V5C51: Battle of Dao

“If you are ready, then the two of you… may begin!”

Even now, they managed to remain silent, plunging into the fight without any hesitation or deliberation. Wu Chao began with a slash from above, his left hand rising to grip the hilt as well and provide more force, while the representative of the Wu District started with a direct stab using the point of his blade.

With these two attacks, one would need to adapt their strategy in order to guarantee success, or else they would just slice into one another and leave themselves with injuries that would make it significantly more difficulty to resolve the battle with a single decisive blow. One injury would grow to two, three and more, since there would be no reason to stop with just a few. Instead of a plain battle to the first successful strike, it would elevate to a battle to the death, and if the Wu District wished for a clear outcome, they would need to let this happen even if they did not wish to do so.

For this reason, Wu Chao attacked significantly earlier than he might have intended, slashing down at the approaching sword and forcing it away, before following up with a slash back in order to attempt to strike his opponent before he could recover.

Naturally, Wu Liang was not going to simply run into the sword and let himself be killed like that, and instead stepped to his right, away from the direction of the slash. Then, he stabbed forward yet again, taking advantage of the opening provided to him to guarantee that any response would be, at best, either delayed or weakened by the current movement, and so he hoped to hit and at least lightly scratch his opponent.

Wu Chao hit back, rapidly changing the direction of his blow to block the stab.

Wu Liang blocked, retreating and narrowing his eyes.

Meanwhile, the Ascendant stood by the side and observed them all carefully, attempting to comprehend not only her own matters, but also what it was that Wu Liang’s vision state was. If it was anything that could be applied in battle, then it was undoubtedly going to be used in a difficult battle, and so he was going to be using it right now to gain whatever advantage he could.

So far, he had not exposed a single obvious point, but the state of his sword and the ways in which he was attacking did give her some ideas.

‘His swordsmanship is obviously good enough, so this vision state is unlikely to have come from an unrelated Dao… In that case, it is either some kind of Sword Dao, or a Dao relating to the sword. Edge Dao, Sharp Dao, Stab Dao… All of those are, technically, Dao, because there is no real restriction to them or the interpretations and thus paths taken with Dao… This shit is rather confusing if you think about it constantly for twelve days in a row, and I don’t think that this is really the best way to go about it,’ she sighed internally, observing the slowly accelerating battle, ‘Action really is more productive in these regards, so it is good that I will soon have a chance to practise.’

Before she was certain what Dao Wu Liang had comprehended, or what vision state had been bestowed onto him with methods that she did not fully understand, it was hard to be certain of who would be victorious. Nevertheless, she had a decent enough guess, for he was slowly but surely being led into the flow of his opponent, rather than maintaining his own.

When one controlled the battle, they were essentially in control of victory, especially when battles were on roughly even footing. In other cases, like when someone in the ninth realm fought another in the first, the former would obviously be able to win in all but the most exceptional circumstances regardless of what they did, but when two people fought without planar energy, using similar swords of high quality, and with bodies that weren’t exceptional but still durable enough to withstand a lengthy fight, the only factor remaining was the one in the lead. In this case, Wu Chao was slowly taking it.

Indeed, as this fight continued, Wu Liang was forced to use more abnormal and unusual techniques to handle the assault from the Great Leech family member, while Wu Chao did not need to do anything of the sort. Their stamina may have been comparable at first, but when one started to expend twice as much as the other for the same effect, then it was yet another factor against the one that was not able to maintain initiative.

Slowly, she was seeing his defeat approaching, and worse yet, she was finding that it was becoming more and more likely that this would not simply end in defeat for Wu Liang.

It was not surprising that Wu Chao might want to harm his opponent, for he had been rather annoyed at the point of entering the duel, but there was not only the desire to harm, but the blatant desire to kill combined with the real possibility of it. Whatever Dao Wu Liang had mastered, it would not help him once Wu Chao built up enough momentum to be able to execute a single decisive strike. At that point, life and death would be up to him, for the Wu District’s authorities couldn’t possibly have a better overview of the situation combined with sufficient power to let him perform the decisive strike and yet stop him before it claimed a life.

Most likely, they would lose their chosen fighter, and would have to deal with the winner between Wei Yi and Wu Chao as their new Heavenly Sword. The problem was that the Ascendant would much rather have Wu Liang as the Patriarch after her go, and she would rather see Wu Chao dead.

For that reason, she needed to do something in order to prevent something like this happening, and she needed to be ready to act in a way that might displease the Wu District’s authorities in this regard, and provide a sufficient explanation for them to not use that against her. She had some ideas, but the easiest would be to invoke a Dao in a manner that would make it impossible to argue with her claim to the position.

The easiest way to do so likely didn’t need to be explained to anyone that had the ability to observe her actions in great detail, but revealing the power of Dao without making it worse needed a Dao at Full Success, at which point she could forcefully project some of its power into the world without strictly spending any planar energy, thus allowing her to use it and not displease the district.

It wasn’t possible to advance it on a whim, however, and so she was instead going to intervene, force things into a state where her mind would finally pass whatever threshold she needed to, and then attain Full Success in a Dao and overwhelm her opponent in a way that couldn’t be ignored or denied.

Before she could do that, she naturally watched and waited. She learned and studied, paying attention to the minute actions of all those that she saw, and when she observed that the sword being used by Wu Chao was being marked with far more chips and nicks than Wu Liang’s weapon, she suspected that she had accidentally figured out exactly what Dao Wu Liang had mastered, and what it was that he was trying to accomplish with his strikes now that he found that he wasn’t able to win with basic combat methods.

With how his sword was slowly cutting more and more into the blade of Wu Chao, he had likely comprehended a kind of Sharp Dao, aligning well with the extreme sharpness of his weapon and thus letting him do significantly more harm to the blade of his foe than should be reasonably possible. It was hard to be sure of what he had comprehended of sharpness to bring him to the Great Stride stage, but it was very likely that he had somehow found some meaning in the sharp edge of a sword and pushed himself to a ridiculous extent, perhaps due to the heavens being aware of the progression and development of swords and sharp weapons, allowing it to bestow a great deal of knowledge to Wu Liang while failing to inform Wei Yi of the notion of Law.

Still, she wasn’t upset at them, and instead wanted to thank the heavens for not being too knowledgeable in the one thing she had taken a great deal of interest in. It saved a lot of effort.

Wu Liang and Wu Chao continued to fight until, all of a sudden, the latter moved far more quickly than before, tapping into his personal physical strength, and bypassed the sharp sword to directly stab into Wu Liang’s neck in a manner that would leave him with no chance of survival. He was doing so in a manner that would leave him with a rather significant pain in his arm for some time, but completely overwhelming an opponent must seem like a worthwhile trade.

One of the five that was observing the battle definitely noticed, but the rate at which their planar energy moved was simply too slow, especially combined with the fact that it did not appear to be intended to affect the situation until after the sword collided with Wu Liang’s throat.

A sudden flash of crimson formed into a blade in motion, colliding with the incoming stab and forcing the blade aside, cutting naught but the air.

In an instant, attention turned from the strike to the one that had caused this with a method that did not even attempt to disguise her involvement. It matched the technique the Ascendant had used at the battle with the Reclaimed Lands, and so none were surprised to find her standing not far behind Wu Liang, who wisely got out of the way the moment that he understood what had happened, retreating quietly but not so far as to get out of the combat arena. For the moment, it was uncertain how this would proceed, so he needed to stick around as to not be disqualified too early.

“Wei Yi, do you understand what you have done?”

“I have stopped one of your descendants from dying. This man intended to kill him, and I prevented this.”

“By doing so, you interrupted-” Wu Er began, but she was interrupted before she could get far.

“I cannot speak for Wu Liang, but I see that the battle was not in his favour, and that he would have been lost. If so, then it does not matter whether I interfered or not, and we can simply proceed onto the next step. I will not use my planar energy at all, not unless the leech does so first. At that point, I would hope that you allow us to fight it out to the end, as I doubt that either one of us will be happy if the outcome of the battle is decided without our input.”

“Wu Liang, are you of the opinion that you would have lost?” the woman asked.

“… The blade coming for me was sharp. It would have been certain to wound me greatly, and it may have well ended my life. I accept my defeat.”

His voice was incredibly hesitant, but he was forced to admit the truth if he was to not appear as either a liar or an idiot, neither of which would paint him in the greatest light. With that admission, he had no choice but to step out of the designated square and join those that continued observing the battles, looking at the Ascendant with some hope in his eyes. She had, after all, saved him, and now she was the only one with a chance of defeating the Great Leech and preventing the Wu District from being grasped by someone with no respect for the deathless nature of the competition.

In theory, at least, if Wu Liang had gotten the strike instead, he would have aimed for a significant part of the body, but without leading to a chance of death. Even the move that had nearly killed him had the opportunity to target a point below the neck, all the way down to his chest and beneath the shoulder, where a cut would have been very decisive without leading to instant death.

As such, it was very simple to label the action attempted by Wu Chao as being more than a little impolite in a reasonable duel such as this one. Wei Yi had a whole bunch of other words that she might describe this situation with, but they would not be suitable for a description that was to remain within a million words or less, as she had far more words in her mental domain than most would ever come across in their entire lives.

“In that case, the final duel shall begin. Wei Yi, Wu Chao, you are the last participants in the Selection of the Heavenly Sword. The victor shall have the honour of joining our district and learning from it, but also the responsibility of providing their talents to benefit the Wu District. If you wish, you may take the surname of Wu, but that is not a necessity,” the third man, likely named Wu Si because he was the fourth out of the group, “Due to your existing rivalry, as well as what had just happened, you shall fight until one admits defeat, or one falls and perishes. We shall not stop you from killing one another unless you surrender clearly, but we will if you make use of energy that contradicts the nature of our values. Is this understood by both sides?”

Wei Yi nodded, as did Wu Chao, a moment later. His face flickered between anger and excitement, for he was seeing the very figure that stood by and let two of his anchors be damaged, and he had the chance to kill her now, for the Wu District would not stop him from doing so.

Even with her inherent dislike of the Great Leeches – or perhaps specifically due to it forcing her to take them more seriously – she was aware that the man was not stupid, and that he would understand that defeating her wouldn’t be particularly simple. With his arm strained due to the attempt at a killing blow, he was now in a tenuous position where his left arm was no longer reliable, meaning that only his dominant arm could be used for any risky attacks.

This greatly limited the range of his attacks, and thus limited the possibility of defeating the Ascendant using only his physical form and power.

Needless to say, such a thing would cause him plenty of problems, but there was no way for him to recover in just a few minutes. For that reason, before they began, Wei Yi was able to see a moment of hesitation in his eyes and actions, for he tried to understand how to handle the situation with the most certainty of victory.

At some point during that deliberation, the thought of employing planar energy to slay her must have crossed his mind. It was undoubtedly tempting, for it would give him an opportunity to remove her from the Planar Continents once and for all, all that the cost of a single measly district that could be acquired by more forceful means. The biggest problem for the moment was, after all, the fact that the Ascendant could come at any time and threaten the few Great Leech family members that remain, prompting their current stance of caution.

Whatever he had concluded upon, Wei Yi was ready to see him act in the worst way possible, for it would not only be incredibly helpful to her overall goal in the Wu District, but it would also make it incredibly easy for her to justify any kind of behaviour even if she failed to advance her Weapon Dao, and the Sword Dao by proxy. So long as she forced him into taking action, any response could be justified with little effort. It would, technically, be best to agitate him as much as possible with taunts and deliberately improper techniques, but she was not going to do something like that. She wasn’t above rude tactics – especially kicking the nether regions of men, for it was too good a target to pass up – but it would leave a bad impression on the Wu District’s people and not fit with the image that she was attempting to create as the Ascendant, Arbiter, and whatever other title she could invent.

It may also be completely unnecessary, provided that she understood her opponent well enough.

This was put to the test right away, for they did not hesitate to strike at one another with methods that could kill if they landed successfully. By correctly guessing the movements he would use due to the contraction of his muscles, she was able to account for the attack before it even came, and thus force him into a defensive action before he had the chance to attempt to land a single hit on her, a positive outcome in her eyes.

When he tried to block and stab, she made use of the motion of his blade to reverse the attack, prompting him to step to the side and close the gap while attempting to land a punch.

Such strikes weren’t necessarily expected in a battle of blades, but it was expected due to the way in which the Wu District wished for those using the sword to understand the sword, and the same for other weapons. If using a different weapon, or a completely different method, could defeat the weapon, then there was no good reason not to permit it, unless it was planar energy.

In this case, his fist was not infused with planar energy, even if there was plenty inside his meridians, and so it was perfectly acceptable, as was the Ascendant’s swift turning of the blade in her hand to place the pommel of the weapon right in the fist’s path.

The collision forced her to grip onto the sword a little more tightly, as to prevent it from being knocked out of her grip, but it also forced the unprotected hand of Wu Chao to land on a tough metal object that sent a wave of pain through his hand. It did not hit any vital parts of his fingers, but as he used the same arm as the one he tried to kill Wu Liang with, the wave it sent through the strained elbow most certainly hurt far more than was desirable.

He placed that hand around the hilt of the weapon and abandoned the attempts to involve his fists in the fight, only to immediately follow with a basic slash that prompted her to dodge to the side with a kick to her leg. Anyone with any understanding of combat would know that he was attempting to figure out her weaknesses, and when she responded more quickly and brought her foot down, pinning his foot to the ground, it was also difficult not to notice how significantly she was currently overpowering him simply by using a greater extent of her physical abilities than before.

By the rules of the arena, she was still well within her limits, as she was not directly using planar energy, physique energy, or her bloodline power, so to simply reveal more of her own power was perfectly fine.

That did not make the Great Leech happy, though. He also had more to bring to the fight, but he was reluctant to employ certain methods due to their potential threat to himself, or perhaps due to wishing to keep them hidden in case he ever attempted to compete for the position of Patriarch in the district. Having some secret cards hidden in his sleeve for the inevitable fights then would be of immense use.

‘Obviously, that’s exactly what I want this asshole to ponder. Once he decides on that, and still can’t beat me, he will inevitably deem that it is only right for him to win, and will then employ planar energy. At that point…’ she paused in her thoughts, although she continued to fight as usual, ‘Actually, since I’ve already connected a part of my Weapon Dao with my Sword Dao, allowing those two to advance at the same time, if I understand the Sharp Dao that Wu Liang had come across, then I should be able to push for a breakthrough in this regard rather easily. Perhaps, if that doesn’t work, I could try to expand the current focus on the Sword Dao to an Edge Dao, involving all edged weapons, and use that to push my understanding of weapons as a whole forward…’

As this was exactly what she had assumed would happen the moment that she got into a proper fight, she had already prepared some space in her mental domain to focus on this kind of thing while the rest of her attention was on planning her combat moves ahead to minimize the time wasted on them.

The overall mental processing necessary was larger as a result, but she was able to push it ahead while the fight was still progressing at a reasonable pace and used sensible and relatively straightforward techniques. In this way, when things did get rather hectic, she would have already been prepared for most potential moves that Wu Chao could use, and would thus be able to transition from deliberation on one topic to another with far more smoothness.

These thoughts did lead to her to adopting some slightly unusual techniques in the battle, mostly with the intention of developing the Dao further, but also to unnerve her opponent. For her, whether she went with some ordinary slash or absurd twist and strike was nearly irrelevant, but he would need to adapt to every random thing that she did.

One of the things that could be understood without any doubt about the Great Leeches was that their mind-set was a little stagnant, no matter which one of them you looked at. From birth, they had been taught a single world view, and had been instilled in them that it was the right way to go for countless years, removing any reason for them to reconsider their actions and stances on nearly everything. It was much like how the Ascendant would not waver on the concept of the Dao of Law, or the fact that the Greats needed to end.

When almost everything in life did not need any deliberation on one’s righteousness and correctness, the rest of one’s actions tended to become overly certain as well, hence Wei Yi’s attempts to expand her range of Dao and not limit herself to a single one. While Wu Chao had a single perspective to use to deal with her actions, she was able to take a look from a dozen different Dao vision states – among other things, of course – and thus act with a little more sense than the Greats did, at least for now. If she was pushed along one of her Dao to something so significant that she was tied into a single worldview, then that might be a problem, but she was expecting to get to the eighth or ninth realm by that point.

“Damn…” the Great Leech muttered under his breath as he found that he couldn’t find a solution to anything that she was throwing against him. Slowly but surely, he was entering that exact same state as what he had forced onto Wu Liang, and so his inevitable end was also obvious.

Eventually, she would overcome him, and she would kill him, for she had no reason to hesitate.

His surface thoughts gave that away without a shadow of a doubt, as well as the conflict regarding the best way to proceed, prompting the Ascendant to force him down a single road with something that she knew would irritate him. When he was at the brink of making a conclusion, she looked him right in the eyes and smiled.

In that instant, a decision was made, planar energy rushed out of his meridians and around the weapon, and he slammed the sword down on the Ascendant, seeking to cut through her blade and carve a great wound in her body at the very least, if not carving her in half at best.

‘Finally! Now, you piece of shit, you will finally die!’ Wei Yi couldn’t stop that smile from growing further as she deliberately allowed Wu Chao’s sword to cut straight through her own as she held it in her left hand. Her Arm could not move particularly fluidly or with as much force as one might want in a swordfight, so it only made sense to free her right hand instead as she brought it up to face the incoming blow.

She held her fingers flatly, forming a flat plane with all five, and met the incoming glowing edge with the right side of her hand.

Normally, her star metal would be sufficient to block the incoming attack, but the sword did not collide with the side of her gauntlets. Instead, it bounced right off an inch away, as if it struck an invisible edge that would only be found on a sword.

The sound, the sensation upon the collision, the way in which his sword bounced off and he was forced to steady his hand to prevent it from flying straight out of them – all of it matched the sensation of a sword, and yet it was impossible to deny that there was no planar energy focused around her hand, even if there were traces of inscriptions in the metal plates that made up her gauntlet. Wu Chao’s eyes widened as he tried to comprehend what it was that he had just witnessed, desperately attempting to comprehend this seeming nonsense, until he looked back into her eyes and witnessed a strange sight of a circle glowing vibrantly within her irises, resembling interlocked blades while lacking any such features on another glance.

In a fit of anger, he tried to thrust his sword into her eyes, but another invisible edge blocked his way once more, this time not even being attached to the side of her hand. Her hand did soon follow, further pushing away his blade and going for his shoulder. For a moment, as her hand shifted, he could see a glint of metal where there was none.

“What is this?” he exclaimed, “What kind of energy do you use now, Rebel?”

“I use the knowledge that you, the Leeches, have sought to steal from all of us. This is Dao, and it is something that your twisted view shall never grant you.”

She was not strictly speaking the truth, but it did not matter to the few that not only heard it, but had a good grasp of what she could possibly mean. Wu Chao understood just a little, but the latter part was a clear insult towards him and the families that he was a part of, so it did not matter whether or not she was accurate. Meanwhile, those of the Wu District that had pursued Dao when their use of certain skills and weapons began to limit their own development realised that was they were seeing was not only a vision state, of which they had heard of but had rarely seen or achieved.

No, this was Full Success, the beginning of the path towards the Great Dao that they all sought.

As such, the leaders of the district suddenly began to lean in favour of the Ascendant, even though some had seen her as being a meddlesome intruder that should not have come with the grudges that she possessed.

In a situation where she had been at a disadvantage, they may have assisted her, but they did not see that right now. Instead, she was only showing a little bit of her power, and she was already managing to go for a successful strike after what appeared to be only three attacks with some power of the Dao bound around her hand and air, or perhaps the aura of her vibrant silver eyes.

That invisible edge bound around her hand pierced into his shoulder and severed a number of significant muscles, doing so with incredible ease due to the length of her Dao blade being incredibly difficult to judge when it itself was invisible to anyone that did not master the Weapon Dao, or the Sword Dao. One instant led to a great quantity of his blood pouring out, much of it nearing the Ascendant’s body but ultimately falling away without leaving a single drop upon her Crimson Robes.

“Rebellious bitch!” Wu Chao cried out, desperately taking a step away, “Our flame shall not be put out by the likes of you!”

“All of your flames shall be extinguished by the incoming storm, no matter what you do!”

She did not cease her attacks and proceeded to stab at the Great Leech once more, targeting his neck this time, but just an instant prior to the collision, she witnessed a ray of light surge from his forehead, moving just as his mouth twitched one more time than would be necessary for him to complete his sentence.

There was no point to hesitate or restrain herself then, for she recalled how Ping Wu had used this exact method to transmit some quantity of information to Testament, leading to her rather daring plan to infiltrate one of their territories and take advantage of them for her own gains. She instantly activated her physique energy and channelled her cosmic energy, accelerating her own movement by a few dozen times, allowing her to separate the vile Great Leech’s head from him body within an instant. Unfortunately, the ray of light left just a moment before.

“Fuck…” she exhaled, turning to the five that were observing the battle, “Look, I’m going to need to challenge the other Heavenly Masters of the Weapon variety. I need to become Matriarch.”

“… Very well. That can be organised,” Wu Wu said calmly and unexpectedly.