Longzang

Chapter 297 Exchange of needs

Wei Yuan immediately got up and went with Sun Yu to the shed where the girls lived.

After the incident that night, Wei Yuan gathered all the girls he had sexual relations with in one place to observe any potential changes in them and to prevent the situation from spreading to others. All the boys involved were gathered in another place, but the management was relatively loose, and they had to work and cultivate with the others.

At this time, each shack where the girls were staying had two rows of bunk beds. The girls were lying or sitting quietly, seemingly not yet understanding what had happened or what it meant to them. However, some girls were unconsciously holding their lower abdomens or gently stroking them.

Wei Yuan walked over to the nearest few girls, carefully examined their entire bodies, and repeatedly scanned them with his divine sense, but found nothing unusual. From any angle, they were ordinary girls with flesh and blood, only now they had a little life growing inside them.

Sun Yu said, "I've already checked, and everything is normal. Perhaps a more thorough examination is needed, but that would require dissecting the body and examining it carefully."

Vial dissection?

Seemingly aware of Wei Yuan's thoughts, Sun Yu said, "There's no rush. If someone dies in battle later, you can give me their body. However, such investigations will always deviate from the true situation, so to find out what's happening right now, it's best to find someone who is pregnant..."

Wei Yuan felt a chill run down his spine. He was about to ask if this wouldn't incur divine retribution when he remembered that the Xuanming Palace had its own secret methods to eliminate karma. Moreover, if killing one person could save millions, from the perspective of the Heavenly Dao of this world, it would also accumulate considerable merit.

Regardless, Wei Yuan still couldn't accept the idea of ​​dissecting a pregnant girl alive. Sun Yu knew he wouldn't accept it, but he only mentioned it briefly, telling Wei Yuan that there was such an option.

Both men were helpless when faced with thousands of girls.

After a moment, Wei Yuan asked, "Is this normal?"

Sun Yu said, "It's definitely not normal! It's possible for one person to get pregnant after just one sexual encounter, but the probability of ten people getting pregnant on the same day is very low. But now there are more than 1,070 people. The probability of this happening is about the same as when I achieved the Unity of All Beings. So, this must be arranged by a powerful being!"

Wei Yuan then remembered something else and said, "None of the guards could impregnate them, but the boy of the same bloodline could. Could it be..."

Sun Yu understood Wei Yuan's meaning and, after thinking for a moment, said, "I will find a way to test it."

Wei Yuan wisely refrained from asking how to test it, and simply left everything to Sun Yu.

The simultaneous pregnancy of over a thousand young girls was a bizarre event that naturally attracted attention. However, neither Ji Liuli nor the old Taoist priest Chuhe could find anything unusual about it.

Wei Yuan could only put this matter aside for now and observe how things would unfold. There were many other things to do within the realm, and feeding these tens of thousands of people was a major undertaking. Although they had just harvested 800,000 jin of spirit rice, if these young men and women were to cultivate freely, they would need to eat at least two jin a day, so 800,000 jin of spirit rice wouldn't be enough to feed them for ten days.

While continuing to cultivate the land, Wei Yuan found a superior spiritual field and planted the black pearl rice.

One hundred grains of pearl rice make one jin (500 grams). Only one jin of seeds, or one hundred seedlings, can be planted per mu (667 square meters). Any more than that, and the spiritual energy in the soil won't be enough to sustain it. Each plant produces about thirty grains and normally takes three years to grow. Currently, each grain is worth one tael of silver, while the original seed is priceless.

Aside from food, clothing will have to wait; Wei Yuan needs to arm these tens of thousands of people first. While the Wu tribe and the Western Jin are still unaware of this new force in the realm, Wei Yuan needs to quickly equip them with fighting power so that if anyone attacks, they can be caught off guard.

The senior brothers and sisters from Tianqing Palace and Shuiyue Palace were originally a great help, but Wei Yuan always felt that Ren Suxing gave off a strange feeling. He seemed to have a lot of influence among the disciples of Tianqing Palace, and he didn't know if this was always the case or if he had done some research on the way here.

Wei Yuan had tried to check his position on the merit list, but after flipping through it for a while without finding it, he gave up. Anyway, with Zhang Sheng in charge of the realm, no one else could cause any trouble.

Wang Yu and Xu Yi are both capable of instructing young men and women in martial arts, and occasionally Yu Zhizhuo and the old Taoist Chuhe will also set up altars to give lectures. Five squares have now been built in the new city, each for teaching different basic body-building methods.

When the old Taoist priest was cultivating his body, he practiced the Earth Element Scripture, and therefore he also taught the Earth Element Scripture.

When the old Taoist priest first preached the Dharma, he was so startled to see tens of thousands of people densely packed in the square that he pinched the cat next to him hard, and the cat retaliated by swatting him back.

Looking at the bloodstains on his hands, the old Taoist priest finally realized that he was not dreaming.

The old Taoist knew how many of these young men and women there were, and how many of them had cultivated the Earth Origin Scripture. But he hadn't expected Wei Yuan to stop all activities and have them all come to listen to the lecture.

The feeling is completely different when you see numbers on paper and tens of thousands of people at the same time!

Facing nearly 30,000 pairs of clear eyes, the old Taoist suddenly felt a sense of solemnity. He sat up straight, took out a whisk from somewhere, placed it on his lap, and began to impart the true methods of the Great Dao.

The lecture lasted for a full three hours, making the old Taoist's face rosy and his magical power slightly increased; the cat beside him also slept and woke up repeatedly, and when it realized that the old Taoist was still talking endlessly, it secretly scratched him a few times, but the old Taoist was completely unaware.

Less than three days after this lecture, the old Taoist priest couldn't resist holding another one. This time, there were fewer people, only five thousand, and the old Taoist priest lectured for two hours.

After that, the old Taoist priest would hold sermons every now and then, which even delayed his farming a bit, but that's another story.

In recent days, not only the True Man of the Farming Cultivator, but also Yu Zhizhuo and Sun Yu have given two lectures, and Xu Yiwang and Cui Yu have each given one. Wei Yuan has seen all of this and can only sigh with envy.

The transmission of the Six Scriptures of Body Forging is a long-term endeavor, a gradual process that will take several years to see results. However, Wei Yuan has other methods to immediately enhance his combat power: armor forging and firearms.

Wei Yuan had always wanted to give everyone in the realm two guns. This idea not only did not diminish after nearly 50,000 young men and women joined, but it went a step further: Wei Yuan planned to equip each boy with a high-quality, high-powered gun, instead of the primitive steel pipe gun that could only shoot within ten feet.

While the idea was appealing, its implementation proved incredibly difficult. For example, the type of firearm, whether it was muzzle-loading or breech-loading, the diameter of the barrel, the material of the barrel, the power of the gunpowder, the shape and material of the bullet, and so on. Each of these issues could be a separate field of study.

Wei Yuan locked himself in his room for two whole days, during which time he read Xu Wenwu's insights over and over again, and also talked with Xu Wenwu several more times, finally making some progress. To be more specific, if we divide the unknown into one hundred squares, then Wei Yuan has already moved forward two squares.

But the problem is that after moving forward two spaces, Wei Yuan discovered that the unknown space had increased from one hundred to two hundred spaces.

Only then did he truly understand the famous saying Xu Wenwu had given him: "The more you learn, the more you realize how ignorant you are."

Wei Yuan deeply agreed.

Unfortunately, Xu Wenwu remembered the words, but not the other achievements of the person who said them. He didn't even know what that great man did.

However, any progress is good. Based on Xu Wenwu's description of the so-called modern weapons, Wei Yuan felt that he would be able to develop a new gun sooner or later.

Just as the young men and women had completed a month of living in the realm, Sun Yu sent a message to the cultivators of the Taichu Palace, informing them that his newly developed gunpowder had been successfully completed.

Everyone gathered at Sun Yu's residence immediately. During this period, Sun Yu had been renovating his courtyard whenever he had free time to conduct various research projects. Now his courtyard covers several acres and is divided into seven small courtyards, four of which are used for drug production, one for medicine making, one for saving lives, and one for gunpowder research.

However, Sun Yu led the cultivators outside the courtyard. The terrain here was very open. It used to be a morgue where the corpses of the Wu clan were piled up. Now that there had been no war for a period of time, the Wu clan corpses had all dissipated their green aura and were cremated and buried, leaving this land empty.

The empty square was riddled with craters and explosion scars, with many places showing overlapping scars, indicating that it had been bombed countless times.

Sun Yu had already set up an iron table at the edge of the open space, with several piles of raw materials of different sizes stacked on it. Wei Yuan recognized the sulfur and charcoal, but did not recognize the rest.

Xu Wenwu was among the many cultivators attending the ceremony. He had already completed his bone forging and was entering the final stage of body tempering through spirit refining. This progress was considered incredibly fast among ordinary cultivators, and for Xu Wenwu's original aptitude, it was nothing short of a miracle. Naturally, the price was also enormous; Wei Yuan had invested dozens of strands of his luck to propel his cultivation forward.

If it were any other cultivator, this fortune would be enough to cultivate seven or eight Dao Foundations, but in Xu Wenwu's case, it only allowed him to achieve the goal of bone forging.

Now that everyone had arrived, Sun Yu didn't delay any longer and got straight to the point: "I've found a brand new gunpowder formula, with roughly three times the power of the old gunpowder. The ingredients are as follows... The main ingredient, ice flame stone, which is saltpeter, has been replaced with thunder sand. Ordinary charcoal has been replaced with inch-gold charcoal and fire glue, and two additional auxiliary ingredients have been added."

We'll discuss the reasons for this change later; for now, let's look at how the old-style gunpowder worked.

Sun Yu skillfully prepared a batch of gunpowder, shaped it into a ball, held it in mid-air with his Dao power, and then ignited it. This time, Sun Yu used his Dao power to permeate every aspect of the gunpowder, restraining the explosion process, slowing down the entire explosion by ten times, and magnifying the internal image ten times.

Even Xu Wenwu saw the slowed-down explosion and blurted out, "High-speed camera!"

Xu Wenwu had also mentioned this concept in his materials, but Wei Yuan categorized it as useless junk. According to the camera performance Xu Wenwu described, some Foundation Establishment cultivators could achieve this with the naked eye. As for high-end cameras, capable of capturing hundreds of frames per second or seeing nanoscale objects, many Dharma Aspect Realm cultivators could do it without even needing a True Monarch.

Furthermore, the structure of this world seems to differ from the world Xu Wenwu inhabits. The specific differences are currently unknown, as Xu Wenwu has already returned all relevant knowledge to his high school teachers. As for his university professors, Xu Wenwu gained nothing from them, so he has nothing to return.

Actually, if it weren't for taking care of Xu Wenwu, Sun Yu could have simply doubled the size of the explosion and slowed it down by half.

Once everyone had a clear look, Sun Yu explained, "The principle of gunpowder is based on the combustion of charcoal to produce gas and heat, with saltpeter and sulfur being combustion aids. The expansion of the hot gas is the source of the explosive power. We already knew this principle before, so I started with it. First, I replaced the original materials with more powerful ones, then I continuously tested and adjusted the proportions, and finally, based on the properties of the gunpowder, I added one or two adjuvants to make it expand more rapidly and powerfully."

Then Sun Yu pointed to the square and said, "After extensive testing, I replaced saltpeter with thunder sand, retained a small amount of sulfur, and replaced ordinary charcoal with 'inch-gold charcoal' soaked in fire glue. This made it burn faster and produce more gas, thus increasing its power to three times the original."

To test the optimal formula, I conducted over 1,700 trials.

This is the basic process of study and lectures at Taichu Palace. It not only explains what the final outcome will be, but also clearly explains the principles and basic research process. In this way, later learners can build upon the work of their predecessors and innovate, without having to repeat every step themselves.

If others want to further improve gunpowder, after listening to Sun Yu's explanation, they can start directly from the main raw materials and try to replace them with materials that burn faster and produce more, thus avoiding many detours.

However, such lectures in the Taichu Palace usually require a price, and are often not made public, but rather are part of the inheritance of each hall. But in Qingming, everyone is used to exchanging information, and with Xu Wenwu, a visitor from outer space, the cultivators all feel that their horizons are unprecedentedly broadened, and their inspirations are flowing freely. They have no time to hide anything, and before they can even warm up their minds, newer and better inspirations will come.

However, this kind of exchange was limited to the initial small circle. Wei Yuan's thirteen senior brothers and sisters were unable to attend and were currently idle in the Zhike Town.

PS: Big Chapter Loan Monthly Pass!
(End of this chapter)