Chapter 460

Waiting on the dark clouds above crescent lake alongside Gui Wang and Loner Hong Yu are three female Gu Immortals, the Hua Hai three immortals: cold Fairy Qing Suo in blue, petite fair Fairy Huang Sha in yellow, and coquettish Fairy Fen Meng in pink, keeping their distance from the two men as though on a different side. Gui Wang’s ugliness fills the three with revulsion, and Loner Hong Yu, who killed his own parents to refine a Gu and betrayed his brothers, draws their open contempt, but the promise of Lang Ya blessed land’s recipes is enough to make them work with two demonic path Gu Immortals anyway. ^{ch. 460}

The blessed land belonged to Long Hair Ancestor, remembered as the number one refinement path immortal: a rank eight Gu Immortal whose talent for refinement, rare even in immemorial times, let him outlive Thieving Heaven Demon Venerable and Giant Sun Immortal Venerable, two rank nine Gu Immortals of his own era, and won him their admiration and their requests that he refine Gu for them. Later reckonings credit him with refining at least thirty-eight Immortal Gu in his life, a figure that only tallies the confirmed cases and leaves out his many legends and rumors, before old age finally caught him; rumor holds that he became a land spirit still refining Gu inside Lang Ya blessed land after death. ^{ch. 460}

A crack splits the sky above the lake and lightning floods through it: the earthly calamity has begun. None of the five Gu Immortals owns a single Immortal Gu despite their stores of top quality rank five Gu, and narration compares their hunger for one to a lecherous man’s hunger for a beautiful woman, and calls it the stronger of the two. More holes tear open as thunder and lightning pour down without end, and the Hua Hai three immortals admit that even the three of them together might not survive such a storm inside their own Hua Hai blessed land. Gui Wang argues, coarsely, that the world always punishes a blessed land’s growing fortune with fiercer calamities, so a storm this strong proves Lang Ya holds many Immortal Gu recipes; Loner Hong Yu backs him, adding that abandoned, collapsing blessed lands only ever draw weak calamities. Fairy Qing Suo answers that cultivation follows heaven’s mandate rather than defies it, and Loner Hong Yu declines to argue the point further. ^{ch. 460}

Gui Wang urges everyone to strike before the land spirit can seal the holes, and the group agrees he should go first. He hurls in a green grape immortal essence bead riding a Gu worm; the earthly calamity destroys the worm at once, but his essence still explodes inside and drains some of the blessed land’s own immortal essence. One by one the others follow with their own precious beads, round after round, the group’s numbers outlasting a land spirit that can no longer produce essence of its own to replace what it spends. Even past a hundred rounds the blessed land still answers, and only Fairy Fen Meng hesitates, warning that Long Hair Ancestor, a rank eight Gu Immortal, left behind white litchi immortal essence that a hundred green grape beads cannot match. Gui Wang counters that the essence would already be badly diluted after the blessed land endured the later eras of Spectral Soul Demon Venerable and Paradise Earth Immortal Venerable, since its very status fell from a grotto-heaven to a blessed land in that time, and Loner Hong Yu agrees. Fairy Qing Suo, cautioning that their essence was saved bead by bead, still commits fifty more rounds on the three sisters’ behalf. ^{ch. 460}

Fifty rounds later the blessed land begins to falter, and Gui Wang’s laughter, once grating to the three immortals, now sounds like triumph to them. Thirty rounds after that, the chain of exploding essence draws no response at all: Lang Ya blessed land’s immortal essence is spent. Gui Wang immediately flies in on bat wings, Loner Hong Yu shoots in behind him as a streak of red rather than fall behind, and the three immortals, indignant at the demonic pair’s treachery, follow. Inside, their rank five Gu activate freely, confirming the essence is gone, and they push through the ongoing lightning rain into a sea of clouds holding twelve grand buildings, ringed by immortal cranes, feathermen and the scent of sandalwood, standing on cloud soil that Fairy Qing Suo finds more fertile than any mortal ground. Fairy Huang Sha marvels that each building is said to hold countless recipes. Gui Wang’s voice already carries back that everything here is his as he flies into one building, Loner Hong Yu has already reached another, and the three immortals split apart toward three buildings of their own. ^{ch. 460}