Dead Sand Gull Egg
Evening light falls over the ruined Zhou Xi oasis. Fang Yuan returns to the ruined clan head pavilion and puts Woman’s Heart away, finally fed full. The killing took him half a day. Feeding it further would push Woman’s Heart into a stronger refinement stage, but Fang Yuan has no plan to refine it now, since it is a consumable Gu gone after one use. ch. 695
Standing on the rubble, Fang Yuan activates hundreds of Gu worms and finds an underground entrance within two breaths. He forces the mortal-sized passage wider until he can walk through bent at the waist. A stone door blocks his way. He destroys it. Hundreds of golden light blades answer with an alarm, but fail to mark even a single spike of his hair armor. ch. 695
Beyond lie at least a hundred thousand primeval stones. They are worth little to him now, but he takes them anyway. Four more stone doors hold Gu refinement materials of differing kinds, all sent into his immortal aperture. A sixth holds Lan clan’s Gu worm treasury, which he empties too. Its rank four and five Gu worms mean nothing to a man with Fang Yuan’s memories. ch. 695
In total there are three Gu worm treasuries and five primeval stone treasuries. Troves also hide inside troves, some ravaged by looters, part of whom died to the guardian Gu worms. ch. 695
Deeper in, Fang Yuan considers the sand gulls themselves. They are seagull-ostrich hybrids, the most common steed in western desert. They have low fertility, with only three or four eggs out of ten usually hatching, yet Lan clan raised far more of them than peer forces. Fang Yuan suspects a secret fertility technique, the only thing in the whole clan that could interest him. ch. 695
A cluster of corpses shows that earlier intruders died to the birds here, a sign of great benefit ahead. A hundred sand gulls attack, their injured beast king among them, and he kills them all in a few breaths. After beating back ten such waves, he emerges into a huge underground cave. ch. 695
A stone table at its center holds a house-sized egg with a dim yellow luster. Sand gull eggs lie buried in the yellow sand around the table. Fang Yuan names the cave Lan clan’s breeding ground. The surviving sand gulls rise to defend it, but he cuts most down and the rest flee. ch. 695
The huge egg draws his gaze, and he wonders with hope whether it is a worldly sand gull egg. He touches its cracked shell, and egg white leaks from small holes down into the sand. It is indeed a worldly sand gull egg, of the ancient desolate beast. The life inside it has already died. ch. 695
Worldly sand gulls breed even worse than common ones, but the egg’s life essence can greatly raise fertility even used superficially. Fang Yuan had hoped to find the fertility method itself. Instead he found a dead egg, which he judges a pleasant surprise from Connect Luck. ch. 695
His connect luck Immortal Gu feeds on sand gull soil, formed from ordinary soil by a worldly sand gull’s influence. He would otherwise have had to buy it or steal it at great risk. He can turn sand into soil with the egg’s life essence instead, enough for the five thousand kilograms he needs. ch. 695
Back at Hu Immortal blessed land, Fang Yuan draws on his past as a blood path grandmaster and present as a strength path grandmaster to devise a method. Using six hundred mortal Gu, he extracts the egg’s life essence, then condenses it with wisdom Gu into a light yellow juice. The juice turns sand into sand gull soil in a day and a night. Three days later, he has enough to feed connect luck Immortal Gu to fullness. ch. 695
That leaves cleanse soul Immortal Gu as the only one he still cannot feed. It needs the flesh of ten thousand white lotus giant silkworm Gu, a Gu once common in the Late Antiquity Era but now very rare. Fang Yuan uses the name Eight Arm Immortal to request it and its recipe. No one answers him. ch. 695
