Chapter 405

The light of glory settles on the cocoon and works a mystical change in it. Fang Yuan’s body still glows gold as he fights upstream against the torrential light stream, but under a rank five killer move the liquid metal Gu’s defense begins to fail, washing away the gold and revealing the bone wings’ true black beneath. ^{ch. 405}

The battlefield falls silent as the dogs, left masterless while the land spirit gives Fang Yuan its full attention, scatter and the fighting Gu Masters stop to watch. A ripple of recognition runs through the crowd until someone shouts that the scene is recorded in Legends of Ren Zu, the world’s most widely read classic: in its second chapter, third section, Verdant Great Sun once flapped his wings and bathed in the light of glory to refine the fixed immortal travel Gu, flying toward the sun. People laugh it off, certain he cannot also have the fixed immortal travel Gu’s other ingredient, the divine travel Gu. ^{ch. 405}

He does. Legends of Ren Zu records why: Verdant Great Sun, worried the divine travel Gu might strand him somewhere dangerous while he was drunk, had the Gu direct him instead, to gather a jade sky colored bamboo from the azure heaven and an eight-sided diamond star fragment from the blue heaven, then use a rising dawn’s light to remake it as fixed immortal travel Gu. ^{ch. 405}

Fang Yuan needed three things: the jade bamboo, the star fragment, and the light of glory of the immemorial era. At first he had none of them. After his rebirth he killed Long Qing Tian and took the jade sky Gu from him, a palm sized, hollow, dark green bamboo stem from the immemorial era that answers as the azure heaven’s bamboo. Legends of Ren Zu describes Immortal Gu plainly, as it does wisdom Gu and strength Gu, while it renders mortal Gu more obscurely. ^{ch. 405}

For the star fragment he did not need to search: Bai Ning Bing had already planted the fixed star Gu, an eight-sided diamond fragment of the immemorial era, in his left forearm, where it glows with starlight. The last requirement, the light of glory itself, he had never possessed, but Xiao Mang’s extreme light Gu, an incomplete Gu taken from a tomb that can be used three times a month before it self-detonates, replicates it well enough through the Torrential Light Stream killer move. ^{ch. 405}

With every condition met, Fang Yuan abandoned the second aperture Gu in his own mind the moment he understood this after his rebirth, and set his real goal on fixed immortal travel Gu instead, though he knew the land spirit’s fixation on the second aperture Gu could never be talked around directly. Bai Ning Bing, Tie Ruo Nan and the two rival factions all became pieces in a scheme he steered from behind, calculated so that once the land spirit accepted the second aperture Gu was truly beyond reach, its only remaining hope would be protecting Fang Yuan himself. ^{ch. 405}

The cocoon trembles as an Immortal Gu’s aura leaks from it, and the watching crowd is stunned; Feng Tian Yu drops to his knees in tears at witnessing an Immortal Gu’s birth, and the blessed land’s remaining hairy men kneel too, treating the sight as something to worship. ^{ch. 405}

Realizing what is happening, Xiao Mang cuts the killer move short rather than let his own power finish someone else’s refinement, and the torrential light stream ends. Feng Tian Yu screams in despair: with only a few breaths left before the light fades completely, there should not be enough time to birth an Immortal Gu. ^{ch. 405}

Fang Yuan answers with two third watch Gu, accelerating time around the cocoon ninefold and surging its aura, and hope flares in Feng Tian Yu before collapsing again: forcing an Immortal Gu this fast should leave it unstable enough to self-detonate. But Fang Yuan has already accounted for that, and produces an Undefeated Hundred Battles Gu, a rank five expenditure Gu that guarantees a refinement succeeds once spent, taken this time from Chou Jiu rather than, as in his previous life, from Feng Tian Yu. ^{ch. 405}

The aura stabilizes as if by miracle, and the cocoon breaks open to release a green butterfly: the fixed immortal travel Gu, unmistakably an Immortal Gu. Fang Yuan flies clear of the light waterfall with the Gu circling him, though the killer move has cost him dearly: the liquid metal Gu is dead, the golden aurora Gu and others badly damaged, his black wings torn. ^{ch. 405}

As the liquid metal fades away it uncovers his face, and recognition breaks out across the crowd: Hu Mei Er, Li Xian, Yi Huo, Jiao Huang and Meng Tu all realize they are looking at the little beast king, the man some of them once dared to assassinate. Bai Ning Bing and Tie Ruo Nan simply stare, struck still by what they have watched him do. ^{ch. 405}

The land spirit sighs its praise, calling him a future Gu Immortal, and Fang Yuan explains that the fixed immortal travel Gu will let him go anywhere he pictures, but only if Ba Gui spends immortal essence to activate it. Ba Gui agrees, warning that the destination in his mind has to match the real place closely, and that using the last of the essence this way will destroy the blessed land immediately. Calling its own death a relief, it hopes only that Fang Yuan succeeds at refining the second aperture Gu someday, and asks if he has any final words. ^{ch. 405}

Fang Yuan opens his mouth, but nothing comes out. He circles once over the torn hall, the blood soaked battlefield and the ruined blessed land, silently bidding goodbye to Bai Ning Bing, to Tie Ruo Nan, and to Southern Border. ^{ch. 405}

The land spirit does not know he is about to take an even greater risk, but Fang Yuan reasons that life is a gamble worth taking while the chance is there. Filled with ambition, he recites a poem to the crowd: immortals passing with the wind, kings returning to eternal slumber, Verdant Sun’s own regretful death, starting over as a king, a carp climbing the heavenly waterfall, and spreading his wings today to become an immortal who will whip the phoenix another day. ^{ch. 405}

Only the land spirit answers, calling his ambition grand and sending him on his way; it pours immortal essence into the fixed immortal travel Gu, and Fang Yuan vanishes in a flash of jade light, leaving only his clothes drifting in the air. The ground shakes as the blessed land, its winds of assimilation rising, begins to collapse, and the surviving Gu Masters flee San Cha mountain in a fresh panic. ^{ch. 405}

Far away in Central Continent, on Dang Hun Mountain inside the Hu Immortal blessed land, a separate battle for that inheritance is nearing its end. Lord Sky Crane urges on Fang Zheng, whose arms and legs are torn and bleeding, as he claws past Ying Sheng Ji and Xiao Qi Xing toward the mountain’s peak with only the climb left in his mind. ^{ch. 405}

Feng Jin Huang forces herself past him: dream wings, an Immortal Gu that draws on a Gu Master’s own spirit and soul rather than immortal essence, blooms from her shoulders, and forcing it as a mere mortal risks amnesia at best and worse at worst. She takes the lead back from a stunned Fang Zheng, though the effort leaves her at her limit, dizzy to the point of nearly fainting. With her arms already braced on the edge of the peak, one step from winning, she forces herself to lift her head for one last effort. ^{ch. 405}

At that moment, jade light flashes and a naked man lands on the peak: his left forearm holds a bleeding hole, and his muscular body reads to onlookers as a battle hardened veteran’s. Fang Zheng recognizes him as his brother, and the shock sends him sliding off the cliff. ^{ch. 405}

Ten Gu Immortals watching the contest are stunned by the stranger’s sudden appearance, and Feng Jin Huang, looking up from where she clings to the ledge, takes in the whole of him without doubt. Fang Yuan realizes where he has landed: fixed immortal travel Gu carries no clothing with it, though he is glad he kept his other Gu worms stored safely in his own aperture. ^{ch. 405}

Recognizing Feng Jin Huang below him, he reasons that the timing recorded in her biography must hold true, that he has beaten her here by a single step, and that since the contest does not forbid Immortal Gu, the rules make him the new owner of the Hu Immortal blessed land. He gloats inwardly that every risk he took has paid off: even failing to refine the second aperture Gu, he now holds a whole blessed land and a working fixed immortal travel Gu. ^{ch. 405}

Only her hold on the Immortal Gu dream wings keeps him, regretfully, from killing her outright for now, so instead he raises his right foot and, under the watching Gu Immortals’ eyes, plants it on Feng Jin Huang’s face and shoves her from the ledge. Already spent, she has nothing left to resist with and falls. ^{ch. 405}

Turning to the land spirit, Fang Yuan asks whether it still means to call him master. The little girl stares, stammers the word out, then covers her eyes with both hands, blushing and stamping her foot as she scolds him, mortified, to put some clothes on. ^{ch. 405}