If this was the Ascendant Realm I hadn't so much ascended as crashed.

  My brain was trying to hammer its way out of my skull and I could feel the bile burning the back of my throat. I’ll be honest, this wasn't what I had expected when I finally made it to the Heavens.

  There was a clink of metal as I moved and I forced my eyes open. Ki suppression manacles. Someone had actually bound my wrists like a common criminal. The audacity stung worse than the headache. Someone thought they could constrain me? Really?

  Actually, the quality of the manacles wasn't bad as far as these things went. I could feel them clamping down on my cultivation while at the same time something was insidiously draining my boundless reserves of ki. Good luck with that. I hope they had a lot of time. Although, having said that, I won't deny that my cultivation felt altogether wrong. No matter, the manacles were still trash and they couldn't hold me.

  With a flex of my ki, I enhanced my muscles and the manacles exploded off my wrists. So much for suppression.

  My smug triumph only lasted a moment. Pain lanced through my body before the shattered manacles even had time to hit the floor. This wasn't the minor discomfort I had expected from breaking the cheap restraints but a searing pain that shot from my wrists up through my arms and into my chest.

  Something was very wrong here. Breaking free of these manacles shouldn't have hurt me at all. I reached for my almost limitless sea of ki to use a perception technique and instead found nothing. The vast reservoirs in my meridians and in my cores were all gone. All I could access was the residual ki circulating through my soul.

  Footsteps sounded from around me and I put this mystery to one side. These were, no doubt, the unfortunates who had been set to guard me. And, right on cue, their ugly faces hove into view.

  Well, at least they had the wit to look scared, even if they didn't have the wit to run away. If this bilge scum thought they were having a bad day so far, it was about to get a lot worse.

  I assessed them with a glance and I literally gasped at the audacity. Three Adepts, the rest mere Disciples. Awakening Realm level cultivators, all of them. Awakening Realm, not even Martial Realm, against a cultivator who was at the peak of the Transcendent Realm. They were clearly trying to humiliate me.

  To give a sense of how insulting it was for me to be accosted by cultivators who were only in the Awakening Realm, let me put it this way: the people who cleaned the homes of the people who worked for me would have been embarrassed to deal with such insignificant opponents.

  Even diminished as I was, they were beneath me. I could grind them to dust without a single technique but simply by using the physical prowess of one finger of my Transcendent body. Of course that would mean I would literally have to dirty my hands with them, and I wasn't about to do that.

  "You dare?" I wasn't the most patient of men at the best of times, and this absolutely was not the best of times. That didn't excuse the cliche though. "You think you can chain me like some drunk deckhand? You?"

  I gathered some of the pitiful amount of ki available to me and used the hand movements for the Drowned Soul Technique. While the patterns were familiar, the flow of my ki felt strange. Slower and more clumsy than my normal elegance as I fought against the ongoing draining of my ki. In any event, being reduced to gestures and words to use a technique rather than simply using a thought was a further cause for shame.

  I decided to work out my frustration as the technique condensed brine between my palms.

  "Drown."

  Their eyes widened as seawater filled their lungs. I watched as their bodies convulsed, then lay still.

  A new spasm ran through me as I released the technique. My remaining ki reserves plummeted far more than a trivial technique like this should have taken. Irritatingly, as I used the Drowned Soul Technique, I could feel the knowledge of the technique fading from my mind as the ki I needed to execute it was burned. I held onto the technique for a moment then allowed it to go.

  You might be reading a pirated copy. Look for the official release to support the author.

  A modest amount of ki was needed to bolster my mind to retain these techniques. Normally that was trivial, but with my current constraints I needed to preserve my ki. It wasn't a long term problem and I could easily relearn them from my Silent Pagoda Archive. Fortunately, I had intimate knowledge of tens of techniques, and had access to hundreds more once I accessed my Archive

  My enemies would run out of life before I ran out of techniques.

  Was I pleased with that line? Yes, yes I was.

  I grimaced and studied the dead men. Each bore the tattoo of a dagger on the inside of their forearm, its blade pointing toward the wrist. Oh, they were all in the same gang. How sweet. Maybe they had a clubhouse that they all lived in together. I hoped so. I would enjoy turning it, and all of its inhabitants, to dust.

  Ignoring the bodies, I tried to work out what was going on. I was in a bare room with no windows and a single, ironbound door. The only thing in the space was the stone chair that I had been manacled to and a circle of runes carved deep in the floor around it. The runes covered the entire floor and were picked out in the dust of various precious stones or lined with platinum or bronze.

  Well, there was now a pile of corpses here as well of course, but they didn't count.

  The glow from that formation was all that lit the space. Without boasting, formations were something of a specialty of mine and, from a quick inspection, I could tell that the runes in this one were related to soul capture and travel between planes. More to the point it was this formation that was the cause of the ongoing drain on my ki. I was right that breaking the manacles or using my techniques shouldn't have caused me pain. That was all a backlash from the insidious formation intent on draining me.

  Annoyingly, the sigils were also intricate and complicated. To work out the specific detail of what they were intended to do I would have to head to my Archive to consult some of my tomes and talk it through with Meiyu. However, an academic investigation was not a priority just at the moment.

  Right now, I had to work out how to get somewhere safe. I had no idea how I got here. In fact I had no idea of where 'here' was. What I did know is that this clearly wasn't The Unchained Deep, my flagship galleon where I had chosen to ascend with Huairen, the rest of my Patriarchs, and my massed armadas watching on. For me to end up like this it was clear that my followers had somehow either been overwhelmed, or had betrayed me while I was distracted with my ascension.

  Worse than all of that, I had somehow been incapacitated. Me. I think it would be fair to say that this insult would be avenged with a disproportionate response on my part. Who would dare to even dream of doing something like this to me?

  But enough. Now was not the time to plot revenge. First I needed to get out of here.

  Focusing inwards, I realized that I couldn't feel either my meridians or my cores, literally all I had was the residual ki in my soul. In fact I couldn't even access my soul bound treasures. There was clearly more suppression going on here than just the manacles. I had been reduced to the power of an Early Martial Realm cultivator at best, not the cultivator at the Peak Transcendent Realm that I truly was.

  Right, if that was the power I had access to then I would make do. Time to replenish those meagre ki reserves. My Tide Renewal meditation technique should do it. It was a technique I had created myself, and it was my preferred technique for at least the last half-century. I allocated part of my mind to meditate while I came up with a plan…and nothing. My connection to the world's energy was severed.

  Oh come on. This was getting irritating now. Not being able to draw in more ki was a significant blow. I needed to get out of here and regroup, for that, I needed information.

  I used my dwindling ki to extend my senses outward with Depthsounder's Insight. Other scanning techniques were more powerful but I wanted something that wouldn't draw attention or drain my limited ki too much. Pain flared again as the energy left me, and again I felt my knowledge of the technique slipping away even as I used it. I gritted my teeth and by sheer force of will I maintained the scan until I found something useful.

  Two discoveries. First, I was in a pocket dimension. Well at least these people were putting in a minimum of effort. A pocket dimension limited both my perception skills and my communication arts. At least my opponents were not complete idiots. Second, and more pressing, ten auras were racing toward my position. Nine were at the Adept Stage. While they might well be sitting at the peak of the Awakening Realm, there was nothing they could do other than distract me.

  The last though. He was a whole Realm higher, somewhere in the Martial Realm. And deep into it if I was any judge.

  I cut off the scan before it drained my ki further and reluctantly allowed the knowledge of the technique to slip away. In my current state I didn't want to spend the ki to probe this Martial Realm cultivator's mental defenses to see exactly what stage they were at. I would find out soon enough.

  I could tell he was strong though, and a smile spread across my face.

  My cultivation was crippled. I had no allies, no weapons, no treasures, nothing. All I had was a fading pool of knowledge and a few drops of ki.

  My smile turned feral. Perhaps this encounter might actually require some effort.