If an alien Heavenly Khagan truly managed to rise right beside him, Wei Yuan felt that would sorely underestimate both his strategic foresight and his ruthless resolve.
With the broad strategic direction settled, Wei Yuan immediately set to work putting it into action, and the vast, efficient war machine of Qingming ground into motion.
Nowadays, whenever Qingming mobilized its forces, touching a single hair moved the entire body; the gear carried on a soldier's person accounted for only a minuscule fraction of overall supplies. For the same headcount, the logistical supplies required by Qingming's armies were already fifteen times that of the traditional forces of the nine states. And before an all-out war could even begin, mere preparations alone would take several months—or even more than a year.
Reexamining the overarching strategy, Wei Yuan paused in mild surprise. Now that he had resolved to campaign against the Liao domain, the northbound floating road he had forced through over the Xu family's objections proved absolutely crucial. This floating road's capacity was only one-eighth that of the Eastern Jin floating road, yet its total transport capability remained terrifying: in a single day, it could project a ten-thousand-man heavy division tens of thousands of li away.
What made Wei Yuan reflect was why he had built such a floating road back then in the first place. When making that decision, he hadn't yet known the truth behind the Liao Clan's catastrophe, nor had he anticipated a massive clash between the Shamans and the Liao. Merely for a barren patch of land like the Three Rivers Khanate, committing strategic resources to construct a floating road—and even slowing down construction of the Eastern Jin floating road in the process—seemed indefensible no matter how one looked at it.
Yet the floating road was already built, conferring immense advantage upon a campaign into the Liao domain. Wei Yuan therefore first ordered the laying of a parallel track along this floating road to double its transit capacity, and then pondered at length just how he could have been so brilliantly prescient.
After deep contemplation, he came to no conclusion other than that divine martial brilliance had simply been born in him. Wei Yuan glanced into a mirror, examined his reflection closely, and decided not to accept that explanation.
With the strategic direction decided came a cascade of prerequisite preparations. Wei Yuan and the Splendor of the Many Realms worked in tandem, drafting over a hundred operational plans within a matter of days. Just then, a message from True Monarch Chuhe leaped into Wei Yuan's view.
True Monarch Chuhe had just completed a modern agricultural workshop in the Three Rivers Liao domain, integrating fodder, medicinal herbs, grain, and spiritual rice under one roof.
Originally, this was just one of the thousands upon thousands of grassroots innovations Qingming generated every year, and Chuhe was merely filing a routine report. But with his sights now trained on the Liao domain, Wei Yuan grasped its extraordinary significance at a glance and decided to visit in person.
Taking a route through immortal heaven, it took Wei Yuan only half a day to reach the Three Rivers Khanate.
The agricultural workshop was built three thousand li from the northern border of Western Jin at the confluence of two rivers, occupying one of the few spiritual sites in the Three Rivers Khanate.
Before even stepping out of immortal heaven, Wei Yuan spotted a radiant halo of iridescent merit light on the ground below. The old Daoist's karmic merit had amassed to such an extent that it was visible even from immortal heaven, leaving him nowhere to hide.
Yet just as brightly colored birds, insects, and mushrooms in nature were usually lethal, Old Daoist Chuhe was an omen of dire catastrophe to immortals. Nowadays, let alone killing him, even grievously wounding Chuhe would cause an ordinary immortal to perish on the spot. Even if Wei Yuan struck him down personally, he would likely have to burn away more than half of his billions of karmic luck to walk away unscathed.
In short, Chuhe was now a walking venomous beast, a mobile bomb, a humanoid natural disaster. What was more, his dharma body was frail and his Dao force flimsy; he possessed lofty status without any combative might. If an immortal in a hurry bumped into him, it could gravely injure the old man and result in the immortal's sudden, violent death.
In the parlance of the otherworldly realm, bumping into Chuhe was the equivalent of hitting a Class I protected animal—if you avoided prison time, you were still looking at probation.
Hence, in recent years, as the iridescent light of merit around Chuhe grew brighter and brighter, immortals practically scattered before him. That black-hearted, foul-mouthed Wen Guantian had once secretly submitted an essay suggesting that during critical wartime emergencies, Chuhe should be hidden at key military strongholds—perhaps baiting a few enemy immortals into getting obliterated.
Wei Yuan had naturally ignored such an essay. He had only heard that not long after submitting it, Wen Guantian was ambushed by a masked raptor while walking home from work one night, leaving him bedridden for days.
Guided by the iridescent glow of merit, Wei Yuan materialized directly beside Old Daoist Chuhe.
At the moment, Old Daoist Chuhe was walking through the workshop accompanied by several hundred cultivators, over a hundred of whom were his apprentices and grand-disciples. As the old Daoist explained the systems to the youthful, attractive students behind him, he designated formation nodes one by one. Template Dao foundation cultivators then took their places upon the nodes, beginning to channel power into the entire workshop.
Materializing, Wei Yuan swept a glance over the crowd behind Chuhe and spotted seven or eight remarkably eye-pleasing—that is, remarkably talented—young disciples. He nodded in approval. "This batch of disciples was well chosen!"
Chuhe replied, "Where would I find the time to select disciples? I've been swamped lately, so I entrusted the matter to Junior Brother Sun Yu, asking him to recruit a batch on my behalf. That's who these are."
"Oh? Sun Yu handles recruiting disciples for others now?"
Chuhe nodded. "Junior Brother Sun's discerning eye is quite famous now. Besides me, Junior Brother Yu Zhizhuo, Wang Hu, and the rest have all asked him to recruit disciples for them. Only Xu Henshui insisted on recruiting personally, but the results were terrible. After agonizing over his choices for ages, he only picked out a few, and one look tells you their looks just don't make the cut."
Wei Yuan had hardly expected such an amusing development, but time was pressing, so he returned to business and said to Chuhe, "This workshop is intriguing. Why don't you show me around?"
Chuhe had no objection and took Wei Yuan on a tour starting from the first floor. Unlike a traditional single-story structure, the agricultural workshop stood six stories high. Its greatest difference from other workshops lay in using spiritual qi to nourish ordinary crops.
The workshop sprawled across a vast area tens of li in circumference. Multiple formations were laid out to siphon and concentrate all the spiritual qi from the surrounding hundred-li spiritual land, supplemented by the spiritual power provided by several hundred cultivators. In ordinary times, these hundreds of cultivators dispersed to cultivate and recharge their spiritual qi before reporting to work, essentially serving as hundreds of humanoid spiritual power converters.
The spiritual power of the entire spiritual ground was gathered into the main production building of the workshop, percolating upward floor by floor from the bottom up. The crops on each of the main building's six levels differed: spiritual herbs at the bottom, spiritual rice above that, followed by medicinal herbs and grain, all the way up to ordinary fodder.
Each floor of the building was subdivided into tiers of racks lined with spiritual soil, where crops grew upon the shelving, flourishing with wild vigor under the nourishment of spiritual qi.
Sunlight was channeled in via formations, allowing for real-time regulation and control.
Taking the fodder production on the top two floors as an example, what was produced here were sprouted wheat shoots. They matured and were harvested in just three days, yielding thousands of tons of green forage per harvest. This green feed, infused with spiritual qi, was more nutritious than dry legume feed; thousands of tons of it were enough to fatten a thousand head of beef cattle for slaughter. This single workshop alone could support an annual output of a hundred thousand beef cattle.
The grain and medicinal herbs were meant for mortals and ordinary Liao folk, boasting colossal yields and exceptional quality. Meanwhile, the spiritual rice on the lowest tier was a new strain bred through Chuhe's divine abilities; its spiritual qi content was half that of standard spiritual rice, but its yield was ten times greater.
This spiritual rice was not intended for cultivators, but for mortals. Regular consumption could drastically transform one's constitution and enhance cultivation talent. According to Chuhe's estimates, a normal, able-bodied mortal in their prime who ate it continuously for half a year could achieve at least one or two layers of Body Casting.
There were currently three such cultivation towers in the workshop, with room to expand by seven more.
Calculated step by step, this single agricultural workshop could sustain the daily needs of two million mortals while transforming their aptitudes. Within a year, over a hundred thousand Body Casting cultivators would emerge from those two million mortals; within a few years, sixty percent of prime-age men and women would reach Body Casting.
The Three Rivers Khanate currently had over sixty million Liao commoners; building just a few dozen agricultural workshops would be enough to feed them all.
Wei Yuan was thoroughly pleased by what he saw. Before he could even finish explaining the immense strategic significance of this workshop to Chuhe, a dozen or so figures suddenly flew into the facility, shouting, screaming, and smashing anything in sight.
For these low-level Liao cultivators to cause trouble at a time like this was like ants rushing into a herd of elephants. With a single glance, Wei Yuan swept them all out of the sky, after which the guards swarmed forward and bound them tight.
Yet these Liao cultivators were stubborn to the bone, continuing to shout and holler even after being tied up. Wei Yuan had picked up some of the Liao tongue by now and could make out that their cries amounted to things like "Give us back our spiritual land!"
Chapter 1373