Chapter 416

Months later, the fox army has drawn in around Dang Hun Mountain. Fang Yuan stands at the peak with his arms folded, tense. Today is the sixth earthly calamity. Each calamity grows worse than the one before it, and he took over this blessed land with only a year and three months left before this one, leaving him little time to prepare. He counts three preparations made: the river dug, the fox army bred up, and fixed immortal travel Gu kept ready to flee. Two threats he has no way to address at all: the clouds overhead, and the blue charm lightning shadow lurking in the west. ^{ch. 416}

The wind dies, a light gathers in the clouds, and a great white door bursts open, releasing a huge rock-like shape that descends toward the mountain. As chelipeds unfold from its shell, a first pair like bronze poles, then nine more pairs from either side, Fang Yuan names it: a swamp crab. Lifted upright, its body could reach a quarter the height of Dang Hun Mountain; its first pincers could break mountain rock or sever a flood dragon in half, and its eighteen smaller legs are still thicker than hundred-year-old trees. Little Hu Immortal seals every rank one to five Gu worm on its body the moment it lands, but whether it also carries an Immortal Gu stays unknown through the whole fight that follows. ^{ch. 416}

Fang Yuan sends the fox army to swarm it; ordinary foxes are crushed underfoot, and his expression turns cruel as he keeps ordering them to throw away their lives, since he bred so many precisely to be spent as disposable pieces, every scrap of damage they land still counting. The combined strikes of the fox army’s own hundred, thousand and myriad beast kings finally strip the mud from its shell, and the crab halts for the first time. It answers by vomiting mud that grows, within moments, into a crab horde a million strong: some huge and tiger-fierce, some needle-clawed, some built for speed. The fox groups turn to fight this new army instead; crab losses run far higher than fox losses, but the swamp crab keeps birthing more, so the horde never thins, and Fang Yuan recalls every fox stationed outside the mountain to reinforce the line, glad he had bred the army up in advance. Directing so many foxes at once leaves even his soul, six times an ordinary person’s, feeling the strain. ^{ch. 416}

With the horde clearing its path, the swamp crab regains its old pace and advances again, unhurried but unstoppable, crushing fox and crab alike beneath it with every step. Fang Yuan names it fully now, the King of the Swamp: hard-shelled, blind from lurking many years in the swamp’s depths, and by his judgment left with no weakness at all. He cannot join the fight directly, since his own strength-path Gu could not crack its shell, and since it has not yet shown an Immortal Gu, he dares not provoke an unknown that size. ^{ch. 416}

Unable to hold it back with the fox army, Fang Yuan has Little Hu Immortal teleport it away; she manages it, moving the crab about nine thousand steps off at the cost of one bead of green grape immortal essence, and does it again roughly five minutes later when it returns, spending a second bead. The whole blessed land holds only seventy-eight beads of this immortal essence, one already spent feeding fixed immortal travel Gu and now two more gone to these teleports, with no way left to replenish them since Hu Immortal’s death. Crabs that slip past and start climbing the mountain meet Dang Hun Mountain’s own power instead: the ground they cross kills their souls outright while leaving their bodies whole. Fang Yuan knows that power alone cannot be trusted against the swamp crab itself, since a desolate beast’s soul endures far longer under that pressure, and he will not let it reach the mountain. ^{ch. 416}

As the swamp crab closes in for a third time, Little Hu Immortal’s expression suddenly changes; without waiting on Fang Yuan, she grabs his arm and both vanish. An instant later, a lightning bolt tears into the ground where they had stood and shatters rock, then pauses and shoots back upward, reforming into a human-shaped figure of lightning that lets out a loud growl: the blue charm lightning shadow. ^{ch. 416}