Much as he had wished to avoid it, the battle had still devolved into a two-front war.
Moreover, on the main front, Cangwu continued to drop Dao soldiers into key areas from time to time. By now, Wei Yuan had exhausted his red lotus karmic fire and had to resort to the clumsy method of wiping out the grey-robed Dao soldiers bit by bit, which effectively turned the engagement into a multi-front conflict.
Had it been any other of the Nine States, or even Great Tang's Nine Armies here, their battle lines would have collapsed long ago under such frequent, concentrated strikes by grey-robed Dao soldiers against their rear and vital sectors.
Yet the Qingming troops were not merely well-trained and excellently equipped; among the frontline forces were many soldiers recruited locally from the State of Ji. These warriors knew full well that they were defending a hard-won, stable life, and so every single one was ready to fight to the death.
The troops transferred from Qingming went without saying—they had always known they fought for their homeland.
Even the refugees recruited from Western Jin and the State of Zhao had by now acquired their own fields and homes within the domain of Ji and tasted a peaceful life, and they too fought on with desperate ferocity.
Wei Yuan had also demarcated six major battle zones, effectively integrating each commander's tactical faculties into the Flourishing of the Many Realms. Not only could neighboring zones coordinate seamlessly, but even the two farthest zones, commanded by Bao Yun and Xiaoyu, could conduct joint operations.
Under the direction of numerous exceptional generals, across the hundred-li main frontline, over a hundred Qingming detachments gathered and dispersed with fluid agility.
The bunkers and trenches served as sturdy anchor points, restricting the enemy's operational scope so that every inch they gained came at a bloody cost.
Thus, the two sides engaged in brutal attrition on the main battlefield. The casualty ratio between Qingming and the Ji army held steady at one to three, but for every Qingming soldier who fell, an additional three grey-robed Dao soldiers were consumed.
Wei Yuan was currently stationed within Guantun New City. Qingming soldiers and grey-robed Dao soldiers were fiercely clashing just a block away, while Wei Yuan stood before a continuously updating sand table map, constantly weighing his options.
Both sides were testing each other's endurance. At this moment, Wei Yuan still held in reserve the five hundred thousand heavy-armored elite troops rushed in from Qingming, having deployed only fifty thousand Dao soldiers to the north to intercept the Mountain Folk.
If he committed these elites directly to the main battlefield now, he was confident he could crush the Ji army. The question was: might this be precisely what the enemy was waiting for?
Immortals could be fickle and capricious, but none were fools. Wei Yuan could use every trick at his disposal to induce a miscalculation and seize the upper hand, but he could never assume his foes would be stupid.
Qingming had previously been undefeated; the State of Zhao and Western Pu had already begun copying Qingming's military system and purchasing armor and fire guns in vast quantities. Back then, Qingming's bloody struggle against the Shaman Clan's Rain Country had drawn the eyes of the entire world. Wei Yuan therefore did not believe the enemy would underestimate Qingming's true combat strength; the only possibility was that his concealment of heavenly secrets had worked, causing them to misjudge the actual forces Qingming currently had deployed in Ji.
And such a misjudgment could only be exploited once. For instance, after Wei Yuan used the red lotus karmic fire to destroy a million Dao soldiers, Cangwu had immediately resumed dropping more Dao soldiers the moment the karmic fire ran out, having clearly deduced that Wei Yuan's karmic power was limited.
Wei Yuan was therefore biding his time, waiting for an opportunity that could seal victory in a single stroke.
Yet another grave problem loomed before him: the Mountain Folk.
The King Buddha had dropped hints that were blatant enough—the secret of the Mountain Folk was worth two censers of pure incense, and he was not the least bit worried that Wei Yuan wouldn't bite.
Now, the Mountain Folk continued to arrive in an endless stream, their numbers far exceeding Wei Yuan's projections.
Originally, based on Li Zhi's experience in the Zhenshan Fief, Wei Yuan had estimated that the scale of the Mountain Folk's assault would at most be around a million, accompanied by one or two hundred giants and overseen by one or two Scenery Command cultivators at most. That was why he had deployed only fifty thousand Dao soldiers.
Fifty thousand Dao soldiers holding strategic high ground, equipped with sharp artillery fire, plentiful ammunition, bolstered by the Dao Soldier Hall's defenses and regenerative power, and anchored by Wang Hu to hold off any Scenery Command masters, would have been more than enough to firmly repel an army of a million Mountain Folk.
Yet the Mountain Folk who had actually arrived—judging only by what had been scouted so far—already numbered over three million, with nearly a thousand giants and an immortal overseeing them!
Immortal Monarch Yanshi had already cast his gaze down, confronting the Mountain Folk immortal across the void. But with that, the strength available to counter Cangwu and the Venerated Lord was noticeably strained.
Immortal Ancestor Zhao Li had to personally watch over the State of Zhao; granting Wei Yuan a little mortal karmic luck in secret and helping him fend off underhanded maneuvers was the absolute limit of what he could do without stepping directly onto the board in broad daylight.
Had Wei Yuan not spent a hundred million points of mortal karmic luck to slay Liumiao, their present predicament would have been even more dire.
The problem was that the Mountain Folk were still pouring in reinforcements—at the very moment Wei Yuan was beset on both fronts and his military forces were stretched thinnest! Wei Yuan did not even need to think to know that the Mountain Folk had undoubtedly been drawn here by the immortals of Ji.
At present, over twenty million people lived under Wei Yuan's governance within Ji territory, including nearly two million children under the age of two. Scattering such a populace across the land had been easy; gathering them back together would be nearly impossible.
Even if Wei Yuan wiped out the entire Ji army right now, if he failed to halt the deluge of Mountain Folk, all twenty million people would be butchered, turned into food or fertilizer. The Mountain Folk possessed a wide and indiscriminate diet; so long as it was meat, down their gullets it went.
Among the great races, the Mountain Folk and the Guiche were the only two that consumed sentient beings, and the Mountain Folk consumed far more than the Guiche.
Wei Yuan was hardly surprised by Ji's collusion with the Mountain Folk to lure their army here; he was past feeling anger over it.
At the level of immortals, morality and righteousness were illusions, right and wrong meaningless; the only thing that mattered was the outcome.
The slaughter of living souls and the devastation of lands stretching for a thousand li were things only mortals cared about. In the eyes of many immortals, a gulf separated immortal from mortal; mortals were merely ants along the roadside. Even if thousands, tens of thousands, or tens of millions died, it stirred no emotion within them.
Moreover, immortals enjoyed exceedingly long lifespans. The parents, friends, children, and grandchildren who had bound them by bonds of affection had perished long ago. By the time they ascended to immortality, new generations of descendants were tied to them only by bloodline; in truth, they were no different from strangers.
Immortals frequently possessed abilities akin to telepathy; even if not an innate divine ability, similar Daoist arts were simple enough, and eavesdropping on the thoughts of anyone below the dharma idol stage was not difficult in the least. Thus, when the ancestral immortals of various clans received worship from their descendants, the thoughts they heard often diverged wildly from the devotion they saw. Over time, immortals drifted ever farther from the mortal dust.
Yet Wei Yuan was different. He had risen from humble beginnings and possessed precocious wisdom; before the age of six, he had already witnessed the misery of the mortal world, listened to the inner voices of commoners, and engraved them into his memory. Thereafter, his cultivation advanced by leaps and bounds while he immersed himself in historical texts. The inner voices of common mortals, the reality before his eyes, and the historical records and classics gradually fused into one within him, rendering his thoughts and outlook vastly different from those of ordinary immortals.
In the beginning, Wei Yuan had merely felt indignation at the bitter hardship mortals endured and wished to rescue some of those stranded in the Shattered Lands. From there, he had inadvertently embarked on a path of cultivation that drew upon mortal karmic luck.
Now, he had walked ever farther along this path. Having inadvertently sworn a great vow, he had come to view millions of mortals as the very foundation of his Dao. Under no circumstances could he sit idly by and watch twenty million mortals be slaughtered by the Mountain Folk.
Yet in this situation, the King Buddha's attitude was exceedingly subtle.
Wei Yuan was not entirely certain whether the King Buddha truly wished to deliver all living beings from suffering, or if his aim was to strike at the Mountain Folk and repel the alien race. Though to a large extent the two were two sides of the same coin, a delicate nuance remained, and that nuance was likely of critical importance.
Wei Yuan considered the current situation once more from the perspective of the Mountain Folk. A pivotal question arose: what on earth existed in this territory bordering the human domain that was worth the mobilization of a Mountain Folk immortal?
In the borderlands between the great races, the heavens and earth were influenced by the opposing side, rendering them barren wastes in the eyes of every race, and the Mountain Folk saw them no differently. The lands surrounding the State of Ji had originally housed very few Mountain Folk; when Wei Yuan cordoned off tens of thousands of li of territory, it contained only a little over ten million Mountain Folk living in primitive conditions.
Evidently, in the eyes of the Mountain Folk, this place was a backwater wilderness—a desolate dump where birds didn't even bother to shit. How could such a patch of land be worth deploying an immortal?
Questions abounded, and the more he pondered, the thicker the fog became. Yet at this moment, the King Buddha had laid a shortcut right before Wei Yuan; all he had to do was take one more step forward.
Moreover, Wei Yuan guessed that the King Buddha's overt hint carried another implication: the crisis was imminent, and time was of the essence. The sooner he unlocked the secret of the Mountain Folk, the more initiative he would seize.
At this moment, fierce battles raged along multiple frontlines. In the northwest, the Mountain Folk army had bypassed the fortress and begun marching into the interior. Two Mountain Folk Scenery Command masters confronted Wang Hu before the pass, while two other Scenery Command masters moved alongside the two wings of the main Mountain Folk force, bypassing the stronghold to outflank their rear.
In addition, two ordinary Mountain Folk Scenery Command cultivators and a Scenery Command mountain ridge giant eyed them hungrily from behind, having already clashed with Xuanyue and Zhidan Sanren, who had hurried to the scene, without yielding any ground.
Right at that moment, Feng Tingyu sought out Wei Yuan and brought grim tidings: the Master of the Hall of the Bright King should have arrived a day ago, yet he had still not appeared.
Wei Yuan knew naturally what this signified: another trap laid to kill. He only wondered who the target was this time.
Things having reached this point, Wei Yuan grew calm instead. Everything now ultimately pointed to the secret of the Mountain Folk; they were the greatest threat. So long as he dealt with the Mountain Folk army in the northwest, several hundred thousand Qingming elites could turn back and shatter the main Ji army in minutes.
Pondering the matter again and again, Wei Yuan ultimately decided not to rely on the King Buddha.
He would delay ascending the lotus throne for as long as he could—every day counted. As for the enemies surrounding him, Wei Yuan refused to believe they, like the Qingming soldiers, possessed both an iron torrent and an iron will.
The Ji troops feared death immensely, and the Mountain Folk feared death as well. While Dao soldiers did not fear death, their immortal creator clearly felt the pain of losing them.
His resolve set, Wei Yuan mobilized another hundred thousand reserve troops from Ji to establish a second defensive line behind the pass. Fortifying it with battle carriages and heavy artillery as before, he blocked one flanking detachment of the Mountain Folk while allowing the other to push deeper.
Then, his figure flickered. Departing the fortifications, he appeared before Xiao Jingyuan and the Supervisor of the Embroidered Uniform Office.
Seeing Wei Yuan appear, the two Scenery Command cultivators vanished in an instant and reappeared just as quickly, yet their expressions were composed and nonchalant, as though nothing had happened.
Wei Yuan stood with his hands behind his back and said, "It is a great pleasure to see two seniors today. Though this junior is only at the dharma idol stage, I have long admired the grace and prowess of my elders. How about... both of you come at me together?"
Xiao Jingyuan's eyes narrowed slightly, completely at a loss as to what medicine Wei Yuan was selling in his gourd. Yet whether he could guess it or not, Wei Yuan had just slain an immortal with a single sword stroke not long ago; even if Xiao Jingyuan were lent several extra guts, he wouldn't dare face Wei Yuan alone.
Although the Supervisor of the Embroidered Uniform Office was present as well, with cultivation that surpassed even Xiao Jingyuan's, what kind of person was Xiao Jingyuan? Cunning and treacherous didn't begin to describe him. He knew all too well that with this supervisor present, he might end up dying even faster.
Chapter 1060