Not long after Jiumu departed, he sent over a thousand Strength Shamans and four Desolate Shamans. These shamans had been transferred from other fortresses, alongside a batch of absorbed Shaman Hunters and convict shamans.
With new recruits to replenish their ranks, the garrison finally climbed back to two thousand. The Strength Shamans under Wei Yuan's command increased to five hundred, all veterans of Fengmang. Having witnessed Wei Yuan's divine valor in the previous battle, they had long since contributed their karmic luck and moved as effortlessly as his own limbs under his command.
This time, Wei Yuan shifted his strategy and erected five blast furnaces in a single breath, which required two Desolate Shamans and over a hundred Strength Shamans for daily operation. Increasing desolate steel production fivefold, Wei Yuan trimmed and tailored the Strength Shamans to fit them with steel armor while forging the surplus desolate steel into bars and plates.
The fortress's buildings used raw desolate stone as their fundamental material. Portions of raw stone were ground to dust, mixed with the blood of desolate worms and flame demons, and blended into binding mortar. Structures built this way were extraordinarily solid and enduring in the environment of the Desolate Realm.
Wei Yuan, meanwhile, embedded steel bars inside the rebuilt city walls and clad key buildings within the fortress in plates of desolate steel. This vastly improved defenses. As long as those flame demons that relied on suicidal blood-spewing attacks did not swarm in massed throngs, the fortress was virtually impregnable.
After testing the new defensive installations and finding their performance remarkable, Wei Yuan expanded desolate steel production once more, raising the number of blast furnaces to fifteen. That required two Desolate Shamans leading three hundred Strength Shamans to smelt steel through day-and-night Desolate Roars.
The Strength Shamans could still endure it; it was just rather taxing on Desolate Shamans.
After working in this manner for seven days, Wei Yuan had no choice but to give one of the Desolate Shamans a day off to rest. Two days later, he granted leave to the other. Time off was a necessity: both Desolate Shamans had roared until their throats were swollen, and their roars were beginning to spray flecks of blood. Only then did Wei Yuan grudgingly give them a break—and for only a single day.
Wei Yuan's defensive strategy was straightforward: expand desolate steel production as much as possible. When steel was plentiful, there was no need to fill the gap with so much flesh and blood during war.
Ronglong naturally saw through Wei Yuan's intent, so he simply gave Wei Yuan three hundred more Strength Shamans, placing nearly all the surviving Strength Shamans of original Fengmang into Wei Yuan's hands. Wei Yuan converted all of these Strength Shamans into artisans, churning out a ceaseless stream of desolate steel.
During large-scale steel smelting, Wei Yuan constantly fine-tuned the Desolate Roar, eventually settling on a fixed cadence and composing it into a battle song. Desolate steel produced with this song was of slightly lower quality, but output increased by thirty percent.
Vast quantities of desolate steel were continuously transformed into armor and weaponry. The newly raised city walls grew sturdier, and more and more buildings throughout the fortress took on a metallic sheen.
Wei Yuan also erected portcullises along every major thoroughfare in the fortress, ensuring that invading flame demons unfamiliar with the terrain would be blocked at every turn. He then leveled buildings across several sectors, clearing out several small plazas.
Multiple roads led from these small plazas to the city walls. Closing the appropriate gates during battle would funnel the breaching flame demons into the plazas, from which they would only have a handful of narrow exits to attack. With their front constricted, the vast majority of flame demons would be trapped in the squares, turning them into prime targets for the Desolate Shamans' large-scale shamanic arts.
Just like that, Wei Yuan worked tirelessly day and night, steadily refining the fortress's defense system while gradually matching the Strength Shamans to suitable posts based on their individual traits.
Through day after day of labor, Wei Yuan also began to harvest karmic luck from the newly arrived warriors, though top-tier karmic luck remained scarce since these Strength Shamans had yet to witness Wei Yuan's valor firsthand.
After inspecting Wei Yuan's arrangements, Ronglong offered no commentary. Instead, he gave Wei Yuan a new mental method for the Desolate Roar, telling him to cultivate it whenever he had free time.
This mental method contained only five roar-syllables, yet it was exceptionally delicate and intricate. The final syllable was absurdly exaggerated: within a single sound, over a hundred distinct parts of the body had to produce sound simultaneously and resonate together, generating more than eight hundred frequencies in total before coalescing into a single howl.
This brief manual instantly opened the eyes of Wei Yuan, who had thought himself well-versed in the Desolate Roar. Dividing over a hundred strands of his spirit to monitor his own condition and continually correct his adjustments, it took him nearly a month just to achieve basic mastery of the first of the five notes.
This sound resembled a high-pitched caw, akin to a crowing rooster suddenly seized by the neck.
Yet the moment the sound took shape, Wei Yuan suddenly felt as though his body had become translucent. Where sunlight had previously penetrated only flesh and skin, it could now reach straight into his viscera.
Wei Yuan instantly felt a searing agony deep within, as if all his internal organs were about to emit a roasted aroma. From that single attempt alone, he suffered no small injury.
However, the widespread damage to his internal organs completely stimulated the vitality of Wei Yuan's body. Surging spiritual power welled from every piece of flesh and blood, and under the churning vibrations of the roar, his physical healing rate increased a hundredfold. In just a quarter of an hour, the damage was fully mended. After recovery, each organ experienced a slight enhancement, but the greatest and most obvious strengthening occurred in his throat, nose, lungs, and all the parts involved in phonation.
Only after mastering the first sound did Wei Yuan realize that this Desolate Roar was a cultivation method suitable solely for the Desolate Realm, using the omnipresent power of the sun in this world to temper the physical body without leaving a single blind spot. The second sound focused on the liver; the third cultivated the kidneys and all related organs of similar function; the fourth targeted all digestive organs, greatly enhancing the speed at which origin qi of heaven and earth was converted; and the fifth attacked the heart, the engine and wellspring of all vitality.
The internal anatomy of Strength Shamans was vastly varied, so these five notes cultivated their true intent. If an individual possessed organs similar in function to the heart—whether ten or fifty—they could all be tempered at once.
Moreover, this mental mnemonic possessed an auxiliary technique: utilizing the Desolate Realm's unique sacrificial power as an aid greatly boosted the effects of physical tempering. Wei Yuan had previously assumed his physical body was already powerful enough, with little room for progress. Only now did he discover that he could continue advancing in the Desolate Realm. This realm truly was a holy land for body tempering.
Once he grasped the first sound, cultivating the subsequent ones went much faster; Wei Yuan mastered the second sound in less than seven days.
Yet when it came to the third sound, he unexpectedly hit a wall. More than a dozen days passed with only minuscule progress. The complexity of the third sound was vastly higher, consisting of forty-nine distinct frequencies. Wei Yuan tried repeatedly, but after spitting out at most thirty-odd frequencies, his lower back would ache and his legs would go weak.
Ronglong had only provided the technique without any explanation, nor did he intend to answer Wei Yuan's questions, leaving Wei Yuan to grope his way forward entirely on his own.
Wei Yuan knew Ronglong had good intentions. After all, the gulf between humans and shamans was immense, and their arts were fundamentally incompatible. The manual Ronglong had given Wei Yuan was essentially a grand outline for the body-tempering path of the Desolate Realm. It required Wei Yuan to uncover the underlying principles himself and convert them into methods suitable for human cultivation. No matter how earth-shattering Ronglong's might was, he was powerless when it came to human cultivation. That was precisely why Ronglong offered no explanation.
From then on, Wei Yuan cultivated while repairing the fortress, but his progress with the third sound remained sluggish. A full month passed, and he was not even thirty percent along. Every time he made it halfway through the roar, his waist would ache, his legs would soften, and he would be utterly overwhelmed.
Having accumulated enough data by now, Wei Yuan finally considered a possibility: humans and shamans seemed to define the kidneys differently, and the functions of both also appeared distinct.
With that suspicion in mind, Wei Yuan summoned Tianyu.
Baptized by several great battles, Tianyu was now completely transformed from when he had first arrived, far more solid and composed. If the earlier Tianyu was a clump of sponge iron, through relentless tempering he had now become wrought iron.
"Boss, what did you call me for?"
Wei Yuan weighed his words carefully before asking, "You used to keep dozens of Little Pretty Shamans with you at all times. Usually, how many times a day did you... do that?"
Tianyu felt a bit puzzled, but shamans paid no mind to such matters. Many Strength Shamans who considered themselves exceptionally capable even relished displaying it in public so everyone could see their prowess firsthand. Thus, he answered frankly, "A hundred times."
With a faint crack, several fractures appeared across the desolate stone chair Wei Yuan was sitting on.
Keeping his composure, Wei Yuan asked, "Every single day?"
Tianyu reminisced. "When I wasn't busy, I usually rounded it off to a clean number. After all, what else was there to do with free time? When busy, it's hard to say—maybe only eighty times."
The word *beast* nearly slipped past Wei Yuan's lips, but fortunately his fundamental self-restraint held. Without another word, he dismissed Tianyu, though an undisguised look of malice already lingered in his eyes.
After that exchange with Tianyu, Wei Yuan finally understood that the physical disparity between humans and shamans was simply too vast. The third sound had been specifically tailored by Ronglong with Strength Shamans as the template, making the difficulty far too extreme for a human. If even Wei Yuan could not hold up, likely no human dharma idol cultivator could either.
Fortunately, as long as he persisted in cultivating, he could still make step-by-step progress. Looked at from another angle, the ceiling of this third sound was unimaginably high; cultivating it would bring Wei Yuan's physical body a bone-deep, transformative leap. It was nothing short of a supreme treasure scripture. Settling his mind, Wei Yuan committed to slow, grinding effort, polishing his body bit by bit.
The body was a lone vessel weathering tribulations, a precious raft crossing the ocean, the foundation of the Great Dao, and the stepping-stone to ascending the heavens.
As his body gradually strengthened, tiny flecks of flesh and blood throughout Wei Yuan began emitting a hazy, scorching sunlight. Borrowing the cultivation method of the Desolate Realm as jade from another mountain, Wei Yuan's comprehension of the Palace of Grand Beginning's dao arts deepened day by day, and secret scriptures like the Indestructible Dharma of Emptiness and Form grew steadily more potent in turn.
Days settled back into quietude. Ronglong seemed to revert to the very beginning, acting distant toward Wei Yuan and going days without speaking a word.
Jiumu, scraping together whatever he could find, sent another thousand Strength Shamans and two Desolate Shamans. Having adjusted his policies, the military merit required to return from Fengmang Fortress had been drastically reduced, giving many Strength Shamans hope of earning enough merit to return home in glory. On top of that, Ronglong's renown had spread far and wide; everyone knew this fortress was home to a boss who would move heaven and earth to save his subordinates. As a result, more and more Strength Shamans were willing to come.
Yet this peace was merely temporary. The Flame Storm had not ended; the flame demons were only resting to recover their strength, so Wei Yuan dared not slacken. He was still waiting for Ronglong's strand of top-tier karmic luck. Wei Yuan had thought the previous battle would have brought things close enough to fruition, yet Ronglong had made no gesture.
The Desolate Realm was gradually settling, but across Qingming, fresh waves were already rising.
Chapter 918