Chapter 1128

Fang Yuan gathers Feng Jun’s corpse, bringing his collected total to nine Gu Immortal corpses and nine matching souls. Such gains are rare. Gu Immortals outside might self-detonate rather than be taken whole. Among Hei Fan grotto-heaven’s immortals only Feng Jun showed sense, giving in once cornered, though it changed nothing since Fang Yuan already held the upper hand. ^{ch. 1128}

Inside the stone pavilion, Fang Yuan tells the brass bell heavenly spirit that as the only Gu Immortal left, he votes for himself to inherit Hei Fan’s true inheritance. The bell rings once. The stone pillars glow, and the tablet turns into a wall of light holding several shadowy shapes, which its written lines name as the inheritance itself, to be taken by reaching a hand inside. The last line is Hei Fan’s charge to his descendant, to achieve great things and never disgrace Hei tribe. Even a figure as careful as Hei Fan could not foresee everything. The once strong Hei tribe has been wiped out, its inheritance passed to an outsider. ^{ch. 1128}

Fang Yuan reaches his left hand into the wall of light, and the white light turns his arm transparent, showing his own skin, bone and blood. The light reacts to his blood before the wall softens like water and lets his hand through. The wall is a test of blood. Fang Yuan passes only because he had already folded blood asset Immortal Gu into familiar face and altered that killer move to disguise his blood. Four shadows sit unevenly inside the wall: a basin sized ball at the center, a sharp rock like shape in the upper right, a mass of threads on the left, and a finger sized shadow at the bottom. ^{ch. 1128}

Fang Yuan grabs the thread like shadow first, and it proves to be a coiled mass of mortal Gu shaped like ginseng roots. These are lifespan Gu, the huge exception to the rule that mortal Gu cannot compare to Immortal Gu. Fang Yuan refines the whole batch with primeval essence as the inheritance’s acknowledged heir, and finds an immense gain: seven hundred and twenty years of lifespan between them, more than twice the minimum three hundred years Old Immortal Chen Chi had guessed. Lifespan Gu is an absolute hard currency. Many high end transactions accept only lifespan Gu, not immortal essence stones. With about eighty years of his own life ahead, he keeps the batch for trade and stores it inside his sovereign immortal aperture. ^{ch. 1128}

Fang Yuan reasons that Hei Fan grotto-heaven’s roughly seven hundred years of lifespan Gu is far less than what Lang Ya blessed land holds. That gap explains why Lang Ya’s land spirit can spare some to feed wisdom Gu, and lifespan Gu is likely a main reason Heavenly Court attacked Lang Ya blessed land in his previous life, sacrificing Feng Jiu Ge without balking. Heavenly Court’s elders lack lifespan and endure only by sleeping through the years. ^{ch. 1128}

Fang Yuan’s attention returns to the largest shadow, at the wall’s center, wondering if it holds the most precious treasure. Touching it feels icy but rough, and it proves too heavy to lift with ordinary strength, so he calls on a strength path mortal Gu to pull it free. It turns out to be a tightly packed ball of black ants, mortal Gu rather than Immortal Gu, extremely heavy for their size. Puzzled, Fang Yuan refines them anyway. Anything inside the true inheritance, he trusts, cannot be worthless. An Immortal Gu is revealed at the center of the ball as the ants are refined away: ant shaped but far larger, with feelers, small legs and a chubby abdomen, its aura marking it rank seven. Fang Yuan cannot identify it, guesses at random that it might be some kind of queen, and decides to refine it first anyway. ^{ch. 1128}