Sitting in his study, Wei Yuan was reading a history book by the bright sunlight streaming through the window. It was an unofficial history, laden with annotations from past scholars pointing out errors and omissions in the text.
Yet having been preserved in the Palace of Grand Beginning, the book naturally possessed its own merits. It recorded numerous mundane details of the region where the author had lived, along with trivial personal events that had no bearing on the greater world.
In its own era, it had been a mediocre work—muddled in logic, skewed in priorities, and colored heavily by the author's personal biases.
In the present day, however, those recorded minutiae had become the sole surviving written memory of that ancient era, offering modern readers a glimpse into the world of three hundred thousand years ago.
Studying history was like assembling a jigsaw puzzle: each book offered only scattered fragments of a bygone age, but with enough reading, a relatively complete picture would gradually take shape.
Wei Yuan reached the final page. Closing the volume, he walked toward a nearby bookshelf, which was packed with categorized historical texts from various eras.
Another Wei Yuan hurried toward him from the opposite direction. Wei Yuan turned his shoulders slightly to let him brush past.
Clutching a book, that Wei Yuan found a well-lit spot and began reading right where he stood. Each Wei Yuan had different habits; some preferred sitting, while others liked standing.
Wei Yuan stepped up to a bookshelf containing the book he wished to read. As for the one in his hand, he could set it down anywhere, and it would return to its proper place on its own.
Three other Wei Yuans stood before the shelf, all engrossed in selecting books.
Wei Yuan waited patiently for them to finish before pulling out the volume he wanted and walking back toward his original seat. But another Wei Yuan was already sitting there. He gave a mild shrug, found another spot at leisure, and resumed reading.
Now standing by the window, he cast an apparently casual glance outside before opening the book. The sunlight was radiant, and the sky shone with a pure, immaculate blue, like an inverted celestial lake without the faintest blemish.
From his angle, he could not see the sun, only the sunlight. And where there was sunlight, mustn't there be a sun?
A faint thought surfaced in Wei Yuan's mind. The sky was so blue, completely unchanging. Could heaven and earth truly be so pure and untainted? If there was sunlight, was there truly a sun?
This was not the true world. This was the Smoke and Fire of the Mortal World.
Every book-reading Wei Yuan was detached from the rest, like familiar strangers who never spoke. Each was a part of Wei Yuan, yet none of them was Wei Yuan.
To this Wei Yuan's eyes, above that pure blue sky dwelled an overarching will that looked down upon all things—the fountainhead of every Wei Yuan, and the origin of this entire world.
In this place, some Wei Yuans had vanished, while new ones had arrived. The newcomers knew nothing of the changes this great hall had undergone, but he did.
He had been here from the very beginning, watching as a few lonely books in the wilderness gradually grew into this grand hall, where the history section alone held more than eighty thousand volumes.
Perhaps one day he, too, would vanish from this place... But why?
Wei Yuan turned the page, pulled back his wandering thoughts, and focused on his reading.
Someday, when that terrifying gaze watching from beyond the heavens vanished or turned elsewhere, perhaps then it would be time to do something.
Meanwhile, Wei Yuan was allocating over seven hundred consciousnesses to manage the military affairs of the war, keeping the overall campaign in crisp order. The scale of the war continued to expand, demanding more and more energy. In the beginning, he had only needed to commit over two hundred consciousnesses; now, at more than triple that number, the strain was still beginning to wear on him.
At present, fewer than two hundred consciousnesses remained dedicated to reading.
He tried his best to maintain the quota of reading tasks. Books in the Smoke and Fire of the Mortal World were multiplying by the day, and astonishingly, the mortals had even devised a method to analyze and decipher the true intent of Daoist scriptures.
A single wisp of true intent contained a tremendous wealth of information. The mortals meticulously recorded this information piece by piece, untangled the relationships within, and recompiled it into Daoist scriptures that even ordinary mortals could comprehend. As a result, the number of Daoist texts within the Smoke and Fire of the Mortal World surged at an astonishing rate.
The Myriad Aspects of Great Yin Moon Splendor that Wei Yuan cultivated had alone been expanded into more than eight hundred Daoist scriptures. Even so, this amounted to less than twenty percent of the true intent Wei Yuan had grasped—and what he had managed to grasp was itself less than twenty percent of the original text.
As for the true intent in the Immortal Chapter of the Myriad Aspects Chapter, Wei Yuan could neither touch nor comprehend it. Yet that single wisp of intent was more vast than all the others combined.
If this was true for the Myriad Aspects of Great Yin Moon Splendor, the true intent contained in other Daoist texts Wei Yuan had seen was similarly substantial. Most significant among the rest was the inheritance of the three sword stances of the Sword of Ten Thousand Generations and Autumns.
Those three sword stances had already been transcribed into more than sixteen hundred Daoist texts, ten percent of which were permanently duplicated within the Smoke and Fire of the Mortal World. Even if the truly fated heir appeared one day and took the inheritance of the three stances from Wei Yuan, they would never be able to strip away these copied scriptures.
This was likely a development that even the immortal who had laid down this scheme had never anticipated. That immortal had treated Wei Yuan as merely a waystation in the lineage, intending only a passing stop while leaving behind a few scraps of broth as compensation. Never had he expected that Wei Yuan would find a way to pluck entire handfuls of wool from the sheep.
There was another crucial source of Daoist texts in the Smoke and Fire of the Mortal World, one that Wei Yuan had never anticipated at first: the mirage demons.
The mirage demon race had once been a true native people of this realm, but an immortal had used vast divine abilities to suppress and refine them, turning them into a grotto-heaven race.
They had passed through long ages, surviving across several generations of immortals, and had long since forgotten the events of those ancient days.
Nevertheless, the mirage demon race had always maintained several Scenery Command cultivators among them, including at least one at Scenery Command Perfection, which allowed them to preserve a wealth of true intent. The true intent passed down through their lineage was harmonized with this world, making it decipherable and comprehensible to mortals.
Upon examining this true intent, Wei Yuan finally recognized the mirage demon race's genuine potential and legacy. Although the three mirage demons under his command were lacking in strength, possessed only ordinary talent, and had comprehended very little true intent, Wei Yuan could still perceive in it the outline of a path to the heavens.
A race like this was beyond the power of the Wise King of the Left to refine; he could only have inherited them from an immortal predecessor.
Deducing from this, the Liao Clan immortal from ancient times who had refined the mirage demons had been terrifyingly formidable, able to refine an entire race possessing its own heavenly path into a mere grotto-heaven clan.
Wei Yuan planned to set aside several hundred consciousnesses once the war with the Shamans concluded to have a thorough discussion with the mirage demons, delving into their clan's historical heritage. Perhaps he might uncover some secrets shared among immortals.
For now, however, Wei Yuan's primary focus regarding the Daoist texts remained on the Myriad Aspects of Great Yin Moon Splendor. He read every single scripture deciphered from the true intent by the mortals with painstaking care.
The true intent he had grasped had been left behind by ancient immortals or mighty figures at Scenery Command Perfection, whereas these deciphered scriptures represented the comprehension of mortals—tantamount to re-examining the Dao path from a mortal's perspective.
Reading these scriptures caused Wei Yuan's comprehension of the Moon Splendor Ten Thousand Facets Chapter to advance by leaps and bounds, yielding fresh insights each day. The bottlenecks and mists of his future cultivation were dispelled bit by bit; it was merely that the cultivation of his physical body could not quite keep pace for the moment.
Wei Yuan split off another consciousness to survey the overarching situation, then stole a brief respite from the busy turmoil to secretly catch his breath.
He was now capable of steadily handling 1,024 tasks at once, with enough divided attention left over to attend to other matters on the side.
Whenever Wei Yuan felt exhausted and bitter, he would think of Xiaoyu; whenever he felt smug and self-satisfied, tempted to let arrogance get the better of him, he would think of Feng Tingyu.
Right as his mind drifted, Wei Yuan felt a stirring in his consciousness and withdrew from the Smoke and Fire of the Mortal World. Outside the door, a cultivator reported that a senior Dharma Idol cultivator from the Palace of Grand Beginning had arrived and was waiting to see him.
Another sect brother?
Wei Yuan was hardly surprised. Qingming had grown substantially and now stood on the front lines of the war against the Shamans, so many disciples of the Palace of Grand Beginning chose to come here for experiential training; some had even adopted it as their primary cultivation ground.
Immortal Monarch Yanshi had already inspected the battlefield against the Shamans and was considering whether to establish a permanent outpost here in Qingming for newly advanced disciples to complete their studies, descend the mountain for tempering, and earn merits—just as Wei Yuan had once trained on the Northern Liao frontier.
Ordinary disciples were one thing; subordinates could receive them. But the arrival of a Dharma Idol cultivator from the palace was a momentous occasion. Wei Yuan straightened his robes and headed to the reception hall to welcome the guest in person.
As he approached the reception hall, before even stepping through the doorway, Wei Yuan felt a sudden flush of heat in his mind. It was as though a blazing fireball burned furiously within the hall, its vitality so immense and terrifying that it scorched even Wei Yuan's divine sense.
Knowing that whoever sat inside was no ordinary figure, Wei Yuan grew curious: how had he never heard of such a formidable expert in the Palace of Grand Beginning?
Stepping into the hall, he saw a mountain of flesh like forged iron coiled in the seat!
The man was toweringly tall, an entire head taller than Wei Yuan, and completely blocky from top to bottom—even the contours of his muscles were square. His musculature was frighteningly dense: not only were his torso and neck heaped with muscle, but even the contours around his eyes were ringed with defined muscle!
Resembling a literal mountain of muscle, he watched Wei Yuan enter, his small eyes—nearly swallowed by flesh—crinkling with broad smiles. "Greetings, Junior Brother Wei! I'm Wang Hu from the Hall of the Bright King. I've come this time to ask for a favor. The Patriarch said you can fight better than any of us!"
"Senior Brother Wang..." Staring at Wang Hu's seamless, unified mass of muscle, Wei Yuan was stunned beyond measure. After a long moment, he let out a sigh and remarked with profound admiration, "Senior Brother, you truly are brilliant!"
Wang Hu froze in shock. "Huh? How did you know that?! All the other disciples think we're stupid; barely anyone knows how smart I am! But those fellow disciples are just too dumb. I tried explaining it to them and they couldn't understand a word, so I couldn't be bothered anymore."
Wei Yuan thought to himself, *Did that even take special discernment? Look at that colossal slab of muscle—slicing off just a few chunks could easily process 1,024 tasks.* He had no idea whether his own computing power could match Wang Hu's biceps, but it certainly fell short of the man's thighs.
*Fortunately, Wang Hu is a man. His physique is different from a girl's; his glutes don't hold much potential.*
Since the guest was the Eldest Senior Brother of the Hall of the Bright King, Wei Yuan asked, "Senior Brother, whatever you need from me, please do not hesitate to ask."
"I came this time to—" Wang Hu stopped midsentence.
He looked left and right, his face creasing with bewilderment. "Junior Brother, something isn't right with this place of yours!"
Chapter 858