Chapter 574

In the emptied, deathly silent hall, only Fang Yuan is left standing. The pale yellow light has merged into the shape of a Gu house, and inside it lies a floor of corpses, almost two hundred Gu Masters dead. Some of the bodies carry scales, some are hard as steel, some grew misshapen limbs with grimacing faces, and some self-detonated, scattering broken limbs across the floor. Grim-faced, Fang Yuan asks Mo Yao in his mind whether this is the killer move she devised. ^{ch. 574}

Mo Yao answers, unbothered, that these Gu Masters were always going to die: six arm heavenly zombie king is a strength path move with heavy demands on the body, more than even a strength path foundation like his own could bear at full intensity. Fang Yuan scoffs and rejects the excuse. He counts the dead aloud: fifty or sixty at the start, about a hundred by the middle, and only six or seven Gu Masters still standing by the end, at least seventeen flaws by his count, and he reminds her of their agreement. Mo Yao laughs it off, telling him not to be rash since six arm heavenly zombie king is still a rough draft that improvement will fix. ^{ch. 574}

Privately she judges that finding seventeen flaws is beyond what his refinement attainment alone should allow, and guesses his strength path cultivation has also neared master level. Fang Yuan, for his part, privately admits he found only seven real flaws and invented ten more to test her, judging that the move actually carries even more than seventeen. Each is quietly probing the other’s attainment. Despite every test subject’s death, Fang Yuan is pleased rather than troubled by what the exchange has shown him. ^{ch. 574}

Fang Yuan reasons that a grandmaster should not make so many flaws even in a rough killer move, but reminds himself that this Mo Yao is only a portion of her will left behind, not the whole of her. His truce with that will is real. He has never abandoned his goal of getting rid of it, though, and this probing has found a weakness. Drawing on costly knowledge he once bought from treasure yellow heaven, he recalls that the wisdom path splits into thought, will and emotion. Thought is the foundation, created and destroyed as easily as weeds whenever a person thinks; will forms once many thoughts gather, and can turn as firm as steel or as empty as a vacuum. ^{ch. 574}

Emotion, hardest of the three to root out, forms from many wills together and behaves like water: a thin stream that resists cutting and steering by reason alike, and grows immovable once it runs as deep as the sea. Fang Yuan is glad that what sits in his mind is Mo Yao’s will and not her emotion, since emotion would have been far harder to root out. He reasons through how it works: thinking creates thoughts, thoughts collide to fuse or cancel, and a will is nothing but countless linked thoughts that generates new ones every time it turns a question over. From this, Fang Yuan concludes that the flaws in six arm heavenly zombie king came not from any limit on Mo Yao’s skill, but from her reluctance to think too deeply and risk her own safety. By this point, Fang Yuan has found Mo Yao’s weakness. ^{ch. 574}

Even a living person tires from nonstop thought, and a will that has no body at all wears down and fades faster the more it thinks. While Mo Yao lived, her main body could replenish that cost. She has since died, and nothing now replenishes her will. That is why her will slept inside Water Pavilion, only waking when Fang Yuan entered: staying awake meant constant thought, and constant thought meant a faster end. Giant Sun Immortal Venerable’s own will sleeps the same way inside Eighty-Eight True Yang Building, a rank eight Immortal Gu house, since a will with no power source can only weaken as time passes. ^{ch. 574}

Fang Yuan reasons that though his own wisdom path skill is weak, being alive is an advantage no will can match, and if he can stall long enough he expects to win. He cuts the thought short there, since dwelling on it only generates more thoughts, and even hiding them with a space thought Gu offers no guarantee Mo Yao will not find a way around it. He sighs. Getting into Imperial Court blessed land and taking Immortal Gu Landscape As Before had already required heavy consideration, and concealing his real thoughts behind random ones now leaves him more mentally fatigued than it used to. Mo Yao mistakes the sigh for a young man overworking himself, consoles him, and tells him she has revised the killer move, six worms to change and three more to add, then gives him the details. ^{ch. 574}

Fang Yuan draws on Hu Immortal blessed land’s link to treasure yellow heaven for a few mortal Gu. He has Ge Guang and Chang Ji You secretly bring captured Gu Masters. Three days later, a second round of experiments begins, its results better than before but still flawed, and Mo Yao gives another round of revisions. Fang Yuan carries them out without impatience, understanding that using test subjects lets the strain of thinking fall on them rather than only on her will, though every revision still costs her some thought of her own, and every thought still weakens her. ^{ch. 574}

After half a month, at the fifteenth experiment, the hall lies scattered with corpses. Fang Yuan gathers up the Gu worms used for six arm heavenly zombie king, satisfied, since the low-cultivation test subjects were never going to survive it, and what mattered was how they died and what it left behind. Among the dead, some had turned into zombies, some grew yellow scales, some sprouted six arms on their backs, some grew sharp spiky scales, some grew thick muscled arms, and some grew pitch-black claws. Fang Yuan sums up what he has learned: six arm heavenly zombie king uses borrow strength Gu as its core and six flying zombie Gu as its foundation, with eighteen Gu as complements. It is, strictly, a transformation path move that gathers zombie energy to turn a person into a flying zombie, a body more than ten times as strong. ^{ch. 574}

Because the zombie energy is so dense, the backlash is severe: even with three life force Gu among the complements, the move can be sustained for only seven minutes, which Mo Yao confirms. She explains that borrow strength Gu draws on the strength of heaven and earth itself, more than even a rank five strength path expert can use carelessly, and that a zombie body’s greater strength and regeneration complement it well. But Gu Masters are alive while zombie energy belongs to the dead, so the longer the transformation runs, the more zombie energy fills the body, until it devours the user’s lifeforce and turns them into a true zombie permanently, the move’s backlash. Mo Yao calls fusing life and death an old, unsolved question beyond her. Three life force Gu was her limit: more would collapse the move’s power, and fewer would shrink its use too short to matter. ^{ch. 574}

Fang Yuan nods along outwardly, but privately reads her explanation as a deliberate change of subject. No case of life and death coexisting has ever existed, yet a refinement grandmaster like Mo Yao could surely devise an entirely new killer move rather than lean on this one. He reasons she chose six arm heavenly zombie king because it cost her the least thought: he himself had already supplied its base, the killer move four arm wind king, leaving her only to improve on it. With her grandmaster attainment, he judges, she could easily have started over. She could easily have thought up something new instead. ^{ch. 574}

Fang Yuan reflects that Mo Yao, a variant human and an inkman of the righteous path’s Spirit Affinity House, has watched coldly while as many as a thousand Gu Masters were spent on the experiment. He wonders whether her feeling for her lover, the Sword Immortal Bo Qing, called the pseudo-Immortal Venerable who split the five regions with his sword, carries some attraction to strength, and whether that would rank a mortal like himself little above the dead test subjects. He keeps this to himself. Telling himself only that in this world a person can depend on nobody but themselves, he asks Mo Yao whether six arm heavenly zombie king is finished. Not yet, she says: they have only tested low rank Gu Masters, and still need a high rank one, ideally a strength path rank five. Fang Yuan can think of no one but himself who meets that mark, sets the matter aside, and declares that with the materials for ink transformation already in hand, it is time to explore Eighty-Eight True Yang Building again. ^{ch. 574}