After Wuliang Mingguang departed, Wei Yuan's dharma body sank once more, leaving only the crown of his head exposed above the surface to maintain his presence in the Sea of Bitterness.
Back in Qingming, Wei Yuan's true body roused from deep meditation. A sudden sigh escaped him as a wave of fatigue settled in. He had just traveled to the world beyond the heavens and fought a desperate battle against countless sin-beasts for several straight days before finally managing to return. However, due to inadequate protection, the newly enlightened Fifth Holy Spirit had met an untimely end at the hands of the beasts, devoured clean on the spot until not a speck of karma remained.
To be eaten by a sin-beast meant more than the destruction of one's physical form and the annihilation of one's soul; even one's karma was completely erased, extinguishing any possibility of reincarnation—the equivalent of returning to primordial chaos.
This great clash had thoroughly exhausted Wei Yuan, leaving him feeling his dharmic power running dry for the very first time in his life. The sin-beasts had arrived in an endless tide, impossible to wipe out or sever entirely, while Wei Yuan's dharmic power was finite. No matter how vast his reserves, there was an ultimate limit.
This was the first massive assault of sin-beasts Wei Yuan had faced since putting down that mysterious woman. Fortunately, the faction she belonged to had not intervened this time, which allowed Wei Yuan to hold out and slay the very last beast.
Yet after slaughtering every last one, Wei Yuan found himself holding hundreds of thousands of grains of grey sand that he dared not pour into the Soil of Vitality. This swarm had been dozens of times larger than the previous one. While the information leak by a human traitor was certainly a contributing factor, another reason was that Wei Yuan had dumped all the grey sand and the colored sand left by the mysterious woman into the soil in a single go. As a result, the Soil of Vitality had skipped an entire major stage, causing microscopic life to emerge in droves and expanding its volume hundreds of times over.
Consequently, the radiance shed by the Leaf of the Great Dao had shone with dazzling brilliance, which naturally agitated and summoned forth far more sin-beasts.
Having returned from the battle, Wei Yuan sat in silent meditation to regulate his breath. Only after several hours did a post-battle summary report appear before him.
The report revealed that in terms of tier, although the sin-beasts possessed only the strength of a dharma idol, the operational data generated during combat was comparable to an ordinary Scenery Command expert.
The volume of data produced by this single battle surpassed even Wei Yuan's long-distance raid on the Silver Moon Royal Court, which was why the report had taken exceptionally long to compile.
This battle had taken place beyond the heavens. Aside from the Soil of Vitality, that realm was essentially a barren graveyard of absolute stillness where nothing existed—even the void itself was ephemeral. Wei Yuan had not cut down the sin-beasts with physical sight, but had locked onto them with divine sense before slaying them one by one.
In such a realm, perception was entirely different from the native world, and the dharmic power actually expended was far greater than Wei Yuan had assumed. Under normal circumstances, it was nothing out of the ordinary for Wei Yuan to engage in dharmic combat with another cultivator for months on end, but out beyond the heavens, his reserves had bottomed out in just a few days.
By now, Wei Yuan's mindscape world had gradually manifested, turning from illusory to real, and his dharmic power was normally stored within the Splendor of the Many Realms. The Splendor of the Many Realms could naturally respire the vital energy of heaven and earth, drawing a sliver of chaos and transmuting it into spiritual energy. This spiritual energy was the source of his dharmic power.
Yet the grotto-heaven needed to maintain its operations; the small temple in the Pure Land needed to dissolve karmic debt; the Yellow Springs needed to sustain reincarnation; and every living being between heaven and earth—from Han Li and Jun Weizhi down to the microscopic organisms in the sea—required spiritual energy.
Maintaining the operation of the Splendor of the Many Realms actually consumed the lion's share of that spiritual energy. The difference between what flowed in and what flowed out was the actual dharmic and Dao power Wei Yuan could freely wield. Daily spiritual energy would replenish his dharmic power, typically taking several dozen days to fill his reserves. Once his dharmic power overflowed, the surplus spiritual energy went toward repairing the mindscape world and tempering its living beings, gradually elevating the world's essence and tier.
Once the entire world had been tempered and attained a sufficient tier, it could be elevated toward the immortal heaven. Before entering the immortal heaven, it would undergo the baptism of the Ascension Tribulation, which was equivalent to a complete re-refining to purge impurities and mend deficiencies. When the entire mindscape world manifested in the immortal heaven to form an independent realm of its own, that was true ascension to immortality.
Because of this, Wei Yuan engaged in direct combat less and less frequently, generally refraining from taking action if an army could handle the problem.
Burning through all his dharmic power to fend off the sin-beasts this time was akin to an entire nation draining its treasury dry on a war. If he wished to replenish his dharmic power more rapidly, he needed to curb expenditures—for instance, by ordering all the rebels to go to sleep. Another newly added heavyweight in spiritual energy consumption was the cluster of twelve isolated mindscape world islands. However, those islands had already been leased out and could not be touched.
Furthermore, every single living being within the Splendor of the Many Realms functioned as a node of thought. Only by integrating these countless nodes did the nearly omnipotent Splendor of the Many Realms come to be. The normal operation of Qingming's various affairs was now utterly dependent on the Splendor of the Many Realms. When it came to judicial rulings, its verdicts had become the definitive benchmark; if an official's verdict diverged markedly from it, they were required to state their reasoning, and the ruling could only be enforced after review and approval by a higher authority. Therefore, if the Splendor of the Many Realms ground to a halt, every aspect of Qingming would freeze as well.
Wei Yuan pored over the ledgers for a long time, only to discover that nearly every expenditure of spiritual energy within the Splendor of the Many Realms could not be cut. Thus, for the first time in his life, he gained a profound understanding of what was meant by "mandatory expenditures."
Wei Yuan sighed. Dharmic power could be restored with time, but the loss of the Fifth Holy Spirit had sounded an alarm for him. To resist the sin-beasts, numbers were paramount. Yet while refining dharma forms was easy, the true challenge lay in enlightening and imbuing them with sentient souls. At his current pace of taking several months to enlighten a single Holy Spirit, the new world would be annihilated in less than a year.
Just then, a sudden flash of inspiration struck Wei Yuan, and an idea came to mind—a flash of inspiration that cost five million mortal karmic luck.
Sentience was hard to come by in the world beyond the heavens, but within the Splendor of the Many Realms, was sentience not available in virtually unlimited supply? Once Wei Yuan refined dharma forms, he could hand them over to people like Han Li and Jun Weizhi to control. While their individual combat power might not match a Holy Spirit, their numbers would be far greater.
The only difficulty was how to allow Han Li and the others to descend into those physical forms. The Path of the Three Realms worked within their native realm, but it was useless in the world beyond the heavens.
Yet there happened to be a treasure that could resolve this very problem: the Hall of Dao Soldiers.
The branch hall of the Hall of Dao Soldiers in Qingming was nowhere near sufficient, but the main hall within the Palace of Grand Beginning certainly was!
Wei Yuan set off immediately, locating Yanshi and Zhu Yan at the Palace of Grand Beginning. Without hesitation, he asked to borrow the Hall of Dao Soldiers. Seasoned and knowledgeable though the two Immortal Monarchs were, they were thoroughly taken aback.
Ever since it was forged, the Hall of Dao Soldiers had never been moved from the mountain. Like the Patriarch's statue and the Hall of Myriad Manifestations, it was not only a symbol of the Palace of Grand Beginning, but also the linchpin defending the palace's northern gate. That the Palace of Grand Beginning had managed to hold off the Liao Clan for a millennium was owed entirely to an endless stream of formidable Dao soldiers.
Wei Yuan said, "There is no need for either Patriarch to worry; your disciple has already thought everything through. Once I take the Hall of Dao Soldiers, all Dao soldiers can be transferred to Qingming on the spot. Afterward, the defense of the northern gate can be entrusted entirely to me—just give me the funds the palace originally spent on defense. I guarantee not a single member of the Liao Clan will step over the line, and the perimeter of the northern gate will expand year after year. This model can be called 'defense contracting.'"
Yanshi and Zhu Yan stared at each other in disbelief. This fellow had finally found a way to squeeze money out of the Palace of Grand Beginning.
Chapter 1402