Chapter 1323

Fang Yuan, disguised as a boy inside the dream, does not recognize the name Tu Shi Cheng among any formation path expert he knows. He reasons the dream may belong to a hidden expert his knowledge never reached. Tu Shi Cheng, the middle-aged Gu Immortal playing his father, asks how many Gu Master paths exist, and recounts their history era by era, from space and time path in Ren Zu’s era down to bone, phantom and restriction path in the present era. He states formation path was created in the Remote Antiquity Era by an unverified founder, in the same era as qi path and wisdom path, making it older than transformation path. From the account’s omission of Spectral Soul Demon Venerable, Fang Yuan places the dream in the Late Antiquity Era. He privately notes that dream path itself will not emerge for another five hundred years. ^{ch. 1323}

Asked the essence of formation path, Fang Yuan, whose own formation path attainment is extremely ordinary, answers without difficulty that it contains countless paths. Tu Shi Cheng confirms this: a Gu formation can call on Gu worms from any other path, from space and time to metal, wood, fire and water, which makes formation path the most complex path of all. Setting one up is very difficult, since even a shallow formation demands understanding of whichever paths its Gu worms belong to, and formation path Gu worms themselves supply only the frame. Because of this steep entry cost, formation path experts have always been very few in the Gu Immortal world, though there are, at the very least, more of them than wisdom path experts. Tu Shi Cheng gives Fang Yuan his first Gu worm, a rank one formation heart Gu shaped like a small yellow ladybug, extremely ordinary and common though it is the basic Gu for laying any formation. Fang Yuan refines it. ^{ch. 1323}

Tu Shi Cheng then lends him four more rank one Gu worms, of earth, water, wind and fire path. He orders him to arrange them with formation heart Gu as the core into a working Gu formation, on the very day he became a Gu Master. Fang Yuan judges the demand absurd. A new Gu Master would ordinarily need two or three months just to learn to calculate primeval essence, nourish the aperture and feed his Gu worms before attempting a formation. He recognizes the water, wind and fire path Gu worms but not the earth path one, since the dream is set before Spectral Soul Demon Venerable’s era, when things were very different from the present. He moves to test the unfamiliar Gu, but Tu Shi Cheng stops him and insists he rely only on feeling, warning him he has one chance. ^{ch. 1323}