"Why is it that what they copy turns out to be an army or a fleet, and nothing else?" Baoyun was still somewhat puzzled.
Wei Yuan smiled faintly. "You have always focused on cultivation and don't understand people's hearts well enough. Those alien grandees sit in their factions at their lofty heights. Though there is much they can see, what they are actually willing to see is only that tiny sliver.
"All they want is to be invincible in battle. So when they look at Qingming, all they can see is our distinctive armaments and weapons. As for what lies behind those weapons, they can't be bothered to look, nor do they care to. Thus, when blindly copying, the stupider ones copy our military organization, flattering themselves by calling it some sort of 'New Army.' The cleverer ones copy our fleet, having at least noticed the utility of a sky-floating fleet.
"However, Qingming's fleet is merely an end result. The systems and mechanisms behind it, the theoretical foundations including mathematics and physics, and the people who study those theories—those are the fertile soil, the true foundation.
"And even if those alien grandees see and think of these things, they won't do them. To put it bluntly, who would take the spiritual qi belonging to Scenery Command and Dharma Idol cultivators and distribute it to mortals and bottom-tier cultivators? Even the King of Zhao hasn't done that, let alone those aliens. When it comes to anything else, there's room to negotiate. But this is fundamentally a matter of distribution—there is nothing to negotiate."
Baoyun understood only then.
Wei Yuan added, "Over the years, I've had another very important conjecture, but I've never been able to verify it. Fortunately, the opportunity has finally come."
"What happens once it's verified?"
Wei Yuan gave a mysterious smile. "It will be of immense benefit to all our cultivation."
Upon returning to Qingming, another set of reports lay before Wei Yuan. This set was specifically focused on the campaign to wipe out Yinyue, divided into three major sections. The first section analyzed the various technical and tactical issues exposed during the battle. The second discussed what improvements Qingming itself needed to make in order to further enhance its combat power.
The third section delved into mysteries, attempting to decipher the secrets Yinyue kept hidden based on materials obtained from places like the royal court and ancestral temple.
The Qingming military could now be said to be the indisputable number-one armed force in the human race; when it came to numbers, it had numbers, and when it came to quality, it had even more numbers.
Yet this came with a prerequisite: immortals could not enter the field, and high-level Scenery Command cultivators had to be matched man for man. Otherwise, lacking top-tier combat power, even an unparalleled military aura could hardly withstand the strikes of true top cultivators. The most typical example was when facing Yinyue: even with Wei Yuan personally at the front lines, the army was nearly heavily battered by Yinyue's desperate, dying strike.
Furthermore, a Dharma Idol's self-destruction caused severe casualties, and even a Dao Foundation cultivator who threw their life away could inflict heavy losses. Previously, when Qingming faced the armies of the Nine Kingdoms, the enemy Dharma Idols rarely fought to the death, so the issue had not yet come to light.
Another issue was troop morale. Although Qingming's templates were weak beyond belief, however weak they might be, they were still Dao Foundations, and many of them possessed every bit of the temper a Dao Foundation ought to have. More importantly, many were no longer willing to risk their lives.
In this campaign at the Sea of the Moon to blockade Yinyue, the newly promoted templates actually suffered few casualties. At the battle's most critical juncture, the casualties were all veterans who had followed Wei Yuan to conquer the realm back in the day. The veterans had surged against the tide, preventing the battle lines from collapsing, but of the first wave that charged forward, fewer than one in ten survived.
The entire report stopped just short of stating plainly: the broad masses of new templates do not want to risk their lives for you.
Yet afterward, some in the army began spouting twisted arguments. In private, they whispered: let those who want to throw their lives away go ahead; once they're all dead, their positions will be ours.
Reading up to this point, Wei Yuan flew into a rage, slamming his hand hard onto the table, ready to execute people on the spot.
Yet taking a deep breath, he forced himself to calm down and reflect deeply. The veterans who had carved out Qingming alongside him back then, if not fallen in battle, had mostly retired from the military to spend their twilight years in peace. A few had attained a Dao foundation, but could hardly advance any further.
That generation had suffered in their youth, resulting in frail constitutions and poor bone structures that inherently capped their growth. Even though Wei Yuan had continually blessed them with karmic luck and distributed pills to cleanse and temper their roots and aptitude, their foundational base was simply too deficient, making any improvement quite limited.
The new generation born after Qingming was founded enjoyed vastly superior conditions. Many were born tall and robust, obvious prime stock for Body Casting. Once this generation grew up and bore the next, the innate qualities of that succeeding generation were even more exceptional; moreover, virtually all of them completed preliminary schooling, and cures had been developed for most common fatal illnesses.
By now, it was already the third generation. Most in this generation began their schooling as toddlers, and from the golden age of six or seven, most children could receive systematic Body Casting training. While this standard could not yet rival that of the Palace of Grand Beginning in Wei Yuan's day, it was no longer inferior to sects in certain blessed lands.
In other words, every member of Qingming's third generation enjoyed at least sect-level treatment; it could be said that cultivation was now accessible to all. The starting point these children were born with was the very finish line earlier generations had pursued for a lifetime.
Naturally, with such a high starting point, many cultivators of the new generation looked down on the elders, considering their roots deficient, their comprehension low, and their speech rustic—a natural foible of human nature.
To turn this situation around, sheer coercion and heavy-handed suppression would be useless. Even in the strictly disciplined Qingming army, as its scale expanded, people would still make snide remarks in private. Within the Splendor of the Many Realms, rebellious dissidents were even more ubiquitous. In such matters, channeling was better than damming.
After careful consideration, Wei Yuan ordered a substantial increase in benefits for the veterans of those early days, while simultaneously multiplying the pensions for those killed in action several times over.
Following the adjustments, the veterans who had fought together to conquer the realm back then—even if aged, disabled, or infirm—could still draw a respectable stipend. As for those who died on the battlefield, their families could live in comfort, while their descendants received preferential treatment in schooling and career advancement. The scions of these families were the so-called "sons of good families," who historically held the key to the rise and fall of a nation.
The report also offered a relatively moderate solution. Its crux was to cut the military pay and benefits of template Dao foundations, on the grounds that templates were currently barely stronger than perfection in Body Casting and their numbers were steadily climbing, so no one would dare object to a pay cut. After slashing their pay, the rewards for military exploits of all sizes were drastically increased. In short: if you don't want to risk your life, then stay poor and rot at the bottom.
This approach delighted Wei Yuan, and he approved it for immediate implementation. Privileges could only belong to the few. When Dao Foundations were scarce, they were called "Dao Foundation Patriarchs." But when Dao Foundations became the majority, they were merely the ordinary masses.
The second part of the report carried far more weight, addressing Qingming's existing system. This major war had demonstrated that Qingming's top-tier combat power remained insufficient. In crucial engagements, individual numbers still struggled to withstand the suicidal assaults of high-level cultivators. In other words, no matter how many Golden Cores one had, they could not withstand a single Dharma Idol bent on self-destructing.
The proposal laid out in the report was to adjust Qingming's current research into Dao paths, slanting heavily toward lowering the threshold for Scenery Command—just as they had once developed the Golden Core—to develop an entirely new Scenery Command.
To lower the barrier to Scenery Command, the most direct path was to shrink the size of the mind-manifested world and simplify its complexity. The smaller the mind-manifested world and the more uniform its nature, the lower the difficulty would be.
The cultivator who penned this section was clearly bold and innovative. He proposed that in the most extreme case, when breaking through from Golden Core to Scenery Command, one could cultivate a pill box as one's mind-manifested world, so long as it could hoodwink the Great Dao of Heaven and Earth.
The author had even cited a rather outrageous earlier research report. That study had proposed the theory of a shared mind-manifested world; the author believed a pill box could also be shared, by dividing it into several compartments, each holding a Golden Core.
This part left even Wei Yuan stunned. He casually drew on a bit of human luck to perform divinations, only for the human luck to drain away faster and faster, several million vanishing in the blink of an eye without yielding a definitive result.
At this, Wei Yuan's expression changed.
Wei Yuan pulled up that report on the shared mind-manifested world once more, studying it closely several times. Then he retrieved all related reports and examined them one by one. Suddenly, a spark ignited in his mind: weren't the small islands he had erected within the Splendor of the Many Realms—with their independent karma and unique rules—essentially miniature mind-manifested worlds?
And how to bind these mind-manifested worlds to individual cultivators? In an instant, Wei Yuan thought of the *Taiyi God-Enfeoffment Method* he had just acquired!
By using the Taiyi God-Enfeoffment Method to enlighten a cultivator's dharma idol, a spark of spirituality could be born. Though the status of this spirituality was artificial and temporary, its tier could reach the level of Scenery Command. This spark of spirituality was the key, able to unlock the corresponding independent mind-manifested world Wei Yuan had already configured.
Yet establishing a link with an independent mind-manifested world was not enough; this was where the techniques of the Three Realms Dao Path came into play.
Wei Yuan could use the technique of bestowing fruition and Buddha power to treat each independent mind-manifested world as a fruition, then bestow it upon these cultivators. They would then effectively possess a mind-manifested world and could draw upon its power. At this stage, they could essentially be regarded as Scenery Command cultivators. Of course, a Scenery Command created this way would merely be the disgrace of Scenery Command, just like the Golden Core templates.
Naturally, this was still not enough, mainly because it lacked stability. Therefore, at this time, the Three Realms Dao Path still had a Flesh Buddha!
Relying on the exalted status of the Flesh Buddha, it would be enough to deceive the Great Dao of Heaven and Earth, allowing this batch of cultivators using the mind-manifested worlds provided by Wei Yuan to attain a status comparable to true Scenery Command. It could be called: pseudo-held Scenery Command.
Wei Yuan nearly jumped to his feet. At this point, the entire Dao path was viable! And as confirmation, a heavenly tribulation was already brewing in the sky.
Next, Wei Yuan refined the details while undergoing the tribulation.
By now, the heavenly tribulation merely went through the motions, blasting about haphazardly without rhyme or reason. It was only because Wei Yuan had undergone tribulation far too many times, and the Qingming research cultivators possessed ideas that were each more bizarrely ingenious than the last, that over time, they had come to treat heavenly tribulations as disposable energy sources.
When undergoing a fire tribulation, Wei Yuan would sit inside a blast furnace; for a lightning tribulation, he went to a power plant; for a water tribulation, he initially went to reservoirs to store water, which later evolved into driving water turbines.
The Heavenly Dao of this realm felt it still needed to save some face; it did not want to be sheared so blatantly, looking like a fool.
Soon, the heavenly tribulation concluded, and Wei Yuan finalized the corresponding details. Sharing a mind-manifested world was not difficult in itself; if there were difficulties, they amounted to just two. First, although the various mind-manifested worlds were situated within the Splendor of the Many Realms, they had to maintain causal independence from it; second, there had to be a Flesh Buddha presiding over it, or at least an entity of equivalent status that was willing to sacrifice endlessly without regret or resentment.
Looking across the world, to find someone who could achieve these two points—it wasn't just rare, there was truly no one else.
With a preliminary plan in hand, Wei Yuan was thrilled and immediately distributed it to the cultivators of the Palace of Grand Beginning to solicit their opinions.
Barely half a day later, he received an urgent message from Feng Chutang, strongly urging him to delay publication and rollout because he had major modifications. Wei Yuan was somewhat puzzled, but was still willing to grant his teacher a bit of patience.
Three days later, Feng Chutang arrived before Wei Yuan sporting dark bags under his eyes and carrying a brand-new proposal.
The core revision of the new proposal was eliminating the permanent bestowal of independent mind-manifested worlds, replacing it with leasing.
Since it was a lease, there would naturally be a term, the possibility of repossession, and above all, rent. This was a path to becoming a Scenery Command cultivator; how precious was a Scenery Command cultivator? Therefore, the rent was naturally astronomically high. It didn't matter if cultivators couldn't afford it—they could take out a loan. The Qingming Minting Bureau was already prepared.
Feng Chutang used a single sentence to make Wei Yuan accept the new proposal: "A cultivator with a loan is bound to work hard."
Chapter 1395