Upon his return, Wei Yuan immediately entered his sea of consciousness, but the sight within left him dumbfounded.
Nether flies covered the Ten Thousand Li of Rivers and Mountains. The closest lay right beside Jade Mountain, while the farthest were over a hundred li away. This time, Wei Yuan had captured several thousand nether flies in total.
At this moment, every single nether fly lay motionless on the ground, completely devoid of life. Near or far, all their heads pointed toward Jade Mountain, as if they had suddenly dropped dead in mid-flight while heading straight for it.
Wei Yuan picked up a nether fly and found that it had lost all signs of life. The power of eternal silence within its body was dissipating, gathering into Jade Mountain.
*How did these nether flies die?*
Yet when he had first drawn them into his Dao Foundation, Wei Yuan had clearly felt them buzzing frantically throughout the Ten Thousand Li of Rivers and Mountains. The instant he returned to the Native Realm, all the nether flies had abruptly stopped moving, their heads all turned toward Jade Mountain.
Unable to reach any conclusion, Wei Yuan exited his sea of consciousness to seek out Sun Yu.
In Sun Yu's courtyard, Wei Yuan manifested a few nether flies. The moment Sun Yu saw them, his expression shifted subtly. He took them away for study and promptly shooed Wei Yuan out of the courtyard.
Next came the pair of butterfly short blades. After having an entire leg severed, Wei Yuan treated them with immense caution. He trapped them beneath several nested bells and cauldrons, weighed those down with several Mortal-Suppressing Pagodas, and only then gingerly handed them over to Eldest Senior Sister.
While Eldest Senior Sister was not particularly skilled at artifact refinement, she was an expert when it comes to dealing with artifact spirits. The main problem with this pair of short blades lay not in the blades themselves, but in their artifact spirits.
After handing over the blades, Wei Yuan gave Eldest Senior Sister full authority over the critical decision of whether to melt them down.
Wei Yuan then returned to his residence. A new day had brought countless trivial affairs in the domain waiting for his attention.
First came the intelligence reports from the north. The Shamans' main force had not pressed their attack on the domain that day. Instead, they had swung east, intending to swallow Yue Jinshan's border army in a single bite. Yue Jinshan was a seasoned commander; seeing the overwhelming Shaman main force advancing fiercely, he immediately fell back, fighting as he retreated.
The two sides engaged in a fierce seesaw battle, fighting across thousands of li over several days, clashing from the north of the domain all the way to outside Hanyang Pass. Only when Western Jin dispatched a massive relief force from behind the pass were the Shaman armies forced to withdraw.
After days of bloody fighting, both sides suffered terrible losses. Only half of Yue Jinshan's eighty thousand border regulars remained, while Shaman casualties were roughly equal, making the battle an evenly matched contest. In terms of troop ratios and casualties, Yue Jinshan even held a slight upper hand; the battle prowess of the northern veterans he had trained was indeed well-deserved.
Yet among the high-ranking cultivators, the dharma idols dispatched by the great clans to protect their juniors had been practically wiped out. Aside from Perfected Person Baoshu of the Bao family, not a single one had escaped.
Moments before the blood curse fell, Perfected Persons Fenhai and Lanhua had actually been gathered with those clan Perfected Persons, exchanging greetings, catching up, and making small talk.
However, once the great battle erupted, Fenhai rushed off to pull a peak Dao Shaman into a game of chess, while Perfected Person Lanhua went to monitor the movements of the Shaman main force and deter any lone Great Shamans. Both Perfected Persons had left the scene.
Only the clan Perfected Persons believed the matter had nothing to do with them, thinking that no matter how fiercely the battle raged, it would never fall upon their heads. One after another, they watched the battle at ease, focusing more of their attention on subtly measuring themselves against one another.
To be tasked with looking after their family's younger generation, these Perfected Persons were naturally no ordinary figures. Nearly half possessed immortal foundations, while the rest held special, potent Heaven Foundations. Such dharma idols were highly valued within their respective clans; otherwise, they would never have been entrusted with the grave duty of extracting clan members from the battlefield.
Before coming, all had been bolstered by feng shui formations. As if that were not enough, they had also worn luck-altering charms or had elders in their clans shift their karmic luck. After all, the Hall of Heavenly Secrets' theory regarding feng shui depressions in the Palace of Grand Beginning was deeply ingrained in everyone's minds. The high-ranking cultivators feared not having too much luck, but rather having less luck than others, so they had prepared thoroughly.
With so much karmic luck blessed upon them, divine calculations regarding their fates were already extraordinarily difficult to perform. Furthermore, they were all adept in concealment arts, coming and going without a trace. By all rights, unless a Heavenly Shaman intervened, the Shamans should never have deduced the arrival of these experts. Yet the Shamans had known nonetheless.
No sooner had the clan cultivators assembled than a blood curse crashed down.
Wei Yuan set down the report, feeling a creeping dread the more he thought about it. Fortunately, Perfected Persons Fenhai and Lanhua had taken an active role in the fighting; had either of them slacked off even slightly, they would have perished alongside those clan Perfected Persons.
The Perfected Persons under True Monarch Xuanyue might be poor, but their lives were exceptionally resilient.
In this great war, Qingming had secured a minor victory in the domain skirmishes, the northern Shaman main force had fought Yue Jinshan to a draw, and the human clans had suffered catastrophic losses among their high-ranking cultivators. Looking at the whole picture, the human race had still lost.
A crushing pressure weighed on Wei Yuan, making it hard to breathe. Next time, he might not be so fortunate; the Shamans might very well make him their primary target.
Then Wei Yuan recalled something. According to Eldest Senior Sister and Zhang Sheng, the shamaness with three pairs of wings had previously slipped into the domain and attempted to steal the boundary stone, only giving up when she failed to solve the problem left by Eldest Senior Sister.
That shamaness's cultivation was infinitely close to that of a Great Shaman, and her divine abilities were bizarre and formidable, on par with Ji Liuli and Zhang Sheng. Bao Yun was younger and possessed lesser cultivation, falling slightly behind her.
With such a powerful shamaness on the battlefield, why had she not played a far more significant role in the war?
Moreover, the Shaman Scholars and shamanesses Wei Yuan had encountered in the Nether Cold Realm were equally formidable, yet their combat prowess was severely undermined by refining the protective shelter into their origin souls. If they returned to the Native Realm, their strength would be reduced by at least thirty percent. On a battlefield where life and death were decided in a heartbeat, that was practically suicidal.
Wei Yuan instinctively felt that those Shaman Scholars must have operated exclusively within the Nether Cold Realm, rarely returning to the Native Realm.
A doubt sprang to mind: what in the Nether Cold Realm was so important that it took precedence even over the frontier war with the human race?
Unfortunately, the swarm of nether flies had been too terrifying. Not a scrap of those Shaman Scholars and shamanesses remained; otherwise, Wei Yuan might have gleaned a clue or two from examining their remains.
The more Wei Yuan thought about it, the more uneasy he felt. He headed to the Hall of Merits to exchange for records concerning the Nether Cold Realm. But after entering the hall, he realized he had run out of heavenly merits. With no other choice, he went to Zhang Sheng.
Zhang Sheng had heavenly merits in abundance, and the records did not cost much. He exchanged for them on the spot, after which master and disciple summoned the rest of the Palace of Grand Beginning contingent to study them together.
Just as Dream Eater had said, the Nether Cold Realm was where the Outer Domains intersected with the Native Realm, situated on the boundary between illusion and reality, filled with countless bizarre and terrifying occurrences. Yet this place was also critical for the advancement of blood shamans. If they could not establish a realm here, blood shamans could never harmonize with the Great Dao of heaven and earth to become Heavenly Shamans.
In the past, the human race had also attempted to send people into the Nether Cold Realm to uncover the secrets of how blood shamans attained Nether Shaman status and advanced even further. Yet over tens of thousands of years, almost everyone sent inside had perished, including two cultivation seeds considered promising candidates to become Immortal Monarchs.
From then on, the human race had abandoned exploration of the Nether Cold Realm.
Wei Yuan had never imagined that exploring the Nether Cold Realm would incur such staggering casualties. Over the ages, more than a thousand people had been sent in, but only several dozen had returned alive.
Then again, it made sense. Dream Eater's Paper Bride trial alone was enough to wipe out nearly all human cultivators. Having experienced it firsthand, Wei Yuan believed only geniuses on the level of Zhang Sheng, Ji Liuli, and Bao Yun had any hope of surviving. Their Dao Foundations and origin souls were extraordinarily powerful, and each possessed immortal techniques that allowed them to awaken from illusory dreams. Anyone else, even Xiaoyu, would certainly die.
Why would geniuses like Ji Liuli ever be sent into the Nether Cold Realm? Had it not been for Nether Shaman Shu Li's great curse, Wei Yuan himself would never have set foot there even if beaten to death.
After reading through the records, Zhang Sheng suddenly remarked, "These records do not explicitly state whether the Immortal Monarchs already know the secrets of the Nether Cold Realm."
The Palace of Grand Beginning had exceedingly strict protocols for recording intelligence, especially for materials exchanged with heavenly merits. If a matter was a secret and unknown, it was marked as unknown. But if it was already known, even if only to a single Immortal Monarch, the records either explicitly marked it as known or omitted it entirely; they could never write that it was not yet known.
Ji Liuli said, "Then they likely know, or at least have conjectures, but have not made it public for some reason."
"What kind of secret could make even Immortal Monarchs keep their mouths tightly shut?" Wei Yuan wondered aloud.
Zhang Sheng said nothing, but Ji Liuli remarked, "There are plenty of such things. History is full of them."
Wei Yuan searched his memory of the history books he had studied, but found no such records.
Seeing that he could not recall, Ji Liuli prompted him, "Have you forgotten what Feng Chutang taught in General History of the Human Race and General Knowledge of the Immortal Path? For instance, how the first Immortal Monarch came to be."
Wei Yuan fell into deep thought. Having read the records, the importance of exploring the Nether Cold Realm had skyrocketed. It held the profound secret of blood shamans advancing to Heavenly Shamans. Furthermore, if he raised enough havoc within, it would be akin to setting a fire in the Nether Shamans' backyard, perhaps drawing their gaze away from the domain and toward the Nether Cold Realm.
His mind made up, Wei Yuan immediately consulted Eldest Senior Sister and his master on Dao arts and techniques for capturing living quarry, intending to catch a few live specimens in the Nether Cold Realm for thorough interrogation.
Zhang Sheng and Ji Liuli naturally held nothing back, sharing all manner of ruthless, underhanded tricks that made Wei Yuan break out in a cold sweat. In particular, Zhang Sheng—the master who possessed an invincible heart in Wei Yuan's eyes—proved no less vicious when striking behind someone's back than Ji Liuli.
Having inadvertently discovered this side of Zhang Sheng, Wei Yuan finally understood with crystal clarity why Sky Azure Hall placed such relentless emphasis on respecting one's teacher and revering the Dao.
Chapter 209