In the sky above Qingming, a flying boat billowing thick plumes of smoke came hurtling in, slamming into the ground in almost free-fall. It shattered into splinters in an instant, tossing out several hundred young disciples and dozens of elderly disciples of the Bao family.
Fortunately, every one of them was protected by Dao light and suffered only superficial scrapes.
Having rushed all the way without pause, the Bao family—who lived farthest away—had finally made it at the eleventh hour.
Night had fallen deep, but the plaza was brightly lit. Xiaoyu sat on an elevated platform, preaching the profound truth of the Dao concerning the first stirring of Shaoyang and endless vitality. Below the platform, thirty thousand Body Casting cultivators listened in rapt fascination, though practically none of them understood a word.
Xiaoyu was not discouraged, proceeding to demonstrate the true intent of Shaoyang. Among the thirty thousand Body Casting cultivators below the platform, nearly ten thousand were disciples sent by major aristocratic families for paid advanced training. Among them, the Cui family of Ji and Zhao, along with the Zhao Li clan, had sent the largest contingents, enjoying the advantage of proximity.
As rulers of the State of Zhao, the Zhao Li clan boasted a vast kin. Furthermore, having barely participated in previous Dao Foundation Grand Ceremonies, they had sent five thousand disciples in one breath.
Among the mass of Body Casting cultivators, the Zhao Li disciples occupied their own quarter. The men were handsome and the women elegant, all tall and slender, aloof and cold, drawing immense attention. They naturally looked down upon the bizarrely shaped Body Casting cultivators around them, disdain written plain across their faces.
Many cultivators wished to make acquaintances with the Zhao Li clan, but seeing their standoffish demeanor, most dared not actually approach. A few bolder ones or those flaunting their wealth went up to strike up a conversation, only to be mercilessly rebuffed.
A few nondescript loose cultivators could not stomach this. One sneered and said loudly, "What's so great about them? Aren't they just Body Casting cultivators like us? If you didn't know better, you'd think every last one of them was a Dao Foundation forefather!"
The Zhao Li crowd was furious and made to attack, but right at that moment, a Dao Foundation divine sense bore down from above, pinning both sides completely motionless.
Seeing the Qingming Dao Foundation cultivators maintaining order, the Zhao Li crowd only then remembered that they were currently merely Body Casting cultivators with bleak prospects of advancing to Dao Foundation—otherwise, they wouldn't have abandoned their ancestral Dao Foundation dharma idols and rushed to Qingming in search of an opportunity.
The Zhao Li clan had sent several dharma idol experts and a Scenery Command Duke to oversee their group. At first, these high-level cultivators had scoffed at Xiaoyu's preaching, but as they listened, their expressions gradually shifted. Subconsciously, they stepped forward to listen from the front row, growing more focused by the breath.
The Dao of Shaoyang that Xiaoyu expounded was profoundly deep; even the Scenery Command Duke felt greatly inspired, not daring to miss a single syllable. Without realizing it, he contributed karmic luck to Xiaoyu.
Seeing several prominent Old Ancestors of their clan listening with such earnestness, the Zhao Li disciples finally realized that this sermon was far from ordinary. They hastily listened with all their might, only to realize a moment later that whether they listened earnestly or not, they still couldn't understand a single word.
Two hours later, nearing midnight, Xiaoyu concluded his sermon and demonstrated on the spot the Shaoyang dharma idol "All Things Grow," along with its prerequisite Dao Foundation, "Glimmer of Dawn." Wei Yuan then activated All Living Beings in a Flash, guiding the cultivators to comprehend the true meaning of this Dao Foundation.
Once midnight struck, the Dao Foundation Grand Ceremony officially commenced. Within a single quarter-hour, Wei Yuan activated All Living Beings in a Flash three consecutive times. Faint glows sparkled across the plaza from time to time, like the first light of dawn.
Cultivating this Dao Foundation was easiest only within this single quarter-hour at midnight; once the window passed, the difficulty multiplied, and even Wei Yuan could be of no help.
In the end, out of thirty-one thousand cultivators, three thousand three hundred succeeded in cultivating "Glimmer of Dawn"—a fairly low success rate. However, once cultivated, the chance of advancing to dharma idol surpassed even that of the Golden Core of Myriad Splendors; an Earth-grade foundation offered a sixty percent chance of attaining a dharma idol. It was just that among all who established this Dao Foundation, barely over a hundred had attained Earth grade.
Those who succeeded wept tears of joy, while those who failed ground their teeth, determined to fight to the bitter end next year.
The Dao Foundation Grand Ceremony concluded smoothly. Wei Yuan suddenly sensed an extremely minute shift in the Great Dao of Heaven and Earth, though he couldn't tell what it was. At this moment, Qingming faintly echoed and resonated with the southern eight commanderies, spurring the Smoke and Fire of the Mortal World to expand once more.
Wei Yuan had stopped resisting; the expansion of the Smoke and Fire of the Mortal World meant the conversion progress slowed down, pushing his breakthrough to Scenery Command further back yet again. But the Smoke and Fire of the Mortal World was simply too vast. Perfected Chuhe's mindscape world was already considered immense, yet it was not even as large as the central city of the Smoke and Fire of the Mortal World.
When the ceremony ended, most cultivators dejectedly departed, while those who successfully advanced were wild with joy. Had they not needed to consolidate their Dao Foundations on the spot, they would have rushed to the local taverns for an all-night revel.
At this time, Qingming specially launched a Dao Foundation consolidation service for template cultivators, tailored exclusively for template Dao Foundations. The newly advanced cultivators needed to enter individual cubicles and channel their Dao power into the formation arrays inside. The output was required to be steady and uninterrupted; the formation had a built-in monitoring function that would sound an alarm if the flow cut off or fluctuated too wildly.
The newly minted template cultivators were quite curious, so the vast majority signed up for a one-month trial course in Dao Foundation consolidation. The fee for this course was remarkably low, leaving all the cultivators praising Qingming's benevolence.
Wei Yuan, on the other hand, left the ceremony grounds early and entered the Smoke and Fire of the Mortal World to review the consolidated reports on the aftermath in the southern eight commanderies of Jin.
As expected, after Wei Yuan swept through the literary circles, scholars and Confucian literati not only from Western Jin but even Eastern Jin joined the chorus of wild vitriol against him, with the clamor threatening to spread further.
Meanwhile, the Thirteen Taibaos were utterly outmatched in both renown and literary prowess, having zero room to resist. Fortunately, the court scribes promised by the King of Zhao had arrived and were preparing to enter the fray. Their literary prestige was far higher than that of the Thirteen Taibaos, yet even they would struggle to stem this surging tide of denunciations.
Most ironically, rearranging the boundary stones across the eight commanderies had received the recognition of Heaven and Earth and was blessed with immense merit. Thanks to this, True Monarch Chuhe had advanced to Scenery Command without danger, mocking Wei Yuan fiercely along the way to the great delight of the Palace of Grand Beginning cultivators.
Yet for that very same deed, because the stones' nurturing was interrupted and the earth qi weakened, various minor and major disasters broke out in many places, and fields in some areas were ruined due to the shifting earth veins. The literati seized on these incidents as proof of Wei Yuan's perverse tyranny provoking natural disasters, vehemently lambasting him as doomed to suffer heavenly wrath and a wretched death, proclaiming that his beloved kin, teachers, and brothers and sisters would all suffer unforeseen calamities, undergo every manner of humiliation, and perish in agony.
Several articles made Wei Yuan's Dao heart waver with uncontrollable fury, prompting him to place bounties overnight through major merchant firms to take the authors' dog heads.
In truth, before rearranging the boundary stones, Wei Yuan had anticipated what might happen. When facing natural disasters, the most crucial thing was grain. Thus, while the Qingming army had been rounding up scholars and officials everywhere, they had simultaneously transported massive quantities of canned military rations to various regions, establishing emergency warehouses in every county for relief if disasters struck.
During this period, numerous scholars and noble clans covertly organized men to raid the warehouses and torch the grain, intending to starve the disaster victims so as to foment turmoil and make trouble for Wei Yuan. But they had drastically overestimated their own combat ability. The result was that time and again, several hundred men raided a warehouse guarded by twenty soldiers, only to be riddled with bullet holes by the defenders' ferocious firepower. Qingming currently possessed a vast number of combat Dao Foundation cultivators; for every fifty soldiers, there was a Dao Foundation captain.
In the eyes of the common folk across the eight commanderies, they only knew that they had been distributed land and rations. For these two things alone, they contributed their karmic luck without reservation. Yet they were illiterate, unable to voice their thoughts, and no one cared to listen anyway.
Thus, in the streets and alleys, all that could be heard were Wei Yuan's evil deeds in the eight commanderies.
Wei Yuan had been pondering how to break the stalemate, but currently, apart from killing people, there seemed to be no expedient solution. There were countless literati in Jin's royal court, and though Wei Yuan had the support of the King of Jin, the leaders of the scholars and Confucianists were the Left and Right Prime Ministers, who would never stand on Wei Yuan's side.
Even if the King of Jin decreed that they write essays praising Wei Yuan, the result would likely be overt praise laced with covert insults—such as likening Wei Yuan to some powerful minister of a past dynasty who spent his nights in the imperial palace, all to smear his name.
Mulling it over, Wei Yuan returned to his study to pack his luggage, preparing to depart for the State of Ji first thing tomorrow morning.
Just as he entered the study, Wei Yuan saw a woman in red sitting quietly by the window, reading the latest popular storybook.
Wei Yuan stepped forward to greet her with a bow, only to notice that her red dress today was of a different style, slit down the side so that when she sat, a section of her snow-white, shapely leg was revealed.
Wei Yuan hastily looked away, but Zhu Yuanjin did not mind in the least. Instead, she swung her leg slightly and said, "I just sparred with a few old friends; this makes moving around easier. Besides, the physical body is the finest weapon. If you were fighting me and dared not look at my legs, do you think you aren't dying fast enough?"
"Your instruction is well taken."
Zhu Yuanjin set down the book in her hands. "The recent storybooks are so dull—neither novel nor punchy, far inferior to the tales of the three great scholars. But who knows how long we'll have to wait for new stories about those three scholars, and they'll probably be poorly written anyway. I actually have an idea."
"Please speak." Wei Yuan knew Zhu Yuanjin never spoke without aim.
"I happened to see a literary periodical published by the Academy. It publishes essays by the scholars and masters of the Academy at regular intervals, once every quarter. I think this format is quite good. If new storybooks were serialized in it, I wouldn't have to bother searching around; I could just buy the periodical regularly. And if newcomers can submit anonymously, there ought to be plenty willing to write about the current affairs of the Three Scholars. Well, you aren't short on silver, so why not get this done?"
A flash of inspiration struck Wei Yuan's mind in an instant!
Periodicals and newspapers from the world beyond the heavens—how had he forgotten about those? When it came to a war of words, who could out-argue someone who controlled periodicals and newspapers?
Wei Yuan saw the light, countless strategies flooding his mind, each more insidious than the last, so many that he could hardly prioritize them all at once.
"That's easy to do, I'll go arrange it right away! But what should we name this journal?"
Zhu Yuanjin pondered for a moment. "Storybooks encompass everything under the sun, so it's not easy to sum up. In ancient times, the sages created the Eight Trigrams to deduce all things—why not call it Bagua?"
Wei Yuan nodded in praise. "Bagua is indeed fitting! Only Patriarch has such naming prowess! I'll begin drafting the plans right now and launch the Bagua Weekly."
Chapter 1002