Spectral Soul Demon Venerable
Fang Yuan spends three days refining Gu inside a five-man-tall cauldron on Dang Hun Mountain, pouring in about half a million primeval stones out of the roughly six million he now holds after selling the swamp crab. Little Hu Immortal steadies the boiling brew with silver ingots as it nears completion. The finished refinement yields a hundred and fifty-nine rank three silver cup Gu, and Fang Yuan keeps every one back from sale, since carrying their refinement up to rank five is unfinished business from his previous life. ch. 422
He credits the light strain from such a large refinement to guts Gu, which he has used over the preceding days to strengthen his soul to fifty-two times a normal person’s. Walking Dang Hun Mountain afterward, he keeps stepping on gutstones, pushing the multiplier higher in stages: sixty-eight, seventy-seven, eighty-five, ninety-two, each stage more intense and more pleasurable than the last. At ninety-three times the sensation turns almost unbearable, and he pushes on anyway, through ninety-seven, ninety-eight, ninety-nine, to a hundred times before he stops himself, biting his tongue to stay conscious. A hundred times is hundred man soul, the fixed limit for an ordinary person. One gutstone further and the soul bursts outright, destroyed completely while the flesh rots slowly around it. ch. 422
He considers other soul path Gu, divine soul Gu, dragon soul Gu and ice soul Gu among them, that could eventually carry a soul past that ceiling toward a thousand or even ten thousand times. He knows little of their recipes, has not settled on which would suit him, and cannot obtain any from Immortal Crane Sect without exposing his own soul to their reach. For now he judges hundred man soul enough, and turns his attention back to trading rockmen. ch. 422
Dang Hun Mountain and Luo Po Valley stand as soul path’s two sacred lands, so named by the path’s own founder, the rank nine Spectral Soul Demon Venerable, remembered as the single most murderous of all Immortal and Demon Venerables. Fang Yuan owns one of the two and has no idea where the other lies. ch. 422
Over the following month, the nine eyes liquor worm helps carry him to rank four peak stage, and he refines a hundred and fifty-five gold cup Gu alongside the silver ones. Combining both kinds in a further refinement across seven days and six nights, his luck holds, and he produces three rank four gold and silver cup Gu. ch. 422
He then turns to the rockmen. Gutstones have swelled their numbers to around three hundred thousand, and the growth brings political strife among the tribes. Rockmen governance can manage at most a hundred thousand people at a time, so, as expected, the rockmen split into three groups of roughly a hundred thousand each, every group settling around its own spirit spring. Fang Yuan hands his newly made rank three slavery Gu to Little Hu Immortal, who teleports them some ten thousand miles to plant on the most crucial rockmen. All three tribe leaders, Yan Yong among them, and more than a dozen tribe elders fall enslaved in a blink, and the three hundred thousand rockmen beneath them pass under Fang Yuan’s control at a single stroke. ch. 422
