Upper Extreme Heavenly Eagle
Upper extreme heavenly eagles are space path immemorial desolate beasts. A mature adult can travel at will through the immemorial nine heavens and into grotto-heavens, which sit in the sky and stay hard to detect unless they open. Outside the immemorial nine heavens the heavenly wind qi walls are extremely thick, yet once the eagle has been to a place it follows instinct through space and returns. It carries rank eight battle strength and flies extremely fast. Fang Yuan judges that unless Hei Fan came by this egg by chance, he must have paid an extremely high price for it. Its only weakness is lifespan: eighty years, shorter than an ordinary mortal’s; other immemorial desolate beasts live far longer. When it dies of old age it produces an egg carrying every memory and space path dao mark from that life, so the chick grows again on that foundation and, barring some mishap, only strengthens with each cycle, weakest as egg or chick. ch. 1117
From this, Fang Yuan judges Hei Fan left the egg behind on purpose, since the eagle must have visited Hei Fan’s grotto-heaven before, making it the key to a place Hei tribe has long searched for without success. He reasons the true inheritance sits inside that grotto-heaven, the safest choice for a Gu Immortal without food path methods to keep every Immortal Gu fed. He reasons too that the grotto-heaven carries no tribulations, since Hei Fan fused a fragment of the immemorial nine heavens into it before his lifespan ran out. But the egg inside the nest is dead. Fang Yuan weighs two explanations: either it died naturally after the nest went unopened too long, or Hei Fan drained its life force himself as a seal that needs a special method to unseal. He prefers the second possibility, though he cannot puzzle out that method by direct thought. ch. 1117
A flash of insight sends him back to the refinement path killer moves Hei Fan modified and left behind. Working them through wisdom path deduction, he finds some of them deliberately weaker than their originals, recalling Hei Fan’s own teaching that a student must think for himself. Stripping out what look like failed modifications, he finds they combine into one new killer move belonging to blood path, not Hei Fan’s own time path. This is not strange to Fang Yuan, since every super force has restricted blood path openly while researching it in secret ever since Blood Sea Ancestor’s rise. He trusts his blood path grandmaster attainment over his refinement path. ch. 1117
He deduces Hei Fan hid this move for use on the eagle egg, but what he recovered is only half of it. Hei Fan kept the complete version, testing whether a descendant could think for himself, and hiding blood path’s bad name from his inheritance. Confident now the egg is not truly dead, Fang Yuan moves to draw his own blood, then stops. He realizes blood path must do something time path cannot: recognize bloodline. A super force’s inheritance is usually kept to its own clan or tribe; attitude Gu and the refinement moves were only the first two precautions, this blood method the third. If the inheritor lacks Hei tribe’s bloodline, refining the egg risks turning the hatched eagle into that Gu Immortal’s enemy. Against its speed and his weak defenses he would certainly die, so he resolves to refine it only with a proper bloodline. ch. 1117
Some days later, in the sovereign immortal aperture, Fang Yuan manipulates the strength path immortal zombie toward Hei Cheng, disheveled and worn from repeated torture. Already Fang Yuan’s broken captive, Hei Cheng cannot even bite his tongue to die. Fang Yuan keeps him alive only because Hei Lou Lan, his remaining use, still lives, so Hei Cheng can neither die nor live in peace. Fang Yuan says this is likely the last time. Hei Cheng, close to tears, protests that Fang Yuan says that every time, and cries out in fear as the ordeal begins again. ch. 1117
