For his return journey, Wei Yuan traveled aboard a Bao family flying boat—a model reserved exclusively for the family core. It was faster even than the flying boat he had rented when he first set out, and it sailed unobstructed the entire way.
With nothing pressing to attend to, Wei Yuan cultivated in seclusion aboard the vessel, lost in a state where self and surroundings blurred together. In the blink of an eye, half a month passed.
On this day, the Ten Thousand Li of Rivers and Mountains suddenly trembled. Jolted awake, Wei Yuan felt his connection to Qingming rekindle.
With Wei Yuan's return, Qingming reactivated. Within the Ten Thousand Li of Rivers and Mountains, streams of spiritual energy erupted, awakening spiritual flora and vastly accelerating their growth. The mortals rejoiced, and several thousand wandering souls drifted in, passing through the Gate of the Many Realms to complete their reincarnation.
Most of these souls came from displaced refugees, a few were mounted bandits, and a dozen or so were elders who had died of old age within the domain. Before departing, Wei Yuan had set up an array to offer temporary shelter to wandering spirits. Those endowed with sufficient spirituality who were reluctant to enter the cycle of reincarnation could lodge in the array until his return, reincarnating through the Gate of the Many Realms.
The Bao family's flying boat moved with astonishing speed. As it drew closer to Qingming, the tremors within the Ten Thousand Li of Rivers and Mountains grew more pronounced. Springs of spiritual water welled forth, pooling into several small lakes.
The instant the flying boat touched down in Qingming, the sea of spirituality within the Ten Thousand Li of Rivers and Mountains began to boil. The Qingming boundary stone shuddered, and in the sky above it faintly materialized a horrifying, monstrous titan over a thousand zhang tall, looking coldly down upon the mortals and spirits below.
Countless mortals and cultivators across the domain looked up in awe, some even dropping straight to their knees in worship. A few well-traveled cultivators guessed that this was a dharma idol, yet could not fathom what manner of dharma idol could possibly be so vast.
One glance was enough to tell that this colossal creature was no ordinary being. It had a slender, serpentine form that phased in and out of sight in the sky. Around its body, marvelous spectacles of mountains and rivers flickered perpetually as it soared and weaved through the clouds.
Wei Yuan felt the spirituality within the Ten Thousand Li of Rivers and Mountains slowly rise, gathering toward the fearsome celestial beast in the sky. This time, the beast was far larger than during its previous attempt to form a dharma idol, and its aura was deeper and more terrifying. If Wei Yuan took just one more step forward, he could achieve his dharma idol.
Yet he couldn't shake the persistent feeling that the spirituality of the Ten Thousand Li of Rivers and Mountains had not reached its true perfection. With a shift of his thought, he calmed the sea of spirituality, and the rising spiritual essence receded, returning to where it belonged.
The terrifying celestial beast in the sky was incensed; this was the second time Wei Yuan had rejected it. It sent down a hazy mental impulse: *There will never be a third time!*
Wei Yuan remained unmoved and continued to draw the spirituality back down. With an indignant roar, the titan had no choice but to begrudgingly dissipate.
In truth, the greatest gain from Wei Yuan's trip to the Bao family was these mortals. They were no longer mere decorative figures within the Ten Thousand Li of Rivers and Mountains; they were organized, genuinely capable of solving problems, and their intellect and spirituality were advancing by leaps and bounds with every research effort.
Furthermore, with Maiden Yin-Yang presiding and guiding them, the mortals were no longer a disorganized heap. Centering around Maiden Yin-Yang, they had established clear divisions of labor, boosting their efficiency enormously.
Wei Yuan wanted to wait a little longer to see what these mortals would ultimately evolve into.
As the giant beast's dharma idol scattered, the dispersing spirituality fell over the Ten Thousand Li of Rivers and Mountains like torrential rain. Mortals and spiritual plants alike cheered in delight, their spiritual essence quietly refining and elevating step by step.
Stepping down from the flying boat, Wei Yuan first extended his senses across the Qingming Domain. His journey had taken a month and a half in total, and the harvest season was just days away. Some grain fields rich in spiritual energy were already being harvested ahead of schedule.
The pool of water within the Qingming boundary stone had grown clearer, while the patches of blighted land were shrinking. The clear spirit trees had taken firm root and entered normal growth, gradually altering the ambient environment.
Returning to his quarters, Wei Yuan began looking through the backlog of letters and official documents.
The Western Jin court's reward had finally arrived, authorizing Wei Yuan to establish two additional border garrisons. The commendation was practically useless, though Wei Yuan had never expected anything substantial from the imperial court. The national treasury was empty, to the point where the King of Jin himself had to pinch pennies.
Hanyang Pass was now back in the hands of the Xu family, and they had rebuilt its garrison. Yet the Xu family's approach was curious this time: instead of transferring elite forces from elsewhere, they merely dispatched a few hundred officers and aggressively recruited fifty thousand new conscripts locally. It appeared they intended to turn the region into a training ground for recruits.
The rest consisted of ordinary routine affairs, hardly worth dwelling upon.
After finishing the official dispatches, Wei Yuan reviewed the gazettes. One dispatch specifically mentioned the State of Ji, noting that relentless autumn rains had spoiled much of the harvest last year, resulting in poor yields. Since spring, civil unrest had flared intermittently, and displaced refugees had emerged in numerous places once again.
Setting down the gazette, Wei Yuan laid out a sheet of paper intending to write a letter home, but paused after a moment of thought and put down the brush. Instead, he summoned a cultivator and ordered him to make a trip to Yongzhou to quietly check on his family. Whatever he saw, he was not to interfere, but simply report back.
An immense gulf separated mortals and immortals, and over hundreds of thousands of years, various models of coexisting had evolved between cultivators and mortal clans. The great aristocratic families adopted the model where cultivators shielded and nurtured their bloodline descendants.
Immortal sects such as the Palace of Grand Beginning, the Four Sages Academy, and the Sword Palace practiced a different model: disciples were required to sever ties with their mortal families before reaching a certain level of cultivation. Each sect possessed secret arts to sever the karmic bonds between disciples and their mortal clans, forbidding them from interfering in mortal kin's affairs until they became True Monarchs.
Only after reaching the True Monarch stage were these restrictions lifted. By that point, however, the relatives the cultivator had known in their youth had usually long since passed away, leaving only distant descendants who were utter strangers.
As a disciple of the Palace of Grand Beginning, Wei Yuan had exchanged some merit points for basic Body Casting techniques and medicinal pills for his family early on, but that was the limit; anything more would compromise the severing of karmic bonds.
Such restrictions existed only in immortal sects and grotto-heavens; ordinary sects and rogue cultivators paid little heed to them.
This practice in the immortal sects traced back eighty thousand years, when the human race saw the sudden rise of Immortal Monarch Taili, whose slaughtering methods were peerless throughout the world. Over a century, his name struck terror into the alien races.
Later, the Shamans secretly colluded with traitors among humanity to locate several of Immortal Monarch Taili's unknown surviving mortal descendants. Using them as a catalyst, they unleashed a Karma Great Curse right as Immortal Monarch Taili was locked in battle against a formidable rival. The curse triggered the Immortal Monarch's karmic debt, causing him to perish on the spot.
From then on, the human race devoted itself to developing methods for cutting off karmic ties between immortals and mortals to prevent anyone from using mortal bloodlines to place lethal curses on powerful cultivators. By now, the technique was mature.
Wei Yuan thus dared not disturb his household carelessly. Only if great cultivators emerged among future generations and the clan transformed into a cultivation family would the time come to reestablish karmic ties.
After finishing the gazettes, Wei Yuan began pondering the future direction of the domain's growth.
The foremost priority for Qingming was naturally its army. With the new gunpowder, the firepower of firearms was finally viable, but the cost remained substantial, with ammunition being the primary drain.
Factoring in full suits of armor for the soldiers, equipping a standard Body Casting warrior cost at least fifty taels of immortal silver, and a single battle frequently consumed over ten taels in ammunition. By this estimate, equipping a standard force of ten thousand men alone cost five hundred thousand taels, while miscellaneous expenses brought the total well above a million.
An elite force would double that cost, and elite cavalry cost four times as much as elite infantry.
Outfitting an elite army demanded an unimaginable amount of immortal silver. Wei Yuan had pondered this dilemma for a long time, but no matter which angle he approached it from, he could never circumvent the need for immortal silver. His envisioned style of combat—high rates of fire, dense barrages, and wide-area bombardments—literally burned immortal silver.
Weighing it over and over, Wei Yuan knew he had to find ways to make money.
Just as he was deep in thought, the flying marten landed on his desk. It informed Wei Yuan that it liked this place quite a bit and intended to roam about. Wei Yuan urged it not to leave the domain so he would know right away if anything happened. He added that if it had spare time, it could also help scout for ore veins.
Seeing Wei Yuan plead so earnestly—or so it fancied—the flying marten felt a twinge of pity, graciously agreed, and leaped out the window, disappearing from sight.
Just then, a letter arrived from the Palace of Grand Beginning, penned by Patriarch Xuanyue. When Sky Azure Hall had previously sent three hundred Dao soldiers, Wei Yuan had returned over sixty Dao Foundation cultivators, drastically easing the pressure on the defensive sector under Sky Azure Hall's charge, which had delighted Xuanyue. Upon hearing of this, True Monarch Huangyun had made a prompt decision, dispatching three thousand Dao soldiers directly to Qingming and promising to gift thirty percent of them to Sky Azure Hall once the training was complete.
Xuanyue had readily accepted, promptly dumping the assignment onto Wei Yuan's head.
Wei Yuan counted the days. The three thousand Dao soldiers would arrive in about ten days. He felt it was a pity they would miss the harvest season and lose the chance to experience the wondrous benefit of tempering their mental state and cultivation through labor in the fields.
Wei Yuan unrolled a map, intending to see where else in the surrounding areas a battle might be fought. But since the capture of Hanyang Pass, the surrounding officials of all ranks had grown well-behaved. Hardly anyone dared step out of line, leaving Wei Yuan with a powerful army but nowhere to deploy it.
If all else failed, he would simply send these Dao soldiers deep into the mines to temper their mental states. If each person polished their mind against several thousand jin of ore daily, a month of that would likely elevate Wei Yuan's own state of mind by another notch.
Right in the middle of his contemplation, a storm of magic power suddenly surged into the sky in the distance!
This was a battle between dharma idol cultivators, and a fiercely contested one at that, shocking even Wei Yuan. With only a handful of dharma idol experts in the domain, could foreign enemies have infiltrated?
Wei Yuan flickered through the air repeatedly, arriving at the scene of the skirmish in the blink of an eye. Hovering a hundred-odd zhang above the ground was a tempest of magic power over a thousand zhang wide. Blurs moved like lightning within the storm, locked in ferocious combat so intense that even Wei Yuan's eyesight could not clearly distinguish the combatants.
He then noticed Old Daoist Chuhe standing off to the side. The old Daoist looked deathly pale, his robes tattered, clutching a dharma sword with half its blade snapped off.
Wei Yuan hurried over and asked, "Who is fighting?"
Perfected Chuhe said, "A marten appeared out of nowhere. I went up to speak with it, but for some reason it started fighting with the cat, and then the snake joined in too."
Startled, Wei Yuan took a closer look and realized the three spirit beasts were indeed clashing in the tempest. Wei Yuan swiftly transmitted a mental impulse, and after trading blows for a moment longer, both sides finally disengaged.
With a flash of movement, the flying marten landed on Wei Yuan's shoulder, while the cat leaped into his arms.
Both creatures seemed astonished by the other's position. Their fur bristled simultaneously, and they lunged at each other once more. The sudden blast of magic power sent Wei Yuan flying backward.
Wei Yuan sent a stern mental command, and the cat and marten finally separated with visible reluctance. The snake coiled in midair, glaring warily at the flying marten. Several of its scales were torn, revealing deep gashes. The cat coughed up clumps of fur, yet even more fur drifted loose in the air, its body spotted with blood.
In comparison, the flying marten had sustained only light scratches.
Listening to Perfected Chuhe's explanation while attending to the accounts from the three spirit beasts, Wei Yuan gradually pieced together what had happened.
The trouble had begun when Perfected Chuhe crossed paths with the flying marten, took a liking to its talents, and tried to win it over.
*Right... he wanted to adopt another boss,* Wei Yuan silently corrected the old Daoist's version of the truth.
The flying marten felt it was already served by a two-legged beast like Wei Yuan and having another servant would only be a hassle, so it had ignored the old Daoist's earnest entreaties.
Yet the cat couldn't stand the sight, failing to understand why the old Daoist was being so attentive to another spirit beast beside itself. The two beasts could not understand each other's speech, yet grasped the general intent. Mutually repulsed by nature, they had instantly come to blows.
Wei Yuan decided it was imperative to speed up development of the spirit beast language. Over the coming days, he resolved to communicate more with the cat, the flying marten, and the snake, collecting more data samples for the mortals in the Ten Thousand Li of Rivers and Mountains to expedite the work.
Just then, a slight stir arose within the Ten Thousand Li of Rivers and Mountains. Sweeping his divine sense inward, Wei Yuan saw a crowd of mortals gathered in a courtyard, bustling about as they hung a plaque over the main hall. Across it were carved several bold, imposing characters of tremendous vigor:
Creation of Heaven and Earth Research Institute!
Chapter 405