Mo Hua frowned slightly.

Why did the Dao Ting’s Bigudan end up in the heartland of the Great Wilderness?

Was it stolen by the Bi Fang Tribe?

Or was it spoils of war, acquired by the Great Wilderness Royal Court’s savage soldiers after defeating the Dao Ting army during battle?

Were these Bigudan military supplies for the Dao Ting?

Mo Hua sniffed the Bigudan and shook his head.

There was a faint, moldy smell of coarse grains; their quality was too poor.

He had served as a Daoist soldier for a few days and had tasted the Bigudan distributed by the Dao Ting. These Bigudan before him simply did not meet the Dao Ting’s “military supply” standards.

Moreover, Dao Ting military supplies had clear Dao Ting markings.

These Bigudan were in blank bottles with no markings on them, so they couldn’t possibly be military supplies from the Daoist Soldier Department.

“So where did these Bigudan come from exactly?”

Mo Hua’s eyes darkened slightly. He vaguely felt that this must be a major event, or at least the beginning of a significant karma.

But there were too few clues to investigate. Even divining karma, these completely blank bottles wouldn’t reveal much.

Mo Hua pondered for a moment, then ordered someone to collect all these Bigudan.

For a long time to come, these savage soldiers’ rations would depend on these Bigudan. One pill per person per day during non-combat times to fill their stomachs. During combat, three pills per person per day to replenish some qi and blood.

Of course, they tasted terrible, and eating them for too long would cause discomfort in the stomach, intestines, and meridians.

But as the saying goes, it was a famine year; having anything to eat was good enough, there was no room for pickiness.

After settling things, Mo Hua went to find Dan Zhu and others to discuss their next move. Should they temporarily reorganize here in the oasis, or continue marching to find the next gathering place for savage cultivators?

Mo Hua was somewhat at a loss with the current situation. He was in the desert, like being in a fog, not knowing where he was, not knowing the extent of the famine, not knowing the situation of other tribes, not knowing the overall situation of the Great Wilderness, and even less knowing how the war between the Great Wilderness and the Dao Ting was progressing.

He could only take one step at a time. However, as the “Wuzhu Daren,” he couldn’t openly say that he didn’t know what to do next. So he gathered everyone to discuss it.

Mo Hua listened from the side, hoping someone might have a good idea or give him some inspiration. But the current predicament was truly beyond human capability to resolve.

After a round of discussions, everyone dispersed late into the night.

As Lu Gu left, he glanced back at Mo Hua, his gaze cold and veiled, clearly still resentful of what Mo Hua had done to his elder brother.

But he didn’t say anything.

At this time, with the severe famine, survival was difficult, and everyone had to work together to live. In many matters, he still relied on Mo Hua, the Wuzhu.

Similarly, he knew well that Mo Hua was a “demon” who manipulated people’s hearts and was not so easy to kill.

Lu Gu left.

Mo Hua knew Lu Gu’s thoughts and sighed softly in his heart. The path of cultivation was long. If one wanted to move forward step by step and pursue one’s own Dao, it was inevitable to form various enmities and affections; one truly had no choice.

However, Mo Hua didn’t take it too much to heart. In this world, there were those who loved him, and many who hated him. And he probably expected that those who hated him would only increase in the future.

In a luxurious guest room in the oasis. This was Mo Hua’s temporary resting place. Outside the window, sand whipped wildly, but inside it was very quiet. Mo Hua lay on the bed, eyes open, staring at the ceiling, unable to sleep.

Conquering the oasis and solving the supply problem was just a small step. How he proceeded next would determine the fate of these six thousand savage soldiers, and even Dan Zhu and the others. If he made a mistake, everyone would die, and everything would revert to zero. All his hopes in the Great Wilderness would also be invalidated.

Mo Hua suddenly felt a heavy heart. Feeling a bit down, Mo Hua planned to sink his consciousness into his sea of consciousness, practice some array formations for a while, find some pleasure, and fill his empty and irritable heart.

But after practicing for a while, the piles of blank bottles of Bigudan from earlier in the day reappeared in Mo Hua’s mind.

Mo Hua always felt there was something strange about it. If the Great Wilderness was a chessboard, Dan Zhu and the others were chess pieces. Now Mo Hua didn’t know where to place Dan Zhu and these chess pieces. And these Bigudan, along with the secrets behind them, were likely closely related to the moves he would make next.

Mo Hua was deep in thought and had no mood to draw array formations. He got out of bed, lit a brazier in the room, and used divination to calculate about these Bigudan.

After the flames burned, cracks appeared on the demon bone. Mo Hua glanced at the divination result, and it was as he expected: messy, vague, and difficult-to-interpret things.

Karma, karma; there is an effect only if there is a cause. For something completely unknown, one cannot deduce its origin simply by using karma techniques. Especially when it involves a grand scheme, the less “cause” one knows, the vaguer the “effect” will be, and the calculated effect will also be very unreliable.

“Where did these Bigudan—exactly—come from?”

Mo Hua tossed the brazier aside, lay back on the bed, and closed his eyes in thought.

“A large quantity of similar pills requires a systematic, mature cultivation craft for assembly-line refining—”

“This must have been refined in a large alchemy room of a major sect or a prominent noble family.”

“Since it’s a ‘cultivation industry,’ there must be certain standardized industrial traces, right? Just like when I established large-scale refining and alchemy workshops in Tongxian City, they standardized things by adding serial numbers and leaving Tongxian City’s mark on the refined pills and spiritual artifacts to indicate origin and batch.”

“Not only Tongxian City, but the refining workshops in Gushan City also have these standardized marking methods.”

As a skilled array master, Mo Hua had deeply participated in cultivation production. Although he never inquired about these details, he was thoroughly familiar with the inner workings through immersion.

“Batch numbers, and marks similar to ‘trademarks’—”

Large-batch production in Jiuzhou would absolutely not lack these two things. Bigudan belonged to the category of pills. The pills themselves wouldn’t leave marks or batch numbers. But the bottles containing the pills definitely would.

To hide these batch numbers and origin marks, were these large quantities of Bigudan therefore put into “blank” bottles?

But “blank” bottles were actually a kind of mark too. Ordinary blank bottles wouldn’t be purely blank; they would more or less have a little writing or cloud patterns. Such pure white bottles, without any writing or patterns, especially in such large quantities, must also have been specially refined to deceive people.

This matter concerned the Great Wilderness, so the process of refining bottles should not have been entrusted to others, otherwise, secrecy would be difficult to maintain.

Mo Hua frowned in thought. If he were responsible for this—if he were an administrator of a powerful force and needed to urgently refine some blank bottles to hold Bigudan—then he would most likely not build a new refining production line, because the cost would increase. Bottles for Bigudan simply weren’t worth that cost.

Instead, he would temporarily modify an existing refining production line to specialize in refining these blank bottles. In other words, these bottles were produced by temporarily altering a refining production line within a certain force and industry.

Mo Hua was suddenly startled.

He immediately jumped out of bed, called for Elder Ba Chuan, and instructed, “Quickly, find some people to go through all the bottles containing Bigudan and look for ‘defective products’.”

Elder Ba Chuan looked bewildered, not knowing what the Wuzhu Daren intended to do. But the Wuzhu Daren possessed vast divine powers, so his actions were naturally beyond question.

“Yes,” Elder Ba Chuan replied, then went down and gathered some savage soldiers. According to Mo Hua’s instructions, they meticulously arranged all the Bigudan confiscated during the day, bottle by bottle, in the outer hall.

Then he led the savage soldiers, inspecting each bottle. Although divine sense could also be used, the images presented by divine sense were different and prone to omissions. So Mo Hua had everyone use both their eyes and divine sense to look for flaws.

They searched for most of the night and finally found a few “defective” bottles. The bottles themselves were not “defective,” but they had some very subtle “blemishes” in their details, leaving behind some traces of glaze brushstrokes.

This was because cultivation industries inherently had a “defect rate.” No matter how perfect a refining industry was, it could not avoid producing defective products.

From the perspective of array formation principles, this was also easy to explain. The refining industry’s structure involves “refining” processes, but once industrialized, its underlying logic is controlled by “array formations.”

Array formations control the process, variables, materials, firing temperature, and so on. The operation of array formations is not always smooth; there will always be some changes and disturbances, leading to the production of some artifacts that do not meet “standards.”

The same applied to these Bigudan bottles. Besides the production process, these bottles also had another set of “engraving” array formations, similar to magnetic imaging. This set of “engraving” array formations would automatically engrave text or marks on the bottles using glaze and other raw materials, indicating their origin and batch. Whether to engrave patterns, text, or nothing at all was determined by this “engraving” array formation.

Currently, this set of “engraving” array formations had been temporarily altered to “blank.” Thus, this refining production line would produce a large number of bottles without any markings.

But as Mo Hua knew, any refining industry has the concept of “defective products.” An “engraving” array formation might run perfectly once. It might even run ten or a hundred times without error. But once it runs thousands or tens of thousands of times, errors and omissions are bound to occur.

Such errors would cause the “engraving” array formation, originally set to “blank,” to malfunction and uncontrollably “engrave” some patterns. And these patterns it engraved when malfunctioning would not be generated out of thin air; they would inevitably be patterns it had “engraved” before.

It’s like a person who has been drawing a tree all along. Now, they are suddenly told not to draw it, but only to sketch in the air on a blank piece of paper. For a short time, they can do it. But over a long period, they might occasionally have a “brain glitch” and habitually draw another tree. These blank papers with a sudden glitch that drew a tree are the “defective products.”

These practical insights, where array formations are deeply integrated with refining, might not be understandable to the average person, but Mo Hua was very familiar with them.

Mo Hua held several carefully selected bottles in his hand. These bottles were blank, but in the details, there were some very faint traces. There were residual brushstrokes and some flowers and birds.

At a glance, a normal person wouldn’t even notice. Even if they saw them, they wouldn’t know what they were. In large-batch production, no one would have the leisure to check such things. But for an “insider” like Mo Hua, the meaning was completely different.

Mo Hua dismissed his attendants, returned to his room, and began to deduce the “array formation” in reverse based on these patterns, to restore what kind of array formation had engraved these patterns.

The “engraving” array formation was used for drawing and carving words; its principle was very simple. It was just that there were many types of such array formations, and Mo Hua needed to spend some time trying and verifying them one by one.

However, for Mo Hua, who had done more difficult and complex research on the principles of secondary lightning array patterns and “array flow” calculations, this workload was not significant.

Half an hour later, Mo Hua had successfully recreated the array formation that engraved the patterns on these “defective products.” In other words, it was also the array formation specifically used for “engraving” with glaze on a certain refining production line.

Mo Hua constructed this array formation and then tried to let it generate “patterns” without restrictions. The generated patterns were all printed by Mo Hua on white paper. As spiritual power flowed, the engraving array formation began to operate.

Complex patterns were printed on the white paper. There were “flowers blooming for wealth,” “phoenixes greeting the sun,” “auspicious clouds,” “a hundred years of harmony,” and so on, all intricate and beautiful patterns.

Mo Hua’s brow gradually furrowed.

Just then, the brushwork of the engraving array formation changed, and it began to engrave a character. This character was stylized, embellished with flowers and trees, with embroidered silk as its skeleton, looking splendid and beautiful. Its character shape was:

“Hua.”

Mo Hua’s heart sank. What did this mean? Which sect, or which prominent family was this?

The Hua family?

Mo Hua frowned, and in a flash of lightning, his heart skipped a beat. He suddenly remembered the noble and beautiful woman he had seen at the Demon Fighting Arena in Damo City, the one who wore splendid and elegant Hua robes, whom Young Master Tuoba treated like a “lickspittle.”

Young Master Tuoba seemed to call her “Miss Hua”?

That beautiful woman was from the Hua family—

The Hua family was connected to the Great Wilderness. So, did that mean the cultivation production lines that refined these bottles and Bigudan also all belonged to the Hua family?

Mo Hua’s gaze was deep. If these Bigudan belonged to the Hua family, why did they end up in the Great Wilderness? Were they stolen by the Great Wilderness tribes?

No… it didn’t look like they were stolen. It seemed more like the Hua family “sold” these Bigudan to the Great Wilderness?

Mo Hua took out a Bigudan, sniffed it at the tip of his nose, and frowned at the inferior scent. The quality control of these Bigudan was really poor. In Jiuzhou, they were clearly low-grade pills. If the Hua family was a prominent noble family, they would never refine such inferior Bigudan.

The only possibility was that they deliberately refined these “inferior” Bigudan, with the purpose of selling them to the Great Wilderness. These inferior Bigudan were “Great Wilderness special edition.” They were for the people of the Great Wilderness. Therefore, it didn’t matter how inferior they were, as long as they didn’t kill people.

Anyway, there was no Hua family mark left on the medicine bottles, so no one would know that these pills were refined by their Hua family. A little inferiority could even lead to higher profits.

But why Bigudan? Why sell nothing else, only Bigudan?

Because… Mo Hua’s pupils constricted.

Famine!

During a famine, Bigudan were not just simple supplies; they were life-saving items. Even the most inferior Bigudan, as long as they were edible and could save lives, were treasures. Did the Hua family stockpile so many Bigudan to provide disaster relief?

How could that be?!

They probably intended to sell these stockpiled Bigudan at an exorbitant price during the famine year. Even the most inferior Bigudan would make the tribes facing hunger and life-or-death situations pay extremely high prices.

Mo Hua took a slight gasp of cold air. In the Great Wilderness, beliefs were chaotic, forces were complex, and tribes were powerful. It was impossible to conquer them, and stealing from them was even more difficult.

If military force couldn’t conquer them, then use trade. Taking advantage of the famine, refining a large number of Bigudan and selling them to the Great Wilderness to reap huge profits. Was this the Hua family’s plan?

Was the Hua family trying to profit from disaster?

But was it really that simple?

Mo Hua took out another Bigudan and sniffed it again, noticing a somewhat aged grain scent. This indicated that these Bigudan had started being refined years ago. But at that time, there didn’t seem to be a famine in the Great Wilderness?

How did the Hua family know that a famine would definitely occur in the Great Wilderness?

Did they anticipate that the war between the Dao Ting and the Great Wilderness would cause unrest? That unrest would lead to famine, and famine would cause the value of Bigudan to skyrocket… So they “gambled” on this?

But was that really the case?

Mo Hua looked again at the series of “flowers blooming for wealth” patterns before him. A refining production line capable of engraving patterns like “flowers blooming for wealth” and “phoenixes greeting the sun” indicated that it had previously produced mostly “luxury goods,” high-grade noble spiritual artifacts.

But this luxury goods production line was modified by the Hua family to produce inferior Bigudan, which was enough to show that the Hua family was convinced that these Bigudan could yield huge profits. This was definitely not a simple prediction or guess.

The preciousness of Bigudan was directly proportional to the severity of the famine. The more severe the famine, the more precious Bigudan became, even more precious than luxury goods. Modifying the production line and refining such a large quantity of Bigudan indicated that the Hua family was certain, not just predicting.

As Mo Hua thought through this, meticulously dissecting the situation, he felt an increasing chill in his heart.

But—why?

Why could the Hua family be so certain that a large-scale famine would break out here in the Great Wilderness?

Why did they dare to mass-produce and stockpile Bigudan in advance?

And there was another question: how did the Hua family transport these Bigudan to the heartland of the Great Wilderness? What was the route?

There was a crucial missing link here.

Mo Hua frowned in thought and suddenly remembered that this oasis was a “pig butchering scam,” a “money pit,” but its essence might be a Hua family “material transit station”? If so, there must be…

Mo Hua’s pupils constricted. He immediately called Elder Ba Chuan again and had him bring people to search the entire oasis once more. This time, they were mainly looking for sand tables or walls, to see if there were any signs of deliberate damage.

After searching for most of the day, everyone finally found a wall. The wall was completely shattered.

The oasis had been conquered, and broken walls were everywhere, which was not surprising. This wall was no different. Under normal circumstances, people would glance at a broken wall and move on, without paying it much attention.

But Mo Hua had specifically instructed them to look for abnormal walls, walls that had been “deliberately” destroyed. Over a thousand savage soldiers conducted a thorough search ten times before finally finding this wall in the corner of a secret room.

This wall was completely pulverized. Upon closer inspection, it had been utterly crushed by the power of a Golden Core cultivator. This was very suspicious.

Mo Hua stood before the broken wall and had everyone gather the pulverized earth and sand. After pondering for a moment, Mo Hua began to use the Great Wilderness Demon Bone technique to “retrace” the karma. He wanted to see what this stone wall looked like before it was destroyed.

But this kind of divination was very arduous. Mo Hua’s calculation ability was limited; he couldn’t calculate the whole picture. He could only calculate little by little, cutting the retraced images into fragments, memorizing them piece by piece in his mind, sketching them, and finally piecing them together.

When he felt his spiritual consciousness overdrawn, he would rest for a while, then continue calculating.

After calculating for half a day, Mo Hua gradually restored pieces of the puzzle. Finally, after great effort and exhausting his spiritual consciousness, Mo Hua managed to completely restore the pattern on this wall.

As Mo Hua expected, it was a map. And it was by no means an ordinary map; it was a topographical map of the entire Three Thousand Great Wilderness. It was a map of the Great Wilderness heartland that even the Daoist Soldier Department might not possess.

But what shocked Mo Hua even more was not the map itself. It was the rough lines marked on this map. These lines followed a certain trajectory, slowly advancing, then converging to form a large encirclement, encompassing the most central heartland of the entire Three Thousand Great Wilderness.

Others might not understand what these lines meant. But Mo Hua could. After only a moment of thought, he immediately understood.

These lines were “famine spread lines.” This map meticulously showed the route and the entire process of the famine spreading in the Great Wilderness—this famine was orchestrated by his Martial Uncle in secret.

Mo Hua himself would not have been able to deduce such a thing. But the Hua family had it. This meant that the Hua family’s patriarch most likely had long since seen through his Martial Uncle’s schemes and had deduced his Martial Uncle’s plan clearly.

They had even calculated when the famine would occur, when it would spread, when it would converge—all of it. They saw these heavenly secrets.

They saw the impending catastrophe.

And they did nothing. Not only did they do nothing, but they actually planned to use these revealed heavenly secrets, to exploit the famine caused by his Martial Uncle, to massively refine and stockpile Bigudan, and to profit exorbitantly from the disaster, to make huge ill-gotten gains from war and famine.

A war was raging ahead. They… were making money.