Only after returning to Qingming did Wei Yuan sense several gazes sweeping across the world.
Though his karmic luck had been wiped clean, his Spirit Abode was complete and his status far exceeded what it had been. Even if immortals sought heaven-and-man resonance, they would face considerable delay. Furthermore, Wei Yuan moved swiftly; after departing the Western Jin royal palace, he did not pause for an instant, returning immediately. Thus, by the time the mighty figures noticed Wei Yuan had left Qingming, he was already back.
Back in Qingming, Wei Yuan was able to set about sorting through his gains while handling the aftermath of the great battle.
First were the two sets of immortal remains. Lu Changhe's remains had sunk beneath the Qingming Immortal Stone, steadily descending toward the depths of the earth veins. With his true spirit extinguished and his soul long dispersed, the immortal power in his remains was unrestrained, gradually diffusing and altering the surrounding world.
Looking down from high above Qingming, one could see a colossal humanoid silhouette deep underground, stretching over a thousand li long!
Only now did Wei Yuan gain an intuitive sense of how formidable an immortal's foundation truly was.
A single Lu Changhe, even in death, could transform into a thousand li of precious earth, thoroughly renewing and enriching the resources and earth veins of a realm—enough to turn a barren wasteland into fertile fields. Within Qingming, across the expanse of precious earth formed by Lu Changhe, numerous plots of land had already sprouted spiritual energy, turning into spiritual fields. By rough estimate, there were at least several hundred thousand mu.
Foundations varied vastly from immortal to immortal. When the Patriarch of the Palace of Grand Beginning passed into meditation, his body had transformed into over eight thousand li of precious earth. Wei Yuan's mathematics was passable now, so he naturally understood the astronomical difference between eight thousand and one thousand across the three dimensions of length, width, and height.
And that was not all. Where the Patriarch had passed into meditation was then the world of the shaman domain; what had to be reshaped was the entire macrocosm. In contrast, Lu Changhe merely enriched the Qingming domain, which had already been transformed into a human domain. The consumption involved in becoming precious earth was completely different between the two.
Lastly, the Patriarch had returned from a monumental battle back then with a shattered immortal body. He had endured for less than three years, barely leaving behind a portion of his legacy before passing.
Looking upon the precious earth left by Lu Changhe, Wei Yuan gained a vivid realization of the Patriarch's magnitude. A curiosity suddenly welled up within him: back then, endowed with power that could reach heaven and earth, why had the Patriarch hurried west immediately after ascending to immortality to fight the First Heavenly Shaman to the death? Had he nurtured and tempered his realm for several decades, would it not have been a guaranteed victory?
He did not even need to ponder the question to find the answer. One only needed to look at Wei Yuan himself right now. If there had been any other choice, why would he have pushed Prince Chu forward? At the very least, Prince Chu was his own flesh and blood.
Yet Wei Yuan was never pedantic. Having made such a choice, he would not berate himself; he would simply lay all the hatred squarely upon the instigators. If the time was not yet ripe for vengeance, he would record the debt in his ledger, never to be wiped clean.
Xu Shuhe's immortal corpse lay beneath the Medicine Garden, but it had only formed a little over three hundred li of precious earth.
However, the shape of the precious earth he formed was very peculiar: small in surface area, yet immensely deep. In total volume, it was hardly less than Lu Changhe's, and that was after missing both arms and both legs.
Wei Yuan could not fathom why, and could only conclude that Xu Shuhe had been tossed in vertically.
Beyond the two sets of immortal remains vastly boosting Qingming's immortal foundation, Wei Yuan had also gained tremendous rewards of his own. First was the Three-Foot Azure Dragon Cave Heaven. After it was incorporated into the Flourishing of the Many Realms, a tiny azure dragon had flown out of the Fourth Cave Heaven. Following an intense clash, the two dragons ultimately merged into one.
The newly born dragon bore stripes of cyan and dark azure; what dragon genus it belonged to was impossible to tell. Though only a foot long, it brimmed with spirituality, soaring across the heavens of its own accord. As it flew, Wei Yuan noticed something amiss: the little dragon actually appeared to be seeking an orbit suited to itself!
Unlike Wei Yuan, who needed to spend substantial time and computational power calculating new orbits, this little dragon flew purely on instinct. Whenever it deviated, it would blur and flicker, returning to its position from a few breaths earlier. Through repeated trials, it genuinely managed to chart out a short segment of an orbit.
Yet this charted orbit held many bizarre traits. Logically, having this segment of data ought to be enough to mathematically deduce the entire orbit, at which point the Seventh Orbit could take shape.
Yet no matter how Wei Yuan calculated—even delegating the task to the Flourishing of the Many Realms, where mathematical masters like Jun Weizhi and Ji Liuli took turns attempting it—there was no result. In the end, he had to let it be. It seemed this bizarre newborn dragon would have to chart out its flight path on its own.
Additionally, Lu Changhe possessed some immortal objects and precious materials on his person that were quite valuable; Wei Yuan deposited them straight into the treasury for future use. Xu Shuhe, on the other hand, had possessed nothing of value, clearly having prepared to die.
Having dealt with these pressing matters, Wei Yuan turned his thoughts to his next moves.
According to the analysis from the Flourishing of the Many Realms, the first matter requiring attention was the appearance of foreign races assisting Qingming. A reasonable justification and explanation had to be provided. After all, those who had arrived were no petty figures—they were the Little State Preceptor of Northern Liao and Heavenly Shaman Yaolan.
Both were of immortal rank, and on the Shaman Clan's side, veteran Heavenly Shaman Jiumu had even intervened indirectly. This could no longer be explained away as personal friendship and sentiment, so it demanded serious attention. If left unexplained and the accusation of colluding with alien races stuck, Wei Yuan would become a street rat that everyone pelted with stones; even the Palace of Grand Beginning might not be able to protect him.
Seeing this analysis, Wei Yuan did not rush to make a decision, instead considering how the immortals would act.
Under normal circumstances, upon returning to their ancestral clan grounds, Cui Zhengxing and Cui Wantong would first rest and recover, examine themselves, investigate their karmic threads, communicate with close friends, and carefully scout the overarching trends. Only after completing these top priorities would they attend to trivial matters—such as Wei Yuan's collusion with foreign races.
Only then would they summon clan elders, briefly outline Wei Yuan's collusion with outsiders, and hire writers to compose polemical essays denouncing him. That was the general procedure. The core of such matters lay in accountability and condemnation at the immortal level, but since both sides had already torn off all pretenses, that aspect amounted to little more than bluster.
Having understood this, Wei Yuan suddenly recalled Bai Kaishui's retorts to Cui Zhengxing and felt an abrupt burst of inspiration!
Wei Yuan immediately assigned a task to the Development Bureau, according it top priority. The task consisted of two points:
First, denounce the Northern Qi Xu family for colluding with the Liao clan, having the gall to guide a Liao immortal in invading Qingming—an unpardonable crime.
Second, denounce the Yan-Chen Cui family's immortal ancestor, Cui Wantong, for selling out humanity for glory, groveling obsequiously, and using humble words and lavish gifts to recruit the Shaman Clan's Heavenly Shaman to their aid, acting as accomplices in the invasion of Qingming.
In the directive issued to the Development Bureau, Wei Yuan not only explicitly provided Cui Wantong's name, but even included a portrait bearing a thirty percent resemblance to Cui Wantong herself. However, this portrait and name were intended for the core scholars stationed in Qingming.
He believed that with the Qingming Development Bureau's formidable Qingyuan funding offensive and organizational prowess, it could instantly whip up a storm across literary circles, pinning the crimes of colluding with alien races and slaughtering fellow humans firmly upon the heads of the Northern Qi Xu family and the Yan-Chen Cui family.
What? You say you didn't do it? Prove it!
Striking preemptively—or rather, slinging mud first to force the opponent to prove their innocence—was the standard playbook of the Qingming Development Bureau, and exceptionally effective.
Beyond this, similar large-scale operations had a secondary function: discerning friend from foe. The Development Bureau would screen all scholars who stood against Qingming, distinguishing core enemies from those who merely joined the fray to follow the crowd. Then it would further categorize the core enemies, separating those who opposed Qingming due to this specific issue from those who opposed Qingming purely for the sake of opposing Qingming.
The latter were classified by the Development Bureau as hardcore diehards. All resources and force would be mobilized to encircle and suppress them—without time limit, without distinction, and without moral scruple. Like a pack of hounds swarming together, they would hound them until their reputations were utterly ruined.
Those who opposed Qingming strictly on the merits of the issue ranked lower in priority, but they were not spared either. The Qingming Development Bureau's consistent principle was that stance trumped right and wrong—or in simpler terms, where you sat was more important than what you thought. Anyone who did not stand with Qingming was classified as an enemy.
The Qingming Development Bureau was no longer a secret. Some people had been so tormented by the verbal barrage that they sought to give Qingming a taste of its own medicine. They spent lavish sums to hire several prominent Confucian scholars, who disguised themselves and slipped into Qingming, intending to launch biting critiques of current affairs to make Wei Yuan's life miserable.
Yet what these eminent scholars and their backers never anticipated was that the populace of Qingming had already been enlightened. The literacy rate in the core major cities exceeded seventy percent, and the younger generation, refined through successive rounds of academy selection and training, had already developed an independent, systematic, and scientific mindset similar to that of the Outer World.
Thus, when these elderly scholars clutched the sacred canons and precepts handed down by sages from thousands or tens of thousands of years ago to deliver their scathing critiques, before they could even step onto a grander stage, they were rebuffed right in a teahouse by common mortals and templated Dao-foundation practitioners until they were tongue-tied and their Dao hearts shaken. The scholars could not win the argument, dared not start a brawl, and eventually had their true backgrounds exposed. Law enforcement cultivators promptly arrested them, threw them into prison, and published their identities to the entire world.
And so, an operation on which behind-the-scenes grandees had spent hundreds of thousands of taels of immortal silver and prepared for over half a year caused a mere afternoon's ripple in a single teahouse, and then—nothing.
Wei Yuan naturally had no idea about such petty matters. After assigning the task to the Development Bureau, Wei Yuan forwarded directives to Baoyun's Ding'an City and Xiaoyu's Yong'an, ordering the publication and circulation of various storybooks about Cui Wantong in both core cities.
In this manner, Cui Wantong would suffer just as Lu Changhe had back then: voices would murmur in her ears day and night, an endless torrent of foul, slanderous obscenities. Wei Yuan wanted to see just how long Cui Wantong could endure it with her fiercely competitive and boundless pride.
At the very least, until Cui Wantong achieved a substantial breakthrough in her mental state cultivation, she could forget about advancing her cultivation by even an inch.
Since Cui Wantong dared meddle in Qingming's affairs, Wei Yuan's answer was straightforward: block her Dao path first before talking about anything else.
As for Cui Zhengxing of Song's Qinghe Cui, there were temporarily no direct methods to target him. That old fox was cunning and slippery; disrupting his Dao heart with such tricks would hardly work. Wei Yuan had no intention of stubbornly fixating on him, simply shelving the matter until his armies bordered the State of Song.
Wei Yuan then issued orders to the frontline legions. The armies, originally garrisoned across various regions to digest the occupied territories, mobilized once again. Several vanguard legions set out, their blades aimed directly at the Lu family's ancestral land.
Since he knew the Thirteen Clans were key to the immortal assembly's chessboard confrontation against the Martial Ancestor, Wei Yuan wanted to see what remaining moves the opposition had once he adopted a posture of utterly flattening the Lu family.
Under normal circumstances, someone should step forward around now to negotiate terms with Wei Yuan. But just like negotiating with Lu Changhe, Wei Yuan felt terms could certainly be discussed, but it was best to discuss them after holding a blade to their throats—only then could the conversation be pleasant.
And that was merely the first step. Wei Yuan also sent emissaries to notify Eastern Jin, declaring his intention to launch a punitive expedition against the Northern Qi Xu family for their unjust deeds. However, as the Qingming army did not currently share a border with Northern Qi, he intended to borrow passage through Eastern Jin to attack Qi.
Chapter 1143