Longzang

Chapter 562 Dark Side
Upon entering Wucheng on the shores of the great lake, Wei Yuan finally realized that the Rain Kingdom's confidence in a short-term counterattack had been shattered.

At this moment, Wei Yuan Ning stood above the city, completely unconcerned about the sneak attacks. Occasionally, a sorcerer would launch a sneak attack, but he would simply blast the attacker to death with a single Daoist spell. That's how arrogant he was.

No matter how arrogant and domineering Wei Yuan was, You Wu was nowhere to be seen.

The 30,000-strong army split into several small squads, patrolling the makeshift city and shouting orders to drive the sorcerers out of their hiding places. They were instructed to bring all their valuables, food, and water and assemble in the south of the city within one hour; those who failed to do so would face the consequences. The army was not worried about the sorcerers' disobedience; they would simply set the city ablaze once the time was up.

Wei Yuan had already summoned the scattered troops through the Dao Foundation Warriors to regroup. Within an hour, more than 40,000 troops arrived, surrounding the witch city on all sides.

Before long, the appointed time had arrived. Only about 600,000 members of the Wu tribe had gathered outside the city. The rest either fled or hid, hoping to escape the calamity.

At that moment, a spark ignited in the north, and the fire quickly spread outwards. Thousands of human cultivators continuously unleashed fire-based spells in all directions, setting the entire city ablaze.

Humans and witches have been at war for many years, and each has many special techniques to counter the other. This technique, which can continue to burn in the witch realm, is one of them. It is particularly effective at destroying cities and can even burn on the water.

The fire spread from north to south, and soon the entire city was engulfed in flames. Many members of the witch clan rushed out from their hiding places, but quickly perished in the inferno. Some witches were lucky enough to find safe havens, while many others died in their hiding places.

Seeing the entire city reduced to ashes, Wei Yuan ordered his men to escort all the Wu tribe members back to Qingming. This place was nine hundred miles away from Qingming, and the Wu tribe members who had not yet escaped were either commoners or slaves, and most of them had little cultivation. Nine hundred miles was a life-or-death journey for them.

Wei Yuan dispatched ten thousand warriors to escort hundreds of thousands of Wu tribe members on their journey, without sleep or rest, eating only one meal a day. Given this arrangement, less than one in ten would survive to reach Qingming.

This is a calculated move, designed to ensure that most of the witch clan members die on their own along the way, minimizing karmic burdens. As for those witches who actually make it to the Azure Sky alive, Wei Yuan will keep his promise and give them a chance to live.

The sheer number of witches would gradually alter the very fabric of the world. Therefore, their sheer numbers would become a path to certain death.

The canal has gradually dried up, and the upstream witch tribe has cut off the water source to prevent the human army from attacking along the waterway.

Filling in the canal would be a massive undertaking, and Qingming was currently in dire need of reconstruction and short-handed, so Wei Yuan simply left the canal unattended. A canal wasn't the key issue; winning the battle was.

Wei Yuan transformed into his own appearance as a Dao Foundation Warrior and followed the main force, while he flew back to Qingming alone.

He first reviewed the official documents that had accumulated over the past two days. In just those two days, more than two hundred matters had been reported to Wei Yuan, requiring his decision.

With the help of human assistance, Wei Yuan processed official documents extremely quickly, finishing more than two hundred official documents in just half an hour. The most time-consuming part was reading and writing the replies.

Now, a new and urgent task is to deal with the land contaminated by the witch's poisonous water as soon as possible. There's no good solution at the moment; we can only use Yu Zhizhuo's method: excavate and remove all the contaminated land, then bring in good soil from elsewhere to fill the land. The contaminated soil will be stockpiled outside the boundary, and then treated slowly.

Besides these, the most pressing short-term issue is war relief, while the most important long-term issue is the treatment of the wounded, although this is only truly a major issue in Qingming. Or rather, in Wei Yuan's mind, it is a major issue. The normal practice among the nine kingdoms, excluding the few famous wise rulers in history, is to simply give them a sum of money and send them on their way—this is already considered benevolent governance. The usual practice is to simply send them home; these disabled people are a burden wherever they go, eventually becoming beggars and dying the following winter.

If you're lucky enough to encounter a wise ruler, they might receive some silver. The amount varies, but even a large sum is barely enough to buy a few acres of barren land, after which the land is left to fend for itself. This is already considered a wise ruler who will be remembered in history.

Under Feng Chutang's guidance, Wei Yuan had already mastered the correct method of reading history and knew that they could not hold onto these fields at all. As long as the market was slightly turbulent, these few acres of meager land would be taken away by others.

Currently, all the land in Qingming belongs to Wei Yuan, and land is awarded based on military merit, so there is no problem for the time being. However, this system cannot last long, and sooner or later it will face the problem of land annexation.

These disabled veterans who have retired from the battlefield, no matter how much grain and land they are given, will eventually run out of food. Wei Yuan thought about it for a long time and felt that the root of the problem was to enable them to have the ability to support themselves sustainably.

But that's Wei Yuan's responsibility; it's up to him to see if he can create suitable job opportunities for these people.

Wei Yuan left this matter to the people, to see what the Crouching Dragon and the Young Phoenix thought.

Following the official documents were the secret reports compiled from various regions. Wei Yuan did not yet have his own intelligence system; most of these reports were sent by Consort Yuan, with a smaller portion coming from Sun Chaoen and Li Weisheng, and these were few in number and received intermittently. Finally, there were reports from merchant caravans traveling between Qingming and other regions.

These caravans were well-informed and very willing to undermine their opponents; for example, the Jin caravan provided a lot of intelligence to the Zhao state.

Today's secret report included an extra letter from Xu Jingfeng.

Since being subdued by Xu Wan'er, Xu Jingfeng has truly turned over a new leaf, cultivating daily and single-mindedly striving to climb the ranks. He has now been at the late stage of the Foundation Establishment realm for some time. If it weren't for the current tense relationship with the Xu family, Wei Yuan would have wanted him to come to Qingming to cultivate for a while, perhaps even hoping he could reach the Dharma Aspect realm.

This secret report only mentioned one person: Xu Lanshan.

Xu Lanshan was also an extraordinary woman. She had reached the twenty-first stage of Dao Foundation and the thirty-five Dharma Aspects before leaving the Xu family to travel the world. A full hundred years had passed since then. Some time ago, she suddenly returned to the Xu family, having already achieved the perfection of the Dharma Aspects and about to break through to the Imperial Realm.

Originally, Wei Yuan didn't really care whether the Xu family had one more or one less Yu Jing.

In this war with the Wu tribe, Feng Chutang secretly plotted and used a secret method to send several hundred pregnant girls from the Xu family to fight. As expected, they all died in battle.

Afterwards, Feng Chutang secretly returned to Taichu Palace and, with the help of the palace's magical artifacts, investigated the cause and effect. She discovered that the karma of the pregnant girls from the Xu family had successfully been attached to Xu Wangu. In other words, if Qingming fell and all these girls died in battle, the resentment and karma of their unborn children would all be attributed to Xu Wangu.

They were not ordinary distant relatives; they were all Xu Wangu's blood relatives. The karmic consequences of the resentment and curses of tens of thousands of blood relatives were unimaginable, and even Xu Wangu would find it difficult to bear. It might even drag him down from his immortal position.

(End of this chapter)