Awakening from a Great Dream

Three years of slumber, waking at last from a great dream. The consciousness of Wei Yuan's true body slowly surfaced. An invisible tempest seemed to stir within the Splendor of the Many Realms, driving every sentient being to seek shelter by instinct. In Qingming, several avatars and multiple sub-bodies turned their heads simultaneously toward the Immortal City. A strange sensation then welled up within each of them—as if they had been scrutinized inside and out, and as though they were the ones who had only just awoken from a great dream. For a fleeting instant, the avatars and sub-bodies felt their wills supplanted. Then the sub-bodies returned to normal, but the avatars were completely reset. During this three-year dream, the avatars and sub-bodies had managed affairs on their own. The sub-bodies had fared well enough, having inherently possessed independent judgment from the start, but something had gone awry with the avatars. Once Wei Yuan descended with the will of his true body, he discovered subtle, inexplicable impurities lurking within the consciousness of the avatars. Though infinitesimally faint, their effect was by no means negligible. At some critical juncture, they might sprout and take root, causing the avatars to develop independent consciousness and break free from the true body. Where had these things come from? All of Wei Yuan's avatars suddenly raised their heads and looked toward the sky. To quietly influence the consciousness of his avatars without a trace was beyond the reach of ordinary immortals; not even the Venerable Master or Boundless Radiance could achieve such a feat. The answer was all too obvious: unless there was a hidden Immortal Lord, it could only be the heaven and earth of this realm—though whether it was the mortal heaven or the immortal heaven remained uncertain. Yet this could hardly be considered an unexpected turn. Having cultivated to such a realm, Wei Yuan was bound to enter the purview of Heaven and Earth. Wei Yuan extracted all divine sense from the avatars, sealed it within the Splendor of the Many Realms for future study, and assumed direct control over them with his true body. Wei Yuan first inspected himself. Three years in the great dream had allowed him to thoroughly digest the Buddha Child, while also absorbing most of the second drop of ink, leaving only a trace behind for subsequent research. The Splendor of the Many Realms had expanded to eighty thousand li before finally ceasing its expansion. Facing the required cultivation time of six hundred thousand years now, Wei Yuan's state of mind remained utterly unruffled. Though Wei Yuan had slept for three years, the Tree of the Great Dao had caused no further mischief, growing in silence until it was now a hundred thousand zhang tall. The Expedition Hall had expanded several times over. Expeditionary cultivators were now as numerous as cattle hairs; anyone who had ever made even a brief appearance on the Merit Board would find female cultivators proactively approaching to introduce themselves even in teahouses. Everything in Qingming proceeded as normal. The Scenery Command experts hailing from the Palace of Grand Beginning each held sway over their own domain, each managing a branch of operations. The mid-tier bureaucracy mostly came from Qingming itself, similarly brimming with talent. Western Jin flourished. Over these years, several major thoroughfares were completed one after another, with massive amounts of materiel moving in and out daily, turning mortal life completely upside down. The earliest batch of people to receive Qingming residence permits were now close to obtaining Qingming citizenship. This stirred the desires of countless more, sending applications flying toward Qingming like snowflakes. Accompanying this, naturally, was a surging torrent of human luck, bringing in two hundred million strands of human luck each year. Outside Qingming, the chaotic war among the various states had raged for over a decade. Over these three years, Li Zhi had expanded from seventeen commanderies to twenty-five, carving out territory bit by bit, and now commanded an army of two million. As one waxed, the other waned; though Southern Jin had deployed three million troops along this front, they suffered continuous defeats, their lands steadily eaten away. Southern Qi remained formidable. Marshaling the power of his single state along with half of the State of Ji, the King of Qi battered Northern Qi, Song, and Southern Jin into steady retreat. The State of Zhao had originally kept to its corner, locked in fierce fighting with Southern Jin. But six months ago, Jin and Zhao suddenly called a truce, whereupon Zhao joined Southern Jin's coalition. The influx of several million Zhao soldiers finally stabilized Southern Jin's position. At this point, battles between human armies featured barrages of artillery fire scouring the earth and flying swords blotting out the sky; every nation was desperately copying Qingming and establishing war workshops. In the northern Liao domain, the catastrophe had already claimed the lives of immortals. The Northern Liao Grand Imperial Preceptor had fallen while resisting the disaster. The Shaman Clan seized the opportunity to launch an all-out assault, sending tens of millions of shaman warriors swarming into the Liao domain. The Sea Clan refused to be left behind either, launching frequent raids in the Eastern Sea and triggering tsunamis nearly every year that swept across a hundred thousand li. Over these years, several hundred million Liao people had perished in the tsunamis. Under this disaster, countless Liao people fled south into the Liao domain under Wei Yuan's control. Over the past three years, Wei Yuan had refined several more boundary stones, essentially converting the Three Rivers Khanate into a human domain. Four hundred million Liao people now dwelled across what had originally been Silver Moon's northern territory. Experiencing a stable life for the first time, their lingering shock gave way to a continuous stream of Liao karmic luck. Having surveyed the realm's situation, Wei Yuan turned his gaze to Qingming's internal affairs to inspect the number of cultivators. Between Qingming and Western Jin, there were now twenty million templates; over these three years alone, new templates had increased by over a million each year. Wei Yuan's long-cherished dream of the entire race taking up the Dao had finally become partially realized. In addition, Golden Core cultivators numbered over a hundred thousand, Nascent Soul cultivators exceeded five hundred, and there were three at God Transformation. Within the Splendor of the Many Realms, a new island had appeared upon the sea. Its scenery closely resembled the natural world of this realm. In its center stood five colossal halls arranged in a circle. Each hall was a thousand zhang tall, divided into stories every ten zhang, with each story partitioned into numerous cubicles, each measuring ten zhang square. Before each of the five colossal halls stood a jade stele inscribed with: Metal Hall, Wood Hall, Water Hall... The five halls corresponded to the Five Elements. Wei Yuan had not bothered to invent fancy names, simply naming them after the Five Elements, while the rooms inside were numbered by floor and room order—for instance, Room 1 on the first floor of the Metal Hall was Metal-0101; Room 1 on the fifth floor of the Water Hall was Water-0501. This complex of Five Elements halls had its karma severed from outside the island, and each room had its karma severed from every other. Wei Yuan had spent three full years constructing this massive project in his dream to see it through to completion. Currently, the nameplates of more than ninety rooms across the five halls were engraved with names, portraits, and dense arrays of data recording their life events, familial bloodlines, and more. Another hundred or so nameplates were extremely faint, some even flickering in and out of sight. With a thought from Wei Yuan, nearly every Nascent Soul in Qingming felt the summons. Recognizing this as a critical moment in their Dao path, they put aside their affairs one after another and rushed toward the Immortal City. The Nascent Souls gathered in the Immortal City and stepped into the Ascension Array. Once each took their seat at their designated array node, the grand array was activated. This array was presided over by Immortal Lord Yanshi, assisted by True Monarch Danming, Zhang Sheng, and Baoyun, and was anchored upon the domain's power, making it incomparably potent. As soon as the grand array rose, the souls of the Nascent Souls were drawn out of their physical bodies one after another. Sensing the activation of the array, Wei Yuan activated the arrays of the five great halls as well. Each of the five halls had a master array, while each room contained a sub-array. Every Nascent Soul had a corresponding sub-array of their own, in which a wisp of their divine soul had already been placed beforehand. These five colossal halls were the mindscape world Wei Yuan had prepared for those Nascent Soul cultivators incapable of attaining God Transformation. After numerous refinements and upgrades, it had finally evolved into the advanced form of office cubicles. The hall arrays and sub-arrays were based on ancient arrays, refined multiple times using insights gained from absorbing the Buddha Child, and were titled the "Xuanming Dutian Soul-Gathering Array"! While the array sounded domineering, it was an out-and-out orthodox array—or at least, that was how Wei Yuan saw it. In truth, this array was an exceptionally potent fishing technique: with Yanshi supporting from below and Wei Yuan pulling from above, they could haul the souls of the Nascent Soul cultivators into the prepared mindscape world, where they would reside from then on. This was the grand art of pulling shoots to foster growth that Wei Yuan had prepared for three full years.