V5C64: False Armies

Even before departing the district, Wei Yi had observed traces of great quantities of energy arriving from the south-east, from the vague directions of the three core districts belonging to the Great Leeches. It wasn’t clear what their exact origin was, but if there was a force dedicated to keeping districts from falling into her hands, it would make sense for all three to contain it.

Technically, that would also mean that there would be two effective waves, or one delayed yet larger wave, but depending on the exact methods of the Leeches and their access to spatial gateways via their Testament, they might be able to skip the travelling process to some extent.

Ultimately, none of that really mattered, for there were two generations that she needed to even care about – and that were still left in any vaguely relevant numbers. The second generation had suffered as greatly as the first, but their ability to summon older images of past generations meant that there was effectively a dozen second generations at least that she needed to deal with. In larger numbers, they would be difficult to handle, which meant that she needed to hope that they couldn’t call upon significantly larger numbers.

The other was the first generation, but they were fortunately limited in numbers that would emerge unless they wanted to no longer bother with whatever seal Ning Huang had mentioned during their first confrontation. If they did, then she would be in a great deal of trouble, and might need to invoke risky or undesirable methods in order to succeed. Considering that she had few such methods, it would not be ideal.

What was more likely was that she would meet one or two of the first generation, and they would learn from their mistakes and not leave themselves as vulnerable to her as Ning Huang had been.

‘Still, the energy that I am sensing… ah, now I know the answer. It was the first option,’ a single glimpse of that which was coming answered her question, and forced her to move out as to intercept this force before it got too close. While the Chu District did have defences, it could still get damaged under a constant barrage of point beams and constructs.

There was also the fact that the best arena for combatting the incoming forces would not be with her back against a wall, but in a place where she could move freely and be more likely to damage territory belonging to her foes than temporarily temporary allies.

Thus, she rushed into the forests between the Chu, Chen and Ning Districts, making a great deal of progress towards the incoming forces that seemed to number in the hundreds – a bad sign, but since each one was only in the fifth realm, and only an echo of the past, this was nowhere near the worst possible scenario – and stopped before she would be anywhere near the range of the Great Leeches. There, she glanced up into the sky and appeared there, far above the canopy, the Titanic Conqueror manifesting right behind her as she put together all six hands and formed a great mass of Obliteration energy.

This was not targeted at the army, mostly because she wouldn’t be able to reach them, but instead at the ground below. Once the mass grew to the size of a small black star, she unleashed it.

One could only imagine what the replicas of the past Great Leeches must have thought and seen from their position in the trees, but even if there were numerous layers of wood in their way, it would have been impossible to miss the sheer overwhelming power and sound produced by a beam of blackened crimson that was easily more than twenty metres in diameter, all falling upon a spot in the woods and blasting out in a great surge of power.

It tore through trees as if they were mere matchsticks put up in the way of a furious storm, shredding those closest and forcefully uprooting countless others that were too far away for the direct power of Obliteration to collide with them. Of course, that did not stop the physical force of such a beam colliding with the ground from travelling even further out, at least partially uprooting and knocking over an even larger area of ancient flora that had been in place for numerous millennia prior to this, an act that would be certain to upset the Chu District once they learned about this.

Her goal was to create a clear place for herself to fight in, for many of her methods did rely on direct collisions and impacts in order to harm her foes. Only something like the Dao of Law was more indirect, but she could not use as much of it as she would like without risking her own survival, so she couldn’t use it as her primary method of attack.

Such a battlefield was likely to benefit the Great Leeches as well, for many of their methods were awfully straightforward and simple, but she had enough material to work with beneath her to minimize their chances of success.

Obviously, she was focused on the plentiful earth and stone beneath the trees that were no longer present, a material that she could pull out of the ground with her Earth Dao being amplified via the Dao of Law with almost no cost or danger to herself. Combining it with some of her other abilities, like the Red Shaper’s Grasp that would reinforce such terrain, it meant that she could raise obstructions and lower them almost at will, forcing the Greats to be in an area akin to the forest, except at her full control and mercy – or the obvious lack thereof, for they were all replicas of vile scum that needed to be removed from existence once more, if dying once hadn’t been enough for them.

To prevent her physique energy from running out during the battle and affecting her ability to create more powerful defensive obstructions for herself, she descended to the ground and put her right hand onto the burnt dirt below. Her energy spread out throughout the earth, and with the empowerment of her Dao, applied her physique energy in ways that would seem random to others.

Out of an even layer of earth and stone beneath that, she made numerous plates of hardened material that were free to emerge and descend into the ground at any time, without interruption from the nearby segments. In a way, she had based it upon the appearance of her Subterranean Shell, and the many scales that the shell seemed to have perfectly overlaying one another in a smooth and seamless manner. Whether this would give her any kind of significant bonus was unknown, but it should make it far easier to manipulate the battlefield, even if it will be a little more predictable after a while.

“Alright. My weapons are on me, my armour is… pretending to be there. My body is ready, and my mind is fine. This place is too far for me to invoke a spatial gateway, so no allies or reinforcements within the near future, but I don’t see any reason to bother the others. I can handle a simple horde.”

She spoke to nobody in particular, for her attention was currently upon the distant forces, and the wait for their arrival. As quickly as she was able to travel, there were still vast distances between the districts, and so no army could move between them within an instant. The best speeds could be achieved by lone travellers, for they had no need to pay attention to others and keep their pace consistent, whereas united armies were focused on it.

It was still taking a while, so once she had made every preparation possible and necessary, she began the last step of her plan, and that was very aggressive cultivation.

So long as things went well, she did not expect to break through to the second half of the sixth realm during the fight, as that would be rather unreasonable and wouldn’t be permitted by the Greats unless they were utter fools – even more so than usual – especially while she so greatly lacked in large quantities of planar energy.

Instead, this would allow her to drain the surrounding area of a large amount of planar energy that would not recover within a short period of time, meaning that she could use her nascent rift to its fullest and keep up a constant barrage of attacks and defences while the Great Leeches would need to pace themselves and act in a way that saved up sufficient planar energy for any emergencies that they might face during the battle, mainly those that would have a chance of killing them. The replicas may not be anything more than that, but the traces of humanity that were present within the Leeches could also be found within them, and so they would not simply throw away their lives like the useless pawns that they truly were.

This was beneficial to her, since it would limit the ferocity and recklessness of the combatants she would face, so she did not intend to break to them that they were long gone, and that the world mostly despised them. An explanation was unlikely to do anything, actually, seeing as they could not speak regularly and might very well be unable to listen properly either.

The instant that the incoming forces crossed the threshold – the line where trees still stood – and entered into the arena she had devised for their battle, Wei Yi opened her eyes and invoked her twin vision physique abilities. Everything in sight was conquered with her blackened crimson power, and the Elder Watcher ensured that the outside borders became as unapproachable as possible, even if it could not raise anything of significant danger to any of the Great Leech replicas and would simply scare them away.

Now that they got as close as they could for a confrontation to begin, she would have been able to confidently state their total number if not for the fact that there was a lengthy stream of replicas pouring out from the three districts – presumably, as her spiritual perception did not reach that far – and that there was no end to them at all. Just in her range of perception, there was already more than a thousand replicas, and more were coming in with every moment.

Still, she had not been scared away by the arrival of the first generation Leech, so this wouldn’t scare her either. Moon Splitter was already in her right hand, and the Arm was being filled with energy.

Upon their cry of garbled words and meaningless noise, she brought the Arm of Slaughtering Shadow forth and unleashed everything that she had built up in an Elysian Blast, the sheer power of which rocked the world as it struck the cores of the incoming troops.

An absolute blast tore through the front lines of the Great Leeches and scattered those on the outer edges of the impact outwards, sending them all flying the moment that the extreme eruption of energy expanded to its fullest within an instant. This was the most terrifying thing about a force that seemed to ignore the vast length of space and reach the end point within a single moment, and this was exactly why the Ascendant attempted to replicate this performance by spreading her killing intent out there and allowing more arm-like shapes to form in the air.

They coalesced into something that couldn’t truly be called the Arm of Slaughtering Shadow, not even a poor replica of it, but when they merged into a ray of light and blasted out at the Great Leeches that had scattered out to the sides, it was still very effective. Fine beams of light directly removed body parts from those who did not have their cores raised, and made significant cracks within the cores of those that did.

‘Didn’t really work, that. None of the attacks are sufficiently powerful, especially not when compared to the true Elysian Blast,’ the Ascendant thought, gathering her own Arm while assessing the field.

Her initial attacks only defeated a few, but that was enough for the false entities to split their straightforward charge and instead begin to approach from a far larger area, where a single attack would not be sufficient to kill them unless she used the Obliteration strike with a greater degree of power concentrated into the same space – the beam used to clear the forest would not kill most of them unless she condensed that unnecessary range of the beam into a diameter no larger than a metre or so.

At that point, it would be far less effective as an area-focused attack, so it wouldn’t be worthwhile.

Instead, she let them make some way into the field that she had cleared in preparation, and then invoked her standard array of techniques and physique abilities. A Titanic Conqueror manifested far above her, not bothering with Obliteration and instead focusing upon the four physiques that had led to the creation of the Conqueror’s Eye, with all four hands filling with energy as they sought the best targets for their attacks.

Numerous phantoms from her version of the Red Phantom Flood were condensed within the fog that spread out from the ground, and countless arrays manifested within the air form just a small quantity of her planar energy. Naturally, she also scattered her Obliteration-infused brands all over the place with a wave of her right arm, then brought out Moon Splitter and met the gaze of numerous Great Leeches that were eyeing her for any sign of weakness. Obviously, they wouldn’t simply stand around and do nothing more than that, so they made use of their standard methods of attack.

Point beams and weaker planar constructs than those they usually utilised were directed towards her with less precision than would be needed to have a chance of hitting her with every strike, but that was obviously not their intention. Normally, attacks needed to be avoided, so by peppering the area where she stood with attacks, she would find it so much more difficult to do so.

This was all nullified the moment that the ground shifted, and a great slab of stone rose from the ground, absorbing every single incoming beam.

Just as quickly, that slab descended and numerous shards of Moon Splitter crashed onto those that had failed to strike her, while the Titanic Conqueror threw out all four attacks at the same time, two for her left and two for her right. A torrent of cold shards flew directly towards the Great Leeches on her left, their evasion made difficult by the appearance of runes upon the ground, all of which were clearly building up in power and were thus best to be avoided as long as it was possible, and she placed them around the Leeches in such a manner that it would be nearly impossible to avoid the runes so long as they had moved.

On her right, waves of toxins seemed to burst out of the ground as numerous banners fell from the sky, peppering the ground and making sure to hit as many different Leeches with each falling rod and length of cloth. Some were able to deal with the force of the banners, others could handle the noxious fluids, but together, these posed a great threat to the cores of the Leeches, and their bodies alike, but she did not think that this would be enough.

After all, behind them were literal thousands of second generation Leech replicas, and while the current front lines may not be doing that well at the moment, so she was forced to consider some alternative measures to add onto her existing arsenal. The first was simple enough, and she tried it the moment that the initial attacks of her physiques had struck and took out a good portion of those that were in range. She had perfect control of her energy within the battlefield she had made for herself, and so all it took was a moment to bring enough of it to the banners.

With them acting as rudimentary anchors, she copied the Ancestral Call technique but applied it to the banners, causing celestial clouds with vaguely human forms to rise from the tips of the banners.

They were rather unstable in this form, as the structure of the banners she had set down was very much unsuitable for this kind of technique, so she determined that they would only have a single opportunity to attack before they would scatter and need to be recreated atop the banners. That fact immediately inspired her to attempt a few things.

Since the figures would be dispersed after a single strike regardless of what they did, she saw no reason to use them for anything but the most powerful attacks that they could possibly produce, ones that would shatter the forms of any human that attempted to make use of them.

While raising more lengths of stone from the ground to block additional attacks, she bid the ancestral figures to focus all of the energy that went into them towards a purer mass of power, one that was not going to be constrained by their form and the channels that could be formed within. Hammers of flame and earth, spears of lightning, orbs of cold, as well as other combinations, shapes and elements were produced from the ancestral phantoms, and all of them turned towards the largest groups of Great Leeches in their vicinity, raising those masses of energy into the air. Then, after a moment in which the attack was finalised, they struck.

The first to reach were the thrown spears and orbs, which flew along the ground or just manifested above their targets, with the phantoms that had summoned them blasting off with the attacks as their mass joined them and prevented any energy remaining in place and somehow aiding the Great Leeches by increasing the energy quantity within the space.

Flames devoured the cores and flesh of those that they latched onto, and great bolts of electricity obliterated all defences of others, achieving much the same in a very different yet destructive manner. It was absolutely glorious to witness, and it prompted the Ascendant to do more and more of the same thing, slamming down more banners and conjuring more ancestral phantoms while orbs of electricity slammed down from the sky and burst in the middle of large groups, earthen spikes and chunks bursting from the ground and tearing into cores and flesh, and absolute frost turning a number of false replicas into naught.

All the while, her cultivation realm slowly crept onwards, until it approached that boundary of progression, the sixth stage. The first past the initial nine attainable via the combination of perfected and ordinary stages, and thus one that would bestow unto her a greater power than any other stage.

Given the time spent at the fifth stage, and the fact that she had hardly been sitting dormant and doing nothing at all, she had a clue regarding the nature of this boon. It was clearly a change in her energy, one that would transform it from the violet celestial glow so familiar to her to one that was more alike to her bloodline power, with a clear red tint to the starry sky and nebulae that fill it. Why the change in colour would occur was beyond her, for things like this tended to just occur within the planar cultivation path. It was one of the many reasons why she believed this not to be the most natural possible path for the advancement of energy, and why it was likely something created, not formed.

In a natural system, something like the creation of a planar anchor would be on the part of the cultivator, not the natural progression of some energy condensing further than a liquid state. The way in which only one element was usually cultivated also made little sense, as elements rarely existed in a perfect vacuum. Wood would be near earth, which would be near water and metal, and fire would illuminate and heat it all, whereas cultivators had to deal with an odd exclusivity.

That was just the tip of the iceberg that was the oddity of the world, and so she could confidently say that the heavens, or some force beyond even them, had created something very deliberately. Why this was done, how this was done, and whether it was even possible to alter was not something that she could answer at the moment, for even the contemplation of the matter caused her a headache while the Truth of the Universe interface continued to display a number of black rectangles in place of any typical text beside the Dao of the Heavens.

For the moment, knowledge and potential alone were enough, at least in this field, for her breakthrough could be guided perfectly by the knowledge of this artificiality.

Unlike a natural system with flaws, oddities and deeper concepts that would be impossible to account for, a rigid system with limited parameters and options had to have limited outcomes, and have a best possible outcome. Pursuing that alone would guarantee her a better level of power than of any other cultivator, and she already knew that she was on the right path.

The Great Leeches were powerful, that much was clear, but there was something that had been bothering her about their nature for some time now. All of the first generation Leeches were in the seventh realm, which was standard for the times, but in the past, she had no hints of them being any higher than that. Admittedly, she had little exposure to their past activities, nor had she seen any memories that featured them in enough detail to perceive their cultivation realm, but by the simple nature of a perfected realm, she had to be getting the best possible outcome from a realm.

That outcome was not multiple anchors, but one. When one tried reaching the eighth realm, they would need to collapse their anchor into an imperfect rift. With multiple anchors, doing so might very well be impossible.

Thus, the Greats might be incapable of getting to the eighth realm, which was why they weren’t able to do much against Kong Shi Meng, nor his city, until the power level of the world as a whole dropped significantly. If that was indeed the case, then it would follow why they would believe that lowering the cultivation realms of the world continuously would be to their advantage, and why they were not seen as much of a threat in the past, when the eighth and ninth realms were available to talented individuals in the common populace. It would clarify also why they were the only ones that even had multiple anchors, and why all of their first generation would be in the seventh realm, even though a single one in the eighth would overpower all current Great Leeches on their lonesome.

Provided that the anchors were indeed limiting in regards to the realm that they would allow a cultivator to reach, then she had a sort of safety net. No matter how much she raised the power level of the world, the Great Leeches would be incapable of truly taking advantage of it, not unless they completely changed their practises beyond recognition.

With that, she pushed her cultivation forward, manipulating more and more of the region to keep the Great Leeches away from her and getting rid of as many of the swarm of replicas via the ancestral phantoms and the like before they could near her. Had one of the otherworldly demons been here, they might have likened the situation to a game in the tower defence genre, but she hardly felt the need to do so given the similarity of the rising walls and pathways to a fortress, with guards and guard towers where they may stand.

She was the one that these guard stations were meant to protect, and she would need that protection for just a little while, as the breakthrough was right around the corner.

The seemingly endless legions of the Great Leech replicas only grew in number and speed with which they appeared, and they had spread their approach from simply entering at a single point to forming a semi-circle on the outside of the battlefield, then attempting to storm in from all points at once. At first, they were not enough to breach the numerous walls that the Ascendant had put up, but sheer numbers were able to overwhelm her power – at least for now.

For every dozen that perished from a strike, a few would go further into her fortress, and since her focus was not on the fight itself, she was not making as good a use of all of her tools as she could be. Otherwise, the few that remained after the easier attacks to perform could be whittled down to around one or two at most, but the closer she got to the next stage, the more she was certain that she was not going to require that kind of assistance afterwards. Simply approaching the sixth stage and seeing the crimson further grow in depth and intensity led to her power rising vastly, and she could tell that she had underestimated the exact nature of the change by the fact that it was no simple change of state.

No, it was instead a transformation of the very nature of her planar energy, to the point that it might no longer be suitable to refer to it as planar energy. In fact, she wasn’t sure that it was even reasonable to call it energy anymore – but that was because she already had physique energy, and so she had wanted to figure out some reason to change the name of one of the energies.

Still, there was a major distinction between a basic, base element of reality, and something more advanced and complex, something that could reach a closer level to the true state of energy despite that.

One might say that none of this made any sense, and, frankly, she wished to agree with them. Energy randomly changing into something completely different, with a crimson tint, and the like, shouldn’t just occur out of nowhere, and if it did, the Ascendant should not be able to make use of a single technique she had been using up to this point because the nature of her new energy – one that she wished to call oblivion essence due to the immense power and amazing potential of the power she intended to achieve – but given the nature of the world, this would not be the case.

It would be easily usable, it would be incredibly simple to adjust to, and her path would progress regardless. Despite her fondness of a personal path, she had no choice in taking her own.

‘True, right now I require my power to be as great as possible to do that which I desire, but if it had been possible, I would have much preferred to take a thousand times as long to cultivate so long as I was able to avoid all of the restrictions of the heavens… Well, whatever. I suppose I shall beat up the heavens at a later time, and then I will figure out something for myself… hopefully.’

As she finally stood at the precipice of the sixth stage, and then the Great Leeches surrounded her, beginning the manifestation of numerous constructs with the intention of ending her life, she still wished to take action to prevent the world from forcing her to progress as the heavens usually did. To take at least something like this into her own hands, she raised the Arm of Slaughtering Shadow and clicked her fingers, forcing the power of Law to be invoked upon her own body, concentrating all of the power into that arm and then prompting her cultivation to step forth, to advance on her own whim since it had to do so anyway.

“Give me a moment, would you? I’m busy,” she said with a grin.