Dragon Canon

On the barren land that was the Great Realm, a group of people, barely clothed, were busy at work. They quarried rocks, sharpened tools, and made plans for the few fertile soil scattered across the land.

Divided into groups of dozens, they scattered in all directions and began to explore the surrounding area.

At the edge of a fertile land, over 100 people were seated in a circle and engaged in a heated debate. Eventually, they elected seven individuals—five men and two women—and then unanimously chose a dignified-looking middle-aged man to serve as their leader.

With their leadership settled, these leaders reorganized the large group of idle people, assigning each a specific task. Hundreds of young men and women knelt before a makeshift stone platform and began praying for rain. Others used stone shovels to dig into the ground, creating large pits and then digging ditches to connect them. It appeared they were preparing to store water once the rain fell.

Sure enough, a heavy downpour began, though the sky remained dark red, and the full moon still hung high in the sky, giving the rain an indescribably eerie quality.

Under the guidance of the elders, the people dug several shallow channels to channel rainwater from the ground into the deep pits, where it pooled into ponds.

They then dug further channels toward the patches of fertile soil, using these waterways to divide the land into separate fields. The only problem was that there was nothing to plant in the fields at the moment.

Several other groups set out in different directions to pay homage to the divine trees scattered across the land. One tree had a cracked trunk with a charred break, but several shoots were sprouting from the fracture. The other two were saplings no bigger than the palm of a hand, but that did not deter the people from worshipping them.

However, the two saplings were fundamentally different in nature. To prove that the divine tree they worshipped was more powerful, the two groups of believers argued fiercely and spat saliva at one another. They were on the verge of coming to blows.

However, the believers failed to notice that the distance between the two divine trees were growing ever wider.

In the distance stood a towering jade mountain[1]. It was the sacred mountain of this world. Atop its sacred peak grew a divine tree that refused to be worshipped or turned into an object of faith.

The area surrounding the jade mountain was also a sacred land they were forbidden to approach.

There was another sacred land in this world, where a True God and her retinue resided. It was said that another True God was currently being conceived, though everyone instinctively shunned this being and refused to offer them even a shred of devotion.

The seven elders who had just been elected had already divided their responsibilities: some were planning grain fields, others were planning cotton fields, and more were searching for mineral veins. Meanwhile, the great elder and another elder were leading the people in quarrying rock to begin constructing stone houses.

Although the stone houses were sturdy, building them was quite labor-intensive and time-consuming. It wasn’t that the people didn’t want to build wooden houses; it was simply that there were only a few divine trees in this world, and no other trees at all. Forget trees, there weren’t even any flowers or grasses.

However, halfway through constructing the stone houses, they encountered a new problem: they couldn’t build the roofs.

Meanwhile, watching this group of people going about in the Great Realm and busying themselves, Wei Yuan was both speechless and dumbfounded.

In the past, the Dao Foundation stage warriors and Avatar-stage warriors who emerged from the ponds were merely puppets. They were incapable of receiving instructions and required Wei Yuan to split his consciousness to control them personally. It wasn’t until they had become sentient that they were finally able to receive Wei Yuan’s instructions.

But this time, he had transformed tens of thousands yin soldiers and vengeful souls into people in one go. Although they were just ordinary mortals, they all possessed spirituality and retained fragments of their past-life memories.

Wei Yuan didn’t notice it at first, and by the time he did, they had already selected a site to build their town, identified fertile land, dug channels to bring in water, quarried stone to build houses, and were even prospecting for mineral veins right now. They had even elected their own leaders. They looked every bit like people who were just taking root in a virgin land and establishing a utopian paradise.

Suffice to say, Wei Yuan was utterly stunned when he discovered that tens of thousands of people were bustling about inside his Dao Foundation.

Just then, several hundred people had built an altar out of stones and began praying in unison. Then, Wei Yuan heard their voices:

Please bestow upon us some seeds, trees, and mineral veins, O’ Creator Immortal.

Wei Yuan could hear their spoken words clearly as a matter of course, but the thoughts they conveyed through prayer were transmitted directly into his perception, bypassing any language barrier.

What a simple and unsophisticated group this was! They were asking for only the most basic and fundamental resources. They didn’t even dare to ask for timber; they merely asked for saplings.

Wei Yuan cast a glance at the Great Realm. It was a fact that this place was too barren at the moment. Aside from a few immortal plants, not a single other spirit plant remained, much less a strand of ordinary wood or grass.

As for mineral veins, Wei Yuan knew all too well that there were absolutely none to be found. All that existed in the Great Realm at the moment was soil and stone.

Wei Yuan silently picked up a stone, infused it with the intent of cauldron, and made it flat and thin. Ignoring its true intent, it was nothing more than a stone slab. He then transmitted the process of the stone slab’s transformation to the consciousness of the praying people.

Upon receiving the true intent within the cauldron, the crowd immediately erupted into a frenzy. A true immortal was manifesting his divine presence!

A wave of adulation instantly swept through the crowd, and in that instant, Wei Yuan heard tens of thousands of different praises simultaneously, some of which were so fawning they bordered on the embarrassing.

But for all the praises, Wei Yuan hadn’t gained even a shred of fortune from them. Then again, their karma had literally fallen into his clutches. He couldn’t ask for more.

These people had all been reincarnated through the All-Gate of Reincarnation and were born within Wei Yuan’s Dao Foundation. In reality, they had no physical form, and their lives and deaths were entirely at the mercy of Wei Yuan’s every thought.

Wei Yuan had originally planned to find someone to experiment on; to see what would happen if he directly erased them. However, after some thought, he shook his head. Although these beings were reincarnations and were dependent on the Great Realm to survive, they possessed their own souls and sapience. At the very least, he felt that they were mostly human. To arbitrarily erase them would be little different from murder.

On the battlefield, Wei Yuan would never show mercy. But in everyday life—even though these beings were, in theory, mere puppets within his Dao Foundation—he was still unwilling to harm them without cause.

After paying their respects, the group began processing the stones in accordance with the true intent of cauldron. Wei Yuan left them to it for the time being and began to inspect the condition of the Great Realm.

By this point, the girl Yin Yang had already begun to develop her spirituality. It was only a speck, but not did it far surpass that of a True Lord’s in rank, Wei Yuan intuitively sensed that it was greater than even that of an ordinary Immortal.

In terms of sheer quantity, tens of thousands of ordinary mortals possessing spirituality were absolutely the equal of hundreds of Dao Foundations and a dozen or so Avatars.

In addition, Wei Yuan sensed that another powerful spirit was being nurtured, its rank already approaching that of a True Lord. This was a phenomenon Wei Yuan had never witnessed before, and he surmised it must be the transformed soul of the old ghost of the lost clan after his death.

He had claimed to be a True Dragon descendant and stated that when descendants of the same bloodline slew one another, they could refine their slain opponents into Dragon Guards. Judging by his words, a Dragon Guard sounded incredibly powerful. Also, the strength difference between two True Dragon descendants seemed to be determined primarily by the difference in the number of kills they had made.

Recalling the old ghost’s shock upon first encountering Yin Yang, Wei Yuan wondered: Could the Shaman woman he had captured back then also have been a True Dragon descendant? After being slain by him, had she been reincarnated as a Dragon Guard—the mysterious girl Yin Yang?

The more Wei Yuan thought about it, the more convinced he became that this was the case. However, one thing remained unclear: If he truly was a descendant of the True Dragon, where was his companion treasure?

Even that old ghost of the lost clan possessed a piece of dragon bone—surely he couldn’t possibly have nothing at all? Although, judging by the size of the True Dragon’s body, this piece of dragon bone was likely either a fragment from some obscure corner of the dragon’s body and the smallest kind imaginable.

By now, the blood qi within the Origin Blood Pearl had been nearly depleted. Suddenly, the Great Realm trembled, and a series of lingering, resonant tones rang out, like the simultaneous tolling of bells and cauldrons.

At that moment, the earth, the sky, and everything between—including Yin Yang and the tens of thousands of mortals—merged into a single entity. Deep within the earth, a vast sea of spirituality emerged.

With this, the spirituality of Wei Yuan’s Dao Foundation had taken form, and he had both perfected the spirit awakening stage and made significant progress in the spirit nurturing stage. He was now on the verge of becoming an Avatar.

However, as a late-stage Avatar, the old ghost’s lifetime accumulation of blood qi was barely enough for Wei Yuan to advance his Dao Foundation by a single minor stage, and definitely not enough for two. This caused Wei Yuan to grumble incessantly in his heart.

1. One thing. In the Great Realm, the jade hill is now classified as a jade mountain. In the real world, because Wei Yuan could only manifest a very tiny portion of it (I think), it’s a jade hill. I apologize for the confusion; in Chinese there’s no such distinction so it’s very convenient for them but very inconvenient for me. ☜

I thought I put an image of true Zhang Sheng before... maybe the image expired or something? Well anyway here you go, the two forms of Zhang Sheng. And yes I totally cut the original image so you wouldn’t notice. :D