Following his discussion with Sun Yu, Wei Yuan drew inspiration and formulated a new plan. He asked Ji Liuli to design a formation that gathered qi to nourish yin, which he then laid out across several areas of vigorous vitality within the domain. Wei Yuan immediately ordered men to dig countless shallow pits within these formations, each measuring seven feet long, two feet wide, and two feet deep.
Arranged in neat rows, the pits resembled a densely packed cemetery at first glance. In truth, it was a graveyard, and the array was one meant to enhance the feng shui of a burial ground. Yet placing such a graveyard in an area teeming with vitality while ceaselessly gathering qi to nourish yin souls would, over time, easily cause corpses to rise as undead.
However, this batch of graves was not meant for the dead; Wei Yuan had prepared them for the living. Mortals who swallowed the anesthetic could lie within the pits, preserving their physical vitality to the greatest extent possible. After discussing it with Ji Liuli, Wei Yuan determined that once they lay down, they could go fifteen days without food or water. Afterward, they could wake, eat a single meal, and lie back down for another fifteen days.
For the first batch, Wei Yuan dug fifty thousand grave pits, intending to place the elderly, the weak, the sick, and the disabled inside. In this manner, the domain's remaining grain reserves could last for up to twenty days.
Meanwhile, Xiaoyu had already organized people to open up farmland on a massive scale. They cleared twenty thousand mu in the first wave, sowing it with broomcorn wheat from the human realm. Broomcorn wheat seeds were easy to come by, and though yields were not high, it grew the fastest—taking merely three months from planting to harvest. In the Qingming Domain, it grew even more rapidly, maturing in just two months.
There were still two months before the domain could reap its first harvest of mortal grain, but Yuan Qingyan was utterly unwilling to give Wei Yuan that time. Even with the grave pits to put people into slumber, they were still forty days short.
Wei Yuan was in no hurry. He buried his head in drilling the troops while instructing the city lords to identify able-bodied men among the mortals, organize them into separate units, and send them into the army in batches. The military was not solely about drilling; most new recruits were dispatched to labor in mines and workshops across the territory, training only during their leisure hours. Only those with a foundation in Body Casting were incorporated into the regular forces to train day and night.
Following the arrival of the eighty thousand people from Quliu Town, the cultivator force, originally eight thousand strong, expanded to twelve thousand. In truth, they could have expanded to twenty thousand in one go, but Wei Yuan simply could not afford to feed so many soldiers, and other areas within the domain also required manpower.
Among the twelve thousand, ten thousand could reach Body Casting perfection when augmented, and fifteen hundred could break through to the Dao Foundation. The army now possessed over three hundred Dao Foundation cultivators. Wei Yuan selected two hundred to form a cavalry troop, while the remaining hundred-odd were assigned to various hundred-man companies as officers.
The number of people Wei Yuan's Ten Thousand Li of Rivers and Mountains could bless had now risen to two hundred. The magnitude of the enhancement was roughly one-fifth of what Wei Yuan granted himself. With Qingming constantly augmenting him nowadays, Wei Yuan felt the enhancement from Ten Thousand Li of Rivers and Mountains was rather limited.
Yet that was only true for Wei Yuan; for ordinary cavalrymen, it was an enormous elevation. Even at a mere fifth of its potency, it was sufficient to boost their strength by fifty percent.
However, the blessing of Ten Thousand Li of Rivers and Mountains could not force a breakthrough into the Dao Foundation, and its capacity was limited. Consequently, the core cavalrymen Wei Yuan handpicked were all Dao Foundation cultivators.
Each of these two hundred riders was outfitted with heavy armor, long reach weapons, their own personal artifacts, and two steel-tube guns apiece.
As it happened, the senior cultivators of the Palace of Grand Beginning had long discovered that gunpowder was prone to dampness. Furthermore, with the steel-tube guns requiring at least half their volume to be filled with powder, reloading during battle was wholly impractical. Thus, once loaded with gunpowder, the muzzle was directly sealed with oiled paper. This eliminated any concern of moisture and allowed for long-term storage, needing only a burst of Dao power to ignite when used.
By the standards of Xu Wenwu's world, this was essentially an oversized cartridge about two feet long and as thick as a fist, meant to be gripped in hand and fired by sparking the primer with one's fingers.
Over the next two days, Yuan Qingyan sent two more detachments of envoys. Every one of them was intercepted and killed along the way by Cui Yu and Feng Tingyu, leaving not a single survivor.
While the domain quietly accumulated its strength, Yuan Qingyan was flying into a towering rage.
It was not over the successive disappearance of his envoys, but rather because he had just discovered that everyone in the three eastern counties—from the high officials down to the petty clerks and garrison soldiers—had completely vanished. According to local commoners who had stayed hidden, the county magistrates had all been abducted by horse bandits and supposedly taken off to the west.
Upon receiving the news, Yuan Qingyan smashed every breakable object in his study; even an antique vase gifted by Xu Jingfeng failed to escape destruction. In the end, with nothing left to smash, Yuan Qingyan resorted to shouting foul curses in the room.
Yuan Qingyan saw right through the ruse. Horse bandits, my foot! They were clearly domain agents in disguise!
Wei Yuan's brazen audacity had truly exceeded Yuan Qingyan's expectations, stoking his fury to new heights. In Yuan Qingyan's eyes, Wei Yuan deserved death simply for failing to pay respects immediately upon his taking office. Now he dared to oppose him time and again? On what grounds? Just because he was a disciple of an immortal sect?
At this thought, Yuan Qingyan's anger flared even hotter. He recalled what had befallen former immortal sect disciples who had fallen into his clutches. Yet the more he dwelled on it, the more furious he became.
Would it have killed Wei Yuan and his people to simply starve to death in peace inside the domain? Why did they insist on going against him!
Once he cooled down, Yuan Qingyan summoned the messengers who had gone to the three counties, questioning them in detail about the local customs, population distribution, and caravan movements. Listening attentively, he gained a clear picture and deduced that Wei Yuan had likely obtained a million jin of grain.
Yet that was the absolute limit. Private grain reserves in the Shattered Lands were negligible; historically, the Xu family had relied on food to control the region's inhabitants, strictly restricting imports so that nearly no household had grain to spare for the next day. If Wei Yuan wanted to buy or plunder, he could only target caravans.
At this thought, Yuan Qingyan ground his teeth. "I'll let you live a few days longer."
Yet he immediately shook his head. "No. Courtesy demands reciprocity!"
Yuan Qingyan summoned two vice generals inside. These two were reinforcements sent by Chen Dao, having just arrived today. Entering the study and seeing the wreckage strewn across the floor, both were taken aback.
Yuan Qingyan pointed a finger at the map and said, "The two of you will bypass the eastern and northern sides to blockade the former territory of the three counties. Aside from hauling supplies for government troops, bar all merchant caravans from passing. At the same time, sweep through the commoners in the region and confiscate all their iron implements and grain—every last bit!"
The two vice generals were shocked once more. One of them spoke up, "My lord, the commoners won't be able to survive."
"The people of the Western Regions are like weeds, thoroughly resilient. They will naturally find a way to stay alive; you need not concern yourselves with that. And if they truly cannot survive, can't they just flee west?"
Only then did the two vice generals realize Yuan Qingyan's true motive. A chill ran down their spines, yet neither dared to speak out, accepting their orders before taking their leave.
Only after gathering their troops and departing the camp to head north did the two dare to speak in slightly louder voices.
One sighed. "This official is truly not one to be trifled with. We've had rotten luck being assigned beneath him."
The other snorted. "We may not love the people like our own children, but we at least try not to disturb them. With this man named Yuan doing such things, isn't he afraid of retribution?"
"If we weren't so pedantic ourselves, we wouldn't have been dispatched to this godforsaken place. I heard Old Zhou was transferred here from the northern border as well. When he gets drunk, he curses up a storm in camp."
"Old Zhou has a high cultivation and married a wife from the Xu family. Whatever he does, he gets away with it. We don't have that luxury."
The two voiced their grievances as they marched north.
At that very moment, Wei Yuan was staring at the map, his gaze lingering around Quliu Town. Yuan Qingyan's first two groups of envoys had vanished without a trace, yet he had actually sent a third. From this, Wei Yuan concluded that the lives of subordinates were worth nothing in that man's eyes. Even if Wei Yuan slaughtered all the troops Yuan Qingyan deployed, the man would not so much as bat an eye.
Since he was going to make a move, Wei Yuan intended to make it a big one. But before that, he still had to carefully gauge the combat prowess of the Western Jin government forces, especially the northern border army.
In the midst of his planning, Wei Yuan suddenly sensed an anomaly and looked out the window.
The sun was setting in the west, painting half the sky in a blood-red glow.
The sunset clouds were extraordinarily crimson, red as blood, swiftly spreading and flowing toward the domain.
Chapter 184