Air Bubble Fish
Connecting heaven Gu flickers through images of wolves for sale before settling on a turtleback myriad wolf king, ten times the size of an ordinary turtleback wolf, its bronze shell towering and shining with strength. Turtleback wolves carry broad, dark green bodies with dark blue eyes and a turtle-like shell weighing roughly a third of their body, useful for both defense and, like a camel, for storing nutrition; the breed has the strongest defense of any wolf. ch. 476
Fang Yuan reviews his wolf group’s shape: three main packs of turtleback, night and wind wolves at around ten thousand each, with a handful of poison beard wolves from the poison grassland and over a hundred water wolves kept for the sake of his white-eyes wolf. Battle losses have cut it from over thirty thousand wolves to about twenty-seven thousand, and sending the old, weak and injured back to Hu Immortal blessed land dropped the total further, below twenty-five thousand, so it needs replenishing. ch. 476
Where an ordinary enslavement path Gu Master would have to organize hunts to rebuild a beast group, Fang Yuan can simply buy from treasure yellow heaven through connecting heaven Gu. Blessed lands that overbreed wild beasts sell off the excess there both to protect their own ecology and to earn revenue, and other Gu Immortals buy in turn to restock their own lands, so wolves from every region are on the market: northern plains offers night, wind, water, poison beard and turtleback wolves; southern border lightning, azure, blood and two-headed wolves; western desert silk, pearl, sand and tyrant wolves; eastern seas ink, greed, red and goldback wolves; central continent white-eyes, star, color and blood wolves, mutated beasts like white-eyes, tyrant and greed wolves among them. No desolate beast wolves are for sale. Fang Yuan knows of one all the same, a peach wolf living in Lang Ya blessed land. ch. 476
Of his three largest wolf groups, only the night wolves have a myriad beast king to unite them. Give the wind wolves and turtleback wolves myriad kings of their own, Fang Yuan reasons, and he could stop personally managing so many hundred and thousand wolf kings, easing his soul’s burden enough to take in still more wolves; he decides to strengthen his existing groups rather than replace them. ch. 476
South Sea Turtle Immortal, selling the turtleback myriad wolf king, wants ten thousand stalks of blowpipe grass, a northern plains material used in Gu refinement, but Fang Yuan’s own supply is only unsprouted seed out of season. Little Hu Immortal asks after immortal essence stones instead, and after haggling Fang Yuan spends one to buy thirty thousand turtleback wolves along with the myriad wolf king. He then buys eighteen thousand wind wolves with their own myriad beast king, and replenishes twenty thousand night wolves, five thousand poison beard wolves and six thousand water wolves, spending two and a half immortal essence stones more on that batch. ch. 476
The new wolves need feeding without starving Hu Immortal blessed land’s own foxes, still recovering in several varieties from the sixth earthly calamity, since hungry wolves and foxes would only tear into each other. Bidding against other Gu Immortals for a batch of just over twenty thousand air bubble fish roes, Fang Yuan pushes the price to one immortal essence stone, drawing ridicule from Gu Immortals who judge the roes, at their roughly thirty percent survival rate and expected yield of about three thousand fish, worth less than that. He knows better: two Gu Immortals will fight over the air bubble sea by year’s end and poison it into a death zone, sending the fish’s price up more than tenfold, and the coming battle of the five regions will push it to a hundred times today’s price. ch. 476
Air bubble fish, a specialty of the eastern sea, have translucent round bodies like a bubble, two small dark eyes, and fins too weak for real swimming, so they move by rising and falling and can float above the water to escape danger, some staying airborne year-round on tiny insects. Their chief value is breeding Gu: worms they swallow are nurtured in their belly until they mature into a Gu and pierce free, which makes the fish sought after for the battle of the five regions. Raised carefully despite the losses, Fang Yuan expects the roes to reach self-sufficiency within decades and at least fifty thousand fish within a hundred years. ch. 476
He rules out fat mudfish as a tankmate, since they would eat the roes themselves, and chooses blue jade carp over gold koi because gold itself harms the fish’s reproduction while gemstones do not; his blessed land’s rockmen, who form gold and gems on their own bodies from the soil they eat, leave him no shortage of either metal. With the water wolves fed, he buys pink rabbit and iron-shell flowers for the night, wind and turtleback wolves, and earth skin pigs for the poison beard wolves, settling them in the blessed land’s east. He finishes by buying many Gu worms and large amounts of refinement materials, and the day’s spending comes altogether to eight immortal essence stones and hundreds of thousands of primeval stones, leaving him twenty of the twenty-eight immortal essence stones he earned from selling remnant recipes. He hands connecting heaven Gu to Little Hu Immortal and returns to Dang Hun palace to refine. ch. 476
