South of the domain, an army of Western Jin had already drawn up its battle lines. Disciplined, imposing, and magnificent, it stood poised against an opposing force only half its size.
Several generals and colonels stood in the central army, gazing from afar at the ragged force across from them, their faces showing varied expressions. One colonel could not help but ask, "General Xu, are these really the Qingming garrison troops that threw back the Shamans multiple times? Are they sure they aren't a band of beggars?"
The general surnamed Xu narrowed his eyes slightly and said in a measured tone, "Wei Yuan doesn't think much of us at all!"
Between the two opposing hosts, the Western Jin force led by General Xu maintained strict, orderly ranks, numbering a full fifteen thousand men. They were fully equipped with infantry and archers, alongside several hundred light cavalry scouts. The core of this army consisted of the general's own loyal direct subordinates, with only five thousand drawn from the local garrisons of the military redoubts.
In contrast, the force marching out from within the domain numbered a mere eight thousand. Every man was dressed in tatters, brandishing an assortment of weapons. Many carried steel rods with long blades lashed to one end, while another steel rod hung from their waists.
They stood formed into three lines. Off to one flank stood a company of archers in scarlet coats and red armor, numbering around seven or eight hundred, looking exceptionally conspicuous. This group stood scattered in a loose skirmish formation, yet many lounged with slack postures, revealing at a glance their utter lack of military discipline.
While every other army went to great lengths to keep their archers hidden from view, Qingming did the exact opposite. No one knew what kind of madness had seized their commander.
Standing in his central army, Wei Yuan felt rather helpless about the appearance of the troops under his command. Right now, what the domain lacked most was not food, but textiles. When the residents tore their clothes, they had no replacements and could only patch them up. At present, the domain produced only crude linen woven from wild hemp and tree bark, and garments fashioned from it were scarcely better than fishing nets.
Yet these troops were, in truth, seasoned veterans of the domain, nearly all of whom had lived through several major battles. Though their absolute martial cultivation fell short, they possessed rich experience and unyielding fighting spirit. These men had held the line and fought bloody battles to the death even after suffering losses exceeding sixty percent. Now, having been fully re-equipped with new guns and armor, their combat effectiveness had climbed yet another step.
Under Ephemeral Multitude, they were scythes meant to harvest life.
Amid the Western Jin ranks, General Xu reached out his hand to feel the surrounding world. "The clear domain of the mortal realm truly is comfortable," he remarked. "Standing here is far better than Quliu Town; at least clothes stay dry, rather than feeling as if we're soaking in water all day. We are fighting within the enemy's domain, but they may have forgotten that we too are mortals. The clear domain of the mortal realm blesses us just the same.
"If we cannot win this battle, I, Xu Li, might as well hang up my armor and return to farming!"
Wei Yuan and Cui Yu observed the Western Jin army. Wei Yuan suddenly remarked, "Daring to push deep into our domain to fight—it seems they hold the power of the domain in very little regard!"
Cui Yu replied, "The clear domain of the mortal realm treats both sides equally. That is likely what he believes."
Wei Yuan let out a soft breath. The mortal clear domain was indeed impartial, but Ephemeral Multitude was not, and the effect of Outlaw of Heaven and Earth multiplied within the domain as well. Ordinary boundary stones possessed no such functions, but what stood anchored here was the immortal stone, Qingming.
Amid blaring war horns, the Western Jin host marched forward in lockstep. Archers drew their bows, and a rain of thousands of arrows tore through the sky, plunging toward that eye-catching target ahead.
There was no helping it; the enemy archers stood out far too clearly. That patch of brilliant crimson against the lush green world could be spotted by a blind man.
The Western Jin army had brought three thousand archers, each thoroughly drilled. This volley of arrows fell sharp and true, blanketing the enemy's entire archer detachment.
Within the Qingming archery ranks, one man fixed his eyes on the incoming storm of arrows and counted down loudly, "Three, two, one!"
In an instant, every archer felt as if they had burst into flame. Boundless strength surged into them from the void and welled up from deep within their bodies. Their vision stretched farther, their reflexes sharpened, and the plunging arrows seemed to slow by three whole beats!
This was the effect of Ephemeral Multitude stacked upon Outlaw of Heaven and Earth. The Cui family youths in the company had experienced this surge of power beforehand, but possessing virtually zero battlefield experience, they stared fixedly at the arrows plunging through the sky, bracing to dodge or parry. The veterans who had survived numerous engagements, however, remained exceptionally calm. They loosed two arrows in return before casually parrying or sidestepping the falling shafts.
The archer captain barked out orders in rapid succession. Before the second wave of arrows arrived, the archery company unleashed a five-volley rapid-fire counterattack!
The Cui family scions scrambled in flustered haste, yet Cui Yu's rigorous training over this past period had borne fruit after all. They managed to keep up with the veterans' rhythm, loosing all five arrows.
As the enemy's second volley rained down, over a dozen shrieks echoed through the ranks. Several Cui family youths still panicked, darting erratically as the arrows descended overhead, and suffered casualties. Two unfortunate fellows had their helmets pierced through by heavy arrows, dying on the spot.
In this battle, the veteran archers and Cui family youths were paired in an even one-to-one ratio. The deaths of the two Cui scions did not shake the veterans in the slightest; wearing composed expressions, they fired off another rapid five-shot volley, then calmly dealt with the third wave of arrows.
After three volleys of arrows, the Western Jin vanguard infantry had closed the distance, yet they found themselves without covering fire. The colonels glanced back, only to discover their own archer ranks in utter shambles. Five or six hundred men had already collapsed, and even a company captain of the Dao Foundation realm stood stiffly pinned in place, dead after being riddled with arrows.
Suddenly, continuous rolls of thunder erupted before the front lines, raising dense billows of smoke and dust. The front ranks of Western Jin soldiers fell in sweeping swaths like wheat before a scythe.
A short while later, beyond the borders of the domain, Xu Li stared in a daze as broken remnants rallied around him. Of the fifteen thousand men he had led into the domain, only six thousand remained; perhaps a few thousand more had scattered during the rout, enough to scrape together roughly ten thousand.
A disastrous defeat, a swift defeat—and he still had no idea how they had lost.
All Xu Li could recall of the final moments was his elite vanguard breaching the barrage of the enemy's mysterious weaponry and charging up to their front line.
Yet at that exact instant, the Qingming fighters seemed possessed by gods and fiends. The first rank of charging warriors was slaughtered almost instantly, and in that very moment, morale shattered, turning the army into a routed mob.
Fortunately, the enemy had not pursued.
By then, Wei Yuan had already arrived at the eastern boundary of the domain, where thirty thousand youths stood in battle array.
They wore gleaming breastplates, grasped long guns resembling steel tubes, and carried five paper-wrapped short sticks strapped to the small of their backs.
The earth trembled. Along the distant horizon, countless cavalry clad in light gray armor appeared, advancing at a measured pace. In the center of the cavalry formation, a great battle standard snapped in the wind, bearing the character "Yue" heavy as a mountain. This was the very iron cavalry Yue Jinshan relied upon to sweep across the northern frontiers!
Military qi surged skyward from both hosts.
The world-renowned Northern Border Iron Cavalry manifested military qi like pale gray mountain ranges towering hundreds of feet high, advancing steadily with the immovable weight of a mountain!
On the domain's side, wisps of dark qi rose, dimming the surrounding world until the scene seemed detached from the mortal realm.
From the southwest, nearly a thousand warriors in scarlet armor dashed up in a loose formation. They were the very archers who had just finished fighting in the south, urgently redeployed to the east.
In the center of the Northern Border Iron Cavalry, a fierce-faced general gazed coldly at the distant battle formation, nodding slightly. "Not bad. Their military qi at least looks the part. But to array only five ranks before me, Luo Bingtian—do they think they aren't dying fast enough?"
Beside him, another general with a ferocious countenance remarked, "Commander Yue gave us ten thousand cavalry. Isn't that overestimating them? In my view, five thousand would be too many; even three thousand would suffice."
Beside Wei Yuan, Cui Yu felt uneasy as well. "Aren't five ranks too few? We still have troops in reserve; let's reinforce with a few more ranks of spearmen! That's ten thousand Northern Border Iron Cavalry across from us; without fifty thousand men, we won't hold!"
Wei Yuan said calmly, "All the steel and gunpowder we produced this month is right here. Rest easy; we will not lose."
Yet Cui Yu could not set his mind at ease. He had read through all the writings left by Xu Wenwu, but could the scribblings of such an uncultured, ignorant fellow truly be trusted?
Behind the battle array, Zhang Sheng, Ji Liuli, and Perfected Chuhe watched the battlefield from afar. The old Daoist released his aura fully, displaying the majestic bearing of a True Person of the Dharma Idol realm, though he showed no intention of joining the fray for now.
Suspended in the air behind the Northern Border Iron Cavalry, a group of generals hovered with solemn, imposing grandeur. Beneath them waited another twenty thousand cavalry, held in reserve.
At the center of the generals, Yue Jinshan stood suspended in midair, his eyes half-closed, carrying only a single long saber at his waist.
The layout of the battlefield was now clear: ten thousand world-renowned heavy cavalry of the Northern Border faced thirty thousand light infantry, a thousand archers, and a thousand horsemen from the Qingming Domain.
Anyone with the slightest grasp of military affairs knew the domain was doomed to defeat.
Amid the howling wind, Luo Bingtian slowly lowered his visor, pointed forward, and let his icy voice resound in the ears of every rider: "Leave none alive!"
The pale gray tide surged into motion. The earth groaned and shuddered beneath iron hooves as a full ten thousand cavalrymen, men and steeds clad in heavy armor at the culmination of Body Casting, launched their charge.
The gray mountains of military qi vaulted abruptly, crashing toward the opposing ranks like a raging tidal wave and instantly scattering the deep dark qi into fluttering wisps. Military qi was the most direct manifestation of both forces' combat strength; in terms of sheer power, though the domain held the advantage in numbers, its actual combat capability appeared far weaker.
The scarlet-clad archers loosed immediately, sending volley after volley of arrows raining toward the Northern Border Iron Cavalry. Yet the riders merely hunched low and accelerated their charge. Within the dense military qi, the force of the heavy arrows diminished drastically, and even direct hits glanced harmlessly off the heavy armor. A full volley brought down only a dozen-odd mounts.
The archery captain grew frantic. With a sharp roar, all the archers began unleashing rapid-fire volleys of twelve arrows as if fighting for their lives!
Behind the main formation, several hundred cultivators sat around three long magical arrays. Large steel canisters were set upon the formations, continuously accelerated, and hurled toward the battlefield dozens of li away. The massive steel canisters arrived at the perfect moment, sweeping over the battlefield just as the cavalry charged past the halfway mark!
Several beams of spear light and saber qi rose from the cavalry, striking the canisters. One was instantly sliced to pieces, scattering a cloud of grayish-white powder. But the other two canisters detonated the moment the saber qi touched them. Two earth-shattering thunders roared above the cavalry, conjuring two immense fireballs out of thin air. Countless lethal fragments rained down like a deluge, while blast winds flipped several hundred horsemen and mounts into chaos!
The strike came so abruptly that the generals charging alongside the vanguard were caught entirely off guard. Seeing another three steel canisters shrieking toward them, a dense curtain of saber qi and spear light surged forth to shred them hundreds of paces away. Yet the charging cavalry had inevitably fallen into disarray, and several hundred riders had been brought down by the first two blasts, half of them never to rise again.
Steel canisters continued to hurtle through the air. The cavalry generals exerted their full strength, not daring to let a single one explode. Each canister contained two thousand jin of the new explosive; even a late Dao Foundation cultivator caught nearby would suffer grievous wounds.
Despite the momentary confusion, the vast majority of the iron cavalry pressed forward unaffected, sweeping within a hundred paces in the blink of an eye.
At that moment, black flames ignited over every youth. Their military qi surged abruptly, connecting earth and sky! Under Ephemeral Multitude, their strength spiked, their thoughts ran like lightning, and their vision doubled in clarity. The hurtling iron cavalry seemed to slow before their eyes.
Most importantly, they felt no fear.
A roar erupted suddenly as a dense curtain of white smoke burst before the Qingming lines, forming an unbroken wall of smoke.
The foremost rank of riders suddenly seemed to slam into an invisible wall, tumbling backward from their saddles. Some were thrown flying through the air, trailing long geysers of blood behind them. Yet the remaining cavalrymen paid this no heed, their eyes fixed only on that paper-thin five-rank line dozens of paces away!
Dozens of paces was a distance the famed Northern Border Iron Cavalry could cross in mere breaths.
After unleashing their volley, the first rank of youths retreated swiftly behind the line. Even before they fully stepped into place, the second rank had already fired and fallen back, followed immediately by the third and fourth ranks!
The youths moved like ghosts. By the time the fifth rank stepped forward once more, the youths who had formed the original first rank were already aiming anew. In the rear, the youths pulled the paper-wrapped cartridges from their waists, slotted them into the barrels, and used Dao power to draw them down to the breech before leveling their aim again. The entire sequence unfolded so swiftly it was nearly impossible to follow.
A lone cavalryman finally breached the front line, the tip of his lance pressing against a youth's chest!
Yet the youth's face remained entirely serene. Concentrating single-mindedly on leveling his gun, he fired at the exact moment the lance drove through his body, shattering the warhorse's skull.
The rider was flung from the saddle, his lance still impaling the youth. Carried forward as if riding the clouds for over a dozen paces, he crashed heavily to the ground, crushing two youths in the rear ranks to death. His heavy steel-clad body skidded nearly twenty paces across the dirt before coming to a halt.
His body had been deformed by the massive impact, blood pouring steadily from his nose and mouth, terror surfacing in his eyes for the first time.
He still remembered that as he fell, the two youths had only spared him a glance from the corners of their eyes before continuing to load their weapons, their hands showing neither tremor nor faltering until the instant of their deaths. Were they men, or were they ghosts?
He did not know in death that he had achieved the greatest tally of any Northern Border rider in this battle.
Amid unending thunderous roars, smoke spread rapidly over the battlefield. Waves of cavalry collapsed, the inertia of men and horses carrying their corpses forward to gouge long trenches into the earth.
Luo Bingtian shoved aside the horse carcass pinning him down, greeted by a field strewn with corpses as far as the eye could see.
His eyes bloodshot, he let out a guttural, beast-like roar, drew his long saber, and charged forward! Not a single person among the enemy possessed a Dao Foundation; he would slaughter them all to avenge his fallen brothers!
His broad saber flared with blazing light, condensing a terrifying ten-zhang blade of qi, but at that moment a soft, luminous saber light appeared, wrapping around his blade.
Though that light seemed gentle, every blow landed with crushing weight and appeared from every angle. Luo Bingtian fell into a desperate struggle in an instant. Driven near madness, he found himself utterly unable to overcome the young girl who was bouncing around while dragging a long blade.
The battlefield fell quiet, the lingering smoke slowly dispersed by the wind. Before the Qingming battle lines, countless corpses of men and horses lay piled together, resembling a scene from purgatory.
Ten thousand iron cavalry, men and mounts shattered alike.
In the span of a few breaths, the fearless youths had expended their five spare rounds, firing a total of a hundred and eighty thousand shots.
In the Northern Border camp, Yue Jinshan suddenly gripped the hilt of his saber. A surge of killing intent vaulted into the sky, tearing through the overcast clouds and letting down a beam of daylight!
Wei Yuan felt a chill in his heart. What he feared most had come to pass after all: Yue Jinshan, shamed into fury, intended to take the field himself.
Spear in hand, Wei Yuan spurred his horse and rode out from the formation with composed grace, a faint, twilight-like glow coalescing at his spearhead.
No matter how strong Yue Jinshan might be, he was not necessarily stronger than the cloth-robed swordsman Xu Shiqi. With the Qingming pool waters abundantly replenished, regardless of whether a single slash from Yue Jinshan could kill him, this thrust would strip away at least two hundred years of his lifespan! Beyond that, it would remain to be seen whether his dharma idol was sturdy enough to preserve any foundation under Zhang Sheng's sword formation.
At that moment, a strand of qi tore through the air from the southwest, locking onto Yue Jinshan from hundreds of li away! A sweet, gentle voice sounded beside his ear: "Old Yue, bullying the young is rather distasteful, don't you think?"
The veins on the back of Yue Jinshan's hand pulsed, yet he slowly released his grip on the hilt. He cast another deep glance toward the battlefield, turned, and departed.
Upon the battlefield, the thirty thousand youths remained standing, their ranks unbroken. Before them, the gray mountain collapsed with a thunderous roar, its military qi shattering into nothingness.
This was a clash of two eras, and a collision between two worlds.
In Quliu Town, within the side courtyard of the Xu family residence...
A human face materialized on the trunk of the Old Tree. It looked toward the woman in red seated by the window, an unspeakably fawning smile spreading across its aged features as it said, "Senior, you are reading popular storybooks yourself!"
Chapter 301