City of Five Peaks

High in the sky, Qilizhayi suddenly looked up and found faint wisps of black qi drifting down from above; every trace of karma originated from the immortal heaven. His wrathful strike moments ago had been meant merely to vent his fury, yet it had been completely dispersed by Qingming's bizarre contraptions, which forcefully split a single bolt of furious thunder into hundreds of lesser arcs. Its might had been drastically diminished, inflicting barely a hundred casualties among the mortal soldiers. Qilizhayi had originally intended to annihilate tens of thousands in a single blow to display his divine might and thoroughly crush the Qingming army's morale, fully prepared to bear the karma that would follow. Yet the reality was that barely any people had been killed, while the karma was that of slaughtering tens of thousands, as if he had committed a massive atrocity. Qilizhayi was utterly flabbergasted. Gazing down, he finally noticed faint formation glows on the Qingming warriors, which had previously been masked by the military aura and nearly impossible to detect. By then, Wei Yuan's prolonged laughter had finally subsided. After a brief halt, the Qingming army paid no further heed to the Fifth Mountain and resumed their advance. For this expedition into the Domain of the Mountain Folk, Wei Yuan had come prepared to counter their numerous immortals. With the cooperation of Immortal Monarch Yanshi, Qingming had successfully developed a mutated Heavenly Secret formation. When an immortal struck at ordinary soldiers, regardless of actual casualties—even if a soldier remained completely unscathed—so long as they were touched by the slightest shockwave of the attack, the immortal heaven would register them as killed and deliver karmic retribution. In truth, this amounted to deceiving the immortal heaven. After tearing off a fragment of the immortal heaven, Wei Yuan had mobilized all of Qingming's research capabilities to study it. Now, in terms of understanding the immortal heaven, likely no immortal stood above Wei Yuan. Thorough understanding was the prerequisite for deception. From then on, the immortal heaven had become a fool in Wei Yuan's eyes, one that could be steered into dumping karma onto his opponents' heads. With this method in hand, Wei Yuan was no longer particularly worried about the immortals of the mountain domain. Having suffered a hidden loss, the Fifth Mountain had no choice but to quietly withdraw. Meanwhile, the Qingming army continued rolling forward, continuously sweeping through tribes along their path, crushing enemy forces that attempted to intercept them, advancing straight to the first strategic waypoint fifteen thousand li from the Qingming border in one breath. Wei Yuan accompanied Qingming's vanguard of fifty thousand into this area. A few thousand li further ahead lay the territory of the Bloodline faction, featuring several massive mountain cities. Furthermore, the Bloodline faction had already massed an army of over a million troops, waiting for Wei Yuan to charge blindly into them. In Wei Yuan's plan, this location was the ideal site to build the first commandery city. Once the army halted, Wei Yuan dispatched several mobile squads deep into the mountains to scout the terrain and search for enemy traces. He flew back and forth over the area himself, finally selecting an ideal spot for city construction. The area was surrounded by five high peaks, with a gentle slope in the middle, forming a valley encircled by mountains. Earth veins converged beneath the peaks, several massive subterranean mineral veins lay nearby, and there was also an open-pit coal deposit. Multiple rivers and several small lakes ran through the valley, alongside expansive tracts of fertile grassland. Wei Yuan touched down at the center of this valley, which spanned more than two hundred li across, and personally planted the boundary stone. As the boundary stone settled, several floating barges landed. Tens of thousands of template engineering cultivators, equipped with specialized magical tools, began excavating deep pits across the ground according to pre-planned blueprints. Their magical tools were specially made; when activated, they emitted a magical beam capable of dissolving earth and melting stone, drilling holes several zhang deep into the ground within mere breaths. More engineering cultivators hauled pilings from the floating barges and drove them into the holes, creating the new city's first foundation piles. As more floating barges arrived in succession, hundreds of thousands of template cultivators arrived within just a few days, thoroughly transforming the mountain valley into an enormous construction site. The blueprints had long been designed by the Splendor of the Many Realms; the engineering cultivators needed only to construct according to plan. Within the construction site, a special group of cultivators appeared. They were merely at the Dao foundation level, yet their strength was boundless—enough even to overpower a dharma idol. These hundred-plus cultivators were all young disciples from the Hall of the Bright King. Back then, Wei Yuan's massive expansion of recruitment in the Water Moon Hall had inspired the Master of the Hall of the Bright King to also recruit several additional batches of new disciples. With the aim of tempering their physiques and honing their dharma bodies, Wei Yuan had enlisted these disciples, equipping each with a full set of tool artifacts specifically for major engineering works such as leveling ground, cleaving mountains, and digging canals. It had to be said that disciples of the Hall of the Bright King were far more useful than Golden Cores. A few strapping men and women working shoulder to shoulder, pushing a massive spade several zhang wide, could carve out a grand avenue wide enough for four horse carriages to ride abreast. As for the buildings, most components were prefabricated in Qingming and airlifted over, assembled directly upon reaching the site. Once a building was erected, Golden Core cultivators stepped in to refine it, fusing it into a seamless whole. For large structures like the city lord's hall, refining it a few more times was enough to finalize its form. Building after building took shape at a pace visible to the naked eye, as if sprouting straight from the earth. The first to be completed was the City Lord's Manor, which served as the hub for protecting the boundary stone and the core of the defensive and offensive formation. Next came the floating barge airfield. This had originally been a massive undertaking, but the progress was now astonishingly rapid. An airfield required leveling rock, filling hollows, and creating an expanse of flat ground with immense load-bearing capacity. The earthworking abilities of the Hall of the Bright King cultivators were second to none under heaven, making this work like second nature to them. Just as the floating barge airfield was completed, several colossal barges hundreds of zhang long touched down right on cue, each either carrying tens of thousands of cultivators or packed with prefabricated building parts, immediately kicking the new city's construction speed up another gear. Following the airfield came the residential areas, formation nodes, defensive fortifications, and various ore-smelting workshops. With a complete array of minerals available locally, Wei Yuan even planned an entire complex of ammunition manufacturing workshops to produce ammunition on-site. In just over a month, a new city rose from the ground. Hundreds of thousands of cultivators moved in, capable of garrisoning an army of a million. Seeing the five high mountains surrounding it, Wei Yuan named it the City of Five Peaks. The mountain domain's terrain was rugged, filled with treacherous peaks and precipitous cliffs, easy to defend and difficult to attack. In past human invasions, troops had been unable to push deep because supplies could not keep pace. But this time, Wei Yuan bypassed land routes altogether, utilizing newly developed giant floating barges as the primary transport and choosing well-situated locations with diverse resources like the City of Five Peaks to erect cities and produce supplies on the spot. Relying on Qingming's vastly superior industrial technology and an immense army of template cultivators, the new city could directly supply seventy to eighty percent of its own material needs. At the same time, taking advantage of the mountain domain's numerous perilous summits, Wei Yuan specifically developed a defensive weapon that could be deployed on mountaintops. It could unleash thousands of Dao-foundation-grade flying swords in a single volley, cutting down any enemy within several hundred li; even a Scenery Command cultivator would be shot full of holes. Once the City of Five Peaks was basically completed and possessed all essential functions, the follow-up Qingming forces arrived one after another, garrisoning the city. The rested and replenished vanguard legion set out once more, their spearhead pointing straight into the depths of the mountain domain. Now backed by a rear base, Qingming's troops acted far more boldly. Within a month, they fought over ten major battles against the Mountain Folk, annihilating more than three hundred thousand enemies and advancing several thousand li. And at this time, in the City of Five Peaks, an elderly Golden Core cultivator, his face flushed with excitement, presented a copper ingot to Wei Yuan with both hands. The ingot was dark brown at its base, striated with scarlet patterns, and radiated sharp spiritual energy. "The heavens bless our Qingming! This blood-veined brown copper has finally been successfully smelted!" The old cultivator was so excited he was nearly incoherent. Wei Yuan took it, inspected it carefully, and laughed. "Good, good, good. This is wonderful news. But remember for next time: the heavens won't be blessing us." Only then did the old cultivator realize his slip, hurriedly saying, "I am getting muddleheaded in my old age." Wei Yuan weighed the copper ingot in his hand and asked, "What is the production capacity? Can the quality remain stable?" The old cultivator replied, "The spiritual ore here is of far higher quality than in Qingming, and the reserves are immense. A single ingot of blood-veined brown copper sells for a thousand yuan in the human domain, and ten ingots are enough to refine a full set of Golden Core magic treasures. Once all ten smelting workshops in the city are fully operational, they can produce one hundred thousand ingots a year!" Even this output exceeded Wei Yuan's expectations. If calculated in qingyuan, the annual revenue from this single mining sector alone would surpass one hundred million. If fully forged into magic treasures, this single city alone could equip ten thousand Golden Cores every year. The new city had only developed a single resource, yet it had already proved well worth the investment, without even counting the other spiritual ores they had not yet had time to exploit. And the two cities yet to be built further ahead were even richer in resources.