The journey took a whole week, but in the end, they arrived at Xi Village, stepping onto the edge of the cliff and feeling a degree of relief.

It was their first time engaging in such a journey over air, and while some hid it far better than others, none were quite comfortable with it, and they were certain that the journey back wouldn’t be significantly better. Of course, before it would be reasonable for even a single one of them to return, they first needed to learn of the situation at the village.

The nine outer disciples had arrived without a specific leader or commander, but one immediately stepped ahead of the rest and advanced towards the man waiting for them – Li Shen, the Phoenix of the Sect (known as such only to a few outer disciples, even if she’d like it to be otherwise).

Her flame-like orange hair and deep azure eyes mixed with her proud, stern expression made many compare her to the legendary ancient beasts that were fading from the world, and some said that even the Phoenix Sect believed that Li Shen had some phoenix blood in her. None were sure where the rumour started from, nor why the Phoenix Sect would have cared about an outer disciple, nor why this all first discussed by Li Shen’s friends, but that was a different matter.

“Are you the one in charge of the village?” she spoke the moment she neared him, cutting off any of the other disciples, “Well?”

“I am Lin Shuming, captain of the guard,” he introduced himself, bowing to them despite all of them being in the same realm, “I am glad you’ve arrived, though it has been quite a while since the incident.”

“What happened-” one of the disciples, a man by the name of Wu Taoshi, tried to speak up only for Li Shen’s far more confident – and more importantly, loud – voice to cut him off and leave him with his head bowed in shame at his failing existence.

“We have heard your call. So, what has threatened your mortal village?”

“It… There was a woman that had been found outside the village. She seemed to be missing her memories, but after a while it became apparent that she was using demonic cultivation techniques. When cornered, she killed Song Ling – a respected man – and fled. Song Ling’s daughter, Song Ming, has already headed out to chase after her,” Lin Shuming summarised, glancing at some of the villagers that had come with him to greet the disciples, “Additionally, there has been a series of thefts that we believe to be the demon’s doing, but she never confessed to it.”

“Have you found those items yet?” a different voice managed to ask the question, belonging to Qi Ping, a less notable disciple of a similar age to Li Shen.

She seemed dull and visually uninteresting for the most part, save for her long black hair that reached down to her tights – with some loose strands and clumps obscuring parts of her face – and brilliant, glowing purple eyes that easily pierced the darkness of her hair. All that saw her noticed that detail, and many remembered it even with few other acts of significant note.

“You…” Li Shen’s expression immediately twisted, clenching her teeth as a wave of immense fury flashed on her face, “Do explain this to us. Since this demonic cultivator has fled, surely you have found the things they have stolen?”

For a moment, Lin Shuming looked between her and Qi Ping, clearly a little confused, but in the end he responded simply, “No, we haven’t been able to track down a single thing. Two technique manuals – one of which I cultivate, the Nexus of Light – and a prized blade, a two star weapon that was in the possession of our village’s cook, Min Yu.”

“Another cultivator?” Li Shen made sure to speak quickly, sending a brief glare towards Qi Ping.

“No. In fact, Song Ming and I are the only cultivators in the second realm within the village at this moment,” he specified.

“Tch. We should just go after that thief of yours, and we’ll probably find locate those items on her body. Did you get a name from her?” Li Shen asked, hoping that the woman would be someone from the bounty board of the Blazing Skies Sect.

“We cannot confirm whether it is real or not, but she claimed to be called Bianca.”

For a few moments, she gave it some consideration herself, then turned to some of the disciples to her side, silently asking them to do the same. The name certainly wasn’t a famous one, as one of them was certain to have remembered it right away, though it was likely that nobody in Xi Village would have survived had someone that famous passed through. After all, few would become famous demonic cultivators – the primary type of individuals found on the aforementioned bounty board – without committing mass slaughters and wiping out large numbers of people without regret or shame, a thing that clearly did not happen here.

In that silence, Qi Ping spoke up again, “We should seek out the items that had been taken. They might lead us to clues about this ‘Bianca’, or perhaps reveal the involvement of others that you had not seen.”

“Do you really want us to be wasting our time on things like… ah, I know!” Li Shen’s face suddenly lit up with a beaming smile, “You, umm… Wu Taoshi and… Shu Long Meng?”

“I-It’s Shu Long Sheng.”

“Whatever. You three stay behind and look for the stolen things. We’ll chase down this Bianca and the other girl that went after her, and take down the demonic cultivator! Come, the rest of you. We have a demon to hunt down.”

“Incidentally, she went south.”

Li Shen glanced in Lin Shuming’s direction, “Very well. I’ll pass a good word along to the elders of the sect. I won’t waste any more time in this place, though. We’re leaving. Have fun, Qi Ping!”

She practically skipped away like a young girl, leaving the five other disciples to follow after her, leaving behind the three in the middle of the open area, with Lin Shuming and other villagers staring at the situation awkwardly.

“That was… as immature as ever. Lin Shuming, can you bring me to where you kept your technique manual?”

 

“Die, mountain! Die, you piece of shit!” Bianca’s cries might have been audible for kilometres around, though she had not been shouting the whole way down the mountain, “I don’t care how, but please die and let me get down safely!”

After travelling for more than a week, she had plenty of opportunities to experiment with her Dominion’s Light, and to attempt to investigate her Demonic Form. One proved more successful than the other, for she had been unable to confirm anything about the latter. Her body seemed as durable as ever, her stomach handled the things she ate about as well as she’d expect when factoring in the apparent effect of planar energy, and there were no observable changes to her appearance.

Obviously, she lacked a proper mirror or a phone to check that she didn’t get glowing demonic eyes or something, but her skin and hands were certainly normal, so she hadn’t got the slightest clue of what was supposed to be happening.

As for Dominion’s Light, it appeared to have two primary effects that were most effective when she actively wished for a target’s death, even if that target was an inanimate object, like the side of a mountain. The first was that she became able to pierce the target far more easily than normal, meaning that a simple kitchen knife could stab into stone and partially lodge itself within it.

The second effect was something she probably should have noticed from the start, as it affected the durability of her weapon – or the durability of her own fingers, apparently.

“Die, you… ah, my throat is not liking this… Why am I yelling out loud, anyway?” Bianca asked herself, glancing down at the earth below, ‘Shit, there’s still a long way to go… At least it should be near the sea level, or something like that. I might finally be able to move on and find civilisation!’

Once she arrived to a cliff edge on her way to the south for the first time, she had to ponder how to get down without breaking all the bones in her body. In the end, she determined that it might have been a good idea to try employing her only sharp weapon as a sort of spike for climbing down the mountain, as she thought that it might be feasible if her skill proved to be sufficiently effective at empowering the kitchen knife.

It didn’t enter her mind at first that the knife might be an object that could break, at least not until she tried stabbing it into some stone and suddenly remembered that metal tended to be somewhat brittle.

‘Thinking back on it, I was very lucky that Dominion’s Light has that protective effect, both on the knife and on my hand. It would be unfortunate if I had lost my fingers to an attempt to stab it into some stone… Goodness, my body hurts so much from all of this. Ow. I swear, it’s like I’ve been climbing for hours…’

With no watch, she couldn’t verify her idea, nor could she believe that she was somehow strong enough to endure a climb like that. Hence, she was just going to assume that the stress and effort of the situation were mixing together to prevent her from having a good understanding of the situation.

On this descent, she used the same method as she did on her first, employing the knife and her fingers to get a grip on the stone and then relied on the uneven stone below and the ever so slightly leaned outwards, meaning that in certain circumstances, she was able to safely place her foot onto the stone and get a breath or two in before she continued on her way down. Getting a longer period of rest would have been nice, but she knew that if she stood still for too long, whatever adrenaline was driving her forward would run out and she would succumb to her exhaustion and plummet down to the bottom of the cliff.

She continued on, step by step, knife stab by stab, pausing every few steps in order to recover whatever energy she could.

There was plenty of air around for her to inhale, and there should be as much planar energy, but her Tyrannical Deity technique wasn’t able to keep pace with her consumption of her own energy. Hence, every step was slowly exhausting the darkness within her body, forcing her to simultaneously minimize the amount of energy she used, and increase the power of her stabs enough to still pierce the stone.

It was tough, especially when she still didn’t understand a thing about controlling her power without the support of the Demonic Tyrant, but the strange screen still existed and continued to provide its support without any explanation to her or anyone else – as far as she knew.

‘Alright, mountain… die!’ she exclaimed within her mind again, but as she attempted to pierce the stone, the tip of the knife bounced off.

Unfortunately, she had gotten into the rhythm of immediately lowering her hand and attempting to acquire a new grip on the cliff, so she had lost both of her primary holds on the mountain side and, due to the force from the knife colliding with stone, she was knocked back off her footholds as well. In a single moment of terrible error, she was sent plummeting down to the earth.

A moment later, she crashed into grass and earth, her back taking the brunt of the impact.

However, she was both conscious and alive, and she clearly hadn’t lost feeling in her body, so she probably wasn’t paralysed from the impact. It was akin to a miracle, until she looked up and saw the marks she had left on the mountain.

‘Wait, was I this close to the ground? I could have gotten down in a dozen more steps or so… No wonder I’m still alive,’ Bianca realised, letting out a sigh of relief, ‘I guess I lost track of my place and got lucky in falling out only now. Thank the heavens, or something along those lines… Still hurts like a bitch, though.’

She reached into her pocket and took out a fruit that was significantly less visually impressive than her glistening berries, but edible and nutritious nonetheless.

As she bit off a bit and chewed on it, she let herself recover some energy and glanced inside herself with spiritual perception, checking her spine and, after she made sure that it didn’t seem to be damaged, her dantian.

The cloud of darkness with flashing crimson and purple filled up quickly now that she wasn’t actively consuming it, and she saw that it was growing close to the limit of her planar aperture. Provided she was able to keep going, she would reach the next stage within the next few days, though it seemed like she was making the most progress thanks to the strenuous mountain climbing she had been engaging in lately. If she had less need to take in energy constantly, she would inevitably need a little more time to reach the next step.

Even with all the time she had spent with this energy, she wasn’t sure whether it was a good thing or not, but it certainly helped her down the mountain, so at least that was decent.

She finished eating the fruit and threw away the core, licking off the juices from her fingers and getting up, putting her knife onto her leg and looking around. From the top, there was plenty of mist and foliage to obscure her sight, so it was hard to get a good understanding of her surroundings before now.

Mostly, it was similar to the lands above, full of trees and foliage and what not, but over to the east, she saw hints of the forest thinning ever so slightly. Given that she had gotten off the mountain, she thought that it might be a decent idea to get a better grasp of her location and decide on the most suitable direction to head in – a village or some town would probably be best, as it would allow her to eat properly without needing to decipher the numerous mysteries of cooking – and a clear area might grant her vision over a very large region, potentially revealing numerous small settlements and what not.

So long as news from Xi Village didn’t pass through the mountains in the same manner as she did, Bianca might be able to get some peace and quiet while she sought to figure out some kind of way forward, a rather difficult thing to imagine at the moment. Even another small village should be alright, so long as she just kept quiet about her cultivation and didn’t invite the same kind of distrust as in her previous place of residence.

She headed towards the south-east, as getting away from the mountains seemed like a good idea, and soon arrived at the open region, a hill that rose over some of the smaller trees and gave her a decent view of the land.

To the south, she mostly saw forests and little more. To the east, there were also quite a few forests, though they thinned at the edge of her vision, so perhaps there was something of note over there. However, to the south-east, the only remaining direction she could go in without running back into the Dragon’s Fangs, she saw some kind of light amidst the trees, and although it seemed rather odd in both shade and brightness, it was still a sign of… something. Bianca did recall the strange glowing plants she’d seen on the other side of the Dragon’s Fangs, but these seemed different.

Hence, she concluded that the best thing to do would be to head over to the south-east and investigate the area.

 

“This is your residence, correct?” Qi Ping asked, glancing back at Lin Shuming.

He nodded, “Yes. My manual was stored within that set of drawers, under some other items, but there was no lock.”

“And you thought that to be wise?”

“There are no thieves in the village, and nobody would think to look under my bedsheets for a cultivation technique unless they already had the ability to externalise their spiritual perception,” Lin Shuming quickly argued, though he was clearly ashamed of his decision.

Qi Ping shrugged, “I would like some quiet to help me focus, so please remain silent for a while. I should be finished in a few minutes at most.”

He nodded and took a step back, exiting the door frame but keeping a hand on the door so that it didn’t shut from a gust of wind. That was good enough, so after a few moments of relaxed breathing, she shut her eyes, held the bridge of her nose with her thumb and index finger, and focused on the energy within her body.

Due to certain circumstances, Qi Ping was one of the rare people to awaken a physique on their own, and her physique was among the rarer and more powerful ones. The Watcher’s Gaze was not an offensive or defensive physique, meaning that it provided only minimal benefits to her body overall and did little to directly assist her in combat, but in certain situations, it was greater than nearly any other absolute physique.

When her eyes opened, the faint violet glow intensified vastly, and what she saw changed completely.

Countless details that were invisible to the human eye jumped out, transforming everything into sights of impossible complexity and nuance. Even with plenty of practise, experiencing this hurt her head slightly, but she pressed on and looked around the area.

At first, everything was as she expected from the home of a man that lived alone. Plenty of details were ones that she was comfortable with ignoring completely, as they did little more than increase the discomfort of using her physique ability in this manner, but one thing jumped out at her the moment that she spotted it.

‘Planar energy, bound and directed into a skill… Traces of it remain near the drawers, exactly where the manual should have been hidden…’ she shut her eyes for the moment, as to not exhaust herself too quickly, and addressed Lin Shuming, “What type of energy did that demon of yours use?”

“What type? Are you referring to an archetype?”

“Just describe some basic attributes. Appearance, feeling, speed and so on.”

“Dark and… uncomfortable. Demonic. Evil,” he struggled to provide her with many suitable descriptors, but it proved to be sufficient.

“This theft in particular was not done by her, unless she has an uncannily good ability to transform her planar energy,” Qi Ping shook her head, “Furthermore, you mentioned she was in the first realm, correct?”

“That’s right.”

She frowned, “On the other hand, the energy here… Fourth realm? It has decayed somewhat, so it is hard to be certain. Either way, Bianca should not have been able to conduct the theft, though, perhaps if she had a companion you had not observed, she might still be related to this matter. We should look at the other sites of theft, so… Mind leading me over?”

The moment she opened her eyes, she would be overwhelmed with information, and although she could decipher exactly when a person had last stepped there and perhaps even where that person had been in the last week, she would not be able to navigate the area properly.

It would also exhaust her use of the physique for the day, making further investigation rather challenging.

Lin Shuming probably couldn’t understand all of this, being a man from a small village in the middle of the isolated Dragon’s Fangs, but he was clever enough to simply do as he was asked, leading her by the hand to the home that was once occupied by the Song family, and then to Min Yu’s residence. In both of those places, she observed the same energy, of a similar intensity, and when she got to see traces of Bianca’s planar energy, she got two things out of it.

On one hand, the energy was indeed very demonic, for lack of a better word. It was unpleasant to be near it, not to mention gazing upon it using her Watcher’s Gaze. She was happy to depart from it as quickly as possible.

Still, seeing it for herself confirmed that it appeared to originate from the early first realm, and may literally have been acquired on the very day Bianca claimed to gain it. That meant that this part was no lie, at least as far as she knew, and the only alternative was that Bianca was some kind of incredibly powerful cultivator playing some kind of strange game and deliberately misleading everyone.

That alternative was very unlikely, so she was forced towards a single, simple conclusion – Bianca might have been telling the truth, or at least part of the truth. She might well have lost some or all of her memories, and she might well have acquired the ability to cultivate her very particular technique through some incident she couldn’t understand. Perhaps, when given access to a planar shard, she merely copied what she had done before the loss of her memory, thus producing her cultivation anew and without her knowledge.

Such a perspective left Qi Ping with a question: was Bianca’s intent as nefarious as Lin Shuming and plenty of the villagers believed, or was it some kind of misunderstanding that spiralled out of control?

“When did Song Ming depart the village?” she asked after pondering the matter.

“The day after Bianca did.”

“Then, assuming she doesn’t just rush in a random direction, she might not catch up any time soon. I think we ought to send someone after her and get her view of the story. Perhaps this whole situation could be resolved in a less drastic manner than Li Shen would desire.”

“Less drastic? After she killed Song Ling?” Lin Shuming raised his voice ever so slightly.

Qi Ping looked at him – long after she’d deactivated the Watcher’s Gaze and gave her eyes some time to relax – with a stern expression, “How many would you see die before the matter is resolved, then? Bianca likely has a family of her own, and if they learn of this, they may go after her killer. Perhaps there was some faction she was close to – say, Long Shiyi’s horde to the south, or even the domain of that Exarch – that will use this as an opportunity to claim more lands and more power.”

“She’s just a random girl in the first realm! How exactly would she warrant that kind of response?” he asked.

“Random girl that is, at once, a terrible, scheming, devious demon. Interesting.”

“I…” he paused, “I recognise I may have seen her as more of a threat than she might have been, but she is still a killer, and most likely, had been planning something. There’s no chance she had truly lost her memories.”

“Hm… We won’t be able to confirm that just from standing around. Nonetheless, simply killing her on the spot – as Li Shen would want – will leave us with many unanswered questions, and invite unwanted risk. I believe Elder Shu Luo would not want us to handle the situation in this manner,” Qi Ping concluded, turning away, “Wu Taoshi! You were a fast runner, were you not?”

 

Without the complexities of the mountain path to slow her down, Bianca advanced towards her destination a lot more quickly than she anticipated. Her stamina and general strength had clearly improved thanks to all the time spent fleeing Xi Village, though it appeared to be due simply to the benefits of exercise rather than the Demonic Form. Even after spending quite a while with it, she wasn’t sure what the body cultivation technique was meant to do for her.

Anyway, as she had climbed down from the mountain early on in the day, she was now arriving at her destination in the evening, and it certainly produced a very interesting atmosphere.

The lights she had glimpsed were teal, a light ghostly mix of green and blue that was reminiscent of some ghost effect she’d seen in movies. As the sun was nearly gone beneath the horizon, it meant that this eerie light was the only thing that illuminated her path, but there was a route that seemed to be formed by the trees and lights, leading her further inwards.

‘No idea if ghosts exist in this world, but most likely, this is something completely different. I do wonder what will be at the end of this path, though…’ she glanced down and noticed that the grass was thinning, and some distance from her, it became neatly flattened, like a road in Xi Village.

That confirmed that there was someone living here, or that someone had lived here not long before her arrival, so the only question that remained was who, and whether they were going to be friendly. It wouldn’t be impossible for her to run into some kind of criminal, be it a killer or a thief, that might decide that it is a good idea to take advantage of her weakness. Naturally, she hoped it would not be anything like that, and that she could just have an easy and nice time in the near future.

 

In the middle of a temple lit only with ghostflame candles, fox-like ears suddenly perked up. The one to whom they belonged turned, glancing out into the distance.

“Hm. It seems like someone interesting has found their way into my grove.”