Soaring Cultivation
Inside Fang Yuan’s aperture, the primeval sea crashes wave after wave against the crystal membrane of rank four peak stage, and cracks spread through it as the sea slowly falls. With roughly twenty percent of the sea still left, one final wave rises fiercer than all before it and shatters the membrane outright. A new light membrane forms in its place, far surpassing the old crystal wall: a true rank five initial stage. A thread of light purple primeval essence appears in the depths of the sea, the color proper to rank five after the green copper, red iron, white silver and yellow gold of the ranks below it. ch. 475
Fang Yuan opens his eyes and reflects that, since his rebirth took him drifting across the world, he has finally reached rank five. Rank five Gu Masters are the true peak of the mortal world, a stage fewer than one in ten thousand ever reach, but his previous life already carried him this far once, so he feels joy for his prospects rather than the ecstasy such a breakthrough would bring most others. He is thirty years old, cultivation at this age matched only by the five regions’ absolute top geniuses, and he judges rank five only a starting point: the next goal is Gu Immortal. ch. 475
Advancing to Gu Immortal would let him fully resolve the danger Spring Autumn Cicada poses him: only a rank six Gu Immortal’s aperture can safely hold it, and until then it keeps pressing on him like a slowly closing guillotine. Where other geniuses hesitate before attempting Gu Immortal, Fang Yuan’s previous-life experience gives him confidence. ch. 475
He rises and inspects six purple crystal relic Gu floating in vats of green liquid, most of them bought from treasure yellow heaven by himself or Little Hu Immortal, and finds only two untouched; the rest show tampering, from muddied liquid to fine purple-black hairs sprouting on the Gu themselves. He uses the two clean relic Gu first, raising his cultivation to rank five upper stage, then uses the two hairy ones together and reaches rank five peak stage, jumping from rank five initial to its peak in a single night. Relic Gu, he notes, carry no side effects and weaken no foundation. ch. 475
Few Gu Masters cultivate this way even when they can, and Fang Yuan reasons through why: relic Gu only raise a small realm at a time, so leaning on them makes the great realm breakthroughs that still require personal effort even harder; a sudden jump in strength without matching wisdom and experience is as dangerous as an infant swinging a broadsword; and relic Gu are so costly that even a Gu Immortal’s own descendants would rarely be indulged so lavishly. Without his A grade aptitude, he judges, none of it would have worked regardless. He may be the only Gu Master alive who could use relic Gu this way to leap so far so fast. Even a genius of the Shang house clan, he reasons, would still have to climb the ranks in the ordinary order, since cultivation still demands long training with Gu worms, and raw rank without the skill to match it only makes a Gu Master an easier target. ch. 475
A night passes in cultivation. Outside, on Dang Hun Mountain, Fang Yuan finds most of the guts Gu grown there reduced to yellow mud paste by the Immortal Gu Gruel Mud’s damage, down from four or five intact in ten to three or four now, and pinches out only two good ones from seven or eight tried. Their strength still lifts his wolfman soul a little further. ch. 475
With Spring Autumn Cicada’s pressure now greatly eased, Fang Yuan turns to the more urgent task of rescuing the dying mountain, clears the ruined guts Gu from it, and activates connecting heaven Gu with Little Hu Immortal. Divine sense floods in from treasure yellow heaven asking the price of his gruel mud, which he has been trading for fragments of the Immortal Gu Gruel Mud recipe, a genuine if single-use Immortal Gu; over several days the fragments offered him grow from less than ten feet of treasure light to thirty or forty feet. None of them satisfy him yet, and he keeps turning every offer down. ch. 475
