Chapter 183

Fang Yuan grabs a handful of the soft red soil from the wall. He recognizes it at once: the glowing red soil he found earlier in a secret cave inside a rock crack shares this same source. He had assumed it was the Flower Wine Monk’s doing. Wary now, he studies the hundreds of holes above him, uncertain which one connects back to the spirit spring. His Thunderwings Gu answers unevenly, its clear blue lightning shot through with scarlet. ^{ch. 183}

An undercurrent surges up from the blood lake, carrying the aura of a rank five Gu. A python’s shadow appears inside it, its length surpassing forty meters and its width over six meters. Hundreds of bats rise faster than the python and reach Fang Yuan first. They are bladewing blood bat Gu, blade edged and clawless, and he recognizes their bloodlust at once. ^{ch. 183}

The bats remind Fang Yuan of a debt from his previous life. Over four hundred years into that life, he obtained an inheritance from the Blood Sea Ancestor. The ancestor was a rank seven demonic path Gu Master who rose from a mortal in eight hundred years. Lacking high aptitude himself, he devoted his research to Gu that could keep drawing natural primeval essence even after being refined. He produced three such Gu before the righteous path cornered and mortally wounded him. The first was bladewing blood bat. The second was the rank four blood frenzy Gu, which spreads its aura but eventually dissolves its host into blood. The third was the rank five blood guillotine, which multiplies by swallowing a Gu Master’s blood and needs no primeval essence of its own. Rather than flee quietly, the dying ancestor seeded hundreds of thousands of inheritance grounds across the Middle Continent and the Southern Border. His Gu were easy to raise on ordinary aptitude, and they went on spreading ruin for generations after his death. Fang Yuan had used bladewing blood bats to found the Bloodwing Devil Sect in that previous life. Subduing them here, he thinks, would complete four hundred years of effort at a stroke. ^{ch. 183}

Ordinary Blood Sea inheritances hold only two or three Gu, so the hundreds of bats here strike Fang Yuan as wrong. He wonders whether rumor is true. The rumor holds that a handful of the ancestor’s inheritance grounds are real, hiding his best Gu and research behind hundreds of thousands of decoys. He readies the Spring Autumn Cicada to cow the bats and starts climbing the wall to summon it. A deep voice booms down from the top of the cave before he can. Divine Investigator Tie Xue Leng has arrived. ^{ch. 183}