Refining an Immortal Gu!
Short red eggmen ring Fang Yuan, jeering that he must be a fool for standing still as they close in, sure of an easy kill. Before they land a killing blow, a formless force sweeps him away, dying and unconscious, and he vanishes from the encirclement. He wakes healed in a plain, moss-grown hall of huge bronze blocks, laid on cold stone, tended by a huge tortoise the size of a house with a hard jade shell, elephant legs and two dragon whiskers, which tells him it has already healed his injuries. ch. 377
Fang Yuan checks his own body, finds himself whole, then laughs at the sight of the tortoise: he has deliberately courted death, using no Gu but his own foreknowledge from his previous life, a huge gamble that has now paid off. He names the tortoise outright as the blessed land’s land spirit, Ba Gui, and lays out what he knows unprompted: this blessed land once belonged to an ancient strength path Gu Immortal who died defending it in a tribulation, and his dying wish, fused with the land’s own power, became Ba Gui itself. Completing that wish, he states, will make him the blessed land’s new owner, and Ba Gui confirms it. ch. 377
Ba Gui explains that the wish is to refine the second aperture Gu, a rank six Immortal Gu the original owner never finished, and that the fated person must be a strength path Gu Master who commands beast phantoms, carries real strength, and stands at the brink of death, since the dead Immortal’s own grudge demanded someone as close to death as he had been. No such person ever came. The blessed land shrank to less than one percent of its original size under repeated calamities, until a breach finally let three wandering youths inside. They grew there into the three kings of the demonic path, returned once their revenge was won, and in old age remade the site into the three kings inheritance; refinement, fire and enslavement Gu Masters all three, none of them ever a strength path cultivator. Ba Gui woke at the remodelling and only watched, hoping the inheritance itself might draw a qualified successor, and searched in earnest once the inheritance’s crowds began draining the blessed land toward destruction, still finding nobody, since strength path had become a nearly extinct practice in the present era. Hearing Fang Yuan already knows all this, Ba Gui says only that he knows a lot; it finds this strange but does not press the matter, since to it the fated person is already found and refining the Gu is the only thing left to do. ch. 377
Asked how much immortal essence remains, Ba Gui raises a bronze cauldron holding only a thin, dwindling layer of greenish liquid, spent down by the many Gu Masters who have passed through the opened inheritance. Fang Yuan judges silently that this is still far better than his previous life, when Ba Gui found no fated owner until near the very end of the three kings inheritance and finally brought in a dying demonic path survivor who was so poor at refining Gu that he died the moment he began. By the time Ba Gui chose a few more strength path Gu Masters from among those still fighting inside, its essence was nearly spent and it was too weakened to act; intruders eventually broke into the hall, fought past Ba Gui, and killed the refiner mid attempt, so the second aperture Gu died out before a single one was ever completed. ch. 377
Privately excited, Fang Yuan reasons through what a second aperture would give him: with his A grade aptitude already holding ninety percent primeval essence in one aperture, a second would carry him past a hundred and eighty percent, double his recovery speed, and give him a whole second set of Gu. He counts three advantages his previous life self never had: his own experience refining an Immortal Gu once already, in the Spring Autumn Cicada; years already spent killing off rival strength path Gu Masters, Xue San Si and Century Boy among them, who had been Ba Gui’s candidates last time; and a land spirit far stronger now than the nearly dead one he met before. Because the original Gu Immortal had made such extensive preparation, he judges his odds at least fifty percent, against the less than twenty percent chance he had succeeding with the Spring Autumn Cicada. ch. 377
