Several Liao Clan Dharma Idol cultivators were horrified, realizing they were already exposed. Resembling a small hill, Tuobuwu let out a great roar, pushing out a ring of air blasts in all directions. In an instant, he emptied every drop of his dharmic power to launch his comrades into the sky like cannonballs!
The flying boat in the sky responded with equal swiftness. In the blink of an eye, a barrage of cannon fire poured down. The gunners aboard the vessel were all templates, whose reaction speeds were far faster than mortals. Firing a cannon was not like drawing a bow; it was simply a matter of pulling a lever.
The Liao Clan Dharma Idols burst forth with astonishing combat power and courage. The old man swept his wide sleeve, unexpectedly sweeping all the incoming cannon shells and flying swords straight into his cuff! Yet his leather robe shattered immediately from the blast, ruining a fine magic treasure just like that.
A second volley of projectiles followed in close pursuit. The Liao Clan experts brought out their respective divine arts to parry and block, closing the distance to within a hundred zhang of the flying boat in the blink of an eye.
Yet right at that moment, a faint tremor and tingling numbness rippled through the air. A massive formation on the surface of the flying boat shifted into place, aiming straight at the cultivators!
The flying boat's main cannon was activating. The old man instantly surged forward, shielding the others with his own body.
Yet the main cannon did not fire. Instead, the sky fell into an eerie silence, and then something flashed past in an instant!
The old man froze in midair. A diagonal cut appeared across the center of his torso, and his upper half slowly slid away, separating from his lower body.
What kind of weapon was this? The Liao cultivators were terrified beyond measure. Only the one with the sharpest eyes caught sight of what seemed to be a bizarre, colossal flying sword—one zhang long and shaped like a sharp triangle, resembling a weaver's shuttle.
Only after the old man's body split apart did the Liao cultivators hear the delayed rumbles of sonic booms. Amid the concussions, the warning bells in their hearts rang at full pitch, but before they could react, a chill ran through their bodies. Several faint, translucent shadows sliced clean through them, cleaving every one of them in two.
With their dharma bodies destroyed, they could no longer withstand the torrential barrage of fire, and in an instant, they were blasted to pieces in midair.
Down on the ground, Tuobuwu watched as translucent souls floated up from the pulverized flesh of his comrades. Yet rather than returning to heaven and earth, the souls were drawn into the flying boat.
"No!" Mingled grief and fury tore a roar from his throat!
The echoes of his roar had barely begun to spread when a triangular flying shuttle plummeted from above, cleaving him in two! As his soul floated free from his body, he distinctly felt two forces pulling against each other. But the flying boat was far closer, arresting the dissipation of his soul and halting its return to heaven and earth, dragging it forcibly into the vessel.
His final sensation was falling into a pool of black water.
The battle concluded, and the flying boat resumed its slow patrol as though nothing had happened. Wei Yuan materialized in midair, rather pleased with the newly developed Idol-Extinguishing Cannon designed specifically against Dharma Idols. The gun-launched shuttles were just a bit too fast and lacked maneuverability; had Wei Yuan not guided that final strike, it would have overshot the mark.
Sweeping his divine sense across the land and finding no remaining stragglers, Wei Yuan issued an order. Several tens of li away, several artillery carts folded their stabilizer struts, deactivated their formations, and redeployed toward the area he designated.
Most of the million-strong vanguard legion had by now dispersed into detachments of various sizes, repeatedly sweeping back and forth across several thousand li of the oasis lands. Wei Yuan had never intended to hold ground in this campaign; his primary objective was to eliminate the Liao Clan's Dao Foundation and Dharma Idol cultivators. As for Scenery Command experts, he left that to chance.
In just ten days, twelve of the oasis's nineteen cities had been captured, but the greatest achievement was that nearly seventy percent of the Dao Foundations and fifty percent of the Dharma Idols had been slain.
Wherever the army passed, they did not slaughter the Liao commoners. However, Wei Yuan ordered that all breeding females and young among the livestock be requisitioned and butchered to replenish military supplies.
With this single move, this corner of the Liao domain would take at least a dozen years to recover its herds.
The staff corps had proposed many other schemes as well—such as poisoning the waters of Blue Sea Lake, breaking both hind legs of every surviving male beast, or deporting all Liao women and children. All of these were ingenious plans that caused no offenses against the natural order while remaining exceptionally effective.
Wei Yuan adopted only the last plan, with some refinements: he relocated all young Liao women and all female children. In any case, Qingming had ample transport capacity; a single flying boat could carry several thousand people.
In addition, Wei Yuan had massive amounts of green forage shipped in from the rear—cultivated with spiritual energy by Old Daoist Chuhe—to serve as payment for the Liao collaborators working for him.
The nutritional value of this green forage was even more potent than dried bean fodder. Once scattered, it rapidly spread, proving even more useful among the Liao populace than immortal silver. To Liao nomads who had spent their entire lives herding, using it once was enough to hook them completely.
Yet Wei Yuan refused to sell it, distributing it exclusively to the Liao collaborators. Holding such a prized commodity, the collaborators immediately grew swaggering and haughty.
These were all methods Wei Yuan used to scour the oasis. Among the vanguard legion, a force of two hundred thousand remained undivided, chewing through the cities one by one. With each city conquered, Wei Yuan would find an excuse to unleash a wholesale slaughter upon the Liao nobility.
Wei Yuan had studied karmic luck extensively and understood how to evade karmic debt. Each time he took a city, he would directly elevate the lowest, most illiterate Liao commoners to high office. In his selection, Wei Yuan gave priority to Liao ruffians who could not read a single character. Upon promoting them, he promised that when the army withdrew, he would take them along to settle in the Three Rivers Khanate.
Having given his word, Wei Yuan dispatched them to interrogate the nobles, giving them completely free rein.
In no time, the Liao dungeons turned into a living purgatory.
Even the interrogator with the strongest moral baseline lost all patience and restraint after half a day, turning interrogation straight into torture and sadistic slaughter. When a Liao noble attempted to surrender and confess, the interrogator simply yanked out the noble's teeth, cut off his tongue, and poured scalding molten tin down his throat to destroy the vocal cords, continuing the torture purely for amusement.
The quickest one lost control completely in a mere five minutes.
By dawn the following day, of the more than three thousand nobles thrown into prison in that city, only half were still alive. Having lived their entire lives at the absolute bottom, these Liao pariahs, once given the slightest opening, immediately unleashed every malice they had ever suffered upon others with compound interest.
Above the largest city in the Blue Sea oasis, Ji Liuli, who had rushed over, found it somewhat hard to stomach and asked Wei Yuan, "Are you truly going to bring these Liao scumbags back?"
Wei Yuan said, "I gave them my word; naturally, I will take them."
"But just going by what happened last night, every last one of them deserves to die! Even if you need karmic luck, we can't just take in anything and everything, can we?"
Wei Yuan chuckled. "How could fellows like that possess any karmic luck? Even if they did, I wouldn't dare take it. Don't worry—I only promised to take them along, not to give them a good life."
"Hmph! Playing word games again. That was how I fell into your trap back then!" Ji Liuli rolled her eyes at him.
Wei Yuan smiled. "I explained everything clearly, with no deception or concealment. If there were a few words they couldn't hear, they can't blame me."
"Tch. Using high-frequency sound—what a rogue."
Wei Yuan chuckled. "High-frequency sound might still be caught by certain innate divine abilities, so I spoke by emitting light from my throat. In essence, that counts as talking too."
Ji Liuli fell silent for a moment.
Looking down at the quiet city below, Wei Yuan remarked with palpable regret, "These Liao cities really have nothing worth tearing down—not even a sewer to fill in."
Ji Liuli lapsed into silence once more.
Wei Yuan added, "Oh, right. The formation I asked you to research last time is no longer needed."
"Which formation?"
"The one to detect whether a Liao possesses aptitude for a Dharma Idol."
Her competitive spirit flared instantly. "Someone figured it out? Who? When?"
Wei Yuan said, "No one figured out the formation, but I just thought of an alternative method. Ninety out of every hundred Liao Dharma Idols come from the nobility. So as long as I kill all the nobles I can kill, and haul away the ones I have no excuse to kill, that'll do it."
Ji Liuli disagreed sharply. "If you haul away the nobles, gifted commoners will naturally rise up to take their places. Wouldn't it be the exact same?"
Wei Yuan smiled faintly. "It's not the same. If a commoner dared attempt reaching Dharma Idol, the nobles would be the first to slaughter him. In the Liao domain, the rank of Dharma Idol is practically the nobles' private property. Without a drop of aristocratic blood in your veins, a Dao Foundation is as far as you'll ever go in this lifetime."
Chapter 1379