Chapter 461

Ge tribe reaches crescent lake and camps among its horseshoe trees, finally able to rest and hunt to restock its provisions. At night Fang Yuan slips away from the camp under the excuse of leading the wolf group to hunt, letting his thirty thousand wolves feed after days of half-starving while he steers them carefully clear of the lake’s other dangers: a larger group of water wolves, a group of three-horned rhinos, a thousand mutated beasts, and a worm group numbering from the hundreds of thousands up to as many as a million insects, none of which bothers Ge tribe or the wolves so long as their territories go undisturbed. ^{ch. 461}

Drawing on memories of his past life, Fang Yuan follows the lakeside east to a stone forest whose grey, purple-black and greenish-yellow pillars, seen from above, trace the outline of the character for “thief.” Thieving Heaven Demon Venerable personally created this stone forest. Wanting to enter the legendary space door and needing Long Hair Ancestor’s help for it, he wagered him over the matter, won three of five rounds, and left the ancestor no choice but to accept the loss and refine him the Immortal Gu Space Escape Gu. The two spent twenty-one years perfecting it together, and Thieving Heaven Demon Venerable praised Long Hair Ancestor’s refinement skill as beyond his own, but the finished Gu still could not carry him through the space door, the one failure of Long Hair Ancestor’s life even after later working the problem with Giant Sun Immortal Venerable too. On his deathbed, Long Hair Ancestor’s friend Immortal Yi Yan, a rank eight wisdom path Gu Immortal known for exact one-line predictions, spent fifty years deducing a forecast for him: after three great eras, three venerables, two men and one woman, would rise in turn, named Spectral Soul Demon Venerable, Paradise Earth Immortal Venerable and Great Dream Immortal Venerable, and the last of them would finally solve the space escape Gu. Spectral Soul Demon Venerable duly appeared and died, and after his death a rank nine male Gu Immortal of the righteous path rose as foretold and was known as Paradise Earth Immortal Venerable; by Fang Yuan’s own time he too has already died, and only Great Dream Immortal Venerable remains unborn. Long Hair Ancestor’s land spirit still waits only to see her, promising Lang Ya blessed land entire to whoever she is once she resolves it. ^{ch. 461}

Ashamed of the failure, Long Hair Ancestor had once promised Thieving Heaven Demon Venerable nine further Gu, refining materials included; six became Immortal Gu, and before the Demon Venerable’s disappearance the two agreed the remaining three chances would pass to his heir under a secret code. More than a decade later, one of the Demon Venerable’s inheritances activated and its riddle, pointing toward Lang Ya blessed land, touched off a craze of failed attempts to solve it across northern plains. Ma Hong Yun, fleeing an ambush at crescent lake after a battlefield defeat, stumbled into this same stone forest, found a hidden passage, met the land spirit, gave the correct code, and received his three promised rank five Gu, recovering enough on their strength to turn the tide and reclaim the imperial throne a second time. ^{ch. 461}

Fang Yuan stops at a purple pillar with a flat stone at its base, the spot where a badly wounded Ma Hong Yun once sat trapped between enemy blades and a pillar he mistook, in his failing consciousness, for the shape of his wife; he addressed it with regret and love before vanishing into Lang Ya blessed land as the enemy’s swords came down. Fang Yuan sees no likeness of a woman on the stone at all and laughs that longing alone made Ma Hong Yun see her, recalling that the wife in question, Zhao Lian Yun, later becomes a wisdom path Gu Immortal and Ma Hong Yun’s strategist wife but is currently just a little girl. He cuts his own flesh to smear blood on the pillar, the Gu’s first activation requirement, and states his desire aloud to meet the second, and his surroundings change at once. ^{ch. 461}

He wakes in a room scented with alchemy fire, dragon pillars, golden curtains and vermillion windows, where a thin old man with a chest-length beard and a baby’s ruddy face sits cross-legged on a bed of cloud. Fang Yuan bows and names himself Chang Shan Yin, the Demon Venerable’s inheritor. The land spirit studies the disguise and picks out, aloud, human skin, shame plum, autumn voice grass, pill fire Gu, medicine strength Gu and more it trails off without naming, frowning as it strokes its beard. It offers to trade a similar-grade recipe for the human skin Gu’s, then remembers the secret code and asks for it; Fang Yuan tells it plainly there is no code and that he will not trade the recipe yet. Furious, it presses him down with a force that makes his bones creak and threatens to imprison him and peel off his skin to reverse the recipe by study, but Fang Yuan holds his ground, telling it he is protected as the Demon Venerable’s heir until the three-Gu agreement is fulfilled. Narration likens the land spirit, born of Long Hair Ancestor, to an artificial intelligence built to intimidate, and recalls that it once frightened Ma Hong Yun in his past life into settling for only three Gu, a choice Ma Hong Yun regretted for the rest of his life as a Gu Immortal. The land spirit glares a while longer before its anger collapses all at once; it climbs down from its cloud bed, tugs at Fang Yuan’s sleeve, and begs him to do it the good deed of trading the recipe after all, leaving Fang Yuan at a loss for words at the sudden reversal. ^{ch. 461}