V5C54: Fighting a Primordial Deity

The square in Kong Shi Meng’s eyes flashed as he suddenly pushed on the barrier and forced it forward, rushing towards the Primordial Deity and almost crashing into it before the entire thing, the rift in existence as all knew it, almost looked to break and rearrange itself into a more preferable state, a thousand limbs of unknown natures appearing where there were once only four – or what seemed like four, anyway.

Even the head was replaced by limbs that were splayed out in maddening shapes and arrangements, creating a web that looked to crack reality. All that could be certain was that the thing shown by the rift, if that was even what it truly was, could not be seen nor understood. Wei Yi could say with certainty that the insides of the entity’s figure, which were clearly marked by a vibrant light flowing in from the outside, almost acting as if space was two-dimensional and the entity was a hole in that sheet of space, were not what they should be if one simply looked at the other side of the thing, but it was impossible to perceive that which it truly was.

Perhaps there was a void, an absolute blackness devoid of value or meaning, or maybe the thing contained within itself a glorious world of power and prosperity, a dream come true. If that was indeed the case, then the only thing the Ascendant could say was that it was completely incompatible with the people of the Planar Continents, for the potential glory of that place was nothing more than madness to the ears of those that were forced to hear it.

Indeed, when the thing changed shape and met the barrier, some incomprehensible change took place, the endless limbs piercing forth, striking the violet mist that came towards them. In an instant, it was torn apart, leaving the people unprotected from the endless chattering that it released.

Her hammer struck metal in that moment, momentarily flashing her back into reality, where another piece had been added to her masterpiece. Unknowingly, she had altered her original blueprint slightly, but as she looked upon the product for a moment, she realised that this was very much in her favour. It fit with one of her other plans for her weapon, and so she would not change that accident back. Instead, she raised the hammer and watched herself be brought back into the battle, where chaotic mumbling pursued the brave warriors of the seventh realm.

But the Master of Yi City would not simply stand by and permit that to happen. He took action right away, vibrant violet surging out in the shape of two symbols repeating endlessly atop one another, both from his original world. One was a ‘1’, the other ‘0’, and they were intertwined in ways that could not be understood even by those that could, by some miracle, comprehend the intended meaning of the pattern, a thing that Wei Yi could not do even after she had spent a long time learning about everything she could from the worlds of the otherworldly demons.

All she was able to do is watch as these symbols met the madness of the thing opposite them, and suddenly twisted in much the same way as Primordial Invader had done moments prior, latching onto the outer portion of this unknowable thing. They changed from arbitrary binary to a series of ropes, chains, cables and more that the Ascendant could not identify, and all of these grabbed the Primordial Deity and kept it still, albeit for a moment.

Above the Forge of Perfection, a faint phantom began to form, but despite the great degree of attention paid to such things by the Patriarch, he was unable to conclude on what he was seeing.

At times, it resembled a sword, but then it would become an axe, or a mace, or even a mass of fragments that looked to have no purpose or benefit as a weapon. It was horrifying to behold at times, but he was forced to keep his eyes on it while maintaining the protective barriers around the Forge. The former was done in order to have even the slightest chance of understanding it and determining the kind of danger that it might pose to him and his district, and the latter had to be done to prevent the waves of killing intent from finally devouring the district, which they seemed want to do as their power grew each time the hammer was swung.

He could almost feel something coming from within, vague images and memories, but he could not even attempt to comprehend them before they vanished from his head, never to return in the same fashion.

Even if it was easy to take it all in, he was aware that it was beyond him to fit all of that into his head. There was a limit to the human mind, especially when one had not cultivated a few very specific mental cultivation methods, so he was not too eager to attempt to do that which he could not.

Instead, he requested that a few planar stones be brought over in order to keep his planar energy pool filled, and to allow the barrier to remain standing for as long as possible.

In the next moment, Primordial Invader changed once more, endless limbs compressing into only four arms and what might be two legs, their sudden change completely shattering all of the restraints upon him. The moment after that, it suddenly moved forward at an immense speed, appearing right in front of Kong Shi Meng, its hands becoming incredibly defined as it almost seemed to grasp at him.

Each limb had six clawed fingers that were most notably blazing with the surging energy of whatever lay within it. Due to the appearance of the entity being at an immense contrast with the world around it, it seemed extremely out of place when it was so close to the Master of Yi City, and especially when its limbs were on either side of his head from the strange perspective that the Ascendant had within these memories. From them, it was nearly impossible to tell whether she was viewing events through the eyes of one or many, nor whether eyes were involved at all.

Kong Shi Meng did not simply let himself be grabbed by Primordial Invader, for that would be stupid. He instead produced a sword from somewhere, and with this sword he performed a straightforward horizontal slash.

It was, by all appearances, incredibly simple, and yet Wei Yi understood this not to be the case when Primordial Invader suddenly recoiled, a clear gash appearing within the uncertain void that was its internal contents. There, those blazing inward flames were visible, and a strange ichor that was even harder to properly discern the appearance of poured from that opening, forcing the Primordial Deity to change form once more to cover the injury.

All of a sudden, the image in the air above the Ascendant stabilised while remaining in complete chaos, shocking the Ze Patriarch as he attempted to comprehend what it was that he saw.

He saw a sword stabilise out of a million different weapons, the names of which he couldn’t even guess. Beside it, a hand was formed from a number of other hands, all of which were positioned in very specific manners. A moment of thought led him to conclude that these were the various kinds of martial arts that could be performed with one’s hand, including palm techniques, finger techniques, punches and so on. These were easier to recognise, but he once again got lost in trying to identify every single one.

What was obvious was that these phantoms were radiating from the forging process below, and that they were influencing it at the same time. Each time the hammer struck, they would strengthen, and over time, more faint images looked to form in the air.

“Everyone, attack it! This Primordial Deity shall not endure if you focus and attack all at once!” Kong Shi Meng proclaimed, urging his followers to fight on while he kept an eye on the Primordial Deity, tightly gripping the weapon in his hand while he attempted to ascertain whether the thing had been able to recover from his attack.

She was able to guess that the technique must have been made or modified using the Truth of the Universe not long ago, unless this battle was one that he had been planning for a long time and had appropriately prepared the exact techniques needed but failed to test them properly. If that was the case, then she would be a little suspicious of Kong Shi Meng’s planning, for there was no real reason not to find some tests to approximate the kind of impact that his attacks would have on his opponent. Then again, she couldn’t identify the nature of Primordial Invader from the memories.

Perhaps it had a very different structure of the other Primordial Deities, or maybe it was able to do more than he was aware of, but that didn’t really matter for the moment.

The seventh realm army attacked the unknowable thing with numerous techniques, most of them not even attempting to get near to the strange thing, and the Primordial Deity took those attacks for just a little while as it stared upon them – or seemed to, at least.

Just as with the last restriction upon it, the thing suddenly shifted, and this time it shattered into numerous individual entities of similar insanity as the initial Primordial Invader had been. These things all had a small wound upon their front, but the overall size of the injury only seemed to match up with the total size of the wound inflicted upon the original Primordial Deity. In other words, it had split its injury across a dozen bodies.

All of them turned in different directions and smashed a limb down onto the ground, causing a similar rift to itself form from within the ground and travel in a large tear towards the surrounding squads.

This happened in an instant, and the one after, the travelling tears burst at the centre of a number of squads, exploding into large openings within the world that consumed the legs and even the lower halves of those that had failed to get away in time. Those in the worst condition couldn’t even begin to get away before they fell down into the rift and were devoured by it.

The large combination of weapons and hands shattered under the observation of the Ze Patriarch, but that somehow managed to only enhance their wholeness. He might have spent some time questioning the absurdity of such a statement, and yet his attention was taken up by the slow formation of a number of other unknown phantoms in the air. For the moment, the most obvious was the appearance of an illusory reality all around the Ze District, partially enveloping it.

With the current vagueness of the phantoms, it was impossible to discern details and identify the nature of the reality, so he didn’t attempt it, and instead looked to the other phenomena.

In the sky above, numerous chains were appearing above the clouds, more and more intersecting one another to the point that it seemed that the sky would be consumed by them. However, beneath them appeared a pair of round shapes, with one split apart to reveal the one above.

He didn’t know what gave him this impression, but he was almost certain that those were a sun and moon, one above the other, shining upon the world. It would certainly explain why the district had retained light even when the night began to fall, for there was no other good reason for such a thing to occur.

The Master of Yi City attempted to keep Primordial Invader under control, as difficult as it was to do so when there were dozens of it that looked to be just as real as any other, but the situation was clearly not going in his favour. His sword swings improved every single time, as was only natural with the power at his disposal, but they did not keep up with the abilities of the Primordial Deity, which seemed to have no end of strange methods to pull out of nowhere – or somewhere, depending on what was truly within, past or through it.

After it had started producing those rifts in the ground, it also started creating spheres of rift-like matter that could completely consume anything that they passed through. Smaller limbs emerging through the rifts was the next skill to be added to its arsenal, and that one endangered even Kong Shi Meng, for there were more and more such rifts forming within the terrain, to the point that he and the entire army was being surrounded by them.

It didn’t take long for Wei Yi to conclude that this had to be deliberate on the part of the part of Primordial Invader, and it appeared that the Master of Yi City concluded something similar.

If nothing else, his expression became more serious, and he gritted his teeth for a moment before looking off to the side, where he must have willed a great deal of energy to enter into some technique of his, judging by the prominence of the rectangular shape within his eyes. As with Wei Yi’s experience of the Truth of the Universe, even in its weakened state, improvements were nearly instant, and that much was obvious by the sudden burst of energy within Kong Shi Meng’s body, all of which was focused upon the sword in his hand.

A blazing eye of blackened crimson stared down upon the land, four hands forming a cross around it. One held soft while light that formed an insignia before its palm, another was surrounded by frost. A third was dripping with a noxious substance, and the fourth gripped a banner made of ethereal mist and of an uncertain nature and colour.

Another eye was on the opposite side of the split moon and shining sun directly above the Ascendant, and this one was held by a strange hand with a crimson glow around it.

The illusory reality spun and formed a vibrant vortex of crimson and silver around the Forge of Perfection, partly obscuring Wei Yi and yet making her all the more prominent as she and the strikes of the hammer easily shone through the obfuscating air, especially with every single strike of hammer on metal shard. Part of the enormous crimson might contained within the Shard of Warfare would pour into the vortex with each collision, and that vortex seemed to slowly feed back into the forging process via some uncertain means.

A vast network of celestial veins pumped through the air, pulsing as more and more cosmic blood accumulated in them and slowly forced them to expand to the capacity that one may find if they looked upon the veins of a living being in their prime.

In the distance, a phantom of a humanoid thing, male and female at once, looked down upon the process. A slight bronze hue was all that defined its appearance other than the obvious physical characteristics, but that did not help the Ze Patriarch to figure out anything about the significance of that thing in particular, if it even had any. With the number of phantoms, it was becoming difficult for him to tell, and staring at the ever-growing phenomenon for a few days in a row was not helping.

More of the Ascendant’s spilling energy congregated into a shape akin to a five-sided planar anchor, but instead of crystallised energy this was composed of the individual states of her planar cultivation.

Brimming golden flames composed one side, marred only by crackling golden lightning and a side of charcoal. A sturdy basalt made up the majority of another side, except for a patch of raw flowing energy and another patch composed of a metal ore that seemed to contain within itself the very cosmos. A dark metal was on the third side, dripping with blood and sharing the crackling arcs of gold that spread between it and the side of fire. Much of the water was muddied by blood, but a wondrous flower grew from the purest part of the mass of water, inherently drawing attention to itself. Finally, the wooden side was burnt in part, and yet the raw energy of the earthen side appeared there, next to which a metal plant spread with incredible speed.

In between all of that, a mass of violet both soft and volatile sparked and surged, occasionally bursting out of the open sides of the anchor-like structure and dyeing the sky purple for just a little while before the traces vanished.

From the sun above, dawn light fell upon the anchor-like structure, dying it a beautiful orange.

Within the flames of the anchor, the faint shape of feathers appeared every now and then, and at one point the head of a phoenix popped out from within as if to behold where it had appeared. A single glance from the Ze Patriarch, who was naturally incredibly curious to see such an active and living phenomenon appear, prompted it to hide, and not appear in full again.

Between the sun and the chains far above, in the layer of clouds, a symbol of yin and yang slowly spun, although both sides were not as distinctly defined as one might typically imagine. Instead, the edges of white and black mixed together like paint or dye, and formed an uncertain boundary filled with strands of both colours, as if they were unable to mix and yet did in the most impossible and confusing of fashions.

From the chains above, a powerful energy rumbled and shook the world, making its ire known to the Ze District, to which the phantoms were mostly contained. Some would be visible on the outside even if the Patriarch put in a great deal of effort to prevent such a thing, so he didn’t bother and simply let it all be seen. With something like this, if the Ascendant had really wanted to hide it, she would have taken some steps to prevent it from going this far, or that was what seemed to be the most reasonable course of action, at least. Obviously, he couldn’t know what she had and hadn’t considered, nor whether she was even aware of all the phenomena appearing above her.

A series of tears in the ground travelled towards the Master of Yi City, who reversed the grip on his weapon and rushed forward, towards one of the separate parts of Primordial Invader.

From the Ascendant’s point of view, that thing looked no different than any of the other pieces of the Primordial Deity, so whether this was just an arbitrary choice or not was difficult to answer for the moment, but what earned more of her attention was the way in which he approached the incoming rips in the world before him.

There was no hesitation as he leapt right into the centre of where the tears would stop and the larger rifts would open, nor was there any slowness to his actions despite the minimal amount of practise that he would have had. With Wei Yi’s own experiences, she knew that the Truth of the Universe could bestow most understanding of the technique upon use, but it couldn’t fully familiarise one with the movements and execution, which was what practise in the Realm of Potential was able to grant her. Thus, although some of the Master of Yi City’s ability was obviously granted to him from a source other than his own mind and body, to be so quick to adapt to newly developed methods was obviously a skill that he had personally acquired.

As he fell upon the ending point of the travelling tear, where the larger rift was about to manifest, he slammed down his blade and stabbed it right into the ground, a blast of his energy exploding from the tip at the same time as the rift attempted to open.

In that moment, instead of opening as usual, the sword being devoured, and Kong Shi Meng following shortly after, the burst of energy forced the rupture in reality apart, causing it to erupt around the position of the Master of Yi City, leaving an unaffected spot for him to stand in. The rift around his released a chorus of maddening voices and several limbs with which to reach out towards him, but he did not linger in place for long and leapt out before he could be targeted by either attack.

More of the tears reached towards him, and each time he struck down with the intention of breaking apart the rifts. Each time, he did improve just a little, allowing him to increase that circle of safety by an inch at a time, but nothing he was able to do successfully shattered the incoming rifts entirely, until Primordial Invader threw out a series of spherical tears.

In the case of the ground-bound rifts, they were not at their most lethal until their explosion, at which point they would remain in place for a time, but the round projectiles were in their most lethal state constantly, from the moment of their appearance. They were also mobile, unlike the ground-bound rifts, meaning that they might very well be more fragile in their movement. As such, if it was possible to damage these, then it might also be possible to obliterate them entirely, granting Kong Shi Meng safe passage.

The Ascendant, lacking experience with such things and being rather focused on the forging process as opposed to the specific details of the battle – she could review the latter later within the Ascendant’s Library, but the shards she was reconnecting with one another could not be handled at a later time – couldn’t come up with a method to damage either form of rift, but Kong Shi Meng was already rushing straight towards the sphere that blocked his way to Primordial Invader.

Flipping the grip on his sword once more, he held it with both hands and plunged the tip into the gap in reality, a single burst of his pure planar energy erupting not only from the tip of the blade, but also from numerous spots on the sides, forming a web of crack-like patterns on the metal.

This energy was shoved straight into the tear within reality, and it popped the moment after, almost like a bubble being pierced. All of the hostile potential within vanished completely, letting Kong Shi Meng continue on and stab into incoming sphere after sphere, all while making slow yet certain progress towards the chosen piece of Primordial Invader. All of the other pieces had few soldiers to attack now, for most had either fled or were staying back with their cores guarding them, so they focused their barrage upon the Master of Yi City, their energy seeming to be endless as the open wound on their centre slowly closed.

In fact, both Kong Shi Meng and Primordial Invader were in the eighth realm, and thus they were both close to the absolute limit of energy regeneration. An Imperfect Rift existed within their dantians, where their anchors used to be, and they would be able to fight for an eternity if this was what they wished to do.

Within the centre of the mass of elements that seemed to match the shape of an anchor, the Ze Patriarch witnessed a small, nearly transparent rift form within the centre, from which the pure planar energy began to pour in even larger quantities.

At a glance, it was hard to say much about it, but he could see not only that the rift was widening, just a little bit, but also that this was not some arbitrary thing born of the great concentration of energy that had to come together to manifest the many phantoms in the air. Rather, this was a vital, powerful thing, and a moment of mental silence brought his attention to ancient texts regarding the realms beyond the seventh. In those descriptions, the words ‘Imperfect Rift’ were most prominent, to the point that they were impossible to ignore.

Once he realised what he might very well be seeing, he had to pay attention to everything else that appeared in the air, just in case it permitted him to advance by a stage through the power of enlightenment. He looked upon the blackened crimson energy at the centre of the left eye, the one surrounded by four arms, and saw similarities between it and the vast ire pouring from the chains above. He looked to the plain air, and there he saw the absolute and undeniable.

Within the spinning mixed symbol of yin and yang, there was propulsion, barely peeking through the concepts of yin and yang, although it was also mixed in, allowing repulsion to manifest opposite it.

The edges of all things manifested were constantly being eroded and remade, to the extent that it was almost impossible to see, but this entropy could not escape the eye of one that had now been staring at this phenomenon for long enough to damage the vision of an expert in the seventh realm. Whatever this perpetual devouring force was, it was contained and almost part of the natural state of these phantoms, if one could even say that there was a natural state for them to be in. How this could even be possible evaded the Ze Patriarch, for erosion and entropy was a perpetual terror for all things with a life and mind to comprehend its inevitable end.

As he couldn’t understand that, he looked out to the skies again, finding numerous books floating amidst the chains, unable to get through, being restrained by every single one of them no matter how they tried to escape. These tomes would occasionally be nearly touched by passing wisps of energy from the representation of the anchor below, but they never came into direct contact.

Beside the looser, less defined phantoms were round marks, with symbols blazing upon them, branding the world with unknown runes of strange purpose and meaning. On some, the violent blackened crimson from above rested calmly, and on others was a vibrant pulsing flame.

From the moon, a powerful beam of moonlight illuminated the Ze District, despite being split in two. It shone vibrantly and softly, yet harshly, as if one could cut themselves if they stepped through the boundary between moonlight and sunlight with too great a speed, or without sufficient care. If the Ze Patriarch was free to move around and examine these phenomena, he might have tested it himself just to be sure, but he instead looked on.

Aside from the vague phantom that made his mind think of the shape of a woman, despite the phantom itself being nigh formless, the last thing he could find within the sky was… oddly enough, the sky itself. It should have been entirely ordinary, the clouds and blue sky above being part of the world as a whole, and yet the heavens were oddly doubled in his vision, as if there were two identical images placed atop one another, but slightly crookedly, leading to one being visible through the other. It was even more absurd than the other phantoms, for the simple reason of the other phantoms being representations of concepts that the Patriarch was unfortunately unable to grasp from the images themselves.

This, on the other hand, was immensely complex and natural, containing far more detail than any of the others even could. Even if one ignored that, what could such a thing represent… but the world itself?