Across the battlefield, dozens of cultivators were still hard at work. They hauled the corpses of Shaman warriors to an open clearing, stripped them of their armor and clothing, searched them thoroughly, and piled the collected belongings in an assigned spot, laying out the corpses in their own designated field. Above the sea of bodies, faint wisps of green vapor drifted continuously, condensing into life-bearing spiritual rain.
On Wei Yuan's orders, the corpses were to remain laid out like this for three days. Once the toxins and magical power lingering in the remains dissipated, Qingming would convert them into spiritual rain. Three days later, the bodies would be transported to a designated area for burial. Currently, the spot Wei Yuan had marked was the edge of the dense forest at the foot of the mountain. Three days from now, the domain would have expanded to reach it.
Seeing with his own eyes the gifts of heaven and earth, and watching Qingming transform the magical power and deadly poisons of the slain Shamans into nourishment for the domain, an inexplicable chill crept through Wei Yuan. Perhaps the underlying truth of this world was far more brutal than he had ever imagined.
As dusk approached, the surrounding lands dimmed into twilight, yet the sky above the domain remained ablaze with fiery sunset clouds. Suddenly, the crimson glow thickened, growing viscous and murky. The heavens abruptly darkened, and a suffocating, oppressive air descended. Everyone felt as if a colossal boulder were crushing their chests, making it hard to draw breath.
Wei Yuan looked up to see the sunset clouds coalescing into rolling blankets of blood clouds.
A Shaman blood curse!
After their crushing defeat, the Shamans naturally refused to let matters rest. This was a blood sacrifice curse unleashed from afar, targeting everything within this pocket of heaven and earth.
As the blood clouds fully formed, drops of blood-red liquid began to fall. Wei Yuan bolted straight toward Qingming, shouting for the four idle Dao Foundation cultivators to take up their positions at the formation nodes at once.
Partway through their descent, the droplets struck the barrier. A faint glimmer of light shimmered into view, sheltering a thousand-zhang expanse centered on the domain's core. The moment the blood drops entered the formation, they began to dissolve, vanishing completely tens of zhang before reaching the ground.
Yet the blood rain grew increasingly heavy. As more droplets poured down, the rate at which the formation dissolved them visibly slowed, and the drops plummeted closer and closer to the earth. The Pure Cleansing Spirit Formation was clearly nearing its limit.
Just then, a sudden gust of wind stirred. Though not particularly fierce, it blew sheets of blood rain outside the domain from time to time. Wherever the blood rain fell, vegetation withered instantly, the earth turned a sickly green, and even solid rock was corroded full of holes.
This wind had risen out of nowhere, yet it blunted much of the curse's might, allowing the Pure Cleansing Spirit Formation to barely hold on. In truth, this was the feng shui formation coming into play, weakening the blood curse through subtle balance. Had the formations not been layered together, the Pure Cleansing Spirit Formation alone would never have withstood it.
Standing beside Qingming, Wei Yuan channeled a strand of karmic luck into the jade mountain. A shadow immediately stained the once-translucent jade peak, and the light within the domain dimmed once more, as if smothered by leaden clouds. The falling blood rain suddenly dissolved far more rapidly, granting the strained Pure Cleansing Spirit Formation a moment of respite.
Even so, the rain pelted down with ever-growing urgency and density. One unfortunate Blood Merging cultivator was struck by several stray drops that pierced the barrier. He collapsed with a bloodcurdling shriek as massive holes were eaten through his body in the blink of an eye. His screams rapidly weakened, and charred black fluid oozed from his flesh. Moments later, the man was entirely consumed, leaving behind several zhang of scorched earth with the faint, smoldering outline of a human form at its center.
The blood rain poured harder, and drops spattered the ground with terrifying frequency. After five or six people died in quick succession, Wei Yuan summoned all the cultivators to gather around the main hall. He drove Qingming with all his strength, focusing entirely on shielding the thousand-zhang perimeter encircling the hall. Within mere moments, an entire strand of karmic luck burned away!
Without hesitation, Wei Yuan fed in a second strand, fighting the blood curse with everything he had.
The blood rain battered the formation like a torrential downpour hammering an awning, its relentless drumming draining the color from every cultivator's face. They did not fear fighting an enemy head-on, but before a catastrophic blood curse that felt like heaven's wrath itself, they could only wait helplessly for death—a terror of an entirely different order.
Amid the falling rain, fist-sized clumps of blood began to form! These clumps could not be dissolved by the formation at all, hurtling straight toward the ground like cannonballs. Unable to master his terror any longer, a cultivator cried out and hurled his flying dagger, slicing straight into one of the descending masses!
The blood clump exploded, spraying countless fine droplets across his face and body. Smeared with foul gore, the flying dagger plunged to the earth, pitted, corroded, and utterly drained of its spiritual nature by the time it struck the soil.
The cultivator shrieked in agony. Every patch of skin spattered by the blood began to fester; in an instant, sores the size of rice grains expanded to the width of bowls, eating away flesh faster than the strongest acid.
He stumbled forward a few paces before collapsing in a heap, dissolving into a charred skeleton before their eyes.
The cultivators looked on in horror. From that point on, they dodged every falling blood clump they could. When evasion was impossible, they gingerly caught the clumps with their artifacts and shoved them aside, preferring to sacrifice a weapon rather than their lives.
After a grueling half-shichen of bitter struggle, the blood clouds in the sky finally exhausted their power and began to dissipate. By then, the Dao Foundation cultivators stationed at the formation nodes had entirely depleted their magical power. Outside the domain, vast stretches of land were left charred, blackened, and foul-smelling, like massive blotches of filth staining a dark green tapestry. Within the domain, several patches of scorched earth a zhang across bore witness to where the blood clumps had landed.
Wei Yuan had burned through four whole strands of karmic luck, leaving only a single strand in his sea of consciousness.
Having finally repelled the Shamans' vengeful blood curse, every cultivator within the domain felt the profound relief of surviving a calamity. For a curse to be this terrifying, the Shamans must have sacrificed at least a thousand souls, with a Great Shaman presiding over the ritual.
Yet they had held the line. Though the cost had been steep, every heart swelled with genuine hope for the future.
In the blink of an eye, night fell, cloaking the land in darkness. Wei Yuan told Xu Wan'er, Yun Feifei, and the others to take turns resting, while he set out alone to patrol the outskirts of the domain.
The Qingming domain held an extraordinarily high status, and because this shattered pocket of heaven and earth was broken, it was exceedingly difficult to divine through standard divination. After unleashing a curse on such a scale, the Shamans would inevitably dispatch scouts to inspect the outcome. Unfortunately for them, they crossed paths with Wei Yuan.
Qingming possessed a measure of perception beyond its borders, leaving the Shaman scouts nowhere to hide. Mounted on his steed, Wei Yuan roamed the night like a specter, harvesting squad after squad of Shaman warriors. That night, the Shamans dispatched seven scouting parties totaling two hundred and ten men; every last one perished under Wei Yuan's spear, not a single soul escaping.
Wei Yuan was down to his last strand of karmic luck. He could not withstand another blood curse of that magnitude, nor even one half its size. If another struck, the cultivators would simply have to leave their lives to fate—even Yun Feifei and Xu Wan'er would perish without question if splashed. The domain would be completely ruined, and repairing a cursed expanse of heaven and earth would take Qingming years, not days.
Wei Yuan had to eliminate all the Shaman scouts, keeping the enemy blind to the domain's true condition. Ideally, it would lead the Shamans to believe the domain possessed specialized defenses against blood curses, forcing them to switch tactics. Changing tactics would take time, and Wei Yuan needed to buy every moment he could.
As pale light seeped into the sky, the first day since Qingming had acknowledged its master finally came to an end.
Wei Yuan returned to the domain, looking as vibrant as ever. As long as the Qingming domain endured, it was as if he were cultivating every moment of the day. While this ambient cultivation could not compare to seated meditation in his cave dwelling back at the Palace of Grand Beginning, it excelled in its steady, continuous flow. If ordinary places in the Western Regions had a spiritual qi density of one, the Qingming domain was currently at ten, while the Hanging Azure of the Empty Valley was at two hundred!
Only after leaving the sect had Wei Yuan truly understood how barren the outside world was.
Dawn broke across the horizon, bringing with it a new day. There was no telling what sort of offensive the Shamans would mount today, or whether another thousand-man blood curse would fall. Still, with one Great Shaman already slain by Wei Yuan's hand, no other Great Shaman would dare show themselves outside Qingming anytime soon.
Chapter 128