Path of the Ascendant

The trouble was that the first threat was not the only one. The Great Worm, now lacking the backing of numerous Perpetuals of the Worm, still remained in the area, and it was clearly not going to leave based on the continued quakes of the earth, which seemed to only ever grow nearer, never further.

“Kong Shi Meng, would you… let me guess, no help?”

“I am afraid that I am unable to help you here, but there are those that would aid you. Give them time to get here, and you shall have a significant advantage in the battle.”

“Cool. Any suggestions of dealing with a massive fucking worm that wants to eat me and, possibly, break down anything composing me into the purest form of energy that can possibly exist out there… Not planar energy, but-” Wei Yi flicked her forehead with enough force to crush a lesser skull when she remembered that she had far better things to do than guess at the nature of the Great Worm’s eroding internal energy.

She threw out a series of Replica Abyssal Eye orbs that sank into the ground, wherever the Great Worm had not yet passed. Its passing made the ground far too unstable to allow her planar constructs to sprout.

It might have been a little wasteful to use as much of her oblivion essence as she did, but before she determined exactly what the worm could do and what it would target in its seemingly random rampage through the area, she had to take whatever chances she could and minimize the possibility of damage. At other times, her various abilities could have permitted her to recover from a drop of blood or a fragment of her overall existence, but the erosion of the Great Worm posed too much risk to her right now. The various entities spawned by her Replica Abyssal Eye technique could help clarify the risk.

Learning more about the worm, regardless of its effect upon her life, also ought to make it easier to contain or hunt it in the future, for she would almost certainly have the need to do such a thing. An entity as large or terrifying as this one could pose as much threat to the world as a Primordial Deity, at least in terms of raw power. It could never be allowed to roam unhindered.

The Great Worm burst out of the ground more quietly than last time, biting down upon a number of planar construct minions as it surged up, and headed straight for Wei Yi on the way down.

While she bid her various summoned planar constructs to attack whatever part of the worm they could, she used the sands that had been turned to glass during the earlier battle and formed them into railgun bolt-like spears that she then fired in the exact manner that her usual Railgun Bolt technique would function. A number of these bolts cracked and shattered before they could be fired, and others turned to dust mid-flight, but enough endured to strike the monstrous entity.

Blasts of crimson blackness erupted upon collision, the minimal Obliteration energy imbued within allowing the bolts to contain force that could be useful both against planar entities and those that responded only to more traditional kinetic force.

Unfortunately, the power of her attacks was insufficient to breach the dense layer of whatever natural material composed the outside of the Great Worm. There were some slight dents in its body, some slight burns from her Obliteration energy, but Wei Yi still needed to shift her position rapidly in order to get away from the ancient entity’s gaping, hungry maw.

It burrowed into the ground once more, taking with it numerous planar constructs that tried to stab any kind of weapon they had on them, whether they were the natural blade-like limbs of the more bestial monstrosities, or vague planar constructs of the more humanoid entities. There were quite a few that were able to get their weapons jammed, and were brought beneath the ground, getting crushed and destroyed by the earth from which they had emerged only a brief while prior to this. Their detonation managed to make more of an impact due to their proximity and the surrounding sands preventing the energy from being wasted, but even that didn’t seem to have a strong effect.

As it returned beneath the earth completely, the Ascendant pondered what kind of force would have the ability to make any kind of significant impact at a time like this. She was not using the strongest methods at her disposal, just as she refused to use her Touch the Heavens against the Great Leeches more than necessary, but her powers were still greater than most Patriarchs of Yi City despite her relatively low realm and minimal time spent in the seventh realm.

Of course, there were still a few candidates and forces that had the potential to make a difference, but other than the dragons, she had not seen any trace of the qilins, phoenixes, or any other ancient forces of significant power hidden in the world.

With her ability to look all over the Western Continent thanks to the Yi City Web, she was able to pay attention to any movements out in the world now that Primordial Inferno was sealed and she only had the Great Worm to combat, and there had still not been any sightings of such forces or entities. There were few places left as a result, and although she had requested for aid from the Eastern Continent, she didn’t expect that she would get much of it before the battle against the Primordial Deities was done with.

The Eastern Continent was far from here, and the people there were sure to have their own problems to handle now that the Primordial Deities have been unleashed. She wasn’t actually sure whether there were any over at the Eastern Continent, but there were bound to be hostile forces with which they would need to battle to ensure that they were able to keep their place in the future.

That left her with the Western Continent, which was either under her control and for her to call upon, part of Yi City but not yet connected to the Yi City Web, or part of an outside nation which, as far as she knew, at least, lacked any powerful cultivators with the ability to change the tide of battle here.

‘Still, Kong Shi Meng should have no reason to lie for now, and I can always flee the Great Worm if I must. It has not been too keen on leaving its territory prior to the emergence of the Primordial Deities, so that behaviour should not change now, and so the Western Continent will mostly be safe from the Great Worm. If not… well, I don’t know what the fuck I can do here, so I won’t bother considering this,’ she watched as the ancient worm emerged from the ground yet again, still trying to devour her.

She had prepared for the latest instance of the worm bursting out of the ground, having manifested an enormous sphere of Obliteration energy in order to experiment with the most effective attacks against it. Primordial Inferno was able to ignore the crimson blackness easily enough, meaning that she would need to change up the nature of Obliteration if she wanted to guarantee its effectiveness against any enemies she came across in the future, but the Great Worm did not have the same resistance specifically to this form of offense.

Instead, it was resistant to just about everything, even though there was really no need to have such an odd endurance.

If she was to look at it from a more objective perspective, she could easily identify the reason for such a defence. The Great Worm contained an incredibly powerful erosive force within itself, and since the overall thickness of the worm was difficult to assess, it might well be that it still affects the outer portions of the Great Worm as much as the inside.

Thus, the ancient entity would need to have the tenacity to endure an energy as powerful as that constantly. Without some form of energy cultivation, all that the worm could have was a powerful body. It would make for a decent material, if she managed to defeat it in the future.

Back to the actual battle, Wei Yi loosed that mass of Obliteration energy upon the side of the Great Worm, starting with the right of its jaw and moving down its length until about half-way, when her gathered Obliteration energy ran out.

There was a brief moment before any quantity of her oblivion essence could be transformed into Obliteration energy, and despite the general lack of impact of this fact, it did mean that she couldn’t generate and maintain a constant beam of energy against an opponent. Still, the effects wouldn’t be too different, given that the cut made by her energy was nearly invisible once more.

‘Still, there is an effect. I ought to try the most impactful form of my Obliteration beam,’ she thought, shifting her position away from the Great Worm’s path to a pre-prepared coordinate.

Although she didn’t make a large dent, or anything even remotely close to it, there was damage, and if there was damage, she could achieve further damage with a little bit of additional effort. If the power of her Obliteration beam was not spread out across half of the Great Worm’s incredibly lengthy body, and if it was gathered in even larger quantities, she might be able to breach the body of the worm and potentially lead to the entropic energy within to either break out and weaken the entity, or begin devouring weaker parts of its flesh, forcing it to escape.

Naturally, she waited for the Great Worm to make another appearance with the Titanic Conqueror behind her, the power that could be summoned by the both of them united into a single mass a short distance from her, as she knew that she would need to dodge regardless of where the worm emerged.

Once it did, she used her killing will to grab up all of the things that she had summoned so far and threw them onto the Great Worm, before then unleashing those blasts of Obliteration energy upon the deepest mark on the right side of the beast that she was able to find. A pulse with the full power of her previous beam landed with a sound that could be described as satisfactory, enlarging and slightly deepening that dent in its side, and it was quickly followed by another one.

The second blast was larger and denser, and it only preceded the third, fourth, and finally fifth blast.

The last one was the first to produce a drop of fluid from the worm’s flesh, a drop that she had to presume to be blood. It was small, to the point that even a normal human wouldn’t suffer from losing such a small amount, but where there was blood, there was a wound, and a wound didn’t stop after a single drop in the majority of cases.

A small stream of black blood poured from the worm’s flesh, tinting the sands as it sank back beneath them, the sand falling into the wound and limiting the amount of blood that poured out.

‘That’s good, but if the wound seals from either the sand or its natural regenerative abilities, then this will be rather pointless. I don’t have enough time to attack it multiple times before it sinks beneath the ground, and if the Great Worm has a sense of pain, there’s no way that it will allow me to keep attacking it if it realises it is becoming injured,’ the Ascendant thought, carefully observing the entity’s recovery – or, as it turned out, the lack of it.

Although a little unexpected, it seemed to make complete sense. The Great Worm had a powerful regenerative ability, but it wasn’t growing out of control – rather, it seemed to be rather stagnant in appearance, meaning that it did not have an excess of this ability. Most likely, it was all being used to prevent itself from being consumed by the entropic energy within itself, and now that something had damaged it sufficiently, it would need some time to recover, or perhaps seek out a greater source of sustenance than the dry sands to boost its regenerative ability.

After only a brief while, the ancient worm began to emerge again, and the mark upon its body was still present, if not just a little smaller and less deep than before. It did attempt to move away from her, not heading straight towards her this time, but perhaps due to lacking experience, it did little else.

Most importantly for the Great Worm, and for her efforts against it, the attempts to evade her did not stop her from targeting that part of its flesh which she had weakened after several attempts. Thus, knowing that there was some effect, she prepared the greatest quantity of oblivion essence that she was able to bring out and attempted to perform the delayed blast variant of her Obliteration energy to a greater level than ever before.

Typically, such a form of Obliteration was only able to produce four to five blasts, as their density, size, and required power increased with every single burst. It was what allowed it to be as powerful as it was, and each time she wanted to repeat a burst, she would require a significantly greater degree of power to pull it off.

With planar energy, four had been her limit. With oblivion essence, she hadn’t had too many opportunities to experiment with such things, and the five she had produced earlier went very smoothly and hadn’t strained her as much as she might have presumed. If she had the boost of a half-way perfected realm, or got the sixth stage in other words, she might be able to employ whatever benefit she gained in stabilising the manifestation of her Obliteration pulses, but the halos currently in use were sufficient to push her limits and produce enough energy for the release of at least six pulses. Whether it was going to be possible to pull off was another matter.

The instant that the worm surfaced, she abandoned any attempts to throw other things at it, or to goad it into any particular actions, and instead repositioned to target it most effectively.

As before, she had no difficulty in employing the first blast, and the second and third. The fourth followed, each one resounding more loudly throughout the north of the Western Continent, catching the attention of some of the tribesmen that had fled their lands when Primordial Inferno had travelled south, as well as some of the Yi City people that had strayed into these lands. That didn’t bother her, but it did mean aid would be able to find her more easily.

That being said, when the fifth blast landed and prompted another few drops of blood to spurt out of the entity’s flesh, she was beginning to doubt that such a thing would be necessary. While the Great Worm moved only like a regular beast would, with no use of energy or anything that a planar beast would produce, it wouldn’t be able to do much against her now that she understood its pattern.

She noted an unusually lengthy delay preceding the sixth pulse of energy, but it was very much worthwhile. For some reason, this pulse was doubled in size and greatly multiplied in power, feeling like it might well cut straight through the Great Worm in a single go.

Unfortunately, it did not do so, and was instead followed by a large cloud of black blood mist from the widened wound, and a larger wave of entropic power. Given that the former already covered several cubic metres easily enough, the latter flooded roughly two dozen cubic metres, the air within vanishing and thus collapsing into a vacuum, causing everything around this eroded space to be sucked in to fill the void. On its own, this didn’t worry her too much, but the fact that this power did not cease erupting and even began to assume a semi-intelligent form was most concerning.

Even then, she still had enough Obliteration energy pooled up, and her body, mind and cultivation were all able to endure the stress required to produce a seventh pulse. It had to draw upon forms of energy other than her oblivion essence far more than usual, tinting it with various shades, but that did nothing to dull its power.

Where the previous pulses might be described as needles – enormous ones, but only in comparison to a typical needle – this one was a mighty spear, cutting through the world as effectively as Reality Severance or Touch the Heavens. It distorted the fabric of the world, smoke and silver flooding through in one moment, yin and yang shining through in another, and the hint of a field of crimson stars was visible in a third. Together, they struck the Great Worm with a vast amount of force, and that was just the kinetic energy that was generated by affecting space. The true power of Obliteration was not contained within such things, for it either didn’t generate a pure physical impact, or far surpassed it.

In this case, it was the latter, and yet the basic force was still enough to push the Great Worm’s head back while the blaze of Obliteration scorched its side, leaving behind a most obvious wound from which blood flowed freely and readily, like water poured from a spring.

From this wound, the formless yet shaped form of the entropic power within bled out even more quickly, and it quickly sought the Obliteration energy and clashed with it, disrupting it and itself. The rest amassed itself into a larger figure, though one still devoid of shape, and almost hastened towards the Ascendant, something akin to a hand yet not one outstretched with clear desire or hunger towards her.

She could have defended herself, but she could feel a sudden release of energy not far from her that led to her simply producing a series of railgun bolts and launching them into the wound of the worm while it was still in sight. Given her momentary focus upon the usage of her Obliteration Delayed Pulses, she had mostly overlooked the battlefield as she did not see any potential threats nearby prior to beginning her attack, and since her attention was now returned to the surroundings, she got to see the incoming attack on their shared foe in full.

A series of figures with antlers on their heads, glowing orbs of pure gold in place of normal eyes, and topless bodies flew in the sky, clouds beneath their feet, and masses of flame bursting out of their hand upon the Great Worm’s entropic energy.

The two clashed, the flames being devoured by the decay, but they did slowly consume the entropic power. Clearly, whatever the source of it was, it did not extend far beyond the Great Worm, and whatever conscious efforts were being made by the thing controlling it lacked the ability to make too great an impact on the world. When the Ascendant’s railgun bolts struck the worm’s flesh, her aim ensuring that they went past the entropic energy, it was further repelled alongside the worm.

With the threat nudged away, and assistance incoming, Wei Yi turned to the latter, easily identifying their nature.

“Qilins of the Qilin Isle. What prompted you to emerge now, and not when the so-called Qilin’s Temple was burnt?” she asked, projecting her voice to them, referring to the territory near the extreme north where the people worshipped the qilins from the closest place to them on the northern part of the Western Continent.

It was to be expected that the qilin at the front had no clue what she was on about.

He, like all of his companions, was tall, broad-shouldered, muscular, and with a strong jaw and fierce eyes, much of it on full display thanks to their minimal clothing. Considering that what they had in their pants – if their loincloths could really be referred to as such – was as impressive, it was no surprise that they were in the hearts of many women of ages past, when qilins roamed the Planar Continents without any hesitation in doing so.

For the Ascendant, however, their most notable feature was the rather unpleasant smell of a damp, unwashed animal, as well as the more humanoid odour of male sweat, neither of which she was very fond of.

“What do you mean?”

“There’s a place by the north calling itself the Qilin’s Temple. Have you never communicated with them?”

“… I do not recall such a thing.”

“Well, disregard it, then. The Qilin’s Temple is unlikely to endure for long with the current state of things,” she said, quietly producing a cold wind that blew their scent away from her and kept the both of them just a little cooler, “My name is Wei Yi, the Ascendant, and current Master of Yi City.”

“Yi City… We do remember that. My name is Qi Xun, and the other five are Qi Fen, Qi Hai, Qi Ming, Qi Lin, and Qi Hao, from your left to your right,” the man introduced himself, “I am at the peak of the seventh realm, and the others are not far behind. We came as soon as we had accumulated enough strength, although we had awakened some time ago.”

“I think I noticed. Something had moved on the Qilin Territory when it should have been empty.”

“Unfortunately, none of us had been looking past our shores at the time… Should we focus upon this large worm first, though?”

“Sure. Let me try something. Release a bunch of your energy for me, in the shape of thin, long bolts.”

The request was sudden and obviously unexpected, especially when the qilins barely had an understanding of the land that they had arrived to after an absence of a million years, but one thing that they could know for sure was that the Ascendant was capable of fighting against the Great Worm – not that they knew the name of it either – and that she shouldn’t have been expecting their presence. Furthermore, one’s own planar energy was generally believed to be the safest thing to use in any occasion.

One’s physical power could be redirected, one’s scheming could be turned against them, but planar energy was generally easy to control and, at the very least, revoke if someone tried to turn it against the cultivator using it.

Thus, they formed spears of fire, aimed at the worm, and watched as Wei Yi wrapped each one in numerous rails, infusing vast quantities of energy within each one, imbuing flame with Obliteration.

From their control, the flame spears were ripped out and shot into the worm’s side, blasts of crimson blackness erupting with far more ferocity than before, backed up by the natural flames of a powerful set of qilins. Each one also carried a significant kinetic force that further threw the worm’s length into the ground, forcing it to dive beneath the ground in a most unfortunate manner for it, clearly worsening the wound on its side.

When it was gone beneath the ground, it didn’t remain to leap out towards the Ascendant or the qilins again, departing further away and leaving the Ascendant’s range of divine sense. With that, it was finally finished off for the day, and Wei Yi was able to turn back to the qilins.

“By the way, if you were interested in helping with Primordial Inferno, you’ve come quite late, Qi Xun.”

“It takes time to cross the ocean and come here, and we were also unaware of the strategies of the people of the continent. From what little we had been able to determine, the north had been neglected by any combatants, and we hadn’t expected such a barrier to be constructed on such short notice…” the qilin said, crossing his thick arms, “It is as if the heavens themselves produced that shield.”

“You’re exaggerating just a little, I think. Kong Shi Meng is impressive, but there is too great a difference between the two so far.”

“Kong Shi Meng. You humans have only had one Kong Shi Meng of particular note in the last two millions years, correct?” Qi Xun asked, a nod quickly coming in reply, “His life was thought to be lost. If he is back, then it is a good thing for the humans, dragons, qilins and phoenixes alike, as well as whatever other forces still reside in the Planar Continents. Incidentally, have those dragons returned as well, or-”

“They have. Is it a problem for you?”

“No, not at all… Damn dragons…”

‘If this is another instance of a horny ancient beast species being disappointed that they cannot have as much sex as humanly possible, then I will be very disappointed with them, and the phoenixes in advance,’ the Ascendant unsubtly rolled her eyes, “You going to help with other Primordial Deities?”

“That is exactly what we came here for. Is there some kind of centre of operations in your Yi City, or is everyone as scattered as they were when some of the last qilins fell asleep?”

“I’ve made some progress on that. I can show you to Paragon, an old fortress built by Kong Shi Meng, and from there you can essentially go to the majority of Yi City’s districts. For whatever reason, the Primordial Deities are primarily in or near Yi City right now, so I suspect that the others will also emerge near there, and you should be able to get anywhere that a new Primordial Deity appears,” she said, “The majority of them are currently sealed in the same barriers that Primordial Inferno is in, and breaking them will prevent them from being successfully reformed.”

“In that case, we shall accompany you-”

“No trying to sleep with random women without their permission, got it?”

“Wh-”

“Yes or no?”

“… Understood,” Qi Xun said, but when he prepared to step forward again, Wei Yi stopped him.

“The five behind you ought to say it as well. The dragons are bad enough, since my divine sense is kept on Yi City at all times and so comes across them busying themselves with over-eager ladies. If you join in, it would be too much,” she explained, “Also, not into guys, though I already end up watching so many of them that I don’t mind…”

The qilin couldn’t speak for quite a while, and even when he tried to speak, his mouth just hung open for a while, “I cannot even begin to imagine what you do in your spare time…”

“Getting desensitised to the weird shit people do in their own time, and making sure nobody is trying to destroy Yi City at the same time. Get going before I figure out how to best share that kind of thing with you, so that you also get disappointed with the average person.”