Wei Yuan had failed his ascension to immortality. The world's immortals let out a collective sigh of relief, yet their hearts remained weighed down. Even when old friends gathered, they often sat facing each other in silence. After a long stillness, all that escaped was a heavy sigh.
A mind-manifested world forty thousand li across had utterly shattered the immortals' preconceptions. Even in their wildest flights of imagination, none had dared to conceive of such a thing. How could anyone imagine what had never before been seen?
In truth, some deep down had harbored a faint hope that Wei Yuan might succeed, wishing to see what a magnificent spectacle it would be if a forty-thousand-li mind-manifested world rose into the immortal heaven. The term "grotto-heaven" could no longer describe it; perhaps it might have become a miniature primary realm, gradually expanding and growing until it turned into a truly independent world.
Yet reality had forced their hands. They had intervened to stop it, yet had failed to strike Wei Yuan dead. Consequently, every one of them was left on edge, and each passing day dragged by agonizingly slowly.
Within Qingming, weeping could be heard in many households. When the Splendor of the Many Realms plunged back down, it had still triggered considerable devastation, and some people perished out of nowhere.
Yet what permeated Qingming was not sorrow, but a surging fury! Nearly everyone had witnessed the destruction of the twelve Heavenly Pillars. All now knew that above their world lay an immortal heaven, and what sort of scoundrels dwelt within it.
Two billion mortals had seen the immortals of the immortal heaven strike for the first time, and for the first time, they realized that the distance between themselves and the immortals was not so vast after all. In that instant, the feelings toward immortals in the hearts of countless people shifted from dread and worship to burning rage.
It was also in that instant that Qingming's fervor for cultivation surged to unprecedented heights. Countless youths abandoned leisure and rest to train relentlessly day and night. They did not know where the road ended, only that every bit their cultivation improved brought millions of peers like themselves closer to defying heaven and changing their fate. So-called immortals were nothing more than that!
The unique thing about Qingming was that many forms of industrial labor were themselves a form of cultivation, with the energy stations being the prime example. Almost overnight, Qingming's productive capacity exploded, and numerous large-scale projects progressed by leaps and bounds.
Xu Henshui's colossal alchemy furnace, True Monarch Chuhe's multi-tiered herb cultivation facility, and Yu Zhizhuo's ten-zhang-wide underground boring machine were all completed during this time.
Wen Guantian and a host of other genius template cultivators discovered that after observing the ascension, their innate aptitudes had advanced by a dramatic leap, opening the path to the Golden Core for an entire cohort. They were already exceptionally brilliant and lacked neither techniques nor precious medicines; once the constraints of their physical bodies were unlocked, their cultivation advanced at flying speed, making attaining the Golden Core merely a matter of a year or so.
Wen Guantian and his peers were no isolated cases. In fact, countless people throughout Qingming found their aptitudes drastically improved. The change was even more pronounced among mortals: those previously incapable of Body Casting grew increasingly robust and could now cast their bodies, while half of those who had plateaued at Body Casting found the path to becoming a template open before them. Calculated this way, fully half of Qingming's entire mortal populace now had the prospect of reaching template status.
That meant one billion templates!
"Who said I spent a billion strands of human luck and the merit of two realms just to play at ascending?" Wei Yuan looked at Xiaoyu with the gaze one might give a lowly single-celled organism.
He chided patiently, "Ignorant folk lack perspective and only know how to parrot rumors. How could you come and ask me something like that too? The facts have been right before everyone's eyes all along. All you have to do is open them and look."
Suppressing his fury, Xiaoyu said, "I'm not the only one who doesn't get it. Eldest Martial Sister, don't you agree?"
Ji Liuli stood at his side without saying a word.
Wei Yuan glanced at Ji Liuli and let out a soft sigh. "Weren't you watching right there on the scene? How do you not know either?"
Seeing the auras rising from both of them as though they were about to attack him, Wei Yuan hastily waved his broad sleeve and conjured a series of projections.
The first showed the Splendor of the Many Realms soaring against the heavens as countless cyan-white tribulation bolts struck the mind-manifested world. One of the tribulation bolts was magnified intentionally: it struck the ocean, obliterating weaker life-forms across a radius of a hundred li in a flash, yet at the point of impact, countless faint starlike motes appeared simultaneously. Some were absorbed directly by sea creatures, while others drifted alone through the waters, transforming into new life.
"Lightning strikes can engender new life, tribulation lightning even more so, and the mightiest of all tribulation lightning is the tribulation of ascension. These ascension tribulation bolts not only tempered the fundamental essence of the mind-manifested world, but also elevated its complexity and diversity of vital essence to a whole new level. Only after weathering this tribulation can my world be said to possess the embryonic form of a true heaven and earth."
The second projection showed the unspent karmic luck and merit turning into black and cyan eerie flames as the Heavenly Pillars collapsed, burning backward along the trajectories of the immortals' attacks. Karmic luck became black karmic fire, already utterly terrifying. Merit transformed into deep-cyan flames of wholly unknown origin; all the secret arts unleashed by the immortals proved useless against it, leaving them no choice but to watch helplessly as it plunged into their bodies.
Fortunately, the Venerable Master intervened in time and drew away the cyan flames, or else a considerable number of immortals would likely have perished one after another.
The third scene depicted how, as the Splendor of the Many Realms steadily climbed, the opening into the immortal heaven grew ever wider, allowing its breath to pour down and saturate the Splendor of the Many Realms. The opening into the immortal heaven was commonly called the Heavenly Gate. Because it had to admit the Splendor of the Many Realms this time, the gate was unprecedentedly immense, spilling countless torrents of immortal heavenly aura. In a normal ascension, a mind-manifested world underwent an essential metamorphosis after absorbing the immortal heaven's aura—the pivotal step from illusion to reality. But the Splendor of the Many Realms was simply too vast and too thick; even with the aura pouring down like a waterfall, it had only transformed the outer crust, remaining far from penetrating the core.
In fact, given the sheer mass of the Splendor of the Many Realms, completing the transformation during ascension was fundamentally impossible, which meant it could never instantly become a grotto-heaven upon vaulting into the immortal heaven. It was like cooking meat: a thin slice was cooked the moment it hit the pot, but putting a whole ox in required stewing it for days on end.
Wei Yuan's plan had been to use the power of the twelve Heavenly Pillars to force the Splendor of the Many Realms straight into the immortal heaven, then slowly temper its essence over low heat inside. As for whether such a colossal mind-manifested world would suck the immortal heaven dry when reducing the broth—well, that was another matter entirely.
The fourth scene showed the Heavenly Pillars destroyed and the Splendor of the Many Realms falling back down. By that point, however, it had already climbed more than halfway, forging a karmic connection with the immortal heaven. Thus, as it fell, it dragged down a great deal of the immortal heaven's aura, even tearing away a small fragment of the immortal heaven itself.
Afterward, it sank into the earth of Qingming. Those fragments of the immortal heaven, immortal spiritual aura, and residual tribulation lightning all dispersed into Qingming, turning into nourishment for every Qingming resident to attain the Dao. For mortal flesh, even a speck of immortal spiritual aura brought a transformation of shedding one's mortal frame.
Only now did Xiaoyu finally understand: Wei Yuan had used this earth-shattering leap to win an opportunity for one billion people to attain the Dao.
"Why didn't you tell us beforehand?" Ji Liuli asked.
Xiaoyu harbored the exact same question. Stationed far away in the Liao domain, he hadn't even been able to experience the grand spectacle in person.
Wei Yuan gave a faint smile. "A mere whim. It occurred to me and I did it, with no preparation at all. If I had prepared, the effect wouldn't have been nearly so good."
Xiaoyu still felt somewhat uneasy deep down, but the answer was barely acceptable. Now Wei Yuan was bordering on ascension, whereas Xiaoyu had only just entered Scenery Command and cultivated the Realm of True Fire of the Great Sun; the gulf between them had grown impossibly wide.
Furthermore, Xiaoyu glanced at his own thirteen-hundred-li mind-manifested world. He had originally intended to hide his strength so he could make Wei Yuan look at him in a new light, but looking back now, thank goodness he had kept it hidden and hadn't pranced around in front of Wei Yuan. Otherwise, he wouldn't even know what kind of hole he would have had to dig to survive the shame.
Having finally understood the whole story, Xiaoyu took his leave, but Ji Liuli did not go with him.
Chapter 1429