Longzang

Chapter 1135 Unofficial History of Immortals
The battle in Ganzhou appeared slow but was actually urgent. The three vanguard legions of the Azure Netherworld roamed back and forth, constantly seeking a decisive battle with the main force of the Lü family. Both sides seemed to have a tacit understanding, with only Dharma Aspect cultivators deployed from their ground forces to engage in mutual attacks and battles.

On the front lines of the battlefield, Wei Yuan appeared from time to time, while none of the Lü family's Yu Jing members could be seen. Those who could become Yu Jing were all geniuses of their time; naturally, there were no fools among them.

Not to mention Wei Yuan, who is a death sentence to anyone who touches her, even the elusive Zhu Yuanjin is hated by gods and ghosts. Nobody wants to encounter such a female demon.

Wei Yuan was not in a hurry to advance. After occupying the three southern counties, he suspended his troops for two whole months to focus on reorganizing the newly acquired counties and eradicating the Lu family's power within them.

Moreover, Wei Yuan was ruthless. He directly set up bloodline detection arrays in the major cities of the three prefectures. All mortals were pulled in batches for screening. Anyone with the bloodline of the Lü family, especially those of Lü Changhe, was gathered together, had all their property confiscated, and was expelled from the three prefectures and sent back to the north, to return to the Lü family's ancestral land.

Naturally, the screening process inevitably uncovered many unexpected cases, such as children whose parents were not of the Lü family bloodline but whose parents did.

Such incidents occurred frequently, resulting in chaos and even house collapses in many households after the screening.

The Lü family's territory was far from war and their lives were peaceful, with each of the three prefectures having tens of millions of people. With such a large population, screening was naturally complicated and difficult, and could only be carried out slowly. After more than a month, 20 million people were screened, and 100,000 people of Lü family blood were found, of whom more than 90,000 were hidden.

Even with Qingming's organizational capabilities and unprecedented screening efficiency, a large portion of the population remains unscreened. Furthermore, many residents of the three counties are scattered in remote rural areas, and completing the screening would likely take several years.

However, Wei Yuan was not in a hurry. He first issued a decree declaring that evading screening was a serious crime. Those who had not undergone bloodline screening were not allowed to join the army, take up official positions, or rent land. If it was discovered that a landlord had concealed or concealed information, he would be considered an accomplice, and the lightest punishment would be the confiscation of all his property.

This action shocked the world. After all, no one had ever treated a descendant of a living True Immortal so brutally before.

Despite the shock, the entire literary world remained silent, with almost no one speaking out.

The Qingming Development Agency has now gained momentum, with a large number of sponsors, and many people are rising in status under Qingming's support.

Anyone who dares to stand against Qingming will be immediately attacked by the Development Agency's dogs, who will accuse them of all sorts of unfounded crimes, verbally abuse them, and often ruin their reputation before they will stop.

Under Wei Yuan's instructions, all sorts of anecdotes about Lü Changhe were compiled into storybooks and widely circulated in Qingming.

When mortals heard that it was a living immortal, they were usually silent and dared not speak. However, Wei Yuan immediately instructed a large number of Dao Foundation stage cultivators to go to the streets and alleys and openly discuss Lü Changhe, calling him by his name.

When people heard someone address the immortals by their names so disrespectfully, they were initially terrified. But later they discovered that nothing happened; not only did no divine lightning strike, but not even a cloud appeared.

Ordinary people, being naturally inclined to join in the fun, started discussing the matter once someone took the lead. Even with the discussion, no lightning tribulation seemed imminent, which emboldened the crowd.

Suddenly, everyone in Qingming, from top to bottom, was talking about Lü Changhe's name. Any storybook about a living immortal would sell out instantly. Now, the number of literate people in Qingming was so high, almost 40%, that storybook sales skyrocketed, more than a hundred times higher than before.

Many down-on-their-luck writers sensed a business opportunity and picked up their pens to write storybooks, going to great lengths to boost sales with their imaginations.

For example, in a famous story, a celestial being takes a beautiful young woman to the best shop in the world to buy clothes. The celestial being is naturally wealthy and generous, so with a wave of his hand, he instructs the shop's maids to take down all the clothes hanging on one wall and buy them all.

For example, the immortals often traveled incognito. Upon seeing a beautiful woman on the street, they would follow her until they reached a secluded spot, where they would ambush her with a club and then commit various unspeakable evil deeds. The readers were filled with rage, cursing as they read, and reading while cursing.

All of this captivated ordinary people, providing fodder for their conversations over tea and meals. The storybooks sold extremely well, unexpectedly bringing in a large sum of money for the down-on-their-luck scholars. Overjoyed, they were finally able to afford to cut down an entire wall of clothes to give to the women they admired.

In short, this is at least the first time since the founding of the Great Tang Dynasty that tens of millions of mortals have discussed a living immortal. Moreover, the more they talked, the more outrageous it became, with stories flying everywhere, numbering at least several hundred versions. The bad things that had happened in the mortal world, as well as those that hadn't yet happened, were all repeated multiple times by Lü Changhe in the stories.

However, Wei Yuan strictly controlled the scope of the discussion within Qingming. No one outside Qingming was allowed to discuss Lü Changhe, and no storybooks were allowed to leave the country. Even within the Qingming army, when discussing military affairs, even with the protection of military aura, Lü Changhe had to be referred to by his code name.

In this way, Wei Yuan guessed that Lü Changhe, with his immortal powers, would hear countless people's murmurs every day, like a million flies buzzing together.

However, with Wei Yuan stationed in Qingming and relying on the Immortal Stones and the fortunes of billions of people, if Lü Changhe dares to unleash a lightning strike like Xu Wangu did back then, Wei Yuan can immediately seize the clues and launch a thunderous counterattack from afar.

Moreover, while not everyone in the Azure Netherworld is like a dragon, they have at least been well-fed and clothed for decades, and everyone is strong and energetic. Body-forging cultivators are as numerous as hairs on a cow, and forty percent of them are literate. Therefore, if Lü Changhe were to strike down a mortal with a bolt of immortal lightning and kill one, the resulting karmic force would be dozens of times greater than that of an ordinary mortal in the outside world. Wei Yuan assumed that Lü Changhe understood this, and thus could only endure it. Furthermore, immortals possess an innate ability to hear the three realms; if this ability were shut down, they would lose their perception of danger.

Now, at least tens of millions of people are chanting Lu Changhe's name every day. The noise is so loud that it can almost drown out all other sounds. Whether or not his supernatural powers are turned off, it makes little difference.

However, once he leaves Qingming, Wei Yuan's counterattack will be much weaker, and Lü Changhe might take action in a fit of anger.

Therefore, Wei Yuan strictly forbade his men from discussing immortals outside Qingming, fearing that Lü Changhe would conjure lightning from the void and strike down anyone who spoke ill of him in public. Wei Yuan had no intention of giving him such an opportunity to establish his authority in public.

Wei Yuan's actions naturally caused a great uproar among the immortals. After all, the reputation of immortals cannot be tarnished, and many immortals, especially those from the Seven Clans and Thirteen Noble Families, felt that their honor and misfortune were intertwined. Wei Yuan's blatant tolerance of mortals slandering true immortals naturally displeased many immortals.

But Wei Yuan didn't care whether they were happy or not.
In December of the fifteenth year of the Hongjing era, the Qingming army, after two months of rest, launched another northward offensive. During the two months of respite, the Lü family also reorganized their forces, dispatching 700,000 elite troops to garrison four central fortified passes, and working day and night to repair the city's defenses. A Yujing was also stationed in each pass to oversee the defenses.

The Lu family's defenses were undeniably formidable. Even when Xu Wangu had regained his youth and defeated Pei Tinghai, at the peak of the Xu family's power, they never once considered taking Ganzhou. This was because Ganzhou had a complex terrain with numerous fortified passes, making it impossible to advance without several times the number of troops and mountains of provisions.

But in Wei Yuan's eyes at this moment, the Lü family's defense system was a complete joke.

Before the army arrived at the city, Wei Yuan covered thousands of miles in a single day, launching surprise attacks on four passes and severely injuring three Imperial Guards with lightning speed. Only one of them, seeing the situation was dire, fled immediately upon seeing Wei Yuan's arrival, thus escaping unscathed.

Subsequently, Qingming gathered nearly two hundred Golden Core Dharma Aspects, forming a Dharma Aspect Assault Team, led by Xiaoyu, Wang Hu, Feng Tingyu, and others. They first drove away the Dharma Aspects guarding the city, then bombarded the city gate with Daoist magic, completely shattering the city's defensive formation with brute force. In fact, as soon as the two hundred Dharma Aspects appeared, more than half of the Lü family's Dharma Aspects disappeared, and the rest only hesitated for a few breaths before vanishing as well.

Then Qingming used heavy artillery to bombard the area and destroy the fortress. After that, the army's task was to occupy the city and take in the prisoners.

Having absorbed the concepts of mobile warfare from the outer world, Wei Yuan transformed himself into the core mobile force, specifically tasked with assaulting enemy strongholds. The Dharma Aspect Assault Regiment was also a product of this concept, assembling a far greater number of Golden Core cultivators than imagined, achieving overwhelming dominance in localized areas.

The Lü family deployed their high-level cultivators in a dispersed manner, following the traditional city defense strategy, which gave Wei Yuan the opportunity to defeat them one by one.

Even though the Lü family had nearly ten Dharma Aspects assigned to each pass, they were still no match for a surprise attack centered around one of the Twelve Heavenly Aspects, supplemented by two hundred Golden Core Dharma Aspects. Regardless of their stage of development, any Lü family Dharma Aspect that was even slightly slow would become a gift from heaven and earth.

After overwhelming the enemy at the higher levels, the Qingming army advanced rapidly, breaking through the pass in a single day, and then advancing deeper into the territory, relentlessly pursuing the main force of the Lü family and annihilating them battalions by battalions.

Only then did the onlookers realize that Wei Yuan's two-month rest was not only to consolidate the three prefectures of Gannan, but also to lure Lü Changhe to deploy a large force on the front line so that he could concentrate and annihilate them.

As a result, the central defense line that Lü Changhe considered impregnable was captured by Wei Yuan in three days, with most of the 700,000 troops being taken prisoner and less than 100,000 escaping back.

Wei Yuan continued his previous strategy. After occupying the four central prefectures, he used heavy troops to block the northern passage, confining the remnants of the Lü family army within the four prefectures of Ganbei. Then, he leisurely rearranged the boundary stones, purged the Lü clan, redistributed land, and so on, appearing to be planning for a long-term operation.

By this point, most of the Lü family's foundation had been laid, and the remaining four northern prefectures, with their harsh climates and insufficient resources, could not support the Lü family's current scale.

Furthermore, the Lü family's forces have already suffered over a million casualties, and their ground troops have been decimated. The Lü family still has 300,000 elite troops remaining in the northern frontier, but not a single one of them can be mobilized; if any more are redeployed, they will be powerless to resist the Liao people.

Resisting foreign tribes is a matter of great righteousness. As long as Lü Changhe continues to shoulder the responsibility of resisting the Liao tribe, there is still room for maneuver.

Just like when Wei Yuan led Qingming to resist the Wu Clan, many of the Nine Kingdoms' covert operations ceased, and they provided considerable assistance, either openly or covertly. Even the Xu family, with whom they had a deep-seated enmity, did not dare to take advantage of their misfortune too much.

Just as Wei Yuan was focused on governing the four prefectures of Ganzhong, he suddenly sensed something and saw a stunningly beautiful woman quietly appear not far in front of him. Although she was incredibly beautiful, her eyes were full of arrogance as she looked down at Wei Yuan and asked, "You are Wei Yuan?"

Her voice was clear and melodious, indescribably pleasant to listen to, but her tone was extremely impolite.

Wei Yuan looked up and said with a smile, "Senior, aren't you afraid of the awkwardness when we meet again after I ascend to immortality?"

The woman paused for a moment before realizing the meaning, and then flew into a rage!
(End of this chapter)