Chapter 187

Racing through the tunnel with the blood bat swarm on his heels, Fang Yuan turns part of his attention inward. The Spring Autumn Cicada’s aura floods his aperture, driving every other Gu down into his primeval sea, its cracks spreading through the light membrane. He works out what a second rebirth would actually do: carry his consciousness, not his aged body, back across the axis of time, since a body cannot exist in the past and can only self-detonate to launch the crossing, using the Cicada, a fragment of the laws of time, as the vessel. But the Cicada has not recovered from its own damage, and his cultivation, rank three initial stage, is far too weak to supply the needed propulsion. He decides to wait, and let both heal before he risks it again. ^{ch. 187}

Fang Yuan pays for the aperture’s endurance with a plundered Gu. The Stone Aperture Gu, looted from Bai Ning Bing, is built for exactly one use: it strips all remaining potential from an aperture and instantly pushes its cultivation to the peak of the current rank. Its grey smoke thickens his aperture’s walls to stone, strong enough to bear the Cicada’s pressure, and his cultivation leaps from rank three initial stage to rank three peak stage in seconds. He reasons the Gu was meant as Bai Ning Bing’s own answer to the Northern Dark Ice Soul Physique’s limits, though a ten extreme aptitude’s endless potential regrows an aperture’s stone walls too quickly for the trick to last long. He pays for it later, too: rank four will be far harder to reach. ^{ch. 187}

The bladewing blood bats close in regardless. Close to a hundred hunt him, but without a Gu Master directing them they turn on each other as often as on him, so only thirty to forty press the attack at any one time, still more than Fang Yuan can hold off outright. He retreats through the tunnel behind the Sky Canopy Gu’s white armor and the Chainsaw Golden Centipede’s spinning teeth, while the Heavenly Essence Treasure Lotus, a grass Gu that generates its own natural primeval essence, keeps his reserves climbing even mid-fight. Then he turns and charges. The Centipede cuts down the swarm’s one male, refined by the first gen Gu Yue to command the whole group, and without him the surviving females scatter. ^{ch. 187}