Chapter 392

Bai Ning Bing’s dog army grinds the first wave of intruders into paste, the way a millstone grinds beans, and more than half of them die outright while some see the danger in time and retreat. The demonic faction alone throws in over a thousand men and gets back only a few hundred. ^{ch. 392}

Mo Wu Tian’s officers report back one after another: Li Qiang meets lightning symbol dogs and chrysanthemum akita dogs once his steel armor dog vanguard breaks, Bao Tong runs into a combined pack of lightning symbol dogs, hedgedogs and corpse dogs, and Hu Mei Er is nearly encircled eight hundred steps in and only just fights free with her life. Li Xian, held in reserve to guard the retreat, waits out the whole clash without a single dog coming near him. Mo Wu Tian concludes someone is steering the dogs by hand, in a formation that keeps changing rather than sitting fixed, and orders a coordinated push down all four routes at once. That attack fails too, at a heavier cost than the first, and he privately credits the hidden enslavement path Gu Master with reading his plan and splitting his forces apart before they could converge. ^{ch. 392}

Bao Tong, gripping his own wound, publicly demands Mo Wu Tian pull his weight as a rank five Gu Master. Mo Wu Tian kills him where he stands with a stare alone, a soul path move that scatters the loser’s soul with no chance even to self-detonate their Gu. The demonic Gu Masters fall silent. They judge him the demonic path’s foremost genius for dropping a famous rank four upper stage fighter without moving, and their grudge over the day’s losses curdles into reverence once he offers up Bao Tong’s Gu as compensation and Li Xian, Hu Mei Er and Li Qiang split the dead man’s fortune between them. Li Xian, who gains the most from the plunder, is first to back Mo Wu Tian’s leadership and guesses the guarded ground holds the Gu Immortal’s fortune itself. Judging his exhausted, frightened crowd too weak to break in alone, Mo Wu Tian has word spread to both factions that Tie Mu Bai’s group has already reached the hall, claimed the King Quan Inheritance, and is now blocking everyone else outside while trying to hoard the treasure. ^{ch. 392}

On the mountain slope, Bai Ning Bing breathes out in relief once the attack finally stops, though she frowns: the methods Fang Yuan left her are already half spent, and only a few more assaults like this one will leave her without an answer. ^{ch. 392}

Alone in a hidden cave, Xiao Mang gloats that his gamble to slip away in the chaos has worked, and hammers repeated light path attacks into a stone door guarding Wang Ba Dan’s, King Bao’s, final inheritance. The door does not crack. He realizes light path cannot match fire path’s destructive force, and that King Bao’s door wants a fire type Gu he does not own. A subordinate’s report of a hidden Gu Immortal treasure and a swelling crowd outside the fog changes his mind; irritated at being called by a title he hates, second young master, he still weighs Wang Ba Dan’s rank five inheritance against a Gu Immortal treasure and leads his men out toward the fog instead. ^{ch. 392}

Back at the fog, the crowd swells to almost ten thousand people of every cultivation level, and Bai Ning Bing, though she commands a hundred thousand dogs, is still only one person facing a growing horde. Hu Mei Er urges Mo Wu Tian to move before the righteous faction, now organizing its own charge, claims the treasure first. Mo Wu Tian refuses: the fog and the steel armor dogs will hold their vanguard, and the righteous path is superior to his own, more united and easier to unite, while demonic path members tend to be loners. Young, and leading for the first time, he cannot yet command veteran demonic experts like Kong Ri Tian and Li Fei Le, and he wants the crowd to feel cooperation’s benefit before he moves to take the whole effort over. ^{ch. 392}

Inside the bronze hall, half a day into the refinement, the golden peanut shell collides with divine travel Gu and thunder roars through Fang Yuan and Feng Tian Yu’s ears, blacking out their vision. Fang Yuan screams the activation and pours everything he has into it. He is only a mortal, so the land spirit secretly feeds him the immortal essence the working needs, and divine travel Gu dissolves into light and enters the golden peanut shell as the qualitative change begins. ^{ch. 392}