Path of the Ascendant

As she looked upon Primordial Energy’s form, she stabilised her thoughts and contemplated some experiments that she had performed the moment Xu Shi Meng had disappeared, leaving her to travel on her own without a full reply.

Mainly, she was attempting to investigate her luck, and she believed that she had found a few methods that were accurate enough. Mainly, it involved her manifesting a half-complete technique, and then seeing whether it would simply scatter into naught or happen to form into something close to what she desired. A typical attribute of luck was that it was sporadic and irregular, at least in common tales, but from what she observed, so long as she was just a step away from a technique’s completion, it could be executed properly every single time when luck was on her side.

It was a method she came up with a short while back, but the first test that she conducted was just before the fight with Primordial Yin and Primordial Yang, during the last period of cultivation prior.

Back then, she found that her energy would not manifest a technique without her express act of completion, but she had the previous assumption about luck at that point. Thus, now she tried it a few more times afterwards and found that, with Xu Shi Meng seeming to leave properly, there wasn’t a single instance of failure no matter how much she tried.

With how quickly he appeared to save her, even doing so just as she had some unexpected stutter at the most vital of moments, she then concluded that there was a high chance of him being present during the entirety of the fight, meaning that she lost the benefit that the world’s luck could deliver to her. On one hand, that was something she generally wanted to throw away, as she wished to succeed on her own merits, but the power of the pair of Yin and Yang made it a very bad time for her to lose that power.

For now, she apparently lacked the power to handle Primordial Yin and Primordial Yang, so she would stick to simply determining the state of her luck for now. At the same time, it would help her to detect the active presence of Xu Shi Meng, though not his passive observation.

That was probably for the best until she had the ability to rival the foes that she currently needed his help with. Whether the passive observation produced the effects of luck, or if it was something else that she had yet to perceive or understand, she needed to allow for the source of that luck to persist while it remained highly useful for her. Now that she knew she could skip a small part of using most techniques, she would be sure to use it as much as possible.

‘I really wanted to say something more to Xu Shi Meng, but I will leave it for now. Primordial Energy isn’t a great threat, so I’ll take care of it quickly enough, and then I must ensure that the pair of Yin and Yang don’t have the chance to damage anything important in the Yi District,’ she thought, completing one last test before advancing towards her enemy.

Since the last time she had seen Primordial Energy, it appeared to have recovered from the time that she had drained its power, though there was still a hint of absence within its form, a certain spot of lesser stability.

What had not recovered was the entity’s mind, for the moment that she appeared prominently before it, the Primordial Deity recoiled slightly, all of its attention falling upon her as if she was the most dangerous thing that it had ever seen. She understood that, especially since Xu Shi Meng never properly appeared before most of the Primordial Deities, and none of them really acknowledged his actions most of the time. It was rather odd, but it only added to the myriad of other matters of concern about that man.

As she was neither in the best of moods nor had plenty of time to spare, she went straight in and produced a number of phantasms around herself with which she invoked Obliteration, then leapt in.

Primordial Energy was clearly afraid of her, as it rushed to dodge her and the Obliteration beams, but that fear also made it more aggressive, as the instant it was out of the way, it produced a thousand simple bolts of violet that were fired at great speed in her direction. They didn’t pose as much threat as any of the strikes of Primordial Yin or Primordial Yang, certainly not individually, but it did force her to pause for a moment in order to handle them. She did not have Xu Shi Meng’s power in this regard, not yet, so she couldn’t simply grab the bolts and take them for herself, whether as a weapon or to recover her own oblivion essence.

She chose to evade the majority and grab hold of the remaining few dozen bolts, the violet light changing right before her eyes to the crimson light of her oblivion essence. It looked fantastic, but it was inexcusably slow now that she had seen the energy simply changing its owner in an instant.

Given that Xu Shi Meng was clearly on a different level from her at the moment, she didn’t think that she should be able to accomplish the same thing immediately, but the fact that he pulled it off meant that she could as well. There had to be a method to improve on her current performance, and she would find it, as it could be immensely helpful against Primordial Yin and Primordial Yang. After all, she wielded those aspects too, so she merely needed to disturb their resonance.

With those dominated bolts, she reversed their flight and let them return in the direction of her foe, though she quietly skimmed their surface for a small quantity of Primordial Energy’s power.

That advanced her cultivation just a little bit, but she would not obtain the Primordial Deity’s authority from such projectiles as it remained within the core of its body, and she would need to get directly to it in order to claim its Dao Branch, which she believed to be the Primal Branch. It exhibited the most ancient, most simplistic forms of planar energy, making it easier to steal from.

The others embodied more complete and refined concepts, introducing their own faults while removing other ones, but what mattered most was that a loose and simple concept was easiest to absorb regardless of specifics. Whether or not Primordial Energy knew or understood this, it couldn’t change its nature after all of the time it had spent in the current state, so it was a perfect target for her to overcome through continuous improvement, as it would provide her with a static bar that she would need to overcome.

Her first attempt to overcome this began with the establishment of her domain via Conqueror’s Eye, letting chains flood the area and grant her greater control over the space. This battlefield wasn’t directly in the Qiang District, being some way away underground, but it was still her territory.

She controlled the nearby district, she controlled the entirety of Yi City, and in the Western Continent she was effectively the strongest human that was acknowledged as such by many. This provided her with a far greater degree of control over the territory than she had possessed during her first usage of the Conqueror’s Eye, and the conquered land could further be infused with her Dao and comprehension, so long as she wished to do so.

With just the Planar Dao, she might not have the ability to overwhelm Primordial Energy, but she created something that she deemed as a step above – the Dao of the Heavens. It represented the entirety of not only the abnormal characteristics of the Planar Continents, but the very concept of a heaven that overlooked the world as a whole, so she suspected that she might have some ability to affect another world where a Heaven’s Will existed. Some of her current Dao comprehension, though she couldn’t determine her exact stage, was certainly her own, not just the world’s false contribution, so it should be nearly universal throughout other worlds.

Since her perception of the world placed the heavens above planar energy, it meant that she had greater power over the latter. If someone was to construct a different system, where planar energy was the base for everything, even above Law, then they might be able to rely on their Planar Dao over everything, but that was a question for a time that she met others that used Dao properly.

For now, with the combination of the Dao of Law and the Planar Dao, which were also complimentary in her view, she exerted control over the other bolts that had flown past her, and willed them into her control. They changed even more quickly, but she did not think it was enough.

‘Xu Shi Meng had not been exerting any obvious form of a domain, yet he succeeded nearly instantly. I need to be faster!’ her eyes lit up with her excessive drive, the chains in one being joined with the twisted tendrils of the Elder Watcher ability in her other eye. By twisting the Laws of the world around her, she could insert more of her own power into the fabric of the world, even if only for a little bit, and would be able to dominate the energy around her even more quickly.

Her previous attempts took several seconds, with her latest being only two, but when she bent the very fabric of the world to her whim, forcing it more and more under her control, she knocked off another half of a second when the Primordial Deity tried to repel her and break down the domain she had created.

“I decree that I am within my domain. Within my domain, my Law is Absolute! Within my domain, I am the heavens!”

With another layer of power added onto the process, she forced Primordial Energy to produce even more bolts of violet only for them to be grabbed from it nearly right in front of it, the light changing rapidly and being thrown right back, leaving it with no time to stay still.

Apart from bolts, it did also produce a few beams and a number of orbs, but all of them were simple and unsophisticated, meaning that taking over them was as simple as taking in the energy of the world, just at a far greater density. Again and again, she let it escape and took over Primordial Energy’s attacks, and while her rate of domination did not grow rapidly, it did progress steadily and surely, falling from a second and a half to just over a single second in order to control a straightforward bolt.

The mysterious man posing as Kong Shi Meng was faster, so that forced her to be faster, and to incite the Primordial Deity before her to act more quickly as well. It wasn’t attacking her quickly enough for her to be able to constantly apply and test her various methods of converting energy in a more efficient manner.

Hence, when she got the chance, she forced the entity to be pinned against a wall in such a manner that it could not continue evading and had to focus its entire power on attacking her, even though the entity itself seemed to understand that there was little it could accomplish.

Primordial Energy may or may not have understood this, but it soon had no other choice.

It seemed to know enough not to invest any of its core authority into its attacks, but it spent the rest of what it had on every kind of technique that it could produce, even beginning to experiment after the previous waves were either avoided or swallowed up by the Ascendant’s power. Larger spheres began to spew out numerous simple bolts, the bolts flew faster and had sharper ends, and a few were even composed of numerous smaller projectiles that made the structures significantly more complex, but did little to influence her rate of acquisition.

Rather, it permitted her to more finely understand the exact limitations of her current methods, and what she could overlook entirely. The time taken to obtain a certain quantity of energy dropped further, to half a second, but she pushed further and further, forcing her mind and body into overdrive, to function at the absolute peak until she found a single moment of perfection at the very edge of her capabilities.

Once she saw it once, reproducing it would be a difficult feat, but not an impossible one. Even if it was to remain outside her reach forever, there would still be plenty to learn from.

After all, her current state, in her own domain with numerous properties that helped her to improve her abilities further, was not necessary for her best performance. Instead, it facilitated the usage of all of her Dao and physique abilities at the same time, without the need for more precise control that would be needed without these domains, while letting her be at a lower Dao stage and with less authority than she might otherwise require.

As her own abilities grew, she could impose more of her will onto the world regardless of whether she was given permission for it, but there were already plenty of things she could achieve that she had simply failed to use fully.

That was the wonder of Dao, the understanding of the world’s Laws and every aspect.

‘More! I just need more!’ she abandoned all other thoughts and focused only on her Dao, on the desire for perfection, and a faint spark ignited within her eyes, illuminating the cave in addition to the countless bolts of violet light produced near endlessly by Primordial Energy, ‘Increase the precision of control, amplify the rate of particle domination, purge the will of the Primordial Deity! Faster!’

She could barely perceive her surroundings changing as the distortion of Laws and the fabric of reality itself slowly reached an unseen tipping point, where it all… aligned.

All of the chains, all of her demands of the world, all of her authorities were arranged into a perfect state, wherein her perception and control was at its highest and interference and resistance was at its lowest. Everything within this domain was hers, if only for the briefest of moments, and it was truly hers. When she had imposed the state of her body onto the outside world, she still operated under the restriction of the Planar Continents – of the Heavens.

This time, all Laws but her own were expunged, and her own notions were put into place.

For a moment, she could see everything, feel everything, comprehend everything, and control everything. All of the planar energy used by Primordial Energy before her instantly changed to her own colours, and the Primordial Deity itself was broken apart into a series of cubic chunks, bound by chains of Law into her desired shape.

In that instant, she could sense numerous chains reaching out from her and going far beyond her domain of control. She didn’t have enough time to perceive exactly where they went, what their purpose and origin was, nor to attempt to do anything with these chains, but she made sure to take note of them in the moment while noting everything else down for later review within the Ascendant’s Library. This situation felt like it carried on for a lengthy decade, but even then she knew that she only had so much time, so she set everything into place and let go of her dominating control.

That authority and comprehension vanished entirely, and she appeared beside the splintered components of Primordial Energy and absorbed its energy immediately, ignoring the immediate feeling of exhaustion that overwhelmed her.

Simply taking in the authority of a Primordial Deity greatly rejuvenated her, but it turned out that the principle of exchanging her current vitality for power over Law continued even when she went far beyond her usual capabilities. The presence of her own Dao meant that the decay was temporarily nullified, and now she was substituting all of the energy that was scattered within her body and torn out of her control with Primordial Energy’s energy and authority.

It was being consumed at a rapid pace, though, so it was entirely consumed and digested nearly instantly. Her breakthrough came and went just as quickly.

After that, the inside of her body slowly began to break down and turn not just into the finest mist, but into a literal nothingness. Each breath she took was equivalent to losing as much of her body as the amount of air she breathed out, and even with every form of her energy contributing to her recovery she could barely regenerate a third of what she lost.

‘Should I say that it’s a good thing I hadn’t accidentally figured out this Dao Domain concept when I was in the Kong Prison Realm, or even before then. I wouldn’t have had any options to resolve this problem!’ she didn’t wait for her state to deteriorate further before reaching out and willing for her connection to the Kong Prison Realm to deepen, allowing her to reach every single spatial stabilisation point connected to it with ease.

Through them, she felt the plentiful lifeforce of the world, and siphoned just a little, while also spreading her divine sense and grabbing onto every particle of planar energy that existed in her districts, taking many for herself and bringing them over vast distances to herself.

Her actual method differed slightly from such a simplistic description, as she relied on the principles of planar energy and its nature as an allocated quantity throughout the world, but the results were effectively the same. In an instant, she obtained a far greater amount of energy than she had needed to accumulate to reach the eighth realm, and all of it went directly to the restoration of flesh and blood, to the recovery from the overuse of Law, and it was only several minutes later that a balance was achieved.

The decay slowed, her regeneration mostly maintained the same rate, and in the end, she survived, though most of her insides were effectively completely new. As always, the only exceptions were things relating to her cultivation, such as the dantian, which existed separate yet together within the body, resulting in interactions that she still had difficulties in predicting.

It was fortunate that such things always benefitted her in the end, but she couldn’t care less about that or the breakthrough at the moment. Instead, she was most interested in her latest insights.

‘Last time I was so inspired, it was when I glimpsed that vision of a woman surrounded by chains… A little odd, seeing as this moment should be far more important – being the first time I have been able to maintain a land of my very own, where my Law applied in its entirety, even if only for a moment – yet there is clearly more to that image than I might have presumed at the time. Nonetheless, it appears that I am onto something with all of my ideas regarding Dao and Law.’

Unlike the vision of the woman surrounded by chains, she had been able to record this experience in full detail and for the whole duration, so she got those records to surge out of the shelves of the Ascendant’s Library and occupied herself with them.

Nearly instantly, she was able to confirm that a lot more had occurred than she had presumed. There was so much that her brain was at a serious risk of boiling after she had merely skimmed through the events. In theory, what happened was straightforward enough, being a simple enough convergence of Law, Dao and her physique abilities into a single area where nothing else was permitted, overriding the properties of the natural world and the Planar Continents alike. The principles of the change itself, and what made it possible, was a far more complex topic, and the only thing she knew right away was that she could not set up something equivalent against Primordial Yin and Primordial Yang.

This was not good at all, as the breakthrough from Primordial Energy only gave her more control over planar energy and another realm, not the necessary power to slay those two.

Even breaking them apart would be absurdly difficult to achieve, as yin and yang were not a direct component of planar energy. She did not have authority over the two opposite aspects, and Law was not directly bound to it either, though the most effective use of Law would require her to be given a moment to properly instantiate some principle without any risk of being destroyed by the pair.

It was not currently possible unless Xu Shi Meng stepped in again and did whatever he wished, but since he was previously extremely reluctant to step in, the Ascendant knew that he wasn’t just being annoying for no good reason. Something did restrict him, but not quite as much as he made her believe.

‘A few more hours remain until I am forced to confront Primordial Yin and Primordial Yang, so I should at least figure out how to apply Law more effectively onto my surroundings. If I could separate them for a moment, it would not only give me another few moments to do something more, but may let me outright kill one or the other if I expend all of my energy again. It would be easy to take care of Primordial Yang afterwards… maybe,’ she thought, though even that wasn’t necessarily true given everything she knew.

When either Primordial Yin or Primordial Yang perished, the other might be able to force an absolute state onto the world, plunging at least the entire Western Continent into a great frost or extreme heat.

At that point, whichever one survived might well have as much power as the two combined, if not more, and at that point she would need to overcome a single coordinated entity that could unleash even more of its power from itself and the world around it. She had enough problems taking care of two Primordial Deities that technically conflicted with one another during the entire battle, even if they maintained a kind of symbiotic relationship, so a greater challenge wasn’t necessary.

‘Alright… So, the most important element I can grasp onto right now is the structure of the world itself, as that will further every other one of my pursuits,’ she concluded for the moment, bringing up those particular memories into focus, ‘Let’s see…’

 

Her eyes opened as she felt the twin energies of Primordial Yin and Primordial Yang getting close enough to one another to provoke significant discomfort. It would cause significant problems if she allowed them to get any nearer to one another, and Xu Shi Meng did not appear to address the situation again, so she rose and arrived at the area above the Yi District again, though a quick glance below her confirmed that this place might not be the best place for their confrontation. If they fought with as much intensity as before, the central district would certainly suffer.

To avert such an outcome, she used the time she had to shift the point of convergence further to the north, forcing it to the edge of the Yi District and into a place that would be easier to defend when it came down to it. At worst, the wall and some of the structures there would be lost, but Yi City had recovered from worse in recent years.

Then, just like last time, she had to wait, but she made sure not to waste the time. With the Conqueror’s Eye, she surveyed the area and got as much of it under her control as possible. Using the Elder Watcher ability, she focused on distorting and changing in her favour the aspects of Law and the duality of Yin and Yang, as the former would assist her most greatly, while the latter would weaken her foes. The extent of such a thing was difficult to predict right now.

She had not yet grasped the entirety of the experience, but a single glimpse into the fabric of the world was enough for her to apply her existing methods more efficiently and effectively.

All the while, she had been producing a technique that she half-completed every single time, letting luck complete it whenever it would. She was expecting the techniques to be unable to complete themselves as the pair of Primordial Yin and Primordial Yang came near, due to the influence responsible for her luck turning its attention to some other matter, but to her surprise and amazement, this did not occur even as she was about to face the pair. It was rather mysterious, but perhaps Xu Shi Meng decided to stay away this time.

There would be no support, but it also meant that she could rely on the oddly consistent properties of luck to achieve the desired results with every single technique she attempted to employ, and spare some time on it by cutting off the activation at the last moment.

Once she had waited just long enough, she produced Moon Splitter in advance and passed the final moment in the process.

She had been prepared for a variety of events, but she believed that it would be very similar to her previous encounter with Primordial Yin and Primordial Yang. They should have formed a particular union together, then attack her together, but perhaps through the shift in their battlefield or their lengthy stay in a constant double spiral, their resonance was intensified by a great deal.

All around her, the air was distorted and formed into a great dome that encompassed her, then seemed to devour the land itself, placing her within a domain of silver and gold, black and white, yin and yang, and there was nothing more. No matter what method she attempted to apply, she couldn’t perceive a world outside of this spherical domain, though she did not have a chance to employ most of her more advanced techniques to divine beyond the admittedly fantastic capabilities of her divine sense and general perception.

Hence, she had to act with the presumption that it was merely her perception that was affected, unlike the time she ended up in something that effectively functioned as a spatial realm by sinking into a door. That time, she had obtained a number of Dao from strange figures, and developed her soul.

This time, she didn’t expect to obtain anything so positive.

‘Alright. Every pain receptor disabled, body strengthened to whatever extent I can, and sword at the ready… I hope nothing else happens while I am effectively locked away from the world.’