In the middle of the seventh year of Zhaoning, Wei Yuan sat upright in the Sea of Bitterness, gazing up at the Bodhisattvas and looking down upon all living beings. As was his habit, he engaged in his customary three self-reflections: Dharma body, good. Cultivation, good. Divine abilities, good. Reputation, good. Appearance... wait, that was more than three.
At this time, in the eyes of the Nine States, Qingming had gradually quieted down, no longer staging earth-shaking moves every now and then as it once had.
All was calm along Qingming's borders. First of all, there was no fighting on the western front. No matter how wildly Qingming's border commanders provoked them, the Nether Shamans simply played dead and refused to take the bait. In the end, the Country of Rain simply withdrew nearly ten thousand li, ensuring that Qingming's border troops could not touch so much as a single shaman hair.
A few hundred li beyond the border lay a pure Shaman Domain environment. Without realm stones, no matter how eager Qingming's commanders were to earn military merits, they could only stare helplessly at the Shaman Domain's sky full of toxic miasma and ground covered in green, stagnant waters.
With the Nether Shamans gone, only the Desolate Ancestor Tribe of the Power Shamans remained. They were old friends of Qingming and diehard loyalists of the realm lord. Back when Qingming first rose to prominence and struck its first fortune, several barrels of that gold had been contributed by the Desolate Ancestor Tribe. With this relationship in place, no matter how much Qingming's commanders itched for a fight, they would never provoke the Power Shamans. The border generals' sole grievance was that a new Power Shaman in charge of trade had arrived at the Desolate Ancestor Tribe. Supposedly, he was Tianyu's brother-in-law—and while Tianyu had several hundred brothers-in-law, this one was at least a shaman of status.
Yet this fellow had a peculiar hobby: reading! And once a Power Shaman took up books, things got absurd.
From somewhere or other, he came across the saying, "Whatever the superior desires, his inferiors will emulate to excess." At once, he was struck by revelation and began frantically throwing shaman honey traps at the border generals! Yet not a single commander among Qingming's border forces fell for it. Every last one rejected the advances with stern, righteous indignation. This left the well-read Power Shaman deeply moved, convinced that Wei Yuan was truly a divine man whose subordinate generals were, without exception, completely abnormal.
As for the north, there was no need to say much. The Three Rivers Khanate alone blocked nearly half of Western Jin's border. With a catastrophe looming over the Liao domain, Wei Yuan had no desire to stir up trouble at this juncture, lest he somehow draw that disaster onto his own head. In any case, he had already taken a massive bite out of the Wise King of the Left, captured a Dharma God, and gained thousands of li of land from the Three Rivers Khanate. Even Wei Yuan felt he needed time to properly digest it all.
In particular, that Hongmo fellow was where the real struggle began once captured. Wei Yuan had more than just a headache; he ached all over.
The south was the same. Yizhou was vast, almost larger than Qingming's core domain. That territory had only recently been seized; it was expansive yet sparsely populated, and most areas still required gradual development. Furthermore, internal consolidation yielded far greater returns right now than external expansion. Merely opening up wasteland, prospecting mineral veins, and establishing fundamental mining and smelting operations would keep them busy for over a decade, to say nothing of large-scale infrastructure across such a vast territory.
Wei Yuan had once experienced a sudden whim to build a road to every single village, but the idea had been unanimously rejected from top to bottom as thoroughly disconnected from reality. To the east, the floating road had already crossed more than half of Eastern Jin and was now advancing into its fifth commandery. The sheer volume of labor required for this floating road was terrifying. According to internal Qingming estimates, the scale of engineering surpassed the entirety of Great Tang's annual corvée labor.
A project of such immense proportions had faced considerable opposition within Qingming as well.
A faction of cultivators, brimming with bleeding-heart benevolence and seeing their own dao paths cut off with no hope of advancement, were unwilling to sit day after day inside the cultivation vats powering engines. They yearned for complete equality with the superior cultivators above them, yet insisted on strict hierarchy over the lowly cultivators beneath them. As a result, they stirred up all manner of bizarre disputes. For instance, several cultivators claimed that snakes and frogs inhabited the forest the floating road was set to traverse; building through it would destroy their homes, so work had to stop immediately.
The Dharma Idol cultivator overseeing that section of the project was cornered by these cultivators, so he swept the area with his divine sense. Sure enough, he found two snakes and a nest of frogs in the woods, but they were entirely ordinary creatures—in Qingming, no one would even bother eating them as wild game.
Yet the bleeding-heart cultivators refused to relent, insisting that construction must wait until the coming spring, when the snakes woke up and vacated the forest of their own accord, before work could resume.
Hearing such nonsense, the Dharma Idol overseer was incensed. He had already wasted half an hour on these rustic Dao Foundation fools, and they still failed to recognize what was good for them?
With a single palm strike, he severely injured all of the bleeding-heart cultivators on the spot, arrested them for obstructing a critical public project, stripped them of their Qingming registry, and ordered his men to dump them directly into the State of Song—that self-proclaimed land of supreme morality. As for how those cultivators would survive in Song, that was not his problem.
The bleeding-heart cultivators naturally grew hysterical, cursing non-stop and swearing they would lodge complaints all the way up to Wei Yuan himself.
The Qingming Dharma Idol scoffed. He was not acting on arbitrary whim. Every disciplinary action had to be reported to the Splendor of the Many Realms, and his proposed punishment could only be executed once approved by the system.
Originally, the Dharma Idol had intended to throw them into Northern Qi, but the Splendor of the Many Realms had altered the destination to the State of Song.
This came as no surprise to the Dharma Idol. After all, Northern Qi was still some distance away, whereas the border with the State of Song was nearly within reach. Right now, Qingming's young officers were so desperate to amass enough military merits for appointments in the Daoist Court that they looked at everyone as an excuse to pick a fight.
Aside from the bleeding-heart cultivators, others fiercely attacked the floating road, arguing that Wei Yuan's construction was merely a facade whose true purpose was expansion. Wherever the floating road extended, Qingming's talons would reach. How could such tyrannical conduct be the doing of a benevolent and righteous man?
Unlike his reaction to the bleeding hearts, Wei Yuan felt a mixture of fondness and irritation toward these critics. What he appreciated was their sharp vision—they had actually seen right through his intentions!
What irritated him was that if they had already seen through his intentions, why did they have to blab about it? Since he was already acting so tyrannically, did he care in the slightest what other states said?
Beyond Qingming, only when thousands of pointing fingers condemned him did Wei Yuan feel he was doing things right. The more viciously the Nine States cursed him, the more it proved he was on the correct path. As for the future? In the future, every last one of those people would become wonderfully adept at singing and dancing.
The floating road through Eastern Jin had always been the highest priority, and Wei Yuan kept a tight rein on its pace. The reason this floating road progressed slowly, aside from being a two-way trunk line, was that the auxiliary works required even more labor than the main thoroughfare.
At set intervals, they erected military camps, waystations, quartermaster depots, Civil Administration Bureaus handling affairs for hundreds of li around, Halls of Heavenly Secrets shielding heaven and earth, and much more. Every thousand li, a base for replenishing and repairing flying barques was added. Wherever a base stood, a substantial city took shape. What was more, these cities did not require Qingming to supply realm stones at all; they were built entirely by mooching off Eastern Jin.
Wherever the floating road reached, Qingming's armies could arrive in an instant, resupply on the spot, shield their movements from heavenly sight, and confound karmic causality. Relying on pre-laid formations, they could amplify military qi and ward off immortal arts and daoist techniques.
As a result, a corridor extending two hundred li on either side of the floating road had completely become Qingming's sphere of influence. Whenever local Eastern Jin officials assumed their posts, they first had to pay respects to Qingming officials, pledge loyalty, and pay homage, lest their positions prove unstable.
At the same time, the floating road exerted an immense siphon effect. Countless workshops sprouted across southern Eastern Jin to supply the road's construction sites. It was not merely petty merchants and commoners; officials of all ranks, local magnates, and even many direct descendants of the Xu family quietly drew upon their life savings to trade with Qingming.
Meanwhile, farmers and landlords across the region had long since cleared the crops from their fields to cultivate exclusively what Qingming demanded. The policy of "converting rice to mulberry" once seen in Jin and Zhao was now repeating itself in Eastern Jin. Back then, discerning minds in Jin and Zhao had run about raising alarms to halt it; today, Eastern Jin accepted the reality with utter composure, and the common people were overjoyed.
A patch of blank space still remained south of Qingming, separated from Yizhou by a considerable distance, effectively leaving an avenue for the State of Zhao to advance westward.
However, if Zhao truly wished to push west, it would first have to march ten thousand li southwest and bypass Li Zhi's Zhenshan Fief. Zhenshan Fief was no longer small; Li Zhi had added four smaller realm stones around his primary one, giving the fief a span of over seven thousand li.
After bypassing Zhenshan Fief, Zhao's forces would have to detour another ten thousand li. All told, marching twenty-five thousand li would merely bring them to the Mountain Folk. At such a distance, by the time an army reached the front lines, the logistical costs on the road would exceed the cost of combat by more than tenfold. A maneuver like that was naturally something no military-minded King of Zhao would ever contemplate.
Yet as Wei Yuan engaged in his three self-reflections upon the Sea of Bitterness, he still felt he hadn't exerted quite enough pressure on his surroundings of late. Northern Qi, in particular, was still infested by a bunch of treacherous baldies. Did they think Wei Yuan had forgotten the underhanded tricks they had played?
For a matter of such gravity, one naturally could not wait until the eleventh hour to make preparations. Wei Yuan had prepared long ago, having set the earliest groundwork in motion over a decade prior. And so, Wei Yuan pulled up a top-secret list filled with engineering projects of terrifying scale, beside which even a floating road running straight to Northern Qi paled in comparison. Every one of these projects had been rigorously debated and verified through metaphysics, and many critical materials were already in production, stockpiled over years.
Wei Yuan scrutinized them item by item, preparing to select one or two to deliver a severe shock to those treacherous baldies—and, while he was at it, give the Eight States a pleasant surprise.
Chapter 1314