Wei Yuan flew straight above the porridge station and released his dharma idol. Around him materialized the illusory panorama of evening lanterns beginning to glow and the bustling prosperity of the mortal world. At the same time, the aura of his dharma idol bore down so heavily that tens of thousands of displaced refugees below could not lift their heads. All the Dao Foundation cultivators, whether of the Mortal Tier or Immortal Tier, were pinned completely unable to move so long as they stood within range of Wei Yuan's dharma idol.
Having first suppressed the entire scene with sheer presence, thunderous iron hooves soon rumbled from the surroundings as a thousand Dragon Wing heavy cavalrymen stationed nearby arrived on the scene. They halted a hundred zhang off in the distance, watching quietly from afar.
Only then did the refugees learn fear. Panic spread among them, and all the clamoring instigators vanished into thin air.
Seeing that order had been restored, Wei Yuan spoke in a deep voice, "Rest assured, everyone! There is plenty of grain! Not a single liang of what each person is owed will be missing!"
The refugees remained dubious, yet beneath Wei Yuan's forceful suppression, no one dared utter a word for the moment.
Just then, another Dharma Idol cultivator flew over at high speed from afar, using Dao techniques to support over a hundred sacks of grain, and tossed them down into a porridge station that had already run out of food. At the sight of grain, cheers immediately erupted from the refugees!
Seizing the moment, Wei Yuan called out clearly, "We did not expect so many people to arrive today and were momentarily unprepared. However, a large supply of grain will arrive shortly! You need only wait for the burn of a stick of incense!"
A moment later, a swarm of Dao Foundation cultivators flew in, each hauling ten sacks of grain. These sacks were uniformly commissioned by Qingming, each holding a standard hundred jin of grain. The refugees finally settled down. Many knelt and kowtowed toward Wei Yuan right where they stood,
replenishing several thousand wisps of the azure qi that Wei Yuan had previously exhausted.
Yet accompanied by the azure qi came a thick karmic debt. The trunk of the Red Lotus Bodhi once again glowed bright red, its leaves continuously swaying in a gentle rhythm. With each flutter, a new sprout would unfurl on its branches.
Gazing at these strands of azure qi, Wei Yuan felt a sudden twinge of sorrow.
Back then, he had labored long and hard just to scrape together a few hundred wisps of azure karmic luck. Now, merely replenishing grain in time and setting up more desks for registration had yielded ten times as much azure karmic luck.
These mortals truly were easy to appease. A single full meal was enough to earn their human karmic luck. No doubt they had never once had even this minuscule wish granted.
Once the massive shipment of grain was delivered, Wei Yuan ordered his men to summon the managers of every porridge station and demanded they surrender their ledgers of grain receipts and porridge distributions on the spot.
In the blink of an eye, twenty ledgers lay before Wei Yuan. Picking one up, he flipped through it swiftly, its entries recorded and committed to the Smoke and Fire of the Mortal World.
Having reviewed all twenty ledgers in mere moments, Wei Yuan could not find the slightest flaw from the numbers alone.
The quantities dispatched from the granaries matched the quantities received at the stations.
The party behind this possessed considerable influence and knew the trade inside out; not a single discrepancy showed in the ledgers of all twenty porridge stations.
Even so, Qingming's current accounting system remained quite rudimentary: it merely recorded simple dates and figures, without any audits or cross-examinations. Porridge stations operated under intense strain, immediately turning grain into porridge and steamed buns the moment it arrived, and no one ever counted whether the grain coming into storage matched the records. Aside from the managers, none of the workers at the porridge stations were literate, so cross-checking was out of the question.
Setting the ledgers down, Wei Yuan said coolly, "Speak the truth now, and you may yet keep your lives. Speak: who put you up to embezzling relief grain?"
Among the twenty managers, some had shifting eyes, some appeared composed, and others trembled from head to foot, yet not one opened his mouth. Wei Yuan let out a cold laugh. As a Dharma Idol cultivator, he had plenty of ways to pry words from mortals who had not even achieved a Dao Foundation. But since this case involved so many individuals, cultivator methods were not yet necessary. Wei Yuan said, "Bring up a batch of porridge station workers."
Once they were escorted in, Wei Yuan asked, "Which porridge stations handed out porridge too quickly today and went to borrow grain from other stations?"
A few workers whispered hesitantly, "The manager told us not to say—"
A warrior standing beside them barked furiously, "Blind dog! You stand before the Domain Lord, yet you dare mince words? Are you looking to die!"
Scared half to death, the workers kowtowed repeatedly and pointed out all the managers who had forbidden them from speaking the truth.
Those managers began shivering like chaff. Suddenly, one of them let out a miserable shriek, blood gushing from his mouth as he actually tried to bite his own tongue off to commit suicide.
Wei Yuan flicked a finger, and a Lesser Clear Spring Art fell upon the man. The bleeding slowed immediately, but the agonizing pain did not lessen in the slightest.
"You think you can kill yourself before me? Heh, feel free to bite a few more times and see if you actually manage to die." Wei Yuan continued the interrogation, quickly confirming that eight porridge stations in total were involved.
Faced with ironclad evidence, the managers had no way to deny it and were forced to confess truthfully.
The mastermind behind this was a merchant guild from Zhao. The guild manager had observed for several days, noticing that Qingming had vast amounts of grain circulating through its hands with only simple entries recorded at dispatch and intake, never audited. Thus, he found a business opportunity.
When grain entered a porridge station, only the manager recorded it. The other workers were illiterate, merely hauling the sacks inside.
He approached the station managers one by one and bribed the grain transporters to haul away a portion of the grain mid-route, then split the shortfall among the bribed porridge stations. When serving porridge, the stations deliberately slowed their pace, thinning the porridge slightly and making the steamed buns smaller. The refugees were starving, wolfing down whatever they were handed, with no means to compare.
When grain eventually ran short, these stations would balance stocks with others—a common occurrence that raised no suspicions. The workers merely thought they were borrowing a bit more grain than usual this time. The managers of other porridge stations knew about this as well; though they did not actively participate, they accepted gifts, which bought their tacit silence.
In this manner, all the porridge sheds ran low on stores simultaneously. Normally, another shipment would simply be requisitioned from the granary, and no one would be any the wiser.
Yet unnoticed, tens of thousands of jin of grain had vanished.
What these conspirators had never anticipated was that today was the day the refugees sold to Wei Yuan by Cui Shutong arrived. Cui Shutong had acted on a grand scale, sending over a hundred and fifty thousand people all at once! As a result, the porridge stations ran completely out of grain shortly after midday.
Furthermore, the movement of grain into and out of storage was of paramount importance, meaning all its data was backed up within the Smoke and Fire of the Mortal World. The moment Wei Yuan discovered the porridge stations were out of food, he immediately noticed the numbers did not add up.
It was only because Wei Yuan had not yet fully activated Qingming's Zhou Tian Celestial Stars Array to surveil heaven and earth. Once the full array was complete, it would possess the capability to record every detail of information within its coverage area. By then, the moment grain was transported in any other direction, Wei Yuan would detect it instantly.
Wei Yuan immediately sent men to seize that Zhao merchant caravan's manager. Yet after waiting a short while, not only had they failed to capture him, but the men Wei Yuan sent had even been beaten and injured.
Hearing this, Wei Yuan froze for a moment before snapping back to reality. Could such an absurd thing actually happen?
Without a word, Wei Yuan soared into the sky, arriving at the Zhao caravan's compound in an instant. By now, the city defense troops had already surrounded the merchant quarters, while hundreds of caravan guards were assembling in formation—their numbers actually exceeding those of the city defense forces.
These caravan guards wore splendid armor and were burly and well-fed, outfitted with gear even superior to Zhao's regular army. Every one of them wore an arrogant, domineering sneer, holding the city defense soldiers opposite them in utter contempt.
Inside the shop, a noble young master was hurriedly packing his belongings, busily boxing up antique after antique. Several pretty concubines were also gathering valuables in a chaotic scurry.
Several retainers were piling up firewood and dry grass in the storehouse, dousing it with kerosene, preparing to set the place ablaze.
When Wei Yuan arrived, he saw a retainer light a torch and toss it onto the pile of firewood.
Having thrown the torch, the retainer quickly skipped backward a few paces, only to see the flame flicker a few times before abruptly extinguishing. The retainers could hardly believe their eyes. They hurled several more torches onto the pile, but each met the exact same fate. Looking at one another in bewilderment, they wondered if the oil they had poured was somehow fake.
Just then, the majestic aura of a dharma idol descended from above like an all-enveloping canopy, pinning everyone of insufficient cultivation completely immobile.
Then, a rich, grand voice echoing with layered resonance boomed out: "The Military Commissioner of Dingxi, Lord Wei, has arrived!"
With a rustle, every city defense soldier dropped to their knees, while the guards fell back several steps, their arrogance turning into sheer panic. Inside the shop, the noble young master packing his things trembled, scattering gold and jade trinkets all over the floor.
Wei Yuan felt the entrance had quite an imposing effect, though using his own dragon guard to shout such a line felt slightly embarrassing.
Yet he suddenly sensed something unusual and looked up, only to see Su Xuejing standing suspended in midair, gazing with keen amusement first at the dharma idol dragon guard, then at Wei Yuan. Shangguan Qianmo was trying her hardest not to laugh.
Gleams of light flashed repeatedly in the sky as figure after figure emerged—even Yu Zhizhuo, dragging his disabled leg, and Xu Henshui, missing an arm, had both arrived.
The group had originally heard that someone had beaten and injured the men Wei Yuan sent to make an arrest, so they had all rushed over to see what kind of extraordinary figure dared slap Wei Yuan in the face. As it turned out, what they witnessed first was Wei Yuan clearing the way for his own grand entrance.
Chapter 506