Beastman
Fang Yuan lands far from the dream realm and releases half of the elite rockmen he raises across Hu Immortal blessed land and Star Form blessed land, arming them and sending them out in groups of ten to gather resources. Their battle strength has been greatly raised, but the deployment is only a facade; even losing them would cost Fang Yuan nothing. He conceals himself and returns to the manifested dream realm, roughly the size of a small hill. Last time, at the eighth star hall of Starry Sky grotto-heaven, he had reached this dream realm’s border and nearly died, escaping only by detonating his bat wings. This time he enters on purpose, since unravel dream now makes him far stronger. ch. 912
Inside, it is night, and beastmen with tiger, eagle and leopard traits dance around a huge fire. Fang Yuan recognizes them as the beastman race, a variant human people exterminated during the Olden Antiquity Era. In the Remote Antiquity Era and the Immemorial Antiquity Era, they were among the strongest variant human races, worshipping fierce beasts and drawing wild transformation path Gu worms into themselves to gain part of those beasts’ strength. During the Remote Antiquity Era, Primordial Origin Immortal Venerable and Star Constellation Immortal Venerable led humans against variant human rule. By the Olden Antiquity Era three human Demon Venerables made war on the beastmen and exterminated them, stabilizing human rule. He knows Star Constellation Immortal Venerable as a rank nine Gu Immortal. ch. 912
Fang Yuan finds himself a bound human boy tied to a tree with more than a dozen other captured children. The beastmen are man-eaters, and history states they prize human children as food and celebrate successful hunts with a bonfire. At the leader’s call, a six-meter elephantman hoists the whole bound tree and slams it to the ground. Some tied children are crushed to death in the fall, and beastmen devour the corpses at once. Amid the panic, Fang Yuan notices one girl stays eerily calm despite her fear. ch. 912
The beastman leader then cuts the children’s ropes and offers a tribal bargain: whoever unties a piece of wind knot grass is spared as blessed by heaven, and whoever fails becomes food. Wind knot grass is a very rare, ball-shaped grass lantern found nowhere in the five regions, native only to green heaven of the immemorial nine heavens. Fragments of that heaven fell into the five regions after Ren Zu’s ten children destroyed the immemorial nine heavens, and in Star Constellation Immortal Venerable’s era many fragment worlds of those heavens fell across different areas. Each lantern forms from roots, leaves and stems that intertwine only in that heaven’s unceasing, shifting winds. As a powerless child, untying his grass is Fang Yuan’s only path to survival. He also grasps the danger: failing does not kill him outright, but each consumption deals his soul a huge injury, and enough of that would break it down and dissipate it, killing him. ch. 912
As the other children work frantically at their own grass, Fang Yuan only studies his, drawing notice from beastmen and from Feng Jin Huang, also present as a child. His calm confidence makes her wonder if he is Star Constellation Immortal Venerable. A tiger-headed beastman seizes a boy who ruined his grass and eats him alive on the spot, calling the failure fair grounds for the kill. ch. 912
Feng Jin Huang, crowded by beastmen breaking the children’s concentration, flies into a rage and curses a crocodile-tailed beastman for its stink. It growls back, and she answers with more scorn, unafraid. The crocodile-tailed beastman erupts, and its tail, tough as iron, sweeps out and destroys Feng Jin Huang’s skull. ch. 912
