Silence reigned across the military camp of ten thousand men, broken only by the occasional bark of challenge for the night's watchword.
Wei Yuan flew back to the central camp and tossed Tianyu down, throwing the Power Shamans into a flurry of hands. Tianyu's wounds were severe this time, but not fatal. The physical bodies of the Shaman race were far more formidable than those of humans; even if they lost more than half their flesh, they could slowly regenerate. For someone like Tianyu, as long as his heart remained intact, he could gradually be reborn.
Miraculously, Power Shamans retained most of their memories even after regenerating, leading Wei Yuan to conclude that they truly did not think with their brains.
Tianyu’s body would still require a considerable amount of time to fully recover, but his upper half retained its combat capability. Wei Yuan therefore arranged for Tianyu to be placed on a supply wagon, allowing him to protect the baggage train along the way.
Before dawn, the army set out. Wei Yuan sat cross-legged atop his flying craft, cruising slowly above the marching troops. The craft possessed six thruster tubes, maneuvering freely with simple adjustments to their orientation.
Meanwhile, a hundred li away, a Shaman army nearly a hundred thousand strong was slowly filing onto an open plain, deploying into battle formation to await the arrival of Wei Yuan’s forces.
In the Shaman center army, the young shaman looked over the sand table and said, "The human vanguard led by that woman general has been crippled by us. We need only dispatch a few thousand infantry to surround and keep watch on them; they can do nothing but hole up on that mountain, daring not to venture out. The one named Cui leads their main force. The terrain he seized is quite advantageous, and they have some cannons, which makes them somewhat troublesome to deal with."
A Nether Shaman with the long lower body of a serpent said, "Those few cannons of theirs aren't worth worrying about; they won't be hard to handle. I need only spew venomous mist for a short while, and we will force them out. If they refuse to come out, every single one of them will melt into bloody water."
Another Nether Shaman, bearing an eagle's head and blue eyes, remarked, "Those humans carry abundant karmic luck. If you slaughter them all, I fear you won't clear away the karmic debt for over a century."
"What is there to fear? Doesn't Young Master Lei Dong possess the means to cleanse karmic debt?"
The young shaman said, "I do have methods, but the amount of karmic debt that can be handled within a given period is limited. We should avoid it as much as possible. Our war against the humans will be long, and later on we must face the counterattacks of other tribes—especially the Desolate Ancestor Tribe. They have sided completely with the humans, making them outright traitors to our race!"
"Why don't we lodge a complaint with the City of Heaven? Let the Ancestral Shamans punish them!" a Great Shaman said indignantly.
The eagle-headed Nether Shaman shook his head. "The City of Heaven moves at a glacial pace. If we submit a complaint, by the time the Ancestral Shamans reach a decision and hand down punishment, several decades will have passed. We are far from the core of the Wu domain and tainted by human presence; in the eyes of those lofty beings in the City of Heaven, this is a cursed and barren land. They wouldn't even read what we write in detail."
Lei Dong chimed in, "Against entrenching humans, poison curses and blood curses are both good methods. We only need to control the dosage, poisoning them until they are half-dead before sending our slave troops in to cut them down. That way, no karmic debt will cling to us."
A shamaness with a head of silver hair said, "Though the karmic luck on these people is not immense, they make superb sacrificial offerings. If we capture them alive, in a few decades they will produce another family of high-grade sacrifices."
Lei Dong was quite tempted, but the demon blade strapped to his back released a wisp of black qi, dispersing the vague, stray thoughts.
Lei Dong frowned immediately and said, "No! Now is not the time to consider sacrifices. Our first priority is to kill Wei Yuan, this human child of karmic destiny! As long as he is slain, even if we must pay the price of lying low for centuries, it will be worth it. To enrage him, the best way is to slaughter—slaughter as many people as possible!"
None of the Nether Shamans objected. Clearly, Lei Dong held an extremely high status in the Leize Tribe.
At that moment, a slender, winged flying serpent entered the tent. It moved like a phantom, and aside from the eagle-headed Nether Shaman, neither of the other two noticed its arrival.
Speaking in a shrill voice, the winged serpent projected an image and said, "The humans brought a new weapon called the Tianqi chariot. I recorded how they moved and some basic data."
In the projection, three chariots advanced in single file, one after another. Their broad continuous tracks struck the Nether Shamans as novel, and the projection noted the dimensions, weight, and armor thickness of various sections.
Nothing else stood out particularly, but the thickness of the armor took several Nether Shamans by surprise.
"Could this thing be pushing nearly a hundred thousand jin?"
"It looks close to that."
"An ordinary Great Shaman probably wouldn't be able to pierce it with an arrow."
"It just moves rather slowly."
After conferring for a time, the Nether Shamans and Great Shamans had basically dissected the characteristics of the Tianqi chariot.
In the end, Lei Dong concluded, "This iron box is sluggish and limited in number; it is nothing to worry about. We shall have the slave soldiers dig a trench before our lines immediately. It needn't be too large—five feet deep and one zhang wide will suffice. I doubt it can crawl across that."
With the matter settled, Lei Dong surveyed the tent and declared in a ringing voice, "Hongye brought about her own downfall, defeated by mere humans. She has now been forsaken by the Shaman Heaven and the Ancestral Shamans, stripped of her karmic luck. We, on the other hand, rise to meet our destiny, but we still lack that final bit of renown.
"As long as we kill Wei Yuan and seize his karmic luck, I will take the next step and assume command of the entire Land of Rain! When that time comes, our Leize Tribe will no longer be mere vassals, but a recognized tribe standing tall in the Wu domain, entitled to take part in the tribal assembly of the City of Heaven!"
A fanatical glint flashed in the eyes of all the Nether Shamans. The eagle-headed Nether Shaman said, "Do not forget, the Land of Rain also possesses the qualification to compete alongside the other lands for the seat of Heavenly Shaman."
A Heavenly Shaman... An unmistakable frenzy flared in Lei Dong's eyes.
Even blessed by karmic luck, and even armed with the mysterious, sentient demon blade at his back that could contend with a Nether Shaman on its own, the rank of Heavenly Shaman remained unimaginably distant to Lei Dong—so far that he had never dared to dream of it.
Yet once he secured the Land of Rain, he would at least qualify to cross that threshold.
The path to greatness had begun, and the opening task was remarkably simple: kill a human named Wei Yuan.
Lei Dong did his best to project calm composure as he said, "Recently, while listening to the voices of fate, I unexpectedly discovered that many among the humans wish to overthrow Wei Yuan's rule as well. We do not even need to kill him; as long as we defeat him, his realm will crumble, and his karmic luck will scatter across the land.
"When that happens, I will share a portion of the gathered karmic luck with all of you. Before long, even though the Land of Rain possesses more Nether Shamans, we will still be able to suppress them. Since Hongye is destined to fall, she shall never return."
Wild joy washed over the Nether Shamans, and they bowed in gratitude in unison.
***
At noon the following day, the two armies drew up their lines. Wei Yuan had even brought up his baggage train troops; combined with the thousand Power Shamans from the Desolate Ancestor Tribe, his force barely reached twelve thousand men. Opposing them were a hundred thousand elites of the Leize Tribe.
Beside Tianyu, a human Dao Foundation cultivator said, "Your Desolate Ancestor Tribe could only send out a thousand warriors? Isn't that a bit weak? You claimed you'd always been going toe-to-toe with the Leize Tribe—were you bragging?"
This Dao Foundation cultivator spoke with immense arrogance, yet he bore Wei Yuan's face; he was Wei Yuan's warrior avatar.
Tianyu sighed. "These thousand warriors were sent only under the pretext of settling a personal vendetta! Otherwise, we wouldn't even have a thousand! Openly aiding humans in fighting another Shaman tribe carries far too foul a reputation!"
Wei Yuan said, "That's not how you should look at it. We humans are helping you attack your mortal enemies; I'm merely here to lend you a hand."
Tianyu’s eyes lit up. "Put that way, it makes sense! I'll tell the elders as soon as I get back!"
By then, both sides had finished arraying their lines. In the front of Wei Yuan's formation were two thousand mounted infantry guarding several dozen wagons in the center. Of the five thousand baggage train troops, two thousand guarded each flank, while Wei Yuan personally led three thousand Dragon Wing iron cavalry posted on the right wing, creating a conspicuously unbalanced battle formation.
Lei Dong found the deployment jarringly awkward, but forced himself to look past it. Striding out before his host, he projected his voice: "Wei Yuan! Today, our battle by the banks of the Haoyue River will surely be recorded in the annals of history for generations to come—"
His long-prepared speech had barely begun when Wei Yuan bellowed, "Shut up! Attack!"
Wei Yuan waved his hand, and the military horns blared with a prolonged wail as war drums thundered through the air. He launched the battle outright, refusing to give Lei Dong any chance to speak.
All of Lei Dong's soaring rhetoric came to naught, sending him into an instant fury. He ordered his entire army to advance.
From two sacrificial altars within the Leize lines, vast stretches of thunderclouds billowed upward. Archers surged to the fore of their ranks, each buzzing with fierce excitement. Using the power of lightning to stimulate the potential of warriors was a specialty of the Leize Tribe's shamanic arts.
At the same time, several clusters of lightning flew out from the thunderclouds, arcing over the ground between the two hosts toward the sky above Wei Yuan's formation, where bursts of thunderbolts rained down. With a thought from Wei Yuan, military qi surged upward, neutralizing most of the falling lightning's force.
Meanwhile, the Power Shamans in the army stripped off their beast-hide tunics, baring chests rippling with bulging muscle. Some roared at the sky, while others pounded their chests with ferocious force before leaping straight into the air to intercept the lightning with their bare bodies!
In the blink of an eye, over a hundred Power Shamans were struck until they were charred on the outside and tender on the inside, crashing heavily to the earth. Several fell dead on the spot, their breaths extinguished.
Yet far from mourning, the surrounding Power Shamans grew extraordinarily excited, circling the corpses of the fallen to perform a primitive dance.
Tianyu said proudly to Wei Yuan's avatar beside him, "Well? Impressive, aren't they, our Desolate Ancestor Tribe warriors? You don't need to worry about those two altars at all—our tribe has the lightning curses covered!"
Wei Yuan was thoroughly speechless. He had never been worried about the lightning curses in the first place. At that very moment, dozens of Dao Foundation cultivators were erecting long metal rods throughout the army ranks. These lightning-diverting rods had originally been prepared for heavenly tribulations; dealing with the shamanic lightning of the Leize Tribe was naturally child's play.
So those few Power Shamans truly were valiant warriors—except they hadn't needed to die at all.
The Leize army fielded ten thousand archers in total. Halting five hundred zhang away from the human lines, they began nocking arrows to their bows.
Wei Yuan paused in surprise; this distance was more than a hundred zhang farther than intelligence had reported. Were the Leize Tribe's archers truly this elite? At this range, only the longbowmen of the Desolate Ancestor Tribe could trade shots with them. The maximum range of ordinary elite archers was only around three hundred zhang, requiring a charge under a hail of arrows. A gap of over a hundred zhang gave the enemy enough time to unleash four volleys.
Looking toward the human lines from afar, Lei Dong gave a cold sneer. "Empowered by my awakened ancient Thunder Shaman arts, our archers can launch heavy arrows beyond five hundred zhang, making them the strongest archers in this entire region! With their frail bodies, do mere humans think they can contend with my Leize using a handful of small cannons?"
No sooner had his voice fallen than nearly a hundred infantry guns were wheeled out from Wei Yuan's ranks. At an officer's barked order, all the infantry cannons roared in unison. Cannonballs whistled through the air, plunging into the ranks of the archers and blasting swathes of Leize bowmen into the sky!
Volley after volley thundered as the artillery fire continued without pause, human cultivators darting back and forth like the wind to haul and load shells.
Under the ceaseless blanket of cannon fire, the Leize archer formation began to crumble into chaos. The occasional heavy arrow loosed in desperate retaliation was effortlessly deflected by the Power Shamans wielding heavy shields beside the guns.
Chapter 621