Wei Yuan sprinted alongside Jidao Zhengang. The farther they ran, the brighter Jidao gleamed, whereas Wei Yuan only exhaled two puffs of immortal mist once in a long while.
Jidao's four legs pumped at high speed, carrying him with remarkable stability. On top of that, he bore the butchered ox on his back. Originally he had not wanted to take the hide, but at Wei Yuan's firm insistence, he had ended up shouldering every last scrap of material.
After spending so much time around Yu Zhizhuo, Sun Yu, and the other cultivators of the Palace of Grand Beginning, Wei Yuan had subconsciously developed an ingrained conviction: everything had a use, and the greater the quantity, the more useful it was. In this world, there were no useless raw materials—only processing techniques waiting to be invented.
The ox hide was the largest single material from the beast, and at first glance Wei Yuan felt a mystical premonition that this might well become another source of wealth.
Of course, the most abundant materials in the Desolate Realm appeared to be an immense stone platform and the ubiquitous sand and soil. That dirt did not even require processing; pack it straight into an artillery shell, and it would serve as premier antipersonnel shrapnel.
The man and the shaman covered several hundred li in a single breath before arriving at the foot of a low hill. Halfway up the slope, a shallow pit had been dug out, propped overhead with a stone slab. Beast hides were spread across the ground, barely leaving enough room to cram Jidao's massive frame inside.
"Master, this is my home," Jidao said, pointing at the wretchedly crude hovel. It could not even be called a cave or a burrow; it was simply a pit with a lid.
Wei Yuan glanced up at the "roof." It was cobbled together from four or five stone slabs with noticeable gaps in between. Supporting it were animal bones—no wonder Jidao had insisted on dragging the ox bones back.
"Master, crude as it looks, my dad and I braved death nine times over to scrape this together. The most valuable things are those stone slabs. Dad and I had decent luck, finding two apiece.
"Next are the beast bones. Only the leg bones and spinal columns of the oxen can serve as pillars. But the bones rot after some time. Beast hides don't rot, but they don't block sunlight, so they're only good for lining the ground to keep us from sinking in while sleeping."
Wei Yuan raised a square of ox hide over his head. Sure enough, though the visible light was blocked, the sunlight here was no ordinary radiance; it still passed through the hide. And once filtered through the leather, its nature shifted. The moment it fell upon his body, Wei Yuan felt something go awry within him—patches of flesh began to die off, while other parts started proliferating wildly.
Jidao jumped in fright and shouted in panic, "Put the hide down! You'll die!"
Wei Yuan had already sensed the anomaly in his body. Lowering the hide, he said, "No wonder you didn't want to bring it."
"Yeah. If criminals like us accidentally fall into the hands of the Shaman Hunters, there's a torture they use: they cover you in beast hides and leave you baking in the sun. In just a few days, even the strongest shaman turns into a monstrous, chaotically mutating creature. It's excruciating agony, but you can't die. Then the Shaman Hunters release those monsters back into the Desolate Realm, and they attack anything in sight."
This entire passage was conveyed purely through True Intent, precise down to the smallest detail. It had clearly been rehearsed countless times.
"Who taught you that?" Wei Yuan asked.
"Why would a mighty shaman like me need teaching? Only a miserable little—" Jidao caught himself halfway through and switched back to True Intent: "Dad taught me. He was afraid I'd get curious and sleep under the hides."
Wei Yuan squeezed the soft underside of the hide and asked, "Can this not be eaten?"
Jidao shook his head. "Bug... vile maggot... Dad said there are invisible needles inside. Eat too much, and your body gets packed full of them. Once there are too many needles, a shaman dies."
Wei Yuan pondered this. It seemed Jidao's deceased father had possessed no small amount of learning; he had just been terrible in a fight, having been gored to death by an ox—an utter incompetent.
Jidao began dressing the offal and beef to prepare a meal. Wei Yuan watched from the side, suppressing his murderous urge while conversing with him in the Desolate Tongue, gradually piecing together a glimpse of the Desolate Realm.
The Great Wilderness Realm differed from the Nether Cold Realm. The Nether Cold Realm was the private domain of the Nether Shamans, whereas the Great Wilderness Realm, though belonging to the Strength Shamans, was designated as an exile ground for the most heinous shaman criminals. Shamans of every tribe could be cast in here.
According to Jidao, aside from Strength Shamans, other shamans did not survive here for long.
Jidao's father had been a Great Shaman at the peak of the Dharma Idol realm, on the verge of advancing to Spirit Shaman. Supposedly, before his exile, he had been a figure of some renown among the Spirit Shamans, but after being tossed into the Great Wilderness Realm, he had grown weaker and weaker. In less than a year, he had perished beneath the hooves of a molten ox.
Only Strength Shamans possessed bodies sturdy enough to endure having their flesh ravaged from the inside out by the sun. With flesh continually destroyed and regenerated, it was effectively an extraordinarily brutal form of Body Tempering. And only prodigies among the Strength Shamans possessed physiques capable of weathering the devastation to grow progressively stronger.
Over the past million years, the Strength Shamans had gradually taken root in the Desolate Realm, continually refining their shamanic arts to harness the realm's harsh environment for body tempering.
"Do the Desolate Shamans have tribes or cities here?"
Jidao replied, "A Heavenly Shaman oversees this realm year-round. For the past five hundred years, Lord Jiuri has held the rotation. We Strength Shamans have a city here called Jitian City, where Lord Jiuri resides.
"I've only visited once, back when I was chosen as a promising seed of my tribe and sent in to cultivate, entering the Desolate Realm straight through Jitian City. But things are different now. If I go anywhere near Jitian City, the Strength Shamans will likely arrest me."
"What crime did you commit?"
Jidao went quiet for a moment before answering, "When I returned from training in the Desolate Realm, I found out that both my sister and my wife had been seized by the city lord of Yan City!
"That old quail egg must have heard tales of their beauty somewhere, and struck while I was away. When I got back, I went to reason with him. I kept my voice as quiet as I could, but he—he actually claimed I yelled at him! Then he summoned his guards, beat me half to death, and threw me right back into the Desolate Realm."
It was a tragic tale, though hardly unheard of in the mortal world. Wei Yuan sighed and asked, "Is your sister very beautiful?"
"Not as beautiful as my wife, but she's very young—barely eighty-odd years old this year, and she's only been married three times. How could that old turtledove ever deserve her? As for my wife..."
Jidao drifted into wistful remembrance, murmuring in a daze, "...She has seven arms, two growing from the back of her head, and every single one is different..."
"Then you... truly are unfortunate," Wei Yuan said.
"Though I am a handsome shaman myself, when it comes to looks, I really don't hold a candle to her."
Wei Yuan looked Jidao over more carefully: three arms, one on the left and two on the right. By the standards of shaman aesthetics, anything symmetrical was hideous, so Jidao truly did qualify as a handsome shaman.
Compared to Jidao Zhengang, Tianyu, who merely had an extra tail, had to be considered dreadfully ugly. But Tianyu was wealthy and radiated an aura of prestige, so appearance hardly mattered.
"Is there any way to leave the Desolate Realm?" Wei Yuan asked.
"The Desolate Realm only has three exits. Two are in Jitian City, and the other is mobile, appearing in different places at set intervals."
Wei Yuan frowned. "Only three exits?"
"Only three that I know of. Entering the Desolate Realm is easy, but leaving is exceedingly hard. Back when I finished my training, I had to wait nearly half a month for a full quota of people before they'd activate the teleportation array."
Wei Yuan's brows knitted slightly; this was indeed somewhat unexpected. Yet his expression quickly cleared. Ending up in the Great Wilderness Realm was already a stroke of fortune amidst catastrophe—after all, it had cost him several million karmic luck to defy fate and alter his destiny to land here.
Since he was here, he would make the best of it. Above all, he had to find the Dao Sword first, and only then figure out how to depart.
Once he got out, he would still have to clean up the mess in Qingming. Who knew how long it would take him to return from this exile? By the time he went back, Qingming would surely be in total chaos, neglected and desolated.
Yet Wei Yuan was optimistic by nature. He felt that no matter how bad things became in Qingming, it would not matter. In the beginning, the land had been nothing but an empty blank slate, yet barely over a decade later, had they not erected several great cities and more than a dozen smaller ones?
If they could build it once, they could do it again.
Even if Zhang Sheng, Ji Liuli, Bao Yun, Xiaoyu, Yu Zhizhuo, and the rest bungled everything, he could still rebuild the realm from scratch.
With his confidence bolstered, Wei Yuan said, "How are tools and weapons made here? Let's get some gear together first, and then find a way to capture a few Shaman Hunters."
"You mean this knife? Such a simple matter, you worthless little—I'll demonstrate right away, Master, just one moment."
Jidao Zhengang lifted down one of the stone slabs serving as the roof and set it on the ground. After searching painstakingly through the soil for quite a while, he picked out a dozen finger-sized grains of grit and placed them into the hollows of the blade. Then he unleashed a battle cry, and both the blade and the grains began to gleam.
Jidao discarded the grains that failed to shine, then bellowed repeatedly at the blade. The knife's temperature soared, and the streaks of iron upon it began to glow a faint, dark red.
Then Jidao began forging.
Wei Yuan had originally wondered what had been used to forge the blade, since one could not even find a decent-sized rock around here. Now he understood: Jidao had hooves.
The undersides of Jidao's hooves were embedded with countless tiny grains of Desolate Realm sand, making them iron hooves in every sense of the word. Stomp by stomp, he hammered the knife, pausing every so often to bellow a few times to heat the metal before continuing his grueling labor. Repeating this cycle again and again, it took him over a shichen to finally fuse those grains into the blade.
After Jidao's battle cries, the knife's temperature had far exceeded what would melt steel to liquid, yet in the Desolate Realm, it merely caused the local iron to glow faintly red and soften slightly. Only continuous hammering could drive out a fraction of the impurities.
Furthermore, Jidao had spent a great deal of time sifting through the soil, only to uncover a meager pinch of usable iron.
Watching his primitive labor, Wei Yuan said, "You withered stalk that even worms wouldn't touch, this won't do. Step aside, let me!"
Wei Yuan picked up a piece of the iron material and weighed it in his hand, noting that it was heavier than the surrounding loose soil.
Wei Yuan scooped up a handful of earth and tossed it into the air, then swept out a wave of Dao power. His Dao power behaved like water; most of the loose dirt floated upon it, drifting and bobbing, while seven or eight pellets of iron sank slowly, clearly separating from the dust.
Wei Yuan gathered the iron pellets, tossed up another handful of soil, and repeated the process. Within moments, a small pile of iron material lay before him. At Jidao Zhengang's pace, collecting this much would have taken the better part of a fortnight.
Then Wei Yuan picked up the nearly indestructible stone slab and rested it on his palm. After several attempts, he finally used a simple Daoist technique to spin it at blinding speed.
As Wei Yuan poured in more Dao power, the slab spun faster and faster, letting out a high-pitched drone. Wei Yuan signaled for Jidao to raise the hoof he used for forging, seized it in his hand, and pressed the spinning slab against the sole. Instantly, sparks erupted like fireworks.
Wei Yuan practiced his Desolate Tongue as he worked: "You clump of bird droppings, having this Daoist master trim your hooves with his own hands is a privilege you couldn't earn in several lifetimes..."
In moments, Jidao's hoof surface was polished smooth as a mirror. The embedded grit could not withstand the high-speed grinding either; thus, a top-grade forging hammer was born.
Wei Yuan looked over Jidao's physique with a professional eye. The horsepower was certainly sufficient, but the power output was somewhat erratic. If he could only build a cylinder to seal him inside, it would be perfection itself.
Chapter 871