No wall was truly windproof. The news that several great aristocratic families had set their sights on the newly added Arhat seats rapidly spread throughout Qingming. For a time, the entire cultivator community of Qingming fell silent, and the number of articles published in Splendor of the Many Realms plummeted by half overnight.
A stifling, oppressive atmosphere began to permeate everywhere. The smiles vanished from the faces of countless templates and Golden Pellets. People lived on in sullen silence, yet no one spoke out.
The Arhat golden body was indeed extraordinary—so extraordinary that even great families would step into the fray to contest it. But that was the reality of this world: any good thing was ultimately either pocketed by the great families or swept into the coffers of prominent sects and immortal lineages.
Neither lower cultivators with Golden Pellets nor bottom-tier cultivators with templates were deemed worthy of an Arhat honorific seat. When the elders of the Cui family came demanding quotas, their attitude was one of utter entitlement. Great families could indeed offer things of equal value in exchange, but what could templates and Golden Pellets offer? A pack of bottom-tier cultivators—giving you something was a favor; withholding it was only natural.
Yet having seen hope only to have it snatched away could not help but chill their hearts.
With this shift in hearts and minds, Wei Yuan's height in the Sea of Bitterness plunged thirty feet, and he noticed immediately.
Wei Yuan had no real obsession with his position in the Sea of Bitterness; he cared far more about his standing in immortal heaven. But the shifting of people's hearts was something he did care about. What was more, extending the path of Dao for the multitude of templates and Golden Pellets had always been an obsession of his.
Wei Yuan promptly issued a proclamation: the two Arhat seats remained unchanged, and the plan to allocate one to a template Dao foundation and one to a Golden Pellet dharma idol remained unchanged as well.
The moment the announcement went out, Wei Yuan soared straight upward in the Sea of Bitterness, surging thousands of feet!
Wei Yuan's colossal dharma body stood within the Sea of Bitterness as he shook his head and sighed. A million templates in truth had only one seat between them. Yet giving them just a sliver of hope brought such an immense return!
Amid his sighs, Wei Yuan remembered another matter and added a supplementary notice, making it clear that even after receiving the fruition seat's recognition and being granted a golden body, a template Dao foundation would still need to undergo prolonged cultivation and succeed in shifting to the Arhat method to attain the dharma idol realm before they could unleash the golden body's true power.
This was only natural. How could cultivation ever allow someone to ascend to the heavens in a single bound? And the Arhat golden body method was already practically that.
Having pacified the minds of Qingming, Wei Yuan reflected. The Bao family and Zhao Li did not strictly need the Arhat seats; their moves were largely intended to bind Wei Yuan closer to them. But the Ji-Zhao Cui family had come directly to trade for them, which in a sense was tantamount to snatching the Dao destinies of the templates and Golden Pellets.
In truth, it was not just this one matter. In so many aspects, bottom-tier cultivators and rogue cultivators were naturally at odds with the great families.
In the Sea of Bitterness, Wei Yuan manifested a thousand-foot dharma body, sat down cross-legged, and began to contemplate the Sea of Bitterness.
Even though he had been buoyed up by thousands of feet, Wei Yuan was still quite far from the second tier. To reach the second tier of the Mountain of Light, he would need to rise at least another hundred thousand feet.
It was not that the power of a million templates was insufficient in majesty, but rather that the overwhelming majority of templates followed the Daoist lineage, consistent with the Palace of Grand Beginning.
Yet in the Sea of Bitterness, only the devotion of those linked to Buddhist cultivation could buoy someone up.
This piqued Wei Yuan's curiosity. The Sea of Bitterness could actually distinguish Buddhist power—how did it accomplish that? At least within Daoism and Confucianism, he had never heard of any comparable expansive celestial realm.
Wei Yuan closed his eyes slightly, extracted a piece of immortal blood mud from the Lu clan's ancestral mountain in the mortal world, transformed it into surging immortal power, and then stirred his sea of consciousness. In an instant, he divided out over twenty thousand divine senses, extending them in all directions to sense the Sea of Bitterness.
Wei Yuan was different from ordinary cultivators now. So-called comprehension mainly meant that he was responsible for perceiving and gathering information, which was then analyzed and processed in Splendor of the Many Realms before reaching conclusions.
Wei Yuan could have reserved a portion of his divine senses to analyze and comprehend on his own, but that would obviously be much slower. It was far better to release all twenty-thousand-plus divine senses exclusively to gather data.
In other words, the Creation Immortal Venerable only needed to look; others would think for him.
In the Sea of Bitterness, Wei Yuan's dharma body bobbed up and down, ceaselessly drawing in and exhaling the sea of light. The twenty-thousand-plus divine senses, like motes of starlight, danced around Wei Yuan in an array of colors and shapes. Each color, luster, and form received data from a specific domain. Wei Yuan himself could never have devised so many categories; most of the divine senses were supervised by specialists in Splendor of the Many Realms, assigned to gather particular types of data.
And for certain data that Wei Yuan did not even know how to gather, Splendor of the Many Realms assisted him in tuning the divine senses so they could capture those specific frequencies. As for why reshaping the divine senses in that manner enabled them to receive that data, the Immortal Venerable did not ask, and Splendor of the Many Realms did not explain.
Though the process seemed unlike traditional immortal cultivation, its efficiency was dozens or even hundreds of times higher than Wei Yuan contemplating alone. Volume after volume of knowledge regarding the Sea of Bitterness was parsed out, drafted into articles, and archived, transforming into the accumulated foundation of Wei Yuan and Qingming.
Articles drifted down like snowflakes. Wei Yuan reviewed them one by one, occasionally uttering a joyous sigh of "So that's how it is," now and then wondering, "It can even work like that?", and at other times simply picking one up in silence, reading it quietly, and laying it down without a word.
Before he knew it, the sixth year of Zhaoning had arrived.
Wei Yuan awoke as if from a dream. Opening his eyes and looking around once more, the Sea of Bitterness appeared entirely different from what he had known. In his eyes now, every wave of light was woven from countless karmic threads, many of which could be traced backward into the past or extrapolated into the future.
And beneath those karmic threads, the Great Dao of this celestial realm had unveiled a corner of itself.
Wei Yuan frowned slightly and murmured to himself, "So the Sea of Bitterness was born of nature, manifesting as soon as the mortal world came into being? If so, how did it become the exclusive domain of Buddhist cultivators?"
Setting everything else aside, just the ability to bestow golden body dharma idols through the Sea of Bitterness possessed incalculable value. It revealed boundless potential for warfare to Wei Yuan, who spent almost every year locked in battle.
By ceaselessly bestowing the mighty powers of golden bodies through the Sea of Bitterness, there was no need even for the Arhat level—even mighty warriors alone could form an army of Dao foundations. These would not be flimsy goods like the Qingming templates, but authentic Vajra Mighty Warriors, equivalent to formidable Dao foundations. By this virtue alone, Northern Qi could push Northern Liao back tens of thousands of li!
Wei Yuan reached out and scooped up a handful of water from the sea of light. The water was composed entirely of the karmas of Buddhist lay devotees, pure beyond measure. In the handful of water currently in his palm, there were many karmas belonging to mirage demons, and the youth Tuoba Hong was prominently among them.
Two years had passed, and Tuoba Hong's karma had grown a thousand times larger than before, transforming from a slender thread of light into a water droplet. At this moment, a faint crimson tinged the youth's karma—clearly a great catastrophe was looming over him, a calamity of blood.
The youth had already reached the completion of his Dao foundation, fully capable of operating while wielding an Arhat golden body with might rivaling an ordinary dharma idol. Having consecutively defeated two Arhat golden bodies of the Pure Land, he had caught the attention of Pure Land supreme experts and was about to collide head-on with an immovable wall.
Of the Buddhist karmas connected to Wei Yuan, half drifted around his body, while the other half remained somewhere unknown.
Wei Yuan scooped up another handful of water. It was still entirely Buddhist karmas, with swarms of tiny mirage demons swimming back and forth within it. Watching the water slowly slip between his fingers, the sense that something was wrong grew increasingly distinct.
The Sea of Bitterness was not composed entirely of Buddhist karma; it also held the karmas of all sentient beings. As Wei Yuan's divine sense delved downward to its absolute limit, it broke through into a completely new layer of the sea. There, the karmas of all living beings intertwined, not just Buddhist cultivators—Buddhist karma accounted for only about sixty percent.
Deeper still was beyond Wei Yuan's current limits.
Yet Splendor of the Many Realms housed countless prodigies. Based on the karmic variations near that lower stratum, they deduced that the deeper one went, the less Buddhist karma there would be, until ultimately it would be entirely the karma of all sentient beings, with Buddhist karma virtually nonexistent.
From this, Wei Yuan arrived at a conclusion: had Buddhist karmas been lifted entirely to the upper layers of the Sea of Bitterness, causing all other karmas to vanish from above?
The Sea of Bitterness possessed no absolute high or low, above or below. The reason a sea surface existed was that this surface line was the closest to the mortal world and had the tightest connection with it. Whether one went further up or further down, one would grow farther from the mortal world, making it increasingly difficult to intervene in the mortal realm.
Shanle's fruition seat lay on the third tier, but because the Heaven of Joy and Bliss needed to receive mortal-world devotees, it was placed just beneath the surface, pressed tight against the water's line.
Therefore, having one's karma located in the upper layer offered immense benefits: intervening in the present world through the Sea of Bitterness became far easier, with burdens vastly reduced. Back then, when the old monk passed into parinirvana and delivered tens of millions of people across four commanderies in a single breath, he had drawn upon the power of the Sea of Bitterness.
Similarly, the various blessings, fortune, and retributions of Buddhist lay devotees would be augmented. If Wei Yuan were at the bottom of the sea and wished to bestow karmic luck upon someone in the present world through the Sea of Bitterness, the expenditure would be over a hundred times greater than at the surface.
In an instant, Wei Yuan realized the manifold advantages of proximity to the mortal world.
The problem was, the upper layer of the sea of light consisted entirely of Buddhist cultivation, which meant these benefits were monopolized exclusively by Buddhist practitioners.
How had this come to pass?
With a stir in his heart, Wei Yuan looked up at the sky. There was neither sun nor moon above; those wheels of astral suns did not illuminate the Sea of Bitterness, only lighting up themselves.
Yet immeasurable heavenly radiance cascaded down from an unseen source. Wei Yuan suddenly recalled the scene he had witnessed through the King Buddha's perspective: could this boundless heavenly light stem from that highest, supreme sun?
Chapter 1256