He is dead (Double Chapter)
Once he calms down, Fang Yuan reasons that refining the second aperture Gu, whether it succeeds or fails, will burn through the last of the immortal essence the blessed land needs to survive its next calamity, so that even winning ownership will not save the place; the Gu itself, he decides, must be his real prize from this trip. He weighs two further problems: Ba Gui’s help will shrink as the essence drains, and the Gu Masters already inside the inheritance might find the main hall and attack together to stop him, just as they did in his previous life. ch. 378
He asks Ba Gui for the recipe outright, and the land spirit recites it in full, a text close to ten thousand words long, describing up to a thousand steps that start with hundreds of early materials, escalate through large numbers of rank four and rank five Gu, and finish by consuming a second rank six Immortal Gu. Hearing it, Fang Yuan’s face turns grave. His previous life’s intelligence had only covered a garbled version of the early stage, and his confidence drops from fifty percent to about thirty. ch. 378
Ba Gui tells him not to worry, since the hall’s own relief carvings already hold the materials: at least five thousand Gu worms from rank one to rank five, over six hundred of them rank four and no less than eighty rank five, plus more than ten yellow gold relic Gu and eight purple crystal relic Gu, an abundance Fang Yuan marvels the outside world cannot match. Seeing it, he is briefly tempted to abandon the refinement and simply take the hoard for himself: the ordinary stockpile alone, he judges, would raise his battle strength more than tenfold, and the relic Gu could carry him to rank five peak stage within moments. He suppresses the impulse, since Ba Gui is guarding the cache for the refinement alone and the second aperture Gu promises a far greater reward once he reaches rank six. ch. 378
Ba Gui then spends sharply from the cauldron to unseal the recipe’s last ingredient: a hollow yellow gem holding a shifting ball of purple smoke that turns by turns into a pegasus, a crane, a cloud and pure thunderbolt, giving off a wine scent strong enough to leave Fang Yuan briefly drunk and dizzy. This is the rank six Immortal Gu divine travel, Ba Gui tells him, a legendary Gu first named in The Legends of Ren Zu beside a figure called Verdant Great Sun, whose body condensed the aura of four rare wines he drank into the Gu. Divine travel Gu can carry its user anywhere in the world, but only while drunk and only to a destination it alone chooses; Fang Yuan reasons it might be one of the four great movement Gu, yet so dangerous that even Verdant Great Sun refined it away into fixed immortal travel Gu, which was also one of the four great movement Gu but needed only a clear mental image of the destination instead. He concludes this very flaw is why the blessed land’s original owner chose to spend divine travel Gu on the second aperture Gu rather than keep it. ch. 378
Fang Yuan spends time alone studying the recipe before beginning, since he judges it carries not just steps but its maker’s own comprehension of heaven and earth, worth weighing against his own experience. A Gu Master is born with only one aperture, he reflects, so a second is an act of defying heaven, and that is exactly why divine travel Gu, a Gu whose whole nature defies ordinary limits, was the ingredient chosen for it. Satisfied, he tells Ba Gui it is time to start. ch. 378
Ba Gui gives him green pond rotten soil, a poison so strong it would rot Fang Yuan’s own arm within a few breaths, and a blood colored powder ground from the mixed blood of eight kinds of immemorial desolate beasts. The third piece is a Gu he already knows, earth treasury flower, the same storage Gu Flower Wine Monk once used at Qing Mao mountain to hide a cache Fang Yuan eventually obtained. Mixed into the soil, the toxic mud and violent blood powder kill the first earth treasury flower outright, and several more after it, since the ancient owner had foreseen failure and stocked spares; only after repeated attempts does Fang Yuan finally plant one that survives, the poison and blood settling into a strange balance that transforms the flower and completes the recipe’s first step. ch. 378
The second step, fusing jade bone Gu, ice muscle Gu and golden relic Gu into a flower’s petals, stalk and heart, he carries out with practiced refinement technique. The third almost misleads him: reading it as calling for stellar fire Gu and snowy plain Gu alone gives too little firepower, until he realizes the true recipe means stellar fire prairie Gu paired with snowy plain Gu together. ch. 378
The fourth step tests his multitasking outright: he raises yang cloud Gu with elixir fire Gu below and yin cloud Gu with golden sand Gu above, so that fiery spheres rise from the yang cloud as gold falls like drizzle from the yin. Realizing the arrangement is inverted and the moment critical, he throws in four beast phantoms one after another, white elephant, black python, stone turtle and horse, but left to tangle freely they only shrink toward failure instead of fusing. He then takes direct control of each, steady white elephant, coiling black python, mountain still stone turtle, wind swift horse, letting each display its true nature rather than clash randomly, and understands only then that the step demands a strength path Gu Master’s grasp of each phantom’s nature, not merely possession of it. Thunder cracks, the inverted clouds right themselves and fuse, and after a final explosion a single rank five Gu remains: a rough disk bearing a beast with a horse’s head, an elephant’s tusks, a turtle’s body and a snake’s tail, the beast strength placenta Gu. ch. 378
The whole refinement has taken five days and five nights without rest, and Fang Yuan collapses asleep the moment it ends, sleeping through a full day and night before waking. Recalling the recipe’s next line, gathering apertures, he tells Ba Gui it is time; the land spirit offers to send him anywhere in the blessed land and shows him a map of everyone inside, Gu Masters, hairy men and dog beasts alike. Fang Yuan picks a target on the map and reappears an instant later in front of Tie Mu Bai, who is briefly startled but quickly composes himself. Before Tie Mu Bai can speak, Fang Yuan waves his hand and summons a rock crocodile phantom; its tail smashes his head, which bursts like a watermelon, and Tie Mu Bai is dead. ch. 378
