"Replay your experience in the minor world so I can take a look," Zhang Sheng said.
Wei Yuan manifested the entire battle. The actual combat had not lasted long; most of the time had been spent in pursuit. Zhang Sheng watched the entire sequence in complete silence, then replayed it from the beginning.
When the projection showed Wei Yuan chasing the beasts up to the moment he was ambushed, Zhang Sheng remarked, "People often say the world is full of treacherous hearts, but among sentient beings, humans are hardly the pinnacle. Many creatures we dismiss as monsters are actually smarter than us. You cannot let your guard down just because they take the form of beasts—especially since certain spirit beasts deliberately disguise themselves as mindless brutes.
"Look here. The moment you stepped out of the light portal, they were already gathering. But your attention was entirely captured by the bird, and you failed to notice the activity in the distance."
Wei Yuan played it back once more. His divine sense automatically recorded everything within his perception, capturing even the details he had not consciously noticed at the time.
What Zhang Sheng pointed out was that as Wei Yuan watched the black birds fly away, faint shadows had stirred in the distance, congregating in one place. In Wei Yuan's perception, those shadows had looked like nothing more than a few sesame seeds in a black ocean. Because they were so distant, he had overlooked the minuscule disturbance, yet Zhang Sheng had caught it at a glance.
Had Zhang Sheng been in actual combat, her reaction would only have been faster than it was now. Wei Yuan had not expected her to be even more perceptive than himself, despite his formidable divine sense, and he humbly asked for her secret.
Zhang Sheng naturally held nothing back from Wei Yuan. Ever since refining over five hundred immortal swords, she had been painstakingly practicing the ultimate killing move of unleashing them all at once. Cultivating in the Nether Cold Realm had vastly improved her divine sense; she could now just barely maneuver each immortal sword independently. However, she was still a long way from achieving flawless coordination—where swords could feint, breach defenses, and adapt dynamically to the opponent's movements on their own.
The moment Wei Yuan heard this, he recognized how terrifying Zhang Sheng's path was. Once she succeeded, her opponent would no longer face a mere rain of immortal swords, but an onslaught from over five hundred Dao Foundation cultivators possessing consummate combat techniques.
As for forming sword formations, that was already a low-level technique by comparison. At that stage, Zhang Sheng would be able to switch instantaneously between different sword formations, or even nest multiple formations together to assault the enemy simultaneously.
Constantly splitting her mind to control over five hundred immortal swords made Zhang Sheng extraordinarily sensitive to her surroundings. The distant gathering and ambush of the monsters had been nearly imperceptible to Wei Yuan, but to Zhang Sheng, that faint anomaly stood out conspicuously.
Zhang Sheng said, "It seems you also need to train your spirituality. You can't always rely on brute Dao power to crush everything. In my opinion, your first goal should be to control 1,024 tasks simultaneously."
"Why do I need that many?" Wei Yuan groaned in dismay.
"Because you are a Dharma Idol."
Wei Yuan sensed something wasn't quite right. Practice handling more simultaneous tasks within his Smoke and Fire of the Mortal World? And what would he do once he mastered it? At most, manipulate more dharma treasures at once, or take it a step further to control more puppets.
And when puppet manipulation reached its pinnacle? Naturally, it meant controlling even more puppets while finding ways to endow them with autonomous spirituality so they could fight on their own.
The problem was, weren't the dragon guards already like that? And weren't the enlightened warriors the same? Not to mention the unenlightened ones—weren't Maiden Yin-Yang and the immortal plants effectively puppets with autonomous spirituality?
Taking it further, hundreds of thousands of mortals could be viewed as spiritual puppets. From that perspective, Wei Yuan's spirituality might not be unmatched under heaven, but among Dharma Idols he certainly had no rival.
The only catch was that these fellows possessed too much spirituality—they did as they pleased, and Wei Yuan could hardly boss them around.
Yet after discussing it with Zhang Sheng, Wei Yuan realized his own shortcoming: his divine sense lacked precision and subtlety. If divine sense had a weight, Zhang Sheng was using one unit of divine sense to accomplish the work of seven or eight of Wei Yuan's, and as her cultivation advanced, that gap would only continue to widen.
A direction had been found, but how to put in the effort remained unclear. Wei Yuan and Zhang Sheng continued their discussion, and before they knew it, night fell and day broke—a full day had passed.
Meanwhile, in the observation room, the female disciples had long since dispersed. Sun Yu had refused to give up, though he was now yawning incessantly. Unable to tolerate missing a single detail yet afraid to pry with his divine sense, he could only stare fixedly at the humanoid projection, waiting on sheer chance.
Just then, a bell tolled three times, reminding Sun Yu that it was time to administer the final dose of medicine to Wei Yuan, after which Wei Yuan would be free to leave.
While reviewing combat experience with Zhang Sheng, Wei Yuan had not been idle elsewhere. Several Dao Foundation warriors had already mustered three thousand elite cavalry from the barracks, equipped with a powerful support unit.
Wei Yuan was not Cui Yu; he reinforced firepower as much as possible. A cavalry force of just three thousand was outfitted with all seventy-odd remaining infantry guns, along with thirty wagons dedicated to hauling shells, as well as three chariots modeled after Xu Wenwu's Tianqi Toad.
By the time Wei Yuan was discharged, this support force had finished marshaling, and he planned to lead them out in three days. He also brought Xu Wenwu along on the campaign, intending to draw upon his knowledge of the world beyond heaven to evaluate his chariot unit, which currently consisted of only three vehicles.
To stabilize the situation in the Red Sand Oasis, Wei Yuan also arranged a logistics detachment dedicated to transporting grain. On the surface, this force was commanded by Xu Henshui, but in truth, Feng Tingyu was hidden within it. Feng Tingyu's new dharma idol was practically the bane of spell cultivators; with her present, any raid by small squads of high-level Shamans would be a joke.
Pre-battle preparations were exceedingly tedious. In particular, with the addition of the infantry guns and three chariots, the support supplies required were more than doubled. Once Wei Yuan packed every conceivable supply, he realized the baggage train had swollen into a behemoth of fully five thousand men requiring three hundred heavy wagons—more numerous than the main force he was leading himself.
The Smoke and Fire of the Mortal World was also bustling with activity, squeezing out ten percent of its resources to help Wei Yuan optimize the logistics plan for the entire baggage train.
After several rounds of optimization, they finally managed to squeeze in another ten percent of supplies while keeping the same number of wagons.
Just as Wei Yuan intended to spend a few more days preparing, an urgent battle dispatch arrived from the front: the main force led by Cui Yu had run into an ambush just as they were about to rendezvous with Xu Yi. After fierce fighting, Cui Yu successfully broke his troops out of the encirclement, but suffered over a thousand casualties, and Xu Yi's vanguard force was surrounded on all sides.
The dispatch revealed that the ambushing Shaman force numbered over fifty thousand. What was worse, Cui Yu had already sent scout cavalry to probe the ambush site beforehand, yet had fallen into the trap nonetheless.
Wei Yuan's first thought was that the Desolate Ancestor Tribe had turned traitor. However, the dispatch stated that the hundreds of warriors sent by the Desolate Ancestor Tribe as guides had been nearly wiped out in the battle. The Shaman army of Leize hated the power shamans of the Desolate Ancestor Tribe far more than they hated humans. From the very outset, they had relentlessly latched onto the warriors of the Desolate Ancestor Tribe, successfully cutting them off from Cui Yu's main army.
The power shamans naturally had no fear of death, fighting desperately to the last breath. Had these hundreds of power shamans not tied down over ten thousand Leize Shamans, Cui Yu's losses would have been even worse.
Having ruled out suspicion of the Desolate Ancestor Tribe, Wei Yuan immediately ordered his men to perform a ritual sacrifice to Tianyu, summoning him to rendezvous along the march. At the same time, Wei Yuan waited no longer; he mobilized his army and set out at top speed to reinforce Cui Yu.
For this sortie, Wei Yuan took only three thousand cavalry and two thousand mounted infantry. The remaining five thousand were ordinary troops tasked with transport, yet the entire force boasted terrifying firepower that had never been seen before.
The army advanced at tremendous speed. Wei Yuan had mounted all the infantry guns onto wagons—each wagon holding two guns, one on the left and one on the right. Consequently, the entire force was either mounted on horseback or riding in wagons; aside from the cultivators, no one walked on foot.
The route of advance had already been cleared in advance by Xu Yi, and bridges had been thrown across several treacherous rivers. Though the bridges were crude, truly heavy loads did not cross them; instead, Dao Foundation cultivators carried them across in flight. Wei Yuan himself could carry two fully loaded wagons at once.
Upon entering the Wu domain, Wei Yuan grew exceptionally cautious, never venturing far from the main army alone for extended periods. Without the protection of military qi, he was a prime target singled out by the very heaven and earth of the Wu domain; encountering a powerful opponent could easily result in sudden death.
Wei Yuan also bestowed karmic luck upon all the elite Dragon Wing iron cavalry. Compounded with Dragon Wing's own karmic luck of cause and effect, if any Nether Shaman dared wipe out these thousands of luck-bearing heavy cavalry, Wei Yuan could detonate the karmic debt with a single Red Lotus Universal Deliverance True Words, in all likelihood delivering the Shaman straight to the beyond.
Chapter 618