Wei Yi had indeed not chosen to stand by and suffer the attacks of the Greats, for despite her previous seeming inattention to each blow, she was currently bleeding from a number of severe wounds, with much of her arms, legs and even stomach being absent from her current body.

Through the combination of her many forms of energy, as well as her sheer will, she had been able to put up an illusion through an enforcement of the Dao of Law, empowered by her conquering of the world within that room where she had truly placed her anchor prior to the beginning of the fight, also using the Dao of Law to bring their attention away from it and onto her, but she would not be able to endure for much longer. Fortunately, she had no need to do so, as she had already learned a number of key things during her act.

It had started when she had caught sight of some of the other new servants being transported to the Chu District to be displayed, allowing her to learn of the method and disguise her own state to be akin to that displayed by these servants. With the combination of the Dao of Law and sheer luck, she managed to fool both the Great Ping and the Great Chu into believing that the deceased Ping Wu had been the one to capture her, with that benefitting especially from the fact that they apparently couldn’t confirm his death or life without some kind of specific, monthly ritual. She then allowed herself to be placed on stage and abused for the liking of the crowd and the Great Chu third generation, and then all she needed to do was maintain her calm for just long enough.

Most of it had indeed been sheer luck, allowing her to end up with the combination of actions and words within her letters to convince all of them for long enough to permit her to feed them her poisoned food, although she was truly unable to make anything better than that without a proper sense of taste nor much care for cooking in the past.

That they had eaten so much was fortunate, and that they had decided to take it slow was even more so. As such, when she decided to act, she couldn’t help but comment on their carelessness.

She was sure that they wouldn’t act like this again, even if they really hated one of the other Great Families and wanted them to be tricked in the same way by her. They would talk about it, let everyone know of the actions that she had taken, but that was just what she wanted. After all, Wei Yi had already said their title, their name in this world, and she was not going to let it be the last time. There needed to be war, and she would make sure that it would come for all of them.

Before then, of course, she needed to return to Paragon, and she wished to do so without the use of the Kong Prison Realm, just so that the exact location of the desert fortress would not be revealed to the Greats before they learned of it some other way. There was still a lot that she could do if her location was unknown, so spilling it and unveiling the secret of the current state of the Kong Prison Realm would be a shame just to make it back more quickly. Once she had no other choice, then she could unleash the full power that instant transportation across the world offered, and the Greats would then learn just who they thought they could treat as a servant.

Going straight back was an option, but for the moment that she was concealed from their gaze and spiritual perception, she had a much better idea in the form of heading to a room that she had found within their mansion.

Due to not using perception in order to not break her cover, she hadn’t looked into it before, but nearly everything about it screamed that it was a treasury or otherwise a place for the storage of valuables. If she didn’t take at least something from them, she would be extremely disappointed with herself. Every little thing she takes, after all, is yet another loss for the Great Families, so why wouldn’t she go all out?

Wei Yi broke right through the door, ignoring the feeble attempts of the lock to resist her. The Greats did appear to expect at least one intruder to this place, but none of them seemed to expect anything more than a casual thug breaking in, hence setting up no inscriptions or arrays to protect it at all. On the inside, she was able to confirm all of the things that she had noticed with her spiritual perception: large boxes, bottles and whatever else of various alchemical materials, but, more importantly, pills and even some elixirs, some of which she could recognise from some of her earlier battles with the Greats.

Some would undoubtedly accelerate regeneration, so she consumed those first, making sure to purge any impurities from within them while consuming them as to not suffer from any potential detrimental effects that might be lodged within them, then proceeded onto the cultivation resources that were also stored there, which did confuse her to a certain extent. There were plenty of materials sufficient for the regular person to reach the seventh realm a hundred times over, so long as they did not waste a single drop of the energy within them, and yet all of the Greats were still in their distinct realms, with the third generation being in the Emergent Anchor realm, the second being in the Marked Core realm, and the first being in the Oblivion Halo realm.

This confirmed one of her earlier thoughts on the matter of them stalling their advancement until a very specific point in time, as they would have no other reason to stock up on that many items if they didn’t intend to go through two realms in one go. This was something that wouldn’t be advised unless their foundation had been fully established and prepared for a whole two realms of improvement, but it still seemed like a rather odd thing to do no matter how prepared they were.

‘The only possibility that I can currently think of is that they are all aware, to some extent, of the limited quantity of energy within the world at the moment, and wish to maintain a certain balance through their disgusting practises. They can rest assured, then, that I shall put everything that they have collected to good use and cleanse them from existence, freeing the world of their blight once and for all,’ Wei Yi thought as she collected everything she could into the House of Gold, filling it up by as much as possible while devouring the pills that she could immediately digest.

Mostly, that included the pills that already contained energy within them and simply needed to be converted into one’s own power, since she not only had a vast pool of energy that was simply waiting to be filled, but also the bloodline of the Greats that she could trigger at any time. With it, absorbing their energy was easier, even if she hated doing it.

All of this was complete in moments, with her entirely ignoring the few artefacts that were present simply because they would occupy too much space and be too difficult for her to use, and yet their attention already managed to return to her after breaking the illusion of the Dao of Law. She could distinctly sense their spiritual perception rushing through the broken door and towards her position, as she had made sure to learn exactly what it felt like as to be able to avoid it in the future, and thus finished up her robbery by punching right through the wall and escaping out of the newly made side entrance to their property.

She could not move faster than spiritual perception of the fifth realm, not even if she was to manifest some divine movement skill of the fourth realm, but she did not intend to simply flee.

Instead, she leapt onto a hill some distance from the mansion and gathered Obliteration energy within her own hands, as well as that of the Titanic Conqueror, then shot everything into the sky once more, using the surplus low-quality energy that she had already digested by that point to flood the sky above the building with as much of the black and crimson energy as it could possibly fit, not caring about the figures that rushed out of it, for they couldn’t help but raise their heads to look.

The moment that happened, she brought the skies down upon them, or so it looked like from the side, as an enormous sphere of energy that gathered in the air erupted into a devastating beam a dozen times the size that had previously pierced their roof. Even now, that hole was still present, and it helped Wei Yi to compare just how different their sizes were when this beam crashed down upon the mansion, completely consuming it and the hole within it, even catching those who were still inside and burning all of them with a similar fury.

Naturally, she knew that there were other servants inside, others that had been controlled by the power of the Great Families, but from the way in which the technique to subjugate their minds worked, she knew that she could do nothing to help them recover.

It took the very cultivation of a person, including their dantian, and forced it all into an energy that would forcefully drain the mind, turning the brain into something that would merely coordinate the signals forced into it by the Greats. The challenge wasn’t just to break that, but to completely recreate the identities of the people there, which was far more difficult than repairing the damage to Min Lian’s mind back in the prison realm. This needed a complete reconstruction, and even if she met everyone who had known those people and spoke to them, she would hardly get an ideal image. Furthermore, and one of the reasons that she didn’t even want to try, was the way in which Min Lian had been permanently affected by a single mistake in the execution of the reconnection process.

She had already inflicted it upon one, and she didn’t want to create puppets for herself with those same flaws out of the bodies present at the mansion. Ending their lives was a mercy for them.

As soon as the last wisp of Obliteration energy left her hands, she fled, and a moment later, the Titanic Conqueror vanished when the energy that it had been channelling also expired. All of that immense power that had been conjured from within the entity soared into the sky, not needing a guiding hand, joined with the crashing beam, and also fell upon the Great Ping Family’s mansion, obliterating it entirely.

Although she was able to hear the wavering of some of the cores, it was insufficient to shatter a single one despite her having her Endless Monolith down behind her, which she naturally picked up the moment that she rushed away, and did so with no hesitation at all.

The moment that she vanished from that spot, a dozen concentrated point beams fell upon it, but she was already gone by then, combining the fact that the World’s Echo physique ability permitted her to keep her momentum. She used it to soar into the air, conquer it with the Conqueror’s Eye, and then blink further into the distance, using the built up momentum to extend the distance of each blink and vastly accelerate her own journey. In moments, she was gone from that clearing amidst the mountains, and on top of one of them, then hastened even further out through the mountainous peaks.

Behind her, the Greats would undoubtedly be angry at her destruction of their property, and perhaps some would chase after her, but while she knew that they possessed some methods to rapidly free from her own attacks, she was much faster than any of them could ever be without the assistance of some high-grade artefact, all of which were either destroyed or damaged by Obliteration.

When she had been arriving to the Great Ping Family mansion, she had been doing so with fury boiling within her heart, and while she left it with that having multiplied by a thousand times, there was also a trace of joy within her. She had learnt not only what Testament was – that being a place, a spatial realm to the west of something – but also partly what it was for, and more importantly now knew the right approach when fighting one of the Greats.

If she couldn’t kill them outright, then piercing their defences and wounding them was not ideal. Instead, she had to shred their anchors, each and every single one of them. That way, the Greats would lose them and then either be faced with the prospect of ending their own lives so that their generation could be remade with new anchors and weaker experience and cultivation, or to keep on going with less of their power available to them. Certainly, she was sure that assisting them in losing even more of their anchors than they already had through the passage of time would be glorious, for they had closer to forty-seven when one of them had entered the Kong Prison Realm, and only had around thirty-eight on average now.

She could also instruct her Arbiters in ways to damage specifically the anchors and not the people behind them, preventing them from having the chance to end the lives of one of their own in mercy and then remaking their generation while impacting their future combat ability.

To ensure that any of her pursuers didn’t have a clue where to follow her, she split herself via the Red Phantom Flood as to travel as far in different directions as she could, scattering the ones she didn’t need and then proceeding with the one that had been going vaguely in the wrong direction, before making use of Aerial Platforms that changed their element and aura with each one that she placed as to make it even more difficult to follow her. After all, even if they were to know that she could switch elements, they couldn’t know whether any aura belonged to her or to someone else.

However, she did not rush back to Paragon right away, for that would be slightly complicated with the vast quantity of energy that bubbled inside of her body at that moment. Wei Yi had eaten quite a few cultivation pills before rushing out of the mansion, and although she could handle all of them at first, the quantity of energy was truly quite high, and could be used for at least one breakthrough if she didn’t squander it on the move.

In order to best make use of that building power and to be at her best when arriving at the desert fortress, she concluded that she would be better off stalling for a few moments, although that meant something closer to around a few days in order to get through everything that she had wished to process. There were some pills that would be useful to ordinary cultivators of the fourth and fifth realm, which would greatly assist those in Paragon and the Kong Prison Realm, but some of the resources were solely useful to people in the sixth and seventh realm, which happened to also mean that it would be of incredible use to her.

For the purpose of doing this smoothly and safely, she split apart with the Red Phantom Flood a few more times, enduring the horrific torment that the technique forced upon her mind, strong as it was in most other aspects, then finally found and settled within a cave on the side of a rather large mountain that she had found.

She locked it away, sealed it off with rocks and arrays and inscriptions, then settled in and consumed pill bottle after pill bottle, consuming all of the energy within them to force her own advancement.

 

“Now, let us all begin the Life Spark Sensing ceremony. We must inspect and confirm whether or not Ping Wu remains alive, and whether the words of the Ping, Bai and the Luo can be confirmed,” an elderly figure shrouded in darkness said, a number of others like him nodding along with his words, “Ping Fu, stand.”

The woman obeyed, rising while she kept her gaze down, although a trace of anger within her mind tempted her to raise it and demand that action was taken by their word alone, without requiring the confirmation of the ceremony. After all, they had all seen that woman, Wei Yi, with her full cultivation despite the letter that had been sent. They had seen her shred through their mansion with a clear sense of purpose in her eyes and an obvious degree of consciousness and intelligence that could never be missed by anyone, no matter how terrible they might have been at their attempt to purge a mind.

A number of their very own number died before their eyes while their home was destroyed, and yet the first generation wanted to wait? It was preposterous!

“Calm yourself, Ping Fu. Remember what we had spoken about,” Bai Chao reminded her.

That helped the flames of fury to fade, just a little bit. The first generation tended to act more like machines than men most of the time, and to pull them away from such a state would greatly endanger their cause. As such, while their insistence on protocol and following the ancient rules of all proceedings was incredibly frustrating, it was something that had to be followed if the purpose of the Greats was to be followed and preserved.

The figures of the first generation raised their hands, their power gathering in a single point amidst the darkness, into which one of the Great Ping’s first generation released a droplet of blood.

It was frozen in the air there, hovering for a little while before a faint light pulsed from it, moving slowly at first but accelerating rapidly, spreading out and coming into contact with Ping Fu. Her own blood trembled for a moment, the movements being relayed to the droplet, but for the light to go further, to sense more than those residing in that place, the very matter that caused it to be a monthly ritual needed to be put to use. A powerful array deep within that realm ignited, all of the energy that had gathered over the past month suddenly erupting outwards.

There was no single point from which all of that energy came out in the Planar Continents. Instead, it surged from every single member of the Great Families, anyone that somehow possessed any of their blood, and the many objects that they had touched and left behind.

It was an eighth realm principle, one that far surpassed the seventh realm capabilities of those currently using it, hence the build-up time. To resonate with the entire world consumed far more energy that could be manifested within a day by those of the limited seventh realm, but with a month to spare, excessive power could be siphoned off for the purpose of being used in all kinds of processes and rituals that the Greats required.

All of the individual points pulsed with the same light that had spread out from the droplet of blood in the air, and quickly spread throughout the Western Continent, but the image that it provided looked grim, to say the least. Quickly, the individual districts were all ruled out, and soon the waves were spreading only into the wilderness while the second and first generation alike looked upon the map that they also used to track down those who used their title. Both had their eyes focused upon it, but the two generations had very different purposes in gazing upon the map, and very different reasons for being so focused upon it.

The first generation naturally wished to learn of the location of Ping Wu, whether or not he was alive, but the second generation that had been present at the fight at the Great Ping Family mansion, Ping Fu especially, desired to know where it was that one of their children had perished, and whether it was truly the Rebel that had been responsible for it.

Although they were confident of his demise, they had no idea whether it had been the woman calling herself Wei Yi, or if she had merely taken advantage of the situation, and whether Ping Wu had the chance to leave the place from which he had sent his message. While his body may have been dead and lifeless, without a beat or breath, the remnant energy of the anchors was bound to give them a better idea of his location, and answer those questions that burned at their minds as they waited for a spark to appear upon the map.

However, there was nothing. Not a single light upon the map, nor a flash in some distant point.

“I knew it! I had told you, and…” Ping Fu attempted to quieten her rage so that her words could be delivered with any degree of reliability and be in any way convincing, “The Rebel had already attacked us once, and we must prevent her from doing so again!”

Bai Chao stepped up and added, “Judging by the message from the late Ping Wu, we can presume that the Rebel and any forces she has will be residing somewhere near, if not in, the abandoned fortress once used by the Master of Yi City. If we assault it at this very moment, it is unlikely to be in a state suitable for proper defence and will allow us to root out the Rebels before they have any chance to influence our activities.”

Their words were heard by the first generation, and they were considered for some time before a reply was given.

 

Once five stages and four perfected stages were achieved, the next step was to unlock the unique feature of the fourth realm that only Wei Yi would achieve with her attainment of every single perfected stage so far, and she was very excited to see exactly what she would achieve. She had spent several days simply sitting around and cultivating, absorbing as much of the energy of the resources that she had taken as she could, and had naturally developed her other forms of energy at the same time.

With the vast quantity of energy rapidly surging throughout her body, the easiest things to develop were her physique energy and bloodline power, both of which had partly lagged behind her mental energies. She had wanted to develop her own bloodline by a realm or two, but she was unfortunately only able to bring it up to the next realm of Echo Awakening, reaching the third stage by the time that her mid-realm breakthrough was approaching. As before, each single stage increased the power of all of her forms of energy by a small degree, and as most other states of cultivation and their stages, the moment that she passed from the ninth stage to the first stage of the second realm, she acquired the same benefit as she might have obtained from regular planar cultivation.

Her bloodline power had naturally become denser and more stable outside of her body with the second realm, and it felt easier to switch between her killing will form and regular state than before, but other than that, she witnessed no grandiose transformations.

That much was to be expected, however, since her bloodline was that of the Ascendant, not of some other inhuman entity. All that would deepen would be her own condition, making it more stable and difficult to alter, potentially limiting her own aging further than just her planar energy would, and her most striking features did become slightly more prominent… which include the recently acquired one, although, fortunately, the change was slight.

Without a full breakthrough of a realm, instead only reaching the ninth stage of her physique energy, she had also not gotten to experience any particular changes, but she had managed to ascend a few of her physique abilities by a stage or two. Her newly strengthened Superior Bright Star ability was able to make the shine of her eyes brighter, and more importantly strengthened her Conqueror’s Eye through some collaboration of eye-based energies. The Human Immortal Mortal ability further increased the width and strength of her five sets of meridians, permitting them to channel even more energy than they could before.

The Pure Restorative Spring and the Superior Vitality Siphon abilities would both permit her to heal the people under her more swiftly, allowing her to channel more lifeforce out of her body at any time, although that would first need to be refilled from the Kong Prison Realm before she could safely employ her full capacity.

Being named in much the same fashion as many other physique abilities, the Superior Energy Pylon did much of the same, and would be particularly useful in advancing the cultivation of her Ascendant’s Arbiters, as well as hopefully permitting their level of cultivation to reach more acceptable and useful levels within a shorter period of time without her needing to invoke that which was held within the anchor energy points. Speaking of those, she currently had more than a thousand of them, and with what far fewer could achieve, she suspected that she might be able to revitalise the world with them.

With the Mortal Lion’s Roar and, more importantly, the Mortal World’s Echo abilities, the names of which had also clearly been following a system of their own, she could achieve a significant amount, although only the latter was of significant use. As her ability to move further in a single blink of the world, and to remain absent from the world for a few instants longer, her ability to resist attacks and rapidly move on a battlefield would be greatly improved.

Then, two movement type abilities had also developed, with the Mystical Bridge ability awakening to permit her to transport any troops that might travel with her to cross gaps that only she could previously handle, while the Superior Aerial Foothold would aid her own capacity in that field.

Her Titanic Conqueror, which was now the permanent state of the Titanic Demolisher ability without sacrificing any of the initial abilities that it had possessed, and in fact strengthening it with double the number of hands that it had before this, had advanced, but she wasn’t sure that the older names would be suitable for it. Instead, she pulled from the theoretical names for the Conqueror’s Eye, and thus named the advanced state the True Titanic Conqueror. Each of the abilities that it could use were empowered, but if she made use of the four quarters of the Conqueror’s Eye herself, they would be unaffected.

Additionally, she had acquired the Humanity Lance ability, one that she had taken a long, long time ago and had not awakened so far. The rest of the abilities from a similar vein didn’t prove to be too significant in her journey so far, but she did consider the acquisition of yet another combat ability to be an ultimately beneficial one due to the overall strengthening of her physique.

Wei Yi had hoped to acquire one of the otherworldly physiques through these developments, but she did not feel a single one of them being even slightly tempted to awaken, and did begin to suspect that this would not be something within her range of abilities. Whether due to her lack of an azure light, some incompatibility between the Yin-Yang Ascendant and the otherworldly physiques, or something else entirely, it might be impossible for the Mirrored Being or the Martial God abilities to be acquired by her. A shame, but an expected one.

‘The breakthrough is clearly approaching. My pool of energy is full, the core is shimmering with energy, and I am ready… I had some clue of what the Endless Monolith might be, but the core hasn’t been cracking, quaking, changing… Really makes one wonder just what the world has in store for me.’

She briefly confirmed the state of her arrays and other defences, making sure that she wouldn’t be in any danger while her core would be out in the world, surrounding her and the Endless Monolith during her breakthrough, then shut her eyes once more, immersing herself within the darkness. Allowing all of her energy to approach a breakthrough, to approach that edge until the next half of the realm, she prepared and waited.

After less than a month of being in the Active Core realm, she approached the fifth stage.