V5C39: A Conversation

They sat on opposite sides of a small table, a cup of tea standing before the tailor, releasing a thin line of steam from the surface of the hot liquid. It was full even after standing there for quite some time.

“You… well, you do look quite good, actually. I just wanted to joke a little…”

“It’s fine. I could have grown bigger boobs had I wanted to, as the Bovine Stomach technique wasn’t exactly difficult to find or comprehend, I just figured that it wouldn’t be the best idea,” Wei Yi responded, “On the other hand, you grew up quite a bit since we last spoke. Have you not found some hot girl to sleep with yet, or are you still playing around as you were when you were younger?”

“Ah, you finally understand what I meant? I had almost thought that you’d still have no idea what sex is, not to mention that women can also sleep together… Are you… well, have you… Heavens, I can’t believe that I am so nervous right now,” Yi Kun said, awkwardly giggling, “Sorry…”

“Don’t be. I understand what you’re trying to ask, and yes, I do happen to prefer other women. If I understand your words correctly, we both have no attraction to men, right?”

“Yeah, that’s it… Actually, the reason that I’m so nervous, aside from never expecting to see you again, especially not… like this, I guess. Your arm… No, I won’t get distracted here. When I began to realise that I couldn’t see boys my age in the same way that other girls did, and when I understood that they were significantly more attractive… I had seen you as one of the best, I guess. You weren’t particularly talented at cultivating, but you had gone through four techniques before settling on the fifth, some metal technique, if I recall. You were at a great disadvantage, but you were strong, and you were smart, and you looked quite… cute, I guess…”

“I had a rather late awakening, to put it mildly. If not for the memories of an adult man forcing me to think about it, I might never have even considered that I might be attracted to anyone, especially not those of the same sex.”

“That does make sense, what with the amount of time you were able to spend cultivating, training and learning. Had you just been born with a slightly better sense of energy, you could have surpassed everyone in the generation… but that’s irrelevant. Basically, I think that I had a crush on you, and, now… I think that I still do. You feel a lot more mature, now, as if you’ve aged twice as much as I but ended up looking far better than I ever could…”

The Ascendant thought that the woman before her looked far better than she did, although that was purely due to her own preferences leaning towards larger breasts and a different facial structure, both of which she could see in Yi Kun. After the several years apart, the tailor had developed a large bust, a larger figure than that of the Ascendant, but she just had less muscle and slightly more fat in the most significant areas. Her butt, thighs, breasts and whatever else one might look at all came together to form a wonderful body, and with their existing connection, there was more than just physical attraction between the two of them.

Unfortunately, she also knew that there was likely to be one major obstacle.

“Look, since the last time we saw one another, both in general and without clothing-”

“That was when I brought you to a small pond to clean up after you got beaten again by… some guy. I recall that quite well.”

“There were plenty of people looking to beat me up at the time. Anyway, since then, I have changed quite a bit. To make it as straightforward as possible, I happened to get a dick.”

That immediately brought a look of confusion onto the tailor’s face, as the rather blatant fire in her eyes faded alongside it. There was no need to explain why, for this was far closer to the normal reaction than the odd excitement of certain individuals, with most being bisexual or otherwise more open to variety in their preferences than Yi Kun, or the Ascendant herself.

“I… There’s no way to get rid of it?”

“Can you get rid of your left arm? I don’t have one, and it wasn’t very easy to fix the problems that it caused… In short, no, it’s not something that I can manifest or remove at a whim, and even if it was, I’m not sure how good of an idea it would be to pretend like I don’t have it while with you.”

“… All of those things that I’d said… They’re still true, of course, but with physical attraction… I… I just can’t handle anything to do with men. Masculine women, sometimes, depending on their face and physique, but even the most feminine of men just… I’m sure those guys are fine people, probably, but I just can’t stand anything to do with their bodies and intimacy and that kind of thing…” Yi Kun managed, “Sorry…”

“No need for the constant apologies, I completely understand. It is quite feminine, though…”

“It just… no. Heavens, I get the feeling I shouldn’t have brought any of that up… now everything is just awkward, and rather than having the possibility lingering in my head, it’s just… gone…”

Wei Yi leaned forward and nudged the cup of tea forward with her right hand.

“We don’t have to be speaking as some kind of couple, nor even as… what did you call them? Friends with benefits? We don’t need to have that. As you said, we got along well enough back in the Yi District, and you still respect me, and I appreciate what you’d done for me at the time. There is no reason for us to be on bad terms, even if we don’t end up spending the rest of the day in bed, fucking each other’s brains out,” she said, leaning back and producing a cup out of crystalline energy, filling it with her liquid energy to manifest something for herself to drink.

Yi Kun glanced at the planar energy cup and drink, then at Wei Yi’s silver gem-like eyes, her subconscious mind noting the presence of several clear circles in her irises but her conscious mind failing to realise their presence or significance, and then back down at her own cup of tea.

“You really have changed, huh. Would have never thought that you’d say something like that openly.”

“In that case, I think I should inform you that I spent roughly twenty years sitting below a brothel, used their services quite a lot – something about the place, time, and my condition put my mind in the mood way too often. I also have a rather powerful spiritual perception, so I had no difficulties in observing everything that happened at all times. I also don’t sleep, nowadays.”

“T-Twenty… years? Wha…”

“I should explain then, shouldn’t I? Where would you like me to start? From the expedition, or what happened when I returned?”

“Expedition, please. You’re the only one who returned to us…”

“A guy who went on the expedition with us, one of the leaders, drove women to lust for him using a mental manipulation method, but it didn’t work against me, and he ended up stopping in those efforts. We got to the Kong District, which existed to the north-east but collapsed long ago,” she explained, clearly seeing that even this much was more than Yi Kun was ready to handle, “Alright, which points do I need to provide more details on? I’m guessing it’s the former point, right?”

“That guy was trying to rape women?”

“Well, not quite. Fifth realm and below, mental manipulation can only amplify feelings, not generate any thoughts, so the women Yi Jiazhi had slept with did have some degree of interest in the guy.”

“He was a known creep where I worked. I hadn’t gotten involved with him personally, but from what I had heard from some of the others, he had started visiting them out of nowhere, they suddenly thought he was the best man ever, they ended up not doing their work for a while, then they came back crying… Some may or may not have ended up asking me to show them what it’s like to be with other women… I had rejected those that were clearly acting irrationally, but I had done my part to teach the others.”

“See, there’s the trouble. When you charm someone with your words, your body, your behaviour and so on, is that wrong?” a brief moment was all that Yi Kun needed to shake her head, “How is using your energy any different?”

“It’s an outside force, influencing a person’s mind!”

“Outside? Everyone has it, more or less, it is omnipresent, and while it can influence your mind, so does the sexy body of a woman with large tits and whatever physique you prefer,” Wei Yi presented the same argument that had been causing her quite a few problems thanks to the existence of the Dao of Lust, and the possibility of it influencing her and those that had fallen for her.

Yi Kun looked at her for a while, “I still don’t like it.”

“Don’t worry, that guy didn’t have the best of times since the expedition. He had a bit of a traumatic experience there, to put it mildly. I will take your opinion into consideration, at some point, but before then, I can proceed with the explanation that I had intended to give you,” she said, “We had gone to the site of the Kong District, descended into it, then began our exploration. It was a lengthy process, and we hadn’t even known where the rest of the groups were, but we started meeting up rather quickly after a while, with one person in particular – one of the leaders, Yi Henghua, the one cultivating the Fairy of Dust cultivation technique – turning out to be an otherworldly demon. I met up with an assassin, Yi Henghua tried to kill us both, I, the assassin and Yi Fenwu ended up taking her down, and at some point, I had broken through a stage or two.”

“That does not sound like anything even approaching a full description… and yet it is already rather scary. By the way, I managed to get into the Emergent Anchor realm not long ago. What about you?” Yi Kun asked.

“Sixth realm, nearing second stage.”

“The fuck? I guess that’s what twenty extra years gets you… Just joking, of course, I know that you must have worked hard and done your best… it’s just rather amazing to hear. Is that arm…”

“Not part of the expedition, nor did I even lose it after I got locked up in a prison spatial realm for twenty years. It also has nothing to do with my realm, although reaching the Linked Channels realm has indeed made it far easier for me to generate and maintain it in the form that you are currently seeing. Just a few days ago, it didn’t even linger permanently, and I needed to manifest it for moments at a time.”

“Yeah, I don’t even have a clue of how you managed this… I had not paid as much attention to this as I should have, mostly because I was being taught by one of the best looking women in the district…”

“I suppose that your hormones must have kicked in far earlier than my own, as I didn’t really feel enamoured with anyone until I met with a woman called Chu Ling. You probably didn’t know her, but she was one of the people that the burning of the district had claimed. Anyway, with one of our expedition leaders gone, we had eventually managed to get to the spatial realm that we had been looking for, where another leader, Yi Fenwu, decided to kill us all and claim the things inside for herself, making use of Yi Bai, a fellow servant that had cultivated an assassination art by accident and ended up being controlled by a token that Yi Fenwu had on her person, while she sought out the core of the spatial realm and tried to control it.”

Again, poor Yi Kun’s eyes were wide and her jaw started to slowly drop in surprise, prompting the Ascendant to grab the cup of tea with the Arm and force it to her mouth, where she reflexively drank some of the warm liquid and swallowed it. She only realised what she did a moment later, but that did calm her down slightly.

“You know, I wouldn’t be able to handle this stuff if I was in your place. There’s just too much.”

“So I’ve been told, in regards to certain other matters, of course. This is hardly the only complicated matter that I’ve gotten involved with, and the moment that you realise what I’ve been up to since I departed from the prison realm I mentioned, you should understand exactly what that is. Anyhow, the spatial realm exploded, as those do, and all but Yi Bai and Yi Jiazhi – and me, obviously – died. I was… shaken, to put it mildly. To put it more accurately, I was completely broken by the events, to the point that I barely paid attention as I stumbled back to the district.”

“Was that when the fires began?”

“Yeah. I came back, and suddenly, everyone’s either dead or dying. I only stuck around for a brief time before the perpetrators found me. Have you heard of the Great Families yet?”

“I have heard of those. They are part of the reason that the Yi District got into a rather poor state, aren’t they? The northern faction, Ascendant’s Arbiters or whatever they are, got into a fight with them, and now I have to work down here instead of up there.”

“Very eloquent description.”

“Yours are worse, you know. I have no idea what actually happened to you on the expedition, other than that one of the team leaders ended up trying to kill you, then another tried to kill everyone, and then almost succeeded. In comparison, I think that I’ve presented everything I had to say quite clearly and concisely.”

“Probably, but if I was to explain everything, I’d need to give you a lengthy tome filled to the brim with words and explanations that still wouldn’t make much sense to you, so this is simpler,” Wei Yi admitted, “Now, it was the Great Families, or, more precisely, the Great Yi Family, that had decided to come after me, because it turns out that one of my parents, my mother, was actually part of their family, and would have participated in their ritual to off most of their children and feed their planar anchors into a single pair to make them significantly more powerful than any usual cultivator with a single anchor. Yes, I am telling the truth, stop looking at me like that.”

“No, I believe you, it just sounds… absurd. Also, that was one of the longest sentences I’ve heard in a while.”

“So, they tracked me down, killed most of the people I had interacted within in that time, and then tried to kill me, only for Yi Yaling to come out to save me. I don’t have a clue what made her think that she could pull it off, as her cultivation realm was lower than mine and her technique was… semi-complete, to put it simply, as she had been inspired by one of my own creations. However, her death drove me to use everything I had, leading to one of the Greats suffering an injury.”

“Did you manage to cut off their arm?”

“No, I scratched a cheek. It was rather disappointing, really, but it pissed them off to such an extent that they shoved me into a prison realm, where time was faster relative to the Planar Continents, but where time in the Planar Continents was slower relative to the prison realm.”

“Yeah, that seems like how time would work. I know I don’t get quite a few higher concepts, but that is rather straightforward.”

“And yet, it is very easy to make a mistake and accidentally invert the words without meaning to. I’ve come across more than enough people that do so, and I am certain that I have messed up at least once,” Wei Yi said, “Anyway, I’ll skip over what happened there, but I decided that I couldn’t really go by my old name any longer if the Yi District and the Yi family had no interest in protecting those bound by their familial rules. Hence, Wei Yi. I do still have the identity token, though I haven’t really used it for anything…”

She flipped her right hand and raised it slightly above the table, leaving her palm to face upwards, and willed the dormant energy within her body to emerge from the hand. It did so somewhat reluctantly, having been left untouched for so long, and seeped through her gauntlet to form into a token that seemed to defy the very nature of reality.

Unlike most of the times that she had manifested it before, it was not made up of a particular element, nor was it breaking apart like it had before when she had attempted to transform the token into cosmic energy. Perhaps due to her current ability to stabilise energy in a solid state without the necessity to make use of some unique property of the array she had used to form the token in the first place, it could now display the full complexity of her cosmic energy without being compromised whatsoever, and it was certainly a wonder to behold. Countless nebulae, stars and principles compressed within a single uncertain mass that did not appear to exist within the same reality as the rest of her surroundings.

“Do I… do I even want to guess what kind of energy that is?”

“Planar.”

“That does not answer anything. From what I know, there can be water, fire, metal, wood and earth-type energy, and there’s also that lightning, which doesn’t seem to fit… Everything I know is nothing like reality, I’m guessing?”

“No, you’re spot on, as far as I understand it. Five elements can combine into pairs, producing lightning and the like, but adding more than two together doesn’t work for whatever reason. There’s also pure planar energy, without the touch of any element, and then there’s the thing that I have. Technically, its everything and nothing at the same time, combining the overall power of everything without any of the downsides. It happens to be something that only I can replicate, and something that only I will ever be able to use, which is extremely convenient.”

“You don’t say.”

“So, I went north, once I escaped, having met the mother of the Master of Yi City, learned that he was named Kong Shi Meng, and then started a faction called the Ascendant’s Arbiters, named after myself.”

“…”

What appeared on her face was an expression containing the most confusion, shock, horror, amazement, terror, fear, uncertainty, dismay, astonishment, bewilderment, disbelief and other emotions that couldn’t be summarised without the sentence becoming absolutely excessive in its repetition and intent.

Fixing this with tea would be rather difficult, to put it one way, so she leaned forward again and tapped the point of the star metal claw on her index finger on the table. In itself, this action was nothing unusual, save for the design of her gauntlets, but when she applied the slightest semblance of her attempt at completing the Invader’s Road, her Imitation Roar, she could touch another’s mind without causing any significant harm. In her understanding, the worst thing that she could do was cause a momentary instance of memory loss, effectively allowing her to remove an instant from someone’s mind if she so desired.

For now, she did not, and her utilisation of the sound she extracted from the partial Invader’s Roar had the intended effect. Yi Kun looked like she was slapped for a moment, save for the lack of obvious physical impact, but her expression returned to normal after a short while.

“Can we talk about what we love the most about women? It seems so much simpler and more fun.”

“I don’t think that will get far. We cannot have particularly unique views on the matter, unless you have some very interesting fetishes – or if I have some that I treat as normal – and we will just end up making one another excessively focused on things that we will need to deal with on our own. Instead, there’s something that I’d like your help with, if you can.”

“What do you need? After everything that you were apparently involved with, I’d give up a few of my current comforts just so that I don’t feel like an asshole for not trying to help you more previously…”

“I am not going to ask something like that. Rather, I just want to find a way to chat with the local Patriarch, and while I don’t expect you to have a direct contact with him, I am hoping that you have some knowledge of where he can be found, what kinds of things he would be interested in talking about, and how he could be convinced to let me in on a bit of their study of the souls,” she explained, not being surprised to find a similar expression of surprise upon her face as before.

A moment of silence later, she sighed.

“Not within your abilities?”

“I think that she is simply surprised to find the Patriarch within her abode,” a voice prompted Wei Yi to turn her head, finding that the doorway, which was nearly at her back, was suddenly occupied by a figure in violet robes and with a violet hood casting his face in shadow, “Am I interrupting?”

“You aren’t using a technique, cultivation method, or physique. How are you invisible to me?”

“You should already have the answer to your question, Ascendant. We study the soul, and the soul has unique features that can affect the world around us.”

“Some kind of Hidden Soul, then?”

“If that is how you wish to label it, then yes. We have certain other names for the variations of souls that we end up invoking, but your naming is simpler, and more convenient for the conversation. As I see it, you have a unique soul of your own, do you not?”

“Something made me think that it would be suitable to call it the Assured Soul. It seems to have an effect of preventing various forms of mental influence from affecting me, although I don’t think that I grasp even a hundredth of its overall potential,” Wei Yi answered truthfully, not only because she did wish to get an expert opinion on the subject, but also due to how little she imagined him being to do with that information.

There was a great deal of benefit to learning certain mundane facts about others, whether one intended to fight them, negotiate with them, or even charm and seduce them, but the soul was one property that appeared to be incredibly difficult to act upon, for one reason or another. It appeared to have the ability to influence that which it inhabits, as the Hidden Soul demonstrated, and she could be sure that this was not an otherworldly property as she could perceive the Patriarch now that she was aware of his presence. There was none of the absolute invisibility under spiritual perception that she was accustomed to from any of her otherworldly gifts.

On a different note, the Truth of the Universe, or the Mysterious Characters, were visible to her purely because of her ownership of the object, effectively fooling her spiritual perception into seeing the object. It was odd, but rather obvious, as she had never been able to understand the full nature of the countless shards of the Mysterious Characters, only ever seeing the surface.

Back to the topic of souls, every little thing that the Patriarch did and said could help her to gain more information about them, even if he did not wish to give anything away.

“Assured Soul… We might have some idea of what you mean, but I would need to request the archivists to browse through our studies in order to narrow down the possibilities. Before then, you wished to obtain some of our knowledge. Is there something in particular that you wish to do with it, or do you merely pursue information for its own sake? I can appreciate both attitudes, but the former might allow the two of us to help one another.”

“Naturally, I want the information itself, but if you are able to somehow influence my soul, then I would very much be interested in exploring that possibility. That being said, I suspect that you don’t intend to include everyone in this discussion, right?”

“No. I shall step outside, and you may finish the conversation. There is something that might just be perfectly suited for you, but it will require just a moment of preparation.”

He did as he said he would, stepping out and sitting down at a seat not far away from the building that Yi Kun owned. Although the Ascendant had lost sight of him now, she was now aware of his existence, and made sure to perfectly monitor the Patriarch just in case he tried anything strange. Plenty of people were capable of appearing decent enough, but when they stepped out of sight, they might attempt to do something that she would not appreciate. She had the mental capacity to spare, so she would not forget to use it.

“Eh… I guess you really were telling the truth about the whole Ascendant thing… why did you call yourself that, anyway? Seems arbitrary, and, from what I recall of your style, to not fit with it all that well.”

“It doesn’t, more so than you might imagine, actually. That being said, with the Yin-Yang Ascendant physique, what else am I supposed to call myself? It was before I got my foundation in the Dao of Law, if you have even the slightest notion of what that even means, so I couldn’t have called myself the… Adjudicator? That sounds decent enough, actually. Maybe once this is all done…” Wei Yi muttered to herself, putting the idea aside for now, “Unless I get forced out of the district right away, I will try to speak with you again once I’m done with the Patriarch. When I return to the north, to my territory, I could bring you along when I next return here.”

“Along to one of the northern districts? I don’t know, the heat there… Let’s just wait and see what happens. I’m not opposed to it, but I will have to consider it.”

The Ascendant nodded, getting up, dissipating the identity token and the cup of energy alike, leaving the building as if she had never been there. For now, the only mark that she had left was a slight scratch on the table, left by the tip of a star metal claw, even despite her attempts to avoid something of the sort.