Path of the Ascendant

“Blame your parents, silly girl…” the voice echoed in her mind, as constant as a breeze by the ocean or the wind inside a tornado.

Whereas dreams could typically pass in an instant, making it seem like you hadn’t slept at all, this dream in particular was unwilling to go by so quickly. It seemed intent on making her recall every moment of the scene that led her to the crimson landscape with great detail, a hundred times over, before it would finally release her.

As much as she wanted to wake herself, she could not, for she also couldn’t move on.

She tried to recall the faces that the two had. Neither of them seemed particularly happy about the things they were doing, but instead had expressions of… disgust?

‘But why?’ she asked herself, ‘Even if my parents had somehow harmed them to a great extent, what does that have to do with me? I never tried to investigate anything about my parents! Even if I was sometimes curious why they had died, and what they had done in the past, I never did anything!’

“They should not have given birth to you-”

All of a sudden, she awoke within the dark crimson cave, and found tears flowing down her cheeks, joining the nearby water stream in dripping onto the stone ground. She blinked in confusion several times, wiping the tears away before getting up and getting another drink from the water stream. Unfortunately, although she wanted to bathe, or otherwise clean herself, the pool beneath the dripping water stalactite was only as large as a few handfuls of water, with the rest sinking away into the stone and pooling up very slowly, meaning that if she wanted to clean herself to any reasonable degree, she would have needed to sit by the dripping water for several hours, or to retrieve some sort of bucket to collect the water properly.

Either way, it wasn’t an option at the moment, so she just drank what she could and looked outside.

There was no change to the crimson light, nor any particular sign of danger nor safety out there, so she walked outside and took another look around. Now that her sight was working a little better than before, as she no longer lacked for water and, somehow, food, she saw her surroundings with far greater clarity than before.

In addition to the mountain she stood on, there were several other similar peaks around her. They were all red, all lacked any signs of life, and none were the source of the red pools of fluid, which had now grown to the point of being connected with a constant stream, as they snaked through the mountainous region and disappeared into the distance on either side. None of them flowed up to, or from the peak of the mountain that she was standing on, making her somewhat curious where the water she had been drinking came from, but that was low on her list of priorities.

Instead, she had to find something or someone – anything, for that matter – that would imply that she was not the only person in this world.

Depending on the result of this search, she would be able to choose one of two routes to pursue. If people that were able to survive within this nightmare of a world, then she would have to learn from them and better her living conditions while also attempting to gain any information she could possibly gain regarding a possible means of escape from the world of eternal red. However, if there was no other life within the crimson wastes, she would have to do both things herself.

That would involve risking quite a lot more than in the other situation, for she would have no one else to emulate in the process of gaining a greater comprehension of this reality.

‘For now, I should focus that search on a day-long distance from this mountain. I don’t know how common the miraculous springs are, nor whether there are any other than the one I have found, and if I get too far away and then fail to return in time, I will be in the same situation as my first arrival here. That wouldn’t be too pleasant.’

Before she could even consider setting off, she noticed a chunk of rock sticking out of the terrain, and then looked down onto her hands before getting an idea. Even though there was no metal or wood to make containers for fluid out of, did she not have an excessive quantity of strength and the ability to release a type of energy that could burn through any typical metal or rock purely through coming into its proximity? Due to that constant storm, both inside and outside of her head, she had nearly forgotten about the fact that she possessed one of the most extreme yang physiques she had ever heard of.

She grabbed that chunk of rock and pulled it out of the ground with ease, confirming that the rock of this world, albeit redder than any blood she had seen, was still just ordinary rock.

With as much care as she could, she split it into two pieces that she then hollowed out, resulting in an empty space within the two of them that was equivalent to four of her fist placed close together, with a thin layer of rock around it that would prevent the water from pouring away.

Then, by placing the two pieces together and sending a small quantity of physique energy to the surface of her hands, she made the stone melt together into one piece. Now that she had a seemingly limitless supply of nourishing liquid to rely on, she didn’t have to worry about running out of True Ascendant physique energy, as it was produced alongside the body’s energy. When she lacked food and drink, it could not be produced, but now that the situation had changed, it was regenerating normally.

After a little more work, she fashioned the top of the container into a bottleneck, which she then sealed with another rock.

In the end, she produced an extremely rough water bottle, one that weighed several kilograms and would be considered extremely horrid to behold in the Planar Continents by all but the most devoted practitioners of earth, who are known to go slightly insane once they reach the fourth realm and are forced to explore the path of cultivation on their own a little more.

With this terrible thing in hand, she brought it back into the cave and filled it with water.

‘Alright, that’s one more issue solved… Now I just need to deal with everything else, like the fact that I am hated by someone just because of my parents…’ she thought, briefly considering before dismissing the idea of tying the stone flask to her body via the loose strips of cloth.

Yi Wei took a deep breath and looked around again, finding the tallest mountain in the area after straining her eyes a little bit. Even though it had been less than a week before she appeared here, she already missed the ability to freely use her planar energy, whether for minor things like enhancing her sight and strengthening her muscles or for major things, like keeping herself alive. Still, she was able to locate a mountain that was slightly higher than the others, further along the stream of red, and rather smooth at the top, she decided to head towards it in order to get a better view of the area.

‘One benefit that I have already gotten from this, however, is the fact that I appreciate certain resources far, far more that I previously had. I never cared for the many trees and plants within the Kong valley, but now that I don’t have anything of the sort, I am far more appreciative of those things. If I had some of the grass from the valley, or some of the wood, I could have made something far better than this messy rock sphere.’

As she walked, thoughts like that passed through her head, though for every near-positive idea that she came up with, the mental storm was all too happy to provide her with a few dozen negative thoughts, like the fact that her casual involvement with Master Yi Yi had gotten the man killed.

These things kept her occupied, preventing the addition bother of boredom from overcoming her.

Every half an hour or so, she took a sip of the water within the stone container. It fuelled her just sufficiently to speed up her pace, and thus she arrived at the tallest, flattest mountain in sight after only three hours, whereas she would have previously needed four or five with her tired, drying body. She ascended it after another hour, stopping at the top and taking another drink.

Surprisingly enough, the storm clouds above her head moved much closer as a result of the ascent, as if they were far closer than she had originally anticipated.

The more significant matter was the fact that she did actually find something in the distance. It was surprising for the simple reason that she had previously wandered for two days without finding anything, but one singular day of exploration brought her two major discoveries.

Besides the first, the second was a small dip within the terrain, akin to a dried lake.

It was far away, about as far as the gap between the mountain cave and the peak on which she currently stood, but she was attracted to it as she saw something within its depths, something with a slight red glow that was unlike all of the other strange red lights and surfaces, as confusing as that very idea might sound.

Something about those glowing distant spots made them seem full of energy, and whatever that energy was, she saw no reason not to take them.

Fortunately for her, that was the exact distance she had intended to cross originally, and so she set off with half of the stone ‘flask’ still half-full of water, or what she was assuming to be water. It was likely to be the distilled version of the strange crimson pools, in which case she could have been drinking someone’s blood this whole time without any knowledge of the matter, in which case she would need to take a little time to consider how to properly react to such a thing.

 

Just as before, she reached her destination without much incident, though her supply of water was near exhaustion and, after a strange burst of sand or dirt from the ground, she was covered in an even greater quantity of red than before.

Fortunately, the thing that she was looking for was still here, and as it turned out, it wasn’t just a single item but over four of them. Each one emitted the same dim light, as she had observed from the peak, and turned out to be far more curious than she had expected. They were floating slightly above the ground and seemed like strange coagulations of crimson light or energy.

This was something that she would have only expected to see within someone’s dantian, and yet here the four floating motes did not seem to have an issue in existing.

She bent down and grasped one of the motes, finding that she was able to lift them without difficulty, as if they had a small, spherical field around them that allowed her to touch the immaterial energy within, and that their texture was strangely sharp, as if she was holding a handful of sharpened knife blades. Even with her impressive physical body and endurance, it still felt like those invisible blades could pierce her skin if she made the wrong move.

The same applied to all four of the motes, which she grabbed and wrapped in spare cloth strips.

After slinging those over her shoulder, she turned back to the mountains and travelled back, heading straight to the mountain which she was using as her home instead of the observation mountain, as they formed a somewhat triangular shape together, making it more efficient.

 

Upon her return, she drank some more of the miracle water and placed the water jug beneath the dripping stones to fill it up. Since the process would take quite some time to complete, she would have to wait for it to complete before setting out again, which gave her around an hour of free time in which to do whatever she liked.

Naturally, the first thing she did was place the crimson motes onto the ground and take a close look at one of them. She poked at it, tested its endurance against various physical stimuli and even put it under the dripping water for a bit, though none of these proved to be particularly substantial. The structure of the mote flickered for a moment when it was exposed to the water, but it stabilised quickly and did not change no matter how much longer she kept it beneath the dripping stones.

When that was done, she did not have much else to test. None of her techniques could be used without involving her physique energy, but that was sufficiently destructive to affect the warp created by the void between worlds, meaning that unless these motes of strange energy were somehow stronger than the void itself, she would be destroying them without any gains for herself.

‘If this stuff is energy, then I should theoretically be able to absorb it, but, unfortunately, not only do I not know what this is, I also lack whatever preparations I may need to take to absorb them correctly. Seeing as it already appears to be stabbing and cutting me just through holding it, taking this in could be equivalent to swallowing a dozen blades without any technique to doing so…’ Yi Wei thought, returning the mote into the pile, ‘Even then, swallowing a sword does not bring any benefit to the person doing it in the vast majority of cases, so I would need to know what the purpose of consuming it would be before attempting it.’

She sighed, for she knew that whatever these motes were, there was a high likelihood that they could be used to attain great benefits, the method for which she just happened to lack.

Unbidden, her mind pulled up a great number of examples of similar situations, where she was unable to do anything despite having every resource at her disposal. A great number of these were from her childhood and adolescence, for that was the time in which she was most powerless, but a few also surfaced from the latest two years of her life. Once they did, her imagination went wild, creating all sorts of scenarios where she had somehow obtained all of her current knowledge on the first day of attaining cosmic energy, and put them to good use to prevent the twin disasters that had followed.

It was unreasonable and absolutely foolish, but her brain refused to listen to her yet again.

For a second, she forcefully pushed those concepts away and looked at the red glow behind them. As far as she understood her mind, this was the metaphysical manifestation of her anger and desire for revenge, and it was causing her issues because she did not fully accept that side of herself.

In combination with the mental storm, it led to her barely being able to handle all of it without the library collapsing onto itself.

To solve this issue, she saw two potential solutions, with others that could be based on those two options. One route would involve her annihilating the crimson light and replacing it with her regular spiritual will, completing the library as it should have originally been. The second option would be… far, far less preferable, and it would mean uniting with that anger.

She saw no reason to ever, ever consider the second option, primarily because of the fear over losing control over herself. After the previous few outbursts of the red light – which was yet another thing that she needed to find a name for, or else it would be completely indistinguishable from the red light of the world and the glowing red motes on the ground of the cave – she had somewhat gotten an understanding of it, and could potentially restrain it in the future, but the moment that she gives it any more ground, she would lose that advantage. As to why she wanted to do so, the reason could be narrowed down to the fear of losing control.

If she allowed such a great quantity of rage to overwhelm her, she would instantly be blinded by it, and no matter how much strength she could gain out of it, she would inevitably be crushed by the results when her anger is finally cleared.

Within that state of madness, she would do countless things that she would then regret, like those previous hypothetical situations she had considered on her initial journey to this cave. Killing people just on the suspicions of them being opposed to her or attacking those in her way just for the pursuit of her own goals… she would never know how to justify such a thing to herself, and then it would pressure her forever.

Such pressure would be even greater than the current mental storm and red light combined, truly equalling the heart demons of the Daoists, and would prevent her advance forever.

‘I mean, what can I possibly say that would justify even a single death caused directly by me? I don’t even have a clear goal, while the rest of the people out there, even the two that sent me to this hellscape, likely have some sort of pursuit that they believe will lead to great things. If I stumble in and mess it all up, I could bring the entire world down for nothing.’

She looked over to the side and noticed that the stone jug was full to the brim, with her mind clearly having lost any track of time since she began to look inward. She removed the stone container from its place beneath the dripping stalactites and lay down on the ground, looking up at the red ceiling.

‘Unfortunately, the better path is also the more difficult one. For now, I cannot push back either threat within my mental landscape, so I will have to get by through distracting myself instead,’ Yi Wei thought, forcing the map of the cave to manifest within her Gilded Library, grabbing it with one hand while using her other arm to hold on to the other manuals she had rescued from the mental storm, ‘Living in a simple cave like this won’t be good for my mental health, nor for organisation. While I am stuck here, I might as well make this place presentable for myself and any potential visitors, and if I do find a settlement or any other signs of life, then I can consider whether to continue using the cave as a residence or if I should move to that settlement.’

By willing the map to stay still and flat in the air, she slowly drew up a basic floorplan for her future abode. Naturally, she still didn’t have any more experience in construction and architecture than the last time she tried to appraise it, but from what she had understood about the crimson rock from the creation of the water jug, it should be stable enough to withstand minor modifications under her intentions.

Her plans were to transform the room with the dripping stalactites into a sort of production room, where she could make things from any of the five great arts, combined with a small pool to allow for more of the water to gather without needing some sort of jug or bottle to contain it. To the left of the room, she would make a bedroom and cultivation chamber, with the latter being used whenever she figures out how to use the resources of this world, and the former allowing for a more comfortable resting place than the current cavern.

On the right would be a storage chamber, which could be utilised for the crimson motes and any resources that this world many contain, be they precious metals or plants.

Finally, the room outside of that would be a combination of everything else she might need, but primarily it would function as a sort of front room where she could meet any intruders, wanted or unwanted, and prevent them from getting inside without her express observation and permission. It could also have a table, if she ends up finding proper food.

All of these plans were mostly for her personal entertainment, however, as it seemed doubtful for anyone that survived for longer than a second within this terrible environment to care for proper manners or aesthetics.

She channelled her True Ascendant physique energy to her hands and got to work.