As dawn broke, small pockets of routed troops fled across the land while sweeps of cavalry and infantry cast their nets back and forth, mopping up the remnants.
Twenty thousand Southern Qi elites had carved straight through the enemy formation before digging into a defensive line along their sole route of retreat. This shattered the enemy's remaining morale, scattering them in desperate flight. Even the Xu family's dharma idol elders could not maintain military discipline and were forced to flee for their own lives.
Watching the sun begin to rise, Bao Yun departed in silence; no one knew the exact moment she had slipped away.
This second conflict between the Ningzhou Xu family and Qingming had ended in yet another defeat for the invaders—not just a total rout, but a fragile, shattering collapse.
The Xu family commander had actually been a seasoned veteran of many campaigns. However, Bao Yun had used the lives of five thousand warriors as bait, completely dispelling his suspicions and encouraging him to drive boldly forward. In doing so, his forces became overextended and walked straight into the ambush.
In truth, the forty thousand youths only had cultivation at the Body Casting realm, and their combat capabilities were unremarkable. Had the Xu family's vanguard dared to mount a desperate charge into their ranks, they could have unleashed wholesale slaughter. Yet the youths had steadily advanced while firing in disciplined volleys, mowing down nearly ten thousand men in just a few rounds.
A casualty rate approaching twenty percent broke the vanguard's spirit entirely, transforming their advance into a mad retreat. The panicked vanguard smashed directly into the center army, which Li Zhi then pierced through with his fresh assault. Finding their retreat cut off, the center collapsed as well, sealing the battle's outcome.
While the battlefield was being cleared, Li Zhi reviewed the engagement inside his command tent, breaking into a cold sweat the deeper his analysis went.
Once stripped of the Ephemeral Multitude's halo, the vast majority of troops within the domain were inferior even to standard imperial soldiers, effectively reduced to the level of militiamen. The forty thousand youths were only comparable to ordinary regulars. Even when factoring in Li Zhi's twenty-five thousand elites, their paper strength had been vastly inferior to their opponents'.
This was precisely why Li Zhi had originally planned for a cautious, steady war of attrition, testing wills rather than taking chances.
Bao Yun's ruthlessness lay in sacrificing five thousand men to buy a total victory. And those five thousand had fought to the death without giving an inch, knowing full well they were doomed.
It was not that they were innately fearless to such an extreme; rather, Brigade General Cui Yu had stood at the bloodiest front line from start to finish, never yielding a single step. When the general refuses to retreat, his men naturally fight to the death. Li Zhi could only marvel at this with deep respect. He could never bring himself to be so cold-blooded, nor did he possess generals willing to bleed to the last breath, or so many doomed soldiers eager to fight to the death.
When it came to the art of war, he was still a cut below Bao Yun.
Even so, Li Zhi was not disheartened. Bao Yun's tactics relied far too heavily on unorthodox gambles and razor-thin risks. According to the academy masters, true warfare should prioritize orthodox strategy with unorthodox tactics playing a supporting role—that was the kingly path. When the time came to command armies of hundreds of thousands or even millions, orthodox strategy would prove paramount. Only then would Li Zhi truly surpass Bao Yun.
After the battle, Li Zhi left all the spoils of war to Qingming, leading his own troops back to his domain. For the next several days, all remained calm.
Despite an event as momentous as the Karma Great Curse, the imperial court acted as if nothing had happened. They appointed no new Military Commissioner, nor did they even dispatch an envoy to inspect the situation. Having suffered two crushing defeats in succession, the Xu family had incurred staggering losses. Of the two hundred thousand soldiers fielded this time, fewer than twenty thousand made it back; over a hundred thousand had been captured, and forty thousand lay dead.
With that, more than half of the forces the Xu family could muster in the open were gone. Those regular soldiers appeared to belong to the Western Jin court, but in reality, they were controlled by the Xu family—private troops clad in the court's uniform and fed on the court's grain. The Xu family could mobilize them without needing an edict from the King of Jin.
Following this disaster, the Xu family became uncharacteristically subdued.
Bao Manshan had personally stepped in to tie down their True Monarch, and through deliberate misdirection, enabled Zhu Yuanjin to heavily wound Cantie. Combined with Li Zhi leading his army into the fray, the realm's great figures viewed this as the Bao family and Southern Qi's Li family intervening together to curb the Xu family's westward ambitions.
Thus, an eerie tranquility settled over Qingming. Yet everyone knew this quiet was only temporary. A complete, unassigned immortal boundary stone held too great an allure. Equivalent to at least an entire prefecture, it possessed enough wealth and territory to elevate a minor clan from obscurity right to the threshold of the Seven Surnames and Thirteen Clans.
Faced with such enormous stakes, the great clans and immortal sects would all have a hand in the pot. It would likely take countless complex, under-the-table dealings before Qingming's ultimate ownership was decided. In the past, with Wei Yuan present, anyone wishing to seize Qingming had to either shatter the stone or kill him. The Palace of Grand Beginning would never stand by and watch Wei Yuan be slain, even if it meant triggering a war of immortals. But now, struck down by the Karma Great Curse, Wei Yuan's life and death hung in the balance. If he were truly dead, the authority of Qingming's Domain Lord could be transferred.
Though the Xu family had quieted down, the Palace of Grand Beginning's situation was no better. The Palace Master had not intervened against the Karma Great Curse, and having remained in secluded cultivation for so many years, doubts regarding his current condition were inevitable. Immortal Monarch Tinghai was already severely wounded; the Karma Great Curse had almost certainly affected him as well, likely worsening his injuries to the point where his days were numbered.
Even so, as the foremost of the Four Great Immortal Sects, the Palace of Grand Beginning relied not solely on its Immortal Monarchs, but also on its sheer, overwhelming foundation. Even if Immortal Monarch Tinghai fell and a brief gap in immortals occurred, new immortals would rise to take his place within a few decades. Moreover, the Palace of Grand Beginning possessed vast numbers of True Monarchs and dharma idol cultivators, granting them absolute dominance over any aristocratic clan at that tier.
Furthermore, many high-level cultivators within the sect maintained intricate ties with the prominent clans, and many clan scions had trained within its halls.
The Palace of Grand Beginning's only real disadvantage was its relatively short history; few of the various clans' immortal ancestors or True Monarchs hailed from the sect. Only in Wei Yuan and Bao Yun's generation had the palace begun to hold a decisive advantage.
Yet ever since Zhu Yuanjin publicly declared his willingness to abandon the northern mountain gate, the great clans had grown deeply anxious that the Palace of Grand Beginning might actually follow through. Without the northern gate, the three nations of Western Jin, Eastern Jin, and Northern Qi would directly face the Liao Clan's onslaught, placing immense pressure on their border defenses.
Thus, the current situation was precarious. The slightest tremor could upend the entire board, leaving everyone afraid to make a sudden move.
***
Having reaped a bountiful harvest, Wei Yuan stepped out of the mountain temple. Through the eyes of his Dao Foundation warrior, he spotted thick plumes of smoke rising from the direction of the village! He immediately ordered the warrior into the air to fly toward the village at full speed, while he bounded along behind.
Inside the settlement, the old woman and a dozen or so villagers were gathered in a clearing, surrounded by several dozen mounted Liao Clan scouts. Several houses were burning. Most of the villagers were gray-haired and decrepit; there was not a single adult in the prime of life among them.
A Liao rider emerged from the village and reported, "From the tracks, there should be seven or eight more people. They probably fled into the woods."
A centurion looked down disdainfully at the villagers and said, "To think people were hiding here. The Great Shaman's prophecy was correct after all—there really is a secret in this area. Question them first and find out if they've seen any outsiders."
A soldier who spoke broken human speech began questioning the villagers, but they only stared back with blank expressions, refusing to utter a word. Growing impatient, the soldier suddenly drew his scimitar and slashed down at an old man's neck!
The sharp curved blade cleaved smoothly through flesh, only to wedge firmly against the cervical bone, unable to cut any deeper!
The soldier froze in shock. He watched as the old man suddenly grinned at him, exposing a mouth with only a few charred, blackened teeth remaining, accompanied by an unspeakably vile stench. In a flash, the old man seized the soldier with both hands and clamped his jaws straight onto his face!
As Wei Yuan's Dao Foundation warrior neared the village, it slowed down and used the terrain to conceal itself before sneaking inside. To its surprise, the villagers were simply putting out the fires, with not an outsider in sight. The blaze had started under truly bizarre circumstances.
However, it was midwinter with snow covering every surface, and the hunters in the mountains returned just in time to help douse the flames quickly. Afterward, the villagers began taking inventory and repairing the damaged buildings. Just then, a horse neighed in the distance; a tall, magnificent steed burst out from somewhere and bolted into the forest.
Seeing nothing out of the ordinary, Wei Yuan recalled the warrior and returned to the stone cottage. The woman was sitting by the fire, working on the snow leopard pelt. When Wei Yuan entered, she tossed the hide aside, climbed into bed, and faced the wall in utter silence.
Seeing that she was unharmed, Wei Yuan breathed a sigh of relief; his worries had not materialized. He scooped a bowl of meat broth and brought it to the bedside, but she remained motionless.
Wei Yuan began loosening his clothes as he climbed into bed, saying, "Since you're not in a hurry to eat, let's pick up where we left off..."
Startled, the woman scrambled up, snatched the wooden bowl from his hands, and gulped down the broth in a single breath. As the hot soup settled into her stomach, warmth spread through her body, and her vitality visibly grew lively. Little did she expect that even after eating, things would still continue anyway...
Two hours later, completely exhausted, she fell into a deep slumber.
Wei Yuan climbed out of bed and began scraping the rest of the pelt, taking advantage of his rare clarity of mind to contemplate his life.
His hands suddenly paused. He remembered the horse his Dao Foundation warrior had spotted in the distance! Wild horses rarely appeared in such treacherous, snow-covered mountains, and that horse had borne distinct impressions from a saddle. That was no wild horse; it was a warhorse—a Liao Clan warhorse!
Recalling the image more closely, Wei Yuan realized there had been a faint, shadowy shape clinging to the animal, seemingly gnawing at it. The way the horse had run looked far less like roaming and far more like desperate flight from a predator latching onto its flesh.
Wei Yuan rose to his feet, then slowly sat back down. He extended his senses toward the woman; seeing her sound asleep, he chose not to wake her.
Piecing together the clues, Wei Yuan reconstructed the likely sequence of events. A squad of Liao scouts had somehow stumbled upon this human village. They had set fire to several houses, only to mysteriously vanish without a trace, leaving behind just one warhorse that had managed to escape.
With a thought, Wei Yuan summoned his Dao Foundation warrior outside the cottage, sending it slinking toward high ground to observe the settlement.
Sure enough, in that brief span, all the damaged houses had already been repaired to their original state. Had Wei Yuan returned only a little later, he would never have known the Liao Clan had ever been there.
Wei Yuan casually laid out a feng shui formation to divine his current fortune. The reading concluded that everything was normal—extraordinarily normal, exceptionally normal, without the slightest hint of irregularity.
Which was deeply abnormal in itself.
Nevertheless, Wei Yuan had no intention of making a move right now, opting to act as though nothing had happened. With the mountain temple serving as an exceptional source of yin qi, he was in no rush. His deep foray into the temple today had yielded a bountiful harvest; while he had not encountered a second dharma idol monster, his accumulated spirituality was nearly sufficient to unlock a second warrior.
His top priority was to heal his injuries and increase his strength. As long as his cultivation grew, the danger would belong not to him, but to his enemies.
When night fell, the Dao Foundation warrior diligently forged flying swords at astonishing speed, exhausting all the dao power Wei Yuan naturally recovered and leaving him with nothing else to do. And so, the woman suffered once again.
Chapter 362