As summer began, the Tang dynasty's imperial edict finally circulated across the realm: Emperor Jing had passed away, and his youngest son, Jiade, succeeded the throne under the era name Zhaoning, honored as Emperor Zhao.
According to ancient rites, this decree raised more than a few troubling questions. Emperor Jing had nine sons and seventeen daughters. His eldest son was already past thirty, yet because the emperor had been in the prime of his years, the matter of appointing a crown prince had never been broached.
To bypass the eldest son and instead enthrone a toddler not even five years old invited endless speculation. After all, aside from the firstborn, four other sons were over fourteen—of an age suitable for imperial marriage.
Yet the King of Jin now ruled as regent, wielding absolute power over the court. Civil and military officials alike offered only choruses of praise, without a single whisper of dissent.
The Nine States each had their own troubles—and those without troubles had their own ambitions. None had the leisure to meddle in the internal affairs of the Tang imperial house. One by one, they merely submitted congratulatory memorials and dispatched envoys bearing modest gifts, doing just enough to maintain appearances.
The enthronement ceremony for Emperor Zhaoning was set for the first day of the sixth month, the pinnacle of summer. It symbolized blazing red fire shining bright—an omen of flourishing vigor and imperial resurgence.
During the grand ceremony, civil and military officials gathered in splendid attire, robes of crimson, purple, blue, and green arranged strictly by rank, their jade belts and golden caps gleaming brilliantly. Banners of the million-strong Imperial Guard stood like a forest, snapping in the wind, stretching from the grand palace hall all the way out across a hundred li! Surges of bright yellow mist steadily rose from the earth, bathing everything in a radiant glow as though coated in gold leaf.
Most of the imperial capital's seven million commoners stepped out of their homes, gathering in designated squares and along avenues to watch the ceremony.
Being mere mortals, they could not see the splendor within the imperial palace, but the bright yellow haze filling the sky drifted like mist and clouds, swirling around the towers and rolling across the capital. Moreover, auspicious beasts occasionally crossed the sky—the fleeting shadow of a green luan, a qilin treading upon clouds, circling white cranes, and soaring vermilion birds—filling the people with breathless wonder.
Before long, golden radiance flared across the eastern horizon. A clear dragon roar pierced the air, resounding through the nine heavens. A golden true dragon wound its way out of the clouds and came to rest above the imperial palace, coiling its hundred-li body right over the sovereign halls.
A true dragon descends; the auspicious hour has arrived!
Pillars of colored light erupted from the earth into the sky, transforming into a falling rain of countless petals. Amidst them, immortal maidens played music and danced, while celestial lords and immortal officials faded in and out of sight, ringing the perimeter in a stance of royal escort.
Witnessing such sights, mortals were left wide-eyed and slack-jawed, their eyes darting every which way, unable to take in the endless celestial throng.
As ceremonial cannons roared, the court officials cried in unison, "Everlasting Longevity!" Ninety-nine times they shouted, their voices shaking the heavens and moving the earth.
When the court's congratulations concluded, drums and instruments sounded, deep and solemn, resonant with the harsh edge of slaughter. The dynasty's Grand Ancestor had risen from the military, sweeping across the realm with a single spear to forge an unparalleled legacy. Consequently, whenever his descendants ascended the throne, the celebratory music played was always the martial anthems of the Great Tang military.
At the height of the Great Tang's power, countless elites bearing heavy halberds and armored in plate advanced in perfect lockstep to military songs, crushing formidable foes, toppling fortified cities, and sweeping the battlefield without defeat.
Though the state's fortune was now in decline, discerning men listening to the fierce martial tones of this war song still could not help but praise it: the fury of the ancestors still carried lingering might.
Right amidst the clashing music of iron and steel, a faint wail suddenly arose!
Seated upon the colossal dragon throne, the little Emperor Zhao—already exhausted by the heavy ceremonial robes and the grueling length of the ceremony—was completely overwhelmed by the thunderous martial music and burst into terrified sobs!
The officials qualified to stand within the palace hall saw nothing and heard nothing, carrying on as though they were no longer part of this mortal world.
Through three movements of the martial anthem, Emperor Zhao wept through all three.
***
"...At present, the realm is at peace, and weapons are laid to rest. This is because the feudal lords revere our might and cherish our virtue, mindful of the grace bestowed by the Great Tang's past emperors. Now that Your Majesty has ascended the throne, the paramount duty lies in sacrifices to Heaven and Earth, the veneration of the ancestors, and the comfort of the realm's troops..."
Today was Emperor Zhao's first morning court. The silver-haired Grand Chancellor, head of the civil officials, was presenting his first memorial. The greatest affairs of state lay in sacrifice and warfare; these were the two matters the old chancellor addressed.
When he finished his grand discourse, a tender, childish voice chimed from the dragon throne: "Approved."
Other officials stepped forward in succession to report grave affairs. That childish voice piped up from time to time, mostly saying "Approved," though occasionally "To be discussed further." When some younger senior ministers stole glances upward, they saw only the dragon throne; they heard the voice, but could not see the person.
By the etiquette of the Tang court, the sovereign's seat was perched high above, broad and immense, displaying the grand majesty of an empire. But with a child barely four years old sitting upon it, his stature was simply too small for the assembled ministers to catch a glimpse.
Most of what the officials reported concerned calm across the four seas, quiescent barbarians, or minor localized disasters that had already been appeased and managed early on.
Once internal affairs were concluded, foreign envoys and feudal border lords were granted audience.
This ceremonial order had also been established by the Grand Ancestor, who believed that no matter beneath the heavens was greater than the domestic governance of the Great Tang. Thus, only after internal matters were resolved did the turn come for foreign lands and barbarian tribes.
When the Martial Ancestor partitioned the realm into the Nine States, he had casually designated all nine as vassal domains. According to Tang regulations, the rulers of the Nine States were merely ranked at secondary first-class. Back then, while the combined territory of the Nine States exceeded that of the Tang, most of it consisted of remote, barren lands, while the Tang imperial house held all the earth-vein nodes, strategic strongholds, and vital passes.
Yet today, the realm's fertile lands had long since been nibbled away by the Nine States. The Tang house was reduced to huddling in a central corner. If not for the sacred places where the Grand Ancestor had risen and the Martial Ancestor had sacrificed to Heaven—places no one dared disturb—the Tang house would likely have nothing left beyond the imperial capital and the ancestral tombs.
Following the Nine States came ninety-nine foreign tributary domains, mostly clad in exotic garb and presenting bizarre gifts. Behind them came a host of military commissioners and border garrisons, vast in number and bustling with activity.
Yet among these military commissioners, the greatest figures were absent. Some merely sent envoys, such as the Mount-Suppressing Military Commissioner; others did not even bother to send a representative.
***
"Why is it so restless...?" Wei Yuan muttered, frowning slightly as he looked at the numerous border reports floating before him.
Most of these reports described clashes along the borders, nearly all of them involving Qingming being bullied. Occurring every few days, they gave Wei Yuan a pounding headache.
Xiaoyu, for instance, had reported over ten clashes during the past month, many of which had resulted in casualties. In the latest incident, some nine hundred li from the traditional border between the two Jins, three Qingming soldiers had died and hundreds had been wounded.
Wei Yuan let out a sigh and rubbed his forehead. The western frontier of Eastern Jin was currently in the grip of spring pestilence, compounded by toxic earth vapors. Qingming's troops were unaccustomed to the local soil and climate; deploying there would inevitably see swaths of them falling ill...
Qingming's forces possessed superior equipment and fierce firepower, but in terms of raw physical constitution alone, their soldiers were not necessarily tougher than those of the Nine States. The border troops of the Nine States in particular had weathered long years of harsh elements and tasted every bitter hardship; their resistance to disease was second to none.
Xiaoyu was not an isolated case. Similar border reports arrived from elsewhere, and numerous missives even came in from the Zhao border. Even the Bureau of Commerce submitted memorials claiming that Zhao officials were shielding one another and treating Qingming people unfairly, urging the Realm Lord to deploy troops and inflict severe punishment.
Yet when Wei Yuan looked into the specifics of the cases, even he, with his thick skin, felt it was awkward to pursue them. The officials in the Bureau of Commerce were truly talented—their skins were thicker than his own, and they reversed black and white without the slightest moral hesitation.
Wei Yuan set all these reports aside with a sigh, knowing people's hearts were restless; they were itching for a fight.
Yet after reviewing Qingming's situation once more, he decided that fighting a war was not the most pressing concern right now. They had abruptly swallowed more than half of Western Jin, then opened up ten thousand li of new territory in Yizhou—virtually equal to another Qingming—while their population had surged from over two hundred million to nearly two billion.
At present, Qingming was like a giant python that had swallowed a water buffalo: the food in its belly vastly exceeded the size of its body, and it needed time to slowly digest. After slaying Lu Changhe and swallowing the ten commanderies of the Ganzhou Lu clan, Wei Yuan had made no further moves precisely because he knew it was time to assimilate what they had gained.
Most of Western Jin consisted of uncultivated lands where mortals lived in bitter hardship. The Lu clan had developed their territory for a thousand years, making it somewhat better than the rest of Western Jin, but only marginally so.
In truth, in Wei Yuan's eyes, whether it was the three Jins or Zhao and Qi, their national strength might differ like heaven and earth, but their mortal conditions were largely identical. Aside from cleared farmlands, everything else was starkly destitute and utterly bare.
Mining was primitive, production relied on handicraft workshops, and the cities possessed virtually no infrastructure. Compared to the worlds beyond the heavens, it was downright primitive.
However, in terms of industries related to cultivators—especially resources tied to high-level cultivation—the various states and aristocratic clans far surpassed Qingming.
In the medicine gardens of the major grotto-heavens and secret realms, spirit herbs blanketed the mountains. Beneath mountain ranges and within earth veins, countless precious materials were nurtured. An immortal's mind-image world solidified from illusion into reality, ascending above the Immortal Heavens, constantly absorbing the origin energy of heaven and earth and transforming it into miraculous treasures of every kind.
Moreover, an immortal's accumulation often spanned hundreds or thousands of years. Time alone created an immense chasm between them and Qingming.
From the perspective of mortals and lower cultivators, an immortal's accumulation was terrifying. When the Patriarch passed into nirvana back then, his remains alone became eight thousand li of treasure land. Beneath Qingming right now lay buried Lu Changhe, most of Xu Shuhe, and a dog head. Although the treasure land was irregularly shaped, by any estimate it spanned two to three thousand li. Furthermore, Xu Shuhe had been buried vertically, making the treasure land exceptionally deep—which was to say, its foundation was extraordinarily profound.
Beneath the Lu Clan Ancestral Mountain lay the equivalent of two immortals and an immortal relic of unknown origin. Just excavating and assimilating those would take Wei Yuan decades.
As the refinement of the Lu Clan Ancestral Mountain deepened, Wei Yuan grew increasingly suspicious that his consecutive slayings of the three immortals back then had been somewhat too easy.
Aside from Xu Shuhe, who had already been approaching death with a decaying grotto-heaven where nearly every domain lacked vibrant vitality and the beings in a fair portion had completely died out—such that in terms of true combat prowess, a peak Scenery Command cultivator might well have traded blows with him—the karmic causes and effects surrounding Xu Shuhe's death had been clear. Qingming had stood united from top to bottom, and Wei Yuan's years of effort in enlightening the common people had finally borne fruit, marshaling the power of the multitude to crush Xu Shuhe head-on.
Yet Liumiao had been very strange. Lu Changhe had seemingly fallen to his own schemes, but thinking back on it later, the more Wei Yuan pondered, the more amiss it seemed. It had still been too easy. In his final moments, Lu Changhe had shown a flicker of bewilderment, as though he had never anticipated that Wei Yuan would launch a sneak attack, expecting only his own strike to succeed. An immortal's divine consciousness could divide into myriad strands; how could he have failed to foresee even that?
Still, such matters would only become clear when the grand figures revealed their overarching game.
Looking at the sea of official documents, Wei Yuan suddenly felt a stirring in his stillness, wanting to travel about Qingming to see the lands for himself. Qingming was now too vast, with too many people; it was no longer the Qingming of old where every single matter required his personal decision.
Just then, Wei Yuan's heart stirred. Someone knocked on the gates of his immortal manor and reported, "An old friend has come to visit."
An old friend?
Wei Yuan withdrew his divine consciousness from the Splendor of the Many Realms and instructed, "Show him in."
A moment later, an emaciated old man appeared in the reception hall. Wei Yuan took the host's seat, instructed a maidservant to serve immortal tea, and studied the unfamiliar elder before speaking slowly: "What wondrous divine abilities you possess, Daoist friend!"
The old man said, "Forgive my offense. The Realm Lord's sun shines bright in the midday sky, your position of supreme authority. Had I not employed this method, I fear I would not have gained an audience."
Wei Yuan narrowed his eyes slightly, his voice deepening. "What guidance brings the Master here?"
The emaciated elder pressed his palms together. "I dare not speak of guidance, yet there is a great act of benevolence I hope the Realm Lord will undertake."
"What sort of benevolence?"
"To propagate the Buddhadharma throughout Western Jin and Qingming, expand the Shakya lands, and deliver all sentient beings. This is the foremost act of benevolence in the present world. I hope the Realm Lord will take the greater picture to heart, prioritize the living souls of this world, and grant your gracious approval..."
Before the old man could finish, Wei Yuan cut him off: "Denied."
The old man did not seem surprised. He chanted a Buddhist name and said, "Where the hearts of sentient beings yearn, this matter may no longer be for the Realm Lord to decide."
Wei Yuan let out a cold laugh. "What, does the Master wish to test my dao arts as well? Pardon my bluntness, but based on your—"
Before he could finish, he suddenly realized that all aura had vanished from the old monk—he had passed away into nirvana with a smile!
Wei Yuan froze. His divine consciousness erupted like a volcano, sweeping across thousands of li in an instant with the aid of the grand array!
Across commanderies, counties, and villages, countless people suddenly looked as though they were awakening from a dream. Joy painted their faces as they pressed their palms together and prostrated themselves, bowing in reverence toward the direction of the Pure Land. In that single instant, there was no telling how many souls had been delivered!
Chapter 1202