Looking at the Comprehensive Plan for Qingming Karma Dissipation before him, Wei Yuan did not know whether to laugh or cry.
The plan was specifically designed to handle the karmic cause and effect incurred from killing civilians or low-level cultivators during wartime. In the past, Wei Yuan had personally overseen virtually every phase of warfare. From the opening missile bombardments to the subsequent artillery barrages, almost every order had come directly from him. Consequently, the lion's share of the karmic burden had landed squarely on Wei Yuan alone.
One day, however, while lost in deep contemplation during sleep, Feng Tingyu concluded that saddling Wei Yuan with every single karmic tether severely undermined Qingming's war potential. A consensus was reached between the two regions with her greatest computational capacity that this state of affairs had to change. Upon waking, Feng Tingyu led the Qingming Academy of Sciences to launch dedicated research into the issue.
After months of arduous study conducted in collaboration with the Equality of All Beings Warfare Research Institute, the Battle Saint Hall, the Creation of Heaven and Earth Research Institute, and other bodies within the Splendor of the Many Realms, this plan had finally taken shape.
It was primarily divided into two major components: karma distribution and karma dissipation. Karma distribution relied on a specialized command structure and custom-developed auxiliary cultivation arts. When frontline commanders circulated the corresponding arts before issuing orders, a high probability arose that the cause and effect would settle upon themselves, thereby shouldering the karma born of the slaughter.
This sequence of actions sounded complicated, and in practice, it was by no means simple.
Yet once the burden was dispersed down to template Dao foundations—with each Dao foundation cultivator responsible for launching only a few high-yield missiles, or even just one—the karma became exceptionally diluted. Even a template Dao foundation could bear it with ease and suffer no harm to their cultivation path.
If that were all, it would hardly qualify as remarkable. The true strength of the plan lay in its complete method for dissipating that karma.
The approach followed the path of merit: cultivators bearing karma would be reassigned to posts overseeing civil welfare and livelihoods for a time. As long as they worked diligently and produced tangible achievements, they could accumulate a measure of merit and mortal fortune, naturally cleansing away the karma. In as short as several months or as long as a few years, the karma would be wiped clean, and they could return to the military.
Template Dao foundations possessed lifespans of over a century, so they could easily afford a detour of three to five years. Golden Core and dharma idol cultivators lived for over three hundred years, making a decade easily bearable. Furthermore, after being cleansed by mortal fortune and shedding their karma, they even had a chance of improving their aptitude, perhaps allowing them to advance further along the path.
For template Dao foundations, it opened the possibility of advancing to the middle or even late stage. If a template Dao foundation could progress from the early stage to the late stage, not only would their dharmic power surge, but their lifespan would also see a modest boost of roughly ten to twenty years.
The plan also incorporated various supporting benefits, many directed toward their families.
After reading through it thoroughly, Wei Yuan approved its formal, realm-wide implementation and handed it over to the military supplies and logistics departments. In order to strike at the Lu clan's core commanderies and their ancestral lands, Wei Yuan anticipated that casualties would be severe. The resulting surge of karma had to be managed properly, making this plan an absolute necessity.
Yet what Wei Yuan valued even more was the process by which the plan had been born.
Throughout the entire endeavor, Qingming and the mindscape world had collaborated for the first time, and they had done so with remarkable smoothness. Cause and effect, karma, and karmic luck were exceptionally mysterious, ethereal domains within the cultivation system, second only to the origins of the Great Daos, time, and fate.
To ordinary cultivators, these domains were harder to reach than heaven itself. Even many Scenery Command cultivators were utterly befuddled by them, knowing what happened but never why.
Yet these domains, so insurmountable in the eyes of ordinary cultivators, had been mapped out with total clarity through the concerted efforts of prodigies at the dharma idol stage—Qingming's Feng Tingyu and Ji Liuli, alongside Jun Weizhi, Fuyao, and others within the Splendor of the Many Realms. They had successfully devised a system that could be implemented across all of Qingming.
What was more, many crucial breakthroughs along the way had been achieved by obscure, low-level Dao foundation cultivators. No one had expected these cultivators of seemingly ordinary talent to have flashes of sheer brilliance.
Some among them possessed mediocre cultivation, yet their comprehension was disproportionately sharp.
When they were first introduced to the topic, they had been completely in the dark. Yet after a few months, the depth of their grasp was hardly inferior to that of grand cultivators.
Moreover, precisely because they lacked unique, peerless talents, many of the solutions they devised could be applied by ordinary people—a distinct contrast to true grand cultivators.
For instance, when encountering a grand defensive formation, Immortal Zhu Yan might casually say, "Can't you just find a momentary gap in the formation's oscillations and slip right through?" In reality, if an ordinary cultivator tried that ten thousand times, the only outcome would be slamming into the barrier and being reduced to ash.
Wei Yuan set aside the main body of the report and singled out the sections detailing the research process, along with some of the working drafts, reading through them again and again.
The materials were vast as an ocean. Even with Wei Yuan's divine sense capable of processing over twenty thousand tasks in parallel, bolstered by the assistance of the Splendor of the Many Realms, reading them with such care took him an entire day.
A day later, Wei Yuan finally put down the report and sat in silent contemplation. Only after several days did he arrive at a conclusion: Cultivators, too, must have their minds opened.
In this plan—which had taken months and mobilized the computational power of tens of thousands of cultivators and countless mortals—the contributions made by minor cultivators exceeded thirty percent. This was a profoundly significant figure. They were no longer dispensable, but of vital importance.
According to the traditions of the cultivation world, mortals were mere weeds, Dao foundations were ants, dharma idols were beasts of burden, and only Scenery Command cultivators counted as human. As for immortals, they stood aloof, looking down upon all living beings.
With every rise in tier, one practically became another species; communication between the strata grew exceedingly difficult. Affairs of the dharma idol realm would never involve Dao foundations, and matters that troubled a Scenery Command would only be discussed with another Scenery Command.
The gulf between major realms was vast as the difference between heaven and earth. Unless one was a genius on the level of Wei Yuan or Zhang Sheng, how could an ordinary cultivator fathom the profound mysteries of the mindscape world while still at the dharma idol stage?
Thus, under traditional conventions, researching subjects like karma, cause and effect, and karmic luck would require an immortal lord as the core, Scenery Command cultivators as the main force, and at the very least, prodigies of the dharma idol stage like Ji Liuli or Feng Tingyu to even participate. Often, a century or eighty years of study would yield only a minuscule result.
Who could have imagined that Dao foundation cultivators could devise pivotal breakthroughs, or that template Dao foundations could make meaningful contributions in such a domain?
Let alone immortals, even Wei Yuan had not been immune to this prejudice. He could easily perceive the effects of opening mortal intellects, but when it came to cultivators, it had not been so easy to see.
Instead, it took Feng Tingyu—who barely used her head in daily life—to drag thousands of cultivators, great and small, into the project without a second thought. The results had been surprisingly good, and the scale of the research expanded steadily until over forty thousand cultivators were mobilized. Naturally, the vast majority were template Dao foundations.
Previously, across all of Qingming, everyone believed template Dao foundations were merely the cornerstone of the realm's development, the primary driving force keeping every industry running efficiently—indispensable for grassroots work, but virtually useless for intermediate levels. As for esoteric topics in cultivation domains, they couldn't even understand the titles.
Yet from this plan, Wei Yuan finally recognized the latent potential of low-level cultivators. And given the sheer number of template Dao foundations in Qingming, their combined potential was terrifyingly vast!
Having understood this, Wei Yuan knew what needed to be done. He spent half a day redesigning the entire academy education system across Qingming.
Wei Yuan planned to establish dedicated foundational cultivation courses in all Qingming primary academies, teaching basic knowledge in body tempering, heaven and earth, the five elements, alchemy, the primordial spirit, and more. These courses would be incorporated into basic introductory schooling. Henceforth in Qingming, children could enter school at age five to spend a year learning fundamental concepts, and at age six take the annual cultivation aptitude assessment.
The aptitude test was similar to the immortal sect unified examinations, only with a much lower threshold. Backed by the Great Array of the Heavenly Constellations, its accuracy was no less than that of the sect examinations.
Wei Yuan then established two new institutions: the Qingming Elementary Cultivation Academy and the Water Moon Hall Outer Branch Academy, tasked with admitting disciples with sufficient aptitude to undergo specialized training for the Body Casting stage. The two academies had distinct roles: the Qingming Cultivation Academy was dedicated to disciples of middling-to-low aptitude aiming for a template Dao foundation, while the Water Moon Hall Outer Branch Academy took in disciples of superior aptitude capable of establishing ordinary Dao foundations.
This outer branch academy differed from the outer disciples admitted to Water Moon Hall via the Palace of Grand Beginning; their aptitudes were nowhere near comparable, but their numbers could be dozens of times greater.
Unlike traditional sects and immortal clans, Wei Yuan planned to roll out comprehensive, systematic education in foundational cultivation knowledge across all cultivation academies, thereby stripping away the narrow sectarian biases of individual schools.
In the past, even within the Palace of Grand Beginning, Water Moon Hall disciples frequently knew nothing of the principles behind the Hall of Jianmu's methods. From now on, the new generation of cultivators raised in Qingming would possess thorough, structured foundations—regardless of whether they could master the arts themselves, they would at least understand the principles.
Finally, Wei Yuan established the Qingming Immortal Academy alongside the Academy of Sciences and the Academy of Engineering, likewise instituting an academician system. The newly founded Immortal Academy's first task was to organize foundational knowledge of the cultivation path, compile introductory textbooks, and develop various research tools and methodologies for cultivation research.
Having assimilated the research methods and knowledge systems of the outer worlds, coupled with years of development, Qingming had long since forged its own methodology—one that was highly advanced and well-rounded.
By this point, the number of tasks Feng Tingyu could process simultaneously exceeded ten thousand, and Wang Hu followed close behind with a capacity of over nine thousand. Although other cultivators could not handle quite as many tasks, each possessed unique strengths. Under such formidable divine senses, what had taken several thousand years of accumulation in the mundane outer worlds devoid of supernatural power might be accomplished here in perhaps only a decade.
After finalizing the complete proposal, Wei Yuan weighed it repeatedly and refined it through the Splendor of the Many Realms. Once he verified that every contingency had been thoroughly addressed, he nevertheless felt as if something was still missing.
Mulling it over, Wei Yuan suddenly had an epiphany and realized what it was: Why go to all this trouble in the first place?
Wei Yuan lifted his brush and added an overarching premise to this series of measures—a guiding principle contained in a single sentence:
"So that all cultivators, regardless of attainment and without distinction of young or old, may know what the Great Dao is."
As those words were penned, heaven and earth instantly shook, and Mount Ling underwent an upheaval.
Chapter 1149