think he will notice if I regenerate that shard a little while he does his thing,’ she thought, for her energy was still cosmic energy even if everything about its appearance suggested otherwise.

At times, this was to her benefit, but at others, like whenever she wanted to use an artefact to its full potential, it was rather irritating to see them explode before she even has the opportunity to experiment with them. It was one of a million reasons why her mind must have remembered to keep working on her project even while it was under the belief that it was within another world where she couldn’t access the House of Gold. In fact, she had gotten through a few of the shards of her old sword while she was unaware of it, but it would still take a little while for her to be done with them all.

With the control that she retained over the wisp of energy, even the small quantity that had already seeped into the planar shard, she forcefully made some of it disperse from the concentration of the sixth realm to that of the fifth realm, effectively multiplying its volume significantly, and directed it to instantly seal up any holes within the planar shard.

In essence, she just used it to rebuild the entire thing as closely as she could, although it was difficult to hide the way in which the shard slowly changed colour from a dull violet to a more vibrant shade tinged with the nebulae of her cosmic energy, as well as a distinct crimson hue that she did not fully recognise. One might imagine that such a thing would be seen as a negative or fault by the leader of the Guardians of Purity, but luckily enough, a glint appeared in his eyes as he observed the change, not appearing to recognise the exact nature of it but instead the simple visual, causing him to glance up at her several times.

Finally, once it was done, he put the shard back into the indentation in the hidden tile, then went down on one knee before her.

“Ascendant, Wei Yi, you have the purest planar cultivation in this world. I, Qi Su of the Guardians of Purity, commit myself and our faction to serve you and to assist in your pursuits, infantile or wise, while attempting to elevate pure planar energy to ever greater heights and to bring it to the entire world,” he said, his head bowed before her as he waited for any kind of response.

“Is this what you had done with Gang Shu Wen?”

“We- no, I was mistaken in my assessment, and I had failed to sufficiently investigate the lies that he had fed to us. I assure you that this shall not happen ever again, not so long as we remember this insult to our long-standing traditions.”

“Do you object to changing certain practises or traditions if they would benefit the improvement of pure planar energy or my aim to rebuild Yi City anew, with myself as leader?”

“Had we been persuaded to change our ways, and shown a better path, it would have been very different from being fooled like we were. The only immutable thing is pure planar energy – all else can be rendered void, in time,” Qi Su stated, “We are not like the Gang family and their absolute adherence to the past, regardless of success or failure of certain practises. It had made us very uncomfortable to work with them, as they had used elemental energy for far too long to ever consider change without a major reform, but their trickery had misled us.”

“In that case, I’ll accept your service. It will be needed very soon, and there are a few things that I would like to get as soon as possible. For one, anything you know about energy as a whole, and how it may be utilised more effectively. Ideally, none of the purely philosophical books, though, as I’ve already scanned most of those.”

He nodded, “I shall see what we still have, and what others among us know, Ascendant.”