Chapter 352: A Glimmer of Light in Turbulent Times

Late at night, when all was quiet, Wei Yuan stood on the peak of the central peak, gazing into the distance.

To his senses, the horizon to the northwest was faintly illuminated by lights. That was where the Shaman city lay. Yu Zhizhuo had discovered a large mineral vein around the Shaman city, established a mining operation, and built more than a dozen blast furnaces directly at the mine entrances. The roaring furnace fires were shooting straight into the sky and casting a reddish glow across the heavens right now.

In the realm of Qingming, some of the rice fields were also glowing faintly. These were fields planted with spirit rice. Spirit rice emitted a faint light once grown, and planted in large expanses, they looked like an ocean of soft radiance in the night.

Light still flickered in several cities. The number of cultivators in the realm was growing day by day, and those who had set foot into the Body-tempering stage were naturally brimming with energy. Many of them worked through the night, hoping to accomplish as much as possible so that their chances of victory in the next major battle would be greater.

The new grain fields had all been planted. When the seeds sprouted, Wei Yuan reaped several thousand more wisps of fortune.

Mortals were simple folk, especially those who had endured the ravages of war. Only when they saw the seedlings growing in the fields could they envision the day of harvest. These fields represented the hope for survival for countless people.

The spirit qi in the herb gardens was growing increasingly dense. It had almost reached the point where it would become visible to the naked eye. The fact that Trueman Chu He’s cultivation was advancing day by day showed how successful his herb gardens were.

Suddenly, Wei Yuan had an epiphany: If it weren’t for the foreign races surrounding them, and the immortals towering aloft in the heavens, it would not be an exaggeration to say that this land was the utopian paradise described in the ancient texts.

Alas, the foreign races remained savage, and the immortals continued to look down from on high. And to the mortals living on the ground, immortals were sometimes even more terrifying than the foreign races.

Under the cover of night, many people were quietly coming and going, or casting certain Dao spells, their Dao energy shooting skyward before vanishing in an instant.

With the realm’s borders now stretching over 1,000 li, it was simply impossible to seal them off entirely. Moreover, with an ever-increasing number of merchant caravans passing through, it was impossible to tell whether the communication spirit objects or Dao spells were sent by the caravans or by those with ulterior motives.

It was impossible to keep the firearms and the gunpowder a secret. Sooner or later, they were bound to be leaked. In fact, after annihilating Yue Jinshan’s 10,000-strong heavy cavalry, Wei Yuan had already prepared for the possibility of his surrounding enemies devising countermeasures or even fielding their own firearm units.

However, Wei Yuan had not anticipated the Xu Clan to react so sluggishly. When the 300,000-strong army advanced, they had carried on as usual, without any specialized tactics whatsoever to counter their firearms.

Wei Yuan felt that if he had been in charge—and had even briefly studied Yue Jinshan’s battle records—the outcome would never have turned out this way. In reality, the Xu Clan’s 300,000-strong army had still fought in the old-fashioned style. From top to bottom, the Xu Clan was like a senile old man: sluggish and stubborn to boot.

But after the battle, even if it might be too much to say that the entire human realm was shaken by the power of firearms, it had certainly sent shockwaves through the Western Jin court. By now, many influential figures likely had firearms and ammunitions displayed on their desks. Perhaps the workshops across the lands had already begun to produce replicas.

But again, it was only a matter of time, and Wei Yuan had long been mentally prepared for it. In his view, the most important thing right now was neither the technology of the firearms nor the formula for gunpowder, but rather the documents written by Xu Wenwu—those most authentic accounts of the world in the Beyond, a wondrous world where, even without the blessing of supernatural power, billions of people could still live in prosperity.

Right now, the study behind Wei Yuan was piled high with historical texts. Lately, Wei Yuan had been reading the chorographies[1] from various regions, with a slightly greater focus on those from Western Jin.

After reviewing these chorographies, Wei Yuan finally discovered the key difference between this world and Xu Wenwu’s world: in this world, ordinary people had no value.

Within the Nine States of Great Tang, ordinary people who hadn’t tempered their bodies were truly worthless. As Wei Youchai once said, there was only so much land and so much grain. Once the population had exceeded a certain threshold, people would naturally start starving to death. After all, with just a decade or so of stability, the population would spring up like bamboo shoots after a rain.

If an ordinary person tempered their body—even if they had only reached the flesh-tempering stage—they could do the work equivalent to two or three ordinary people. Not only that, they only consumed half as much food.

This was even truer on the battlefield. A dozen or so Body-tempering stage soldiers, clad in armor and wielding sharp weapons, could effortlessly slaughter a force of over 100 ordinary people. The larger the force, the greater this disparity became.

When the nine states faced natural disasters or local uprisings, even a thousand-strong regiment of the most poorly trained Body-tempering stage troops would dare to tackle a peasant army numbering in the tens of thousands head-on. More often than not, they would emerge victorious.

Therefore, an ordinary person who had not tempered their body was useless be it as a soldier or a civilian. All nine states had specific regulations stipulating that those who underwent body-tempering were entitled to various privileges and benefits; Western Jin had simply taken this to a more extreme level.

If one had not undergone body-tempering, they were not even welcome as sacrificial offerings to the Shamans. At least, they must first undergo a series of complex treatments, fattened, and purified before they could finally serve as part of the sacrificial contingent in major rituals.

Moreover, countless classical texts had already established that the offspring born to ordinary people were, for the most part, also ordinary people. Consequently, the doctrine of bloodline prevailed in scriptures across the human realm. In certain aristocratic fiefdoms, ordinary people must even obtain permission from their lords to marry.

Wei Yuan pieced these scattered facts together, and they ultimately led to one conclusion: ordinary mortals have no value.

For this reason, the policies of various nations were, to varying degrees, intentionally designed to suppress the population of mortals. Some directly drove commoners onto the battlefield, while others conscripted them year-round for forced labor. The more subtle approach was to turn a blind eye to major disasters and calamities and allow a portion of the population to starve to death.

Wei Yuan couldn’t help but recall the famine-induced uprising he had witnessed way back when he was three and had just begun to understand things. Looking back now, perhaps the Ji State wasn’t without solutions. It was simply that, from top to bottom, the authorities were deliberately turning a blind eye.

However, things were different in Qingming. Thanks to Life is a Flash, even the most ordinary mortals could become the backbone of the army on the battlefield.

Many people who were deemed incapable of forging a Dao Foundation in their lifetime had nonetheless achieved it in Qingming. If this was true for Dao Foundations, why not body-tempering?

Wei Yuan recalled Fang Hetong’s three essays. It would not be an exaggeration to call Establishing Words and Establishing Merits godlike in terms of tempering the body. Alas, the man had perished early, and with it his Dao Foundation.

Wei Yuan planned to wait until the new Dao Foundations—for instance, the Ten Directions Lapis Lazuli Golden Fire and the Six Paths Jia Yi Divine Wood Qi—had fully matured. After that, he would research how to lower the threshold for body-tempering so that more mortals could undertake it.

Under the cover of night, the land of Qingming was drawing closer to the world of Wei Yuan’s dreams.

At the edge of the realm of Qingming, in a place that appeared to be completely empty, someone had used Dao energy to separate the two realms and carve out a small, independent world.

A figure crept into this place. They were just looking around when darkness suddenly spread out and engulfed them. Then, both the darkness and the figure disappeared entirely, as if nothing were there.

There was a flash, and the next thing the figure knew, they were standing before a landscape of green mountains and clear waters. A middle-aged man sat under a tree, holding a wine cup and smiling at them. Yet though the man was smiling, it didn’t reach his eyes at all.

The middle-aged man said slowly, “This place is cut off from the outside world. Unless an immortal is present, no one can detect it. You need not be nervous, but you must be careful to cover your tracks once you return.”

The figure who had been whisked into this strange world was completely wrapped in black robes. The garment itself was extraordinary in that it could block spiritual perception. They said in a hoarse, masculine voice, “I risked my very life to come here—I must see the item first!”

The middle-aged man’s face darkened. His pupils suddenly turned into golden vertical slits, and faint scales began to appear on his neck. The entire pocket world was instantly filled with a murderous aura that warped everything around it almost to the point of shattering!

The black-robed man said, “It’s not that I don’t trust you; I simply don’t trust anyone right now. My modest request isn’t worth getting you so worked up over. I should also remind you that as long as you remain within this realm, your fortune will become unstable and prone to spiral out of control, so you’d best be careful. If your whereabouts are exposed, you might not be able to escape.”

The middle-aged man slowly withdrew his unnatural outburst, but he still felt an inexplicable aversion whenever he looked at the black-robed man. He then took out a palm-sized box and placed it on the table.

The black-robed man opened it with some impatience. Inside it was a red gemstone the size of an apricot. It exuded an alluring fragrance. Upon seeing it, the black-robed man instantly swallowed hard, and his aura fluctuated violently.

He dared not look at it for long and quickly closed the box. It took him quite a while longer to calm his racing heart.

The middle-aged man waited quietly until the black-robed man had calmed down before saying, “This top-grade Blood Yingluo could not only extend one’s lifespan, but also improve the innate aptitude of humans. With a bit of luck, you might even inherit some of the innate abilities the original owner possessed when they were still alive.”

“This one’s a bit small... it’s not enough.”

The middle-aged man sneered. “Just this one piece is worth over five hundred thousand taels of immortal silver among your human race! With your meager abilities, if not for this opportunity, would you ever have had the chance to even catch a whiff of it in your lifetime? If you don’t want it, then I’ll simply find someone else to negotiate with!”

The black-robed man immediately tucked the box into his robe. He then pulled out a pouch and took out one everyday item after another, all of which looked quite ordinary.

“This is a history book he read; this piece of paper is one he scribbled on and tossed into a wastepaper basket; ... this is a strand of hair he shed.”

The middle-aged man scrutinized each item carefully, while the black-robed man stood beside him, not daring to breathe a word and looking extremely nervous.

A moment later, the middle-aged man finally nodded and said, “That’s enough.”

The black-robed man immediately let out a sigh of relief.

The middle-aged man opened his mouth and sucked all the miscellaneous items into his stomach. He then said, “Seek out an opportunity to leave. Otherwise, don’t blame me for what happens next.”

The pocket world vanished like a bubble, and the middle-aged man transformed into a black streaking, vanishing beyond the horizon in an instant. The black-robed man also turned and walked into the realm, blending perfectly into the night.

In the study, Wei Yuan set down the history book he was reading and walked over to the pile of books sitting in the corner of the room. While reading, it suddenly occurred to him that he needed to consult another book for comparison.

Wei Yuan quickly dug out the specific chorography and began flipping through it rapidly. However, he suddenly glanced at the pile of books and felt that it had gotten just a tad thinner.

But then again, he had acquired a vast number of history books, so much so that there wasn’t nearly enough room in the study to store them all. Moreover, Wei Yuan possessed a mighty perception that allowed him to memorize anything after reading it just once. Keeping the physical copy around would have been an exercise in futility. Only the chorographies—books that hardly anyone ever read—required him to revisit from time to time. It was because when he first read them, he had merely skimmed through them rather than reading every word carefully.

Wei Yuan would often move the historical texts he’d already read to the warehouses for others to consult. However, aside from himself and Zhang Sheng, virtually no one bothered to read them. Only Sun Yu and Feng Tingyu would occasionally take a few volumes home to read.

But for some reason, Wei Yuan felt somewhat unsettled tonight.

1. Random note, but I checked my glossary and found out that I accidentally translated this as chronography back in chapter 106. It has since been fixed. Apologies for the mistake. ☜