Path of the Ascendant

Just like that, roughly eighteen days passed by without too much happening. Her buildings plans had gone along smoothly, and the bedroom and the primary room was fully complete, while the storage room and the dining rooms neared some semblance of existing. One thing that she hadn’t considered was the fact that she couldn’t really create a door or a doorway, as hinges weren’t easy to produce out of a solid chunk of stone with only her hands as tools, so instead she made the dining chamber incredibly wide, making it seem as if that was intentional.

She hadn’t intended to make such a mistake originally, of course, but with every day, both the mental storm and the red light had been growing even more than she had expected. Neither was able to consume the stable foundations of the library that she had already put in place, which made her happy that she was able to make at least one correct decision in the past and didn’t go for the overly opulent library that the mysterious characters had offered, but both of the plagues spread significantly.

The mental storm now revolved across the entire library, occupying both floors and often picked up random books out of the shelves and spun them around for a while before throwing them elsewhere.

Meanwhile, the red light now lit up everything within the Gilded Library, making it as painful to look at as the rest of the hellscape she had been forced to live in. In fact, they seemed so similar that, even with her mental faculties being lowered to one percent of their typical capacity, she realised that there might be a connection between the growth of the crimson light and the red world around her, though she could not figure out exactly what the cause was. With absolutely everything in the area being red – with her skin soon to join that list – it was absolutely impossible to tell whether it was the crimson light pouring in through the clouds, the ruby-tinged water that she regularly drank, the scarlet stone on which she slept or literally anything else.

As a result, since she could not cut out all of those things to prevent them from affecting her, she had to focus on solving those mental issues, forcing her to pull out a number of books out of the storm to try and gain the understanding of mental cultivation techniques that she would need to fix the issue.

After quite a lot of effort, she was able to extract the Kong Mental Arts, Gilded Library and the tome on the Third Eye Elixir out of the mental storm, only barely holding on to the things she had already been keeping in her hands in the process. She sat down in an alcove by the entrance of the cave, where she could better watch over any potential intruders, and began to study the books.

Some time passed – as always, she could not keep track of it due to the lack of any obvious changes around her.

Then, a little more time passed. Perhaps it was an hour, or perhaps it was two, but she was finally able to complete her reading, studying every single manual and tome with such excruciating detail that she likely discovered things that even the original creators of the books were unaware of, even if the process did take far, far longer than she would have preferred. Fortunately, she remembered most of them even without needing to access the mental library, cutting down the time she had needed to spend on the process.

Her final gains were… underwhelming, to say the least. She had already read these things a number of times, some within reality and others within her mental library, and thus she knew pretty much everything within them. Unfortunately, not a single one of the authors understood how to move beyond a stable mental domain, and none had any recommendations on how to purify mental realms of strange red energy, nor did they include instructions on clearing away extreme storms.

Both the Kong Mental Arts and the Third Eye provided her with a means of purifying and strengthening mental energy, but after having experimented with both of those recently, neither seemed capable of clearing away either malaise, with their only benefit being the strengthening of the library’s foundations. That was helpful, but not a solution.

Yi Wei sighed again, rubbing her brows to provide herself with some temporary relief to the headache she was having as a result of her current failure.

Glancing outside, she saw no changes within the mountainous landscape, so she got out of the alcove and returned to her central room, taking a quick drink of the ruby water to recover the energy she had wasted on her contemplation.

Even though she couldn’t outright solve the problem she was having, she still wouldn’t allow herself to be consumed without doing anything to stop it. She sat down on some smoothened stone ground that was higher than the floor, intended to function as a seat until she could make it look more like a chair, and began to practise her various mental techniques. As she wasn’t in the position to use all of them at the same time, due to the issues with her mental landscape, she primarily focused on the three primary techniques – Kong Mental Arts, Gilded Library and the Triumvirate’s Will.

The essence of the other mental techniques was infused into the three, which she initially practised carefully. Due to the possibility of the red light in her mental library being connected to the crimson world outside, carelessly attempting to refine her mind could lead to the quantity of the red light increasing without any benefits to offset the loss.

She cultivated those techniques, and then sent the refined energy through the Third Eye in order to further strengthen it.

Unfortunately, she quickly saw that this process was not as productive as she would have hoped. In spite of the effort to keep her mental energies clean, every time the mental energy returned to her head, it was further tinged with crimson light.

‘So, this isn’t going to work either, then…’ Yi Wei thought, ignoring the red glow that tried to cause the emotion of anger to grow within her mind, ‘This reminds me of the time before I discovered cosmic energy and lived on a house that was actively trying to kill me, albeit slowly. If my breakthroughs hadn’t cleansed my dantian and purified my body, the combination of the Potential Draining, Planar Corruption, Mental Distortion and Dantian Clogging arrays would have made me completely useless, with the effect intensifying with each passing day until it takes me all of my energy just to consider what I want to eat for breakfast. Fortunately, I have no chance of falling to such a fate here, for I don’t have a choice regarding my food, but still…

‘Who put those arrays there, and why? Since they were placed there somewhere around the time of my birth, there is a chance that it was those same two people, but-’ she stopped her thought midway as she saw the red light inside of the library brighten, ‘Not the right time to be thinking of this. My mental stability and sanity are key at the moment, and considering these matters is just like asking the anger to overwhelm me.’

She calmed herself and instead looked into the mental storm once more, seeking something else to attempt as she did not want to sit by idly while her mind was consumed. Although both her memory and thinking speed had dropped due to the twin malaise, to read out small passages from flying books and recall the rest of the text was still within her ability.

More time passed, with her reading and recalling all sorts of things. From the methods of cooking a planar rhinoceros-lion to perfection to the guide on scaling Mt Tai; she had previously committed all sorts of things to memory, and not all of them were necessarily useful. However, they did serve to minimise the speed of the mental storm by acting as obstructions to the thoughts that would be beneficial to her, thus making it significantly easier to read either type of thought or ideas. In a way, it was a sort of silver lining, though one that she wouldn’t have needed to consider if not for the mental storm.

After even more hours passed, with the day likely moving over to the nineteenth since she began to work on her mind and her residence, and roughly the twenty-fourth since she arrived in this crimson world. In the end, she achieved… nothing.

‘Both mental cultivation and other forms of mental energies, like killing intent, which some theorise to be an actual, separate energy and not just a transformation of spiritual will that is caused by the taint of hatred, are rather poorly understood. For every mental cultivation manual that exists within the Planar Continents, there seem to be a thousand manuals relating to combat and planar energy. Furthermore, they are considered to be nothing more than methods to prevent mental trauma and to keep one’s mind in check against mental attacks, which are also rare. Even when it comes to illusions, most only assist in remembering that the world before the viewer is illusory, and not in breaking the illusion nor circumventing it. If I hadn’t had the Kong Mental Arts in the Kong valley, I wouldn’t have stood a chance against their impressive illusory formation arrays…

‘In other words, as much as I can grasp from the manuals of the continents, they do not contain the full extent of the knowledge regarding mental cultivation, just as the manuals on body cultivation – or, rather, physique cultivation – seem to have no mention of physique energy, presumably due to the lack of body cultivators that completely omit the cultivation of planar energy. Whether mental cultivation can travel the same path, or if there is some other approach to it that I am unaware of, it is likely that few had ever used the likes of the Gilded Library and then encountered a situation similar to mine, before succeeding in solving it.

‘I cannot access the knowledge I need from the manuals alone. Somehow, I must either find a new source of knowledge, or develop something on my own… and I just happen to be in the worst state for the latter approach, with my mind, a place that is typically under my complete control, being enveloped in a storm of paper and crimson light. By the heavens…’

Since her access to the conveniences of her mental landscape were limited, it meant that she would need far, far more time to achieve the same results – time that she did not possess.

If the growth of the twin malaise continued to accelerate in the same fashion as it has already done, then even the spot where her mental self typically stands will be consumed within a day, at which point she would be in an even worse situation than if she willingly accepted the endless anger. She would no longer be in control, and it was not something she could ever accept, but even with how little time she had, she did not want to risk her initial first option of willingly taking in the crimson light, for that would bring along a similar situation.

‘Even though they could not, or did not, kill me in the Yi District, they might do so now, almost a month after our initial confrontation… I have to say, this would be the worst death – the death of the self, and of the mind, even while my body lives on…’

To shake her thoughts a little, or perhaps to accidentally discover something through an epiphany alike to those that brought her the Elysian and Dawn series of techniques, she got up and headed out of the cave. However, before she could even near the entrance, she heard something unusual that broke up the typical calmness of the red wastes. It was like something hitting sand repeatedly, with the source of the sound nearing. Those two factors combined made it seem as if someone was approaching.

The very possibility of life within the hellscape caused Yi Wei’s mental storm and the red glow to recede ever so slightly, while she rushed to the entrance of her cave.

Within such a terrible world, there was a far higher likelihood of encountering someone dangerous than someone who she could converse with peacefully, if this sound was even caused by a person in the first place. Nonetheless, she wanted to- no, she needed to see who it was, for this entity could provide her with the hope she needed to maintain her mind and possibly even push back the malaise.

After all, the sounds that were being produced could not be made by an ordinary human or beast, unless the beasts of this ruby world were somehow significantly larger than most planar beasts, suggesting that some for of cultivation or energy usage did exist.

She reached the exit of the cave in record time and did so just in time to see something fascinating.

A red glow within the sky, one that stood out amidst the crimson storm clouds and the light that poured through them. It quickly descended, crashing onto the ground without any obvious care for the things beneath it, then launched up once more, the impact generating the sound that she had previously heard and was attracted to. In just a few of these leaps, the person that was surrounded in this light – for it did appear to be a person, one dressed in a set of ruby robes and with long black hair trailing behind them – crossed a small mountain and neared Yi Wei’s position.

As she did so, Yi Wei felt a strange sensation approach her. It was akin to incredibly thick killing intent in nature, expect it was not concentrated on any single person, instead being emitted from the person surrounded in the red light. Furthermore, the more she looked at it, the more she realised the similarity between it and the light of the world and the one within her mind.

Before she could do too much thinking, the figure drenched in crimson light landed at the foot of her mountain and leapt up to land once more only a few metres away from her.

With her being so close, it was immediately obvious that this person was a woman, for her figure was lithe yet full in what could only be described as all the right places. Her breasts bulged out of her robes, and her hips were wide. Even her face was far above the human standard, marred only by the extremely vicious expression she wore combined with the endless and ruthless killing intent that radiated from her body.

Her eyes were of an ordinary colour, but even though the red light receded into her body, it remained within her eyes, dyeing them a pure shade of crimson. The red light radiated endlessly from her eyes, making them glow as brightly as the ruby motes that she had collected from the distant dried lake.

“Oho, what have I found here? Boy- no, girl, are you new?” the woman said, her lips curving into a wicked smile, “Did those fuckers send you here to die as well?”

Yi Wei narrowed her eyes, attempting to mobilise her spiritual will to feel out this woman’s strength, but she could not make her spiritual will extend beyond a tenth of its typical limit. Since she did not want to risk approaching her due to the immense quantity of killing intent pouring out of her, she was forced to remain cautious and still, “I’m afraid I can’t reply with that information alone.”

“You sure about that? Do you know the Great Families, the so-called righteous bastards that have thrown all of our ancestors into this hellhole just because they had once gone against them! I say, you look nothing like us lot – what got you into this mess?”

‘Great Families? Righteous? They can’t be the same people that…’ Yi Wei replied, “I may just be going off of first impressions, but you seem like someone that would kill someone for looking at them wrong. It is no surprise that we do not look alike. If I did bear some great resemblance to you, I would have to start questioning my own life choices.”

Instantly, she nearly bit her own tongue when she realised what she was saying, and to whom. ‘Damn it, this red light must be affecting me more than I had originally thought. To say such a thing to her-’

“Ha… Hahaha!” the woman unexpectedly broke out into laughter, nearly folding like a piece of paper before barely recovering, “So, you’re one of those righteous types, are you? I must say, you were not what I was expecting, not at all! You aren’t wrong though, you slutty girl, I am more than happy to kill someone for something slight. You know what the people around here call me? The Black Terror, that’s what. I’m not sure if its ‘cause of my hair, or if it’s based on the colour that I like the blood on my body to get to before cleaning it off.

“However, is there really such a big difference between the two of us?”

‘Contrary to her own depiction of herself, she’s talking to me slowly… What is she trying to do?’ she wondered, taking a second to wonder whether it was a good idea to continue speaking to her, before eventually deciding that there was no trace of mental techniques trying to affect her brain and replied cautiously, “I dare say that there is. Unlike you, I can count the number of my kills on one hand.”

“So? Whether you’ve killed one or a million, you still did what you thought was right, did you not? You probably thought you were making the world better, as is so common for your ilk, or maybe you were doing something for yourself. Right?”

“If you’re trying to say something profound, then got on with it already.”

“Impatient, are you? Fair enough – so am I,” the Black Terror grinned, stretching out her hand to her side, closing her hand around her fist as the red energy burst out of her body and formed into the shape of a one-sided blade, with the dull side being filled with countless spikes of various sizes and shapes. The very blade radiated a sensation of terror and rage, one that pressed down even upon her strengthened mind.

“Listen up, you righteous slut. All of the things you do, I do… Who the fuck should decide what the right thing to do is? Those Great Families? Neither of us could possibly say yet to that seriously, and even if you think that they might have somehow fucked up in your case, then ask yourself why they should ever be the arbiters of righteousness. I don’t know what it’s like back in the upper world, in the continents, but down here, we’ve got something more reasonable. Might makes right. The one that beats up the other is clearly in the right. We need strength in this world, and if you can beat up the other, then you’re clearly right.”

“That’s exactly why people like you, who we’d call bandits in the Planar Continents, were cleared away by the Master of Yi City, and the various families that now live in the districts!”

“Isn’t that exactly what the rest of you do? All of the Great Families, the districts, the people living there… even some of the bastards here, they all do exactly that. In fact… think about the Master of Yi City herself… or himself, who the fuck cares… do you think anyone would have respected him as much if he had failed? No, but he would have still thought he was in the right. Alright, you get it?”

“I-”

“Now, die!” the Black Terror suddenly yelled, charging forward with immense speed, the remaining crimson light surrounding her and the blade, almost forming into armour around everything beneath her head.

However, in Yi Wei’s eyes, her movements rapidly slowed, before stopping completely. She felt her mind accelerating to levels that she had only experienced when she had scanned the jade slips produced by Great Dark, and was pulled into the mental landscape, the Gilded Library, where the red light and endless mental storm mingled together.

The black-haired woman’s words were crude and poorly worded, as she would expect of someone who had lived in a world like this.

Despite that, she thought that there was something to what she was saying.

‘Indeed, no matter whether the two siblings were from a Great Family, or were just some random people that had an issue with me and Yi Yi, they view their actions as righteous, for why would someone do something that they did not believe would yield beneficial results?

‘The Master of Yi City had a goal of some kind, and he too set out to change the world without any care for the opinions of others. It is well known that there was great resistance to his actions, far greater than to any person or group before and after his life. Had he lost and failed to achieve his dreams, he would have been remembered as a plague – a demon. But he won, and thus, any actions that he had taken, justified or otherwise, are now at the very peak of morality.

‘To be free, to be able to do whatever I desire, I must be at the peak of the continent.

‘To reach the peak, I cannot hesitate. I cannot question my every action. I must be decisive, to take advantage of everything I have, and take out every potential threat before it can bloom into genuine danger – for if I accomplish the same deed as the Master of Yi City, I will have succeeded. With my success, I could bring about countless years of peace and glory to Yi City. For every person that suffered for my actions without proper justification, I could allow a thousand generations to survive without the threat of Great Families or simple killers like this Black Terror. I could remove the barrier of bloodlines entirely and allow this world to prosper with the techniques and arts that the various districts hold – for I possess something that no-one else would be able to equal, preventing any challenge to the peaceful rule of the continent.

‘I must become the Master of Yi City!’

With her final words, the small library and all of her mind shook together, the red light suddenly bursting out as if it had been freed from some prison – for it had been. It tore through the mental storm on one side, annihilating the pointless thoughts of hesitation and regret, while she and mental energies forced the regular manuals and books to return to their shelves.

The crimson light overwhelmed her mental self and the library as a whole and merged with both. The structure of the library broke apart, but before the countless ideas within could scatter, it was rebuilt, with every strand of mental energy being wrapped in a tight rope of crimson light.

In place of the original library, that was too small and insignificant to contain the things she required it to hold, appeared an enormous chamber created purely from her imagination, and yet contained even greater detail than her depiction of the old library. Rotting and ancient wood was replaced by a dense and strong mahogany, both new and seemingly eternal, and surrounding it were great quantities of gold, though they were all tinged with a certain ruby light and dark aura that would have threatened to consume any visitor who could possibly enter it.

Every book returned to its rightful place, not through flight, but through a direct teleportation, in which the various manuals and tomes were wrapped in crimson energy and pulled through an ember-filled void to their respective shelves. With the new library being triple its size and containing four individual floors, the things that previously broke the library apart now fit with far too much space in between.

On the first floor, she placed the manuals regarding cultivation and the usage of planar energy. The second contained everything she understood about the body, and the third held that which she knew about the mind. The fourth stored the rest: trivia, encyclopaedias and things that could not easily be placed elsewhere.

In an instant, the twin malaise of the mind vanished, and her silver eyes, which had long seemed dull and empty in comparison to what they used to be, regained their splendour.

‘You called yourself the Black Terror? Thank you for becoming the first threat to be removed on my path. Your words were greatly appreciated.’

She raised her fist as the scenery around her returned to its normal speed, lunging forward with only the might of her physical body and physique. The blade in the woman’s hand was completely ignored as she threw a punch directly at her head without withholding even one percent of her strength.

“Goodbye,” Yi Wei whispered just as her fist collided with the woman’s head.

The Black Terror’s eyes widened in that instant, for she also witnessed the curious transformation of the woman in front of her. Just the second after, her head exploded, bursting like a watermelon, though the extreme force of Yi Wei’s caused the countless bits and pieces to fly away from her, resulting in her fist being completely clean of blood when she brought it back.

Her headless body fell to the ground in silence, the crimson light disconnecting from her body and flying off into the sky.

Yi Wei shut her eyes for a second, and when she opened them again, all of her spiritual will burst out of her body, evenly covering four and a half metres around her. It sank into the woman’s body and confirmed to her that there were no defensive precautions placed on her body, so she bent down and removed the robe and a number of pouches from the woman’s body before turning around and locating a rock to sit down on.

There, she took off what few scraps of her robes remained and put on the woman’s crimson robe.

‘I am not familiar with this world, but I wouldn’t imagine anyone keeping things that are valuable to them anywhere but on their person,’ she thought, looking through the pockets of her new robes, ‘If that red light that formed into a weapon and armour came from a form of cultivation, then a manual for it will have been somewhere on her corpse.’

The robes had six individual pockets, with two on the outside, on either side, and four on the inside, with one set of lower pockets and one set of upper pockets. In the left outside pocket, she found nothing but dust, which matched her discoveries within the right pocket. This, too, was perfectly natural, for those pockets were easiest to access for some pickpocket or thief. Keeping anything of value within them would be akin to inviting people to steal from the wearer, especially due to the fabric deforming easily whenever anything was placed within, even if it was a small pebble.

In the inner pockets, she made four discoveries right after one another. The first was a manual labelled as ‘Violent Third Pool’, which appeared to be some sort of cultivation technique. She scanned it with her spiritual will in a single second then drew her physique energy to her hand, instantly setting the manual aflame. The second was a number of red motes similar to those that she had found within the lakebed, though none matched the ones that she had. They were all thicker and denser, with three appearing to almost be solid. Based on the fact that these things were being carried around, she came to the conclusion that they were indeed of some value and thus returned them to the pocket she found them in, before idly glancing up and thus making her third discovery.

Somehow, in between the time that she removed the robe from the woman’s body and found the crimson motes, the body had turned almost entirely to dust, with all that remained being her headless skeleton and a further series of those strange motes lying roughly in the former location of her heart.

‘So, these can be produced by the deaths of people? Or, perhaps, does it have some relation to the manual that the woman held?’

For now, she held back the questions and completed her search of the robes and pouches, with her last significant find being a black dagger that seemed to be made of stone. Its shape was almost natural, as if it wasn’t forged but instead found in a large pile of rocks, but she could sense that it was sharp and contained something within that was comparable to a low-grade artefact.

Whatever it was, it could function as a decent weapon even without the infusion of an energy into the blade, so she kept it somewhere that she could draw from quickly before returning to her cave.

‘That woman came from a settlement of some kind. The people there can clearly survive with relative ease and believe in strength over any kind of authority – though I doubt that they do not have someone acting as either a leader or a police force that prevents any one individual from taking over completely. Whatever the case is, they almost certainly won’t give things away for free, but one of the items on the Black Terror’s body ought to function as currency, or be valuable in bartering, so I shouldn’t face any issues on that front,’ she thought as she collected the red motes from her storage cave before filling the stone jug to the brim with water, ‘Before I go, I think that it is time for another change.

‘My name… The Yi family, regardless of the common people within it, allowed me to be targeted by the Great Families, and clearly did not care to protect me as one of their own. To bring their name into this world would be folly. Instead, why don’t I go the simple route?

‘From now on, I shall be Wei Yi, and I shall found the first ever Wei family. Just like the Master of Yi City brought his family to glory, I shall do the same, or die trying.’