Mutual Exchange

Wei Yuan rose at once and went with Sun Yu to the sheds where the girls lived. After that night's incident, Wei Yuan had gathered all the girls who had coupled into one place, to watch for any changes that might follow, and to keep the influence from spreading to anyone else. All the boys involved were gathered in another place, but under looser supervision—they still labored and cultivated along with everyone else. Each shed housing the affected girls now held two rows of communal bunks. The girls lay or sat, all of them quiet, as though they still did not understand what had happened, or what it meant for them. A few, though, had instinctively cupped their lower bellies, or were stroking them lightly. Wei Yuan walked to the nearest few girls and examined them all over, then swept them again and again with his spiritual sense, and found nothing abnormal in any of them. By any measure they were ordinary girls of flesh and blood, alive and whole—only now with a spark of life being nurtured in their bellies. Sun Yu said, "I've already examined them. Everything is normal. Perhaps a more thorough examination is needed, but that would mean cutting the body open and probing carefully." Vivisection? As though reading Wei Yuan's thoughts, Sun Yu said, "There's no hurry. If someone dies in battle later, you can give me the corpse. But examining a corpse will always depart from the truest condition. So if we want to understand what's happening right now, the best thing would be to find one who's with child..." Wei Yuan felt his hair stand on end. He was about to ask whether that wouldn't invite heavenly retribution, then remembered that the Hall of Xuanming had secret methods to erase karmic debt. And if killing one person could save ten million, by this world's heavenly dao there would even be considerable merit in it. Be that as it may, Wei Yuan still could not accept vivisecting a pregnant girl. Sun Yu knew he would not accept it either; he had only raised the matter to tell Wei Yuan that such an option existed. Facing more than a thousand girls, the two of them were at a loss. After a while, Wei Yuan asked, "Is this situation normal?" Sun Yu said, "Definitely not! One person conceiving from a single coupling is possible. Ten all conceiving on the first try is very unlikely. And now it's over one thousand and seventy. The odds of this being natural are about the same as the odds of my attaining Unity. So this must have been arranged by a great power!" Wei Yuan thought of something else. "Not one of the guards could get them pregnant, but boys of the same source and blood could. Could it be..." Sun Yu understood him. He thought for a moment, then said, "I'll find a way to test it." Wei Yuan wisely did not ask how. He simply left everything to Sun Yu. More than a thousand girls pregnant at once—such a bizarre affair naturally drew every eye. Yet neither Ji Liuli nor Old Daoist Chuhe could find anything abnormal in it. Wei Yuan could only set the matter aside for the moment and watch for what came next. There was still a great deal to do in the domain; simply feeding these tens of thousands was a major undertaking. He had just taken in eight hundred thousand jin of spirit rice, but if these boys and girls cultivated without restraint, they would eat at least two jin a day apiece—eight hundred thousand jin would not last ten days. While continuing to break new fields, Wei Yuan found a top-grade spirit field and planted the black pearl rice. A hundred grains of pearl rice make one jin. For planting, only one jin of seed could go into each mu—that is, a hundred seedlings. Any more, and the spirit power in the soil could not keep up. Each plant bore about thirty-odd grains and normally took three years to grow. The current market price was one liang of immortal silver per grain, and the original seed was beyond price. Aside from food, clothing would have to wait. Wei Yuan first had to arm these tens of thousands. While the Shamans and Western Jin still did not know the domain had gained such a fresh fighting force, he had to get them battle-ready quickly, so that when an enemy came, he could catch them off guard. Originally the senior brothers and sisters of Sky Azure Hall and Water Moon Hall would also have been no small help, but Wei Yuan always felt there was something strange about Ren Suxing. And the man seemed to have great influence among the Sky Azure Hall disciples—whether that had always been so, or whether he had done some homework on the road, Wei Yuan could not tell. Wei Yuan had once meant to look up his place on the Merit Board, but after flipping through it a while without finding him, he could not be bothered to search further. In any case, with Zhang Sheng holding the fort in the domain, no one could stir up any waves. As for instructing the boys and girls in cultivation methods, Wang Yu and Xu Yi were both up to the task, and now and then Yu Zhizhuo and Old Daoist Chuhe would get the urge and open a forum to preach. Five plazas had now been built in the new city, each for teaching a different basic Body Casting method. Old Daoist Chuhe had cultivated the Earth Origin Scripture during his own Body Casting, so what he taught was the Earth Origin Scripture as well. At the old Daoist's first sermon, he suddenly saw tens of thousands of people packed densely across the plaza and was so startled that he pinched the cat beside him hard. The cat returned the favor with a claw. Looking at the few bloody scratches on his hand, the old Daoist finally confirmed he was not dreaming. The old Daoist knew how many boys and girls there were, and he knew how many cultivated the Earth Origin Scripture. But he had not expected Wei Yuan to halt every activity and make them all come and listen. A number on paper and tens of thousands of people appearing before his eyes at once felt utterly different! Facing nearly thirty thousand pairs of clear eyes, the old Daoist suddenly felt a sense of solemnity. He sat up straight and proper, fished out a horsetail whisk from somewhere, laid it across his knees, and began to transmit the true dharma of the great dao. He spoke for a full three shichen, until his face was ruddy and his mana had even grown a little. He also spoke until the cat beside him slept and woke, woke and slept, and, half asleep and half awake, discovered that the old Daoist was still going on and on—so it secretly scratched him several times, and the old Daoist never noticed at all. Less than three days after that sermon, the old Daoist could not resist opening another forum. Fewer people came this time—only five thousand—and he spoke for two shichen. After that, every few days the old Daoist would open a forum to preach, even delaying his farming a little. But that is a later matter. In these days it was not only Perfected Chuhe: Yu Zhizhuo lectured twice, Sun Yu twice, and Xu Yi, Wang Yu, and Cui Yu once each. Wei Yuan watched it all, and could only sigh to himself with nothing but envy. Teaching the Six Books of Body Casting paid off over the long run; it was a steady trickle, and it would take years before results showed. But Wei Yuan had other ways to raise fighting strength with immediate effect: forged armor and fire guns. Wei Yuan had long wanted to issue two guns to every person in the domain. After nearly fifty thousand boys and girls joined, that idea had not shrunk but advanced a step further: he meant to equip every youth with a high-quality, high-power gun, rather than the primitive steel-tube gun that could only shoot within ten zhang. Fine as the idea was, putting it into practice revealed endless difficulties—the pattern of the gun, muzzle-loading or breech-loading, the bore of the barrel, the material of the barrel, the power of the gunpowder, the shape and material of the bullet... and so on and so on. Each of these questions could be a field of study in itself. Wei Yuan shut himself in his room for two whole days, reading Xu Wenwu's notes over and over, and then talking with Xu Wenwu several more times, and at last made a little progress. To put it concretely: if the unknown were divided into a hundred squares, Wei Yuan had advanced two. But the trouble was that after advancing two squares, Wei Yuan found the unknown had gone from a hundred squares to two hundred. Only then did he truly appreciate a famous saying Xu Wenwu had quoted: the more you learn, the more you discover your own ignorance. Wei Yuan agreed wholeheartedly. Unfortunately, Xu Wenwu had remembered the saying but not the other achievements of the man who said it. He did not even know what that great man had done. Still, progress was progress. Combining it with the so-called modern weapons Xu Wenwu described, Wei Yuan felt he would sooner or later be able to develop a new gun. Just as the boys and girls had lived in the domain a full month, Sun Yu sent word to the cultivators of the Palace of Grand Beginning: his new gunpowder had succeeded. Everyone gathered at Sun Yu's dwelling at once. Over this time, whenever Sun Yu had a spare moment he had been rebuilding his courtyards for different lines of research. His compound now covered several mu, divided into seven small courtyards: four for making poison, one for making medicine, one for healing, and one for researching gunpowder. But Sun Yu led them all outside the compound, where the ground was open. It had originally been the corpse yard where Shaman bodies were piled. Now, with no fighting for some time, the Shaman corpses had all lost their green qi and been cremated and buried, and the ground had been left empty. The open ground was pitted everywhere with blast scars, many of them overlapping, from who knew how many explosions. Sun Yu had set an iron table at the edge of the open ground, and on it were stacked several piles of raw materials of varying size. Wei Yuan recognized sulfur and charcoal; the rest he did not know. Among the cultivators who had come to watch, Xu Wenwu was conspicuously present. He had now succeeded in Bone Tempering and entered Spirit Refinement, the final stage of Body Casting. Such progress was godlike speed among ordinary cultivators, and given Xu Wenwu's original aptitude it was little short of a miracle. Naturally, the price had been enormous: to push his cultivation forward, Wei Yuan had invested dozens of strands of karmic luck, one after another. For any other cultivator, that much karmic luck would have been enough to foster seven or eight Dao Foundations. On Xu Wenwu it had only brought him through Bone Tempering. Now that everyone was present, Sun Yu wasted no time and came straight to the point. "I've found an entirely new gunpowder formula. Its power is roughly three times that of the old gunpowder. The ingredients are as follows... For the main material, I replaced ice flame stone—that is, saltpeter—with thunder sand. I replaced ordinary charcoal with inch-gold charcoal and fire glue, and added two more auxiliary ingredients besides. "As for why I made these changes, I'll explain later. For now, let's first look at how the old gunpowder works." Sun Yu deftly mixed a batch of black powder, kneaded it into a ball, held it in midair with Dao power, and lit it. This time Sun Yu's Dao power permeated every part of the powder, constraining the explosion, slowing the whole process tenfold and magnifying the internal image tenfold. So even Xu Wenwu could see the slowed explosion clearly, and blurted out, "A high-speed camera!" Xu Wenwu had written of that concept in his materials too, but Wei Yuan had filed it under useless junk. By the camera performance Xu Wenwu described, some Dao Foundation cultivators could match it with the naked eye alone. And as for the high-end cameras—hundreds of frames a second, or seeing things at the nanometer scale—no True Monarch was needed; many True Persons of the Dharma Idol realm could manage it. Moreover, the structure of this world seemed to differ from Xu Wenwu's world. Exactly how it differed, there was no way to know for the moment, since Xu Wenwu had long since returned the relevant learning to his middle-school teachers. As for his university teachers, he had gained nothing from them, so he had nothing to return. In fact, if not to accommodate Xu Wenwu, Sun Yu would only have magnified and slowed the explosion twofold. Once everyone had seen clearly, Sun Yu said, "The principle of this gunpowder is mainly that charcoal burns to produce gas and heat; saltpeter and sulfur both aid combustion. The hot gas expands, and that is the source of the blast's power. We already knew this principle, so I started from it: first I replaced the original materials with more powerful ones, then tested repeatedly and adjusted the proportions, and finally, according to the properties of the resulting gunpowder, added one or two auxiliary agents to make it expand faster and more violently." Then Sun Yu pointed at the open ground. "After extensive testing, I replaced the saltpeter with thunder sand, kept a little sulfur, and replaced the ordinary charcoal with inch-gold charcoal soaked in fire glue. It burns faster and produces twice the gas, so the power rises to three times the original. "To find the best formula, I set off over one thousand seven hundred test blasts." This was the basic procedure for research lectures at the Palace of Grand Beginning: not only to say what had finally been obtained, but to explain the principles and the basic course of the research. That way those who came after could build on their predecessors and bring forth the new, without having to repeat every step themselves. If anyone else wanted to improve the gunpowder further, after hearing Sun Yu's lecture they could start directly from the main ingredients, trying substitutes that burned faster and produced more gas, and so avoid many detours. At the Palace of Grand Beginning, however, such lectures generally required payment, and were often not made public at all, but kept as part of each hall's heritage. Only in Qingming had everyone grown used to mutual exchange, and with Xu Wenwu, that otherworldly visitor, among them, the cultivators all felt their horizons broader than ever and their inspiration surging. There was no time to hide anything away—before an idea had even warmed up, a newer and better one might come along. But this mutual exchange was confined to the original small circle. Wei Yuan's thirteen senior brothers and sisters had not been able to attend; they were still idling in Zhike Town.