“I hadn’t seen those things before… Must have taken some thought to make them that ugly,” Chen Jushu said to nobody in particular as she held out one hand, around which a thick cloud of petals had already formed. With a thought, a number of petals moved outward, melting into pure golden energy and forming an array of pure offensive capability, with every one of the searing marks on her core empowering it greatly.

Just as the monstrosity fully formed, the array collapsed into a single golden projectile that splashed onto its fractured mirror-like surface and instantly melted it, destroying the horror before it could do so much as consider moving towards her and the group of other combatants.

However, just as soon as the first monster dispersed into mirror-like shards, another three began to form from the fog, all three of them emanating the faint power of the third realm, forcing Chen Jushu to immediately begin work on three more array-based attacks as to end their existence as quickly as possible.

That was when a figure clad in darkness appeared from the obscurity of the night, the only sign of identity being their crimson hair that disappeared into the shadow that covered the rest of her body. She leapt from a nearby rooftop and landed on the air itself, an incredibly thin and nearly transparent platform appearing beneath her as she released a significant quantity of strange silver and crimson energy that steadied itself in the air and formed a large array pointing directly at the point from which the mirror fog monsters were appearing from.

In the time that those at the scene attempted to comprehend the array, she had already leapt away, seemingly moving towards one of the other key array points.

“W-Who was that person? Should we target the array?” one of the warriors asked.

“… then the nodes pass through there… the energy channels are routed in this manner… huh… Wait, did you say something?” Chen Jushu broke her gaze away from the floating array, then answered, “So far as I’m aware, this should be an offensive killing array focused on the manifestations of the Mirror Plane, but the design is not one I’ve seen before. I wonder who that was…”

As her gaze returned to admiring the array structure, the three monstrosities formed in their entirety, displaying similarly insane shapes to the horrors that appeared during the earlier invasion of the mirror layer. Unlike the first monsters to appear at Wei Yi’s location, these fiends immediately charged at the foes before them, although they did still take the opportunity to roar at them in an attempt at intimidation.

What did not change was their fate – as a small prism of light seemed to form in the centre of the array, it only took a moment before three dense beams burst out from it, piercing the mirror-like bodies of the monstrosities and splitting them in half before receding.

The parts that remained only did so for a short while before they turned to glass dust and then melted into the air and the fog beneath them.

“That was marvellous… I wonder if-”

 

‘- there’s a number to the actual limit of these fragmented creatures?’ Wei Yi asked herself as she set up another array that could sustain itself on the planar energy in the air and some of the energy released by the arrays beneath the ground and leapt away to do the same yet again, assembling as many as she could possibly manage without exhausting all of her killing will, as every single array that was created consumed a small fraction of her overall mental energy capacity. If she went too far and covered the entire Ning District in these arrays, she would likely have no energy to support her Ascendant’s Library, although, considering the split between mental energy, mental capacity and general mental faculties, that might be an incorrect assumption.

For this reason, she only created more than one set of arrays – that being an energy gathering, focus and then killing array which she had combined into one based on one of Master Yi Yi’s designs – at the point where she initially began her work, and where she found an insufficient number of people protecting the array point.

There were also a few individuals that were weaker than their realm and stage would suggest, who she also decided to assist by enhancing the number of targets that their arrays could strike at once, although they had fortunately positioned themselves near other, better fortified positions which they could retreat to if things did not go as they hoped, although she would be lying if she said that she hadn’t modified some of the district’s geography to make this easier for them.

In an important battle like this, it was important to minimize the chances of something going wrong. She could control herself easily, whether physically, mentally or in any other fashion, but to control other people was far more difficult, so she had to use these methods instead of assassin-like control.

When she was almost done with the last point of interest, near the Chu Alchemical Store, she happened to witness how Chu Huazhi emerged from his store with a large bag of pills on his back, with many more small pouches within to separate the pills from one another and allow them to be given out in small portions.

After him, Fu Xiu also emerged, carrying a second bag that was even larger than his.

“Is anyone in need of- Oh…” his words froze in his throat before he could complete a single sentence, for he saw the current state of the Mirror Plane and the forces that attempted to hold it back.

On the ground, a dozen large and half a hundred smaller creatures had formed entirely from the fog, and were now attacking some unaffiliated people from the district who had not gone to sleep and instead decided to protect their homes alongside the two combatants from the mercenary group. All of the terrific monstrosities were all in the third realm, regardless of their size or physical prowess, but the power that they were able to manifest nearly equalled the fourth realm, overpowering many of the common folk through the mysteries of the mirror-like fog.

The hired warriors were faring far better, with some of them being in the fourth realm, thus allowing them to oppose the monstrosities with some success, but they began to spawn from the fog more quickly with every single moment, slowly multiplying more quickly than they could be slain.

Above all of this, a figure stood on the air and channelled an immense quantity of crimson and silver energy into a gigantic array that floated in the air above these fog and mirror-like horrors, with a shape, design and overall appearance that seemed to be entirely different from anything that Chu Huazhi himself was familiar with, even including the arrays that he recalled the new alchemist in the district creating in a matter of moments.

This figure only stood still for another moment before she leapt into the air and vanished under the cover of the night’s sky, while the array that she had created finally came to life.

Over a dozen different points on the array, some near the middle while others were located near the edge, burned brightly with silver light, almost turning into miniature stars before the excess energy from them surged down, countless vibrant beams crashing upon the abominations and terrors below, absolutely annihilating the smaller horrors while the larger were cut into a thousand pieces that shattered on their own, the remaining dust mixing with the rising fog and slightly accelerating the congealment of new phantasms, only for them to be struck down all the same, as if they were naught but the previous illusory foes that had been defeated so easily.

“This…” Chu Huazhi stood still for a few moments, watching the terrors be obliterated in moments, before he came to his senses and rushed to the exhausted group of civilian fighters with his enormous bag of pills, “Everyone, take a pouch of recovery pills and prepare for their numbers to grow. I’ll let you have these for half the price after this is all over…”

 

When she returned to the point that she had chosen initially, she was able to confirm that her suspicion was very likely to be correct. While the other locations were slowly growing in number of foes into the hundreds, this place had already been filled up to the thousands, with the initial killing array being far from sufficient to stop their growth. As a result, the maze-like pathways that she had created displayed their purpose, with the many killing, barrier and general obstruction arrays activating a countless number of times to stem the tide.

‘I suppose this is an excellent opportunity to try out a certain technique by the name of the Defiler’s Point Beams…’she leapt into the air towards the point where the greatest number of monstrosities had pooled up, then raised a hand into the air as forty-seven points of energy appeared within the air.

She attempted to change the quantity of points from which to fire, but she could only reduce the number of points and increase the power compacted within them, while going beyond that quantity proved to be entirely impossible despite the principles for the technique seemingly allowing it. Considering the rather specific number, she could only assume a single thing, and that was that the anchor shards of the member of the Great Family that she had integrated into her own anchor were affecting the technique itself, also suggesting a potential correlation between the quantity of the anchors that the Greats themselves had and the number of point beams that they would create.

Neither of the Great Family members that she had fought before had gone up to as many points as she did, and since their quantity of anchors remained high enough to facilitate more points than they typically produced, she assumed that their conclusion had been that condensing all of that energy into as few points as necessary was more efficient.

Whether or not that was true didn’t truly matter to her, as the most important thing now was to obliterate as many of the mirror abominations as she possibly could.

After a moment of charging up, the forty-seven points of cosmic light fired out simultaneously, striking the mirrored monsters and piercing directly through several layers of their assault while disintegrating their bodies entirely, after which the remaining energy either impacted the ground and blew away a few more invading monsters or damaged some others, impacting their mirror-like structure sufficiently to allow some of her established arrays to finish them off.

In the little time that she needed to build up the energy for one set of point beams, she analysed the process and made a small change to it as she created another set, repeating the process over a hundred times in just a few minutes as she hastened to cull the number of mirror-like monstrosities that were pouring into the rest of the district from the fog of the ground, occasionally being forced to undo one of the minor changes due to it not functioning in the manner that she expected. She wasn’t necessarily pursuing a perfection in these attacks as she had been with the arrays, as the only thing that she needed right now was to be able to attack as quickly as possible.

‘I could call this variation Defiler’s Beam Barrage, or something along those lines,’ she thought while deciding to attempt an even more significant alteration, changing the execution of the technique to repeatedly fire from a single point instead of requiring a constant repetition of the charging process.

Unlike the arrays that she had been working on earlier, this technique was significantly more refined and of a higher quality, meaning that the only changes she could reasonably make were those that shifted the intention of the combat technique towards a different purpose. In theory, once she advanced to her equivalent of the fourth realm through her perfected stages, she would be able to uncover new ways of advancing her version of the Defiler’s Point Beams, although considering the fact that the Greats appeared to use very similar techniques to one another, it was not impossible for the technique to have been developed up to the peak of whichever realm the Great Families had been able to reach at their best.

The version that she was able to acquire wasn’t complete, being a simple scan of what undoubtedly had a larger picture described through a technique manual, but so long as the base principles did not change significantly between different realms, she could theoretically extrapolate the exact superior variants of the technique just through what she already had.

One issue that she did foresee was that her cultivation path already differed from the Greats and most other people, given her fracturing five-sided anchor, the nascent rift within it, and the combination of four different cultivation paths being followed at the same time, meaning that if she was in some way restricted by the anchor shards or the lack of multiple anchors, her progress with the technique would eventually either stagnate entirely or otherwise fail to advance nearly as effectively as it should, hence the work that she was already putting in to trying out different variants of the point beams.

At that point, all of the current experimentation would determine whether she has enough information to come up with a suitable equivalent to the point beams, whether it involved combining the Dawn beam series with them or doing something entirely different.

‘Speaking of the Dawn Slicing Beam, if I incorporate everything that I learned from it into the Defiler’s Point Beams, I could create something like the Defiler’s Cutting Beam… Slicing Beam? Eh, fuck it…’

She dispersed the current forty-seven glowing points and instead rebuilt them, albeit limiting herself to only two points as to not spread her power too thinly across the energy nodes before she was able to master their execution. Out of all of her planar energy techniques, the Dawn Light series was perhaps the closest to the point beams in function and principle, and yet it did the most to show the difference between her own techniques and that of the Greats.

It was something that couldn’t truly be explained to someone without a great comprehension of planar cultivation, techniques and energy, although even understanding all of that wasn’t truly a guarantee, considering the fact that this couldn’t be summed up in simple diagrams and plain statements.

Perhaps the simplest way to put it would be to first compare the techniques created naturally to those composed by the gifts of otherworldly demons, like the Gilded Library and Wei Yi’s Ascendant’s Library. One was unnatural, highly straightforward but limited in terms of how it could be extrapolated and expanded without inspiration, while the other was the collection of all insights from the Gilded and the Augur’s Library, as well as every other technique that she was aware of, with a kind of natural flow and the potential for growth, even past the present incredible state that the mental library had reached after absorbing most of the killing intent and spiritual will of the Kong Prison Realm.

Meanwhile, the techniques of the Great Families were clearly natural, but they were oddly powerful and oppressive in their nature, perhaps being the reason for the terrifying presence that they always exuded, as if they originated from dragons rather than from men.

From what she understood, they were very different from actual draconic techniques, which were occasionally practised in the Daoist Continent, lacking any presence of powerful yang, the dragon bloodline, and every other attribute that could be ascribed to dragons, and instead possessed a certain order, a righteous property that brought her mind to the words that had slipped from one of their victims in the prison realm.

‘Blessings of the heavens… Certainly, that could be one possible source of that oppressive power, but I doubt the validity of their words, and although I have little respect for the heaven’s will – considering how little they appear to have done for me or for the world they presumably control – I doubt that they would be so weak as to be unable to supply the Great with techniques that can match the abilities of an otherworldly demon,’ she thought while dropping down onto the ground as an instance of her cutting point beams exhausted its power and finished tearing through a wave of mirror-like monstrosities, ‘Regardless, this is enough practise.’

As powerful as her many ranged attacks were, the combination of her powerful physique and planar energy best suited a different combat style.

“Bone of the Beast. White Echo,” she said to herself as she removed them from the House of Gold and wielded them within either hand, imbuing them with absolute killing will until they glowed brightly with silver and familiar crimson.

While she willed that energy to arrange itself according to the principle of the Moon and Sun Eclipse Split, the fog before her seemed to sense the threat that she posed to it, for all of it suddenly rose at once, over a thousand shapes filling the square that had been mostly emptied by her techniques and the constant barrage of the arrays above them. Few of them were large, but all of them could be seen to wield a maddening quantity of killing tools, whether natural or otherwise.

The speed at which they formed was greater yet again, taking almost a tenth of the time that they would require during their first formation.

‘I’ve forgotten how long this technique takes to execute… Excellent opportunity to waste all of those anchor points, seeing how many of them I have managed to acquire. Perhaps more of the Mirror Plane Aberrations will emerge from the ground and supply me with more, or perhaps their deaths beneath the ground will still result in me acquiring their anchor points,’ she considered, before opening the interface of the Truth of the Universe and quickly pressing on the button beside the category labelled Eclipse Ire and Split.

Since she could improve both, she would naturally improve both as much as was necessary.

That line took only a moment to fade before it reappeared, with the label of Full Success changing to that of the First Stage. Perhaps due to the focus of her current need and desire, or through the natural route of the principles that permitted for the Demonic Ire and the techniques she derived from it, there was no great boost in her energy, as everything was instead focused on the very nature of the energy, transforming it from a violent power into… well, it remained a violent power, but it developed a more controlled nature that greatly enhanced not only its offensive capability, but also the rate at which it could be used and how much she could control it.

In an instant after, the sun and moon formed above her, carving the night’s sky in two as it was split between pale moonlight and radiant sunlight. Neither provided much light yet, their form mostly obscured by one another and by a shadow of an eclipse, but this twin display still provided enough to slightly brighten the entirety of the Ning District, bringing the events to the attention of those that were still unaware of the Mirror Plane.

Most importantly of all, that included the guards that were stationed on the top of the enormous wall, who quickly turned half of all of their ranged weaponry towards the inside of the district while they established exactly what the cause of the sun and moon was, as well as any other potential threats.

However, their actions were of no importance to Wei Yi, whose attack progressed rapidly.

The blocked sun and moon were slowly unveiled, the former shining upon the Bone of the Beast while the latter shone upon White Echo, until their light was at its brightest and fullest, illuminating the entire district even more brightly than the natural sun and the natural moon could do in combination with one another. Without the split itself being executed, the light alone was able to scorch the weaker horrors from the Mirror Plane, disintegrating the weaker ones while the strongest were slowed, held back and otherwise weakened.

It was then that Wei Yi slashed through the air, the moon and sun passing one another as their blades cut the world in half.

None could tell whether there was one slash or two, whether or not it truly pierced space itself, or even whether their colour in any way resembled that of the sun and moon, but what could never be denied by her, any random observer, or even the heavens themselves was that it occurred in a single instant, the slashes piercing through the area between her and the buildings on the other side of the open square, obliterating every single fog creature that stood there.

They had no opportunity to break down into particles of mirror shards and assist further entities in reforming themselves, and even the great fog seemed to decrease in density after her cut. It almost seemed as if she would be able to clear out the fog entirely, so long as she persevered.

Such a feeling did not last for long.