Chapter 593

Hei Lou Lan walks out of Tai Bai Yun Sheng’s room dissatisfied, since Tai Bai Yun Sheng is the leading healer and a healer not in good shape will make Hei Lou Lan’s own rounds harder to clear. He looks up at the summit of the sacred palace. There, Eighty-Eight True Yang Building has condensed sixty-seven floors and is condensing its sixty-eighth. Through his one-edge owner token he senses that the sixty-eighth floor has just assimilated a strength path Immortal Gu. It is a rank six Gu called flying bear strength Gu, drawn from the flying bear, a desolate beast whose battle strength can match a Gu Immortal’s. The Gu gives its wielder a chance to burst out with a flying bear phantom and strike with the beast’s divine strength. Hei Lou Lan wants it because it could let him advance into a strength path Gu Immortal, a step his plan for revenge depends on. ^{ch. 593}

His aide Hei Shu kneels before him and reports on the other experts’ progress in the building. Chang Shan Yin is stuck at the ninetieth round of the seventh floor with no progress. Ye Lui Sang is at the forty-ninth floor past its eighty-first round, but thirty percent of his Gu Masters have already died there. Hei Lou Lan had opened Eighty-Eight True Yang Building to every Gu Master, a rare and costly move that set off a scramble for owner tokens even as their price rose to a sky-high sum. Blinded by greed, many died chasing the tokens. ^{ch. 593}

Counting the dead from Tai Bai Yun Sheng’s own attempt, five rank five experts have already perished: Chang Biao, Pan Ping, Hao Ji Liu, Gao Yang and Zhu Zai. Each loss shrinks the forces Hei Lou Lan can mobilize. It also makes flying bear strength Gu harder to seize. Opening the building also lets surviving Gu Masters gain strength quickly, and a number of them have advanced to rank four and rank five. ^{ch. 593}

Eighty-Eight True Yang Building was originally arranged by Giant Sun Immortal Venerable for the benefit of his descendants. Hei Lou Lan names the sixty-eighth floor the tribe’s main focus, a task handed to him personally by one of the tribe’s supreme elders. He ranks it far above winning the thirty-ninth floor. He orders Hei Shu to announce that the building is closing to everyone else until the sixty-eighth floor is broken. Hei Shu is stunned: the order comes from the tribe’s own supreme elder. Every Imperial Court contest is a chess game among Gu Immortals in which even strong Gu Masters are pieces, and Gu Immortals routinely back tribes to obtain a wanted Immortal Gu. Hei Lou Lan expects the closure to anger people, but knows a Gu Immortal’s backing keeps anyone from raising an objection. ^{ch. 593}

He plans to draw on three Gu Masters. Tai Bai Yun Sheng, once he rests for about half a month, can fight from the rear as a healer, and Hei Lou Lan means to sway him with a need for lifespan Gu. Chang Shan Yin, whose son has just died in the round he is fighting and who already owes Hei Lou Lan for a loan of flying bear phantom Immortal Gu resources, can also be moved. Ye Lui Sang holds a fire path support Immortal Gu and can be lured with a heavy bait. The plan’s true weight rests on three Gu Immortals, Xue Song Zi, Hei Cheng and Hei Bai, and Hei Lou Lan sends each of them a letter. ^{ch. 593}

Hei Bai reads the letter and is overjoyed that wooden chicken Gu has finally turned up, inside the sixty-eighth floor of all places. He does not doubt it, since Hei Lou Lan is Hei Cheng’s son and the Hei tribe’s own leader. Hei Cheng asks whether the letter also mentioned a strength path Immortal Gu. Hei Bai admits he had been so fixed on wooden chicken Gu that he forgot his nephew’s need. ^{ch. 593}

Hei Lou Lan carries the Great Strength True Martial Physique and needs a strength path Immortal Gu to advance to Gu Immortal, and none had appeared in Eighty-Eight True Yang Building until now. Hei Cheng frowns at the news that still no such Gu has appeared. Hei Bai reminds him that Eighty-Eight True Yang Building has eighty-eight floors in all and twenty of them have yet to condense. Hei Cheng reflects that Immortal Gu Dark Limit cannot mask his son’s physique much longer, calling it close to his son’s last chance at life. The two Gu Immortals decide to act at once and head toward Demon Blood Hill, the place named in the letter. ^{ch. 593}

The two Gu Immortals arrive above Demon Blood Hill soon after. The hill earned its name after four great righteous tribes of the Northern Plains once allied there to wipe out a demonic path bandit gang secretly backed by demonic path Gu Immortals. The righteous side suffered serious losses of its own before the bandits were annihilated, and the demonic path dead dyed the whole hill red. Hei tribe’s two Gu Immortals had been ready to move for a long time, prepared to help Hei Lou Lan clear his floor as fast as possible. ^{ch. 593}

Eighty-Eight True Yang Building sits inside Imperial Court blessed land, which raises the question of why Gu Immortals from outside it can still help clear a floor. The building is a rank eight Immortal Gu house built from innumerable small towers, with divert disaster Gu as one of its cornerstones, spaced several li apart across the Northern Plains region by region. Ordinarily, the small towers take in wild Gu. Once every ten years they sink one after another, sacrificing the wild Gu inside and resonating with the blizzard outside. That resonance plunders the whole Northern Plains of its Gu resources, drawing them up to the sacred palace to condense floor after floor of the building. ^{ch. 593}

Giant Sun Immortal Venerable’s original plan for the building was rejected by Long Hair Ancestor, a refinement path supreme grandmaster who devised the current design instead. Each floor forms through an act of refining Gu, using both the wild Gu already in the towers and the strong Gu drawn in from outside. On the sixty-eighth floor, flying bear strength Gu was absorbed and refined first to form its hundredth round, and other strong Gu worms then refined the ninety-ninth round and the ninety-eighth after it. Where no Gu worm of the right quality is available, the building substitutes a Gu recipe, primeval stones or an inheritance secret instead. A harder round always yields a more bountiful reward. It took countless Imperial Court contests and generations of immortals probing before this mechanism was finally understood. ^{ch. 593}

Over time, a loophole appeared in its refining. Gu Masters of the Northern Plains learned they could exploit it. Refining a Gu worm runs on will: Fang Yuan had once refined the liquor worm the same way, pouring his will into it through primeval essence until the worm’s own will was worn down and it became his tool. When their Gu worms differ by two ranks or more, Fang Yuan used Spring Autumn Cicada’s aura to force the weaker worm’s will to curl up, then poured his own will and essence straight into it. Eighty-Eight True Yang Building is not itself a Gu Master, so Giant Sun Immortal Venerable had deliberately left his own will behind to do the refining in his place. Fang Yuan had once felt the true scale of that will while refining the guest halt stele, vast as the sun beside the ant-sized will he himself had left there. An Immortal Venerable’s will is unrivalled and can extinguish a lesser will with ease, so the building’s refining had never met a problem before. ^{ch. 593}

A will still needs a soul to carry it, or ceaseless thinking wears it down until it chooses to hibernate. Mo Yao’s own will once hibernated the same way. It woke again only when Fang Yuan entered Water Pavilion. Giant Sun Immortal Venerable died long ago, and his will, unable to hold out against the years any longer, has also gone into hibernation. With Giant Sun’s will asleep, the building’s Gu refining has slowed, and that slowdown is the loophole. ^{ch. 593}