"Reporting to the Realm Lord: an old friend has come to visit."
Looking at the ugly burly man who pushed open the door and entered, Wei Yuan smiled faintly. "Why are you so unwilling to change that skin of yours? It's far too conspicuous. Come here a few more times, and anyone would remember you."
The man gave a bitter smile. "I can't! This is already the limit of what I can endure. I really can't stand making myself that ugly."
This person was Tianyu beneath a human skin. This body was practically equivalent to a spirit treasure, with an internal space capable of housing his true form along with a few pretty little shaman women.
Back then, to make coming and going convenient, Wei Yuan had deliberately left a mark upon this physical vessel so that Tianyu could freely pass through the Qingming Grand Formation, and could even enter Wei Yuan's study directly without announcing himself.
Setting down the official document in his hands, Wei Yuan asked, "Is there something that brings you here this time?"
"What else could bring me here?" Tianyu said. "Isn't it about that ban on flesh and blood essence? The ban was working perfectly well, so why did you suddenly repeal it?"
Wei Yuan replied, "My consumption of flesh and blood essence is growing ever larger, but your supply has never managed to keep up. So I simply lifted the ban. That way, I can purchase flesh and blood essence from the Liao Clan as well."
"It's not as if you don't know the current state of the war," Tianyu said. "We're locked in a tug-of-war with the Liao Clan right now. The front lines on both sides are more or less fixed—we take a few pieces of ground today, only to lose them tomorrow. Unless we capture one of those fortified Liao cities, there won't be any substantial extra supply of flesh and blood essence."
Wei Yuan nodded, offering no response.
Tianyu vaguely sensed that matters were not developing as he had anticipated, and he grew somewhat anxious. "Without the ban in place, people in our clan will secretly sell our own kin's flesh and blood essence! Those commoners and slaves who die on the front lines would have had the chance to be brought back to their homelands for burial. But now, as you can imagine, their corpses will be secretly processed into flesh and blood essence and shipped to Qingming!"
Wei Yuan said, "That seems to be an internal matter of your Shaman Clan."
"As long as you don't buy it, they won't do it!"
Wei Yuan said, "It seems you ought to be reining in your own clansmen, rather than demanding that I refrain from buying what I need."
Tianyu grew even more agitated. "If I could control them, would I have come looking for you? Even my uncles..."
He did not finish his sentence, but the very first batch of Shaman flesh and blood essence had flowed into Qingming from the Desolate Ancestor Tribe—and that had been during the period when the ban was still in place.
The smile on Wei Yuan's face faded slightly. "Flesh and blood essence is of great use to me. You should know that the amount you have on hand far exceeds what you sell to me, which means there are shamans above who are unwilling to let me acquire more. Since that is the case, I will no longer impose restrictions on myself either.
"I know things are difficult for the Shaman Clan right now, so I have raised the purchase price of flesh and blood essence by ten percent this time. That will be enough to cover the Shaman Clan's payment for this term's goods."
Tianyu's lips moved, but after all, he was no longer the naive fool he had been in those earlier years. The words—"Is the bond between us still not as important as your grand cause?"—were never actually spoken.
Stepping out of the immortal city, Tianyu let out a long breath. There was really no need to ask that question. Anyone even remotely sensible would consider Wei Yuan's grand cause far more important than personal sentiment—the two were not even comparable.
Yet Tianyu did not think that way.
Looking at Qingming's canopy of sky, the city bustling with prosperity uncharacteristic of the mortal realm, and the high-rises standing row upon row, Tianyu felt a sudden desolation. In the past, this had been the fairyland in his heart, the goal of his striving; here was the most prosperous life, and here was his best brother.
Yet now, he almost wished he were still that foolish Power Shaman of old, without having to see everything so clearly.
He knew Wei Yuan was not in the wrong. He could not restrain the Shaman Clan's nobility from selling their own people's flesh and blood essence, yet he had come to demand that Wei Yuan, the largest buyer, refrain from purchasing it—the logic of such a demand hardly held up. Tianyu collected himself, preparing to return to the Desolate Realm, bring Yaolan along, and seek out Jiumu to demand a clear answer on one matter. Though Wei Yuan had not mentioned it, Tianyu vaguely felt that repealing the ban on flesh and blood essence was inextricably linked to it.
What he wanted to get to the bottom of was why they had acted to stop Wei Yuan from ascending to immortality back then.
Only after Tianyu departed Qingming did Wei Yuan withdraw his gaze. It was true that he needed flesh and blood essence to refine boundary stones, but having a little more or a little less did not actually matter that much. The flesh and blood essence yielded by the Mountain Folk's holy war had increased drastically, more than enough to fill any shortfall.
In truth, Wei Yuan intended to use this method to induce the Shaman Clan nobles to slaughter the underclass and slaves. The price of flesh and blood essence had been meticulously calculated: previously, it was higher than a living slave; with the price increase, it was higher than the lowest living commoners. Thus, butchering living shamans, processing them into flesh and blood essence, and selling it to Qingming became a lucrative business.
That foolish Power Shaman's inner world was perhaps cleaner than that of the vast majority of people in this world, which was why he had harbored that unspoken question.
Even though Tianyu had not asked, Wei Yuan knew what he had wanted to ask.
In Wei Yuan's view, this realm had entered a perilous stage. The various factions of the human race had begun wholesale replication of Qingming's weapons, equipment, tactics, and doctrines, and were even starting to innovate.
In the war between the Shamans and the Liao, flying sword guns, heavy artillery, and chariots had also appeared on a massive scale.
Wei Yuan was not worried in the slightest about their copying weapons, equipment, tactics, or doctrines. Qingming's military had already progressed to a new stage: a legion of five hundred thousand had just been newly assembled and was currently undergoing final training. What made this legion most extraordinary was that every single warrior was a template.
This was an unprecedented all-Dao foundation legion!
What Wei Yuan truly worried about was alien races copying Qingming's practice of enlightening the common folk. Enlightening the populace yielded boundless benefits: immediately, it produced vast amounts of karmic luck, and the long-term benefits were even greater, practically innumerable. What genuinely drove Qingming's progress was actually people like Wen Guantian.
Based on this concern, Wei Yuan lured the Shaman Clan nobles into slaughtering their own underclass to intensify the conflict between them. The underclass would not rebel, of course—after all, even if all of them banded together, they would be no match for an Ancestral Shaman's single finger. But if enough of the underclass were killed, especially slaughtered like livestock, the Shaman Clan nobles would resist enlightening the common folk on their own. Once the common folk gained enlightenment, after all, they would no longer be easy to fool, and they would realize the truth that the nobles were not actually that clever.
Tianyu's arrival was merely a minor interlude. Wei Yuan's plan was to refine two new boundary stones once the new shipment of flesh and blood essence arrived, and build two more cities in the mountain domain. These two cities would penetrate substantially deeper into the Domain of the Mountain Folk, forming a W-shaped defensive line that could constantly threaten the Mountain Folk heartland while completely bringing the mountain domain spanning a hundred thousand li into his grasp.
This was currently Qingming's foremost priority, second in importance only to the world beyond the heavens; Wei Yuan naturally would brook no obstruction. Moreover, refining a boundary stone was not guaranteed to succeed on the first attempt; to obtain the required divine traits, substantial extra amounts of flesh and blood essence would inevitably have to be poured in to refine it anew.
As for the military campaigns on the human side, Wei Yuan paid little heed to them. In terms of territory, once he connected Qing and Yi Provinces, his realm would equal the former three kingdoms of the Great Tang. His national strength already surpassed the entirety of the Great Tang.
Wei Yuan glanced at the map, sensing that before long, the Zhenshan Army would be able to open up an overland passage to Qingming.
He pulled his thoughts back and reexamined the construction plans for the three new cities in the mountain domain, contemplating what counterattacks the Mountain Folk might mount.
Just at this moment, an urgent military dispatch was delivered directly before Wei Yuan via the Three Realms Daoist Court:
The Qi army had suddenly appeared at the Jin capital, launching a pincer attack against the Zhenshan Army. The Zhenshan Army suffered a crushing defeat, and Li Zhi fled back to his fiefdom alone, escaping with nothing but his life.
From this battle report, Wei Yuan gleaned a single message:
The universal sovereign had long been designated by the assembly of immortals—how could solitary ghosts and wild phantoms be allowed to lay a finger on the prize?
Chapter 1479