When the scheduled time arrived, the background music in the Expedition Hall shifted from soothing to brisk. One light portal after another materialized out of thin air. Cultivators greeted one another and stepped through with excitement and anticipation, rushing off to the battlefield.
Wu Ben Pingfan followed near the middle and rear of the ranks, stepping into a light portal. While waiting in line, several nearby cultivators chatted idly and exchanged a few words with Wu Ben Pingfan, though it was merely polite conversation. All of them were newly advanced Dharma Idols, and two were taking to the battlefield for the first time; inevitably a bit nervous, they were preoccupied with themselves and noticed nothing out of the ordinary about Wu Ben Pingfan.
Wu Ben Pingfan stepped through the portal. The view before his eyes slowly brightened, revealing a brand-new world.
This was Wei Yuan's first time beholding the outer world from the perspective of a dharma body. He was currently standing in a grand plaza surrounded by several tall buildings serving as nodes for ordnance, defense, and rest and medical treatment. A domed hall was bathed in golden light—this was the main hall of the Hall of Dao Soldiers, where all dharma bodies had to register their military merits and tally their combat records after battle. If needed, cultivators could also requisition and exchange for magical instruments and Dao arts directly here.
Wei Yuan turned around and saw a towering crystal spire standing in the center of the plaza, rising high into the sky. Judging purely by sight, it was at least hundreds of thousands of meters tall. The area within ten thousand zhang of the crystal tower was a forbidden zone that no dharma body could approach.
The sensations of this body were entirely different now, as though he had stepped into a whole new life. The moment he appeared on the plaza, pleasant chime prompts rang continuously in Wei Yuan's ears: "Pre-equipped magic treasures detected. Initializing... Initialization complete. The following magic treasures have been activated: Scarlet Night Immortal-Slaying Sword (Ordinary Appearance); Destiny-Settling Heaven-Striking Spear (Ordinary Appearance); Mystic Heaven Imperishable Immortal Armor (Unique Ordinary Appearance)..."
Wei Yuan swept his divine sense over the magic treasures and was quite pleased with their functionality. They reproduced about seventy to eighty percent of the original treasures' might, and paired with this specially refined Ever-Living Primal Chaos Dharma Body, his combat prowess securely surpassed the late Scenery Command realm.
Nearby dharma bodies looked toward Wei Yuan, whispering and pointing. They could not understand how a drab, dull Earth-tier dharma body possessed more treasures than their Heaven-tier ones.
However, the Expedition Realm was still only an early release; murder and looting were not yet on the agenda, so the Heaven Tier cultivators could only drool over Wu Ben Pingfan's treasures.
At that moment, an announcement echoed across the entire plaza: "Combat is about to commence. Please prepare yourselves and proceed to your designated battlefields. Note: under no circumstances should you enter a battlefield that does not belong to you!"
Then Wei Yuan's vision shifted once more. Multiple teleportation arrays appeared across the plaza, marked with their respective positions in the upper and lower vaults of heaven. In Wei Yuan's eyes, only a single array glowed with a faint, bright blue light, while all the others had dimmed.
Before the battle began, Splendor of the Many Realms had already partitioned the battlefields and assigned one to each cultivator, ensuring a balanced distribution of strength. An elite force of cultivators was also organized and initially held in reserve to monitor the situation across every battlefield. So long as the front remained stable, this elite force would be deployed to one of the battlefields to swiftly rout the fiends within, sweeping through battlefield after battlefield in a ruthlessly efficient slaughter.
Wei Yuan strode into his assigned teleportation array. In the next instant, he found himself adrift in an expanse of void, vast and boundless, where numerous fiends roamed in the distance.
With a thought, he propelled his dharma body toward one of the fiends. Drawing the elegantly shaped yet dully colored Scarlet Night Immortal-Slaying Sword, he swung it downward, cleaving the fiend more than halfway through.
On the same battlefield, several cultivators opened with thunderous strikes, severely wounding fiends before finishing them off in short order. Wei Yuan, on the other hand, struck here and there while roving unpredictably. The fiends he targeted were mostly left wounded rather than slain, allowing other cultivators to reap easy pickings. At the same time, a few cultivators caught in dire straits were fortunate enough to be rescued by Wei Yuan as he "happened" to pass by.
After fighting for a while, Wei Yuan saw that there were no hidden enemies lurking in this battlefield, so he moved on to inspect another.
Back on the plaza, another dharma body appeared. This was the most basic type, officially designated as Mortal Tier, though originally jokingly dubbed "Subterranean Tier."
This dharma body was a complete blank slate with nothing equipped. If it had any special trait at all, there was only one: inside resided a partitioned soul of Wei Yuan.
In the eyes of this dharma body, every teleportation array was illuminated, and the battle conditions behind each array were clearly visible. He picked a battlefield locked in fierce stalemate and teleported straight there.
In truth, the entire plaza was an illusion, constructed atop the soil of vitality. Traveling to the various battlefields did not even require teleportation arrays; one could simply fly there directly. However, taking the teleportation arrays saved the puppet dharma bodies' precious magic power, enabling them to slay one or two more fiends. This minor optimization, multiplied across thousands of dharma bodies over time, would compound into an immense figure.
As for that colossal crystal tower, it did not exist at all; it was merely a disguise to conceal the Dao leaf and the surrounding region where microscopic life had begun to stir.
Still, with the tower, the massive departure plaza, and the ability to resupply by returning to the tower's base, all cultivators felt an inexplicable sense of security and charged into battle brimming with confidence.
At this time, the blank-slate dharma body materialized on the battlefield and flew toward an empty patch of space. Just then, an injured fiend happened to fly by, skimming past the blank slate. Without hesitation, the blank-slate dharma body struck with an immortal sword Dao art, bisecting the fiend, and then unleashed a prepped flame incantation from its left hand, burning the creature to ash.
A Heaven-tier dharma body had been hot on the fiend's trail and had not expected to have the kill snatched by a blank-slate newcomer. Yet, as a high-level cultivator, he could hardly complain. Besides, the dharma bodies automatically recorded combat contributions, and the credit for inflicting severe wounds was not necessarily less than delivering the killing blow.
The Heaven-tier dharma body could not help but take a closer look at this blank-slate body. Though it was shockingly impoverished and clearly piloted by some minor cultivator without backing, its actions were remarkably decisive. The two mediocre Dao arts inherent to the dharma body had been executed with consummate mastery, without wasting an ounce of power. If this was no coincidence, then this blank slate was bound for great achievements.
The Heaven-tier dharma body immediately felt a desire to make his acquaintance, but the blank slate had already turned to charge toward another location, intercepting an isolated fiend. Low-tier dharma bodies possessed weak innate Dao arts and could not dispatch fiends in a single blow.
Yet this blank slate was extraordinarily patient. It added wound after wound to the fiend—from minor cuts to heavy trauma, and finally to mangled flesh across its entire body. Throughout the fight, it parried and dodged the fiend's attacks without the slightest error, functioning like a precision machine as it carved the creature down bit by bit.
Watching the fiend being sliced into hundreds of pieces, a phrase suddenly surfaced in the Heaven Tier dharma body's mind: death by a thousand cuts. He involuntarily shivered and made a mental note of this blank slate named "Wu Ben Chu Kuangren."
Meanwhile, on another battlefield, another blank slate had chosen no Dao arts, equipping only two basic magical instruments—a shield and a sword—and relying solely on the dharma body's innate Iron Body Art.
This dharma body, named "Shi Bu Sha Yi Nie," circled a fiend for thousands of steps, landing a sword strike every few paces until it minced the creature into fine mincemeat.
There were many other idiosyncratic figures across the battlefield. For instance, a dharma body named "Jianxin Ji Wuxin" wielded sword qi fine as silk, felling a fiend with a mere subtle loop. To utilize a dharma body's standard sword qi with such supernatural proficiency meant her swordsmanship had truly attained the Dao; within was none other than Zhang Sheng.
As she flicked out stream after stream of sword qi, the fiends around her plummeted like rain.
Just then, a dharma body that had clearly undergone special crafting and matched the tier of the Glazed Heavenly Phoenix suddenly appeared. Its attacks were straight, lightning-quick arcs of sword qi, incomparably sharp, cleaving fiends like tofu and carving them into diverse patterns.
Yet looking at this fellow named "Guangke Ji," Zhang Sheng could not shake a subtle sense of malice.
At this moment, in the eyes of Wei Yuan's true body, swarms of fiends surged through the surrounding space, but there were also thousands of sparks of starlight. Every point of starlight was a fighting cultivator. In time, these stars would grow ever more numerous and shine ever brighter. So long as the stars were plentiful enough, a true sun would inevitably be born from among them.
And the stars that never became suns would each possess their own unique brilliance.
Chapter 1413