Having finished annotating an official document, Wei Yuan leafed through the stack on his desk and pulled one out from the middle, purely because it bore Sun Yu's personal mark.
In truth, Wei Yuan could easily process official affairs through divine sense within the Splendor of the Many Realms. He could handle tens of thousands, even hundreds of thousands of matters simultaneously at vastly greater efficiency.
Even so, Wei Yuan still preferred documents written on jade paper. What the superior favored, those below invariably emulated; thus, the most important official documents, provided they were not especially urgent, were inscribed on jade paper and delivered to Wei Yuan.
Jade paper offered another advantage: it could carry true intent. Many matters in the cultivation world could not be made clear in mere words, yet a single strand of true intent could make everything lucid.
Some claimed Wei Yuan was nostalgic, while others said he liked a sense of ceremony, but neither was the real reason he preferred reviewing scrolls of jade paper. He maintained this habit to preserve his human touch.
Every day, Wei Yuan's divine sense processed thousands upon tens of thousands of official matters simultaneously in the Splendor of the Many Realms; his dharma body gained enlightenment in the Sea of Bitterness; his true form refined chaos in the realm beyond the heavens to nurture the world; and numerous avatars roamed far and wide, able to seize control of his sub-bodies' divine senses at will, or dive into any one of the billions of living beings throughout the Splendor of the Many Realms.
As time went on, Wei Yuan found that he was gradually tending to splinter into tens of thousands of fragments, both large and small, and he could feel less and less of the joys, sorrows, and passions of being human.
This bizarre sensation was recorded clearly in the Daoist canons of the Palace of Grand Beginning: when pushed to its utmost limit, it was called merging with the Heavenly Dao.
This was why Wei Yuan strove to retain human habits in important matters wherever possible. Otherwise, he feared he might end up becoming the next Ancestral Shaman.
Still, annotating official documents every day, demanding though it was, held pleasures that could hardly be explained to outsiders.
What Sun Yu had submitted was a proposal entitled "Plan for the Efficient Utilization of the Physical Body."
Sun Yu had discovered that in recent years, mortal ailments of the heart, blood vessels, and internal organs in Qingming had been on the rise. After thorough research, he realized these diseases all stemmed from excessive visceral fat—simply put, people were eating too much and eating too well. Conventional thinking dictated that they needed to lose weight, but Sun Yu believed that being able to eat and pack on flesh was one of mortals' greatest strengths, one that had to be preserved across generations, and Body Casting was the ultimate solution for dealing with bodily fat. Consequently, well-versed in human anatomy and possessing profound mastery of Daoist arts, Sun Yu further simplified the Body Casting method, eventually producing an epoch-making technique.
The upper limit of this Body Casting method could barely reach the template level, but its threshold was shockingly low—one could say that anyone with arms and legs could practice it. The core of this new Body Casting method was a mental art paired with a dedicated pill; so long as one engaged in continuous, heavy physical exertion, one could absorb the medicinal properties and advance the Body Casting process.
In other words, from now on, building bridges, paving roads, cleaving mountains, and mining ores could all spare the machines, mules, and horses, putting these people who needed Body Casting to work instead.
Wei Yuan immediately saw the boundless potential in this new Body Casting technique!
Advancing through pill-popping strictly placed this method in the category of unorthodox cultivation. Yet Wei Yuan harbored no sectarian prejudice, nor did he care about low-cost labor that even provided its own rations.
The main thing was that roughly seventy percent of Qingming's population still could not achieve Body Casting, and in Western Jin, fewer than one percent of its three billion people had cast their bodies. Yet once a mortal cultivated to the initial Sinew and Muscle Realm, they would inevitably produce a strand of karmic luck. That meant billions of potential strands of human luck!
As for the medicine, so long as there was a prescription, Wei Yuan had ways to produce it in quantities as vast as grain. And when it came to heavy manual labor positions, there was certainly no shortage—there were as many as needed. If even that proved insufficient, for the sake of all living beings' Dao journeys, Wei Yuan could even halt the machines.
Naturally, at the end of the proposal, Sun Yu still showed a bit of his tail. The crux of this brand-new Body Casting method was the ingestion of an external medicine—and this medicine happened to be something Sun Yu had just developed and was preparing to mass-produce.
Wei Yuan gladly signed off on the approval, designating universal Body Casting as one of Qingming's core projects. As for that external medicine, Sun Yu would hold exclusive production rights for ten years. Wei Yuan understood this martial uncle of his very well by now: Sun Yu did not lack money, nor did he care for it; he simply loved the sensation of holding the lifeblood of all living beings in his grasp.
Then Wei Yuan personally took up his brush to name the new Body Casting method: the Primordial Desolation Dao-Suppressing Hunyuan Precious Register, with Sun Yu listed as the author.
Having settled this major affair, Wei Yuan felt refreshed. Picking up the next two documents, his spirits surged, and he eagerly read on. The contents of these documents were actually a quarrel between Chuhe and Xu Henshui—and a massive one at that. Each had submitted a memorial accusing the other, their tempers flaring to the point of personal attacks.
True Monarch Chuhe had clearly flown into a real rage, opening his memorial with a direct curse: "That effeminate sissy..." Xu Henshui, for his part, felt thoroughly wronged, berating Old Daoist Chuhe for lacking any aesthetic sense, having vulgar, tacky tastes, riding the immortal chicken's coattails, and failing even to manage a pack of guinea pigs—so that the meat farm saw either an uprising or a hunger strike every single day. For Chuhe, "fowls hopping and dogs leaping" was not a metaphor.
After picking at petty flaws, Xu Henshui let loose completely, accusing Old Daoist Chuhe of being a shameless old scoundrel who staged accidents for extortion. His evidence: when the two argued face to face, Old Daoist Chuhe had actually thrust forward his old face—shimmering with seven-colored immortal light—pointed at his cheek, and dared him, "If you've got the guts, hit me, eh?!"
Xu Henshui had slapped him across the face on the spot—and promptly died a little.
The core of their argument was actually a spiritual field located at the heart of Qingming's earth vein. Converging the earth veins of all Qingming, it covered roughly a thousand mu. Given Qingming's current foundation, the grade of this immortal field was high enough to grow immortal medicines directly in the open ground, surpassing the several medicine plots that the Palace of Grand Beginning's main mountain had painstakingly cultivated for millennia by two whole ranks.
Looking across the entire realm, the only sacred sites capable of decisively outmatching this spiritual field were likely the Merit Pool before the Buddha's throne and the small flower garden the Sage had once personally laid out in his courtyard.
Old Daoist Chuhe wanted to plant spiritual rice and spiritual fruit, while Xu Henshui wanted to plant medicine. But there was only so much land. Both felt their own undertaking was more vital, and neither would agree to split it half-and-half. Consequently, as the quarrel escalated, tempers flared; Chuhe unleashed an ultimate move, and Xu Henshui could not contain his rage either, almost leading to a fatality.
Each stuck to his guns, leaving the matter entirely in Wei Yuan's hands to resolve, though they agreed that neither would meet Wei Yuan in person. Their excuses were flimsy: Xu Henshui feared Chuhe would use merit to influence Wei Yuan's mind, while Chuhe feared Xu Henshui would dress in women's clothing to test Wei Yuan's bottom line.
Wei Yuan cursed inwardly on the spot: You two are arguing, so why drag me into it?
Both proposals actually had their merits. According to Chuhe's plan, it would produce top-grade spiritual rice that could slowly enhance the aptitude even of Scenery Command cultivators, to say nothing of Nascent Souls. As for Golden Cores, they could only eat one meal a month; eating more risked sudden death. Compared to this new spiritual rice, the black pearl rice the Bao family had gifted back then—which Wei Yuan had regarded as a rare treasure—would not even qualify to serve as weeds in this field.
Once mass-produced, the new spiritual rice would not only broaden the Dao paths of Qingming's Scenery Command and Nascent Soul cultivators, but Scenery Command figures across the realm would also flock here upon catching wind of it. What was more, it could be used to win over countless immortal fowl and wondrous beasts. For instance, the immortal chicken suddenly remembered that it seemed to have living elders. It even claimed that back in the day, the Little State Preceptor's dog had never eaten this well... and that dog had left behind posthumous pups. Meanwhile, the Qiongqi in the Spirit Herding Ring stated that if such immortal rice were available, going without meat would not be entirely unacceptable.
Xu Henshui's proposal took an entirely different tack: he argued that the Dao of Alchemy had to break new ground. Other sects prioritized their geniuses, at most feeding Dao Foundation pills to Body Casters or Dharma Idol pills to Dao Foundations. Xu Henshui, on the other hand, proposed diluting Dharma Idol pills to feed mortals, and diluting immortal pills to feed Dharma Idols, dubbing it a "pill strike from above."
Under Xu Henshui's plan, the vast harvest of immortal ingredients from the spiritual field could be used to refine a furnace of Nine-Revolution Immortal Pills, enhancing the aptitudes of ten thousand Golden Cores. Diluted even further, it could enable a million templates to break through their limits! In short, Chuhe sought to broaden the Dao path for high-end cultivators, while Xu Henshui aimed to drastically elevate the quality of middle- and lower-tier cultivators; it was impossible to say which was better.
Wei Yuan felt both made sense, yet neither man thought so. Refusing any reconciliation, Xu Henshui had even posed a question at the very end of his memorial that struck straight at Wei Yuan's sea of consciousness: To whom, in the end, does the spiritual field belong?
Chapter 1461