Chapter 16-417: Uninvited Guests (1/2)

Based on advanced geomantic calculations of Being Close to The Damn Middle of This Place, Sama skated through the shadows and the night and the crimson Qi-lighting to a section of white walls topped with crimson tiles that was generating a whole lot of vibrations, typical of the thrum that happened when great amounts of power used to set up large energy fields were deployed.

The pillars spewing faint scarlet flames lazily might have been a subtle hint, too, in that eye-slapping-ugh kind of way. Fires from sacrificial blood... they were probably running light on the stuff. No unlimited resources, after all! That meant all those disciples coming in vigorously and stumbling out drained of Qi were being used as batteries.

While it would be nice to kill a whole bunch of them, that wasn’t why she was here.

She hopped up on the edge of the wall, and quirked a sly smile. The bastards thought they were being clever.

A strand of her hair stole forward and swiped at something in midair. A crimson line came into visibility a foot ahead of her, neatly swiping off the very tip of her hair.

It was revealed in her Null, no longer invisible; red as blood, very thin, and very sensitive.

But they were dealing with a Forsaken, not a Powered or a Cultivator. These threads would react to any hint of energy directly manipulating them, but a Vajra, ki?

The tips of her toenails were driven into the wall and supporting her easily. She wove her hands about, seizing those deadly and sensitive threads in her Vajra, holding them taut as she severed them, and then simply tied them to other such threads deftly, rapidly clearing an opening for herself.

She only needed an inch of clearance on all sides to get through smoothly, pulling herself up and through the invisible opening.

Of course, there was another layer of the webbing on the inside of the wall, designed to catch the overconfident, but those sorts of people weren’t Trembling Sages, tyvm. She tied off that opening even faster, and when the bored guards on their thirty-second routes passed by, she was already past them and down into the inner Warding area.

Clusters of disciples were gathered here and there, many of them visibly sweating as they channeled energy into the Wards and alleviated the resource cost of maintaining them. She studied the flow of energy, and ghosted into and along the patterns organically, shunting from one flow to another towards the middle, where the most senior acolytes and masters had gathered.

She really, really wanted to pull out Tremble and show these pasty-faced fucks what being the Sage of Swords was all about, and had to tamp down on her killing intent, letting Seven Dragons worth of meditative techniques swirl through her thoughts.

Downsides of massive mental Stats were massive mental impulses. It required levels of control just as inhuman to keep them in control.

Sometimes, she just had to let her Stupidity Stat go, but this was not one of those times.

She was tracking and charting everything within ten paces, above and below ground, and matching it up to what she could see visually. She glided closer to various nodes and meeting points, verifying if the patterns changed or altered, and if there was symmetry.

There were alterations that seemed direction-based, external energy flows that matched powers that might just match those of Sects in those directions.

She glided to a stop by the Ward to the inner area’s short wall.

Currents of Qi were flowing by, preparing to ignite if they moved through something or were interrupted. They flowed into and out of the gates, the only viable ways in, the walls sealed off from above, patterns playing over the circular dome and arrangement of tiles and spires scattered upon it.

QL 32 work on the stonework, 35 on the Formation. Someone wanted some security.

Alas for them. A Source’s Sun would have ignited it already; a Void could purify it, but would interrupt the pattern.

A Null, well...

She smirked. It was a given that intellectual one-upmanship existed among high-Level people, and paper-scissors-rock of defenses was one thing they debated a lot. Building examples of potential defenses and getting past them was a very interesting thing to the Stealth-minded.

Certain things Voids did best. Other things, you just couldn’t beat a Null, especially one with a Vajra.

She reached out with her Null and spread it around this wall of Qi in front of her.

It wasn’t a Wall, or they wouldn’t be able to pinpoint disruptions. It was a bunch of parallel streams of Qi flowing sideways. The trick was to spread the streams along her Null, like forcing a stream to divert around a rock intruding into it, without breaking the flow like something material would do.

She pushed her hand in, her Null expanding about it, forcing the parallel streams of Qi first inwards, and then up and down, all without breaking their flow, and slow enough to not trigger any alarms.

If there were independent timing pulses designed to measure continued synchronicity within each little beam, this would have been harder, but that would have required some advanced electronics and computational devices you didn’t find among Cultivators.

Soon she had a bulge large enough for her to literally hop over and through. As her Null receded behind her, each separately expanded thread flowed back into position smoothly.

If someone was specifically looking at this area, he would have noticed a momentary surge as the pattern was restored, and nothing else. Divine Sense was regularly sweeping this area, but what did a Null Darkstalker care about such things? The spiritual perception of the Daoists swept through her as if she was not there.