Waves of Shaman warriors surged toward the domain like a green tide. Ding'an City stood like a reef of stone, holding firm amidst the scouring emerald flood. Yet the flood was simply too vast, rolling outward along both flanks. Ding'an City was built midway up the mountainside; to its east stretched flat, open plains, while rolling hills rose to the west and south.
The Shaman host split into two wings to flank the position. Across the plains, Wei Yuan had already erected seven or eight small forts, each garrisoned with a thousand soldiers and equipped with five or six cannons, forming a formidable line of defense.
Yet the Shaman troops were simply overwhelming in number—six hundred thousand laid siege to Ding'an City itself, while two hundred thousand swept around each flank. In mere moments, the foremost two small forts were overrun. The green tide washed over them, tearing the defenders within to shreds in an instant.
Two Great Shamans, exhilarated by the slaughter, leapt straight into the third small fort and began butchering the defenders. One of them transformed his left hand into a blade over a zhang long; with a casual sweep, he cleaved seven or eight human soldiers in half!
At that moment, three or four ordinary human soldiers cowered together before him, their faces pale with terror.
The Great Shaman relished nothing more than clustered prey. Flicking out a two-foot-long tongue to lick the blood from his blade, he was about to bring it down upon their heads when a massive hand seized his head and ripped it clean off!
The moment the other Great Shaman caught sight of that figure, he turned tail and fled!
Stepping out from behind the fallen Great Shaman, the figure was none other than Wei Yuan.
Reaching down, he ripped off the Great Shaman's bladed arm and hurled it with tremendous force. Like a bolt of lightning, the blade pierced through the fleeing Great Shaman's body in an instant, extinguishing all his life.
Wei Yuan mounted the fort's parapet. A halo of light burst open before him as a water blade gleaming with dazzling golden radiance shot from his hand, sweeping through the endless ranks of the Shaman army.
Wei Yuan's golden water blade could burrow rapidly through the earth, and against ordinary Shaman soldiers, it was utterly devastating. Wherever the water blade grazed, flesh and blood vanished in an instant. With a broad horizontal sweep of the massive water blade, an open clearing dozens of zhang wide was instantly carved out before him, littered with severed limbs, liquefied flesh, and rolling heads.
A hundred zhang away stood a great banner emblazoned with the insignia of a legion commander. Among the Shamans, five or six ten-thousand-man brigades typically formed a legion, and multiple legions joined into a grand army corps.
Spotting the banner, Wei Yuan instantly altered the trajectory of the water blade, sending it shooting straight toward it. It tore through the opposition like dry twigs, slicing and crushing countless Shaman warriors into paste along the way!
Such a gruesome death struck utter terror into the ranks, rattling the legion's morale. And when the legion commander saw the water blade carving through his army and rapidly closing in, he was scared out of his wits and fled without hesitation.
Though he held high rank, he was merely a Great Shaman himself, having attained his position solely through noble blood rather than superior prowess. Having just witnessed Wei Yuan rip two Great Shamans apart with his bare hands, how could he dare withstand a single blow from him?
With the legion commander fleeing, the great banner moved with him. The legion's morale collapsed in an instant, and hordes of Shaman warriors began retreating. Yet behind them, two more legions were pressing forward; the colliding forces crashed into each other, resulting in untold casualties.
By this time, the walls of Ding'an City were swarming with Shaman troops. The bunkers were completely surrounded, falling silent one after another. Only the gate towers continued firing desperately, constantly cutting down Shamans.
Shaman warriors had already begun leaping down from the battlements into the city. The reserve troops trapped inside the shelters could not even poke their heads out, let alone rush into the bunkers to reinforce them.
Within the City Lord's Manor, Bao Yun finally gave the order. A plume of crimson smoke shot straight into the sky!
Atop more than a dozen high towers at the rear of Ding'an City, the tarpaulins were pulled away to reveal dozens of retrofitted city defense cannons. Every single cannon roared to life simultaneously—and their target was unexpectedly the forward wall of Ding'an City!
The shells exploded upon impact. Hundreds of shrapnel fragments ripped through countless Shaman warriors atop the wall, tearing them to pieces in an instant, while shockwaves blasted the surrounding Shamans into the air. Meanwhile, the surviving human soldiers were sheltered within bunkers forged of concrete and steel plates, impervious to the bombardment.
Right after, shrill howls pierced the air as more than a dozen missiles streaked toward the Shaman army's center. Great Shamans within the Shaman ranks acted immediately; over a hundred shamanic arts wove into a multicolored cloud before them, barring the missiles' path.
Yet every missile shifted course simultaneously, plunging straight downward to detonate in front of Ding'an City—right where the Shaman army was packed most densely!
Over a dozen colossal fireballs billowed skyward, leaving more than a dozen vast craters of emptiness amidst the crowded Shaman formations. This single salvo of missiles took the lives of over ten thousand Shaman warriors.
The cannons atop the towers behind Ding'an City boomed relentlessly, pounding the Shamans on the walls without pause. Driven from behind, more Shaman troops were shoved onto the battlements, but without cover or concealment on the bare walls, they howled like ghosts and wolves under the bombardment. Some simply jumped off the wall.
The wall was not particularly high anyway; jumping down would not kill them.
Those Shamans who had breached the city, however, were not so fortunate. While the cannon fire cut off their reinforcements, large cohorts of Qingming's heavily armored elites finally emerged. Surrounding these lightly armored Shaman warriors, they unleashed a ruthless slaughter, wiping out all several thousand Shamans inside the city in the blink of an eye.
The defense cannons roared without cease, sweeping the battlements with fire again and again. These fragmentation-heavy shells caused little damage to sturdy structures, but their lethality against Shaman flesh was terrifying.
The Shamans' behemoths had suffered heavy losses in the initial bombardment during the assault, but now they were dragged forward once more. With the defense cannons on the city wall entirely destroyed and the high towers to the rear having limited range that could not reach them, the Shamans drove the behemoths before the city once again.
Pack beasts followed behind pulling carts loaded with leather balls filled with venomous water. The behemoths scooped up ball after ball and hurled them directly into the city!
The leather balls burst upon impact, splashing venomous water everywhere. Its corrosive effect on wood was exceptionally violent; wooden buildings across the city collapsed in swaths. A soldier who accidentally stepped into the black water lost his footing instantly and fell into it, letting out harrowing screams.
A nearby captain stopped his subordinates from rushing forward to help, then slashed out with an ice blade, putting an end to the man's agony.
Wei Yuan looked on coldly, paying no heed to the tragic scene within Ding'an City. While continuing to reap the fleeing Shaman troops ahead with his golden water blade, he waited for the behemoths to fully deploy. The moment they gathered together, his divine sense stirred.
Howling roars cut across the battlefield once more as over a dozen missiles streaked in at high speed, targeting the Shaman center again. This time, however, the Great Shamans were wiser; their intercepting shamanic arts were not concentrated in a single place, and they released swarms of flying, self-detonating shaman-bugs. On the ground, whenever Shaman formations clustered too tightly, commanders promptly dispersed them, terrified of becoming targets for the missiles.
Yet this time, multiple cultivators guided the missiles. Their trajectories flickered erratically before dispersing into the Shaman ranks. Only two missiles, which had seemed to drift sluggishly through the air, suddenly accelerated at the end, breaking through the interception and slamming straight into the cluster of behemoths!
Each missile was packed with a thousand jin of gunpowder, leaving nothing alive within a radius of fifty zhang. Thick-skinned and hardy though the behemoths were, they could not withstand the blast shockwaves, while the immensely lethal fragments tore straight through two or three behemoths in succession.
When the two missiles struck, half of the Shamans' immensely precious war behemoths were instantly obliterated, leaving fewer than a hundred surviving. By comparison, the few thousand corpses and several hundred sharpshooters claimed by the other missiles hardly seemed to matter.
To the east of Ding'an City, Wei Yuan stood like an unshakeable pillar, relying on the firepower of several small forts to firmly hold the line against the Shaman flank, all while directing his attention to controlling the broader battle.
To the west of Ding'an City, Li Zhi commanded his core forces, utilizing the mountainous terrain to construct defensive positions, with Wei Yuan having supplied them with an abundance of fire guns and ammunition.
Yet in the blink of an eye, all the ammunition was spent. Shamans flooded over the mountains and plains, charging into the positions and locking in brutal melee combat with Li Zhi's troops.
Just then, an invisible power descended from the heavens. As though injected with pure fire, every soldier felt the power within him surge and boil, cleaving Shaman warriors down like chopping vegetables.
Though this power did not last long—fewer than thirty breaths in total—it was enough for Li Zhi's troops to butcher every Shaman who had overrun their positions, forcing the rest to fall back and regroup.
Like the stingiest of miserly landlords, Wei Yuan meticulously calculated the nurturing power accumulated by Qingming, triggering Ephemeral Multitude with absolute precision and refusing to keep it active for even a single breath more than necessary.
At this moment, he suddenly sensed an unusual and subtle shift between heaven and earth. A passage seemed to have opened in the vault of heaven, continuously drawing something upward from below.
Deep within Wei Yuan's eyes, the colors shifted, turning black in one pupil and white in the other. Before him unfolded a sight invisible to ordinary mortals and the vast majority of cultivators alike.
A gargantuan vortex had formed in the sky, from whose center hung a colossal pillar of light. Guided by an unseen tug, the souls of countless fallen Shamans flew toward the pillar, ascending within it all the way out beyond the celestial vault!
The pillar of light descended almost hugging the boundary of the Qingming Domain, thereby drawing in nearly every soul of the fallen Shamans.
Wei Yuan did not know what was happening, but instinctively felt it boded no good. What was the purpose of taking back these Shaman souls?
To reincarnate them as puppets? To smelt them into stronger souls? Or to transform them into vicious wraiths?
With a shift of Wei Yuan's thought, Maiden Yin-Yang within the Smoke and Fire of the Mortal World stirred. From beneath her feet spread black and white domains, forming two colossal yin-yang fish. At the eye of the fish, the yang eye faintly gave rise to rising flames, while the yin eye rippled with water's sheen.
The warped world around her abruptly flung open, and two pillars of light—one black, one white—soared straight into the sky!
Beneath Wei Yuan's feet, two faint yin-yang fish materialized, slowly rotating. The Shaman souls nearer to him instantly altered their course, plunging into the black-and-white curtain of light. Soon, many Shaman souls plainly entangled in dark red grievance also abandoned the light pillar descending from the sky and converged on Wei Yuan instead.
For a time, the two forces vied back and forth on a plane verging on the Great Dao, competing for the wandering Shaman souls!
This was a contest between Maiden Yin-Yang and that magnificent will beyond the heavens, yet she managed to wrest away twenty percent of the souls.
Nine hundred li away, atop the altar, Hongye suddenly looked toward Qingming. In his perception, many Shaman souls were mysteriously vanishing. Piercing through layered obstacles, Hongye's gaze fell upon the black-and-white curtain of light around Wei Yuan.
"He dares snatch the souls of my clan!" A cold light glinted in Hongye's eyes. With a wave of his broad hand, two Nether Shamans set out immediately, flying toward Qingming.
With the Nether Shamans entering the battlefield, the curtain on the war had fully risen.
Chapter 493