Chapter 423

He Feng Yang reads Fang Yuan’s reply and reddens with anger: the guts Gu he wants stays off the table, but rockmen are offered for sale instead. Guts Gu would raise Immortal Crane Sect disciples’ strength by thirty percent if he ever got hold of it, and being unable to buy it galls him. He cannot simply seize it either. Fang Yuan sits behind the blessed land’s defenses with his fixed immortal travel Gu ready, and He Feng Yang, like the rest of Immortal Crane Sect, is wary enough of his trump cards to hold back. ^{ch. 423}

Privately He Feng Yang curses Fang Yuan as a wicked, execrable rascal, furious less at the refusal than at his own temptation: rockmen, properly raised, let a blessed land dig out its underground resources and build underground cities, and demand for them far outstrips supply since only Fang Yuan can raise them at this scale, a trade that could flourish for at least a hundred years. He calculates that a good showing here would ease pressure from the supreme grand elder, the second elder and the third elder, and silence Lei Tan besides, so he decides to take the deal after all. As payback for the refused guts Gu, he vows to withhold yellow gold relic Gu and purple crystal relic Gu from Fang Yuan in turn. ^{ch. 423}

Fang Yuan reads the reply calmly. He Feng Yang has offered relic Gu, and even help surviving the seventh earthly calamity, in exchange for guts Gu, and Fang Yuan dismisses both as no threat to his resolve. He accepts selling rockmen instead, partly to keep his fictitious status as an Immortal Crane Sect disciple intact, and he already knows his quoted price sits below market value, a concession he is making on purpose while he still needs time to grow. ^{ch. 423}

This transaction, sixty thousand rockmen, cannot simply walk out of the blessed land’s doors, since blue charm lightning shadow still prowls Tian Ti mountain and an open door risks its entry. A hole earth Gu is required to move them safely, but Fang Yuan distrusts one supplied by He Feng Yang, insists on refining his own, and sends back an elaborate list of Gu worms and ingredients. He Feng Yang, suspicious that Fang Yuan means to improve on the five-hundred-year-old recipe or extort him, wavers, trims the list, and argues it back and forth for eight to nine days. He researches from a shortened sixth list but fails to reproduce anything useful. Only when he finally receives Fang Yuan’s completed hole earth Gu, half a month later by central continent’s time, does he manage, after three more days of study, to reverse-engineer the recipe. ^{ch. 423}

What he finds is the ordinary hole earth Gu recipe, unchanged. He Feng Yang erupts, screaming that Fang Yuan tricked him, and heaps insults on him as shameless, unscrupulous, devious and vile, extending the abuse to his ancestors. ^{ch. 423}