"I'm not someone who only wants peace. Truly, I'm not! Nor did I say we shouldn't fight. I just don't want to fight too many wars at once. You eat one bite at a time, and you fight one war at a time..." Wei Yuan sat at the table, speaking with earnest sincerity.
The Sixth Princess sat across from him, resting her chin on her hands like a little cat, listening with utmost diligence.
Her obedient demeanor only made Wei Yuan want to pour his heart out more. "War is no child's play. Provisions must precede the troops. Besides, when our legions move, they need far more than mere rations—the volume of ammunition to transport far exceeds that of food! If an army of a million mobilizes, how many floating boats will be needed for transport?! Do we even have that many floating boats?!"
Wei Yuan spoke with impassioned grief, but then routinely searched through the Splendor of the Many Realms. His expression stiffened slightly. "...All right, fine. We actually do."
The Sixth Princess finally had a chance to speak. "The ancients said weapons and war are instruments of ill omen. War causes great suffering; it's better to fight less."
Wei Yuan shook his head, however. "What the ancients said isn't entirely correct, and applying it to our situation is an outright blunder. As for the people of the Nine Realms—if we don't conquer them, they'll suffer even more. Only by living under Qingming's rule can they enjoy true well-being. Look at the people of Western Jin: what were they like before, and what are they like now?
"If nothing else, take food alone: each person's nutritional intake has tripled. Oh, to reach a precise conclusion, you actually need a bit of arithmetic foundation. The main tools used here are..."
Wei Yuan proceeded to lecture on arithmetic for an entire two hours, and the Sixth Princess listened with rapt interest.
It was not until the hour of the Tiger drew near that the Sixth Princess spoke: "You've been lecturing all night. Shall we get some rest?"
Only then did Wei Yuan realize with a start how much time had slipped by. He nodded ruefully. The cat-like girl blew out the lamp...
Darkness descended quietly, concealing the truth.
When the light of dawn finally ripped through the darkness, Wei Yuan got up and dressed, preparing to go to work. But glancing back, his whole body suddenly froze. The person lying in bed was not the Sixth Princess!
Wei Yuan forced a smile and said, "Chunyi? How is it you?"
The one on the bed was none other than Princess Ningguo of the State of Zhao, Li Chunyi, the Sixth Princess's half-sister. Born with a mischievous streak, she stuck out her tongue and said, "That's right! It's me! So your work last night was all for nothing—you'll have to put in overtime today!"
"How... how is this possible... Feng Tingyu!" Wei Yuan's gaze was like lightning as he swept his surroundings. Yet there was no trace of abnormality around him; the culprit had long since fled far away.
Wei Yuan had been mentally and physically exhausted lately, and had indeed been distracted. Yet the only person capable of pulling the wool over his eyes was Feng Tingyu, whose arts could obscure all divine senses. When Feng Tingyu attained Scenery Command, it had happened in complete silence; even the heavenly tribulation had vanished without a trace upon entering her heart-aspect world, and she had naturally broken through. Wei Yuan had only learned of it after the fact.
In any case, what was done was done, and Wei Yuan felt waves of headaches coming on.
Yet Princess Ningguo clearly had no intention of letting Wei Yuan off so easily. Instead, she dealt him another heavy blow by handing over several essays.
Wei Yuan took them and looked. They were all theoretical treatises on arithmetic, focusing on mathematical tools he had never even heard of. The author of all of them was the same person: Cangxuan.
Wei Yuan had heard of the name Cangxuan. Over recent years, this figure had risen to prominence, publishing numerous significant treatises. Just the few in Wei Yuan's hands demonstrated remarkable prowess and had been cited by multiple leading academic authorities.
But why was Ningguo showing him these? There were plenty of treatises Wei Yuan could not understand these days; his heart didn't even stir.
Ningguo leaned against Wei Yuan, blowing softly into his ear, and whispered, "When Little Six was young, she was raised as a boy. Back then, her name was Li Cangxuan."
The words were spoken softly, yet to Wei Yuan's ears, they fell like a clap of thunder!
The moment he recalled how he had spent hours enthusiastically lecturing the Sixth Princess on arithmetic, even his nearly peerless dharma body flushed red with embarrassment.
At the hub of the immortal city, Wei Yuan plunged headfirst into the Splendor of the Many Realms, working continuously for hours and pushing every shred of his divine intent to the limit. Yet there were always one or two disobedient strands of intent that repeatedly constructed a single scene:
"A person should be the same inside and out, unifying knowledge and action! Look at you—why do you need to be so smart when you look like this? Isn't that just deceitful?!" Wei Yuan pounded the table heavily in anguish.
The Sixth Princess lay across the table like a kitten, resting her chin on two chubby little fists, staring at Wei Yuan with big, bewildered eyes, having no idea what he was talking about.
Yet such fantasies were of no help. Wei Yuan truly did not know how he was going to face her tonight. But this matter concerned diplomatic relations between the two states, and was no trifling affair.
Wei Yuan forced himself to calm down, and then remembered something: some time ago, the Sixth Princess had traveled to Eastern Jin specifically to observe the construction of the floating road.
Not long after that, Cangxuan had published several papers proposing brand-new perspectives on how to eliminate vibrations in floating roads, replacing structural reinforcement with vibration isolation.
On that trip, Xiaoyu must have accompanied the Sixth Princess the entire way. And Xiaoyu's grasp of arithmetic was even worse than his own—Wei Yuan was utterly confident of that. With Xiaoyu's personality, suffering a defeat at the Sixth Princess's hands was almost a certainty. Why hadn't that fellow breathed a single word about her level in arithmetic?
Wei Yuan's mastery of the human heart was far superior to his arithmetic, and he arrived at the answer almost in an instant: precisely because Xiaoyu had been drenched in the rain, he was determined to leave no umbrella for those who followed, terrified that anyone else might stay dry.
Yet understanding it changed nothing; he still had to face her tonight. The Sixth Princess possessed a special innate gift, making her the best possible candidate to bear his offspring from every angle. Furthermore, any descendant with her had a high probability of inheriting Immortal Zhao Li's talent for gravitating toward good fortune. If that happened, Wei Yuan wouldn't have to worry about anything.
With his mind made up, Wei Yuan stopped letting his thoughts wander and focused entirely on the affairs of war.
Now that Qingming was wealthy beyond compare, Wei Yuan's mindset had subtly shifted. He was not averse to war, so long as victory was guaranteed. His ideal doctrine of warfare was now to commit ten percent of his strength, hold seventy percent in reserve, and still command certain victory. The desperate, all-or-nothing mindset from when Qingming was first founded rarely surfaced anymore.
Against Northern Liao, defense would be the primary focus. The Shaman Clan already held far too much land, which could not possibly be converted and digested all at once. The Yizhou front, on the other hand, could be vigorously expanded—after all, a single major mineral vein stretched for hundreds of li. Across three directions, Wei Yuan had worried about command bottlenecks and whether logistics and supplies could keep up.
He then used the Splendor of the Many Realms to test the cognitive strain of commanding multiple army corps simultaneously, only to discover... there was hardly any strain at all.
Wei Yuan pondered for a long time before finally making up his mind. He issued a series of commands, and the war chariots of Qingming finally began to roar into motion.
In the winter of the sixth year of Zhaoning, Qingming formed three army groups—West, North, and South—and conscripted 3.5 million new troops to resist the Liao Clan in the north, push west into the Shaman Domain, and assault and conquer the Domain of the Mountain Folk in the south, acquiring land and establishing cities.
In an instant, the world was shaken.
Yet rather than shock, what the people of the world felt most was bewilderment. After all, Qingming was striking on three fronts at once, stretching its lines thin with distant supply routes—practically committing every single cardinal taboo in the art of war.
Chapter 1275