Wei Yuan pondered for a while before finally remembering where he had seen this image before. It was the dharma body of the King Buddha he had witnessed in an illusion around the time he obtained the King Buddha's foundational method, the Indestructible Dharma of Emptiness and Form. In fact, it differed considerably from the official Buddha statues found in temples.
The sudden transformation of his true body into the likeness of the King Buddha sent a chill through Wei Yuan's heart. He meticulously examined all of his thoughts, but found no trace of distortion or alteration. Still, not finding anything did not mean nothing had happened; it could simply be that the other party's methods were too profound and Wei Yuan's cultivation was not deep enough.
After examining his thoughts, Wei Yuan's gaze grew momentarily dazed before clearing again as a critical question occurred to him: was he gradually forgetting the King Buddha?
Could this forgetting mean that the King Buddha's karma in the mortal world was dissipating?
His heart tightened. His divine sense vaulted infinitely upward, arriving at the Sea of Bitterness. At this moment in the Sea of Bitterness, Wei Yuan's dharma body had only recovered a sheet of skin, which bore a complete face whose two eyes roamed restlessly across its surface.
Wei Yuan opened his eyes and gazed toward the upper reaches of the Sea of Bitterness. High above, far beyond ordinary sight, he faintly glimpsed two great suns.
Seeing that the King Buddha's fruition was still present, Wei Yuan finally felt a bit relieved.
Returning to the Land of Vitality, a map appeared before him. Plotted across it were numerous workshops, defensive strongholds, and military bases.
The engineering cultivators' senses had all been warped by Wei Yuan. They believed all the workshops and facilities were situated on a flat plane, but in reality, each base was distributed around the Land of Vitality. In fact, the larger bases were not even flat within themselves, instead being spread across curved surfaces.
Wei Yuan lightly tapped his finger, and a team of cultivators received his blessing, their speed dramatically increasing. The cultivators assumed this was a dao technique inherent to the Dao itself and cheered in admiration. Occasionally, a cultivator looked back toward the colossal crystal pillar reaching straight into the firmament, unable to see the Tree of the Great Dao or Wei Yuan.
Just like this, day by day the Tree of the Great Dao grew taller, and Wei Yuan's true body seated beneath it grew increasingly massive. As more and more threads of divine sense penetrated the primal chaos, the radiance of heaven and earth origin qi surrounding his seat expanded ever wider. The growth rate of the Land of Vitality had long deviated from its normal trajectory, and it continued to accelerate.
Teams of avatar puppets and engineering cultivators bustled back and forth around Wei Yuan without pause. Beyond the heavens, great battles with abominations broke out constantly, sometimes occurring right before Wei Yuan's eyes. Whenever a battle caught his interest, he would pull the battlefield from the distant skies right before him to observe it closely.
For instance, right now an unremarkable pair of Heaven Tier avatars stood before him, reaping abominations with precision and efficiency. The male cultivator suddenly paused his movements and said, "The Realm Lord is truly wise and mighty!"
The female cultivator remarked, "He's quite handsome, too."
The male cultivator's expression changed instantly. "That's not the line."
"Oh. He is handsome, yet delicate, like falling petals, each one a footprint left behind by autumn—"
Wei Yuan snorted. He had long noticed that something was amiss with this man and woman, so he fed everything they said and did into the Splendor of the Many Realms, cracking their crude cipher in the blink of an eye. The actual dialogue they had just exchanged was as follows:
Male cultivator: "Something feels off. It feels like someone is watching us."
Female cultivator: "Is it him? I don't think he's that kind of person!"
"That old villain is insidious; it's better to stay on guard."
"Just keep earning merit. If he wants to watch, let him! We're earning merit with our own two hands now—wherever we go, we can speak with our heads held high."
"But our plan—"
"Forget about it!"
Although these two cultivators had concealed themselves exceedingly well, to the extent that even their physical bodies stationed in Qingming were disguises while their true bodies were shrunk to tiny specks hidden beneath their brows, deciphering such intricate, clever puzzles was Wei Yuan's greatest specialty. Smashing a few million points of karmic luck into the problem laid their cards completely bare.
The two spoke in this cipher because Shengxin felt that since the avatars were all refined by Wei Yuan, their words and even the thoughts they formed might be eavesdropped on in secret, leading him to invent a cipher for their communication.
Shengxin and Huixin could be considered old acquaintances of his, and karmic ties already existed between them. Now that they had infiltrated Qingming to harvest merit, their karmic bonds with Wei Yuan grew heavier by the day.
The two shamans did not seem to realize this was a problem, or if they did, they thought little of it. In reality, however, a newly drafted plan was currently resting in Wei Yuan's private archive, with initial preliminary research funding set at five million Qingyuan and two million units of human luck.
The plan was titled "Causality Curse Technique: Karmic Luck Driven Edition."
After exchanging a few words, Shengxin and Huixin resumed hunting abominations. Wei Yuan returned this battlefield to its original location and pulled another over to observe closely.
The primal chaos had clearly reacted to the Land of Vitality. The abominations it birthed grew ever more numerous and powerful, and many had even evolved magic treasures and armor—some had even developed immortal swords.
Abominations possessed neither hands nor feet, so evolving immortal swords was utterly absurd. It could only be said that the primal chaos was replicating humanity's combat techniques through some method unknown to Wei Yuan, then turning around to use them against humankind.
Wei Yuan could not help recalling an unresolved mystery once more: was the primal chaos corporeal, or formless?
At the borders of Qingming, a small team of cultivators concealed their presences and crept along a desolate area into the realm. Yet the moment they crossed a certain invisible boundary, several beams of starlight suddenly fell, illuminating them right out of the shadows.
The cultivators were greatly alarmed. Their sect's secret shadow-escape technique was exceptionally refined and rarely failed, yet they had been exposed by a formation several hundred li before even reaching the border!
The cultivators made a snap decision and turned to flee. The moment they ran, the starlight turned dense and viscous, drastically slowing their speed. But because they fled with utter decisiveness, by the time Qingming's patrol cultivators arrived, they had already escaped the starlight's reach and vanished.
Similar incidents occurred from time to time in every direction around Qingming. Some cultivators were fortunate enough to escape, but many were captured and thrown into prison.
No matter how Qingming's law enforcement cultivators interrogated them, these cultivators insisted it was a spur-of-the-moment decision; they claimed that going through the official checkpoints was too troublesome, so they had merely wanted to save on the entry fee and slip through the wilderness to broaden their horizons.
Above the immortal heaven, the Venerable Master slowly withdrew his gaze, looking somewhat puzzled. "His mindscape world has expanded by another eight hundred li. It was already an unwieldy burden to begin with. Instead of looking for ways to streamline it, why is he still making it larger?"
Beside him, Duke Yansheng snorted. "His path to immortality is already severed, yet he remains so obsessed with grandiose feats. It's no wonder he is courting his own destruction."
The Venerable Master said slowly, "He is restarting heaven and earth, earning merit rarely seen throughout antiquity. Such immense merit is sufficient to warp most karmic threads. Perhaps things have already happened that we know nothing about."
"In any case, his days are numbered, so why not let him thrash about? Right now, the struggle for the new dynasty is at a critical juncture, and the catastrophe in the Liao domain is about to enter its next phase. With so many major affairs, how can we attend to everything? Why bother paying heed to him at a time like this!"
The Venerable Master pondered for a long time before saying, "I still feel somewhat uneasy. How about this: Wei Yuan requires vast amounts of human luck to restart heaven and earth. Let us find a way to sever his human luck first!"
Chapter 1440