151: Chapter 151 Veterans Return to Camp, Population Lockdown

Inside the Task Hall, Jiang Daoling pulled up Wang Pingan's recent files.

On the public surface, it only displayed Divine Kingdom Closed Construction, while the specific territorial changes and troop losses were tightly muddled by high authority.

An aristocratic descendant leaned against a crystal pillar and sneered, "If he does not take on tasks for twenty days, his ranking will drop further. The Grade A Sequence review will not wait for him to slowly recover from his injuries."

The team behind him had swept through three tasks in a row, building up momentum to widen the points gap.

Jiang Daoling ignored him, instead turning around to pull up Wang Pingan's old record of soloing the Xiuluo Fragment, his gaze locked onto "One Hundred Percent Devouring Rate".

Qin Zhaoye paced to the front of the leaderboard, looking at the jumping rankings, "If he cared about this empty fame, he should have come out to take jobs seven days ago. Whatever he is holding onto right now is definitely more important than these damn points."

Jiang Daoling closed the file, turned around, and walked out, "Postpone the original probing, wait for him to come out on his own. Stepping up at this time is purely acting as a pathfinding stone for others."

The remaining aristocratic teams did not have this kind of composure, madly grinding high-point tasks, determined to squeeze Wang Pingan out of the top ten before the review.

On the same day, the audit results of the Federation System regarding the Three-God Siege Battle were released.

Carlo's forcible connection to the spatial trajectory of the student's Divine Kingdom was dug up completely.

The ironclad evidence was like a mountain: Carlo led the invasion, followed by the forcible merging of tracks by Baal and Tuya, with the three gods joining forces to encircle and suppress.

Wang Pingan's counter-offensive after seizing back the passage was stamped and concluded by Federation legal codes as "Legitimate Self-Defense Extension".

The ownership of the spoils of war from the three alien Divine Kingdoms was clean and without any controversy.

Before the audit official document was even issued, deep within the main leaderboard of the Task Hall, an encrypted battle record quietly appeared.

The name, proceeds, and evaluation were all sealed off by the highest authority.

As soon as the record popped up, it transferred into the settlement sequence, and even the deacon maintaining the leaderboard could not peel back that layer of authority, causing external suspicions to boil over even more.

In the ninetieth year of the Divine Kingdom, the wounded from the Three-God Siege Battle stepped out of the Medical Cultivator Camp one after another, and most of them were already able to walk and breathe normally.

After returning to the camp, some old veterans always hugged their battle blades at night before they were willing to close their eyes.

As soon as the roar of the Artillery Battalion's routine trial firing sounded, they would flip over and leap up, subconsciously searching for the shield walls and Formation cores.

At night, an old veteran punched and shattered the camp gate, shouting "Protect the Formation".

The on-duty lieutenant stepped forward to seize his arms, and only when the old veteran saw the tents all around did his tense shoulders slump dejectedly.

Wang Shan initially thought this was due to unfamiliarity from resting for too long, and intended to send the returning wounded into the Shura Field to re-polish the military Formation through drills.

Before the military order came out of the main tent, he first went to the wounded soldiers' camp, flipping through the armor, Medicinal Pills, and Medical Cultivator records bed by bed.

He walked to Wang Chuan's old bed.

On the bedding lay only a folded set of old military uniform, and the wooden plaque at the head of the bed was engraved with "Guardian General of the Seventh Formation Core".

The surrounding old veterans were each doing their own things, but whenever they passed this empty bed, their steps would lighten, and even the weapons in their hands were returned to their scabbards early.

Wang Shan stood before the bed and looked for a long time.

After returning to the camp, he picked up a brush to cross out the additional training military order, and summoned the manager of the Medical Cultivator Camp and the military instructors.

"All wounded soldiers from the war will be placed in a recovery period."

Wang Shan pressed his palm against the tabletop.

"The Medical Cultivator Camp will check their bodies, and the instructors will look at their condition.

Only when both sides nod can they return to the front lines.

Whoever treats waking up at night as laziness again will go to the wounded soldiers' camp to guard for a month, and only return to lead troops after listening to all their battlefield records."

The Medical Cultivator Camp divided the recovery period into four stages: quiet recuperation, light training, Formation adaptation, and legion joint training. If anything went wrong in any stage, they would retreat to the previous stage and start over.

The military instructors took the opportunity to withdraw the artillery surprise attack drills, letting the old veterans practice from small Formations first, and then gradually take over city defense and cross-border marching.

Wang Shan looked through the recovery roster every day without urging a single word.

Three months later, the first batch of old veterans finally donned the xueming mysterious armor again.

This group of people was not directly transferred to the Main Battle Army.

Wang Shan selected those with seasoned experience and stable injuries, and dispatched them to the academies of the Twenty-Four New Cities to serve as instructors.

The old veterans taught basic military Formations, battlefield first aid, cross-border survival, and retreat judgment in the academies.

The young people in the academies thus touched blood-stained battlefield records for the first time.

The fifty-thousand-strong Main Battle Army would no longer be expanded, and all newly recruited soldiers were assigned to the reserves, enduring three years of basic drills before being allocated to various camps according to their strengths.

Wang Mu had no objection to this scheduling, but drew a red line for the military instructors: "Instructors shall only manage teaching and drilling, and are not allowed to interfere with city administration and resource distribution under the guise of military merit."

An old lieutenant stuck out his neck and asked if the instructors could directly seize people if the academy managers embezzled the military Formation classes.

"No."

Wang Mu's tone was steady.

"You can all submit a petition to the Ancestral Court.

City administration has its own assessment regulations, and the army cannot manage local affairs under the guise of training."

The boundary between the military and the New Cities was thus clearly drawn.

Wang Shan copied the rules into the military manual, and all external instructors had to sign this military order before entering the city.

During this period, the three alien divine corpses sealed in the grand treasury caused various departments of the Hundred Arts Hall to quarrel endlessly, and transfer request documents piled up like a small mountain on the long desk of the Ancestral Court.

The Casting Workshop wanted to dismantle Baal's crab shell; since the gravity Law had already been eradicated, the remaining hard shell was enough to forge thousands of heavy shields and mine tunnel supports.

The Medical Cultivator Camp wanted to use Tuya's divine body to study toxicology, and the Alchemy Pavilion also stared at the poison sacs and bone spurs, hoping to use them to improve antidote Medicinal Pills and medicinal baths.

The Formation Hall had its eyes on the water-type patterns in Carlo's divine body; if peeled off properly, they could fill the high-grade Formation core of the pure water Formation.

The military was not to be left behind either, submitting a document and plotting to take all three divine corpses in their entirety, re-equipping the massive army before the next battle.

The managers of various departments argued in the Ancestral Court for half a day, refusing to yield to each other, and even brought back the scraps that had been divided earlier onto their tables.

Wang Pingan sat high on the main seat, not showing favoritism to the military.

He ordered various departments to list irreplaceable items, and make decisions based on whether the Materials could regenerate.

The water-type Law of Carlo's divine body was distributed to the Formation Hall, the ordinary bone armor was kept for later use, and the remaining remains were sealed as they were.

Tuya's poison sacs, bone spurs, and Law tissues were handed over to the Medical Cultivator Camp and the Alchemy Pavilion for joint management, and all trials had to be conducted within the poison-sealed zone.

The Materials in Baal's crab shell that could be repeatedly remelted were sent into the Casting Workshop, and the core gravity tissues were locked into the Ancestral Court grand treasury; no knives were allowed to be used without an order.

"Take the regenerative Materials into production first, leave the irreplaceable Laws for deduction, and seal the rest."

Wang Pingan handed down his judgment, "No one is allowed to gobble everything up in one bite."

This allocation did not let any single family take full advantage, but it protected the long-term usefulness of the three divine corpses, and the quarrels within the hall finally subsided.

In the one hundred and twentieth year of the Divine Kingdom, the population growth of the Twenty-Four New Cities surpassed the earlier delineations, and the first three new cities showed signs of fatigue.

The output of the spiritual fields could still keep up, but the academies and the Medical Cultivator Camp were already overcrowded, and the beds in the Nursery had not been empty for three consecutive years.

The camp managers proposed expanding the Main Battle Army and engineering corps, stuffing the excess population into the military camps, and by the way speeding up the excavation of the northern mining area.

Wang Mu finished reading the resource booklet of the New Cities, and immediately called a halt to the immigration orders of those three new cities, transferring all the allocated resources to the Nursery, academies, and the Medical Cultivator Camp.

As soon as this order came out, the military immediately refused to have it.

Several lieutenants felt that since the Divine Kingdom had just experienced the Three-God Siege, fifty thousand Main Battle Army soldiers trying to protect a territory of three hundred thousand square kilometers was truly strenuous.

"As soon as the population increases, you start clamoring for troop expansion?

If the academies and Medical Cultivators can not keep up, thirty years from now, you will only be left with a batch of new recruits who have not even laid a solid Foundation."

Wang Mu tapped his knuckles on the desk.

Wang Mu suppressed the expansion accounts and refused to approve them.

The military representative turned around to look for Wang Shan, hoping that he would use the identity of the Main Battle Army commander to submit another memorial.

Wang Shan did not commit to an answer.

He led people through ten years of military supply accounts, and personally went to those three new cities to tour the academies and the Nursery.

A single classroom was stuffed with over a hundred people, and the instructors could not even set up a platform to lecture on Formations.

The on-duty medical officers of the Medical Cultivator Camp had not closed their eyes for a peaceful sleep in months either.

Returning to the Ancestral Court, Wang Shan placed the Main Battle Army's expansion accounts from back then in front of Wang Mu: "The fifty-thousand-strong Main Battle Army is temporarily sufficient. Take this money to build academies first."

The military representative was anxious on the side and chimed in to remind them that once the expansion accounts were returned, wanting to submit another memorial would take at least ten years, and the armor and weapons of the reserves would also suffer along with it.

"Even with ten thousand fewer people in the legion, we can still form Formations."

Wang Shan pressed the hilt of the knife at his waist.

"With six fewer academies, the next generation will not even fully recognize the Formation diagrams.

When a real fight breaks out, what will we use to fill in our lives?"

Wang Mu accepted the accounts, swung his vermilion brush, and specially approved six academies to be completed ahead of schedule.

The basic armor expenses for the reserves were retained as before, and not a single item of daily drills was reduced.

The three new cities halted their immigration orders for a full twenty years, and the extra built residences were all converted into classrooms and medical halls, while the Nursery also smoothly expanded its second circle.

The population of the Divine Kingdom climbed from fifteen million to twenty-eight million, but Wang Mu did not raise the head count further, instead setting a dead population red line for the entire realm.

The carrying capacities of rations, Spiritual Qi, academies, and medical halls were laid out openly to be calculated.

Each city could only approve child-rearing quotas based on its own surplus.

The Creation Pool no longer urged fertility, and the power of creation shifted its direction to exclusively nourish the bones of newborns, elevate their Foundation, and resist diseases and evils.

Several managers of the new cities feared that slow population growth would delay the work, and proposed recruiting artisans from the old lands to fill the vacancies in the mining areas and spiritual fields.

Wang Mu only approved short-term rotations, rejecting all memorials for whole-family relocations.

"However many mouths the city can feed, that is how many people stay.

The numbers on the books can not fill stomachs."

The Twenty-Four New Cities thus stabilized their footing, their population was no longer inflated, and the spiritual fields, workshops, academies, and the Medical Cultivator Camp finally got some breathing room.

In the one hundred and thirtieth year of the Divine Kingdom, the first batch of new city apprentices stepped into the Hundred Arts Hall.

Among them were many children of artisans originating from the former seabed and mining areas.

They figured out the local water, soil, and mineral veins, and upon entering the Formation Hall and Casting Workshop, it did not take long before they took charge of the daily repairs of the new lands.

The personnel dispatched externally earlier were successively withdrawn back to the old cities.

In the one hundred and fortieth year, the Nine-Ring Array Network had not had any mishaps for ten consecutive years; the three sets of cycles exchanged and replaced Qi alternately, never causing the chaos of a full-realm Spiritual Qi cutoff again.

Wang Pingan finished inspecting the third stage, nodded, and permitted the Twenty-Four New Cities to connect into the Ancestral Court's transportation array network.

The travel speed for the movement of personnel and goods became several times faster.

But Wang Mu did not slacken his vigilance over the earth veins.

Inspections of the thirty-six core Formation bases doubled out of nowhere, and the Formation Hall had to record every single deviation and shift of Spiritual Qi.

Ten years later, in the one hundred and fiftieth year of the Divine Kingdom, anomalies surfaced one after another in the Nine-Ring Array Network, and three strands of Law power that had already been diverted actually began to converge toward the hinterland of the new lands.

The Formation Hall burrowed underground to investigate for several years, and finally figured out a Law-entangled dark knot at the intersection of nine top-grade Spiritual Veins.

Water flow, poisonous miasma, and heavy pressure—these three forces huddled together in that place.

Every bit the dark knot expanded, the New City water network and the Ancestral Court Spiritual Vein had to bear an extra fraction of heavy pressure.