On the Qingming front lines, battle cries shook heaven and earth as countless Shaman warriors surged toward Qingming like a swarm of locusts.
The air was thick with the howling trajectories of missiles and water spheres. The arrows shot by the Shaman marksmen carried new devices attached to them, releasing toxic smoke upon impact. Wherever the venomous fumes spread, all life was snuffed out; ordinary human soldiers could not endure more than ten breaths.
After several major battles, the Shamans had suffered bitterly under the city defense cannons and missiles, so they were frantically reinforcing their own ranged attacks.
In this battle, the strength of the Shaman masses was actually inferior to their previous elites. They had clearly drafted the robust and sturdy from among their lowborn and slaves, throwing them to the front lines as cannon fodder. However, these new warriors showed evident physical mutations; their defensive power was even greater than that of past elites, making them difficult to take down with a single shot unless struck in a vital spot.
Wei Yuan stood at the very front line in person. Around him, dozens of Dao Foundation warriors continuously unleashed the Water Blade Art, slicing down the front-line Shaman warriors in swaths.
By now, the Red Lotus Bodhi was weighed down heavily by black qi, its branches bending toward the ground under the burden. Yet Wei Yuan remained unmoved, continuing to harvest ordinary Shamans.
In the center of the Shaman formation, Hongye wore a sullen expression, gazing at Wei Yuan from afar and baffled as to how Wei Yuan could withstand so much karmic debt after slaying so many Shamans. Could it be that Qingming possessed more than one immortal art, retaining specific methods to handle karmic debt?
Hongye's gaze shifted toward a monk in the Qingming battle formation. The monk barely moved, spending most of his time chanting sutras. Yet as he chanted, another bead would quietly manifest upon the prayer beads in his hand. On the surface, the bead appeared completely black, but in truth it was blood-red—a red so concentrated and intense that it took on the pitch-black shade of night.
Wei Yuan stood before the battle line like a pillar supporting the heavens. Any Shaman who drew near was cut down without mercy. Within several li of Wei Yuan, not a single marksman dared show his face. The moment any dared appear, they were instantly killed—either crushed beneath the Jade Mountain, blasted apart by lightning and heavenly fire, or struck by a missile descending from the sky.
Before Wei Yuan, fear was visibly spreading through the Shaman army. If not for the surging press from behind, the front ranks would likely have turned tail and fled immediately. The water blades sliced back and forth, filling the air with spraying blood and severed limbs; the psychological impact on morale far exceeded that of bombardment by cannons and rifles.
Hongye felt a jolt of concern. He realized that the sacrificial power used to suppress panic and maintain morale was depleting at a rapid rate. At this rate, it would not hold out for much longer.
At this point, both sides were locked in a contest of endurance: whether Wei Yuan would succumb first to the backlash of karmic debt, or the Shamans would run out of the sacrificial power holding their morale together.
Behind Hongye, a Sacred Shaman sighed. "This Wei Yuan is truly difficult to deal with."
Hongye said coldly, "Yet he can only use such a trick once. Withdraw the troops for now and rest. We will attack again after regrouping and restoring morale."
At Hongye's command, horns blew through the Shaman army, and the horde began to pull back. Seeing that the Shaman casualties were not yet overwhelming and their center army remained steady and poised in battle formation, Wei Yuan did not order a pursuit. He merely summoned over a dozen missiles to reap more than ten thousand lives.
As the Shamans retreated, Wei Yuan immediately summoned the reserve units to reinforce the positions and sent fresh troops to the front line, relieving the battered defenders.
Cui Yu came to Wei Yuan's side, panting. "The Shamans have grown smarter."
"Indeed," Wei Yuan replied with a grave expression.
The Shamans' morale had begun to waver under the assault, but once they withdrew and had their incantations reapplied, their morale would stabilize. The consumption of sacrificial power would drop sharply, allowing them to hold out much longer.
In the lull between clashes, a cultivator hurried over and said, "Several envoys have arrived from the imperial court bearing an imperial decree. Mister Zhang Sheng instructed me to bring the decree here first for you to inspect."
Wei Yuan took the scroll casually and asked, "Where are the envoys?"
"They heard a fierce battle was underway on the front lines and didn't dare come over, so they handed the imperial decree to us."
Wei Yuan unrolled the decree and skimmed through it.
The phrasing was exceptionally severe, castigating Wei Yuan for "tormenting the populace with tyrannical cruelty" and condemning him as "ignorant of propriety, devoid of shame, and blind to the teachings of the sages." At this moment, Wei Yuan was supposedly "accused by a thousand fingers and reviled by ten thousand voices."
After a litany of denunciations, the decree concluded by announcing that Censor Zhu Xiaocun would arrive bearing the Imperial Sword to inspect all affairs in Qingming. In the interim, he would act in the capacity of Military Commissioner of Dingxi, and Wei Yuan was ordered to hand over all authority until the censor completed his investigation and the imperial court issued further decrees.
This imperial decree came as a slight surprise to Wei Yuan. Rolling the scroll shut, he looked ahead.
Before him loomed dense, mountain-like military qi as countless Shaman soldiers regrouped their morale, preparing for their next assault.
Beneath Wei Yuan's feet was the front-line position, strewn with corpses. Surviving soldiers dragged their comrades' bodies from the fortifications to carry them behind the lines, then piled up the corpses of Shamans before the parapets to serve as makeshift barricades.
Here, questions of cruelty or kindness did not exist; there was only life or death. The means did not matter in the slightest, nor did anyone care; every person was desperately struggling for that minuscule glimmer of survival.
The reason Wei Yuan stood on the front lines and bore the karmic debt was that the Smoke and Fire of the Mortal World had calculated that doing so would save six thousand human soldiers from death before the Red Lotus Bodhi reached its limit.
In the eyes of many court magnates, in the minds of the so-called pure stream faction, these were merely "a paltry" six thousand mortals—hardly worth a dedicated mention in their essays.
Yet for the sake of these paltry six thousand, Wei Yuan felt it was well worth fighting on the front lines and shouldering the karmic debt.
Heavy footsteps sounded behind him. Looking back, he saw columns of mortal soldiers trotting toward the fortifications under their captains' lead, filling the gaps along the depleted defense line.
On those faces were panic, fear, excitement, or numbness. Regardless of their expressions, they all shared one trait: their appearances were plain, even bordering on ugly.
One could tell from their features that they came from refugee origins.
Anyone who looked halfway decent, whether man or woman, was unlikely to end up a refugee. Even if circumstances reduced them to refugees, they would never survive to the very end; they would vanish along the way for one reason or another.
Wei Yuan knew that once this battle ended, more than half of the people before him would become corpses. From start to finish, from the moment they were reduced to refugees, they had never possessed the right to choose.
Wei Yuan reopened the imperial decree, looked over it once more, and suddenly felt like laughing.
Those so-called high-minded scholars of the pure stream faction, who dared not set foot on the front lines of the battlefield—would they truly fly into a righteous fury and raise their voices in impassioned cries on behalf of refugees like these? If actual refugees were brought before them, scarcely any of them would fail to hurriedly cover their noses and mouths.
Was so-called righteousness really so trivial—nothing more than scribbling a few impassioned phrases on a sheet of paper?
Wei Yuan tore the imperial decree into shreds and tossed them carelessly onto the mud-strewn ground. Then he said, "Go invite the envoys over. I will wait for them here."
The cultivator hesitated. "But the honorable envoys seem unwilling to come."
Wei Yuan said indifferently, "I am waiting for him here. Does he dare refuse?"
The cultivator caught his meaning immediately and hurried off.
Wei Yuan had someone summon the Peacock Buddha Mother. Finding a large boulder to sit upon, he closed his eyes and listened to the Peacock Buddha Mother chant sutras. As the chanting echoed, the surrounding air gradually grew tranquil and serene. Wisps of black qi were drawn out from Wei Yuan's body, slowly coalescing into another prayer bead in the Peacock Buddha Mother's hand.
The chanting was suddenly interrupted by a shout: "I am a Hanlin scholar personally appointed by the King! A commissioned official of the imperial court! How dare you act so outrageously—are you not afraid of having your nine clans executed?!"
Wei Yuan opened his eyes, and the black qi ceased to emanate from him.
A squad of cultivators marched over, escorting five men clad in official robes. The leader wore the robes of a sixth-rank official and looked barely in his thirties, quite young. He struggled furiously, glaring and hurling threats at the men around him, but the surrounding cultivators turned deaf ears to his words, dragging him all the way to the front line.
Upon seeing Wei Yuan, the civil official seemed to find his backbone at once. Stiffening his spine, he bellowed, "I come bearing an imperial decree as an imperial commissioner of the court! Wherever I go is as if the King of Jin were present in person! Wei Yuan, treating me like this—are you attempting to rebel?!"
Wei Yuan said indifferently, "Disrupting military morale. Slap his mouth first."
From among the nearby cultivators, two burly, thickset men stepped forward. Spitting thick wads of saliva into their palms, they wound up their hairy hands and swung them straight across the scholar-official's face!
With a sharp smack, the civil official's face swelled high, and several teeth sprayed from his mouth.
Wei Yuan pointed forward. "Drive a few wooden stakes here and hang these gentlemen up so they can see how a war is actually fought."
The envoys were scared out of their wits. Where Wei Yuan pointed was the very front line of the battlefield; any Shaman who took a dislike to them could end their lives with a single stray arrow.
Yet Wei Yuan's men were all veterans who had rolled through piles of the dead. Ignoring their shrieks, they hoisted the civil officials like squawking chickens and bound them fast to the stakes.
Once everything was arranged, Wei Yuan stepped up before the envoy and said, "Academician Wang..."
The official struggled to squeeze out a smiling face. "This humble official's surname is Sun! Could Lord Wei please release me? This humble official is willing to follow you into battle to kill—"
"I appreciate the thought." Wei Yuan gestured. A cultivator beside him immediately yanked a boot off a nearby Shaman corpse, ripped off a muddy foot-binding cloth soaked in blood, and stuffed it into the Hanlin scholar's mouth.
The cultivator's body and face were smeared with filth and gore, his eyes sullen and grim, exuding a sharp killing intent. He paid no heed to the mud-soaked battlefield, as if completely numb to the heavy stench of blood and rot, and cared nothing for the horrific reek of that foot-wrap.
In truth, two years ago, this fierce, demonic-looking cultivator had been an elegant young nobleman—one of the sixteen scions of noble houses who had accompanied Cui Yu to Qingming in the very first cohort.
In the distance, war drums thundered like collapsing mountains. The Shaman army had restored its morale and charged once more.
This battle raged exceptionally long. Hongye pulled his army back to regroup three times before finally retreating. This was the fifth battle between Qingming and the Shamans; the Shamans suffered one hundred and ninety thousand casualties, while over forty thousand human soldiers fell.
Such a casualty ratio brought Wei Yuan no joy, for the majority of Shamans killed in this fight were cannon fodder drawn from the lowborn, not the elites of previous encounters. Moreover, replenishing Qingming's refugee manpower was growing increasingly difficult, and not a single refugee was coming through from Jin.
When the fighting ceased, Cui Yu came to Wei Yuan's side and said, "That Hanlin scholar actually survived, though he took seven or eight arrows and his legs are ruined."
"Since he didn't die, let him go. You handle things here; I'm going to see how the arrangements for the Treasure Appreciation Assembly grounds are coming along."
"All right, go ahead with peace of mind. Still, I truly don't understand—don't these pure stream civil officials grasp that when the lips are gone, the teeth are cold? What good does bringing us down do them?"
Wei Yuan chuckled softly. "You've been leading troops too long; you've grown naive again. To the pure stream, right and wrong don't matter at all. The only thing that matters is whether someone belongs to their faction. 'When the lips are gone, the teeth are cold'? Even if Jin falls, the ones who perish will be the King of Jin, you, and me—not them. At worst, they will simply go serve another state as officials; they will never lack glory and riches."
Cui Yu's expression grew solemn. "What about that Hanlin scholar? Are we really letting him go? When he returns, he will definitely snap at you like a mad dog."
Wei Yuan took to the air. From aloft, he called down, "Someone is using the pure stream to test me, and I want to test them as well. Sending this Hanlin scholar back is the perfect way to see their reaction."
"Aren't you afraid the King of Jin will lay blame on you?"
Wei Yuan burst into laughter. "How can he blame us? We never saw this Hanlin scholar."
Chapter 525