The first year of Zhaoning passed by imperceptibly. In substance, nothing of great consequence occurred throughout the year. Following routine, Wei Yuan drafted a memorial requesting an audience with the sovereign in the capital. Though he suspected hardly anyone bothered reading such petitions anymore, he still dispatched someone to deliver it to the Tang court. One could not say the letter was utterly useless; at the very least, by submitting a formal memorial, the Emperor of Tang would invariably issue an imperial edict of comforting words and dispatch a modest sum of coin and grain in response.
Yet while no monumental crises rocked the realm, petty unrest flared incessantly, and the overarching situation grew grimmer by the day.
In the several commanderies of Ganzhou that had fallen to conversion, the autumn harvest was barely brought to completion under Sun Yu's heavy-handed pressure. Once winter set in, however, heavy snow blanketed the doorways. It became the season when households had idle hands and nothing to do, whiling away their days dropping by neighbors' homes and bragging over idle chatter. Yet such neighborly visits could just as easily turn into conspiratorial collusion.
In years past, villages and market towns across the northern lands had spent the snowy seasons this way; with all that visiting back and forth, brothers-in-law and sisters-in-law would easily end up rolling into bed together. This year, however, was different. Wherever a dozen people gathered, someone would inevitably begin preaching the sutras and expounding the dharma.
Although Sun Yu had used clever ploys to apprehend the vast majority of the Masters, in mere months people continuously experienced sudden awakenings or dreamt of eminent monks transmitting the dharma and teaching scriptures, causing new Masters to sprout up one after another.
The Masters preached, and the faithful listened. After hearing the sermons, the congregation would invariably host the Master for an extravagant feast, joining in to dine alongside him.
Yet grain was scarce in the northern lands to begin with. Under normal circumstances, folks scraped through winter in a semi-starved state, and countless people froze or starved to death each year. Feasting lavishly like this, their winter grain provisions clearly would not last even two months.
Thus, even as they listened to sermons, the faithful sent delegates to demand relief grain from the local government—uncompromising in demeanor and demanding provisions as though it were their birthright.
The magistrate of a certain county had only recently arrived from Qingming to assume office. An unyielding man by nature, he flatly refused to dispense grain unless the believers and Masters renounced the Buddhist teachings and engaged in winter water conservancy works, trading corvée labor for rations.
Never did he imagine that the believers across the surrounding countryside, after gorging themselves on their remaining provisions, would storm the county seat at the behest of their Masters! The county's yamen runners and militiamen were mostly converts themselves; they stood idly by as tens of thousands of faithful surged into the town, encircling the yamen completely.
Relying on his late Dao Foundation cultivation, the magistrate attempted to protect his family and hack a path out. Suddenly, several figures emerged from the throng brandishing magical implements. A barrage of potent Buddhist incantations slammed down, instantly striking the magistrate from the air.
The believers swarmed forward, beating the magistrate to death with a flurry of fists. As for his family members, their fate was no different from falling into the hands of a ravenous mob—a living hell worse than death.
The Masters immediately threw open the granaries to distribute food, but the county held meager reserves. With the multitudes feasting and drinking, the granaries were scraped bare in a matter of days.
Consequently, several yamen runners and clerks volunteered to head to neighboring counties to borrow grain. If the neighbors refused to lend, they attacked the town. Within a few days, two more counties fell. Most of the officials dispatched by Qingming were beaten to death, and some were even hung from city gate towers and burned alive.
By this time, Sun Yu had already returned to Qingming, and the commandery governor was also a recent transferee from Qingming.
Decisive and capable, the new governor immediately mobilized the garrison troops to seize key thoroughfares, cordoning off the three rioting counties from one another. At the same time, he relocated all militiamen and yamen runners from the currently peaceful counties outside the walls to camp in fortified barracks, garrisoning the towns themselves with Qingming troops.
The rioters of the three troubled counties launched repeated assaults, yet they were no match for the heavily armored Qingming soldiers. Every attempt ended in failure, leaving behind hundreds of corpses in vain.
Having forcefully isolated the counties with an iron fist so they could no longer coordinate with one another, the governor promptly petitioned Qingming for grain and personnel, preparing to replace several magistrates who showed signs of conversion.
To such matters, Wei Yuan reacted with exceptional swiftness. He immediately dispatched new magistrates, accompanied by Golden Pellets, to arrest the converted magistrates and escort them back to Qingming.
Upon taking office, the new magistrates demonstrated their respective prowess. One magistrate, in the name of ascetic cultivation and preaching, gathered numerous core believers under one roof for a grand seven-day assembly, during which he provided only clear water and a single steamed bun per day. Following the assembly, the core followers were so weakened by starvation that they had no strength left to make trouble.
Another magistrate took inspiration from this: not only did he hold assemblies, but he also secretly laid formations around the assembly grounds to siphon the vitality and essence of the faithful. Once the assembly concluded, everyone felt as though stricken by a grievous illness, with half of them bedridden.
There was even a magistrate named Chen Dao who not only laid such arrays, but conveniently used the harvested vitality and essence to refine medicinal pills, significantly bolstering the county treasury.
After isolating the three rebellious counties, the governor sent men to deliver wine and spirits. The believers and Masters accepted the alcohol and indulged in a three-day drunken stupor. Once sober, they felt boundless vitality coursing through them, except they grew ravenously hungry at alarming speed, needing to consume three days' worth of food in a single day.
The counties already had little food to begin with, and now their supplies vanished in the blink of an eye. Yet their stomachs churned with unbearable hunger. Under ordinary circumstances, riots should have erupted immediately; instead, multitudes of believers merely gathered in groups, sitting in quiet contemplation and chanting sutras, somehow enduring the agony.
The governor was equally composed. Dispatching scouts daily, he held his troops back, waiting for the believers to succumb to internal strife when they could endure no more.
Yet after waiting several days, what arrived was a horrifying report: some believers had slaughtered those who did not revere the Buddha, minced them into meatballs, and distributed them for all to eat!
The governor instantly realized the situation had turned dire. He immediately mobilized large formations of shield-bearers to launch an aggressive assault, knocking down groups of people to haul them away, subduing one batch after another. In the blink of an eye, several makeshift encampments were packed to capacity. Even so, the three counties held more than four hundred thousand souls in total—more than they could ever capture.
Once the captives were secured, the governor dropped all pretense. He dissolved Ginseng Lingzhi Pellets—which accelerated digestion and accumulated essence—into water and forced the prisoners to drink it. This pill brought immense benefits to Body Casting, but at the cost of vastly increasing one's appetite and intolerance for hunger. He wanted to see just how long these people could hold out under extreme starvation.
The rioters of the three counties were nothing more than an undisciplined rabble. With elite vanguard strikes backed by numerous Golden Pellets, and the governor himself—a mid-stage Dharma Idol expert—personally overseeing the suppression at the front lines, the quell of the rebellion was never in doubt.
"—Though the rebellious populace has been subdued, their treacherous hearts remain unchanged; this has merely saddled us with four hundred and thirty thousand prisoners. The moment the army withdraws, chaos will reignite. Your servant's learning is shallow and talent modest; I possess only the ability to stabilize the situation, not the power to reverse heaven and earth. I implore Prince Wei to establish a grand strategy swiftly to resolve this perilous crisis—"
This was the memorial submitted to Wei Yuan by the commandery governor.
The northern commanderies lay right under Wei Yuan's nose. It had to be said that the newly reassigned officials were remarkably competent, employing diverse measures to keep the situation firmly suppressed. In a northern land teeming with believers and swarming with Masters, holding things in check without causing massive, bloody slaughters was no small feat.
The officials currently deployed to the north had all grown up within Qingming, paragons of talent who had stood out from among tens of thousands. They identified solely as people of Qingming, knowing nothing of the Tang Son of Heaven, nor caring for the Nine Nations. In their eyes, aristocratic clans and immortal sects carried no weight; the only reverence they held was for the Palace of Grand Beginning, and even that stood second to the Realm Lord.
These officials were truly capable, resourceful enough to govern their territories with countless inventive stratagems. This was a source of relief for Wei Yuan and saved him a great deal of mental strain, sparing him from fretting constantly over the northern lands so that he could concentrate on amassing strength in preparation for the decisive battle against the Pure Land.
Setting down the memorial, Wei Yuan exhaled a long breath. As long as the northern commanderies remained under control, even if conditions did not improve, it mattered little; at worst, they yielded no output and required garrison forces.
At this stage, however, even Western Jin's southern five commanderies had only just laid their groundwork and embarked on large-scale construction, while the central fifteen commanderies were on the verge of linking up to the floating roads. For the northern commanderies, developing earlier or later made no difference. If the situation there remained volatile, those funds could be diverted south instead, where they would yield faster results.
Yet those believers were as if possessed—fervently devout toward the Pure Land on one hand, while reviling and rejecting Qingming on the other. They managed both without compromise, their conviction unyielding as steel.
The cultivators Qingming sent were all at their wits' end. Only Bao Yun's Heavenly Demon Wondrous Idol could temporarily convert a portion of them; even so, it was merely temporary. After several months, they would gradually recall past memories and yearn for the Pure Land once more.
Moreover, this conversion left no trace behind; it was impossible to pinpoint what had actually changed. Yet these believers were like madmen—no reasoning reached them. Those already converted simply could not be turned back.
This was tens of millions of people. In Wei Yuan's eyes, they were the very foundation of his path to Dao, yet a massive chunk had been gouged away.
Sun Yu was conducting fundamental research, but progress was agonizingly slow; several months had passed without any good news from his end.
Meanwhile, in the immortal manor at the Lu clan ancestral lands, Wei Yuan had ordered the construction of another terrain sand table spanning the northern kingdoms.
Whenever he had free time, he would stand beside the sand table in contemplation. Currently, he was pondering an invasion route starting from Western Pu, cutting through Eastern Jin, and striking straight into Northern Qi. This would be an expedition of hundreds of thousands of li, and Wei Yuan's weapon of last resort.
If all else failed, Wei Yuan was prepared to mobilize the full might of Qingming's armies and flatten the mountain gate of the Great Baohua Pure Land.
Yet this was the worst of strategies, a choice of absolute desperation. The Pure Land would certainly have prepared countermeasures specifically against such an assault. Furthermore, launching an exhausting long-distance expedition had always been anathema in warfare; even legendary military deities had met their downfall over this very folly, and historical precedents were numerous.
Presently, Qingming's military power was formidable and packed tremendous firepower, but the cost was military supplies dozens of times greater than those of the Nine Nations' traditional armies. For every ten thousand troops mobilized via floating barges, nearly a hundred vessels were required.
In Wei Yuan's vision, several marching routes traversed mountains and valleys, heading eastward. Each route had its pros and cons, and each risked encountering different complications—such as natural disasters, ambushes, surprise raids, or even heavenly tribulations.
Relying on his myriad divine intents to analyze massive quantities of information, Wei Yuan nudged the marching routes eastward bit by bit. No matter how difficult or intricate the military strategy, it could not baffle Wei Yuan.
Yet Wei Yuan had a faint premonition: the worst possible outcome was not failing to breach Baohua's mountain gate. Rather, it was paying a grievous price to raze Baohua to the ground, only to find nothing at all.
Another reason Wei Yuan had refrained from rash action in recent days was that the two monks, Jingru and his companion, were actually a warning from the Pure Land. Next time, there was no telling how many monks would infiltrate the north, the south, or even Qingming and Yizhou. Nor would those monks sit into parinirvana right before Wei Yuan, where their divine abilities would be suppressed by his grand array to a mere thirty or forty percent.
They would find secluded spots to quietly pass away, thereby converting the mortals across thousands, hundreds, or tens of li around them.
Do not underestimate minor cultivators having smaller conversion radiuses; if one passed away in the center of a bustling metropolis, the fallout would still sweep over millions or even tens of millions of people.
This was what truly worried Wei Yuan. He was not afraid of his own Dao foundation being shaken, but he truly could not bear to see hundreds of millions of ordinary mortals reduced to fanatic devotees.
Wei Yuan bore no hostility toward the Buddhist path, nor did he oppose Confucian cultivation, but he could not accept forced conversion. Allowing the people to choose for themselves—that was what Wei Yuan truly desired.
Chapter 1216