By the time he finished handling the routine affairs of Qingming, dawn was already approaching.
Wei Yuan picked up a bowl of medicinal broth sitting beside him and drank it down. As it entered his belly, it felt as though he had swallowed a live coal, leaving his mouth brimming with a tart, puckering astringency akin to eating a meal of unripe preserved plums.
The moment the broth entered his stomach, a sudden spasm of agonizing pain struck; even his formidable stomach was corroded a layer thinner. Then, part of the toxins seeped out of his stomach into his thoracic and abdominal organs, while another part entered the bloodstream and spread throughout his body.
Wherever the toxins went, bodily tissues necrotized and died off.
With his internal organs damaged, the vitality within Wei Yuan's body erupted in an instant. The vitality across his flesh surged dramatically, mending the damaged organs on one hand and reinforcing existing visceral tissue on the other to guard against future poisoning. At once, an endless, maddening itch crept into the searing pain.
Only when the agonizing pain inside and out finally receded did Wei Yuan feel his wits return, allowing him to concentrate on his tasks once more. By now, his physical body's toughness had increased by a minute fraction.
This bowl of medicine was the first collaboration between Xu Henshui and Sun Yu, proclaimed as a precious cultivation concoction tailored specifically for Wei Yuan—one that only Wei Yuan could drink without dying.
The concoction relied primarily on virulent toxins, designed to strike every vital tissue of Wei Yuan's body thoroughly and evenly, thereby fully awakening his body's innate instincts and enhancing his physical strength through the process of repairing the damage.
Sun Yu had handled the toxic components and medicinal principles, while Xu Henshui was responsible for refining the formula and concocting it. Xu Henshui's alchemy was truly extraordinary; under his hand, the broth's potency had increased by fifty percent out of thin air. For anyone other than Wei Yuan, a single sip meant certain death—the kind where even an Immortal Monarch could not save them.
That it could actually push Wei Yuan's physical body further proved it was a miraculous medicine indeed.
It was just that Xu Henshui had inherited the vile habit of the Monastery of Creation: the broth tasted like slop wastewater that had sat in a kitchen for several days, inflicting psychological trauma on Wei Yuan that far surpassed the physical torment.
The original intention behind developing this medicine was actually to enhance the physical bodies of low-tier cultivators. Among cultivators, the vast majority were Body Casting cultivators unable to establish a Dao Foundation. Sun Yu had long wanted to research a medicine capable of tempering their physiques, which was the quickest and most effective way for bottom-tier cultivators to boost their combat strength.
Once the formula was refined by Xu Henshui and concocted by his hands, its toxicity skyrocketed, so the two of them sought out Wei Yuan to test it. After multiplying the dosage several times, they finally reached an amount that yielded noticeable effects on Wei Yuan.
A medicine that could take effect even on Wei Yuan would undoubtedly prove several times more potent on ordinary Body Casting cultivators. It was just that this single bowl Wei Yuan drank could likely poison thousands of Body Casting cultivators to death.
The reason Wei Yuan cooperated so willingly in testing the medicine was that it could markedly accelerate the Body Casting process for mortals and increase the proportion of Body Casting cultivators who attained great completion.
Having finished the medicine, Wei Yuan continued reading historical texts. This time, he was searching for the problems and answers regarding the status promotion system.
Among the four tiers—guilty commoners, soldiers, commoners, and registered official posts—rising from guilty commoner to soldier was quite easy. However, the registered official tier encompassed many ranks and was exceptionally difficult to advance through. One had to decapitate thirty thousand enemies on the battlefield to reach Brigade General, ensuring their numbers would remain few. The main reason was that the imperial court had only granted Wei Yuan two Brigade General positions, and one was already occupied by Cui Yu.
Thus, for this final stretch, Wei Yuan needed it to be visible to the people yet kept out of their reach, which gave rise to the preposterous military merit requirement of slaying thirty thousand on the battlefield. Of course, anyone truly capable of felling thirty thousand enemies in battle was bound to be a high-tier dharma idol cultivator, who would hardly care about a mere Brigade General rank anyway.
Therefore, the core of the entire system actually lay in the transition from soldier to commoner; the crux was how to make people willing to advance from soldier to commoner.
Whether this advancement channel was effective hinged on what one could gain as a commoner, and whether it held sufficient appeal.
And right now, what attracted people most was land.
Regarding land, both Great Tang and the world beyond the heavens attached immense importance to it. Great Tang's historical texts held that land annexation by powerful aristocratic clans was the primary cause of a dynasty's downfall. Yet records from the world beyond the heavens showed that vast concentrations of land in the hands of the wealthy had little consequence. This seemed quite contradictory.
Beyond that, the world beyond the heavens also featured systems such as communal land ownership or restrictions on land transfer. However, Xu Wenwu lacked specialized knowledge in this area; he merely knew the facts without understanding the underlying principles, so his recorded notes were rather fragmented. Only through the reverse deductions of the Smoke and Fire of the Mortal World did Wei Yuan arrive at a systematic understanding.
The world beyond the heavens ultimately drifted toward two extremes: one was public ownership of land, and the other was completely unrestricted private transactions.
Currently, the domain operated under an extreme wartime model where all land belonged to Wei Yuan alone, and everyone's basic necessities—clothing, food, shelter, and travel—were provided entirely by Wei Yuan.
Wei Yuan had deduced that with his Smoke and Fire of the Mortal World dharma idol, such a system could indeed be sustained. He could manage the affairs of over a million people down to the finest detail. Under his innate Diting divine ability, there was no room for malfeasance or slacking off.
Wei Yuan retrieved a sheet of paper, writing down the current system on one side and unrestricted land transfer on the other. After pondering for a long while, he finally wrote "granted land" in the middle, then added two tags: "commoners" and "military merit."
By comparing the systems of the two worlds, Wei Yuan discovered that although unrestricted land transactions were the root cause of dynastic collapse in Great Tang and past dynasties, they did not affect the state fortune of the powerful nations in the world beyond the heavens. The difference was that agricultural yields were of paramount importance in Great Tang, whereas in the world beyond the heavens, they accounted for a negligible share.
The world beyond the heavens had no shortage of grain at all; people starved only because they could not afford it, not because it could not be transported to them.
Thus, Wei Yuan crossed out unrestricted land transfer. That system was clearly beyond Qingming's current capacity. Meanwhile, the wartime policy where all fields belonged to the Domain Lord alone had to be phased out gradually. In this interim stage, granting land to commoners became the ideal transition.
Wei Yuan's thoughts flowed like a spring. Under the real-time optimization of the Smoke and Fire of the Mortal World, he restructured the commoner tier. The revised commoner status was divided into six grades, with each grade naturally requiring ever more military merit.
Wei Yuan also delineated a parcel of farmland around each city to serve as granted land. Once domain citizens reached first-grade commoner status, they earned the right to redeem military merit for one mu of granted land. Each subsequent grade allowed them to redeem an amount of granted land equal to that grade's number. By advancing to sixth-grade commoner, they could redeem a total of twenty-one mu of land. Given that Qingming currently yielded six harvests a year, if one sought only subsistence, those twenty-odd mu could sustain sixty people.
Granted land could not be bought or sold; if one no longer wanted it, it had to be sold back to the Military Commissioner's Office. This would eliminate the problem of wealthy clans annexing land at this stage. At the same time, Wei Yuan stipulated that the tax on granted land would be twenty percent of the harvest, never to be increased.
In a human domain where ordinary land rents currently stood at fifty percent or even higher, possessing a plot of granted land meant an entire family would never again have to worry about food and clothing.
After further optimization and deduction through the Smoke and Fire of the Mortal World, this system was deemed viable. Thus, after deliberate consideration, Wei Yuan drafted the new system, intending to discuss it tomorrow with the cultivators of the Palace of Grand Beginning before promulgating it.
According to the deductions of the Smoke and Fire of the Mortal World, the commoner class would soon become the mainstream among Qingming's populace in the coming period.
This group's identification with and loyalty toward Qingming would far surpass that of the surrendered Xu family troops, imperial soldiers, and the displaced refugees taken in during the mid and late stages, second only to the original refugees and rogue cultivators who had first arrived in Qingming.
Furthermore, Wei Yuan considered a deeper implication: only with a stable livelihood could there be a foundation for widespread literacy education and the popularization of Body Casting cultivation methods. Only then could Qingming take its first step toward a world where everyone was like a dragon.
Chapter 448