When Wei Yuan stepped into the Shaman City beside the great lake, he finally knew that the Land of Rain's ability to mount a short-term counteroffensive had been crushed.
At this moment, Wei Yuan hovered motionless above the city, paying no heed to sneak attacks. Whenever a shaman attempted an ambush, he simply countered with a dao art that blasted the attacker to ash with brazen arrogance.
Yet no matter how blatant his contempt, not a single Nether Shaman showed themselves.
The thirty thousand troops split into numerous squads, patrolling and shouting throughout the sprawling provisional city. They drove the shamans from their hiding places, commanding them to gather in the south of the city with all their belongings, food, and water within a single two-hour shichen; anyone late would suffer the consequences. The army was not worried about disobedience—once the time was up, they would put the entire city to the torch regardless.
Through his Dao Foundation warriors, Wei Yuan had already summoned his scattered detachments to regroup. Over the course of that shichen, more than forty thousand additional troops trickled in, encircling the Shaman City on all four sides.
In the blink of an eye, the deadline arrived. Only a little over six hundred thousand shamans had gathered outside the city walls. Some of the rest had fled, while the majority remained hidden, hoping to escape notice.
At that moment, a point of fire flared in the north, and a wall of flames rapidly surged outward. Over a thousand human cultivators cast fire dao arts in all directions, setting the entire city ablaze.
Humans and shamans had fought for countless years, each developing numerous dao arts tailored specifically against the other. This particular flame art—one that continued to burn within the heavens and earth of the Wu domain—was among them. It was remarkably effective for razing cities, capable of burning even upon the surface of water.
The fire line swept from north to south, and before long, the whole city was transformed into a sea of flames. Many shamans dashed out of their hiding spots, only to collapse in the blaze moments later. A few lucky shamans found safe shelters, but far more perished right where they hid.
Seeing the entire city reduced to ashes, Wei Yuan ordered the escort of all the gathered shamans back to Qingming. This place lay nine hundred li from Qingming. The shamans who had failed to flee were either common laborers or slaves with virtually no cultivation; to them, nine hundred li was a road between life and death.
Wei Yuan dispatched ten thousand warriors to march the hundreds of thousands of shamans along the road, pressing on day and night without rest, feeding them only once a day.
Under such conditions, fewer than one in ten would make it to Qingming alive.
This was an open scheme, a method to let most of the shamans perish naturally along the journey without incurring much karmic debt. As for those who genuinely survived the trek to Qingming, Wei Yuan would honor his word and grant them a chance to live.
Shamans in large numbers would inherently alter the heavens and earth over time. Thus, sheer numbers had become their own death sentence.
The canal water was gradually drying up. The shamans upstream had cut off the water supply to prevent human forces from advancing along the waterway.
Filling in the canal would be a massive undertaking. With Qingming's rebuilding still in its infancy and manpower stretched thin, Wei Yuan simply left the canal alone. A single canal was not what mattered; winning the war was what mattered.
Wei Yuan had one of his Dao Foundation warriors assume his appearance to accompany the main host, while he flew back to Qingming alone.
First, he reviewed the official documents that had piled up over the past two days. In just those two days, more than two hundred matters had been submitted for his decision.
With the assistance of the Smoke and Fire of the Mortal World, Wei Yuan processed the documents at incredible speed, clearing over two hundred official dispatches in less than an hour. Most of that time was spent merely reading and penning endorsements.
One pressing new issue was the urgent need to treat the lands poisoned by Shaman water. There was currently no clever solution for this, so they had to adopt Yu Zhizhuo's method: excavate and haul away all the contaminated soil, then bring in fertile soil from elsewhere to fill the void. The poisoned earth would be piled in a designated area outside the domain boundaries to be treated gradually over time.
Aside from that, the major short-term concern was casualty compensation, while the major long-term issue was the treatment of disabled veterans—though only in Qingming was this regarded as a major issue. Or rather, in Wei Yuan's heart, it was a major issue.
The standard practice across the Nine Kingdoms—setting aside the few enlightened monarchs famous in history—was generally to brush them off with a small sum of silver, which was already considered benevolent governance. The usual course was simply to dismiss them home. Disabled individuals were a burden wherever they went; eventually, they became beggars and perished in the following winter.
Those lucky enough to serve an enlightened monarch received some silver. The sum might be greater or smaller, but at most, it was only enough to purchase a few mu of poor land, after which they were left to survive on their own. And that was already enough for a monarch to be commemorated in the history books.
Guided by Feng Chutang, Wei Yuan had long since mastered the proper way to read history. He knew those veterans could never hold onto such land; at the slightest turmoil in the market, those few mu of meager fields would be snatched away by others.
At present, all land in Qingming belonged to Wei Yuan, distributed based on military merit, so this problem did not yet exist. But this system could not last forever; sooner or later, it would face the challenge of land annexation.
No matter how much grain or land was bestowed upon these crippled soldiers retired from the battlefield, a day would come when it was exhausted.
After pondering for a long while, Wei Yuan concluded that resolving the root problem required giving them the capacity to sustain themselves through their own labor.
Yet that fell upon Wei Yuan's shoulders—it depended on whether he could create jobs suited for them.
Wei Yuan handed the matter over to the Smoke and Fire of the Mortal World to see what ideas those Crouching Dragons and Phoenix Fledglings might devise.
After the official documents came the secret intelligence gathered from various quarters. Wei Yuan did not yet have an intelligence network of his own. Most of these confidential reports were sent by Consort Yuan, while a small portion came from Sun Chao'en and Li Weisheng, sparse and irregular. The remainder originated from merchant caravans traveling through Qingming.
These caravans were well-informed and delighted in undermining their rivals; for instance, the Jin merchant caravans had provided a great deal of intelligence regarding Zhao.
Among today's secret dispatches was an additional letter from Xu Jingfeng.
Ever since Xu Wan'er had cowed him, Xu Jingfeng had truly reformed his ways, cultivating day after day and dedicating himself entirely to climbing the ranks. He had now lingered at the late Dao Foundation stage for some time. Were it not for the current strained relations with the Xu family, Wei Yuan would have invited him to cultivate in Qingming for a period; he might well have possessed hopes of achieving a dharma idol.
This secret report focused heavily on only one person: Xu Lanshan.
Xu Lanshan was an extraordinary woman as well. She reached Dao Foundation at twenty, attained a dharma idol at thirty-five, and subsequently left the Xu family to wander the world—a journey that had lasted a full century. Just recently, she had abruptly returned to the Xu family, having reached perfection of the dharma idol realm, on the verge of breaking through to Scenery Command any day now.
Originally, whether the Xu family gained or lost a single Scenery Command cultivator was of little consequence to Wei Yuan.
During the recent war with the Shamans, however, Feng Chutang had secretly laid a plot: after applying a secret technique, he had dispatched several hundred pregnant young women of the Xu family into the fray, and without surprise, all had fallen in battle.
Afterward, Feng Chutang had secretly returned to the Palace of Grand Beginning, using an immortal treasure within the palace to inspect karmic causality. He discovered that the karma of these pregnant young women had been successfully anchored to Xu Wangu. In other words, had Qingming fallen and these girls died in battle, the resentment and karmic debt of their unborn children would all be placed upon Xu Wangu's head.
These were no ordinary distant relatives—they were Xu Wangu's direct kin of blood and flesh. The resentment and curse of several hundred direct blood kin generated karmic causality vast beyond imagination, something even Xu Wangu could scarcely endure. It might well drag him straight down from his immortal seat.
Chapter 560