Shen lined up for the wall with her new staff, as there were more people wanting to go up there than places available for them to stand due to the demons mostly remaining at the top of the steps. The two sides had been swapping out members as they became exhausted for the last seven hours, but so far both sides looked like they hadn’t taken any casualties.
Of course, the demons had lost some people, but with a large number of human slaves being dragged along they were able to clear the dead and injured from the field so that it looked like there were no more than a few injured people on the front line.
When Shen got to the front of the line to go up the steps she saw Do leaving the wall. “So Sho let you get in some target practice?” Shen commented and he nodded.
“Can’t exactly help with the healing when no one is injured.”
One of the other disciples joined into the conversation. “The demons are idiots.” he said. “They are just standing there futilely attacking while watching their own people die. Even Dragon boy here managed to kill a few.”
Do shrugged. “Well, I got lucky. Ice shard got into one of the gaps and froze a few of them to death.”
The man laughed and slapped Do on the back before passing him on his way down the steps. Shen said goodbye to Do and climbed the steps to the wall. After finding a gap she pointed her staff at the ground in front of the barrier. There, upon her orders, the staff searched for something to grow. The grass and other small plants on the surface had been destroyed by all of the attacks which splashed against the barrier, but under the ground were still roots and seeds. She found the seed of some sort of vine just outside the barrier and sent wood chi into it, ordering it to grow. The seed’s natural lifespan was overridden and the plant rapidly grew underground. One of the weaknesses of this attack was that it took a long time to build up to full strength, as so was best used as a trap instead of an attack.
For the next minute she continued to feed it chi, causing it to grow in a large circle until it had surrounded the entire barrier. The demons had placed their weakest members at the back, as well as their field hospital, and through the plant Shen could weakly sense the demons and enslaved humans there. Unfortunately, despite the fact that was the weakest part of the barrier, Shen couldn’t break the barrier on her own as it was still a Nascent stage barrier.
The only actual openings she could find in the barrier were near the city, where the attacks of elders were forcing breaches in the barrier, so she returned her concentration there. She had almost exhausted her supply of Wood chi just growing the vines, but she was ready now. All across the barrier the vines started to sprout, covering the ground around it. Due to the large amount of high purity Wood chi she had used to grow it, the plant had taken on some of the properties of spirit beasts, becoming an initial gathering artificial spirit plant. This allowed it to start drawing in wood chi on its own, further fueling its growth.
All of the growth was focused on one of two areas. Either the plants expanded on the back side of the barrier where attacks couldn’t reach it, or the vines grew towards openings in the barrier near the city in an attempt to get inside and grab people.
Shen soon completely depleted her stores of Wood chi and was forced to stop directly manipulating the plant. She had managed to get it to a point where it would grow on its own, but without her direct control it would just be driven by simple instincts like the one to look for nutrients. The next time she climbed the wall she would give it the drive to consume the flesh of demons, but for now it was only seeking the more fertile soil it could smell inside, as that outside the barrier was mostly depleted of nutrients from the previous rapid growth of the plant.
Shen exhausted the rest of her chi in attacks directed at the barrier, but the demons appeared to have gotten better at closing the holes in their barrier, as she was only able to get a few attacks through due to the speed at which they closed.
Once she was out of chi, Shen left the wall and let someone else take her place. The sun had already set, and she decided to go get something to eat before meditating and returning to the wall.
That night she ended up going up the wall three more times, making the plant a bit more carnivorous each time. She had tried to have it only target the demons, but the plant was still only barely able to detect the difference between them and their slaves. Shen would have to learn more about the demons to make the plant better at finding enemies.
As she stood up there she found herself wondering if this was much different than the target shooting they had jokingly referred to it as. The demons were just standing there, unable to do anything to the people of the sect, but the sect was able to consistently but slightly injure them. They were like mosquitoes swarming someone in armor. If the insects were unable to even sting you, could you even justify killing them?
After thinking of them like that for several minutes she realized how dangerous such thoughts were. If people started thinking of each other as inferior animals, it became easy to treat them like animals. People didn’t think about killing animals unless those animals were pets or those animals benefited them more if alive. Only spirit animals got treated differently, and only when they reached Foundation and were people. And if you treated people as pets, how was that any different than slavery?
She felt the dark thoughts of wanting to look down on the demons as inferior beings inside of herself, but at this point they were so weak that she could push them away. She was glad that she had noticed them in time to push them away. If she hadn’t, and instead given into it, it could keep her from her path long enough to become a proper heart demon, and thus permanently block her advancement.
She finished using up her Wood chi once again, and used what chi she had left to aim for holes the elders had created. This time she only got one attack through, as the demons seemed to be able to shift the breaches in the barrier to prevent the sect’s former tactics from working. The vines, however, were at the peak of Cleansing and would soon advance to Gathering. Maybe if she kept this up, she would be able to get it all of the way into the Nascent Soul stage. Plants didn’t grow sapient no matter how far their cultivation advanced, not having a mind and rarely having a soul, so there was no moral reason that she couldn’t raise it to the point that it could push through the barrier on its own. Without a soul it wouldn’t be able to advance into Nascent, however she may be able to get an elder to give it enough of one that it could advance to that point.
The next several weeks were a continuation of this same pattern. Shen would go onto the wall, control the plant until she ran out of Wood Chi, and expend the rest of her chi on trying to get techniques through the barrier. She had greatly improved with her divine sense, being able to redirect it to a hole in the barrier and send the attack through it almost as fast as she could swat a fly out of the air. This was the only way to get an attack through the barrier at this point, as the demons had gotten so good at moving and fixing breaches that seeing with the eyes simply wasn’t fast enough to find breaches and exploit them.
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Those below Foundation had been delegated to transferring their chi into the Foundation ranked people on the wall, and Shen had even spent a bit of time drawing formations to help with the transfer and purification. The latest design took a small amount of chi from the incoming chi, including the ambient chi, and purified every element using tiny amounts of every other. These five patterns were able to then be stored in the imbuement section of the formula, so that all of the chi that was sent to the Foundation and Nascent level fighters was well above what the outer disciples could produce. Depending on which formation and element one was talking about, the purity of the chi it would give you was somewhere between 20 and 30 percent. As the formations weren’t connected, they all had reached their current level of purity on their own. Shen had been trying to figure out a way to connect the 30 or so formations so that they would purify each other, improving the purity by a few more percent, but so far she hadn’t thought of a way to do it without using something like metal wires to connect the different formations, as that wasn’t part of here original design.
She hadn’t been able to convince any of the nascent soul people to put part of their soul into the Peak Formation vine, as that would allow someone to control part of them by controlling the plant. She did, however, find a way to do what she wanted. She had mentioned her problem to the twins and they had mentioned that their sect had worked with ghosts and artificial spirits. She remembered them creating an ice fairy at one point to cool themselves down, and asked if they could place one in the plant. Unfortunately they didn’t know how to add a false spirit to a living creature, and feared that they would injure or kill the plant if they tried. They offered to put one into the puppet Mae had following her around, but she turned them down. All that would do was let it obey her voice commands and maybe use a few basic techniques, and she already had a tablet that let it do the first one. Minor techniques wouldn’t help her very much.
Then one of the twins revealed that the ghosts their sect worked with weren’t just dead humans. Any animal that had a soul could become a ghost as well, including spirit beasts. The souls of spirit beasts and humans were most favored for use in barriers, but disciples often trained on the rarer but common enough souls of animals. They said that if they could find an animal with a Wood affinity and a soul, they could place it in the plant so that the plant could have a soul and therefore advance to Nascent Soul.
Shen spent several hours of her down time learning from them how to detect souls. Their method for detecting souls was different than the one you used to reach the peak of Foundation, as it was for detecting the souls of others, and their soul manipulation was different from that of Nascent soul cultivators, but when fully mastered would let them coax a soul into doing what they wanted rather than forcing it to do so. It was the difference between dragging and whipping an animal to get it into its pen and feeding it in the pen so that it willingly entered and stayed. She spent her next three breaks looking for an animal with a soul and last night she found one. It was a simple cicada. It appeared to have trace amounts of wood chi inside of its body. This wasn’t enough for it to actually start cultivating, but likely indicated an affinity for the energy, as it had been gathered by eating the spirit plants in a spirit herb garden, as that is where she found it.
She carefully brought the insect to the brothers who used a sleep spell on it so that they could influence its mind. They gave it dreams, simple dreams that even an insect could understand, that it had become the plant that it was eating. At first the insect reacted as if it was a nightmare, but in time, after several hours, it became comfortable with the idea. At that point the two followed Shen to the wall. The vine couldn’t enter the barrier, as nothing was allowed to do so, and they weren’t allowed to exit the barrier to touch it, or even leave the city area, so Shen did the best thing she could think of. She found a seed of the same species of vine in the ground and floated it up to her. The twins then placed the seed on the insect and pressed it through the insect’s exoskeleton. It slowly died but, because the soul had forgotten it was an insect and thought it was a vine, instead of leaving the body and reincarnating, it left the body and attached to the body it thought was already its own.
Shen threw the vine seed out of the barrier, into the middle of the other vine, then sent wood chi into it until it had grown to a few meters long. She then had the vine wrap around the superior vine and, when it had done so, lit the new vine on fire. The soul responded immediately by trying to run away, as it remembered doing as an insect. But it couldn’t. Plants at the Cleansing stage couldn’t move on their own outside of growth and minor things like phototropism. But, as the soul wasn’t well bonded to the vine, it had another option. It fled the body, immediately possessing the nearest compatible body, one which couldn’t be harmed by those flames, a Peak Foundation level vine.
Shen put out the fire and sent wood chi into the superior vine. As the chi was transferred the soul bonded to its body even more, and was able to move itself to search for ways to find its prey. Eventually, just as Shen was nearing the end of her wood chi, the soul grew to the point that it developed a sense of self. This sense was only on the level of the insect it had once been, but it let it discover that there were two ‘its’, the body and the ghost. The body was too slow, though. The body was what was keeping it from reaching the holes to grab its prey. So, if that was the case, could the ghost It move without the other body It and grab them?
There was a surge as the massive amount of gathered wood chi condensed within the soul of the plant, and the ghost managed to put a tendril through a tiny hole that the demons hadn’t noticed, forcing the hole to grow slightly larger and touching one of the demons on the leg. As a ghost, it couldn’t drain blood, but it could drain chi, which it happily began doing.
Shen lowered the staff. As a Foundation level artifact, the vine, which had just broken through to Nascent, was beyond its ability to control. She had completed her goal, though, and now they had gotten an assassin into the demon’s barrier.
The vine pushed part of its body into the barrier and sent a root into the ground, then started to expand. Now that it had a body it could properly attack and feed. The demons started screaming something in their native language and running from the vine as it neared them. For every demon it killed and fed on, it had a new source of chi and nutrients, allowing it to grow far more quickly than before.
Shen sent out her divine sense through the hole the vine was rapidly expanding and noticed something strange. The vine was collecting something from the demons it killed, something round and golden, which emitted chi. Shen realized that they were just like the core she had detected in the spectator at the tournament. She sighed and rubbed her face. Of course. That man must have been a Demon in disguise.
She had assumed it was merely a cultivator that was growing a core like the Body Cultivation book mentioned. But when she hadn’t found another person in the sect, even among elders, that had a core, she wasn’t sure if that were true or not. But if he was a disguised demon, having a golden core would make sense. From what she could tell, most of the demons had one. It would also explain why the demons had far more Peak Foundation ranked members than they should, rather than having them advance to Nascent. She had previously thought that demons might just not have the talent for the Nascent soul realm as often as humans, but they could have such talent and have a reason to delay the advancement if they all grew a Golden Core upon reaching Peak Foundation, then worked on growing that core for several years. That would place the Demon’s chances at having the talent for each level at close to humans, the difference being a matter of not bringing the worst of them into battle or Heart Demons stopping their progress.
With the plant continuously attacking the demons, Shen went down the steps and handed the staff to Mae. Like the other medical personnel, Mae was doing something other than treating people’s injuries. In her case, she had brought a small cauldron from the alchemy shop to the staging area and was making pills out of whatever was available. Most of what she had was the common ingredients from the fields in the outer city, as few of the superior ingredients were available, having been used before the demons arrived. With the staff, however, Mae realized that she could rapidly grow the ingredients she needed as long as she had the seeds. They may not naturally have the amount of chi that they normally would, but Mae could make up for that by simply giving them more Wood chi, assuming she had enough. Shen quickly explained the staff’s features, then left to take a break.
Outside the wall, the demon’s lines were in disarray. Now that the vine had made it inside at started eating and draining them, they couldn’t completely destroy it, as it was mostly underground, sending up vines to grab and consume people only when it wanted to. The plant wasn’t invincible, of course, and Nascent Soul troops could cause permanent damage to it by attacking its soul, but for now, they were forced to retreat.
The people of the city cheered. Now that the demons had retreated they believed that they could go out and gather more of the rare supplies that they needed. This wasn’t the case, however, as only a few minutes after the demons retreated they began launching waves of hundreds of long range, Nascent Soul level attacks.
Some of the people from the flying group that had previously attacked the demons during their advance had the idea that they could go out and collect the ingredients instead. There were sections of the barrier where the bombardment didn’t reach, which could let them leave and, upon returning, open up a large enough hole to reenter through. Unfortunately, the demons were insistent that they not do that. Upon leaving the city in several different directions, each of them, including Sho and Do, were ambushed by a team of ten demons, also flying with various treasures, many of them confiscated swords.
Sho, Do, and most of the others managed to make it back with only light injuries, with only ten percent being killed, but the message was clear. No one would be allowed to leave unless they wiped out the demon army first.
