Chapter 138: V3C17: Red Shaper’s Grasp

Beside the ruined sleeve on her left arm, there was surprisingly little destruction to the terrain around her, and her power only grew as much as if she absorbed those particles of physique energy from others, rather than generating them herself, meaning that there was nothing different about this particular process than her usual method of acquiring physique energy.

Thus, she did not bother to greet those within the Kong Prison Realm, and instead emerged only a few real minutes after entering, returning into the confines of the Ning District and into the guise of Wei Yi the Alchemist, who decided to head to the Chu Alchemical Store once again.

“Hello there, Fu Xiu. How are you feeling today?”

“Wei Yi… I am feeling sleepy again. In comparison to before, it’s like I have no energy at all, and doing so much as moving a chair can feel entirely exhausting…”

“How is that in any way surprising? In comparison to an infinite font of power, any finite quantity will feel limiting and insignificant, no matter how great the finite quantity is. After all, the moment a finite quantity surpasses an infinite one, one of the two ceases to be,” Wei Yi said, clearly causing the exhausted receptionist’s head to hurt.

“I don’t get it… but I’m not as tired and sleepy as I was, so it seems to be an improvement. Would you like something?”

“Yes. I know that you have exactly nineteen portions of physique awakening pill ingredients, and I would like them all. If you offer me a small deal, I can even sell them to the store for a far smaller price afterwards.”

“You really like physiques, don’t you…? I think it should be fine… Sure, take them… yourself.”

She nodded, “Will do. I’ll be back within a day.”

 

In the end, the process of refining all of those ingredients using her Antithesis method took up only nineteen hours, during which she had figured out how to best balance quantity and quality of her products in such a fashion that it resulted in far more pill output for the same quantity of ingredients, getting an immense quantity for herself while still being able to accumulate as many funds as she wanted from the ones that remained.

She also had enough time to calculate exactly how many pills she needed to consume per physique energy particle, and figured out that if they were at the same realm as before, roughly ten particles came from each pill, but for whatever reason, she required the consumption of all of the pills before they would take effect, which was something that was something that she could not figure out yet.

Perhaps her own body would not waste the physique awakening energy until it could achieve something with it, or perhaps the Yin-Yang Ascendant would not allow any interaction between it and the pills until a similar requirement was met.

‘Either way, if there are any more physiques I want to awaken, I will need to consume the appropriate number of pills first, and perhaps consider whether one individual physique might be less costly than another, perhaps due to their quality and grade. Perhaps if I attempt to advance the Energy Pylon physique, an average physique, it will require only five pills or so,’ she theorised, glancing at the pouch within her hands that stored more than a hundred pills that were all of the same quality as one another, ensuring a level of consistency within any future experiments, ‘However, with the gains I receive from lower physiques, it makes no sense to go for something that I do not require. If anything, advancing the Immortal Mortal, Sun’s Regalia and Shaper’s Grasp physiques would all benefit me significantly more, even if it costs ten times as many resources to do so.’

Any one of those three greatly enhanced her abilities, whereas the Energy Pylon physique would only slightly increase the amount of lifeforce that she could mobilise in healing others.

Meanwhile, the Immortal Mortal physique would amplify the size of her meridians, significantly increasing the amount of energy that she could store and mobilise at once, the Sun’s Regalia would boost her overall abilities while active, and the Shaper’s Grasp physique would allow her to manipulate materials at a greater level, with the first two being beneficial at increasing her own prowess while the third would mean that she could more easily equip her own forces with whatever they needed, be it armour, weapons or even trinkets.

Essentially, so long as she chose the right kind of physique to advance, no matter how expensive it was to do so, it could potentially allow her to turn the tides of any battle that would otherwise be unwinnable no matter how many Restorative Spring and Vitality Siphon physiques she cultivated.

For this reason, after much deliberation, she concluded that her Vibrant Phoenix physique was enough of strengthening herself for now, and decided to focus upon the Shaper’s Grasp physique over the other two in order to be able to provide herself and her forces with equipment that could match their general abilities.

She returned into the prison realm once more, as that remained the best place to do her work as it was slowly saturated with planar energy due to her and Yi Shi Ming’s influence over it. At this point, it could be used to cast talismans and power incredibly weak pseudo arrays, although if anyone attempted to cultivate it all they would be able to accomplish would be slightly reinforcing their bones after a hundred years of effort. To achieve an actual planar pool of any kind, or even to activate their meridians, no amount of effort could make up for the absolute lack of energy to mobilise within a kilometre of any one individual.

‘Well, purely theoretically, if they were to construct countless planar gathering arrays all over the Kong Prison Realm and direct all of the energy towards one point – utilising knowledge that ought to be entirely unavailable to them as few of the hatred avatars were masters of arrays and few regained their memories on that subject – they could achieve the breakthrough for one of their number,’ Wei Yi estimated, although even that would require a technique sufficient to make use of such thin planar energy, ‘Regardless, they will realise when there is enough planar energy…’

There was no need to finish that thought, as the outcome of the first planar cultivators naturally appearing within the realm in what was likely to be millennia at the very least, depending on exactly when Kong Shi Meng had created the prison realm and when the Greats had decided to start tossing people into it, was easy to imagine.

Before that could occur, she travelled to her earlier location in the Silver Side, sitting down in the same place and repeating the process of consuming ten pills to active the isolated particles of the Shaper’s Grasp physique, which had been in positions similar to the Vibrant Phoenix but were moved for this.

They were desperately attempting to return to their original position, occasionally crashing against her spiritual will barriers with enough force to cause the energy that was an entire realm above them to tremble, so she was forced to complete her work as quickly as possible, accelerating the drive of the physique awakening energy towards the one hundred and thirteen particles of the Shaper’s Grasp physique, which were dark and almost resembled the night’s sky when they were close to one another, matching nicely with the cosmic energy that flowed all through her body beside it.

When all of the physique awakening energy filled the particles, they shook and collapsed onto one another, the combined collision threw out a dozen stable sparks of energy in one go, all of which also fell towards the cluster of particles and struck them, generating several more sparks of light. Every single one of them repeated this, but the repeating strikes generated fewer and fewer particles each time, making it obvious that they would not reach double of the previous number, even if that was all that she needed. Since the major stages, levels or realms of physiques tended to be incredibly different in power, with even a single increase in the level of a physique allowing anyone to defeat a more skilled and intelligent opponent with its power and nothing more.

This gap widened with the grade of a physique, so an average physique would not affect one as much as the growth from Grim Mortality to Pure Grim Mortality.

The cluster of physique energy suddenly burst outwards, piercing the barrier set up by her spiritual will and travelling all over her physique meridian network, bright threads of violet energy linking each individual particle as several more appeared between the longest gaps of the particles, the threads seemingly requiring a certain thickness beneath which the thinnest would be filled with more particles.

So far as her understanding of the concept of physiques, energy, matter and whatever other concept applied here, this should have been entirely impossible, seeing as the physique awakening energy did not appear to be exhausted, and yet the physique developed, nonetheless.

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When the remaining medicinal energy did come into effect, however, it was clear and more than effective. In a single shallow breath, all of the threads erupted in physique awakening light, sending a burst of pure, unbound energy out of her body and at the ground around her, kicking up an enormous cloud of dust and cracking much of the stone beneath at the same time as the many threads broke off from their respective physique particles and coalesced within a single point, merging into new particles composed of much of the medicinal essence.

Within just a few moments, her count of physique particles more than doubled, and it only continued to grow immensely with every single thread that was formed between sufficiently distant quantities of energy. Two hundred grew to three, then four and five within moments, flooding her body and meridian network rapidly.

These particles paused beside the one hundred and eight points, each time they did so resulting in further bursts of energy that struck the ground once more at random intervals and into random directions, carving strange patterns into the ground within moments.

As soon as their number reached nine hundred and seventy-two, this stopped. A red light surged out of all of the particles and clumps of energy, surrounding them in a radiant halo of crimson that crowned the darkness of the Shaper’s Grasp physique energy, sending out one final enormous blast of energy that scorched the entirety of the region in which she sat, turning the silver of the still unnatural sand into an absolute black.

The crimson and dark focused around her hands, enveloping their soft skin with an unsettling glow that appeared otherworldly in nature, although not in the way of the otherworldly demons.

With it, she felt that she could manipulate anything given to her in any way she desired, although she knew that this was a mere illusion of the mind due to the general limitations of every single physique under the heavens, which fortunately even included the otherworldly powers of the demons, as they had certain limitations and requirements for their usage, even if their power was ultimately made nigh unlimited due to the azure light contained somewhere within them or their gifts. Even those incredibly powerful individuals had certain limitations and restrictions in what they could do, and how, and then there was an absolutely enormous price to pay in terms of their sanity.

‘I suppose that this would be the Red Shaper’s Grasp, the next stage of the physique… Certain things have a degree of logic to them, but this is not one I understand,’ she thought, examining the dark and crimson light that now surrounded her hands due to being composed of both yin and yang at once, equalising the physique into its true form, ‘What connection does shaping anything have with crimson light like this? In fact, what does the cosmos have to do with shaping matter and reality? On that topic, how would the properties of an ascendant permit absorption of other energies… Fuck it, I don’t know…’

She gave up on figuring out the inner workings of the universe and the mind of the heavens for now, as they were impossibly complex and were likely influenced at least in part due to the otherworldly demons that had endlessly poured into the world in the past and possibly were still entering the world now, and instead scooped up a handful of scorched sand with a single hand.

Influencing it with her newly advanced physique, she willed it to assume the form of an arrow, much like the combatant that she had witnessed in Automaton Point had done, finding that it morphed into the desired image far more quickly than it would have ever done before, recreating every single intricacy of her mental image of the projectile within the physical world. Furthermore, the arrow was incredibly tough and stable, meaning that she couldn’t snap it in half without a great deal of effort despite the material that if was made from. It was far sturdier than anything she could have created before, and far more detailed.

When she tossed it at the ground, the arrow impaled the sand and stuck into it up to the fletching.

‘Curiously sharp, too. Everything that could have been improved appears to have been greatened by a high degree… With this and my growing blacksmithing abilities, I should be able to effectively supply a large line of archers with little effort, and improve on these armoured robes that I’m attempting to create,’ she thought, grabbing another handful of scorched sand that she willed into the form of a pair of gauntlets.

They were based on the discarded design from Fu Zan’s attempt at armour, but she had modified them significantly. Now, they covered more of one’s hand, and were connected with pseudo leather as to allow her more mobility than connected plates of metal.

‘On second thought, there are several otherworldly materials that are more flexible and, given that the material itself is unchanged, just as protective as the fake leather, are there not?’

Crimson light surrounded the gauntlets for a moment, shifting the thick leather-like texture into a thinner material, something that was apparently called carbon fibre, a diagram for the creation of which had managed to stick in the tailor’s memory and thus allowed her to replicate more than the mere appearance of it, shaping the particles of the individual specks of sand according to that diagram, adding in the properties of the material called latex in a significantly less elegant manner. Frankly, she wasn’t even sure that she was accurately replicating the properties of that material and wasn’t just imagining the perfect version of it to include, but the Red Shaper’s Grasp appeared to permit such vague additions to her creations.

In general, one thing that she was relatively certain about Fu Zan was that he was not any kind of scholar or learned man in his original world, as his knowledge was incredibly limited and focused on all sorts of utterly unnecessary things, with things like carbon fibre being sourced from something referred to as a ‘search engine’, which was incredibly intriguing to her due to the nigh-omniscient description she had received of it.

The resulting gauntlets were thinner and more pleasant to behold than the first attempt, with her finding the carbon fibre-like material to be especially interesting, but in combination with all of the gauntlets actually being made from charred sand, they weren’t exactly comfortable to wear.

‘Well, so far as I understand the advancement of the Shaper’s Grasp, I can manipulate things into less realistic and more fantastic materials, using the power of the physique to ensure the stability of the equipment when it goes beyond what the world and the material can handle,’ she considered what she had experienced of the physique ability so far, removing the glove from her hand once more and willing it to transform according to exactly what she wanted and needed from these gauntlets, that being flexibility, defence and as much anonymity as possible, so that she could entirely hide her identity if she wore a mark and equipment that covered the rest of her body.

She also wanted to have a certain degree of symmetry between her left and right hands, so she allowed both of the gauntlets to retain the sharp tips that she adjusted to match the length of her killing will claws, although it would have been better to outright remove the gauntlet on the left hand as the metal – or dirt and dust, in this particular case – was inferior to her own body, and would remain as such until she had been able to obtain any kind of physique that allowed her to safely channel her various form of energy to coat her armour and enhance it.

For now, however, as she was creating something that she intended to dispose of once she had completed her experimentation, she modified both gloves in the same manner, observing the material change once more to become even thinner, to the point that it was almost as thick as her own skin, with the metal doing something similar as to prevent it from getting in the way.

As she put the twin gauntlets on, she felt that the resulting material was somewhat like silk, soft and tight while remaining comfortable. Even with the added length of the sharp tips on her fingers, she was able to do almost everything she wanted with her hands, tightly folding them into a fist not included. They also prompted her mind to browse through her extensive collection of combat techniques and pick out everything related to combat with claws or abnormally lengthy nails generated by one’s inability to trim them or through certain physiques that prompted such things, which she had found amongst the many combat methods of the Yi family’s libraries.

After selecting a few of the best movements and skills from them and merging them into a basic combat technique of her own, as these would be useful either if she managed to extend the left of her killing will form onto her right hand or otherwise created these gauntlets to a sufficient standard, she assumed the posture required by the technique, with her hands raised to the level of her chest, fingers held apart from one another while the metal claws were pointed at some imaginary enemy.

She stood in place for a moment, visualising how to perform the next few movements.

With a glint emanating from her eyes, she suddenly stepped forward with a single foot, practically slamming it onto the ground as she thrust her hand forward, jabbing at the eyes of an imaginary foe. Powerful cosmic light gathered around her fingers and followed after her thrust a second later, piercing into the distant edge of the pit she had been awakening her physique in.

A crated that was several metres deep and long formed within the ground as she returned to a standing position and slashed with both hands, two sets of cosmic light emerging from the sharp tips of the gauntlets and flying out at the surrounding walls of sand, cutting several metres into them before the energy dissipated due to getting too far away from her, rather than the inability to pierce the ground any further.

She followed with a downward cut and a few other attacks, infusing as much of her other techniques into these strikes as she could without shattering the dust that made up her gauntlets. Slowly, she understood how to do this most optimally, and discarded several movements of her new technique while integrating others that functioned better, pursuing the potential peak that the Ascendant’s Claws had to represent. In the end, she was able to understand a very things about this particular form of martial arts, and the first and perhaps most obvious being that unless she incorporated typical fist techniques and weakened her attacks by not utilising the advantage of the sharpened tips of the gauntlets. The second flaw was that her fingers were naturally weaker than the entirety of her hand, and would thus be more vulnerable than her fists.

‘Nevertheless, it is yet another method of attack I can utilise while using part of my killing will form, so this is in no way a negative… However, I should get out of here as quickly as possible,’ she thought, communing with Yi Shi Ming, ‘I don’t want to deal with any attention for now.’

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