Path of the Ascendant

Although it was unpleasant to know that something was capable of influencing her mind so easily, she had no methods of handling the mysterious characters, nor did she wish to get rid of her only hope to cultivating.

Thus, she shook her head and returned home, doing the best she could to avoid any direct encounters with passers-by. Since she had no stealth techniques, there were still undoubtedly witnesses to her mostly nude hopping about the forest.

When she got back to her hut, it became quickly obvious that rumours of a random ragged temptress would fill the minds and ears of the common folk for a few days. At some point during her careless travel out of the forest, what little remained of her cloak was torn apart, leaving only the pocket and the area around her neck.

On the positive side, with her new physique and pseudo-second realm cultivation, her speed was sufficiently great to avoid any details of her visage from being seen and remembered by others, so at the very least she wouldn’t be recognised in the streets, but to avoid anyone else seeing too much of her skin she quickly threw off the rag, removed the vine hungry nest root and threw it elsewhere before taking out a set of clothes that she had acquired earlier.

Just as she put on her shirt, she heard shouting outside her door.

“Yi Wei! Come out here and answer for what you’ve done to my brothers! Do you hear me?”

“Yes, I hear you,” she replied just loudly enough to the man outside to hear her, ‘How does everyone I don’t want to see know where I live? And what is he even talking about?’

She couldn’t remember anything of relevance to the situation until she stepped outside and saw three young men around her age, one of whom had strangely short hair, eyebrows and a furious look in his eyes.

‘Oh, it’s… Yi Jin? No, that was the metal cultivator, so…’

“Yi Jun, is that the person that stole your Planar Gathering pill and burned you without any provocation whatsoever?” the third man, older than the other two, whom Yi Wei had not seen before, asked.

“That’s right, big bro Yi Jang, she-”

She interrupted him before he had a chance to say any more blatant lies, “Yi Jang, do you mind if we talk with each other alone? I have a feeling there is a slight misunderstanding of the situation, and I might be unable to explain myself properly if two people constantly attempt to speak over me.”

Yi Jang looked at her with an odd expression for a while before he came to a conclusion, “Fine. Since you dare to speak with me, you might have something to say. Yi Jun, Yi Jin, stay here and… well, there’s nothing for you to steal, is there? Just don’t make a mess. If everything you’ve said is true, I’ll get revenge for you.”

“Of course it’s true, big bro! Don’t listen to her lies!”

“I’m not as stupid as you two, so don’t worry. Now, go away,” Yi Jang shooed them away as if he was talking down to animals, and turned around once they had gotten far enough away, “So, how will you defend yourself? Or do you intend to beg for-”

“I apologise for interrupting, but I do not intend to beg you for anything. I simply want to correct whatever story they might have told you. Where should I start?”

He frowned at her, “I don’t like your attitude, but… begin with the seventh. It is obvious that you stole the Planar Gathering pill on the second, so-”

“That is very presumptuous of you, Yi Jang. On the second of this month, I was approached by Yi Zhang, who proposed a duel with me. I accepted, with the stakes being one Flesh Recovery pill and one Planar Gathering pill. I won, and took my prize,” Yi Wei explained without letting the man’s angry expression phase her, “Surely you’re not going to have a problem with that, are you?”

“Yi Zhang? Hm, he is only in the second stage, so if he did get his hands on the pill, it makes sense for you to beat him at… what realm were you in?”

“The first.”

“Hm. Fine, continue.”

“On the seventh, after my cultivation, Yi Jin and Yi Jun approached me and got into another fight because I didn’t let myself be beaten by Yi Zhang. Their skills weren’t very good, so I defeated them easily. They tried to catch me off guard afterward, but I was alert and foiled their little plot.”

“Indeed, their skills are rather weak. They even tried to claim that you were in the second stage, but I didn’t believe such an obvious lie.”

‘No, that was the one lie you should believe when it comes from a sore loser. I am surprised they didn’t claim I was, or had the help of, an Emergent Anchor realm expert, as that would have been much more like their style,’ she thought, shooting an angry look at the pair that seemed to be about to tear apart what little remained of her fence, “I don’t care what they have and haven’t said. If you don’t have anything else to say, can we just get to the conclusion of this? I have something else to be doing.”

“Fine. I think I can understand what happened. They paid the brat to fight you, and when he lost, they made up a few stories to get me to save them some face,” Yi Jang sighed, “Keep the pill, if you still have it.”

Without any further words, he turned to Yi Jun and Yi Jin and went to them. He placed his hands on their shoulders and lead them away from her home, turning the street after a while.

‘Regardless of what he’ll do with them, I find it curious that he hasn’t made any semblance of an apology. Had he not believed me, and had I been a regular peak Energy Condensation realm cultivator, he would have easily defeated me with his second realm, third stage cultivation, and then he would have been able to punish me for defending myself thrice in a row,’ Yi Wei sighed after she confirmed that they were too far away for her to hear, even with the aid of cosmic energy, ‘I can see why whatever memories were left inside the mysterious characters had such a negative reaction to the thought of simply trusting the family.’

She knew that whatever the origin of the mysterious characters was, it wouldn’t be smart to consider it entirely harmless after one instance of their unwanted side effects being correct, so she made a mental note to keep an eye on any future instances of unusual activity before leaving her yard and heading for the Colosseum.

On the way, she switched clothes again, and encountered no strange people trying to recruit her. For once, the journey was somewhat calm.

Since Jiang Sheng’s fight, she had participated in formal combat four more times, mostly due to her teachers being busy with gathering materials for her. Two of the matches were supposed to be to the death, but her opponents turned out to be far less impressive than the first. They were defeated with sufficient ease to remove any tension from the fight, and so her opponents were spared by the arena's organisers, likely to be put into battles with more fairly matched opponents.

As a result, she walked away with eight gold and forty silver coins. Even with the large quantity that she had spent on materials to assist in her breakthrough, she still had two free manuals she could redeem, as well as one gold and a dozen silver coins left over.

There were currently no obvious ways to spend the money, so she was hanging onto it, keeping the majority of it in a hidden spot that she reinforced with a pseudo Aura Obscuring array. Any powerful cultivator would easily be able to see through it, but it should prevent the Yi Juns and Yi Jins of the world from finding it.

Once she entered the building at the far edge of the Deadly Martial Colosseum’s land, she saw the twins waiting for her as always. She had been tempted to ask whether they had anything else to do the last time she visited, but it was slowly becoming evident that they had very little work in general.

Just as she was about to speak, however, she realised that there was something different about them this time, “Great Dark and Great Light, have both of you advanced by a stage or two?”

“We could ask you the same thing,” Great Dark, looking at her strangely, “Now, we are both at the peak of the Marked Core realm… though we may push for a breakthrough in the near future, depending on how long our momentum lasts… May we now receive your answer?”

“I have made one stage of progress,” Yi Wei replied briefly, her attention drawn by the curious state of yin and yang qi within the twins – or, rather, the absolute absence of the latter. Typically, any regular human had a 33% on 66% split of yin and yang depending on their gender. A man would be two-thirds yang and one-third yin, and a woman would have the opposite. Someone with a Yin or Yang Physique would have three-quarters yin or three-quarters yang, and a Greater Yin Physique would cause someone to have four-fifths yin, Absolute Yin would lead to five-sixths yin, and any further stages of the physique would lead to similar increases.

Great Light and Great Dark, however, had no yang qi at all despite being men. It was like someone had come along and thoroughly drained them of any yang, then went ahead and replaced every internal organ with solid sculptures made up of condensed yin. Such an absolute absence of a core element of reality was far stranger than the True Ascendant Physique, although the exact split that it caused was also not known to Yi Wei at the moment.

“Just one? That… huh. How does it work if someone has enough perfected stages to break through early?” Great Light said, before being immediately slapped on the face by his brother.

A wave of absolute yin pulsed out from the strike, filling the air with frost.

“Have you completely lost control over your mouth recently?” Great Dark muttered, but it was too late.

‘So they did catch on. It would have been strange if someone approaching the sixth realm couldn’t detect the perfected stages of a first realm cultivator, especially when I never tried to hide it in front of them. In fact, it is rather surprising that there seems to be no-one else who realises this,’ she thought, raising her masked face to meet the eyes of the two, “Since you know, I might as well admit it, but I would appreciate some form of equivalent exchange. I lack certain information, and you two clearly want to know some of the things I know.”

“True. The existence of perfected stages is well known to anyone over the age of fifty, as they would have had to stumble upon a book describing them by that point, but the Master of Yi City is one of the few who is believed to have even succeeded with perfecting more than a few stages. Otherwise, the Ze District is at the peak of the world, their focus being perfected stages,” Great Light nodded, “Since you are in need of a teacher, I can educate your straight to your imminent demis-”

“Great Light! The Void Room, now!”

The next moment, Great Light vanished from the darkness of the illusory world, leaving only his twin. He didn’t seem to have moved, or even used the fourth realm’s instant movement, he just… vanished.

“Ahem. Great Light has been having a few problems with his cultivation as of late, and-”

‘Hold on, they’ve recently begun to advance rapidly, their yin energy has gotten even thicker, and it just happened to occur after I defeated Jiang Sheng and, most likely, allowed his technique to be taken by those two, and now, after a few days during which Great Light has been acting strangely, he seems to have gone completely off the rails- rails? What does that even…’ she was momentarily stumped, but waved the strange concept of a ‘rail’ away and interrupted the twin, “You’ve been practising that forbidden skill, haven’t you?”

“…” he blinked several times in silence, “How… do… you… figure… that?”

“You’re not blind, and I’m not blind. I don’t know why it isn’t affecting your appearance, nor your voice, but your brother is clearly more vulnerable to its particular mental effects. Or, so I assume based on how much he has lost control over the past two weeks, to the point of you sending him to some sort of Void Room. I assume that, if it deserves to be called a Void Room despite this illusory world being completely empty, then it would be a sort of isolation cell for someone to calm down, but the fact that it has never been used before in my presence implies that things haven’t gotten this bad in a while, and that Great Light hasn’t been behaving himself when you two were on your own, as well. Is that about right?”

“… Yes. The effects of Ice Demon’s Will were somewhat greater than we had expected, and for the past few hours, he’s been ranting and raving about a number of things that shouldn’t be said,” Great Dark admitted, “As such, let us focus on perfected stages. What did you want to know?”

“Well, I’d actually like to read the manual for Ice Demon’s-”

“No. Perfected stages only.”

She raised an eyebrow, but ultimately decided to acquiesce, “Then, I wish to know a little bit about the basics. What effects do they have on one’s cultivation? What are the largest quantities of perfected stages ever achieved by regular people, and how have they influenced their future stages and realms? Are there any known unusual scenarios that occur upon achieving a sufficient number of perfected stages within a certain realm?”

“Hm… In the rare instance that someone achieves a perfected stage, the general density of their energy will increase, or the particular element of the realm will be strengthened. The highest quantity of perfected stages reached by a single person that I am aware of is four, in total, across all realms… That same person was forever stuck in the Emergent Anchor realm as they were unable to control their energy sufficiently to create the shield of the Active Core realm… Other than that, I cannot think of anything,” Great Dark spoke slowly, slower than usual, “Now, tell me how you have perfected each stage in your cultivation.”

Yi Wei saw a slight cold glint within his eye, but even if it was some sort of forgotten lie-detecting technique, she wasn’t too worried, “It’s a technique I acquired… If you want to know where, I may tell you if you let me examine the Ice Demon’s Will.”

“I will do fine without that information, then.”

“Tch. Would it really hurt you to let me take a look?”

“Even if we limit the ‘taking a look’ to a minute, you’ll read it in its entirety, won’t you?”

“It’s not like the manual will explode if just one person reads it, though, so what is the issue with it? You two deemed it safe enough to practise, so are you afraid to let your best student do the same?”

“Is that something I have to explain to you? You have some awareness of yin and yang in your surroundings, or so I assume… and you should know that it is safer for those with high quantities of yin to practise yin-type techniques than someone with a high quantity of yang doing the same… I can apologise for us mistaking you for a woman, however. Such a quantity and purity of yang qi is rarely seen in most men.”

‘That means my breakthrough was well-timed. However, it is very curious that he says that I do know certain things, rather than asking me about it… Is he making an incorrect assumption about my identity?’

Since that mistaken assumption was getting her new information with surprising ease, she decided not to correct him for the moment, “You mentioned a person being unable to reach the next realm of cultivation due to perfected stages. Is that something specific to the Active Core realm?”

“Obviously not… In the Planar Pool realm, the dantian may be unable to withstand the planar energy at a density beyond that of the Energy Condensation realm… In the Emergent Anchor realm, the cultivator may lack the strength to control his energy to a sufficient enough degree to form a planar anchor… at the Marked Core realm, the issue could be much the same. This is a general danger anyone could face, though perfected stages increase the chances of them occurring.”

‘If that is true, then it is a good thing my planar aperture was cleansed before my planar energy began to condense into liquid.’

“There have been several methods by which various experts have attempted to strengthen their planar apertures and forcefully induce a perfected stage. We have a number of them at the Deadly Martial Colosseum, and they can be shared with you if you would permit us to study the effects of perfected stages on you.”

‘I already know that my cosmic energy is able to hide of its own accord, and that the mysterious characters are invisible to anyone but me, so I doubt there’s much he’ll be able to see. In addition, there’s the elevation of my duties once I openly display my pseudo second realm cultivation, which might take me out of the city district for a number of months. I can grab all of the techniques, put them together into another painful mess, and then avoid anyone who knows me until I am actually in the second realm, at which point I can pin everything onto some sort of miraculous encounter, or the aid of an expert,’ she smiled beneath the mask, but controlled her voice to sound calm, “Sure. Where are the manuals?”

“I’ll summon them for you… but you are already considering leaving the district as soon as possible, aren’t you?”

“Any reason I shouldn’t be? You are spending your weeks sitting in a dark space, but I have a number of things I need to be doing,” Yi Wei said in a self-important tone – the way the two interpreted it was none of her business.

“Very well. Just get to reading already. You’ll reduce our lifespan by a couple hundred years…”

 

“You want to do what? Did you not listen to what I told you the last time? I said… do not waste your opportunity!”

“And I heard you. However, I wish to go back to the pagoda anyway.”

Yi Wei had read through the various books and manuals even more quickly than before, mobilising what little spiritual will she could to scan through the text next to where she was reading, thus accelerating her progress. There were few completed and completely harmless techniques, as expected from such an unexplored area as perfected stages, but after putting together everything that should work from the hundreds of books, she had a Cosmic Dantian Refining technique, and an updated variant of the Condensed Formation Body that incorporated the extreme yang qi of the True Ascendant Physique as well as the insights of the experts on perfected stages.

As a result, she wanted to get to grips with them as quickly as possible, and to do so she needed a certain… stimulation. The sort that would almost certainly be found within the upper levels of the pagoda. She brought this up with Great Dark, naturally omitting the fact that she had unexpectedly found a pill refining recently, thus leading to this exchange.

Clearly, the man of absolute yin was not too happy about the idea.

“Even with perfected stages and an Absolute Yang Physique, that isn’t enough to go beyond the sixth floor… the first six are designed to… weed out the simpler types-”

“But you still allow those in the Energy Condensation realm to participate, implying that it isn’t impossible. Let me go back into the sixth floor, and I shall leave once things get too difficult again. Or, is there some particular reason you want to keep a man like myself from returning there?”

Somehow, she managed to say that sentence smoothly, without stumbling on any part of it, despite the fact that it included both an obvious lie and an unnecessary, provocative and accusative question.

“I hope it was not a mistake to take you on as a disciple… Very well… Off with you.”

The expansive stack of books abruptly vanished, and the scene from the pagoda’s sixth floor reappeared. Out of the five sides of the room, only one remained, displaying a pill furnace.