Chapter 1145

Over these days the hairy men and the snowmen and rockmen grow closer. They are natural allies, given human dominance and variant human scarcity. Though the Demon Venerable has died, Shadow Sect’s goal is still Spectral Soul’s, reaching beyond the boundaries of race. So Sixth Hair, a Shadow Sect spy, backs the alliance too, selling the other side nearly all his intelligence on Fang Yuan to raise his own standing. ^{ch. 1145}

So the snowmen and rockmen learn Fang Yuan’s history: once holder of Spring Autumn Cicada, reborn, an otherworldly demon who destroyed Eighty-Eight True Yang Building and Imperial Court blessed land. The last fact draws them closest. It greatly weakened Northern Plains’ human forces, and they once held a three-day banquet on first hearing the news. ^{ch. 1145}

Within Earth Mother Altar, Xue Er asks about the future. Fang Yuan answers, already prepared, that he has lost Spring Autumn Cicada, and admits, calling it truly an accident, that his own act brought down Eighty-Eight True Yang Building. Xue Er and Shi Shi Cheng brighten, calling him amazing and a natural hero for managing it even by accident. ^{ch. 1145}

Fang Yuan says Lang Ya blessed land became his only refuge. Living among variant humans, he found their sincerity, trust and loyalty exceed humans’, arguing the two peoples should coexist under heaven’s will. His performance convinces Xue Er to tears, and Shi Shi Cheng, extremely moved, now addresses him as lord, saying the world would be better if other humans understood as he does. ^{ch. 1145}

Xue Er returns to her unanswered question. Fang Yuan admits Eighty-Eight True Yang Building’s fall was never his intention and had never happened before his rebirth. Northern Plains has changed too much because of him, he adds: that fall, and Ma Hong Yun being kidnapped and bought by Old Ancestor Xue Hu once his fortune rivalling heaven Gu was exposed, led to a refinement his first life never saw. Xue Er asks whether the result is now hard to deduce, since Northern Plains’ human Gu Immortals will rise a whole level if Xue Hu succeeds. ^{ch. 1145}

Fang Yuan asks whether they mean to stop it. He grants that they could: their immemorial rock dragon is genuine rank eight battle strength, and a hard one to face, its might stressed in the historical records. Shi Shi Cheng and Xue Er both flatly refuse, unwilling to expose their hidden tribes by provoking a rank eight expert who commands Snowy Mountain blessed land and many demonic path experts. Seizing the Gu themselves would draw every human force in Northern Plains against them, more than several rock dragons could withstand. ^{ch. 1145}

Fang Yuan privately concludes these variant humans rival Northern Plains’ own human elite. Fortunately he holds rank eight battle strength, which turns his demon status and his rebirth from a source of trouble into a halo and makes the tribes court him rather than trouble him. With no rank nine alive, rank eights are the overlords, and Northern Plains’ whole structure follows from their conflicts. ^{ch. 1145}

He privately muses that his upper extreme heavenly eagle is in fact already dead. Forced to grow it with time path methods, he had too few heavenly crystals to sustain it, so it was starving by the time he released it, its vitality only a blood path disguise. It died almost the instant he returned it to his aperture, but its death produces an egg that will hatch and be reborn. He loses the immemorial desolate beast and gains in its place the eagle’s egg and the beast’s giant corpse. Fang Yuan accepts the loss completely: he had to disguise himself as a Hei tribe bloodline to command the eagle at all, and the forced growth left it flawed and too proud to obey a rank six. He means to alter the egg’s memories with Hei Fan’s inheritance so it obeys once hatched. ^{ch. 1145}

Old Ancestor Xue Hu refines fortune rivalling heaven Gu openly for seven days and nights, shaking all of Northern Plains before the Gu Immortal world strangely quiets, since none of the region’s rank eight experts have yet responded. He chose an opportune, calculated moment. Both the variant humans below the icy plain and Fang Yuan himself stay out of it: the matter turns on a rank eight great expert, and though Fang Yuan is stronger than before, interfering would leave him crushed. ^{ch. 1145}