Since it could not be avoided, let it come with even greater fury. The Middle Way was never an easy path to walk. When practiced by a great nation, it was called the Middle Way; when attempted by a small one, it was mere fence-sitting. History made that abundantly clear.
Wei Yuan understood this principle well. Ever since the Heavenly Shaman took to the field, Wei Yuan had harbored no illusions, completely unleashing the growth of the Yellow Springs Grotto-Heaven. Stretching out his neck brought a strike, and pulling it back brought the same strike, so he might as well return a blow before his demise.
The Yellow Springs Grotto-Heaven remained faint in power, but large or small, its very existence carried meaning, allowing the Smoke and Fire of the Mortal World to complete a cycle of even greater significance.
Yet Wei Yuan could not help feeling uneasy that such a major breakthrough had not brought a single heavenly tribulation.
In the mountains surrounding the Hall of Heroic Spirits, headstones were multiplying in massive swathes, packed closely together across several slopes. The memorial tablets in the first great hall of the Lingxiao Heroic Spirits Hall steadily grew in number, their glow shining brighter and brighter, shimmering without ever going dark. With the twin surveillance of the Dao domain and the Great Array of the Heavens, virtually every act of heroism was guaranteed proper recognition.
This was something the mortals had long known and repeatedly proven true. Thus, whenever a critical moment arrived in battle, large numbers of soldiers would fight to the death with bathed-in-blood resolve, prepared to perish alongside their foes to save desperate situations. To repay a gift of a peach with a plum of one's own—such was the Dao of most ordinary soldiers.
Wei Yuan showed immense patience. He directed his forces to contract little by little, yielding a small parcel of positions each day while the ferocity of their artillery steadily waned.
Finally, when Liu Lan had completely overrun the first two defensive lines and assumed victory was within his grasp, Wei Yuan unleashed a full-scale counteroffensive. The intensity of the artillery barrage was unprecedented. An entire two hours of savage carpet bombing taught Liu Lan what it meant to possess an abundance of martial virtue.
After the artillery saturation, no living creature remained on the surface of the positions. Because massive quantities of high-explosive shells had been used, even the Shamans sheltering inside the trenches suffered catastrophic casualties.
Immediately after, hundreds of thousands of Qingming troops surged forth, striking at the enemy across a front extending over a hundred li. They swiftly broke through the Shaman battle lines, recaptured the first defensive line, and encircled several hundred thousand Shaman troops between the first and third defensive lines.
For the first time, Qingming deployed large numbers of heavy-armored units. Armed with double-barreled scatterguns, they pushed forward along the trenches. These scatterguns packed tremendous firepower; within a few fathoms, even a Great Shaman would be wounded by a direct hit, and noble Shaman Scholars at the Dao Foundation level were cut down with practically every blast.
On the battlefield, Qingming's young officers keenly seized fleeting opportunities, carving the Shaman forces into smaller and narrower pockets to annihilate them piece by piece.
Meanwhile, Shaman reinforcements in the rear were suppressed by torrential artillery fire and could not charge forward at all. Seeing their heavy forces on the verge of destruction, the entire vanguard legion was about to suffer a crippling blow.
Wei Yuan looked down upon the entire battlefield, feeling quite gratified. These young officers had finally matured through one battle after another. Their battlefield command and grasp of tactical opportunities were both remarkable. Though slightly inferior to the full-spectrum orchestration of the Smoke and Fire of the Mortal World, that was merely because they fought in localized sectors and could not perceive the global state of the field.
If they could be granted awareness of the entire battlefield's disposition, then... it seemed the Smoke and Fire of the Mortal World would still hold the upper hand?
With his hands clasped behind his back, Wei Yuan waited quietly for whatever new move the Shamans would make. If they had no other cards left to play, he would gladly claim these hundreds of thousands of Shaman soldiers.
Dense clouds blanketed the vault of heaven, churning at incredible speed without any fixed direction, resembling a pot of boiling porridge. This was the Scenery Command masters of the human and Shaman races locked in fierce combat high in the firmament; the clash of their mindscape worlds was spilling over, rippling into this realm below.
Wei Yuan was not worried about the battle beyond the sky. His side might be at a disadvantage, or they might not, but they should be able to hold their ground. At a higher tier, even if the Cui family's Immortal Ancestor could not intervene directly, simply disrupting the Heavenly Shaman's placement of pieces would fundamentally improve the course of the war.
Even if the Shamans brought down another grand curse, Wei Yuan was fully prepared to weather a round using his Peerless Dao Domain until the encircled Shaman army was wiped out. Moreover, the encircled Shamans were under relentless bombardment at every moment; they would not last much longer.
After careful calculation, Wei Yuan concluded that few variables remained. Victory in the opening battle was already in sight.
Coiled upon the sacrificial altar, Liu Lan had originally looked on with eyes spouting fury, his rage repeatedly drawing the gazes of extraterrestrial monstrosities sweeping across the battlefield. Now, however, he abruptly turned serene and composed, his irises deepening into a dark, lustrous silver.
He let out a cold laugh. "Finally taken the bait! Putting on an act of fiery rage for so long was truly exhausting."
Before his voice faded, his body expanded at terrifying speed, stretching several hundred fathoms long and coiling around the entire main altar. Above his head materialized a silver feathered serpent reaching from earth to sky. Bands of hazy light emanated from its serpentine eyes. This light actually snared the gazes of the extraterrestrial monstrosities, leaving them spinning in place within the luminescence.
Immediately after, altar after altar blasted pillars of blood light into the sky before shattering to pieces one by one. Even the main altar upon which Liu Lan coiled did the same. The vast sacrificial power stored within, coupled with the worldly force borrowed by offering the entire altar itself as a sacrifice, surged to an insurmountable height!
In an instant, heaven and earth were overturned!
Wei Yuan was alarmed, yet there was nothing he could do. He could only watch helplessly as a wave of earth more than a hundred feet tall came rolling forward from the direction of the Shaman camp!
This was nothing short of a natural catastrophe, impossible to withstand through mortal strength alone. Concrete fortifications constructed to withstand extreme punishment were hurled into the air by the earth-wave, blown to smithereens. The Shamans and humans locked in bloody melee were swept into the sky alongside the debris and slammed violently down. Far more, however, were directly crushed beneath the upheaved earth.
The underground fortifications were completely ruined as well. They could endure grand curses descending from the heavens, but against a curse that shook the very foundation of the earth, they possessed no defense. Large numbers of soldiers concealed within the tunnels had nowhere to flee, buried beneath the ground then and there.
In the blink of an eye, the earth-wave swept past the third defensive line before finally exhausting its momentum and grinding to a halt.
The battlefield was reduced to utter wreckage, unrecognizable from its original state; only a few tilted bastions proved that this had once been a fortified sector. The surface was buried under freshly churned soil and rock, corpses strewn everywhere, while many men and Shamans buried halfway in the dirt struggled desperately to pull themselves free.
A fortified region spanning an entire hundred li was wiped out just like that.
Wei Yuan felt chilled to the bone, his heart plunging as though soaked in freezing water. Such earth-shattering devastation—this was the true might of an immortal!
The sky above the battlefield turned bloody once more as vast swaths of dark clouds became blood clouds, weeping a drizzling rain of blood. At the same time, a wind shimmering with moonlight blew from the Shaman camp. Intangible and formless, the wind did not harm physical living beings, yet it corroded and compressed boundaries and domains.
Beneath the caress of the lunar wind, Qingming's nurturing power drained rapidly like water through an opened sluice, forcing Wei Yuan to retract his domain by a hundred li; otherwise, he could not sustain it for long.
Without the protection of the domain, there was no defense against the Shaman blood curse, leaving the soldiers to endure it with their own bodies. Looking upon the unbroken threads of rain, Wei Yuan's heart sank, knowing that few survivors would remain.
This round of blood curse made no distinction between friend and foe, yet was all the more potent for it.
Amidst the blood rain, Shaman warriors writhed and wailed as well, dying in agony. Many noble Shaman Scholars madly cursed Liu Lan in their dying moments. Their curses condensed into a black rain that poured ceaselessly over Liu Lan, only to be turned away by the silvery moonlight cloaking his body.
Nor was that the end of it. From the Shaman camp rose a billow of rolling green mist, driven toward Qingming by the shamanic wind. Even from afar, Wei Yuan could sense the dense true intents of rot, ulceration, distortion, and extinction radiating from it.
The toxicity of this green mist was not overwhelmingly fierce, yet it was exceptionally vicious. Wherever it passed, the ground was thoroughly corroded and poisoned, slowly seeping into the depths of the earth. Any soil tainted by it would be ruined permanently, vastly worse than sowing coarse salt across fertile fields. Once the vitality of the soil was destroyed, not even crops edible solely by the Shamans could take root, nor could fish and shrimp survive in its waters.
Four grand curses, each more venomous than the last. The Earth Curse destroyed fortifications, indiscriminately burying the armies locked in battle; the Moon Wind Curse dispersed the domain's power, stripping away the umbrella sheltering living souls; the Blood Curse slaughtered life, sparing neither friend nor foe; and finally, the Corrosion Curse turned the soil into poisoned, dead earth forever. This was an attempt to tear Qingming out by its roots!
In less than two hours, Qingming suffered its heaviest single-day loss in history: a total of two hundred and fifty thousand troops were buried here, with eight hundred thousand Shamans buried alongside them.
Yet even that was not all. The terrifying karmic debt generated by this slaughter, because Qingming had formed its own world and severed itself from the Wu domain, converged entirely onto Wei Yuan!
This defied the Heavenly Dao and flouted every natural law. Clearly, the Heavenly Shaman had intervened, tampering with the worldly Great Dao to pin karmic consequences onto Wei Yuan that he should never have borne.
Only now was the horror of an immortal laid bare, almost capable of stealing the sky and swapping the sun.
A massive cloud of black-and-red energy pounced viciously toward Wei Yuan. Yet suddenly, droplets of light rained down from the sky. Countless strands of black-and-red karmic debt vanished beneath the gentle drizzle, disappearing without a trace. A small portion was drawn away by the Yellow Springs Grotto-Heaven, leaving only a tiny wisp to descend toward the Smoke and Fire of the Mortal World, where it was entirely received by the Red Lotus Bodhi.
Chapter 848