There was naturally no need for everyone to act together against a single village. Ji Liuli and Bao Yun split off to the left and right to handle the smaller settlements nearby.
Two minutes later, the group reconvened, leaving a field of ruins behind them. Many Shamans still lived, having fled into the surrounding wilds, but every settlement lay utterly destroyed.
The next target was a small tribe of several thousand people, built along the shore of a small lake.
This time Wei Yuan struck first. He manifested Ten Thousand Li of Rivers and Mountains, casting it straight downward. Bao Yun reinforced it with the Seven Marvels Treasure Tree, swelling its manifested reach to a thousand zhang once more and forcibly turning this stretch of heaven and earth into a mortal clear domain.
A portion of Ten Thousand Li of Rivers and Mountains even extended over the small lake and the paddy fields beside the settlement. The lake suddenly boiled, and several massive, multi-foot-long fish breached the surface, two even flopping onto the shore. Spines and serrated barbs ran along their hideous backs. Their scales now flared open one by one as blood seeped continuously from between them, writhing in sheer agony.
The flesh of these fish was intensely poisonous, yet that very poison aided shamanic arts, making them a staple upon any Great Shaman's banquet table.
The paddies were planted with things resembling small trees covered in burls. Goaded by the clear qi, the wooden galls swelled continuously and burst one after another, oozing a sticky, pale green fluid.
Once ripe, the interiors of these galls turned to powder; mixed with water, they served as the staple food for ordinary Shamans.
The water of the paddies boiled as well, and countless dead insects floated to the surface. Even Shamans were loath to eat such bugs; they were said to be the nourishment of slaves and the destitute underclass.
Pandemonium reigned within the village. Several Dao Foundation warriors took flight, only to be struck down by Wei Yuan's golden cauldron. Many ordinary Shamans fled the settlement into the open wilderness. Wei Yuan did not stop them, nor did he go out of his way to hunt them down; he focused solely on slaying every cultivator among the Shamans and razing the village.
In less than two minutes, the entire village was destroyed. A Shaman Scholar and five warriors within were slain, and not a single one who had completed Body Casting was spared.
Along the way back, the group destroyed two more settlements before returning to their domain. This was not due to any soft-heartedness on Wei Yuan's part, but a lack of time. The longer they delayed, the sharper the warning bells rang in their hearts; linger just a bit longer, and a Great Shaman's blood curse might well come raining down upon them.
The moment they returned to the domain, Xiaoyu rushed up eagerly to greet them. "Come, try out the new gun I made!"
Xiaoyu failed to notice the somber mood hanging over the others. In high spirits, he led them toward the stone valley in the back hills. A new stone table stood in the valley, bearing a slender steel tube gleaming with a faint azure sheen. Its muzzle was roughly thumb-thick, and one end was sealed shut.
Xiaoyu loaded gunpowder and a prefabricated iron bullet into the steel tube, held the tube as though gripping a sword, pointed it at a large tree ahead, and ignited the powder with Dao power. With a loud bang, the iron bullet whistled forward laced with chilling sword intent, burying itself several inches deep into the trunk.
Everyone possessed keen eyesight and could tell that the bullet's trajectory after leaving the barrel was stable, unlike the somewhat wavering flight of Wei Yuan's stone gun from the night before.
Xiaoyu twirled the steel tube into a sword flourish, saying smugly, "Well, what do you think?"
Wei Yuan was thoroughly intrigued and asked about its construction. Xiaoyu held nothing back and detailed the crafting process.
Xiaoyu had retrieved two sword blanks from Lanshen Palace's secret vault, melted them using the True Fire of the Great Sun inherent to his immortal sword, and spent the entire night meticulously refining their physical properties. He finally cast the steel tube and re-attuned it with Dao power. In the end, the tube weighed only half as much as the two original sword blanks, but its quality had surged drastically, rivaling a mid-grade Dharma sword.
As Wei Yuan studied it, he felt something increasingly bizarre.
The object looked like a steel tube, yet Dao rhyme resided within it—and that Dao rhyme was of the sword. In the eyes of a cultivator, this thing was a sword; even if it were twisted into a cruller or rolled into a ball, it would remain a sword.
So Xiaoyu had just held an immortal sword and fired a shot?
Now that line of thought is rather interesting, Wei Yuan mused.
The quality of this sword—no, gun—crafted by Xiaoyu was quite decent. It could kill an expert in the Blood Merging Realm, though against someone at Bone Tempering, it would fall short. Wei Yuan estimated that penetrating the bones of a warrior who had achieved Bone Tempering would likely prove difficult with a single shot. However, under multiple rounds, even a Bone Tempering warrior could perish.
The power of this sword-gun was still slightly inferior to an ordinary Liao bow, but it was far easier to handle—one only needed to point in the right direction. The consumption of Dao power was also vastly less than guiding a Dharma-tool long arrow. A common Liao rider could shoot only a single Gale Arrow in a battle, but with this gun, firing dozens of rounds would be no trouble at all.
Xiaoyu beamed with pride, thinking that if these guns could be mass-equipped, they could immediately raise a formidable ranged force. Wasn't this mass production?
Wei Yuan had initially shared the excitement, but pondering a step deeper revealed a host of problems.
For instance, the weapon had to be triggered with Dao power, meaning only warriors who had cultivated the Origin Soul could use it. And once someone had cultivated to the Origin Soul, wielding a bow and arrow was naturally far more convenient, with a rate of fire far outstripping a gun that required reloading gunpowder and bullets.
Xu Wenwu's world naturally had firearms that shot faster and struck harder, each bearing a specific name. But at this moment, everyone felt that unless the issue of destructive power was solved, a higher firing rate was meaningless.
Ji Liuli suddenly had an idea. She asked for the steel tube and reloaded it with gunpowder—this time packing it all the way to the brim before embedding an iron bullet at the top.
Ji Liuli aimed at a large boulder over a dozen zhang away and flicked her finger. The steel tube shot forth like an arrow and pierced deep into the stone with a dull thud! Only after the tube sank into the boulder did a resounding boom erupt; the gunpowder ignited, launching the iron bullet clean through the other side of the boulder!
Wei Yuan's eyes lit up. Stab with a sword first, then fire a shot? Who could guard against that?!
Everyone began conceiving new variations, yet none expressed support for Xiaoyu's notion of mass-equipping troops.
Xiaoyu hadn't bothered to think: his sword-gun used two low-grade Dharma sword blanks as raw materials, melted by the True Fire of the Great Sun. Who else possessed such means? All told, the production cost of this sword-gun hovered around a thousand liang of immortal silver, yet its power could only kill a Blood Merging expert.
With those thousand liang of immortal silver, hiring an assassin would yield the deaths of a hundred Blood Merging experts.
Though Xiaoyu's dream of mass production was shattered, everyone took inspiration from it. Wei Yuan, for example, wondered: what if he followed this line of thought to forge a spear?
No sooner thought than done. Wei Yuan immediately retrieved two blanks for Dharma-tool staves, asked Xiaoyu for a plume of the True Fire of the Great Sun, and began smelting on the spot.
Xiaoyu, inspired by Ji Liuli's flying sword strike, began reworking his steel tube. He planned to shape it directly into a sword; there was no need to strictly follow the rules of Xu Wenwu's world.
Naturally, Zhang Sheng would not join in their foolish antics. He pulled Ji Liuli away to inspect the leylines and feng shui, preparing to conduct a thorough survey of the mineral resources within the domain.
Bao Yun stayed behind to help Wei Yuan. Working together, they soon smelted the Dharma-tool staves into a spear shaft, burning out many impurities. Under Bao Yun's enhancement, the temperature of the True Flame of the Great Sun rose further, making Wei Yuan's refinement proceed as smoothly as a fish gliding through water.
Refining materials and enhancing their physical properties were basic skills for every disciple of the Palace of Grand Beginning. That step was not hard; the difficulty lay in generating Dao rhyme and engraving formations upon the Dharma tool to impart special traits.
Fortunately, Wei Yuan had no intention of adding flashy traits. He intended only to bestow the two most fundamental qualities: Sharpness and Tenacity. These were the most common attributes for weapon-type Dharma tools, both appearing in the graduation examinations of centralized instruction. Thus, Wei Yuan inscribed them with practiced ease, completing them without the aid of any formation tools.
While Wei Yuan and Xiaoyu engraved their formations, a cyan bough materialized from the Exquisite Treasure Tree. Both men immediately felt their minds clear and inspiration well up like a spring, raising their artifact-crafting success rate by a full thirty percent.
After less than half an hour, Wei Yuan finally finished forging his Dharma-tool spear. It appeared to be an ordinary spear, though Wei Yuan had grown taller in recent years and found his previous spear somewhat short, so he lengthened this one by an extra foot.
Curiously, Wei Yuan had forged only a single spear shaft—which reached the level of a mid-grade Dharma tool under the treasure tree's enhancement—yet in one go, he forged three spearheads, each merely a low-grade Dharma tool.
In truth, this spear consisted of two Dharma tools: the shaft was one, and the spearhead was another. Strictly speaking, it was barely a composite Dharma tool. The shaft was hollow, packed with gunpowder before affixing the spearhead; with that, Wei Yuan's spear was complete.
Inspired by Ji Liuli, Xiaoyu refined the steel tube into a two-foot blade, then forged an additional one-foot sword tip. Joined together, they formed a Dharma sword. The blade body was hollow, filled with gunpowder.
When wielded, the sword was empowered by the Immortal Sword Great Sun. After shooting toward an enemy, the gunpowder would detonate, propelling the sword tip forward for a secondary strike.
The only flaw was that the sword had to be unleashed swiftly; the Immortal Sword Great Sun bore the True Fire of the Sun, and the slightest delay would ignite the gunpowder directly. Xiaoyu had already learned this lesson the hard way, paying for it with a fair amount of hair.
Watching two of the most outstanding disciples of the Palace of Grand Beginning's younger generation craft such insidious Dharma tools one after another, Bao Yun fell into deep thought.
She felt that she had perhaps never truly grasped Xiaoyu's true nature in the past.
The aura of the spear Wei Yuan forged was slightly unusual; after all, the shaft and spearhead were of different grades, which would arouse at least some suspicion in an opponent. Yet the sword in Xiaoyu's hand appeared completely seamless, showing no signs of being segmented at all. Had Bao Yun not watched him forge it, she might have overlooked it without careful scrutiny.
The disparity between Wei Yuan and Xiaoyu was readily apparent in their artifact-crafting.
Xiaoyu had casually added quite a few rare materials of his own into the sword. As a result, its quality rose even higher, making it a masterwork among mid-grade Dharma tools.
However, this caused the cost of his sword to skyrocket from a thousand liang for the steel tube straight to five thousand liang. With that much silver, one could easily purchase a brand-new high-grade Dharma tool, or hire a renowned cultivator to slice something to ribbons.
Xiaoyu was utterly oblivious to the sword's outrageous expense. Enthusiastically pouring gunpowder into the blade and attaching the tip, he turned to Bao Yun and said, "Come, help me test the sword."
"All right," Bao Yun replied, standing directly across from him.
Xiaoyu gauged the distance and waved. "A bit closer. The aim on this sword might not be great."
Bao Yun complied, taking several steps forward and coming to a halt ten zhang away.
"This distance is just right." With the sword in hand, Xiaoyu's expression turned solemn, bordering on devout. As a sword cultivator, holding a sword demanded a pure heart and sincere mind, treating the blade with utmost devotion.
Seeing Xiaoyu so serious, Bao Yun circulated her Dao power in advance, waiting for him to make the first move.
Xiaoyu adopted a standard opening stance. Raising the long sword level and aiming the tip at Bao Yun, his eyes locked on the blade. Two fingers of his left hand stroked lightly down the sword body, igniting blazing True Fire of the Sun wherever his fingertips passed, as he intoned in a resonant chant:
"Alone, I fought across eight thousand li;
One sword can stand against a million men!"
Before Xiaoyu could finish the two grandiose lines of poetry, and with his fingers only halfway down the blade, a sudden bang rang out. Amid smoke and fire, the sword tip was already right in front of Bao Yun!
Bao Yun was startled. Raising her hand in a flash, she caught the flying sword tip, momentarily thrown into disarray.
Wei Yuan's eyes lit up—his horizons of thought had widened in an instant.
Chapter 143