Upon receiving word that the army of Ji was mobilizing, Wei Yuan felt an instant surge of energy. He urgently summoned all the cultivators of the Palace of Grand Beginning and simultaneously began selecting qualified warriors in the new city to organize them into regiments.
Another year had passed, and the youths of the Xu family had reproduced once more, giving birth to a full thirty thousand infants. After the infants devoured one another's primordial spirits, the number settled at five thousand. According to Sun Yu's testing, all five thousand of these newborns possessed Dao Foundation potential.
Wei Yuan had no time to focus on nurturing infants for the moment. While mobilizing his troops, he deployed his battle lines, dividing the front into six operational zones centered around Guantun County and appointing a commander-in-chief to each. When the great battle began, once these commanders received their overarching orders, they would be free to direct operations according to conditions on the battlefield.
Ever since Qingming had been established, the flames of war had burned year after year. The cultivators of the Grand Beginning had been through thorough tempering; regardless of their assigned responsibilities, every single one of them was capable of leading troops.
The selections for the six war zones were quickly finalized. Baoyun, Ji Liuli, Xiaoyu, Cui Yu, Feng Tingyu, and Feng Chutang easily filled all the slots. As a result, figures like Wang Hu, whose dao force and intellect were both at the absolute pinnacle, had to take a back seat, while Xu Henshui, Sun Yu, and Yu Zhizhuo could only be assigned to logistics.
Two of the Twelve Celestial Idols from the Dharma Idol Assembly of yesteryear could not even squeeze into the positions of chief commanders for the six great war zones.
Hearing that a massive clash was imminent, even the State of Zhao and Western Jin were in an uproar, and large caravans of merchants poured into Qingming. Representing various factions, they all expressed a desire to take part and brought generous meeting gifts.
Wei Yuan accepted every gift without exception and then increased his purchasing volume of raw materials, taking as much as they could supply. However, the materials that could be transported to Qingming were limited after all. In their anxiety, and prompted by a hint from Wei Yuan, the various factions combined their influence in the courts of their respective states to push Western Jin and Zhao to each initiate the construction of a new royal highway leading to Qingming.
Public sentiment in the rear was surging, but Wei Yuan remained exceedingly calm. He was well aware that more than one immortal stood on the opposing side. Immortals like Liumiao and Cangwu were mere vanguard pawns; this great battle would certainly not let him pass easily.
At this moment, the State of Ji had only just begun mustering its army. To assemble over a million troops and march out would take several months at the very least. Thus, after careful consideration, Wei Yuan finally decided to erect the Mirror Lake boundary stone, choosing to set it down at the Red Sand Oasis.
The Shaman Clan in this area had long been cleared out, and the Qingming domain would soon expand over it to transform the land. Erecting the Mirror Lake boundary stone here would cause the two domains to overlap; the boost to Qingming would be modest, and it would represent a clear disadvantage in total covered area. However, with the stacking of the dual domains, the various mystical properties of this place would be tremendously augmented.
The Red Sand Oasis was originally a confluence of earth veins. The Nether Shaman lineage had established it as a base for offering sacrifices to the Ancestral Shaman, where supreme sacrificial rites within several thousand li around would gather to worship heaven. Accumulated over tens of thousands of years, the earth veins here had become extraordinary, gradually turning into the heart of the surrounding region.
Had there been a choice back then, Qingming truly ought to have been founded at the Red Sand Oasis.
With the plan decided, Wei Yuan returned to Qingming, took the Mirror Lake stone, and brought it to the Red Sand Oasis, setting the boundary stone down at its center.
As the Mirror Lake boundary stone came to rest, faint clouds of vapor began to rise across all the lakes within the Red Sand Oasis. The water turned exceptionally clear; standing at the edge of a lake, one could see straight to the bottom, while from afar, the water's surface reflected the misty mountain sky.
A moment later, the nearly hundred lakes large and small covered by the domain were all as clear as mirrors. Water mist drifted through the air, casting reflections of the lakes into the sky as well.
Wei Yuan swept his divine sense across the land and saw clear lakes across the entire oasis, their waters like mirrors reflecting the clouds and mist. Sky and lake merged into one seamless hue; it was impossible to tell whether the starry vault had fallen into the waters or the shadows of the lakes had risen into the sky.
The Red Sand Oasis was truly a place where water and fire intersected. With the Mirror Lake boundary stone erected atop it, a mirage realm was born, blurring the line between illusion and reality.
Once the boundary stone stabilized, the domain had fully overlapped with Qingming. Processed by the Hall of Heavenly Craft, the Mirror Lake boundary stone was now another sub-stone of Qingming, uniting the domains into a seamless whole.
Shortly after, several cultivators from the Heavenly Mechanism Hall arrived to lay down formations around the boundary stone. In this place where water and fire met, anchored by the Mirror Lake boundary stone, the heavenly mechanism formations they established yielded extraordinary efficacy.
Large contingents of troops had already marched to key positions, surrounding the Red Sand Oasis to guard it on all sides and beginning the construction of a new city.
Once everything was in order, Wei Yuan cast down the newly obtained supreme otherworldly karmic luck. The entire domain instantly became ethereal and unfathomable. Everyone within looked up at the same time, unaware of what had just occurred.
The Mirror Lake boundary stone had now become Qingming's third karmic luck node. Once the otherworldly karmic luck was cast down, it immediately shielded the heavenly mechanism; everything related to Qingming and Wei Yuan became nearly impossible to divine.
Yet the Mirror Lake did not prevent divination entirely; rather, it allowed calculations to produce results, but they were specious and misleading. Where exactly the calculated results went astray depended entirely on fate.
With such an arrangement, even with the power of Immortal Monarch Yanshi, it would be difficult to unravel without drawing upon the might of the Palace of Grand Beginning's main mountain.
Between the power of Mirror Lake and Wei Yuan's own towering peak of karmic luck, enemies would easily tumble into traps without realizing it—in short, they simply had bad luck.
With that done, Wei Yuan finally felt confident to proceed boldly with his deployments. He brought out all the skiffs and airships in storage, on standby, and under repair. One-third carried troops, and two-thirds carried supplies and equipment. In total, over a thousand airships set out in succession, airlifting an entire heavy-armor force of five hundred thousand directly into the State of Ji in a single deployment.
Previously, there had been fewer than three hundred thousand troops within the territory of Ji, and the most elite mobile heavy-armor forces had numbered only twenty thousand. The other side had immortals observing qi, so naturally it had not been difficult for them to discern truth from falsehood. Only now, having concealed the heavenly mechanism, did Wei Yuan begin to bare his fangs.
All was in readiness.
In the blink of an eye, the end of the second month arrived. The army of Ji had finally finished assembling and set out in stages, advancing along separate routes to converge on their target. At last, they arrived at Guantun County and pitched camp opposite it, establishing a connected line of encampments stretching three hundred li.
For this campaign, the State of Ji had mobilized a total of 1.5 million troops and twenty million civilian laborers and able-bodied men from the rear. An operation of such monumental scale emptied more than half of the national treasury in one stroke.
On the eve of the great battle, Wei Yuan divined the heavenly mechanism by night.
For this divination, Wei Yuan did not seek precise outcomes; he merely intended to examine the general battlefield situation. Therefore, rather than choosing hexagrams, he used yin and yang.
Wei Yuan set up a bronze basin in the hall, placed a sand table map of the State of Ji inside it, dipped a brush in spiritual ink, and touched a droplet to the water. The ink mist dissolved, shrouding the lands of Ji. Then, with a thought from Wei Yuan, several areas of varying sizes were outlined within the faint mist.
The largest was right outside Guantun County—naturally the main encampment of the Ji army. There were two other areas as well, located in the north and south of Ji, both quite far from the royal capital and Guantun County.
Wei Yuan had no clear idea what was going on in those two places. Judging by the scale of the divination results, each appeared to harbor around a million troops. It seemed these were the State of Ji's true hidden reserves.
However, being able to divine reserves positioned so far away came as a major surprise to Wei Yuan. He habitually began to reflect on himself once more: when had his attainments in the Dao of Yin and Yang reached such a level? Progress truly occurred at every moment, and its leaps always surpassed expectations.
It took the army of Ji three full days just to construct their main camp. A veil of mist hung over the encampment, fortified with a grand formation designed to prevent divine sense scanning and heavenly mechanism divination.
Over the next few days, the Ji army began assembling various siege engines. Watching the slow pace of their construction made Wei Yuan drowsy, so he decided to do something to disrupt their rhythm.
The next day, as a routine Ji convoy transporting grain and fodder drew near the camp, over a dozen flying projectiles suddenly dropped from the sky! The dharma idol general in charge of the transport was no archer, so he could only watch helplessly as the projectiles struck the ground and reduced hundreds of supply wagons to ashes. In a single strike, several million jin of grain and fodder went up in smoke.
On the second day, Wei Yuan repeated the tactic, destroying three more of the Ji army's grain transport convoys. The strikes rattled the army's morale to the point that they finally marched out of camp to assault the city.
The following morning, hundreds of thousands of Ji troops marched out from their camps and drew up their ranks before the town. Massive ballistas were wheeled out from the main camp, firing continuously from three thousand zhang away.
The bolts were not aimed at the walls; instead, they shot high into the sky and detonated several hundred zhang above Guantun County one after another, transforming into churning storms of magic power that tore at Wei Yuan's camouflages and heavenly mechanism protective formations.
The Ji army attacked methodically, rolling out catapults as well as a peculiar kind of cannon. These cannons had short, thick barrels, their muzzles as wide as water vats, and were trained directly on the walls of Guantun County.
At the same time, over a hundred towering siege towers were wheeled out from the Ji camp. Each stood twenty zhang tall, pushed by over a dozen Dao Foundation cultivators in preparation to storm the walls.
The great battle finally raised its curtain.
Thousands of colossal bolts continued to detonate high in the sky, the storms of magic power growing increasingly violent. The more than a dozen formations Wei Yuan had laid down to mask the heavenly mechanism were destroyed in succession, and the sky-veiling pillars caught fire one after another. The defensive line of Guantun County was at last laid bare.
As the illusions dissipated, the generals of the State of Ji were left completely dumbfounded!
In their imagination, Guantun County, which Wei Yuan had fortified for two whole years, was bound to have towering walls, deep trenches, and impenetrable defenses.
Yet what stood before their eyes was nothing more than a lone gate tower. All the city walls had been torn down. Several li away, odd, boxy buildings could be seen gathered together into a city with no walls at all.
Along the front line, aside from that single gate tower, there were no prominent defensive structures in sight. There were only low, dark gray bunkers scattered everywhere, each bearing a row of embrasures hugging the ground.
A Scenery Command grandmaster swept his divine consciousness across the opposing positions and saw long, winding trenches crisscrossing the earth. Only a scattering of soldiers was spread thinly along the trenches; slightly more were gathered in the bunkers, roughly a dozen in each.
With the troops dispersed so thinly, even if the grandmaster wished to unleash a large-scale dao art, he could not find a suitable target. Calculating back and forth, any strike could cover at most a few hundred men.
Just as this grandmaster was scanning without restraint, his divine sense abruptly brushed against a cluster of sinister fire!
He let out a bloodcurdling scream, feeling as though red-hot iron spikes had been driven into his eyes. In an instant, they swelled red, and fire began to smolder within his sea of consciousness. Hurriedly retracting his divine sense, he swallowed three life-saving pills in rapid succession before he managed to extinguish the projection of that sinister flame.
He was appalled. If a mere projection was this formidable and had nearly ignited his entire sea of consciousness, what would the true fire be like? The state duke dared not display the slightest complacency any longer. Forcing his swollen, red eyes open, he looked ahead once more using ordinary mortal vision.
In the center of the enemy lines, a faint sinister sun had risen. It was not intensely blazing, radiating only a sliver of true intent—just enough for discerning grandmasters to grasp its meaning. And this Scenery Command state duke had experienced firsthand that the sinister sun's true intent was no laughing matter.
He simply could not fathom how such a bizarre thing could exist in this world.
Once the phantom of the sinister sun hung suspended in the air, every shred of divine sense scanning across Wei Yuan's positions vanished, and no one dared cast another reckless glance.
The sinister sun hung in the sky for several full breaths before slowly dissipating.
Without prior agreement, the generals of Ji all turned their gazes toward Xiao Jingyuan. Xiao Jingyuan frowned deeply in contemplation.
He had spent a lifetime on campaign, yet he had never encountered a defensive line like this; for the moment, he had no idea where to even begin. What was certain, however, was that the hundred-odd siege towers built at enormous expense were utterly useless, and neither the catapults nor the newly rushed heavy cannons had any target to strike.
Chapter 1056