The Shamans' advance was slow yet steady, progressing ten li each day alongside the forward crawl of the canal.
Nine hundred li from Qingming, a colossal city had already taken shape. Boundless quantities of supplies flowed ceaselessly down the waterway, small tribes arrived one after another, and every day the Shamans cleared ground for new military encampments.
On the sand table map before Wei Yuan, a straight river could be seen stabbing like a spear directly toward Qingming, its leading tip less than eight hundred li from the domain.
On the map, a small lake had appeared seven hundred li out, something that had not existed before.
Over five hundred thousand Shaman laborers, protected by an army of equal size, had advanced to this location. In just three or four days, they had dug out the lake, and they were still deepening and widening it. Clearly, once the canal reached this point, it would serve as another reservoir.
Looking at the map now, Qingming was like a pristine emerald jewel inlaid into the earth. To its west was a faint green that gradually transitioned into dark emerald green. But a slender, dark emerald needle was constantly thrusting into the pale green, closing in on the gem at the center.
At this moment, the Land of Rain was like a moving mountain, slow and inexorable, capable of crushing and destroying everything in its path.
Bao Yun flew onto the main peak and stepped into Wei Yuan's residence. There, she saw a Go board laid out before Wei Yuan. He was playing against himself, recording each move in a game manual beside him.
Bao Yun had possessed a solid foundation in the four arts—the zither, Go, calligraphy, and painting—since childhood, so she stood beside him and watched for a while. Yet after following only a few moves, she felt slightly dizzy, her mental strength drained. There were simply far too many variations in this game; many of the placements were beyond being wildly imaginative—they seemed utterly incomprehensible.
On the board, black and white tore at each other in ferocious entanglement. Every section was locked in combat, battle raging everywhere, yet each small battlefield was intertwined with the others; tugging a single thread would shake the entire board. The situation was so intricate that Bao Yun had never seen anything like it in any ancient manual.
After pondering for a long time, Wei Yuan set down another stone, thoroughly setting ablaze the board's very last patch of pure land.
Wei Yuan let out a long breath, recorded this move in the manual, and prepared to pack it away.
"You're not playing anymore?" Bao Yun could not help asking, having grown engrossed.
"Yeah, this is as far as it goes." Wei Yuan pointed into the air, and a pillar of water mixed with chunks of ice materialized out of thin air, pouring over his head. The water instantly flashed into steam, filling the entire room until one could barely see across from them.
After filling the room with steam like this, Wei Yuan's body temperature slowly cooled, finally bringing some relief. He had been running so hot he had half a mind to open a hole in his head and pour water straight in.
For this game, he had mobilized nearly the full capacity of Smoke and Fire of the Mortal World, playing for three full shichen to reach this point.
Bao Yun was no novice at Go. Seeing that the game had not even reached two hundred moves—just as the battle had grown fiercest, preceded by thousands of brilliant moves and full of endless possibilities ahead—why would he abruptly stop?
Noticing her confusion, Wei Yuan said with a weary look, "Stopping here is best. As soon as dawn breaks, I'll send people to deliver the game manual to Mister Chenzhou, Qiuyue, and those great-grandfathers of yours. Though the Seventh Elder probably won't understand it. Help me think—who else are the grandmasters? They need to be at least at Scenery Command, and preferably capable fighters."
Bao Yun grasped Wei Yuan's intention immediately. She said, "Actually, giving it to Chenzhou, Qiuyue, and Seventh Grandfather is already enough. How does the quality of this game compare to the Doodle Manual?"
Wei Yuan said, "The skill level is a whole rank higher."
"Then that's plenty. If they can't figure it out, they'll inevitably share it with other grandmasters. There's no need to deliver it upward ourselves, which would only diminish our stature. Still, when did you become so formidable at Go?"
Wei Yuan said, "It's not that I'm formidable; my dharma idol is special. It's the one that knows how to play. Speaking of which, how is your foundation coming along? How much karmic luck have you accumulated?"
"Ding'an City now has seventy thousand people, plus a garrison of forty thousand. The karmic luck is abundant—basically anyone who sees me adds a bit of karmic luck to me. It's quite strange..."
Wei Yuan thought to himself that it was not strange at all. If the eldest young lady of the Bao family claimed not to know just how lethal her face was, Wei Yuan would never believe it for a second.
Whether in looks, figure, bearing, talent, family pedigree, or erudition, this young lady was top-tier in every regard, without a single flaw. Perhaps her only defect was an occasional penchant for theatrical drama, but not just anyone got to see that side of her.
Furthermore, during the previous Shaman attack, she had genuinely repelled formidable foes, so gathering karmic luck was hardly surprising. The cultivation method she practiced also happened to require karmic luck.
Bao Yun's perception of karmic luck was relatively vague, unlike Wei Yuan, who could directly count the azure qi, violet qi, and black qi within his dharma idol. But the karmic luck she had accumulated was now ample enough to have basically made up for the deficiencies in her Dao Foundation. She was only missing that final step before it brimmed and overflowed; once the right opportunity arrived, she could attempt to break through to dharma idol.
Bao Yun's standards for her dharma idol were naturally different from Cui Yu's. She demanded absolute perfection in every aspect before she would make her breakthrough; her standards in this regard were not one bit lower than Zhang Sheng's or Ji Liuli's.
Wei Yuan had already noticed that the more one pursued perfection, the more prone one seemed to encountering complications. It had been true for Zhang Sheng, Ji Liuli, and Bao Yun alike. In contrast, those like himself and Cui Yu, who were not so particular and simply took things as they came, found breaking through to dharma idol remarkably easy.
It was just that both Zhang Sheng and Bao Yun had actually been dragged down by Wei Yuan—a fact that Wei Yuan selectively chose to forget.
Dawn was approaching, the hour when the Shamans were most exhausted. Wei Yuan flew out of Qingming and, as was his routine, made a circuit of the Wu domain to observe their progress. The night before, the Shamans had excavated ten li forward just like any other day, with increases in the numbers of both troops and laborers.
Whatever Wei Yuan saw was immediately analyzed and processed in Smoke and Fire of the Mortal World, taking stock of everything in the scenes. In the end, the Shamans within Wei Yuan's field of vision numbered seven million. Although most were civilians and laborers, the counted warriors alone already reached 1.2 million.
The provisions he could count amounted to roughly twelve days' rations, but that was no issue: as long as the canal remained, the Shamans' frontline army could never run short of grain or armaments.
Just as he returned to Qingming, Wei Yuan suddenly felt heaven and earth tremble, as though everything in creation were slowly shifting, and the Dao governing the workings of heaven and earth was beginning to change!
This was the Shamans' Heaven-and-Earth Severance: Spear!
In an instant, the rules of heaven and earth shifted slowly, and all true intents of the spear gradually dissipated, leaving only twenty to thirty percent of their original power. Wei Yuan took a spare magical spear from his storage treasure. This was a genuine spear, originally kept by Wei Yuan for executing Counter-Slay.
Wei Yuan channeled his Dao power and thrust the spear out casually; sure enough, its power was greatly diminished. He retreated several li, stepping outside the domain. Wielding the spear again without the protection of domain power, he found that the true intent of the spear within the magical weapon had almost entirely dissipated, making the circulation of Dao power exceedingly sluggish—as if he were using a fire poker.
Wei Yuan's expression turned rather odd. He raised his karmic luck, made a few wild guesses, and suddenly wondered if it had something to do with his Dusk of the Immortal Path.
The more he thought about it, the more plausible it seemed. The Nether Shamans and Sacred Shamans of the Wu race likely feared his Dusk of the Immortal Path, which was why they had sealed spears. After all, virtually none of the cultivators used spears, and those with spear foundations in their Dao Foundations were exceedingly rare.
The further along one cultivated, the more difficult advancement became, and the more vital longevity grew. Many high-level cultivators were slightly lacking in natural talent or fortune, leaving them no choice but to cultivate and accumulate bit by bit through lifespan, hoping for a rare flash of insight or opportune moment to grant a sliver of hope for a breakthrough.
However precious longevity-extending medicines were, that was precisely how abhorrent Dusk of the Immortal Path was. Yanxin had felt this most acutely—under a single spear strike, he had turned from a fresh lad who had just tasted the pleasures of the flesh into an impotent octogenarian.
Wei Yuan had never imagined that the Shamans would actually expend a precious Heaven-and-Earth Severance on spears, all merely to guard against Dusk of the Immortal Path.
As for fire guns, flying-sword guns, short-barreled cannons, and the like, even though some also shared the designation of spear in their names, none were affected by the Heaven-and-Earth Severance. The flying swords launched by flying-sword guns still carried a trace of sword intent, while the projectiles of fire guns were propelled by gunpowder and held no true intent whatsoever—or if one really had to say, perhaps a bit of lead-and-copper true intent.
Wei Yuan shook his head wryly, drew the Crimson Night Immortal-Slaying Sword, mounted it onto Brutal, and a faint dusky glow lit up at the tip. Seeing that Dusk of the Immortal Path could still function as usual, Wei Yuan felt reassured.
Just then, in the distant Wu domain, a beam of dark emerald radiance suddenly soared into the sky! Following it, boundless green qi surged from the earth, and within the freshly excavated canal, the green qi was as dense as a solid wall!
The worldly power of the Wu domain nearly boiled over, expanding furiously outward from the dark emerald pillar of light. In the northwest, the Qingming Domain was pressed back step by step, retreating in a single surge all the way to the foot of Ding'an City!
The domain had actually been forced back by forty li?!
Wei Yuan manifested his dharma idol and merged with Qingming, barely holding off the erosion of the Wu domain's worldly power. Shocked, he looked into the far distance; the origin of that dark emerald column of qi was likely nine hundred li away. Altars had been under construction there days ago, and it seemed that one of them had now been brought into use for a massive sacrificial ritual, bolstering the worldly power of the Wu domain.
The trembling of the Qingming Domain immediately alarmed the cultivators. Countless cultivators flew into the air, unaware of what had occurred.
Wei Yuan immediately flew to Ding'an City and found Bao Yun. "Change of plans," he said. "The city-defending array takes precedence now. Put all efforts into reinforcing the defensive array first."
Bao Yun promptly summoned the city's officials and generals to assign the tasks. Wei Yuan returned to the main peak and gathered the cultivators of the Palace of Grand Beginning to deliberate countermeasures.
This sacrificial ritual by the Shamans was unprecedented, capable of compressing the domain itself. For a Qingming newly established and insufficiently nurtured, it struck directly at its soft underbelly. If this happened a few more times, the entirety of Ding'an City would be left exposed outside the domain.
Once the cultivators had all gathered, Wei Yuan drew several concentric circles on the map, the innermost of which was already within a hundred li of the boundary stone.
At that moment, Smoke and Fire of the Mortal World was calculating with all its might. Combining it with his own estimations, Wei Yuan marked the numbers one, two, and five on the first three lines, then said, "If a ritual like that happens once more, the domain will retreat to the first line. Twice more, the second line. If there are five more, Ding'an City will be entirely outside the domain."
Li Zhi had long studied statecraft and governance strategies and knew a great deal about foreign races. He spoke up at once: "A ritual of this kind must come at an immense cost; in terms of direct lethality, it isn't even as effective as casting blood curses. In my view, the Shamans' objective in deploying this ritual is Ding'an City. Once they are fully prepared, they will compress the domain and leave all of Ding'an City exposed. Then, combined with blood curses, they can slaughter the city's garrison en masse. Therefore, my opinion is...
Abandon Ding'an City."
Chapter 478