The Zhao army's rearguard of several hundred really were all little tyrannosaurs. The moment they saw Wei Yuan's army arrive, they scattered across the hills and fields, staging an impromptu game of "come catch me, my king."
Naturally, such clumsy playacting hooked Wei Yuan on the spot.
The reason was simple: a glance showed Wei Yuan that a lingering trail of treasure qi remained in the area, and this qi clearly belonged to the spirit embryo of a Scenery Command spiritual treasure!
Such conspicuous treasure qi, combined with the little tyrannosaurs scurrying all over the mountains, practically told Wei Yuan straight to his face that the treasure was on one of them—it was simply a matter of whether he wanted it.
Wei Yuan looked at the lively, bounding little tyrannosaurs and immediately detached three thousand troops to capture them, while he continued leading the combat wagon units in hot pursuit.
After pursuing for another hundred-plus li, the Zhao army ahead held a treacherous choke point, setting up a defensive line.
Wei Yuan pulled no punches. He immediately ordered the fire-support wagons forward to reveal their vehicle-mounted infantry guns, fiercely bombarding the Zhao positions. In less than an hour, the Zhao rearguard was either killed or surrendered, and Wei Yuan pressed on with the pursuit.
Several hundred li further, the Zhao army suddenly split into two. A small squad of high-ranking generals fled across the mountains with their personal guards, while the main body of Zhao troops kept sprinting along the highway. Wei Yuan could already see the Zhao military qi, and at this point, he was faced with a dilemma once again.
Weighing his options, Wei Yuan gritted his teeth and sent the wagon units after the main Zhao force, while he personally led the light cavalry into the mountains to pursue the small group of Zhao commanders.
Thus they chased and fled, a whole day and night passing in the blink of an eye. Wei Yuan finally began to close in on the small detachment ahead. By now, they were outside the Shattered Lands. Wei Yuan dared not rashly act outside the cover of military qi, lest an ambushing Scenery Command expert strike him—a blow that would hardly be pleasant to endure.
Therefore, Wei Yuan stayed close to the two thousand light cavalry, constantly using the remnant pages of the military treatise to boost their movement speed. Just as they were about to catch up, the Zhao troops ahead suddenly stopped moving. Then several dharma idols broke away from the battle formation and flew south at full speed!
Wei Yuan was stunned. He had assumed they loved their troops like their own children, preferring to risk capture rather than abandon the ranks and flee alone. Who would have thought that at the final moment, they would actually ditch their own personal guards!
To a general, personal guards were closer than flesh-and-blood brothers. In real battle, whether a general had combat power often depended on the prowess of his personal retinue. That was why Wei Yuan had suspected nothing and pursued relentlessly all this way.
Yet at the crucial moment, how could those dharma idol generals suddenly flee!
Wei Yuan moved to give chase, but a faint aura of Scenery Command materialized in the air, halting him in his tracks. Wei Yuan narrowed his eyes, looked into the sky, and said in a heavy voice, "I have made note of Senior's benevolence today! I shall certainly repay it in the future!"
High in the vault of heaven, someone snorted heavily with immense displeasure, but said nothing more. Wei Yuan could only watch as those dharma idol generals vanished into the distance. With no outlet for his frustration, he ordered his men to bind all the personal guards.
When they were brought before him, however, Wei Yuan's fury flared anew. How were these personal guards? Every last one had shoddy cultivation—not even a single third-tier Body Casting among them! They were merely ordinary soldiers dressed in the armor and uniforms of personal guards. It appeared the Zhao army also possessed a treasure similar to Treading Shadows—and with even greater power—enabling them to run so swiftly while hauling along a bunch of ordinary grunts.
With a sullen expression, Wei Yuan had no choice but to lead his troops back and await word from the other detachment.
Soon, news came from Cui Yu. The main Zhao force had suddenly splintered into a dozen small groups of several thousand men each, fleeing in all directions. Daring not to divide his forces, Cui Yu had latched onto just one group and wiped it out. By then, they were already close to the Zhao border; unable to pursue any further, Cui Yu escorted his captives back.
Thus, Wei Yuan's thousand-li pursuit ended with the destruction of fewer than ten thousand Zhao troops, along with several hundred little tyrannosaurs.
Speaking of the little tyrannosaurs, Wei Yuan did harvest a shield embryo. It brimmed with spirituality and was indeed a treasure, yet it contained the true intent of sharpness. What on earth did a defensive shield need sharpness for? Consequently, the item was a complete white elephant. Even if refined into a spiritual treasure, it would be pretty to look at but practically useless, ranking at the very bottom of its class.
If Wei Yuan were someone who had barely managed to scrape into Scenery Command, it wouldn't have been entirely unusable. But with a whole pile of immortal plants already in his possession, how could he possibly care for such a thing?
Wei Yuan had nursed a belly full of sullen irritation throughout the chase. Fortunately, the speed and firepower of his mobile combat wagon units had exceeded the enemy's expectations, allowing him to gobble up two small rearguard detachments. Otherwise, he might well have suffered internal injuries from sheer fury.
Next came the massive relocation of the two commanderies. With a thousand tangled threads to untangle, Wei Yuan was run off his feet, toiling for two full months. Only by midsummer had all several million people been moved into Qingming, pushing Qingming's population past twenty million for the first time.
With more people, land reclamation had to be rushed forward. And to reclaim land, one had to deal with water. Yu Zhizhuo and Perfected Chuhe collaborated to dig deep canals across the fields, using bamboo fences as canal walls so that the water in the soil seeped into the ditches. From there, the water converged into hollowed-out open mine pits, forming artificial lakes where its quality was gradually transformed.
At this stage, Qingming brought several million more mu under cultivation, surging from fifteen million toward twenty million mu. A single season's grain harvest exceeded three billion jin—enough to feed sixty million people for an entire year, and that was by the generous standard of three hundred jin rather than the bare minimum of two hundred and forty.
With more people came more fields, more grain, and more karmic luck. At the same time, with everyone in Qingming having enough to eat, the number of Body Casting cultivators soared. Now, over a million individuals throughout Qingming had begun Body Casting; five hundred thousand had attained the first tier, the Sinew and Muscle Realm, and two hundred thousand had completed Blood Merging.
In the summer of this year, cultivators reaching Body Casting culmination numbered over forty thousand. Among them, twenty thousand were repeating attempts after failing to cast Dao Foundations in previous rounds, while nearly twenty thousand were newly minted Body Casting culminations. Factoring in aristocratic clans, itinerant cultivators, and the Dao soldiers trained by the Palace of Grand Beginning, Wei Yuan had to host the Grand Dao Foundation Ceremony for a total of fifty thousand people in the summer session of the seventh year of Tianqi!
Just activating All Living Beings in a Flash three times would consume one hundred and fifty thousand strands of human fortune azure qi, and factoring in the extra luck bestowed on distinguished guests added another ten thousand strands.
That year, Sun Yu developed the Dao Foundation template of Lesser Heavenly Cycle Origin-Nourishing Toxin-Clearing Qi. This Dao Foundation manifested as a cloud of misty water vapor capable of soothing the mind, accelerating physical regeneration, and purging toxins.
The reason Wei Yuan remembered this Dao Foundation was that it once again reset the lower limit for Dao Foundations: the bone structure and aptitude required to achieve it were only half of what the Great Bright Demon-Subduing Sword demanded, and seventy percent of Old Daoist Chuhe's Beast Mastering Heavenly Heart.
Compared to the poorest Mortal Tier flying sword of the Palace of Grand Beginning's past, its prerequisites had dropped to a mere thirty percent of the original standard. In Sun Yu's words, anyone who vaguely resembled a human being could cultivate it.
Sun Yu's claim was not without basis. The requirements for this Dao Foundation specified that young girls had an easier time achieving it, and for those of fair features, the difficulty decreased by another ten percent. As for why, Sun Yu couldn't explain either. Then again, the cultivation world was full of oddities, and there were far stranger requirements than this.
Wei Yuan inquired closely about the employment prospects of this Dao Foundation, only to be persuaded by a few words from Sun Yu.
Wounded soldiers and patients had long convalescence periods after treatment, and the quality of their recovery during this interval directly affected the final outcome. Yet the number of pretty female disciples in the clinics was limited, utterly unable to meet the vast demand for nursing care; after receiving basic treatment, patients were simply cast aside to fend for themselves.
Cultivators who attained the Origin-Nourishing Toxin-Clearing Dao Foundation, however, could dramatically accelerate recovery through daily nursing care. Sun Yu estimated that after amputations or organ transplants, nursing care from cultivators of this Dao Foundation would slash mortality rates by seventy percent and reduce recovery time by two-thirds. Given Qingming's current population, Sun Yu figured they needed at least two thousand nursing cultivators—at one per ten thousand people, that was already quite modest.
This reasoning convinced Wei Yuan on the spot, so this Dao Foundation became a headline promotion for this session of the Grand Dao Foundation Ceremony. To Wei Yuan's surprise, alongside pretty girls, many delicate, fair-featured boys also opted for it.
There were also some boys and girls who merely thought they had fair features and attempted the same Dao Foundation, with disastrously dismal success rates. Wei Yuan had no choice but to transfer them all to study Beast Mastering Heavenly Heart, where eight out of ten surprisingly succeeded.
The summer of the seventh year of Tianqi's Grand Dao Foundation Ceremony was destined for the history books. Not only did candidates surpass fifty thousand for the first time, with successful Dao Foundation finishers exceeding five thousand, but it also proved that good looks genuinely increased one's odds of attaining a Dao Foundation—though of course, merely thinking oneself good-looking did not count.
Qingming added over four thousand more Dao Foundations; together with recruits and defectors, the total count of Dao Foundation cultivators approached fifteen thousand. Although the vast majority were template cultivators unsuitable for the battlefield, if it ever came down to life and death, handing them a flying-sword gun would still render their combat strength far superior to Body Casting cultivators.
With more human karmic luck, Qingming's rate of expansion picked up as well. Its radius now reached over eight hundred li, covering an area equivalent to two commanderies.
Over the past year or so, Qingming had expanded at an astonishing pace. Ever since Wei Yuan became the Southern Military Commissioner, what with seizing and purchasing, the population had ballooned by a full ten million almost overnight. At present, merely ensuring these ten million newcomers had food to eat and homes to live in kept everyone delightfully busy. Next would come clothes to wear, books to study, and finally, immortal arts to cultivate.
Wei Yuan bustled about, attending to countless trivial matters. The days flew by in the blink of an eye. Only when everything in Qingming finally settled onto the right track and functioned smoothly did Wei Yuan realize that, without noticing, he could now effortlessly handle five hundred and twelve tasks at once.
This was a tremendous accomplishment. High in spirits, Wei Yuan went to share the good news with Zhang Sheng, only to find him in secluded meditation, nourishing his spirit to break through into the late stage of Dao Foundation. Seeing Wei Yuan arrive, Zhang Sheng emerged from seclusion, intending to offer his disciple some guidance in cultivation.
The master and disciple chatted for a while, and Zhang Sheng soon discovered that all Wei Yuan lacked at this point was accumulation—patient, grinding work—and beyond that, tempering his spirituality. There was truly nothing to instruct him on.
So Wei Yuan asked about Zhang Sheng's cultivation progress instead, discovering that Zhang Sheng was striving to bring forth spirits within his immortal swords.
When an immortal sword birthed a spirit, the most common manifestation was a sword-bearing sword immortal. This was the supreme sword Dao proven by the Sword Palace over nearly ten thousand years; in terms of comprehensive power, no other form of dharma idol could match a sword-bearing sword immortal.
Zhang Sheng was prodigiously gifted, so he naturally walked the orthodox path, cultivating the righteous sword-bearing sword immortal. With a point of Zhang Sheng's finger, a green-robed sword-bearing sword immortal stepped out from his body and stood in place, holding the Heaven Tier Azure Silk Rain in its hand.
Wei Yuan saw that this sword immortal operated smoothly and effortlessly; though it had not yet birthed true spirituality, it was already remarkably nimble. Once it became a dharma idol, gave birth to true spirituality, and underwent a metamorphosis of Dao power, in pure combat ability, a single one could take on six of Cui Yu's celestial soldiers.
Wei Yuan was merely a bit curious. If he remembered correctly, Zhang Sheng had refined thirty-six Azure Silk Rain swords in total. He wondered whether this sword immortal would sprout thirty-six arms to hold one in each, or grow sword pouches and knapsacks to pack them all in.
Right as he wondered, Zhang Sheng said, "There are currently four of this kind of sword immortal."
Immediately afterward, a swordswoman clad in red holding a flaming immortal sword appeared before Zhang Sheng. She grasped an improved version of the Immortal Sword False Sun, which was originally only Mortal Tier. Yet in her hands, its power was enhanced once more, reaching Earth Tier potency. Though still far from the authentic Immortal Sword Great Sun, it was already enough to form an independent dharma idol.
Zhang Sheng said, "There are currently twenty-four of this kind of sword cultivator."
Thoughts flashed through Wei Yuan's mind as he did quick mental math, arriving at a conclusion: these twenty-four swords were more than enough to pin Xiaoyu to the ground and beat him black and blue.
Zhang Sheng naturally was not so petty and bored as to needle Xiaoyu's Dao heart for no reason. Wei Yuan, however, was quite bored enough—and prepared to write Xiaoyu another letter.
Chapter 775