As to whether the Peerless Dao Domain truly was peerless under heaven, Wei Yuan had no idea. That was simply the name of the divine wonder, bestowed upon it by the Immortal Monarch who had refined Qingming.
Once the Peerless Dao Domain was activated, all karmic luck and feng shui within the domain would favor humans and disadvantage non-humans from that moment on, and the speed of transforming heaven and earth was accelerated.
Its second function was that by expending Qingming's power, it could purge all curses and Dao arts cast by enemies within the domain, including natural disaster Dao arts.
As for the amount of Qingming's power consumed in dispelling curses, according to the immortal's explanation, so long as the enemy was not employing immortal arts, Qingming's harmony with the Great Dao of heaven and earth meant it would cost at most a quarter of the power required by the opponent's curse.
If the curse was not cast by a Scenery Command cultivator, the cost plummeted to a tenth of the enemy's magic power.
Thirdly, when cleansing enemy curses, depending on various factors such as the current Great Fortune and feng shui of heaven and earth, as well as the karmic luck states of the casters on both sides, the domain's power could inflict a random additional strike upon the enemy caster, functioning much like a curse-kill.
Learning of this new divine wonder, Wei Yuan was both surprised and delighted.
"Peerless Dao Domain"—the name sounded immensely boastful, but its capabilities were truly formidable. With this divine wonder activated, the claim that Qingming was the number one boundary stone under heaven finally held a shred or two of credibility.
At this moment, Qingming trembled ceaselessly. The heaven and earth of the entire domain were shifting, and a profoundly mysterious aura filled the expanse.
The blood clouds in the sky faded noticeably in color, and the curse-killing power of the falling blood rain diminished by at least thirty percent. The red leaves drifting through the air thinned drastically, reduced to a mere twenty or thirty percent of their former numbers.
This was merely the passive effect of the Peerless Dao Domain upon activation, yet it had already severely undermined the Shamans' curse-kill. Wei Yuan attempted to channel the domain's power, and a bell toll rang out in his ears, rippling across the entire domain in an instant.
An invisible astral wind seemed to sweep through Qingming, scouring away every last red leaf, while the blood clouds in the sky were torn to tatters. In that instant, Wei Yuan's mind merged with Qingming, and he faintly sensed a presence far away, brimming with hostility.
Wei Yuan immediately followed the technique recorded within the divine wonder, blending together the scattered grievances, malice, and misfortune left by dispelling the shamanic art, imbuing them into divine lightning, and hurled a bolt straight at that presence!
Nine hundred li away, Hongye's face turned pale. "My shamanic art has been broken!" he gasped.
The Sacred Shaman was shocked. "World's Decay? Isn't that your innate shamanic art? Even we Sacred Shamans can hardly neutralize it and must endure it with brute force. Who could break your innate shamanic art? Could an Immortal Monarch of the human race have intervened in secret?"
Hongye's expression fluctuated. He frowned. "The sensation was exceedingly bizarre. It felt like an immortal, yet not quite. Ambiguous, almost elusive... Who's there?!"
A patch of shadow suddenly materialized in the void above him, followed by a bolt of foul-smelling, greenish-yellow yin lightning crashing down.
The strike arrived without the slightest omen, manifesting the instant the thought arose. Caught completely off guard, Hongye took a direct hit. His head spun, his stomach churned violently, and an indescribable stench erupted from deep within him, forcing him to his knees as he violently vomited up everything he had eaten over the past several days!
The Sacred Shaman beside him stared dumbfounded. "Th-this lightning..."
The intrinsic power of this yin lightning was not terribly great, but the chaotic bundle of true intents attached to it was utterly devastating. It was the sum total of everything loathed by sentient, feeling beings—an amalgam of true intents representing stench, rot, decay, viscidity, disease, and more.
Whatever a living creature despised most could be found within it—and found directly inside the mouth, stomach, and even the primordial soul and sea of consciousness. Thus, severing one's divine sense was useless here.
Even with Hongye's cultivation, unprepared as he was, he had no choice but to vomit on the spot.
Back in Qingming, Wei Yuan unleashed the lightning bolt using the domain's power, only to discover its offensive strength was unexpectedly weak. Yet, augmented by those messy true intents, the hostile figure became vastly clearer in his perception. It felt as though, in the vast expanse of a pitch-black night, what had once been only a faint candlelight in the distance had now flared into a blazing torch.
Wei Yuan instantly understood the function of this Dao art: it was a marker. It ensured that anyone casting curses upon Qingming would have nowhere to hide.
In fact, no marker was even needed; from the direction and distance of the hostile presence, Wei Yuan had already concluded it must be Hongye.
Yet now that the domain's power was active, Wei Yuan's perception became exceedingly peculiar. He felt as though no distance existed between himself and Hongye; any Dao art could lock onto Hongye and strike him directly. The hundreds of li of boundless terrain separating them seemed illusory, as if it did not exist at all.
A thought stirred in Wei Yuan's heart. He suddenly noticed that the Red Lotus Bodhi was wreathed in black mist, as if shrouded in thick smoke, while its trunk and branches had turned blood-red, as though about to drip blood. Its karmic debt had reached such an overwhelming degree that even a sacred Buddhist treasure like the Red Lotus Bodhi could no longer digest it.
Wei Yuan suddenly remembered that the Arhat had also imparted the Red Lotus Universal Deliverance True Words back then, though he had never had an occasion to use them before. Now, in a flash of inspiration, the incantation returned to his mind.
Wei Yuan immediately linked his divine sense to the Red Lotus Bodhi, channeling its overflowing karmic debt, and began chanting the Red Lotus Universal Deliverance True Words: "...All conditioned dharmas should be viewed like this..."
In the blink of an eye, the chanting concluded. Wei Yuan formed a flower-pinching mudra and pointed distantly toward Hongye, consummating the incantation. More than half of the Red Lotus Bodhi's karmic debt vanished instantly, and the bewitching blood-light upon its trunk dimmed.
Within the Dao domain, Hongye looked as though struck by a bludgeon across the skull. His aura plummeted, and then he dissolved like a bubble, leaving behind only the boundless Dao domain and nothing else.
A flash of lightning seemed to strike Wei Yuan's mind, and he blurted out, "This is a karma Dao art!"
The boundless world in the Dao domain truly was illusory; all that existed was karma. And that bolt of yin lightning was a Dao art meant to mark the target and strengthen the karmic connection, paving the way for potent follow-up Dao arts.
A true method of an immortal!
Regret washed over Wei Yuan in an instant. Had he known earlier, he would have hit Hongye with Dusk of the Immortal Path instead, sending the old bastard peacefully to his grave.
Still, the Red Lotus Universal Deliverance True Words hardly seemed gentle either.
Throughout the war so far, at least a hundred-odd thousand Shamans had died directly or indirectly at Wei Yuan's hands, more than a hundred thousand civilians had fallen in battle under his orders, and countless tangled karmic threads had accumulated, amassing a karmic debt so dense that even the Bodhi tree before the Buddha could not bear it. Yet with a single Universal Deliverance incantation, Wei Yuan had dumped half of that karmic debt onto someone else.
Evidently, judging solely by his methods, that Vast Wisdom Supreme Universal Deliverance Arhat back in his day had likely been quite ruthless himself.
With no time to ponder further, Wei Yuan seized the opportunity after dealing Hongye a savage blow. He immediately led his army in a direct advance, driving the routed enemies before him out of Qingming, then abruptly wheeled his forces left, charging into the flank of the Shaman army's central legion.
At that moment, desolate horn blasts echoed across the battlefield, and the Shaman army receded like an ebbing tide.
Seeing the Shamans retreat some distance, Wei Yuan only then realized that this battle had already been won.
Meanwhile, atop the altar in the center of the lake, blood wept from both of Hongye's eyes. Dense black mist lingered stubbornly between his brows, and an aura of rot and decay emanated from the inside out, making him look as if he had aged several centuries. He felt sticky all over, as though he had gone days without bathing.
He casually wiped beneath his nose, only to come away with a hand full of blood!
Yet this blood was a dark purple, reeking of putrefaction.
Hongye grabbed the Sacred Shaman and rasped hoarsely, "Quick! Take me to the Great Altar and preside over a purification ritual! Damned humans... they polluted my cultivation foundation with karmic debt!"
The Sacred Shaman asked in shock, "How did they manage that? I didn't sense a thing just now."
Gritting his teeth, Hongye spat, "It's a karma Dao art! They have an immortal!"
The Sacred Shaman's demeanor turned grave. Grabbing Hongye, he flew into the distance, pausing only to instruct a Nether Shaman, "Withdraw the army for now. We will return in seven days."
Once Hongye departed, the Shaman host splintered into disarray, retreating in utter chaos. Wei Yuan pursued with everything he had, claiming tens of thousands more heads, but he halted after chasing them thirty li beyond the domain, recalling his troops to Qingming.
A great battle thus drew to a close.
Yet Wei Yuan knew this was merely the first battle. The Shamans had clearly held the tactical advantage on the battlefield; why had they suddenly retreated? Perhaps because he had struck Hongye with the Universal Deliverance True Words?
Another possibility was that the Shaman army's momentum was not as impregnable as it appeared. Using secret arts to suppress their soldiers' fear and desire to survive likely carried an exorbitant price, one that could not be sustained for long.
Wei Yuan promptly brought out the elite forces he had kept in reserve to guard the boundary of the domain, then dispatched the standby civilians to clean and sweep the battlefield.
By a rough estimate, Qingming had lost nearly a hundred and fifty thousand lives in this battle, ninety percent of whom were civilians. The twenty thousand troops of the Dragon Wing and Longxiang armies were preserved intact, having sat out the entire engagement. Of the hundred and fifty thousand standing troops of the Five Armies, twenty-odd thousand were killed or wounded, leaving their core strength largely preserved.
Of the eighty thousand civilians who had marched out ready to die, twenty thousand had fallen, while the remainder would still be sent to the battlefield in rotation. Once the newly recruited refugees were organized and drilled, they would need to be led into battle as well.
Each of the eighty thousand civilians wore a metal tag around their neck, engraved with their name and basic identifying information. This was another practice learned from Xu Wenwu's records. That way, if someone fell in battle, even if their face was mangled beyond recognition, their identity would remain known.
Surprisingly, when handing out the small steel tags, Wei Yuan had actually reaped a fair amount of karmic luck. Presumably, no one had ever cared about these mortals before. In the eyes of the rulers of the Nine Kingdoms, when a mere mortal died, they were simply dead; there was no need to waste time learning their names, nor was there any need to bury or cremate them. There were pits dedicated to piling corpses, into which they were simply tossed.
The Shamans, on the other hand, had left behind at least three hundred and fifty thousand corpses, with hundreds of thousands more wounded. The vast majority of Shamans had perished from artillery bombardment and missiles; even gunshot wounds were rare.
Yet no one could celebrate. Almost everyone knew someone who had died in battle. Everyone worked with tense urgency; only staying busy could briefly dull their grief.
At this time, the ground floor of the Lingxiao Heroic Spirits Hall had just been capped with a roof, and people were already arranging rows of shelves inside. Desks were lined up in a row at the hall's entrance, with Cai Shizhi's students seated behind them. Taking each identity tag, they transcribed the information onto a memorial tablet. Dedicated workers then carried the tablets up to the shelves to be enshrined.
A boy who was clearly not yet of age carried several tablets to an empty wooden shelf. He placed the tablets up one by one, softly reciting the names as he did so. His still-childish voice echoed softly in a corner of the hall:
"...Hu Laosan, Liao Yong... Fei, no, it's Pei, Pei Yi..."
Chapter 496