Chapter 380

Ku Mo, pleased with himself, commands several hundred steel armor dogs whose thick black leather gives the greatest defense of any dog through the King Quan Inheritance’s first fifty rounds, and has just recruited a jade eye dog king, a beast king Gu also effective against the ghostly Yin dogs that hurt him on a previous run. It is only the eighteenth round, unusually fast progress for a rank five Gu Master, and he credits good luck this time; his last attempt only reached the sixty eighth round, and he privately worries about Tie Mu Bai, who chose King Xin Inheritance this time and once passed over eighty rounds there. Ku Mo had deliberately avoided facing Tie Mu Bai directly by choosing King Quan Inheritance instead, and, without knowing its source, has noticed King Xin’s early rounds have grown strangely easy to talk through rather than fight, a shortcut Fang Yuan had quietly spread. ^{ch. 380}

Space tears open before him and an unfamiliar young man appears; startled, Ku Mo shouts a challenge, and Fang Yuan answers by summoning golden dragon Gu. Terrified, Ku Mo tries to activate his own Gu and gets no response before the dragon’s claws tear through his upper body and kill him, so suddenly he never even reaches for his emergency token, which the land spirit’s control would have nullified regardless. Fang Yuan notes to himself that golden dragon Gu hits hard but handles roughly; he had only meant to crush Ku Mo’s skull. ^{ch. 380}

Looting the corpse, Fang Yuan finds only one rank five Gu, soft bones Gu, which the narration calls despicable: it can turn any living body’s bones soft within a twenty five kilometre radius, and even his own essence iron bones would eventually soften and leave him collapsed and dying without a single outside blow. The other seven Gu are unremarkable rank four bone path Gu; since he barely understands the bone path himself, he judges he could not fight at even half Ku Mo’s level with this set and keeps it in storage rather than use it, unlike his own deep grounding in the blood path from his previous life’s blood sea inheritance. He feeds the aperture to the beast strength placenta Gu, which grows smoother and more lustrous again, and the narration marks it a pity that a lifetime of hard won accomplishment, built alone against the odds, ends as another man’s stepping stone. Regretting only that the dog enslavement Gu cannot be carried off with it, Fang Yuan vanishes. ^{ch. 380}

Elsewhere, Wu Gui, once an enslavement path Gu Master before a lack of resources forced him to change paths, commands only forty or so chrysanthemum akita dogs, a breed that grows stronger the more of them fight together, against a lightning symbol dog pack five times their size; skillful coordination keeps every one of his dogs injured but alive. Absorbed in the battle, and stripped inside the blessed land of the investigative Gu and body modifications he would normally rely on, he never senses Fang Yuan behind him. A bone spike flies out and pierces his heart, driving into the ground; Wu Gui manages only to ask who is trying to kill him and to turn halfway before he dies without ever seeing his killer’s face, a demonic expert even more senior than Tie Mu Bai, dead with a grievance. ^{ch. 380}

With Wu Gui dead, his dogs lose all control and are swallowed by the lightning symbol pack, which then turns on Fang Yuan; he summons golden dragon Gu again and slaughters them. Looting Wu Gui, he finds one rank five Gu, pitch black Gu, which oozes a black smoke that seals the abilities of anything ranked below six, alongside eight or nine mismatched rank four Gu spanning different paths, nothing like Ku Mo or Tie Mu Bai’s coherent sets. Fang Yuan judges it was mostly pitch black Gu that let Wu Gui roam the southern border freely; he keeps it, pockets the rank four Gu, and feeds the aperture to the placenta Gu. ^{ch. 380}

His own aperture is now crowded with five rank five Gu and many rank four ones, and above all with the recovering Spring Autumn Cicada, whose healing the blessed land’s own time, running three times the outside world’s pace, is speeding along and which presses harder on his aperture by the day. He must finish the second aperture Gu and survive the Spring Autumn Cicada both, since toward the refinement’s final and most demanding step, using divine travel Gu, the blessed land’s essence will be nearly spent, the land spirit powerless, and the site exposed to attack from outside. Taking Wu Gui’s death as a warning against being caught unaware, Fang Yuan turns to his one other piece on the board, Bai Ning Bing, trusting the poison vow between them, and appears before her. Startled, she asks how he got there so suddenly. ^{ch. 380}