V5C41: Awakening the Soul, Part 2

Even if someone was really interested in viewing her body naked, as if the images that had spread from the Chu District weren’t enough for them, the Ascendant changed within a matter of seconds, removing her clothing and tossing it all into the House of Gold, from which she then took out a few spare clothes that she had stolen from Fu Zan when he hadn’t been paying attention.

Given that she was not intending to keep her spare clothing, even if it wasn’t destroyed in the process, she did not opt to take advantage of her new ability to actually put things on without struggling for hours in the process. She chose a loose robe – something referred to as a bathrobe by the otherworldly demon – which had long, loose sleeves and a length of cloth that she tied at the front to keep the robe together. She didn’t have much of a problem with the people present witnessing her naked skin, but there was no point in showing herself off.

Most of the people in the room were men, so she was hardly interested in charming any of them, nor did she imagine that the women present would be interested or available after the experiment. Far more importantly, she wasn’t in the mood after having gotten things out of her system last district.

With the potential speed that she could get through some of the next districts, she might even get to the Yi City Web connected territory before her body has the chance to accumulate any amount of desire. She wasn’t expecting for this to occur given the incredible delay posed by the Bao District, one that could, in theory, occur many times over in the Shun, Wu and Ze Districts, but she was also not a beast that had fallen to her primal desires. Even though the second newest appendage on her body, if one counted the Arm, did manage to amplify her lust, it was less and less prominent due to the rapidly growing killing intent raging throughout her system.

“So, are you lot ready yet?” she asked, stepping onto the central platform.

“There are a few more matters to look at, a few more checks, but that will only take a few more seconds… Ah, we are done now. Please remain still,” the Xin Patriarch said, “If that arm functions sufficiently alike to one made of flesh and blood, you may maintain it, otherwise it might be best to temporarily lose it.”

“The Arm of Slaughtering Shadow is as close to a living limb as it can be. It circulates all of my energy, it can come into contact with things, and requires no active maintenance. It’ll stay.”

On the observation ring, the Patriarch nodded and communicated with his people via his energy, quickly delivering instructions while also keeping an eye on Wei Yi. His planar cultivation was partially necessary to activate some of the arrays and inscriptions, which, despite having stored up a decent supply of power, was only going to be sufficient to drive the great structure for a brief while. The density of planar energy in the world was still lacking, relative to the amount needed.

Technically, Wei Yi herself could power the structure for a significantly longer time, with her total supply of energy vastly exceeding that of any Patriarch that she had met, especially if all five cultivation pathways were to be considered, but it would be somewhat difficult to then apply that same energy at herself in the same way as completely unrelated energy. It was similar to how she could circulate all of her forms of energy throughout her body with ease, but if she shoved it into the body of someone else forcefully, it would not be quite as smooth or seamless, even if it was completely unchanged by the change in vessel. If it behaved in an identical manner, it would rapidly remake and reinforce the body it entered, but with the sheer power of her cosmic energy, this would not be smooth when acting upon someone with a far, far weaker physique.

Similarly, their energy wouldn’t behave the same in her body, as she might easily be able to ignore any passive effects that it possesses due to her built up endurance to such effects. All of this would be problematic if a very specific effect was required from a particular interaction, so she wasn’t able to provide her own power to the great structure without changing the dynamic.

That being said, she did not expect this to be the only instance of her using the principles locked within this structure. All otherworldly gifts perform certain functions, and not all were entirely out of her reach, so with the excess energy that she possessed, she could attempt to duplicate the results of the process by constructing everything out of her own cosmic energy. She had already done this with the bloodline refinement technique that she had created, and she was sure that if the soul was an aspect of the Planar Continents, she could influence it without the power of another world.

First, though, she would need to understand exactly what the structure did, how it did this, and what parts were most significant, all of which she would learn through its activation and effect upon her. For now, she had to trust the experts.

The dark energy of the Xin Patriarch sunk into the ground and flooded the many open channels in the metal floor, some even soaring up through the walls and into the ceiling, where a further number of channels were placed. Plenty of it filled the outer portions of the pillars, prompting the many portions to shift and jitter, slowly aligning into a different arrangement that continued to shift, and do so more quickly as time went on, taking a minute to accelerate fully.

It was after that minute passed that the many inscriptions and arrays truly ignited, surging light bursting through the channels and seemingly modifying the appearance of the metal itself, transforming it into a shining and golden surface that seemed to resemble molten metal, although the state of the floors shouldn’t have changed.

The biggest change came after that, even if one was to include the visual transformation of the entire chamber. First, every single one of the inner rings – effectively meaning all but the outer observatory ring, which was separate from the rest of the arrangement and would not be included in any of the following descriptions – shook and slowly began to move, with certain sides of the rings rising up while the opposite sides descended. Each of them appeared to shift on an unseen axis, being limited in their rotation by the pillars containing the otherworldly gifts, meaning that they essentially wobbled in a circle, spinning around without being able to rotate in full.

Second was the sheer wave of power that seemed to flood out of the metal pillars, seeping past the ever-shifting metal pillars and thus being transformed into sporadic flashes of energy.

They raced towards the Ascendant, some passing through the wobbling rings and the others going through entirely untouched, all landing upon her within the first few seconds of activation and adding up to a total of energy that was akin to the usual combined total of a seventh realm cultivator’s planar pool. It enveloped her body and pierced the robes she had put on moments prior, keeping them intact for now.

Although this alone was sufficient for her to feel her cultivation rising, slowly but certainly, progressing towards the second stage at a far superior speed to what she might be able to accomplish without some other exceptional method, this wasn’t enough to impress her nor to affect her soul. She was attempting to bring it out as much as she could, but with something that she had not used due to a lack of sufficient understanding, it was rather difficult for her to know exactly how to do this. To name an example that she was incredibly familiar with, thanks to having witnessed it herself a number of times, if someone with no experience of using planar energy was told to do so, they might have some vague notion of the process, but it was far, far more likely that they would blunder and attempt to use a completely wrong approach to this.

Most of the otherworldly demons seemed to have been endowed with some natural knowledge of planar energy to allow them to have a better starting point than an infant, but she did not have the same advantage with the art of using one’s soul.

What she did have was everything that she could siphon from the Ancestral Hall of the Xin family while she was passing through, even though the Xin Patriarch likely had no clue that she had scanned anywhere near as many tomes, ancient slates and scrolls as he led her through to this large chamber. While standing around, examining the otherworldly gifts, and changing, she had categorised everything she had scanned in, and now that she stood in the centre, she had completed the process and was now able to go through the knowledge she had obtained.

Aside from the many cultivation techniques and combat methods, there weren’t as many soul-oriented matters as she’d like. For the district of souls, it was distinctly lacking.

What was there, however, appeared to be of great value on first glance. Most things were kept rather brief and organised in a manner that was rarely seen in many other districts, and so the value of every single word was almost twice as great as that of an ancient tome she had salvaged from the Kong District, back when she had visited it.

Thus, with the speed at which her mind functioned, she was able to sort out a basic principle from the first few dozen soul-oriented manuals: it was not like planar energy, at least not in the way that it was utilised. In the first place, the way that planar energy was used was difficult to describe, as it was akin to having an arm appear out of nowhere, as it was both foreign and familiar to the people of the Planar Continents. Meanwhile, to use the soul would be like using planar energy for otherworldly demons with no intrinsic information of planar energy being given to them, meaning that it would be entirely different to using any limb that one naturally has knowledge of.

In essence, to drive the soul, she needed to make use of an entirely new method.

That was easier said than done, as one might obviously imagine. So long as one was asked to use something they already had, even if they weren’t familiar with it, they could repeat past experiences to eventually figure it out. Meanwhile, when someone attempted to utilise a completely new, completely foreign element, something that had to be deliberately different, they would naturally struggle a great degree.

Her first few attempts failed, meaning that the first few bursts of energy from the many pillars around her were only able to contribute to the growth of her cultivation. Since it was not as effective as she would have liked, she spent a little longer scanning the various new texts in her Ascendant’s Library.

Some moments later, she managed to find a method that appeared to have a good chance of working in her case. It was one intended for those that had chosen to cultivate via the absorption and refinement of artefacts into their body, a niche but effective method that could allow many to surpass certain physical weaknesses, granting some the ability to walk despite a crippling disability, among other abilities. This caused numerous issues for most cultivation methods and so no district had this as their focus, nor did any current Patriarchs, to her knowledge, cultivate such a method, so to see something like this within any documents was already rather fortunate, especially because it was intended for someone who completely relied on such a method.

Now, she did not actually own any internal artefacts, nor had she ever used one for her cultivation. What she did possess was a number of dantian shards, carefully positioned within herself to manifest an array and a series of talismans that functioned as inferior searing marks – and especially Astral Scars – ones that coincided with the effects desired and the positioning needed.

Whether this was a pure coincidence or if her chosen arrangement was rather beneficial in general, causing the intended layout for the method she found to match, this appeared to be exactly what she needed. This method would allow her to sense her soul more clearly, force it out of her mortal form, and grant her the opportunity to realise how this was performed so that she would be able to replicate this in time, depending on her own talent.

Of all the things that could have been needed from her, talent was something she had plenty of.

Thus, when a larger burst emerged from the pillars around her, surging in her direction, she naturally applied everything she could obtain from the techniques she had read so far, combining them with the energy and arrangement of her dantian shards, waiting for just the right timing.

The very moment before the majority of the pulses of energy would collide with her form and be uselessly absorbed as an increase to her cultivation, she activated all of the talisman dantian shards at once, draining some of the energy that she had accumulated during the previous few moments as well as a number of her Astral Scars to intensify their effects.

All of it came together to form a visible wave of the sheer rise in energy within her body, rippling out, shaking the various metal pillars around her, and even displacing the robes and hair of the Xin family members standing on the observatory ring. It did more damage to her spare clothing than anything so far, although she knew that the true cause of his was not the wave itself, as impressive as one might deem it to be when she had not truly released even a drop of energy from her body, but instead the faint but incredibly familiar sensation of something within herself that she had only sensed once before, in something that might as well have been purely illusory.

What little she could observe about the soul so far led her to feeling a degree of surety, of certainty that she did often possess in life in general. It was akin to experiencing someone else’s emotions, without the trap of being overwhelmed by them as it was still her own nature – her own soul.

It was touched only moments later by the vast energy flowing in from the outside, crashing upon her skin and the thing that appeared to be just a brief yet insurmountable distance below. She sensed the surety, befitting the title of Assured Soul, wavering for a moment, confronted with this foreign power, but that was where her own nature, separate from the exact attribute of her soul, came into play. Flowing out into her soul’s surface, it merged with the attribute, releasing a faint vibration that shook her skin.

She sensed the property of her soul trembling also, resonating with herself, with the energy outside, with the world. So many different feelings rushed into her head, but she could barely recognise any.

Another wave came from the pillars, and she forced her soul out yet again, feeling a connection to it that she had not yet sensed before, noticing that it much easier to bring it out and that she recognised, albeit incredibly faintly and with far too little detail to understand in full, how she could pull it off on her own. It was akin to finding a piece of a puzzle, but only one of a hundred.

‘I barely understand what my soul is doing right now, nor do I have any reason to believe that it will even be beneficial to me aside from the words of the Xin Patriarch, but if I am going to continue with this, I shall do this in full, without holding back, just as with my cultivation, my goals, and my overall path,’ Wei Yi, standing within her Ascendant’s Library while observing the state of her body and soul with care, thought, glancing back at the grey dust that had made its way to her mental domain, ‘Really, I understand this even less, but it may be that I have some kind of affinity to the elements, or planar energy as a whole. It’s one of the few ways that I could have possibly overcome the fragment of Primordial Earth, and since it’s the most reasonable guess I have for now, I might as well attempt to make use of this property…’

Just as with otherworldly gifts, she neither trusted nor was particularly keen to utilise the power of a Primordial Deity, or what seemed to be that, at least, but she was going to use it in full this time.

Out of all elements, she had only the grey dust, matching with the element of earth, but her cosmic energy represented her best version of all of the elements she had gathered so far, and her general ability should be good enough for her to achieve whatever effect this kind of pursuit would grant her. With all of her power exerted in one go, perhaps the sheer exceptional nature of the grey dust would be equalled by only her own effort.

Hence, with the second wave that affected her soul, she mentally reached out for the grey dust and crushed it in the smoking Arm of Slaughtering Shadow, which now appeared in her mental domain as well as the physical one. At the same time, she unleashed the rest of her power.

This time, the wave that followed was absolutely caused by the release of energy from her body, shredding the thin robe she wore in an instant and rushing past the many shifting metal pillars in the area around her. All of the pillars shook, the sheer quantity and density of her built up power almost breaking some of them in some small ways. The wobbling rings cracked and distorted, at least in part, and the outermost ring was shielded at the moment of collision by the planar energy stored within a hidden inscription on the walls of the chamber, preventing those with lower cultivation on the observation ring from being harmed by the excessive power.

After she did this, she felt her soul practically outgrow her mortal form, if only for a breath, for a moment, for the briefest instant that could possibly exist within this world. Outside of her body, it could receive the full effect of the waves of influenced power, and it most certainly did so when the waves touched it.

Her sensations from the first effective wave were intensified a thousand times with the second effective wave, an overwhelming sensation of confusion rushing into her mind. It spread to her body, to her energy, all five meridian networks that continually channelled energy throughout her form, and even shook the Ascendant’s Library, almost throwing around some of the many tomes stored on its numerous shelves.

With monumental effort, she was able to keep each one in their place, and then head outside of that small mental bubble and face the pressure of her soul, and the pressure upon it, directly. She stared upon it and forcefully endured the vast excess of power rushing towards her, utilising everything she still could without resorting to one of her five paths of cultivation, meaning primarily all of her Dao and natural principles that she had comprehended over her latter twenty years of life. Her expectation was that the Dao of Law would be the most useful at this moment, as it had proven to exist even in a simulation of a world without the benefit of the heaven’s will, but when she had felt herself being drawn towards a particular Dao, she realised that the most aligned with her Assured Soul was, in fact, the Absolute Dao, which had almost five times as much effectiveness.

In an instant, she was able to comprehend why, as this was hardly difficult to figure out. Something or someone certain was guaranteed to be, whether it is to be successful, victorious, tricked or anything else. However, even someone or something assured couldn’t be absolute in whatever matter something is to be described as being certain in.

In a slightly less opaque way of describing something, the only way to move forward was to overcome the natural capability of even the most certain plan to fail. She needed to make something absolute.

To become absolute, one would need an incredible quantity of energy and resources. One would need an excessive wealth of knowledge and skills. The comprehension of Dao and principles that would require many decades to even dream of. Most importantly, however, to truly guarantee that something would be absolute, that something could not be circumvented in the slightest, that it would hold against all adversity and all pressure, one either needed to reach the very pinnacle of reality, either as an all-encompassing aspect or as something so basic and foundational that surpassing it was impossible, or to go around the Laws of the world itself so as to prevent any of its limitations from being significant.

Wei Yi herself was, in her mind, a perfect example of the former attitude. She intended to master the Planar Continents, to comprehend the Dao of Law to an absolute peak, and to impose that which she imagines to be for the betterment of the whole world. Thus, to obtain this aspect, she needed to draw from none other than herself, although the many others around her that had done great things in different ways, such as the pulsing cultivation of Long Huang.

Meanwhile, the path of otherworldly power was also being walked by her, albeit to a vastly smaller extent, but she could easily supplement all of that with the incredible quantity of otherworldly gifts that had somehow gathered around her, whether by design or by coincidence.

When she knew what she needed, the world almost twisted itself to provide it for her growing soul. All of the artefacts and all of the energy that had been prepared for the process of awakening her soul were instantly activated in full, charging towards her and forcing the careful balance that she had found herself in and pushing it to the edge, then far past it, leaving her to fly in one direction and vastly passing any limits that she had previously seen before herself. A single breath left her in a place that she had ability to relate to her previous position, and her speed only seemed to increase with every single moment. She barely knew what the process she was enduring even was, for she could barely focus upon it as her soul transformed, but she could see her goal. It was always right before her.

All that she needed was a single moment in which it was just a little closer than before, for her Arm was long and her fingers were fully capable of gripping and holding onto anything she needed, and in the moment, it was hard to imagine anything she needed more. She required the superior form of her soul, and if it took a subjective eternity, the cost might very well be worthwhile.

Then, all of a sudden, her goal was right there, right in front of her, just the right distance away for her to take it. So, she did.

The inner chamber of the Xin Ancestral Hall quaked as a vast shockwave, caused by a combination of factors rendering it as naught but a pulse of overwhelming light and darkness all at once, struck the walls and pillars within, many cracks appearing instantly within the walls and floors.

This burst broke apart the delicate operation of the chamber, as half of the wobbling rings fractured completely, with the rest losing the integrity of their channels and having many of their array nodes displaced by the combination of the pure force, cracks forming in the rings themselves, or even the erosion of the material used to make up the rings and the things within and on them. A single moment was all that was needed for the incredible structure to be broken into many pieces, rendering it unusable for many years in normal circumstances.

All that remained in full was the figure at the centre, who, for that moment, looked whole once more. Her entire form was shaded by a luminous bronze, covering up the smoking Arm of Slaughtering Shadow, coating her hair in an absolute glow and making her breasts look just a little larger than usual, although it affected her lower parts more.

Whatever the others saw as a result of this, Wei Yi herself could sense the absolute nature that her soul had gained, as well as the growth in her own cultivation. The latter was more straightforward.

Her current realm had been in the first stage for a while, and now it had climbed to the very beginning of the third, bringing with it two more perfected stages. Within her core, the thin strands from the Linked Channels realm had gained an additional four companions, each strand intertwining and forming a thicker, denser string, a kind of rope connecting the Eternal Monolith with the Astral Scars on the inner portion of the Subterranean Shell.

Provided that this continued on similarly, she would gain up to ten such strands before she reached the half-way point of this realm. She wasn’t sure what the effects of accumulating so many strands would be, but she had already noticed a faint crimson becoming stronger within the depths of her cosmic energy. Most of the perfected realms bestowed upon her a fundamentally different version of things that many other cultivators acquired in their own cultivation, but she wasn’t sure what could possibly happen to the fundamental nature of her planar energy, as it usually remained roughly the same for every single realm, with the minor exception of changing states from gaseous to crystalline – in her case.

Meanwhile, her Absolute Soul was far more obvious to her own senses than her previous Assured Soul, both due to the change in its nature and the vast quantity of energy that still surged through it, dissipating into her own body and the world around her slowly, while the rest was still being digested by it. It was hard to figure out how to use it, even now, but she was able to control it just a little.

This breakthrough did appear to affect all of the dantian shards within her system, including those that she had not made use of, but it looked like none of it was permanently harmful to her, nor temporarily inconvenient. She had not used them for some time due to a number of flaws within her methods, and the decline in the effectiveness of the array shards and talisman shards, so even if this connection to her soul rendered them completely unusable, it wouldn’t be particularly harmful to her anyway.

With a moment of effort and a bit of guessing, she was able to prompt her soul to recede into her body, and instantly felt significantly more comfortable, with every aspect of herself stabilising as a result.

‘It seems like the soul isn’t quite as freely usable in combat as any kind of energy, especially since it doesn’t quite seem to be usable in the same ways as my other cultivation paths,’ Wei Yi thought, glancing at both hands, one of flesh and another of smoking killing intent, and feeling the Absolute Soul within, ‘Presumably, simply forcing the soul into spiritual perception won’t work, but if I can grab onto the attribute or the aura of it, the same one released by the Xin Patriarch, I should be able to achieve an imperceptible yet absolute spiritual perception.’

She lowered her hands and looked towards the observatory ring, towards the entrance to the chamber where she saw the majority of the observation crew standing on the remnants of the observatory ring, with the Xin Patriarch keeping that part standing with a spherical barrier.

“I seem to have caused a bit of a mess. Need help with all of this?” she asked, finding that her words seemed to come out of her mouth just a little bit easier than ever before.

“Ascendant… you have damaged a great deal, so your contributions will be appreciated only if they do not cause any further damage to the area. It has been hard enough as is to hide this place from the Great Families, and any further explosions of the sort shall be incredibly hard to divert their attention from,” the Patriarch said, lowering some of the barrier now that there was no active threat targeting them.

The Ascendant nodded while holding out her arms and mentally reaching into the House of Gold. She willed the Crimson Robes of the Third Arrival, her star metal scale bodysuit, the gauntlet for her right arm as well as the high heeled boots to emerge from within, using her spiritual will to briefly raise herself into the air.

She wasn’t confident that this would succeed, but, when all of those items appeared upon her body and did so exactly as she wanted them to – save for the crimson robes, which were sufficiently loose for them to fall onto her shoulders – she realised that the increased ease of activity extended to more than speech or movement. With the increased sensitivity of her own form, she was able to accurately position her body and her clothing in the right way to equip the latter without requiring anything more than some adjustment of her robes, which she could now do easily using her two hands.

With that out of the way, she returned to her mental domain and took out the blueprint of the chamber that she had assembled before it had exploded.

Most of the arrangement was incredibly complex, especially by the standards of many arrays that she had assembled. Perhaps the most comparable thing would be the Four Cardinal Beasts array, and she wasn’t even the one assembling it within the Kong Prison Realm due to the sheer amount of mental capacity that was needed from the one attempting to reconstruct it from memory. However, most of the materials were still near their original locations, and she had many helpful abilities in this regard.

After taking a breath, she shut her eyes and focused, spreading her will, conquered domain, the influence of the Elder Watcher and Shaper’s Grasp to the entire chamber, grabbing onto every broken fragment and damaged region. Then, she got straight to work.