Chapter 1360

Zuo Ye Hui takes to the air to strike Heaven Overseeing Tower. Duke Long turns the tower phantom, and the attack misses. Purple Mountain True Monarch, still hidden, weighs countering the phantom form but holds back. Being a split soul rather than the main body, he holds only part of the Immortal Gu the counter needs, and spending them on the tower would be too inefficient. Duke Long steers the phantom tower into a dream realm, which devours a corner of it anyway, and he pulls back. Duke Long had prepared against the killer move that pinned the phantom tower at Yi Tian Mountain, but his patient opponent never uses it. ^{ch. 1360}

Duke Long concludes that any Immortal Gu House without dream path methods will simply be lost inside a dream realm, and that the tower is too big and too slow for this battlefield. It is Duke Long’s first look at a real dream realm, a thing tied to Great Dream Immortal Venerable, and dream path has beaten this tower before, when Ying Wu Xie used lead soul into dream to put Heaven Overseeing Tower Lord to sleep. He returns the tower to solid form as bait for Zuo Ye Hui. Purple Mountain True Monarch intervenes with a mystical light that makes the tower look illusory, stopping Zuo Ye Hui just short of the dream realm. The true tower then appears behind it, and Purple Mountain True Monarch realizes the entire feint was meant to expose his position. Duke Long orders Fairy Zi Wei to attack the formation and kill Fang Yuan. ^{ch. 1360}

He himself hunts Purple Mountain True Monarch. He names him a lingering split soul of Spectral Soul. He sends Heaven Overseeing Tower away expecting Zuo Ye Hui to follow, and the beast weighs Duke Long, Fairy Zi Wei and the tower, knowing the battlefield restricts a body of its size and wanting the tower destroyed for the aura it hates. They trade blows before Purple Mountain True Monarch finds he cannot match him and runs, with Duke Long promising him death and giving chase. Fairy Zi Wei reaches the super Gu formation, and Fang Yuan, realizing he has been drawn into a trap, braces to defend it. She identifies a flaw, that the formation’s Immortal Gu are borrowed from many owners, and unleashes her Immortal Gu House, Star Constellation Chessboard. It dissolves her into starlight that infiltrates the formation; Fang Yuan strikes at it, but the starlight completely ignores the attack and dulls his control over the formation’s four-colored defense. ^{ch. 1360}

Fairy Zi Wei names him an otherworldly demon chosen by heaven’s will who turned on the righteous path, and offers him a whole corpse and a written life as a cautionary example if he surrenders. Fang Yuan laughs and calls it a magnificent piece of scheming by heaven’s will. He keeps fighting for control as mortal Gu slip from his grasp at the formation’s fringe. He concludes that Heavenly Court now knows his true identity and that he can no longer recall his dark limit Immortal Gu. He expects that with time the formation will pass to Heavenly Court entirely. He rules out fleeing at once with reverse flow protection seal, reading Heavenly Court as wanting him to lean on it alone, since a broken killer move would backlash, cost him all his battle strength and even kill him outright. He rules out the upper extreme heavenly eagle too, since he lacks the heavenly crystals to make it an immemorial desolate beast and could not trust its loyalty regardless. ^{ch. 1360}

With no way off the battlefield, reverse flow protection seal is his only hope, though he knows the odds of Heavenly Court lacking an answer are slim. Both stalling methods, Reverse Flow River or his own aperture, only buy time. Giving up the initiative is very dangerous. Those two methods pay off only if Southern Border’s reinforcements repel Heavenly Court, and though its righteous path outweighs this Central Continent group, beating the tower is uncertain and a win would still end his disguise. ^{ch. 1360}