Chapter 1489

Fang Yuan places City Well, his fourth secluded domain of heaven and earth, inside Mini Central Continent. City Well was formerly the living environment of minimen. The mini city inside it is already destroyed by his hand. Miniscule Mountain, once housed inside City Well, had already been removed and destroyed in Northern Plains. Many blessed lands, belonging to Gu Immortals he killed using City Well, still remain inside it. Those without land spirits are already looted, but the rest hold cultivation resources he cannot yet take, since their entrances are closed to him without the upper extreme heavenly eagle. ^{ch. 1489}

Beyond those blessed lands, City Well carries huge value of its own. With it, Fang Yuan can raise variant humans, even pure bred humans, in isolation. Immortal aperture development normally follows seven levels in strict order, from mortal resources up to raising variant humans and, last, producing lifespan Gu. Fang Yuan is currently only at the third and fourth levels, far from the fifth. City Well lets him jump straight to the sixth level, raising variant humans without the usual foundation. ^{ch. 1489}

Each variant human race carries its own unique resources: snowmen give ice tears and snow lotus essence, rockmen give rock dragonx, feathermen give freedom Gu. Sold at scale, such resources bring huge profits. All variant humans and humans also produce a shared resource, human qi, one of three qi that must balance for immortal ascension and still extremely important to Gu Immortals though its ordinary use falls afterward. Quite a few methods to use human qi as a Gu material survive, above all among the now rare qi path Gu Immortals, and under the same circumstances a variant human yields less of it than a pure bred human. Humans and variant humans alone produce special immortal materials like fan door wind, a rank seven material that grows only on the doors of mortal houses and never in the wilderness. A hypothesis in Shadow Sect’s inheritance holds that the more human qi one accumulates, the more likely a Gu Immortal is to comprehend human path, the path Ren Zu created. ^{ch. 1489}

Raising ordinary humans is impractical, since their intelligence is too high and they cost too much to raise. The Gu world has ten variant human races, hairy men, rockmen, snowmen, feathermen, mermen, inkmen, eggmen, beastmen, minimen and mushroommen, each with its own specialty. He sets beastmen aside as extinct. He considers hairy men for Gu refinement, rockmen, a batch of which he once raised and can raise very easily with guts Gu, snowmen, whose tribe now supports him by marriage, and minimen, suited to nurturing his immortal plants there. Feathermen, mermen, inkmen, eggmen and mushroommen would also give him huge benefits, but with only one City Well he can raise just one race and reaches no decision. The plan is not urgent, since his immortal essence stone reserve is low, though his red date immortal essence keeps accumulating rapidly under his aperture’s faster time flow. Confident his dragonfish business, now free of rivals, will soon solve his funding problem, he turns to thinking about Thieving Heaven’s dream realm and descends toward the desert, where Tang Fang Ming greets him as Lord Fang Yuan. ^{ch. 1489}