Volume 5, Chapter 106 – Tracing the Cause

With Bai Xiang personally speaking to set the tone of the matter, it also meant that, on the surface, all officials aligned with the Liu faction had lost their right to speak in this incident.

Take Zhang Xianzhi and Xu Ling, for example. All they could do now was hurry to contact familiar members of their faction for questioning and persuasion. They themselves were no longer qualified to do anything concrete, and before Bai Xiang summoned them again of her own accord, they were not even qualified to attend court deliberations.

Politics was politics: first policy was determined through discussion, then governance was realized through execution.

They could not even participate in the very first step of discussion anymore. It could be said that they had been temporarily squeezed out of the core political circle.

For a unified imperial dynasty, this was no longer as simple as falling out of favor. Their households could be confiscated and their clans exterminated at any moment.

So the two of them were frantic. The moment they came out, they started making phone calls, sending telegrams, and writing letters, contacting their faction allies with near-manic desperation.

On the other side, Bai Zhuqing, following Bai Xiang’s instructions, selected some people from the remaining court ministers and granted them the office of inspector-governor, ordering them to fly at once to the various prefectures and take charge in place of imperial authority.

Wasn’t the Liu faction afraid?

Didn’t they claim they did not know what to do?

Then they could simply stop doing anything at all.

At a time like this, they still wanted to play games with me, acting as though the whole country could not function without them.

Bai Zhuqing sneered inwardly. This move might barely have worked against her in the past, because back then she really had lacked manpower. Many veteran generals and old ministers who had taken part in founding the dynasty were still stationed all around with military authority in hand, and such people could not be moved lightly.

But now that Big Sis was here, the situation was naturally completely different.

For example, with the Qingyun voidfiends destroyed, most of the key strongholds in the northwest had been freed up. Right now, she could shift Bai Tingyun and his army from the entire far northwest to the twin southeastern prefectures in one stroke and take over the situation there.

That was something utterly unimaginable in the past, yet now it could all be done.

Then there was the effect of Big Sis’s public lectures. Since then, many “wild” qi cultivators had appeared all over and pledged allegiance. These people had talent and cultivation but suffered because all the good positions were already blocked off by those who came before them, leaving them only able to take on minor idle posts and miscellaneous work for the time being.

Naturally, they too were dissatisfied. The Liu faction’s current situation probably suited these people perfectly. They could not wait for someone to make a mistake so they could take their place.

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After giving those orders, Bai Zhuqing also began reviewing the intelligence network to investigate where this latest wave of heaven-and-earth transformations had come from.

But she was still not as fast as Bai Xiang.

Bai Xiang had not even moved from where she sat in the hall. Yet as she closed her eyes and sank her mind into her inner body-scape, using the Shenming Sword nurtured in her Qi Sea to connect to the Path of Qi divine pool, that white noise from every direction instantly became clear.

At that moment, Jade Spirit Mingxin played an enormous role. The cluttered and useless information was all filtered out, while the information matching set keywords was extracted. Through this, Bai Xiang quickly learned that on the night before last, there had been a wave of “meteor showers” across various regions, yet none of the prefectural authorities had taken it seriously.

“Meteor showers.”

Opening her eyes, Bai Xiang rolled the term over in her mind.

When she had descended and returned in the first place, coming back to Wangchuan Circuit, she too had arrived together with a meteor shower.

Meteor showers did not form out of thin air. They came from the void, from the fragments of old lands that had been summoned back and drawn in by the main world.

Some of them might have been summoned straight down. Others might have been called back earlier but failed to fall, first being captured into the planet’s star ring, only to descend once the time was ripe.

That was why meteor showers were not considered rare. Nowadays, they counted as an ordinary celestial phenomenon.

Before Yu Daoyong’s Heaven-Monitoring Directorate had been established, surveying Illusory Realm fragments, verifying geographical changes across the land, and recording historical events had all been the work of the Court of Ceremonies. Bai Xiang reviewed the Court of Ceremonies’ past survey reports and confirmed that she had remembered correctly: the probability of a meteor shower containing voidfiends was around ten percent, while the probability of it containing Illusory Realm fragments was under one percent.

Therefore, if it had been a “natural shower,” such massive heaven-and-earth transformations would never have occurred.

To cause a disturbance on this scale, a great number of those “meteors” had to have been carefully selected, with all of them containing Illusory Realm fragments. Only then could geographic fusion begin after impact.

As for the voidfiends, they were merely incidental.

“The only one with that capability is the Starsea Federation.”

Bai Xiang was certain it was the Federation making trouble.

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“They must have done an initial round of screening on the star ring, then knocked those meteors out of their orbital track.”

Taking out her phone and checking online, Bai Xiang discovered that the Federation was suffering from similar trouble as well.

The night before last, meteor showers had also blanketed all regions of the Federation, and now the Federation too was facing changes in terrain across its lands.

The Federation was a union polity, equivalent to more than three great states from her previous life merged together. Its landmass was therefore ten times that of Great Xia, making the disruption there far more serious than on Great Xia’s side.

So this was a move that hurt the enemy by five hundred while costing oneself a thousand?

What exactly was Blood Lord Xue En thinking?

Did he feel that, since he could not defeat me by force anyway, he might as well draw in more fragments to return, accelerate and push the revival of ancient saints, and then borrow their might to suppress me?

The method was crude, primitive even.

But she had to admit that, for him, it was a good move.

“We need to prevent these things from joining forces.”

Bai Xiang thus set the tone for the matter.

She did not care about the many voidfiends. She did not care about massive upheavals in heaven and earth. But if a whole string of things like Fang Yang, Xue En, Demon Lords, Jiuli, beings equivalent to ancient immortals and Buddhas, were to revive, and even form a Saint Alliance against her, then her future actions would be constrained.

From a third-person perspective, seeing a single individual treated like a raid boss, with groups banding together to target them, sitting in the center like some Supreme Human Emperor from a novel, suppressing so many great saints, immortals, and Buddhas across the six directions and eight wastes so that none dared act rashly, naturally looked cool enough.

But one must not forget that at the same time, that Supreme Human Emperor was also effectively trapped within the imperial city.

That was far too stifling, with far too many constraints. If possible, Bai Xiang still wanted to strangle such an alliance in the cradle.

Ideally, she would discover signs of revived saint-level powers as quickly as possible, determine their coordinates, and then personally go to kill them.

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To investigate something like that clearly, relying on the Path of Qi divine pool alone was nowhere near enough. She still needed an amplifier: Yu Daoyong’s Demonic Aura Observation Towers.

“So he really picked a good time to defect.”

Bai Xiang decided to increase her resource support for Yu Daoyong.

As long as the towers proved effective after completion, they would need to be rolled out nationwide as fast as possible.

“Your Majesty.”

Bai Zhuqing came back in again, calling Bai Xiang by the proper official title, her face carrying a confident smile.

“The policy orders have already been issued.”

“I’ll have those inspector-governors take over local defense in some regions. On one hand, they’ll organize air-defense forces to intercept any meteor showers that may still come later. On the other, they’ll handle relocation and war preparations.”

“Add one more thing,” Bai Xiang instructed her. “Each region is to gather elite demon-elimination squads starting from the Origin Realm upward. If they encounter any Demon Pool or anomaly that even those people cannot handle, they are to report the coordinates to the center immediately, without delay.”

Because most such anomalies were caused by revived powerhouses.

Take the Blood-Sun anomaly at White Crane Temple, for instance. An Origin Realm cultivator could not deal with that kind of hidden danger. It still required Bai Xiang to wipe it out personally.

Bai Zhuqing accepted the order at once and withdrew. Bai Xiang remained seated in the hall and looked through online information for a while longer, discovering that although panic was not insignificant, it was still being kept within fairly limited bounds.

And that was not merely because Bai Xiang herself was there to hold the line.

True, her return had acted like a powerful shot in the arm for the nation, giving people confidence. We have a supreme powerhouse too now!

But in a great upheaval like this, one that touched virtually every person and every household in the nation, what truly gave people confidence was the strength they themselves held in their own hands.

Three hundred million qi-method citizens. Out of Great Xia’s current population of five hundred million, that meant roughly two out of every three people cultivated qi methods.

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That proportion was terrifying.

Even if most people never cultivated to a deep level and would struggle to reach even the third layer of Refining Qi, they were still fundamentally different from the mortals of the former dynasty.

Asking them to face organized voidfiend forces was not very realistic.

But against these large-scale natural transformations, their ability to protect themselves had increased enormously compared with the former dynasty.

“This is the change qi methods have brought to ordinary people’s lives.”

Bai Xiang’s lips curved upward slightly.

“An era where everyone lives eight hundred years.”

“This transformation has only just begun.”

Whoosh.

Jian Three appeared again.

“Your Majesty.”

“Chief Inspector Zhang… says he has an urgent matter and requests an audience with Your Majesty.”

“He already has progress this quickly?” Bai Xiang raised a brow.

“Very well.”

“Let him in.”