Chapter 388

Long Qing Tian gloats over his luck, rarer than one in ten thousand: the weakened zone will let him poison the blessed land, link it to the outside world, use Gu worms freely against the three kings’ own rules, and turn the spot into a base for seizing every reward going. Sensing someone, he turns and squints at Fang Yuan, addressing him by his alias, little beast king Fang Zheng, puzzled to find him here. Fang Yuan answers with a thrown bone spike instead of words. ^{ch. 388}

Long Qing Tian activates a defensive Gu as his poison spreads across a wide area. Fang Yuan has no way to cure it and will not risk touching it, so he fights only at range. He has lost his rank four all out effort Gu and cannot summon the mutated beast phantoms at will, but the many Gu worms taken from earlier kills carry him. Long Qing Tian can only use one Gu at a time; Fang Yuan, with the land spirit’s help, can use as many as he needs. The gap tells, and Long Qing Tian falls within a few rounds. ^{ch. 388}

The win leaves Fang Yuan’s expression ugly. Long Qing Tian’s corpse has already turned pale jade green, poisoned by his own Gu. Before dying he smiles darkly at Fang Yuan and sets off jade sky Gu himself. Fang Yuan does not kill him; he chooses suicide, knowing he has no hope of surviving. Fang Yuan calls it exactly what he would expect from a demonic head. ^{ch. 388}

Jade sky Gu carries a poison from the immemorial era, already extinct, curable in the present day only by the four great doctors. Devouring Long Qing Tian’s aperture would mean touching that poison, and a hit would fade Fang Yuan’s whole body into green light in under two hours. Very few Gu Masters survive it; Wu Shen Tong of Wu clan was one of the extremely lucky. Even risking it, Fang Yuan might come away with nothing, since the weak heavenly power there would let Long Qing Tian’s remaining worms self detonate one by one. The benefit does not match the risk, so he lets it go. ^{ch. 388}

His last portion of immortal essence has gone into this unplanned fight instead of a second kill, leaving the beast strength placenta Gu’s aptitude stalled at eighty nine percent, short of the ninety he wanted. Fang Yuan admits he is still too weak to script every outcome: even with his previous life’s memories, small details no one ever mentioned to him are beyond recall, and after everything his rebirth has already changed, whether this exact incident happened before is something even he does not know. ^{ch. 388}

The poisoned ground will eventually rot and burst into a hole of its own, worsening the blessed land’s collapse and weakening the land spirit further. A younger, richer blessed land could still cut the rot away and seal the wound, but this one, old and short on immortal essence, cannot. Fang Yuan’s killing ends there. He returns to the hall to race the clock, sleeping only an hour a day and pushing himself past his limits; aside from a few failures he cannot avoid, his progress is fast enough to draw praise even from the land spirit. ^{ch. 388}

Far off, while Fang Yuan closes in on success, his younger brother Fang Zheng is in high spirits. At Central Continent’s Tian Ti mountain, in the heart of Hu Immortal blessed land, Fang Zheng climbs Dang Hun Mountain and draws every eye as he overtakes climber after climber. One onlooker is jealous; Fairy Bi Xia watches his rising silhouette with a complicated look; Wei Wu Shang, his rival, admits the lad has a real chance now. Using hands and legs and Lord Sky Crane’s help, Fang Zheng passes the ten sect elites one after another until only three still climb above him: Xiao Qi Xing, Ying Sheng Ji and Feng Jin Huang. He Feng Yang, watching, sighs in relief that his gamble has not been wasted. Gu Immortals agree the winner will come from those four, and note Immortal Crane Sect still sits fourth, far behind the top three, its odds now resting on how much ground Fang Zheng can still close. The whole inheritance competition has reached its final stage. ^{ch. 388}

Back in the hall, Fang Yuan works the recipe by hand: a water tank sized lump of light, ninety grams of retrieved willow orpiment folded in, then thirty snowball Gu, until after two days and one night of unbroken effort it shrinks into a small, unremarkable soil yellow rock. Exhausted, he falls asleep at once, wanting a week of rest, but the land spirit wakes him after only an hour: the rock will evaporate within fifteen more minutes and undo everything. Refining a Gu like this is brutally hard, Fang Yuan reflects, even for a strength path master of the refinement path with his own memories and foundation behind him; no one managed to refine a second aperture Gu at all in his previous life. ^{ch. 388}

An hour’s rest leaves him better but still heavy headed and mentally drained, pale, unkempt and worn. He asks how much immortal essence remains. Five portions, the land spirit answers, its voice weak. Eighteen days have passed since Long Qing Tian’s death, and the speed of the blessed land’s decline shocks him; sustaining the three kings’ inheritance is burning through immortal essence so fast that word has spread outside, drawing more Gu Masters, some already established, to come explore. With refinement only two thirds finished and five portions left, Fang Yuan asks the date: the nineteenth of October, the land spirit says. By his own count the final step will fall five days later, on October twenty fourth, the very day history records Feng Jin Huang winning Hu Immortal blessed land. ^{ch. 388}

He remembers what that victory meant before: Feng Jin Huang’s rise to Gu Immortal and a name that shone across the world. After his own escape to Central Continent in that life and his founding of the bloodwing demonic sect, she became his mortal enemy through at least a few hundred battles, until he allied with numerous demonic path Gu Immortals to kill her at great and painful cost. Her rise now, he sighs, is a prize even a second aperture Gu cannot match, and he is too far away this time to stop it. Fang Yuan does not know his brother is still alive and locked in that same contest against Feng Jin Huang. The narration adds that the ripples of his rebirth have already reached Central Continent’s ten sects. ^{ch. 388}