The Xue Clan brothers' performance was clumsy and overdone.
First of all, miracles truly existed in this world. Go north beyond the Yan Mountains, east past Fallen Dragon Shoal, cross the Southern Ranges, or trek through the Poison Desert, and you could see miracles... indeed, Red Mountain to the southwest and the Sea of Bitterness to the northwest stood right there, while the Han River basin supported a population of over ten million.
There were miracles as great as you could wish for, good ones and bad ones alike. If one of those beings truly took a fancy to you, you would get everything coming to you.
At the same time, however, miracles were often of little practical use.
This was because, after Lord White Emperor, the order of the Four Sovereigns had taken shape, and their struggle in the mortal world had reached a fever pitch. In particular, the Ancestor Emperor's Eastern Expedition falling short at the final hurdle, followed by the spectacle of the Four Sovereigns each backing a successor, had provoked intense resistance and disgust among discerning mortals.
Otherwise, where had the Three-One Orthodox Church, which exalted the Three Luminaries and suppressed the Four Sovereigns, come from? Why did emperors call themselves the Supreme One on Land?
Commanding dragons, enfeoffing land, promoting Literary Cultivation-all these measures adopted since the High Tang seemed, beneath the surface, to include practical resistance by mortals against the Four Sovereigns.
And the results had been quite striking. In particular, after the Three-One Orthodox Church spread, large-scale divine manifestations had virtually ceased in the settled lands of the central realm-that is, Hebei, the Eastern Territories, the Central Plains, the Jin Region, Guanlong, Western Liang, Bashu, Jingxiang, Jiangdong, Jiangxi, and Jianghuai... most accounts concerned chance encounters experienced by a tiny handful of people.
In