NOVEL WEB Chapter 14: FOURTEEN
As the day grew old, Tian Zheng slowly attended to the customers that were present. Some won, some lost and the truly unlucky ones found dead gu in the stones they had picked. As the sun was nearing the west, and the sun mirror gu worms that provided light in these tunnels were starting to fall asleep, he closed up shop. Most of the rocks had been bought and he only remained with about ten. He gathered them and sat back behind the counter. Within the still darkness, a young man with eyes like that of a cat sat alone as small qi winds escaped from his index finger and slowly chipped away at the rocks that remained.
His face was calm without any emotion clear to the world and his mind was also like a still pond. Once in a while he would reach an arm's length from him and take a sip from the refilled wine gourd. Slowly, pieces of stone fell down and the two rocks he had been opening were empty. It seemed that there once existed a gu worm in one of them but it had long ago been turned to dust by time and that dirt had fused with the stone. He let put a small sigh before he picked up two other rocks, one for each hand.
A small smile formed on his lips once he saw how efficient he was at this. The ground was filled with rock dust and he had not gotten a single gu worm. 'I wonder if there is a luck path. maybe I have been cursed with bad luck.' His thoughts wandered as the precise carving of the rocks continued. In the year he had spent doing this, he had gotten so used to using qi that it came as second nature to him.
A few hours passed and he was down to his last rock. In all of them he had not gotten a single one. 'There is definitely a luck path.' once the rock dust fell down he cursed in his mind. Ten chances and some of those rocks came from the rare category, yet he hadn't gotten a single gu worm. He sat back, his gourd on his lips as his mind wandered. While his Human path and Heaven Path methods had gotten close to Grandmaster. He had the theory down but he hadn't had the chance to practice anything within these paths. He only had two Heaven path gu worms; Heaven's Vision gu and Man Made Heaven gu which was a mixture of Heaven path and Human path. he had tried to form recipes but had hit a wall when he spent a month and got nowhere. He didn't have human path gu worms. For now, he just had the theory of the two paths. While for rule path he was a Master due to something that had happened when he tried to refine a rank 1 Qi path gu worm.
He remembered when he was close to the end when the Foreign attached itself to the gu worm. For the first time he heard a gu worm scream and it was horrifying. In that second, when he tried to use the False Seal gu to salvage the refinement, he saw something. The rules of Heaven and Earth had seed to be angered by the will and tried to suppress it but they were broken. The very rules of Heaven and Earth had been broken by the will and the False Seal gu had been nearly killed. This also led to Tian Zheng discovering something. The False Seal gu was his vital gu.
He had thought the Heaven's Vision gu was his vital gu but he felt a small connection between himself and the dying gu. Tis connection was the only reason it was still alive. For a month he had gone down a rabbit hole of the things he had forgotten and while some of the knowledge he knew had come back, not everything came back. At this point the only thing he was stuck with was a feeling of having forgotten something but couldn't remember what. While this feeling was annoying he had found the source after a little searching. The Qi path gu that had its will hijacked had appeared in his aperture, causing the number of gu under the Foreign will to increase. It now had the frog wart gu, a very injured lightening feet gu and now a light qi gu was added to the roster. The light gu now produced a black light that corroded all that was touched by it. Heaven's Will had the fire man gu, the fire man gu, the Heaven's Vision gu and the Man Made Heaven gu. While it had a greater number of gu worms at its control, the Foreign will was still winning. This was what led to the feeling that he had forgotten something. He assumed it was due to the void call gu. While it was in active most of the time, the gu acted when the Foreign will was losing causing both Heaven's Vision gu to restrain it while the Man Made Heaven gu dives into the primeval essence every time the void call gu appears.
While the Foreign will was hostile to nearly everything, except him and the gu he had refined, it hatted everything else and the thing that was at the top of that list was Heaven's Will. This caused it to try and destroy anything it had built, including the secrets it had hid. This was the main reason it was nagging Tian Zheng to remember.
He sat there in the dark, seeping his wine; waiting. A few hours went by before the sound of the door creaking echoed around the room. A deep shadow appeared in front of Tian Zheng a few seconds later. In the darkness he could feel a gaze sweep past him and rest on his gourd. He cleared his throat a little and this caused it to move away from his property. "Do you have all of it? If not, then you will need to work for e one more time so that you can afford it." The voice whispered, but in the silent room the sound was loud and clear. Tian Zheng didn't speak a word but he pushed two primeval elder gu worms. Their creepy faces were smiling to the point they looked like they would rip. A shadowed hand reached for them and after a few moments he heard a small grunt from the man. "What about the other material, do you have that?" the horse voice from the man appeared once again. An uninterested Tian Zheng handed a small leaf shaped gu. Once he fed it some of his primeval essence, untouched by any of the Wills that now lived in his aperture, the leaf morphed into a small bonsai tree that had a single fruit.
Red eyes appeared behind the shadowy figure, this blatant show of greed caused Tian Zheng to snort. He made sure the man heard him. The red eyes grew dimmer but they were still there. "One Death Bonsai gu. I trust that you know how to use this, or else your little organization would have been destroyed long ago." The red eyes moved from the gu worm and bore at him. He didn't show any fear as his cat like eyes turned to the man. He didn't know if the man had a gu that enabled his eyes to light up, but he knew that his eyes were powerful.
They were made from a certain gu he had found one day. It had found its home in a Myriad beast king, deep inside its eye. When he had killed the beast and was preparing to eat it, he accidently swallowed the insect whole. In a matter of a few days the gu moved from his stomach, through his skin towards his eyes. It ate them and then after a few days of ingestion it replaced his earlier black eyes. Now his eyes could change from normal, when there was light to cat like when darkness descended or he activated the gu. The red eyes shadow looked at him for a moment before he swiped the bonsai. "Where do you even find these gu?" the shadow finally asked after a few moments of silence.
Tian Zheng felt like laughing a little, for he too didn't understand. It felt like these gu were following him for even his Qi path gu worm. He never went out looking for them or bought them, he always found a Qi path gu in the wild or one that was close to death as he searched for rocks to put up in his gambling den. "To tell you the truth, I don't understand it either. They just come to me. like that gu, I was just walking one day in the forest and there it was." He had told this tale many times when he drunk a little bit more spirit wine than he could handle and no one believed him. No one could believe that a simple man such as him could be walking around in the middle of the day and when he slept under a tree, he found a rank 4 Qi path gu worm conveniently sleeping on his stomach. Even he himself couldn't believe it, and the story grew weirder, when he looked up, he found a mysterious gu sleeping on a leaf that had mysteriously been weighed down by the gu causing it to be visible to him. Once he refined this gu and tried to use it, it mysteriously dissipated and he had never seen it again.
These events had led to his fame spreading. Gu masters started asking him to find gu worms for them and slowly he had built a small side business around his ability and luck. A few months ago, this shadow man had approached him in Niuang and they asked him to find a rank 3 gu worm. One so rare that no one though it to exist. It couldn't be refined by anyone since it had only ever been found in the wild and all who tried to create a recipe had been found dead with their bodies filled with dried branches. The Death Bonsai gu was a mixture of two paths. Shadow path and transformation path. it fed on the dead bodies around it and when it had had enough, it would create a fruit that once ripe would give birth to a mysterious gu. Shadow as Tian Zheng had grown accustomed to calling him, hadn't told him the name or the function of this gu and he honestly didn't care about it. All he knew was that he was getting paid in a lot of Qi path gu worms that would push his strength further. While he didn't have the methods to use the Heaven path, Human path, Rule or even the foreign path attainments that he had cultivated, he could use Qi path for the time being. He chose it simply because it resembles the clouds that had swilled around Sky King Mu Chen when he fought that yellow eye in the sky. He watched as a pale hand with long slender fingers reached from the shadows and grasped the Death Bonsai gu worm, his will inside the gu was repelled and replaced with another marking the new ownership. "Now where are my gu worms?" This question escaped from his. It seemed the spirit wine had influenced him more than he had realized.
He didn't waste any time, a small wave of qi passed through his body twice before it faded and with it all the alcohol in his system was washed away. 'I guess I haven't developed a strong alcohol tolerance yet.' With all the alcohol he had been drinking he thought that his body would be used to it. While he loved the sweet taste of the drink, it seemed his body wasn't used to it.
He watched as the hand reached out and opened to reveal a small group of gu worms. They were four gu worms. The earth qi gu worm, fire qi gu worm, water qi gu worm and a rank 5 ugly heart qi gu worm. While the first three gu worms three rank 2 and rooted in nature, which existed due to Heaven, Earth, qi and transformation combining, the ugly qi gu must be refined by the ugliest of beings and they must face hardships due to their ugliness, this was a sort of tribulation for the formation of the gu. When the ugly being died, their corpse would be consumed by this gu worm and it would start radiating a special type of qi. This qi turns people with good hearts into beautiful beings and those with evil hearts into grotesque mindless beasts that were under the gu master's control. However, it would cause the gu master to slowly turn ugly the more he used it.
Tian Zheng didn't want to turn into an ugly monster that not even a mother could love, but he needed this gu worm. He had gotten an idea as he watched the Foreign will break the very rules of nature and he also saw how when that happened, nature itself grew angry. Heaven`s Will didn't even command it but something grew angry at the Foreign will and tried to attack it. Tian Zheng didn't even know if what attacked the Foreign will was Heaven or not, since that thing was much more primal than Heaven's Will could ever be. He wanted to draw that will out again.
He had crafted a killer move with the void call gu at its core. While he had previously thought it was dangerous to activate the gu, he found out that the will could still reach out to him even when he didn't touch it. This led to his fear of the two wills to lessen. He had even taken a hobby of watching as they fought. He wanted to advance his Rule path attainment, so what better way than to watch two monstrous wills that controlled their own types of rules fight without holding back.
He took the gu from the shadow's hands and the shadow grew quite. A few breaths later the door opened and Tian Zheng was alone once more. He held the ugly heart qi gu worm. It looked like a half-eaten and rotten heart the size of a finger. When he finished refining it and made sure they were placed in the pure primeval essence the heart started beating following the rhythm of his heart. With every beat, strands of qi that looked like maggots emerged before digging themselves back inside.