At Qingming's routine military council, the cultivators of the Palace of Grand Beginning set aside whatever they were doing and arrived in full force.
The first topic of discussion was the failure of the missiles. The sacrificial altar was not far away, and the signs of a great hex being cast were quite obvious. Combining scouts and divine sense probing with lower-tier divinations, they quickly deduced the reason for the failure.
Yu Zhizhuo was the first to speak: "Since the Shamans are willing to cast great hexes, let's hit them with a massive barrage! Even a Nether Shaman has to rest and catch their breath after releasing a great hex. We'll launch missiles in waves at regular intervals. As long as their Nether Shamans can't recover in time, we'll hit them with a vicious wave—fire several hundred rounds all at once, guaranteed to blow their altar to pieces."
Perfected Chuhe said, "Since the Shamans' great hex specifically targeted the guinea pigs, why don't we shift our thinking? We can make several batches of missiles—some loaded with guinea pigs, and some with conventional warheads. We fire them alternately. That way, one wave has guinea pigs and the next doesn't. The Shamans will soon be thrown into disarray. Once they're overwhelmed and grow somewhat complacent, we'll launch a massive wave. We're bound to wipe out their altar!"
Xiaoyu listened from the side. What he had intended to say had already been voiced by the two seniors. He racked his brains, wishing to contribute a bit of his own wisdom, but his mind seemed to suddenly jam, drawing a complete blank. He squirmed with anxiety, completely at a loss.
Just then, Feng Tingyu suddenly spoke: "Isn't sacrificial power the Shamans' most precious asset? The altar is merely an instrument to channel it. As long as we deplete their sacrificial power, it doesn't matter whether the altar is destroyed or not. Why don't we launch several massive waves in a row? Don't put any guinea pigs inside, don't even mount warheads—just empty shells.
"The Shamans will never dare let the missiles strike the altar, so they'll do everything they can to intercept them. By the time they realize they're intercepting empty husks, it'll already be too late. That way, we're essentially trading sheet metal and gunpowder for their sacrificial power. We won't lose a thing."
"Brilliant!" Wei Yuan's eyes lit up.
The others marveled as well. None of them had ever expected a disciple of the Hall of the Bright King to one day display the bearings of a master strategist!
Concealed in the shadows, the Master of the Hall of the Bright King grinned from ear to ear, releasing dozens of shadow stones all at once to record this historic moment from multiple angles.
The council adjourned, and the cultivators dispersed. Xiaoyu deliberately walked a little slower, falling behind Feng Tingyu. Star Lord Shaoyang appeared beside Xiaoyu, staring intently at Feng Tingyu's swaying rear.
Xiaoyu cleared his throat and whispered, "There are elders hiding in the shadows. Rein it in a bit..."
Star Lord Shaoyang snorted and said coldly, "What kind of junk fills that head of yours? This Star Lord only wanted to see what exactly you lost to."
Xiaoyu's face instantly froze. Hearing voices behind her, Feng Tingyu looked back and saw Xiaoyu. She paused, waiting to leave the military city together with him.
Out of courtesy to a fellow disciple, Xiaoyu strained to find a topic of conversation. "During the meeting earlier, I was wracking my brains too, but for some reason my mind just went blank, like a jammed mechanism. Perhaps because so much was at stake, I was overly nervous."
Xiaoyu had intended it as self-deprecating humor, but Feng Tingyu replied, "Is it possible that it wasn't a jam, and that you're just genuinely stupid?"
Huh??? Xiaoyu was dumbstruck, entirely unable to respond. A lump of fury caught in his chest, nearly making him explode.
Feng Tingyu said earnestly, "If you're stupid, just practice more. As long as you work hard enough, any human can process 1,024 tasks simultaneously. You can definitely do it!"
By now, the two had exited the military city. Feng Tingyu gave Xiaoyu a firm slap on the shoulder by way of encouragement and flew off on her own, leaving Xiaoyu standing alone and utterly bewildered in the wind.
Star Lord Shaoyang materialized once more. "What are you thinking about?"
"I'm wondering if I offended her at some point."
Star Lord Shaoyang said, "You're overthinking it. She simply speaks without thinking."
"True enough. Disciples of the Hall of the Bright King are all like that." Xiaoyu seemed to find a shred of self-consolation.
Yet that fleeting relief was shattered the next instant by Star Lord Shaoyang: "When they don't think before speaking, they don't lie."
Xiaoyu flared up in rage. "Are you saying I'm stupid?!"
Star Lord Shaoyang replied, "She's the one saying you're stupid. As for the two of us, we're cut from the same cloth—I'm merely a cut above."
For the first time in his life, Xiaoyu conceived the notion of changing his Dharma Idol, though he knew full well that was utterly impossible. With a frosty look, he demanded, "What are you trying to say?"
"Knowing shame spurs courage. Both of us need to work harder. There's no reason we should lose to someone else's backside—especially just one cheek."
Xiaoyu's mouth slowly dropped open. He hadn't expected it to circle all the way back to that.
Wei Yuan acted with astonishing speed. The meeting had ended only the previous afternoon, yet by dawn the next day, hundreds of dummy missiles had already been retrofitted. In the blink of an eye, dozens of missiles shot into the sky, hurtling toward the altar in the Shaman camp. Moments later, dozens more launched, soaring above the more than one million warriors locked in life-and-death combat below and streaking toward the altar.
Within two quarters of an hour, four successive waves of missiles flew toward the Shamans. Whether each contained a guinea pig was randomly distributed, but all of them were live missiles. Then, flames lit up the sky over Qingming as more than six hundred missiles rose simultaneously, rocketing toward the Shaman altar.
This wave was so numerous and magnificent that many battling Shaman and Qingming warriors slowed their hands, watching hundreds of points of light streak across the vast heavens toward the Shaman encampment.
Within the Shaman positions, urgent, piercing horns suddenly blared. The calls were relayed in waves, traveling into the distance even faster than the incoming missiles.
Then the distant sky abruptly turned bright green. High in the clouds, a terrifying behemoth was taking shape. From beyond the heavenly vault, countless gazes brimming with deathly stillness instantly peered downward, but after sweeping over the gargantuan entity, they found no trace of life. That colossal monstrosity, spanning thousands of zhang, was spawned purely of hexcraft.
The massive hex creature unleashed an earth-shaking roar. Even hundreds of li away, Wei Yuan could feel a tremor through his bones.
Though such a hex creature was not truly alive, for as long as it existed, not even a Scenery Command cultivator would be willing to provoke it.
The hex creature dug its talons into the top of its own head and ripped its scalp wide open, revealing honeycomb-like tissue amidst the mangled flesh. The next instant, countless insects surged from the nest at lightning speed, far faster than the missiles.
Each insect locked onto a missile and slammed right into it. Their several-foot-long bodies were unimaginably hard, knocking the missiles off course or even snapping them clean in two.
The hex creature suffered agonizing pain; it seemed that every insect that flew out subjected it to torment. Only when the last missile crashed to the ground did it utter a roar of apparent relief, dissolving into nothingness.
On the altar, Liu Lan let out a long sigh of relief. If this great hex had still failed to intercept the missiles, those two idiots would have forced him to take the field himself.
The feeling of being watched by creatures from beyond the heavens was excruciating. Hundreds of years ago, Liu Lan had experienced it once, losing over a century of cultivation before recovering. He had no desire to go through that again, so he had resorted to a forbidden hex he rarely ever touched. In any case, he was carrying out the Heavenly Shaman's will, backed by those two fools, and could expend sacrificial power as he pleased.
It was just that the hex spirit of this forbidden great hex was visibly in worsening torment; it likely couldn't be summoned many more times. Thinking of its final roar, Liu Lan felt a sudden surge of resentment, though he didn't know who to direct it at—Wei Yuan, or those two idiots?
The two fools stood upon the altar, showing no intention of moving.
Liu Lan shrugged. Disregarding his stature, he flew down from the altar to inspect the fallen missiles. The altar was vital ground, so few Shamans had been stationed nearby to begin with, but in the previous waves, a few missiles had slipped through the net and blown up quite a few Shaman Scholars.
The two fools didn't care, but Liu Lan couldn't bear it. Many of those Shaman Scholars were his own clansmen, and many more were trusted aides who had followed him for years. Thus, before this unprecedented wave of missiles arrived, Liu Lan had dismissed them all, paid the price of burning through a massive amount of his artifact spirit's life force to invoke the forbidden hex, and consumed eighty percent of the sacrificial power bestowed by the Heavenly Shaman.
Liu Lan picked up a missile—the warhead was empty! He picked up another—still empty! A dreadful premonition gripped him. Reaching out, he pulled over a dozen missile fragments within a thousand zhang. Without exception, every single one was empty!
This wave of missiles was nothing but flashy, useless dummies! They hadn't even bothered using spirit-linked guinea pigs!
Liu Lan felt as if his heart were bleeding. That artifact spirit had been passed down from his grandfather and had always been the supreme treasure of his clan. In his hands, it had only ever been used twice, each time decisively turning the tide of battle. That was how he had won the trust of Heavenly Shaman Huiye, earning the chance to advance to the late Scenery Command stage and hover on the verge of becoming a Heavenly Shaman candidate.
"What did you find?" an inquiry drifted down from the altar.
Holding a missile, Liu Lan flew back to the altar and ground his teeth. "We were tricked. These missiles are all empty!"
"Empty?!" the two Shamans screeched in unison. "You wasted so much of the Master's sacrificial power on mere dummies? Are you an idiot? Falling for such a simple trick?!"
Liu Lan felt murder surge straight to his crown, almost blacking out in fury.
*They're the Master's confidants, the Master's confidants...* he repeated in his heart over and over before barely managing to suppress his mad urge.
Just then, a Great Shaman flew in at full speed, stopping at a distance to shout, "The army sent toward Hanyang Pass was ambushed by the humans! Suffering catastrophic losses, they are retreating back to camp!"
"Another defeat?!" The Shaman on the left flew into a rage. "Qingming still has the spare strength to launch ambushes?!"
"The ambushing forces weren't from Qingming, but from Hanyang Pass! A human Scenery Command took the risk to intervene, slaying both our leading commanders with a single sword strike! Our troops fell into chaos, which led to the rout!"
"A Scenery Command dared to strike in the Shattered Lands?! How dare he!"
"That person possesses an immortal treasure, which blocked the creatures from beyond the heavens and allowed him to escape back safely."
The Shaman on the right turned to Liu Lan. "Didn't you claim that the Xu family of Hanyang Pass harbors a deep, bitter feud with Wei Yuan and would never dispatch troops to aid him?!"
"I never said that! Spout any more of your nonsense, and not even the Master will be able to protect you!" Liu Lan could bear it no longer and roared back.
"That's exactly what was written in the report sitting on your desk!"
"Those were merely conjectures by subordinates, and did I ever give you permission to read it?! You snooped, and you believed it—what the hell am I supposed to do about that?!" Liu Lan was practically bellowing.
Far away, Wei Yuan gazed from a distance at the turbulent, terrifying Shaman auras, keeping himself secretly on guard. It seemed they had swindled the Shamans rather severely this time. Could those Shaman powerhouses fly into a humiliated rage and join forces to attack him?
Wei Yuan looked down at the lands of Qingming beneath his feet, at the countless soldiers fighting fiercely in blood, and at the azure sea of karmic luck within the Smoke and Fire of the Mortal World. Confidence welled up unbidden.
The mobilization at the start of this battle had earned Wei Yuan a full ten million wisps of azure qi! Yet receiving such a gift came with responsibility. No matter what, Wei Yuan had to honor his promises; otherwise, the karmic luck of tens of millions would in an instant transform into resentful karma, enough to plunge Wei Yuan into doom beyond redemption.
As the saying went: water can carry a boat, but it can also overturn it.
Chapter 852