Chapter 336: V5C14: Learning and Conjecture

Wei Yi had been able to confirm her suspicions about the jade slips easily enough with her spiritual perception, and while she didn’t know how to access this particular kind of slip, she had been able to confirm the method for opening up the boundary dome. The technique should have been a challenging one to pick up for those that weren’t able to access every detail of it, and it was harder than usual to glean the necessary details from the mind and actions of the guard, but she managed it before the opening was sealed again.

Many of the techniques intended for overcoming seals as an individual that is meant to access the restriction focused primarily on the aura of one’s planar energy, and thus it became incredibly easy for her to copy it. The rest was essentially a lengthy password essentially written into the technique and then directed into the barrier, which can then resonate with the structure of the dome and prompt it to open in any place that is properly set up to support the integrity of the dome that is otherwise damaged by the opening of a major tear within it. It was simple enough once it was separated into individual elements, but it still showed a clear commitment to using knowledge as one’s strength over brute force or energy quantity and quality.

The guard that she had interacted with had only a third realm cultivation, but the opening within the barrier would have needed to be supported by energy in the fifth realm in order to allow for the same size and stability of the opening. Instead of random words or even letters, the password was essentially a lengthy series of statements and excerpts of techniques that all looked to be highly accurate and effective, so long as they were put to use in their appropriate ways.

She already knew quite a few bits of the password, and was very familiar with where the segments came from, although she wouldn’t have been able to throw them together into the password without knowing it ahead of time. By making the password out of such excerpts, the Ru family was able to keep most from guessing it while also teaching those that were aware of it a number of key factors about a great variety of techniques. So long as the guards understood what they were given, they would certainly benefit from it greatly, allowing them to optimise their usage of planar energy and the circulation of it throughout their meridians during combat, travel and most other relevant tasks.

For now, she was not going to make use of the technique, instead keeping it for future use if the district was not keen to work with her, or even decided to become enemies with her.

As per her standard approach when alone in an unfamiliar place, she was going to begin without provoking anyone unnecessarily. Instead, she wanted to find the battle scholars and see what the requirements for entering them were. Whether she would actually join them was a different question, but if it led to her being noticed by the Patriarch in the same way as in the Qiang District she would be very pleased.

Frankly, if things went exactly as they had in the previous district, then it would be absolutely perfect. An additional powerful otherworldly gift, combined with a supportive ally and whole district that would come to her, was more than she would have expected from the first southern district, and what she would be very happy with getting again and again until she did get back into the northern portion of the Western Continent. Obtaining more otherworldly gifts wasn’t necessary, but the benefits that she otherwise obtained were very much helpful regardless of quantity.

According to the records of the Yi District, ones that were greatly out of date already, the Bottomless Archive was not a place that she could just enter as an outsider, and it was one of the few things that she expected to remain accurate up to this day. The southern tendency to dislike outsiders was consistent for a million years, and as the archive grew, they shouldn’t have gotten any more willing to let in those that they didn’t know or trust.

Hence, heading straight for the archives wouldn’t be worth her time. The better place to look first would be a more public library, or perhaps some kind of battle scholar-owned structure that would be open to speaking with a northern outsider. If not, joining another group, like she had in the northern districts, would also work, and she could use their connections to get in touch with the battle scholars and the Patriarch above them, one way or another. With her current cultivation and combat ability, there was no chance of being overlooked by any part of the hierarchy.

Fortunately, the district was very organised, if a little confusing to comprehend at first. Rather than using the same straight roads and grid pattern that Wei Yi had chosen to use in the Ping District, they were instead laid out in a similar fashion to the blood vessels within a human body.

The equivalents of the veins and arteries were wider roads that allowed each larger region of the district to be reached by foot, carriage or planar beast, and then smaller roads branched off from all of them in a way that ensured that no one narrow road was too long. It was a simple principle, like many in the Planar Continents and beyond, but when done as well as in the Ru District it allowed for people to travel anywhere without encountering particularly busy streets no matter where they went.

Whether one rated the efficiency or artistic value of such streets, which some people likely did, the place was undeniably designed wisely.

With that kind of layout, she had no difficulty with locating a library in the district, as there was one located on every other intersection and significant stretch of road. All were owned by different people and were not likely to have any connections beside their placement in the Ru District, but every single one had a number of Ru family guards standing in front of them, alongside protection owned by the library owners themselves. This should have meant that they were safe to access regardless of the stance of the Ru family itself, and so she headed to the largest library that had fewest restrictions for entry that might affect her.

From afar, her spiritual perception could scan books about as well as when she stood close to something, but her mind had a certain limitation due to the source of her perception being her own body. Her perception was enhanced while in the range of the Kong Prison Realm and within the region of the Yi City Web that was connected to it, as there the realm itself was able to function as the source of her senses.

In theory, so long as she could replicate this exact property and allow it to be present regardless of the presence of a spatial realm, she would have incredible strength in the aspect of detection and perception, although that was a long-term project among long-term projects, and difficult to attain.

As she entered the library, all that was asked of her was a quiet glance at her clothing, the spiritual perception of the guards reaching out to identify the nature of the beast that had provided her with the fur that she now wore on her back. The hand of the guard was about to rise and block her, but the moment that their spiritual perception detected a trace of the wolf’s original cultivation, they lowered it again and stepped out of the way to let her past. Given that this response was shared by both types of guards, she presumed that she had passed at least one of their tests.

On the inside, there was a small waist-high wall between the entry chamber and the rest of the library, including the stairs to the rest of the floors, and the only way through was right near a reception desk.

“May I enter the library?” Wei Yi asked, seeing no obvious indication of who could and could not proceed through to the bookshelves that she was already looking at and actively scanning. Her mental capacity was more than sufficient to be consuming a dozen books even while focusing on something else, and so she wasn’t going to waste her time while she was waiting for a response. If she was refused, having as many books stored as possible would be excellent.

Nothing would stop her from standing near the library and scanning it anyway, but it could attract attention from those that were more powerful. So long as her actions were observed by the Patriarch and were used to form his first impression, then it might prevent her from allying with him quite as easily as she otherwise might.

“You are free to read what you like. Please pay one gold coin per hour in advance.”

‘One gold coin? For reading? I will need to look around carefully, then, don’t I? There has to be something of note for me to scan,’ she thought, reaching into an inner pocket and taking out four coins, “May I return and add more if I wish to continue reading?”

“So long as you return the next day, then you may. Otherwise, you can only access the library once a day,” the man behind the reception desk stated, not bothering to look up at her or reach out a hand to take her money while she had not yet determined exactly how much she was going to pay them, “These are the rules, and will be enforced no matter your identity or status. To break them would mean to sully the legacy of our library.”

She shrugged and took out two more gold coins from her pockets – using the House of Gold, of course, with a minimal invocation of Law to disguise the fact that there were no coins prepared in her pocket – that she then placed on the desk. The man at the reception desk glanced up then, wrote something down in an open book in front of him, took the coins, and pointed towards the opening to his right.

This looked to be all that she would get from him, so she shrugged and proceeded into the library, having already collected several of the bookshelves that were near the entrance. Given that she could compare books to ones that she had already collected far more quickly than reading them in sufficient detail to understand the words, she didn’t need to browse through every single manual that she saw in full, and could thus clear them far more quickly. Had every single manual and tome been completely new to her, it would have taken her more time, but she might have also opted for a slightly different approach.

At the moment, she was reading and comprehending those books that she read in full, but she could also scan them in and then understand them at a later point by reading them when she had the time to go through more things more quickly.

For her, this would be beneficial only if the library itself did not contain anything of value, and if she didn’t need to locate that item of value through hints of some kinds hidden in the books, like she had been able to obtain the Gilded Library from the technique library in the Yi District. It would be rather unfortunate if she discovered something of the sort, but was then unable to access it without requiring a great deal of effort and time.

‘Admittedly, it is very unlikely that there will be anything here right now that will then vanish from the spot the next day, but you can never be too careful in that regard. Had I been at the Yi District’s library some time later, I might have ended up failing to find the text for the Kong Mental Arts, as all that would have needed to happen was for someone to damage the books or decide to replace the pages that had the unusual characters,’ Wei Yi thought to herself as she approached one of the shelves and picked up a book that did interest her, just in case someone decided to investigate her actions and verify whether she was genuinely reading the book that she had selected.

She learned from the last time that she had decided to browse books in person, where, although she did end up making a friend for a short while, she had also attracted attention that she didn’t need to. For the moment, while it was unclear whether her activities – short and long-term alike, whether in this district or beyond – would be supported by the owner of the library or the Ru Patriarch, it was best for her not to act in a suspicious manner.

While she was looking at the page, however, her spiritual perception was settling down in the area and expanding slowly, flowing into the pages of the tomes around her and gathering more and more from them.

This was not her usual approach, but one informed by the previous thought regarding the faults of her usual spiritual perception. Of course, she couldn’t amend those weaknesses in mere seconds, no matter how powerful Endless Calculation and her mental domain were, but nothing was stopping her from slightly emulating the strength of a mental domain that stretches into the physical world. She only needed to model the world around her, then stabilise her perception via her Endless Monolith to allow it to exist with the same stability as it would had she possessed a spatial gateway to the Kong Prison Realm with her at all times.

It was a rather risky thing to do given the fact that she was attempting to avoid attention, and since her spiritual perception would eventually accumulate to a point that it would be noticed by a seventh realm expert even if she did her best to hide it from them, but she wanted to try it anyway. This kind of thing would have to be seen in a slightly better light than just blatantly reading everything in range with spiritual perception, if only because she would be seen as someone with a certain skill rather than just a random woman with too much attention to spare on multiple books at once.

Her manifestation of the world within her mind took some time, as she needed to add it in the appropriate place relating to the Kong Prison Realm and everything else that she had already grasped, not to mention doing so without actually affecting her mental processes. Due to the intense killing intent supporting her mind, she didn’t need to worry too much about it being damaged or decaying due to any mismanagement of the mind, so to speak, she still needed to be careful with what she did.

Luckily, after almost half an hour of work, during which she managed to get through the book normally and had reason to move onto another shelf to study something else, she was close to a success.

With a stabilised image of the room within her mind, her spiritual perception could exist within the area using less energy and with less mental strain, and thus she could dedicate more of her attention to the reading process. Her mind had long gotten used to using spiritual perception, and so she was not aided by this as much as if she shared the technique with someone else, but any overall decrease to the cost of her mental energy still came across in the end. Previously, she was able to read no more than two dozen books at the same time, if she had nothing else to do, if she wished to understand each and every word and sentence.

This process added six to that number, giving her a reading capacity of thirty in total.

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Once that was added to the incredible reading speed that she possessed, it meant that she could go through that many books per minute and remember all but the faintest of details, which she might need to check at a later point. Adding that to the books that she could scan in without reading them at all, and she could get the entire library into her mind within the six hours that she had provided herself with as a result of her earlier payment.

This kind of thing would have made her very desirable as a student in the eyes of many experts, as one of the issues that they often possessed was the inability to relay all of their vast knowledge in only a few words, which is what certain young masters desired. This often led to simplified lessons and many finer details being left out in favour of fundamentals in certain cases, and the other way around in others, where the teacher believed that they were able to offer something in that regard that would not be obtained through casual study and practise. Some thought this to be sufficient, but failed to consider the true nature of the lessons that they have to teach.

Often, fine details are very fundamental, and fundamentals result in extremely specific behaviours that cannot be fully explained and taught separately from those fundamentals.

‘Again, yin and yang, light and dark, whatever else. Everything is ultimately very similar, is it not? Perhaps the nature of the heavens can also be explained in a similar manner, so long as I understand exactly what the yin to their yang, and the yang to their yin, is,’ Wei Yi thought, switching to another tome and replying to a frown from a nearby reader who thought that she was being too loud.

In a way, flipping through a page every few seconds was quite audible and unusual, even as the typical mental ability of a cultivator rose in their cultivation. This effect wasn’t particularly significant at the first realm, but with each one the mental range of a cultivator rose, and thus their minds needed to become stronger in order to be able to withstand the additional information that they are able to obtain at any moment. This doesn’t directly translate to a similar increase to reading speed as the increase to the range of spiritual perception, however.

It was far more linear of an improvement when compared to the exponential growth offered in the way of spiritual perception range. For instance, if a cultivator in the first realm could read a book in an hour, then the same cultivator in the second realm could get through it in two or three minutes less, as their eyes would be just a little quicker, and their mind would be able to pick up everything provided via the eyes in a little less time.

Upon reaching the third realm, another few minutes would be gained, and then a few more in the fourth. This was not something that could continue forever, and so it was likely that this growth would slow down in the fifth realm and beyond, as there was only so much that could be done to optimise the mind and allow it to process more information. One was to think about it would be to consider the time needed to understand a single word, or a single character on the page. For a normal person, without any cultivation at all, this might take a second, and then the second realm could knock off a few milliseconds that would be chipped away again in the few realms after that.

However, time was still needed to understand the word. Simply put, it was entirely impossible to eliminate the processing time without completely changing the human body and mind into something likely to be unrecognisable entirely.

Thus, once some of the weaknesses of the standard human mind were removed, like the impurities often found within the muscles, there was far fewer improvements to be gained without directly focusing upon it. In her case, she had benefitted greatly from the first time that she had purged her impurities, and then continued to grow in strength as she cultivated physique energy, bloodline power to amplify it, and a form of planar energy that encompassed everything and improved everything. Her mind, on the other hand… it was rather odd, now that she thought about it.

Before she knew anything about the array beneath her shack in the Yi District, she was a fast reader, but nothing particularly exceptional. She had never earned anything more than small praise for it.

When the mind was cleared of the array’s influence, however, she experienced an enormous increase in her capabilities, to the level of being able to read through typical technique manuals in moments. It had made sense to her back then, somehow, but now that she had the time to process such things in greater detail, she realised that this was not normal in the slightest.

‘To be fair, I should have considered this far sooner. I also didn’t have the time to do so, what with all of the bullshit that happened during the expedition, in the Kong Prison Realm, and on the two times I had to travel north,’ she considered, frowning as she glanced up from her book, looking at the ceiling of the library, ‘I had seen the Greats, and I know that they are not this capable. In fact, they are inferior to the usual cultivator, as they are too arrogant and stupid, but with those properties gone their bloodline would still be insufficient to lead to this. The bloodline of the Yi family is similarly lacking in such abilities.’

She had looked in the direction of the sky as there were two things that had the ability to alter a person like this, or bestow a power to someone that stood out this greatly: otherworldly gifts and the entities that controlled them, or the heavens.

The first shouldn’t have had the chance to influence her, nor did they leave any of their usual signs of doing so. No parts of her body were invisible to her spiritual perception, especially not her brain, and the only gift that she had since birth was the Truth of the Universe, which was inert for sixteen years due to the absence of an azure light within it. That gift also lacked the ability to accelerate the mind of a person by such an extent, as shown by Kong Shi Meng in his mother’s memories.

Hence, her thoughts went to the skies and the heavens, but it was hard to conclude anything about them as she had not seen any example of direct action taken by them, at least not as far as she knew. There were also no particular marks of the influence of the heavens, so she couldn’t search for it within herself in order to be sure. Even assuming that she did find something, she wasn’t sure what exactly they would be trying to achieve, since what they ended up creating was a person that hated their existence regardless of the reason for their seeming lack of action in so many situations.

Of course, it would be silly to dismiss the last possibility – that her mind just happened to be special.

It was not an impossibility in a world of strange physiques, contradictory Laws and all kinds of other things that had to be noted. Considering the fact that techniques could be used to strengthen the mind significantly, there was clearly room for improvement in a person’s mental ability, and if she happened to be born with such a thing, the arrays would have led to it being obscured for a time.

The issue was that the continued activity of the arrays used by the Greats wouldn’t have been invisible to those that paid attention to it, as people had back when she was younger. The elders of the Yi District would have been more than happy to find a hidden talent and take all of the credit for bringing it out of them, resulting in a far more honest and loyal follower of the district than someone that learned of their power on their own, like she had ended up doing after the Truth of the Universe was coincidentally awakened by a stray failed talisman.

‘Why do things always have to be this strange when it comes to my life? I’d like a simple answer that doesn’t require me to delve into the very nature of the world for once…’ she held back a sigh as she nearly got through a book far too quickly and would have attracted twice as much attention by the rapid reading and the sigh that would seem to come out of nowhere for the people around her.

Nothing that she did know was able to explain things in full, so she shifted her attention to the various items she had been able to scan from the outer portions of the library, as well as the regions that were out of the view of the common visitors. There were a few uncommon techniques that she had only heard about before, but there wasn’t much that she could reasonably add to her existing methods and combat style. It would still benefit the overall development of her Dao, particularly the Dao of Law and the Dao of the Heavens, which included the Elysian methods and the Planar Dao, the latter of which  appeared within the Truth of the Universe the last time she checked it.

She did find a few texts describing matters in the district that were written only recently, and one explained that the battle scholars that she wished to encounter were not only real, but offered a method of joining them without any permanent obligations, at least at first.

That was exactly what she had been looking for, and so the discovery was easily the most pleasant one she had came across so far. As long as there have been no major changes in the scholar’s protocol since the text was written and published, she would be able to enter, learn from them and possibly steal a few things from their secret libraries, then not be bound by any of their rules once she deems it suitable to leave.

It was unlikely for her to be given the opportunity to browse the techniques she actually wanted through that process, as this process was used to obtain a kind of honorary position, but she would be certain to witness them in action at one point or another. The participation in this process should also ensure that she would be seen by the Ru District’s Patriarch, who was said to be the honorary leader of the battle scholars. She didn’t need a full position to begin with, so that was exactly what she had been looking for in the district.

Her spiritual perception naturally dove beneath the library’s floor in the search for any hidden tomes, treasures, or anything else of value, but there wasn’t much to be seen down there other than some excessive stockpiles of food and miscellaneous resources. The amount was rather unusual, that was obvious, but she was unable to locate anything of personal interest to her, as she saw no techniques nor artefacts that she could utilise for herself. If this turned out to be some kind of issue to the Patriarch, she could always report it to him when she met him, which she was almost certain would occur before she left the district.

For now, she did not have any reason to get involved, so she just proceeded on and got through the rest of the library slowly but without missing any book, page or detail.

 

“Patriarch, this particular slip was filled far more quickly than any I’ve seen before… I have let her into the district, but I wish to confirm that I had not permitted a terrible monster into our district,” the guard reported to the back of the sitting figure, “Forgive me for my interruption.”

She had handed over the hade slip to the figure previously, so the only physical response was the slight shifting of his hood and the movement of his shoulder, amplified by the heavy shoulder pad, as he looked upon it more closely. His metallic gauntlet meant that his fingers could clearly be heard as they rubbed against one another.

“This… is the most wondrous collection of ideas regarding a single topic that I have ever seen.”

“Patriarch?”

“Beginning with the technique manual of the Crushing Tap, a first-realm finger technique, she then lists all kinds of interesting facts about it and potential uses, complications, methods for improvement, and so on. It is amazing,” the Patriarch placed the slip down and clapped his hands together, “This is an excellent scholar, to be sure. Had she been born within our district, I think that she might have made for an excellent candidate for Matriarch.”

“R-Really? Such high praise…”

“If she has even a fraction of this knowledge on other matters, then I am not exaggerating. I shall keep an eye out for her.”

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